There were cars passing by under her window. People walking in the evening. Normal people. A thousand of them all around her, playing music, talking, laughing. While I sat there on her bed, with a pad of paper in my lap. I started writing again.
I want to tell you.
“Then go ahead.”
I don’t know how.
“Start with where it happened. Draw me the house.”
I looked at her.
“I’m serious. You were eight years old, right? Isn’t that when it happened? Where did you live?”
I thought about it for a while. Then I put the pad down. I stood up. I went to the door and opened it.
She bit her lip as she watched me.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Good-bye.”
I stayed there at the door.
“What? What is it?”
I picked up the pad.
Let’s go, I wrote.
“Where are we going?”
I’m going to show you where it happened.
It was getting dark now. It was crazy to be doing this. I had no business taking her where I was about to take her, but I had been on the run so long… I was so tired, and I had already lived through enough in the past few days to last me for the rest of my life. So maybe the fact that I had no idea what I was doing was a good thing just then. Maybe that was exactly what we both needed.
She got on the back of my bike. Just like old times. It felt just as good as ever to have her hands around my waist. We rode out of Ann Arbor, heading due east. I knew where I was going. I had always known. Even though I hadn’t gone anywhere near it in ten years.
I got off the highway, right before it took us into the heart of the city. I wandered in a slow zigzag toward the water. I knew we couldn’t get lost now. All we had to do was keep going until we hit the Detroit River.
It was coming up on midnight when we hit Jefferson Avenue. We turned north. We passed the enormous steel plant on the river. The taste of the smoke and the grit in the air already, punishing us as we got closer and closer. Amelia wrapped her arms tighter around my body.
I kept going. I knew we were close. Then I saw the bridge.
The bridge over the River Rouge.
I looked at the street signs. Just before we got to the bridge, I took that last left turn. The last turn before the river. We were on Victoria Street now. I rolled to a stop.
“Is this it?” she said. The wind was still buzzing in my ears. “Is this really where you lived?”
Now understand, this has nothing to do with the city of River Rouge. Or the people who live there or the businesses or the streets or the river itself. It is a place like any other place, where you grow up and you go to school and you make your stand against the world. If you go to this particular street, though, you’ll be just as amazed as Amelia was when we got off the bike and looked around and breathed that air.
There are six houses on the southern side of Victoria Street. On the northern side is the plant where they make wallboard, a city unto itself of brick and steel, of pipes and smokestacks and water towers and huge mounds of gypsum.
“Is the air always like this?”
Amelia covered her mouth with her hand. Besides the gypsum, there was the salt from the salt plant just up the river, the coke and the slag from the two iron plants. Not to mention whatever came out of the wastewater plant. Or from the storm drains, whenever it rained.
“Which house did you live in?”
I walked down to the street and stopped in front of the house. She followed me. It was a simple one-story house. Inside, a small living room, a small kitchen. Three bedrooms. One bathroom. An unfinished basement. At least that’s what I remembered. I lived here from the time I was born until that day in June of 1990. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Playing outside in the tiny backyard on those days when the air wasn’t too bad. Inside on all the other days.
As I looked at the house, I knew it was empty. I knew it had been empty for ten years. Nobody would buy this house. Nobody would live inside these walls. Never mind the air or the industrial blight across the street. You wouldn’t go into this house for one second if you knew what had happened here.
And everybody knew. Everybody.
The whole street looked abandoned. I opened up one of my luggage bags and grabbed a flashlight. Then I took Amelia by the hand and led her up the two front steps to the door. I tried the knob. It didn’t turn. I got out my tools and started in on the lock.
“What are you doing?”
It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. I turned the knob and pushed the door in. I took her hand again and led her inside.
The first thing that hit me was how cold it was. Even after a warm September day, the unnatural chill in this place… the lights from the plant came streaming in through every window, so it wasn’t that dark, but still I felt myself wanting to reach for a light switch. To fill the place with a warmer light than this pale glow that made everything look like it was underwater.
Amelia didn’t say anything. She followed me as I walked through the living room, our footsteps creaking on the wooden floors. There was no carpet. I remembered that. Other things coming back to me, like where the television was. Where the couch was that my mother would sit on while I was on the floor, watching cartoons.
We went into the kitchen. The tile had curled up in places. The old appliances were still in place.
“Why is this house still here?” she said. “Why haven’t they torn it down?”
Yes, I thought. Tear it down. Burn the lumber and everything else that will burn. Take the ashes and bury them in the ground.
I led her back out, through the living room to the hallway, where it got much darker. She gripped my hand tighter, and I took her past the bathroom, past the master bedroom, past my own bedroom from way back when. To the extra room at the very back of the house.
This door was closed. I pushed it open.
It was empty. There was still a roller blind on the window. I went to open it and the whole thing fell off the window with a crash.
“Okay, I’m getting a little nervous in here.” Her voice was small in the middle of this emptiness.
I looked along the floor for the faint indentations in the wood. Four of them. They were centered against the back wall.
I took out my pad of paper and my pen. I started to write, holding the pad up to the dim moonlight that came in through the window. Then I put the pad back in my pocket. There was no way I could do this and make her understand what it felt like. This whole trip was a horrible mistake.
“So show me,” she said. “I want to see what happened.”
I shook my head.
“There’s a reason we’re here. Show me.”
I took out the pad again. I started to draw a picture. But I didn’t have room on the pad. How could I do this on a stupid little pad of paper? I ended up throwing it against the wall.
That’s when I got the idea.
It was plaster, with a simple coat of off-white paint. It had always been that way. No bright colors for this house. No wallpaper.
I turned on the flashlight. I went to the wall, and I started drawing with my pen. Amelia came over to me and watched over my shoulder. I drew a picture of a little boy reading a comic book in a living room. I drew a woman smoking a cigarette and watching television. My mother. On the couch next to her… this was the tricky part. A man with a drink in his hand. But not the father. How do you make that clear? This man is not the father.
“Michael, do you have stuff out on your bike? Pens? Pencils?”
I nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
What? You’re going to leave me here?
“It’ll only take a second. You keep doing what you’re doing.”
She left the room. I heard her footsteps, and I felt the air shift as she opened the front door. It was just me and the ghosts for a long minute or two. I fought off the feeling that I was trapped here forever now. That the door was locked and she’d never come back.