Coming Home
by Katrin Pitzken
“Don’t touch this!”
She lolled in her seat and opened her eyes.
A child was walking up and down the aisle of the airplane. He grabbed his little toy dog and looked with wide eyes at his mother.
She was going to miss it - the feeling of always having somebody around, all the toys lying around and even all the screaming from four little children in the house.
For nine months she hadn’t seen her parents and friends back in Germany. In the first months of her exchange year, she had really missed them. All the strange and new things, including the language. Everything was different to her.
Sometimes she had just stayed in bed, crying and wondering why she had gone on an exchange year. She had never been the kind of person to take risks. She was shy and quiet and never really got noticed. Her best friend, Mandy, was the opposite - outgoing, pretty and popular. Everywhere they went she always attracted attention. Sometimes she even wondered why they were friends. But they were; really close friends. They did everything together.
When she told her friends in school she wanted to go abroad, they laughed at her. So she wasn’t the only one who had doubts.
But maybe this was exactly why she stayed, to prove to others as well as to herself that she could do it. And now, nine months later, there were no doubts left. She had stayed. And instead of the six months she had originally planned, she had stayed nine.
For a long time she had pictured herself on the airplane going home. She imagined how it would be seeing her friends and her father again. She had been longing for this for many months. But now the longing had stopped.
She had found the family she belonged to, and they were not in Germany. No, they lived in a tiny town near St. Paul, Minnesota.
Their first meeting had been quite awkward. They picked her up at the airport. Everybody was wearing pink T-shirts and yellow tights; the whole family. That’s all she saw. The kids were running around, screaming and nagging. But with time, she got to know them. They called her their Daughter, gave her presents for Christmas and told her they would miss her.
In the beginning, the kids hadn’t liked her.
”We don’t wanna have you here. Go back home!” they had screamed. They got used to her as a sister and started to like her. And she started to like them.
The feeling of a real family with mother, father, and children pleased her. They went to baseball games and shopping and took her on trips. Even the children shared their toys with her (even if she wasn’t really keen on playing with a gigantic Sponge Bob). It was their way of showing their love.
In Germany her parents were divorced. Her mother had moved back to Russia where she emigrated from 20 years ago, because she couldn’t stand her tyrannical husband. He cheated on her, lied and didn’t take her seriously.
After her mother had left, her father told Lisa he would be going to work, but instead he went to see his girlfriend. He said bad things about her mother, which weren't true, just too make Lisa stay with him and not move in with her mother.
So Lisa thought her mother never wanted to have her. She thought her mother went back to Russia to live with another man, with whom she had cheated on her father. That’s what her father told her.
It worked. Lisa never found out the truth. Her best friend often told her to move out and go live with her mother, because she noticed how bad Lisa got treated by her father, but she never did. And now she wished she had.
Her father never had been a picture-book-father. He disappeared for days without letting her know where he had gone. He made her clean the house and wouldn’t even let her leave the house sometimes. Lisa often called Mandy, desperately crying because her father wouldn’t let her go out.
But Lisa seemed to ignore all of that.
Even though he was a bad father, Lisa wanted to like him. She didn’t want to move to Russia, so she ignored his bad qualities and pretended he was a good man.
Three months ago she had gotten a telephone call.
“Yeah?”
“Hey Mandy what’s up?”
“Mmmh, nothin’.”
“So, how’s school goin’?”
“As always.”
“Any news?”
“Come on Mandy what’s wrong with you?”
“Today…your father… You’ll move...” Lisa could hear her fighting the tears. She felt that something wasn’t right.
“What? What’s wrong Mandy?” Lisa almost screamed.
“Today your father called my mother. It seems like… like… I think you’re going to move.”
“What?”
“Your father told my mother you were going to move to Berlin. He wants to move in with his girlfriend..!”
Lisa felt like someone slapped her in the face.
She looked out the window of the airplane. How could her father do that to her? What had she done wrong? Not only didn’t he tell her he had a girlfriend, he also didn’t tell her that he planned to move.
Moving to Berlin. For her it was the end of the world. She had been looking forward to returning home. Home to the place she knew, to the school she knew, the people she knew and the city she knew. She wanted to go shopping with Mandy, sit next to the Rhine in an old café, drink hot chocolate and just enjoy her life back in Germany. That’s what she was longing for. She did not want to go home and start all over again, in a new school, in a new city. What was she supposed to do without her friends?
While she was in America, she had problems making new friends, even though she had became more outgoing during her stay. At home she wouldn’t even be “the exchange student”; she would just be an ordinary girl. Ordinary and alone. How could he do that to her?
The woman sitting next to her tapped her on the arm.
“Hey, are you ok?” she asked. Lisa had been staring out the window for about an hour now.
“Yeah, sure. Thank you!”
The woman kept on talking.
“Are you going back home or are you visiting somebody?”
That’s a good question Lisa thought. Was she going back HOME? “No”, she thought, “where I’m going is not my home. Not anymore.” But where was her home?
The woman was still staring at her, waiting for an answer.
“I’m visiting somebody”, Lisa said. And it wasn’t even a lie. She wanted to visit somebody whom she thought was her father, a father who cared for and loved her.
Lisa never liked making decisions or getting into conflicts. That’s why she hadn’t made any effort to convince her father not to move. For her it was a decision that had already been made, without any concern for her. Even though she didn’t like it, she decided it would be easier to live with it than to argue. Her father didn’t care about her opinion anyway.
Even her best friend didn’t understand her. The last time they talked was a month ago. Mandy blamed her for just accepting the situation. Of course, Lisa thought, Mandy would do anything to keep her parents from moving, but that was different, Mandy was different.
“Train to Frankfurt leaves in ten minutes,” a voice announced through the speakers.
Lisa looked for the train that would take her home from the airport.
Lisa entered the train and looked around for 17 A. That must be a window seat. There it was.
A man with a leather jacket was sitting by the window. His blond hair was in a ponytail and she could see a tattoo through his muscle shirt. She looked back at her train ticket. Yeah, the man was definitely sitting in her seat. For a moment she thought of telling him, but then she decided not to. She looked around for another seat she could take, but the train was packed with people. She walked up the aisle. It was just a two hour ride. She could stand. That would be easier than getting into an argument. “Wait”, she thought, and her blue eyes sparkled, “No, that’s the old me. I have been on my own for nine months. I can go there and ask him to get out of my seat”. She grabbed her bags.
“Excuse me, but I think you’re sitting in my seat!”
“Oh, yeah? I didn’t notice that. I’m sorry”, the man smiled.
She stored her bags in the luggage rack. “See, that was easy”, she thought. The train started slowly. While Lisa looked out the window, she thought of how it would be, seeing her father again, with his girlfriend living in a new house, coming into this new life that someone else had chosen for her.
What should she say to her father? She didn’t feel like hugging him and yelling “Finally. I really missed you Dad!”
“Hi Dad. How are you doing?” That is what she felt, but her dad would be disappointed. How should she react to his Girlfriend? She had never seen her and she wasn’t keen on seeing her either.
“Arriving in Bensberg”.
The sentence stuck in her head. Arriving in Bensberg. Her father would be standing there, with his girlfriend, waiting to take her to her new home. Their new home, not hers.
The train slowed down, she could see the grey platform. The train stopped. She looked out of the window. There was her father. His blue eyes looking for her to come out of the train. The last time she saw him, his hair was reddish with grey streaks. Now his hair was brown.
A woman with long blond hair, a Gucci bag and a pink coat, was standing next to him. Her smile seemed false. She looked young, too young for her father and definitely too young to be her mother. Next to her stood a teenage boy.
What was he doing there? “I’m sure he is just randomly standing there”, Lisa thought. The woman put her arm around his shoulder and said something to him. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic. “Ok, maybe they know him, but that doesn’t mean he is what I think he is”, thought Lisa. He was wearing a pink shirt and jeans.
Why didn’t her father tell her that his girlfriend had a son? Wasn’t that something she should know?
As she looked at them standing there, they looked like a perfect family. They looked like what her father always wanted. She should have felt happy for him and maybe she would have if he had told her before she came back. But know she felt left out. She felt like she didn’t belong in this family. There was no place for her.
Now would be the time to stand up, grab her luggage and get out of the train. But she couldn’t move.
How could he do that to her? How could everything change so much in just one year?
A thousand thoughts rushed through her head. The train started slowly. She had always tried to fit in, but now she just couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried.
Just once she was going to do what she wanted. But what was it that she wanted? She wanted everything to be as it was when she left, but she knew that it was impossible.
As the train left the station, she could see the silhouettes of the perfect family fade away.
She knew in one hour the train would stop in Moitzfeld, the city where she used to live. The high-rises passed by and wide green fields appeared.
In the past, Mandy had asked Lisa several times to stay with her family, instead of moving, but she never thought of actually doing it.
Now she would move in and stay with Mandy. Mandy’s parents loved her like a daughter and it was the only chance Lisa had to stay in the city she grew up in. She could go to her old school and see her friends again. Everything would work out fine.
Not only everything at home had changed while she was gone. She had changed too. She had learned to stand up for herself while living with four children and going to a school with over 4000 students. She had made new friends and overcome her fears.
“Arriving in Bensberg” a tinny voice announced through the speakers. Lisa woke up with a jolt. She must have fallen asleep. She could see her father standing on the platform. Next to him stood a woman in a pink coat. And a boy.