4. The Wife in Her Home

I wondered sometimes if we had really smiled this much or been so in love before the war. We had been told that we were. By neighbors and in-laws. We'd been told that we were nauseating story-book lovers.

Maybe we were. If we hadn't been then, we certainly were now. Coming back from the dead will do that to you.

We were certainly being nauseating now. Chopping vegetables for salad. Playing the radio too loud and dancing a little as we put dinner together. Breathing in the smell of enchiladas as it crept through the kitchen. We were excited. Marco was coming home for a few days.

Instead of going back to his ridiculous mansion he was going to stay in the house that he had bought for us. Peter was helping me put together Marco's favorite dinner, enchiladas and, incongruously, cream cheese wontons. I'd thought it wold be nice, seeing as how he'd had a tough couple of days. I remember my own courtroom trials, though a war crimes trial for an entire planet was different than my experience taunting Visser One while she worried about the Council of Thirteen.

"How do you think Jake is doing?" Peter asked me as scooped cherry tomatoes form the cutting board into the salad.

"Do you mean in a general, or given recent events?" I asked. They had all been at Visser Three's trial up until a couple days ago. Jake had been accused of war crimes, and while the accusation had been laughed out of court, I'd seen Jake lately. Talked to his mother. It was hard to imagine he had just brushed it off. Seventeen thousand Yeerks hung around the boy's neck like an albatross.

Just under Tom.

Right above Rachel.

I'd tried talking to Jean about it. Lately, she had been trying to get him to seek some sort of therapy. There were people now who specialized in Post-controller counseling. The government and Veteran Services had been offering programs to help people forced into the war. Jean was convinced that Jake could be helped. She and Steve had both seen someone for a while and were much better for it. Steve had been referring his patients to their specialist for months.

I had told Peter at the time that I didn't think Jean and Steve understood. They had been infested for less than a month. They had never killed anyone. I knew that they had been bait and hostages and probably terrified every second the entire time, especially having just learned their importance to the resistance. It was good that they'd sought help. But they hadn't experienced the war that Jake had. No one had. Even Marco and Cassie were different from Jake. You could feel it when they were in a room.

Peter had nodded and gave me the look he always did. Sad and hurt as he imagined what it must have been like for everyone who had been in this struggle for years like his son and I had.

The front door creaked open. "Mom? Dad?"

We both ran to the door, pulling our son into a dual hug, squeezing him a little too hard. Long after the war, glad to see him alive.

"Enchiladas?" he asked, breathing.

"Of course, mijo," I told him, kissing his temple. He hugged me again and we scooped him into the kitchen. His father asked him how his trip had been, like it had just been one of his jaunts taken in the company of the model or starlet of the week.

I did wish that Marco would settle down. I'd heard from Michelle, Cassie's mother, that Cassie was practically engaged to some nice young man from her government department.

Marco didn't say much about the trial. We didn't pry, though I did want to see Visser Three fry. He talked about Jake when we asked. Apparently Jake had been propositioned by an entire family: daughter, mother, grandmother, and this wasn't at all uncommon for Jake. But he was finally doing a little better since Cassie and Marco had knocked him out and dropped into the ocean to force him to morph dolphin.

"Morph therapy," Marco chuckled.

My husband and I exchanged a look. Marco was doing well, all things considered, and considering Rachel's fate, and Jake's and Tobias's, it still felt like a miracle. But he was still different from other boys.

"And I think I might be able to convince him to get out of his parent's house and move near my place. Maybe slowly depower his epic buzz-kill abilities."

"Maybe find him a nice girl?" Peter asked.

Marco paused, took a deep gulp from his wine glass and cleared his throat. "I wonder sometimes… if he never really got over Cassie. She told me this week… Jake asked her to marry him. I never knew."

"When?" I demanded before I could stop myself.

Marco kept his eyes on his glass, tapping his fingers against the glass and watching the way it caused the liquid to ripple. "Umm… right at the end. She told him that she'd marry him after everything had been over for a year." He took another sip and Peter and I exchanged another glance. "Cassie… I think she always knew exactly how this would all shake out." He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again his tone was light, not even forced. "She's doing great." He bounded into a story about Cassie saving the rainforest and a bunch of endangered species and how this time he really was going to start calling her every once in a while.

That turned into a story about a long call with his ghostwriter and then his biographer, neither of whom believed the story about the time the Animorphs had all been sent back to the time of dinosaurs. Cassie had been startled when the fact checkers had called her, and then the fact checkers had been annoyed when the only person who could verify her claim that broccoli was an alien plant was Marco.

We didn't ask why no one called Jake. No one ever did and paparazzi had just released photos of him sitting at Rachel's grave at night. People left him be for the most part.

We all had another class of wine. Marco went to sleep in the guest room. Peter and I curled up together on the couch, not really watching some movie on cable. We fell asleep like that. His arms around me. My head on his shoulder.

Home.