The trees here are tall, the houses are nearly taller. They look obscene and hollow. The shutters are fake, and the houses are too far apart to climb from window to window. It’s a new development and most of the houses are empty, because no one in Waldo has the money to live here. Of course Janie hated it.
Dewey turns again, and I see it. He’s right. There’s nothing left to see. Except the black toothpick frame of the house. The beams poke out of the ground like the ribs of a giant. They remind me of Janie’s fairy tales. Nothing else is black. They don’t tell you that about fires. I thought it would all be burned black, but it’s not. Everything is gray. It is all the same color as the sky.
I am out of the car, but I don’t remember unbuckling my seat belt. Or opening the door. But I am outside and it’s dry and it still smells like fire.
The grass is crisp under my feet.
“Micah, don’t,” I hear Dewey say.
There is yellow tape everywhere, but I duck under. I ignore Dewey, and he doesn’t come after me.
The world is tilting, but I still don’t remember.
The sun is hidden, but it still hurts my eyes.
And my lungs.
Among the toothpicks is half an armchair. The chimney and the fireplace. Something that might have been a piano. I don’t remember the armchair. They must have gotten it after they moved. That’s right. I remember Janie talking about the new furniture, and hating that too.
“Micah?”
I flinch, and turn to see Mr. Vivian standing at the end of the driveway, and Dewey diving back into the car to avoid whatever is going to happen next. Janie’s dad is a big man, but he looks gray too. He used to be on the football team at Waldo High, and the track team. He used to date Piper’s mom, and also Wes Bennet’s mom, and they might have overlapped. Janie told me that freshman year. She was convinced her parents could have been happy with anyone but each other.
“Isn’t that funny?” she had said. We had just come back from a ninja mission. She was perched on the windowsill, about to climb away. “If there’s one person in the world you should be with, there must be one person in the world you shouldn’t be with. Well, I mean, a lot of people. But one person in particular. Don’t you think it’s funny that out of all the people in the whole wide world, my parents ended up with each other? I do.”
It’s not a helpful memory. It’s not what I came here to remember.
“Micah, what are you doing here?” asks Mr. Vivian. He walks up the driveway slowly but doesn’t cross the yellow tape.
I watch him but keep walking backward. The ash is thickening. It reaches my ankles. It covers my shoes. I look up; the sky is the same color as the ground. “Is this where her room used to be?” I ask him.
His jaw is tight.
I look around. The trees are fine, mostly. Some of the branches are burned, but for the most part, they’re okay. They cage the house in.
“She lied,” I said. “You can’t see the Metaphor from here.”
“Micah, you know you can’t be here,” he calls. “It’s blocked off for a reason. And you—you especially can’t be here.”
He’s almost yelling. He says you like it’s shit in his mouth.
“Will you move back now?” I ask.
There is a screw in his jawbone and it’s tightening and the tension is too much.
“Leave,” he tells me, and I wish—I wish I could. But my feet have sunk into the ash. I can only look at him. His eyes are bluer than Janie’s. His hair is dark, but his beard is red like her hair. I can see Janie in him. I would never tell her that. She would never listen. She would probably punch me if I said it. But I can see her in him.
“Micah,” he says. “I want you off my property. I want you to leave. I never want you near my family again. I don’t ever want to find you here again. The next time I want to see you is in court.”
You can see the quarry from here, so that part was true. But I can’t see the Metaphor. There’s Old Eell’s barn and so I should be able to see the Metaphor, and Janie wouldn’t lie about that. Janie would never lie about the Metaphor.
“I have to go,” I say, and I stumble past him and down the driveway, where Dewey is waiting in his car. I don’t remember when he did that. He must have dived in when he saw Mr. Vivian, which doesn’t surprise me. Dewey usually solves problems by getting the fuck out of there.
I am still walking toward Dewey’s car, I am still staring at my best friend who is an asshole safe inside, I am still wondering why I couldn’t see the Metaphor from the top of the hill.
But then suddenly I am also in my bed, and the room is dark, and Janie is beside me. We are tangled in the blankets. Her head is in my pillow and she is screaming. Her father is standing in the door, and he fills the room.
The moment fractures and turns to dust. Ash.
I stumble into the car.
“Let’s drive to the quarry,” I tell Dewey, and he does.
In the car, I remember again. “What did Janie’s dad mean, about court? And me?”
Dewey hauls ass towards the quarry, away from the tall, empty houses. “He didn’t mean anything.”
“You didn’t even hear.”
“So why the fuck are you asking me, then?”