“People breathing in ashes?” he says. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
“No, you haven’t,” I say. “Not even close. Come on; I know exactly where we are now.” I hook my elbow around his and pull him toward the concrete platform that overlooks the water. Maddie presses her stomach against the railing, her arms outstretched, the fingers on her good hand wriggling over the water.
“I’d come here with my father all the time,” I say. “And this is where my brother tried to teach me how to fish. Right here.”
The water is gray and unceremonious, and probably nothing like the picture I painted that afternoon when I lay in bed telling Gabriel about it. I can see in his eyes that he’s not very enchanted.
“This used to be the East River, more than a hundred years ago,” I tell him. “Before so much of the land around it eroded.”
“Now it’s just the Atlantic?” he says.
“Right,” I say. Gabriel, a lover of boats and the idea of sailing, only had the outdated maps and atlases in the mansion to teach him. A hundred years ago there was nearly twice as much land to our country. Some of it was ruined by warfare, but most of the land loss was natural, the land deteriorating slowly and sinking into the ocean. But rather than relay this dreary history lesson, I show him the figure standing out in the middle of the water. A woman all in pale green, with a spiked crown on her head and a torch in her hand.
“There’s the Statue of Liberty,” I say. “You could get a better look if you wanted to put five dollars into one of these telescopes.”
Something changes in Gabriel’s eyes as he stares out at the Statue of Liberty. “I’ve seen this before,” he says.
“In books?” I ask.
He stares a moment longer, and then he shakes his head, clearing the dazed look from his eyes. “Must be. In my orphanage, I guess. I don’t remember much about my time there. I was still young when I went to auction.”
He was nine years old when his orphanage decided to auction him off for profit to the highest bidder so that he could live the rest of his lifetime in servitude. Young, but more than a third of the way through his life.
Maybe Maddie is picking up on my approaching somberness, or maybe she’s completely oblivious to it when she grabs my hand and pulls me away from the water. As we press on, I tell her about the billowing black clouds that erupt from funnel-shaped factories, how they are producing everything from plastics to smelted iron to food. The trees are small and bare, confined to cedar patches in the sidewalks. They aren’t the brilliant orange blossoms of the mansion, nor are they the blood-red petals of the rose garden, but still I’ve missed them. I’ve missed the coppery smell of this air. I’ve missed this horizon of buildings. Always buildings. Some towering factories, some apartments, and others crumbling brick houses that all complement one another. A sepia photograph of a city.
Among my father’s books there were antique postcards of the Manhattan cityscape in the twentieth century, taken from the Hudson River. They were all taken at dusk, with the buildings’ corners glinting as though on fire, windows lit up like a circuit board, everything close together. It was a city that didn’t sleep, my father said. But, bit by bit, it crumbled. A later postcard shows the same cityscape in an afternoon fog, looking less complete. And while it’s still the busiest, most crowded city I can imagine, it’s merely a ghost of those old pictures.
We take a turn down a decline, at a brick crater that was a church when my parents were children, and I can feel the anxiety knotting in my chest. My street is just as I left it. There is still that robin’s-egg blue colonial with the collapsing porch, and the high oak tree where the man in the smallest house ties his barking collie, thinking that tiny creature will keep him safe from thieves. And there is the three-level brick house where my little neighbor girl used to live, her window so close to mine that we could reach out our arms and touch.
Next to her house, of course, is mine.
I see my house, and my breathing stops. First in triumph, then realization. Because this isn’t my house, not really. It’s a skeleton, charred black. The windows are broken through, or else murky with some type of brown grime.
I can do nothing but stare at it. At these bones that used to house my family. The front door is missing, and the steps—I used to count them every morning and every evening, one, two, three—are littered with glass and bits of blackness.
This can’t be right. There should be color here. And then I’m sure I have it wrong, because the charred blackness becomes bright white, and then, for just a moment, I can see the color of the bricks, and the burlap curtains in the windows, and the house shudders as it draws a breath.
I feel my knees buckle, a hand gripping my arm so I don’t collide with the pavement that’s rushing up to meet me.
Something cool and rubbery brushes my face. I blink, and Maddie is sliding a wet leaf along my jaw. She plucked it from one of my mother’s evergreen shrubs that have all managed to stay alive beneath the kitchen window. They don’t die as easily as flowers; you can grow them nearly anywhere. My brother says they’re like weeds that way. But after our parents’ death, even he didn’t have the heart to uproot them.
I’m sitting on the top step—number one in the morning, number three in the evening—staring at Maddie’s unreal blue eyes. Blackbirds take flight and rush across the skies in them. The world is slowly coming back into focus. The familiar street where I grew up. The overcast sky. Lifeless branches shaking at a gust of cold February wind.
I moan, stretch my legs in front of me, and raise my palm to my throbbing forehead.
“Careful,” Gabriel says. “There’s glass.”
“I blacked out,” I say. I meant for it to be a question, but my voice can’t summon the wherewithal required for inflection.
“For a few minutes.” Gabriel is rubbing my shoulder, as though trying to coax my blood back into circulation. His eyes are dark with worry.
“This is wrong,” I say.
“Here, drink some of this.”
“I—”
“The sugar will help.” He’s holding a can of soda in front of me, but I only stare at it.
“I don’t understand. How . . .” I don’t finish the thought. The word flutters around me and echoes into the atmosphere. How, how, how . . .
Gabriel tilts the can to my lips, and I choke for a second and then force myself to drink.
I let the sugar and the calories spread through me. I let strength and thought back in. It takes a while, but I convince myself to turn around and look at my house. It’s so ruined that even the century-old ivy imprints are gone.
“Oh, Rowan,” I whisper. “What did you do?”
I tread carefully, upsetting the cockroaches that spread out and rustle in the shadows. There is nothing left of the soft orange wallpaper in the kitchen. The linoleum tiles—the ones still here, anyway—are scorched. The tip of my shoe knocks against an empty can, causing it to roll into a pile of ash.
No, not ash. Paper.
I crouch at the hill of crumpled pages by the door frame. They reek of gasoline, and the black oval on the wall beside them tells me the fire must have started here. I tear through the pages, searching for one that isn’t destroyed, that doesn’t crumble to dust in my hands, and finally I have one. I uncrumple it and read the words that are scrawled outside of the lines:
crossbred flowers
cilium
eggshells and chloroform
my sister’s ideas
greenhouse gases
my mother’s hands
one hundred days
but still no sign
The fragments are delivered one atop the other, like a chaotic madman’s poem. The rest has been crossed out by a frustrated hand; the pen nearly dug through the paper.
“My brother wrote this,” I say.
Gabriel crouches behind me and reads. The words make no sense to either of us, but they can’t hurt him like they hurt me. Because this page is one of dozens. And maybe all of the pages together would bring this story into focus. But I will never know if that’s true.
My brother set fire to his words. There’s no message here for me because he didn’t think I would come back to read it.
I feel dizzy. Numbly I allow Gabriel to take my arm and guide me to my feet. There’s no place to sit down, so I lean against him and look around the room. There is nothing for me here. Over the threshold I can see the living room in the same state.
“Maybe it was arson,” Gabriel says. “And your brother was forced to evacuate.”
I know he’s trying to make me feel better, but I am too drained right now to allow false hope. “No, I’m sure he did this,” I say. My brother can be ruthless about defending what’s his; one winter he let a dead orphan lie on our porch for days as a warning to trespassers. He would not have been driven out of this house against his will. “He wasn’t planning on coming back, and he didn’t think I would either.”
“But why burn it down?” Gabriel asks.
I have no answer.
There’s a memory of my mother, shrouded in light. Light and blue. She was hanging blue glass doves over the kitchen window with kite string. A sort of wind chime. Her voice was so melodic, humming the words to me while I sat on the counter making soap bubbles through my fingers. “Always look after your brother. He isn’t strong like you are.”
I remember giggling at the absurdity. Rowan was stronger than me. Of course he was. He was always taller, and he could bend tree branches down so I could pluck their best autumn leaves. He could hold a fishing rod against the resistance of a struggling catch without letting go and losing it to the ocean. I relayed this, and my mother told me, “A different kind of strength, love. You have a different kind of strength.”
A loud creak jars me from my thinking. I recognize it as the last floorboard before the basement door.
“Maddie, wait!” I cry. “It’s dangerous!” But she has already pulled open the door and is descending into the darkness. Gabriel and I follow her. She still has the flashlight from the hotel, and now she’s waving it around as she goes. I’m surprised the steps are able to hold our weight, but the basement looks as though it has been spared.
One step, two, three, four. With each one I wrestle with hope. That when I get to the bottom, something will be waiting for me. Or that my brother is still here. But ultimately I’m wondering why my mother said those words to me. I must have been very small, because my bare feet were in the kitchen sink as the tap water ran between my toes. I remember that. And the smell of something baking. And how pretty the walls looked in that slant of daylight.
Rowan’s note crinkles in my palm, and I fold it and tuck it into my pocket.