Outside WoodCove Farms, the neighborhood quickly changes. Government-owned plots run up against seedy lots, and I pass three mobile home parks in a row, which are crowded with outdoor charcoal grills and fire pits and shrouded over by a film of smoke and ash, since the people who live here use electricity only sparingly.
Brighton Avenue carries me on-peninsula, and technically across the border and into downtown Portland. But city hall, and the cluster of municipal buildings and laboratories where people have gathered to protest, is still several miles away. The buildings this far from the Old Port are no more than a few stories high, and interspersed with corner delis, cheap Laundromats, run-down churches, and long-disused gas stations.
I try to remember the last time I went to Lena’s house, instead of she to mine, but all I get is a mash-up of years and images, the smell of tinned ravioli and powdered milk. Lena was embarrassed by her cramped home, and by her family. She knew what people said. But I always liked going to her house. I’m not sure why. I think at the time it was the mess that appealed to me—the beds crammed closely together in the upstairs room, the appliances that never worked correctly, fuses that were always powering down, a washing machine that sat rusting, used only as a place for storing winter clothes.
Even though it has been eight months, I navigate the way to Lena’s old house easily, even remembering to shortcut through the parking lot that backs up onto Cumberland.
By this point, I’m sweating, and I stop my bike a few doors down from the Tiddles’ house, wrestling off my hat and running a hand through my hair so I at least look semi-presentable. A door bangs down the street, and a woman emerges onto her porch, which is cluttered with broken furniture and even, mysteriously, a rust-spotted toilet seat. She is carrying a broom, and she begins sweeping back and forth, back and forth, over the same six inches of porch, her eyes locked on me.
The neighborhood is worse, much worse, than it used to be. Half the buildings are boarded up. I feel like a diver on a new submarine, coasting past the wreck of a tanked ship. Curtains stir in the windows, and I have a sense of unseen eyes following my progress down the street—and anger, too, simmering inside all the sad, sagging homes.
I start to feel incredibly stupid for coming. What will I say? What can I say?
But now that I’m so close, I can’t turn around until I’ve seen it: number 237, Lena’s old house. As soon as I wheel my bike up to the gate, I can tell that the house has been abandoned for some time. Several shingles are missing from the roof, and the windows have been boarded up with fungus-colored wood. Someone has painted a large red X over the front door, a symbol that the house was harboring disease.
“What do you want?”
I spin around. The woman on the porch has stopped sweeping; she holds the broom in one hand and shields her eyes with the other.
“I was looking for the Tiddles,” I say. My voice rings out too loudly on the open street. The woman keeps staring at me. I force myself to move closer to her, wheeling my bike across the street and up to her front gate, even though something inside me is revolting, telling me to go. I do not belong here.
“Tiddles moved off last fall,” she says, and begins sweeping again. “They weren’t welcome around here no more. Not after—” She breaks off suddenly. “Well. Anyways. Don’t know what happened to them, and don’t care, either. They can rot away in the Highlands as far as I’m concerned. Spoiling the neighborhood, making it hard for everybody else—”
“Is that where they went?” I seize on the small bit of information. “To Deering Highlands?”
Instantly, I can tell I’ve put her on her guard. “What business is it to you?” she says. “You Youth Guard or something? This is a good neighborhood, a clean neighborhood.” She jabs at the porch with her broom, as though trying to tamp down invisible insects. “Read the Book every day and passed all my reviews just like anybody else. But still people come poking and prying, digging up trouble—”
“I’m not from the DFA,” I say to reassure her. “And I’m not trying to cause trouble.”
“Then what are you trying to do?” She squints at me closely, and I see a flicker of recognition pass across her face. “Hey. Have you been around here before or something?”
“No,” I say quickly, and jam the hat back onto my head. I’ll get no more help here, I can tell.
“I’m sure I know you from somewhere,” the woman says as I climb onto my bike. I know it will click for her any second: That’s the girl who got paired with Fred Hargrove.
“You don’t,” I say, and I push off into the street.
I should let it go. I know I should let it go. But more than ever, I have an urge to see Lena’s family again. I need to know what has happened since she left.
I haven’t been to Deering Highlands since last summer, when Alex, Lena, and I used to hang out in 37 Brooks, one of the neighborhood’s many abandoned houses. 37 Brooks is where Lena and Alex were caught by the regulators, and the reason they attempted a last-minute, poorly planned escape.
Deering Highlands, too, is even more run-down than I remember it. The neighborhood was practically abandoned years ago, after a string of busts in the area gave it the reputation of being tainted. When I was little, the older kids used to tell stories of the ghosts of uncureds who’d died of amor deliria nervosa and still wandered the streets. We used to dare each other to go into the Highlands and put a hand on the derelict buildings. You had to keep your hand there for a full ten seconds, just enough time for the disease to seep through your fingertips.
Lena and I did it together once. She chickened out after four seconds, but I waited the whole ten, counting slowly, and loud, so the girls who were watching could hear. I was the hero of second grade for a full two weeks.
Last summer, there was a raid on an illegal party in the Highlands. I was there. I let Steven Hilt lean in and whisper to me, his mouth bumping against my ear.
It was one of four illegal parties I’d attended since graduation. I remember how thrilled I was sneaking through the streets, long past curfew, my heart clawing up to my throat, and how Angelica Marston and I would meet the next day to laugh about how we’d gotten away with it. We spoke in whispers about kissing and threatened to run away to the Wilds, as though we were little girls talking about Wonderland.
That’s the point. It was kid stuff. A big game of make-believe.
It was never supposed to happen to me, to Angie, or to anyone else. It definitely wasn’t supposed to happen to Lena.
After the raid, the neighborhood was officially repossessed by the city of Portland, and a number of the houses were razed. The plan was to set up new low-income condos for some of the municipal workers, but construction stalled after the terrorist incidents, and as I cross over into the Highlands, all I see is rubble: holes in the ground, and trees felled and left with their roots exposed to the sky, dirty, churned earth, and rusting metal signs declaring it a hard-hat area.
It’s so quiet that even the sound of my wheels as they turn seems overloud. A thought comes to me suddenly, unbidden—Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie—the old rhyme we used to whisper as kids when we passed a graveyard.
A graveyard: That’s exactly what the Highlands is like now.
I climb off my bike and lean it against an old street sign, which points the way to Maple Avenue, another street of large, carved bowls of dark earth and uprooted trees.
I walk down Maple for a bit, feeling increasingly stupid. There is no one here. That is obvious. And Deering Highlands is a large neighborhood, a tangle of small streets and cul-de-sacs. Even if Lena’s family is squatting somewhere around here, I won’t necessarily find them.
But my feet keep stepping one in front of the other, as though controlled by something other than my brain. The wind sweeps quietly over the bare lots, and the air smells like rot. I pass an old foundation, exposed to the air, and it reminds me, weirdly, of the X-rays my dentist used to show me: toothy gray structures, like a jaw split open and tacked to the ground.
Then I smell it: wood smoke, faint but definite, threaded underneath the other smells.
Someone is having a fire.
I turn left at the next intersection and start down Wynnewood Road. This is the Highlands I remember from last summer. Here the houses were never razed. They still loom, gloomy and vacant, behind thick stands of ancient pine trees.
My throat begins to tighten and release, tighten and release. I can’t be far from 37 Brooks now. I have a sudden terror of coming across it.
I make a decision: If I come to Brooks Street, it will be a sign that I should turn around. I’ll go home; I’ll forget about this ridiculous mission.
“Mama, Mama . . . help me get home . . .”
The singsong voice stops me. I stand still for a minute, holding my breath, trying to locate the source of the sound.
“I’m out in the woods, I’m out on my own . . .”
The words are from an old nursery rhyme about the monsters that were rumored to live in the Wilds. Vampires. Werewolves. Invalids.
Except that the Invalids, it turns out, are real.
I step out of the road and into the grass, weaving through the trees that line the street. I move slowly, careful to touch my toes lightly to the ground before shifting my weight forward—the voice is so quiet, so faint.
The road turns a corner, and I see a girl squatting in the middle of the street, in a large patch of sunshine, her stringy dark hair hanging like a curtain in front of her face. She is all bones. Her kneecaps are like two spiky sails.
She is holding a filthy doll in one hand and a stick in the other. Its end is whittled to a point. The doll has hair made of matted yellow yarn, and eyes of black buttons, although only one of them is still attached to its face. Its mouth is no more than a stitch of red yarn, also unraveling.
“I met a vampire, a rotten old wreck . . .”
I close my eyes as the rest of the lines from the rhyme come back to me.
Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won’t make it home, I’m already half-dead
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.
When I open my eyes again, she looks up, briefly, as she stabs the air with her makeshift stake, as though warding off a vampire. For a moment, everything in me stills. It’s Grace, Lena’s younger cousin. Lena’s favorite cousin.
It’s Grace, who never, ever said a word to anyone, not once in the six years I watched her grow from an infant.
“Mommy, put me to bed . . .”
Even though it’s cool in the shade of the trees, a bead of sweat has gathered between my br**sts. I can feel it tracing its way down to my stomach.
“I met an Invalid, and fell for his art . . .”
Now she takes the stick and begins working it against the doll’s neck, as though making a procedural scar. “Safety, Health, and Happiness spells Shh,” she singsongs.
Her voice is pitched higher now, a lullaby coo. “Shhh. Be a good girl. This won’t hurt at all, I promise.”
I can’t watch anymore. She’s jabbing at the doll’s flexible neck, making its head shudder in response as though it is nodding yes. I step out of the trees.