“Mrs Glenn.” Ken chuckled. “She used to look after you when you were little.”
“She’s great with the girls,” Amy said. “The only concern is that she’ll get too attached and flee the country with them.”
“You should be safe there,” Erika said. “I doubt Mrs Glenn knows a good passport guy.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Amy said. “She seems like a woman with a history.”
“So, what’s the big mystery?” Kaito asked.
“That would be the owner of the car outside,” Erika said. “He seems to have disappeared on us. Again.”
“Can you blame me?” Jason asked from the doorway. “I’m nervous and love dramatic entrances.”
Amy and Kaito turned around, wide-eyed.
“G’day, Kaito, Ames. How’ve you been?”
Kaito pointed at Jason.
“You… but… did… how…?”
“I guess we know who painted the helicopter,” Amy said. “Not dead, then?”
“I gave death a try,” Jason said. “Wasn’t for me.”
Despite her light voice and flippant words, Amy’s face was stricken, her eyes panning over Jason, cataloguing the changes from the boy she remembered.
“Why don’t we all sit down?” Ken suggested.
After Jason talked the rest of his family through essentially the same thing he had told Hiro and Erika, he left them alone in the lounge to digest while he went into the backyard. It was the same backyard he had growing up, although there was a strange sense of alienation. Part of that was his heightened senses; he was literally looking at his childhood haunt with new eyes.
There were also the details that showed the passage of time. The old, dilapidated fence had been stripped out and replaced, although he guessed his father had done that. The gazebo had been torn down and rebuilt larger from scratch, to better suit Erika’s style of culinary entertaining.
The lemon tree was bigger and showed signs of care. Erika clearly wanted those lemons and had taken the time to foster fruit growth. The flower garden their mother had always insisted she’d find time for and never did was now a herb garden. The patio furniture had been replaced; their mother had purchased for appearance, whereas Erika and Ian chose comfort. The wood and cloth folding chairs were a little daggy, but nice to sit in.
He could sense his family inside the house. Their emotions practically shouted through their auras. There was a lot of confusion and no small amount of suspicion, mainly from Erika and Amy. They were the smartest and knew him the best; they had immediately realised how much he was withholding, not that he made any great attempt to sell the authenticity of his story.
The first one to make his way outside to join Jason was Kaito. They each claimed a folding lounger and neither spoke for a long time.
“That was a prick move with my helicopter,” Kaito said, finally breaking the silence.
“You don’t like yellow?” Jason asked.
“Not that. Pulling a prank that my wife had to explain to me. Reminding me of all the things you and her have in common.”
“You’re reading too much into it.”
“No, I’m not,” Kaito said. “I know the way you think, and you think I took her from you.”
“I used to, Kai. It took me a long time to realise that I pushed as much as you pulled, but that doesn’t make what you did okay.”
“No,” Kaito acknowledged. “It doesn’t. Jason, is this thing going to hang over us for our entire lives?”
“Yeah, brother, it is,” Jason said. “Remember that one of the things you and Amy have in common is that you worked together to gouge the heart out of my chest and back over it with a school bus.”
“We could have done things better,” Kaito said. “It was always going to be bad, though. I am sorry, Jason.”
“Nobody cares if the guy who stabbed them in the back is sorry, Kaito. They care that they got stabbed in the back.”
“Do you even know how stifled she felt by you?”
“Yes,” Jason uncomfortably conceded. “It took me longer than it should have, but yes.”
“There was no good way it was going to go.”
“So you decided to go with the worst way? Thanks for that.”
Kaito sighed and got to his feet.
“I was hoping that you coming back from the dead meant we could… I don’t know. Move past it.”
“We can,” Jason said, also standing. “But I’ve been waiting six years to say those things, Kai, and I think maybe you’ve been waiting to hear them. I’m probably going to say them again, too. In fact, I suspect I’ll be kind of an arse about it.”
“As long as you stick around to say them, I’ll listen.” Kaito offered his hand. Jason shook it.
“Then I’ll go complain to my wife,” Kaito added.
“Oh, you prick.”
“I’m probably going to be a bit of an arse as well,” Kaito said.
Kaito went back inside, sharing a look with Ken, who passed him coming out. Jason hadn’t paid a lot of attention to reading emotions through auras and was unable to read the complex interplay between the two men conveyed through that brief glance.
Ken pulled his son into another long hug.
“I’m sorry I didn’t stand up to your mother more,” he said.
“It’s alright, Dad.”
“No,” Ken said, pulling back to put his hands on Jason’s shoulders and look his son in the eyes. “It was my job to hold the family together and I let you be pushed out.”
“Dad, none of it was easy and we all made mistakes.”
“And it was my job to rise above them, which I didn’t.”
Ken brushed his fingers over his son’s scars, bisecting one eyebrow and leaving a hairless line in his beard.
“Are you alright?” Ken asked softly.
“Honestly?” Jason said. “No.”
Jason sat back down while Ken claimed the chair vacated by Kaito.
“I’m not the person I want to be right now,” Jason said. “I’ve done things. Had things done to me. I’m not making great choices right now and I’m hoping that being home will help me to get back some of what I lost along the way.”
“This mercenary work,” Ken said, broaching the topic like an animal handler trying to catch a wild creature. “You saw fighting?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you…?”
“Yeah,” Jason said.
“We’re here, son. I’m here. Whatever you need.”
Jason looked over at his dad.
“You know what I really need?” he asked. “I need a big dose of normal. I need the things I’m cranky about to be that my brother married my ex. I need my problems to be finding out-of-season chutneys and my mum being disapproving and stand-offish. Hell, I need Koji to come by and hypocritically accuse me of being a banana. Is he still in town?”
“Your cousin? Sure. Shiro bought the caravan park a couple of years ago and left Koji to run the place. Into the ground, mostly.”
“Uncle Shiro bought the caravan park? I thought he was all about those high-end developments.”
“He is,” Ken said.
“Oh,” Jason said. “He’s going to replace the caravan park with a bunch of fancy holiday homes? Try and turn Casselton Beach into the next Castle Reach?”
“Pretty much. Your mother’s snobbish hands are all over the project.”