It was hard to reconcile the farm being nothing more than a line on some corporate balance sheet. We had spent nearly every weekend on the farm, and I had pleasant, sepia-tinted memories of chasing chickens and playing hide-and-go-seek in the barn. In particular, the memory of our Fourth of July gathering in 2000 was etched on my heart. It was the last time we were all there: Grammy and Pops would be killed by a drunk driver less than one month later, and, three months after that, Uncle Jason would leave Aunt A. The Cave family had already moved into the house next door to ours. It was the beginning of the end.
But we didn’t know what was coming for us, and so we celebrated. Uncle Jason had driven to Indiana and stocked up on fireworks, which made Mom and Aunt A cluck their tongues in disapproval and Pops’s and Daddy’s eyes light up with mischief. While we awaited nightfall, the adults prepared a feast. Pops supervised while Daddy and Uncle Jason grilled hamburgers and chicken breasts, drinking beers and telling bawdy jokes in muted tones. Mom set out an impressive array of salads: green, pasta, potato. Aunt A drank too much wine and ruined most of the deviled eggs she tried to prepare, leading us in a slurred rendition of “America the Beautiful” all the while. Grammy made three pies for dessert, including my father’s favorite, pecan, even though she teased him it was a winter pie.
Snacking on sloppy deviled eggs, Lanie, Ellen, and I crept down to the pond. Our mothers’ younger brother had drowned in the pond as a child, and we were forbidden to play there unsupervised—but that summer, twelve years old and practically grown up, we no longer felt obligated to obey such rules. We constructed makeshift fishing poles from sticks, dental floss, and safety pins, and used stale Cheetos and stolen bits of raw hamburger meat as bait, neither of which proved enticing to the fish we were certain were in the water.
A frog captured Lanie’s attention, and she leaned forward, trying to coax it toward her cupped hands. But she misjudged the stability of the muddy bank and tumbled in head over heels. The water wasn’t deeper than a foot or two, but she fell with a spectacular splash and emerged soaking wet and covered in algae. Ellen wrinkled her nose in disgust, and that was all the encouragement Lanie needed. She took off, chasing Ellen toward the farmhouse, slimy hands outstretched like a zombie. I ran on Lanie’s heels, yelping with excitement. Lanie caught up with Ellen just as they reached the adults and smeared a handful of green algae across Ellen’s face and through her golden hair. There was a quiet second, the calm before the storm, and then Ellen started to scream. Our mother had been horrified by Lanie’s behavior, but Daddy and Aunt A laughed until they cried and even Grammy looked as though she was struggling not to chortle as she led Ellen and Lanie around the back of the house to hose off.
Later that night, as the sun dropped behind the horizon, we roasted marshmallows over a bonfire as Uncle Jason set up the fireworks. Lanie made a double-decker s’more for Ellen, who—this was years before she would become obsessed with calories—ate it with relish. The incident with the algae was forgotten. We were a family, and there was nothing that could come between us. Or so we thought.
Cold beads of sweat sprang up along my hairline when the WELCOME TO ELM PARK sign came into view, marking the spot where the cornfields gave way to the town’s uninspired grid of paved streets and square lawns. Elm Park had once been a bustling town bursting with potential, but like so many small midwestern towns before it, its prospects had faded. By the time I left, the first of the factories was already gone, relocated to a country with cheaper labor; in the ensuing years, the other factories had followed, as did most of the big-box stores and both of the movie theaters. Ellen narrated all this as we drew closer to the city limits, her tone such that I expected little more than a ghost town, just boarded-up buildings and deteriorating homes.
But Elm Park looked just as I had remembered. The welcome sign was the same weathered oval with faded green letters and paint peeling from the carved elm tree leaves decorating the border. Just beyond the sign I could see the dark, hulking hospital, and on the other side of the street, the 7-Eleven with a handful of loitering teenagers sipping Slurpees in front of it. I had the feeling that if I were close enough to see their faces, I’d recognize them.
Intellectually, I knew that wasn’t true. Anyone young enough to be skulking about convenience stores would be too young for me to have known when I lived in Elm Park. But as Ellen and I drove farther into town, the uneasy sensation that the entire place had been undisturbed by time only intensified. The most noticeable changes I spotted were that the elementary school had a newer, shinier jungle gym and that a couple unfamiliar restaurants dotted the edge of campus. As Ellen drove past Ray’s Bistro, a memory hit me so hard that I dug my fingers into the seat’s upholstery to avoid crying out.
In the weeks before Ellen and I left for college, Aunt A had grown increasingly emotional about our departure. She had been following us around for weeks with watery eyes, offering to drive us to the mall or the swimming pool, despite both of us having driver’s licenses (and having stopped hanging out at the mall years ago). I almost felt guilty about leaving, but I knew Aunt A didn’t want us to stay in Elm Park forever.
Like Lanie seemed poised to do. We had once loved touring Elm Park College’s campus with our father and imagining our own matriculation there (the dorm room we would share, the majors we would choose, the picnics we would have on the quad), but things had changed. I planned to attend the University of Illinois, which had an undergraduate enrollment of 32,000 people—10,000 more than the population of Elm Park—while Lanie rejected the idea of college altogether. She’d graduated from high school by the skin of her teeth and had refused to apply to college, despite Aunt A’s pleading. We had no idea what she planned to do. She hadn’t been living with us for months, and it had been weeks since I had seen her. The most recent sighting was brief, when I had caught her in the kitchen “borrowing” some money from Aunt A’s purse.
Somehow, though, Aunt A had extracted a promise from Lanie to attend a going-away dinner at Ray’s. Aunt A had dressed up for the occasion, wearing a silky tunic that disguised her slightly round figure and setting her long, glossy brown hair in rollers, and Ellen and I had followed her lead, both in sundresses with full skirts and lipstick. Our reservation time came and went without Lanie materializing. The three of us picked idly at the bread basket while Aunt A repeatedly sent the waiter away with assurances that our fourth would “just be a couple more minutes.”
It wasn’t long before neither Ellen nor our waiter could conceal their irritation, and Aunt A finally conceded defeat. As if on cue, just as our waiter disappeared into the kitchen with our drink and appetizer orders, my sister breezed through the door. In a room full of people dressed in their Sunday best, Lanie wore a white T-shirt with a ripped neckline, denim cutoffs, and mud-caked Dr. Martens boots. Her makeup was smeared, eyeliner collecting under her eyes in exaggerated shadows. Her septum piercing looked tarnished, like it possibly had blood on it. She didn’t look like she had showered in days. And she was clearly high.