It’s been three years since my mom sold our house. One afternoon I’m early to meet a friend and close to MacDougal Street. I’ve passed the house before, but that was before the new owners moved in. I feel the urge to spy on them, see if they’re treating the house right. I walk on the Dante side of the street, facing the row of houses, but it’s too dark to see inside. I notice that the facade looks faded. I see dried watermarks. The house has been crying.
I want to know who took our place, to see who is standing where we stood, saying and doing and thinking where we did all those things. They don’t know about us, just as we didn’t know or think about those who came before us. I want to tell them about Dead Man Smith, and warn the kids that Norman Bates lives in the basement. They should know about Ciggy, Sasquatch, and the lady on the corner; and if Jimmy comes back, they should direct him our way. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Even if I ring the bell and tell them everything I think they should know, I’m just a firsthand person telling stories to a secondhand person, who will inevitably tell some third-hander, and on it goes, until the people I hope will be remembered aren’t people at all, but the stories of people who were once real. I guess that’s who we all are. The stories of ourselves other people tell. Somewhere, though, is the story of us that never got told, some original self that never happened.
I cross the street and notice that newspapers and trash have collected on the ground outside the front door. The camera Jimmy put up is rusty and broken, dangling by its wires like a nearly severed head. The windows in front are covered by cardboard, so I can’t see inside, down the hall, and into the secret garden. The paint is chipping, the window guards are rusted, and the gold letter slot on the front door has grown a green patina. As I stand and stare, passersby eye me, suspicious. I want to reassure them I’m not a Peeping Tom or, worse, a tourist. I used to live here; this was my home. But now, it seems, we sold it to a ghost. It feels too early for me to be on the other side of this house’s history, but here I am, locked out, with the view blocked by cheap cardboard. No one moved in. I open the mail slot, but I can’t see anything.
Someone bought it and let it sit here for years, and it’s grown saggy with despair. Stale tears have eroded the paint, leaving milky streaks down its front. Now it’s twice the price. Only wine and real estate are covetable with age. There it sits, the house I grew up in, where everything I feared would happen, happened; where the people and things I love no longer converge and can’t be found. All the garden kids are gone. No one lives new lives on top of our old one. There are no children racing around, sliding down banisters, racing out into the garden; there is no one giving thought to the people who came before. Three years on, the house stands like a premature gravestone. If Jimmy comes back, he won’t know where we went.
As a little girl, when I left for my dad’s house on the weekends, I always feared the house would be gone when we returned, and in its place a black empty rectangle. But this is worse. The house is here, but its soul is gone. The garden is no longer mine, nor is the school around the corner. Everything important in my life used to orbit in relation to this house, and this house meant my mother and my mother meant home and home meant safe and those things together meant I wouldn’t die. Until Etan Patz disappeared, at least.
* * *
When I was in sixth grade, a man was apprehended for luring two small boys into the sewer system. His name was Jose Ramos, but the newspaper dubbed him “the Drainpipe Man.” A known pedophile, he was finally sent to prison in 1985, but he became a suspect in the Patz case when it was revealed that he dated the woman who occasionally cared for Etan. That woman, Sandy, had walked Etan to the school bus in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Without a body, the Patz family could not pursue a wrongful death suit, and so, in 2001, twenty-two years after their six-year-old son disappeared, his parents declared him legally dead.
Then, on May 24, 2012, out of the seeming blue, a day before the thirty-third anniversary of his disappearance, a fifty-one-year-old man named Pedro Hernandez confessed to killing Etan Patz. I was forty-two years old and on my way to a picnic in Fort Greene Park when I received the alert on my phone, and I sat down on a nearby stoop, shaking as I read the claims. In 1979, Pedro Hernandez, then an eighteen-year-old stock clerk, was working at the deli adjacent to the school bus stop. When Etan arrived on the corner, gripping his soda money, Hernandez told him to follow him to the basement to get his drink. Hernandez claims that halfway down the stairs, something came over him, and he put his hands around Etan’s little neck and strangled him. He tossed his school bag behind the refrigerator, and put Etan in a box, placed the box inside a garbage bag, and, later that day, hauled the boy down the street and discarded him in an alley.
I didn’t go to the picnic. I turned around and went home, turned on the news, and read everything I could. But I could not stop shaking. How could this be? I kept thinking. How is it possible that all this time, and all these years we’ve been waiting and looking and hoping, he’s been dead? It made no sense to me; it didn’t add up, not just because the story seemed odd, but because when it comes to this case, I am still a nine-year-old, just as Etan is still six. He disappeared between 8 a.m. and 8:10 a.m., but to me, he didn’t die. He’s been alive all this time because I never knew that he wasn’t. Despite the confession, we will never truly know what happened to him. He got swallowed by the in-between, and life stopped. For some of us life never started again.
And yet, through all that, and through all those years, not once did my loyal house abandon me. It never disappeared or cut itself out from the world. We, my family, are the abandoners, leaving no one to care for the house that cared for us. The building is my memory, the one solid object that means my past, and here it stands now, an empty legacy that won’t carry any of us with it. Soon we’ll be the memories, but with no children of my own, who will remember me? I never gave birth to those who would miss me most. Will anyone feel the loss of me? Like Etan’s posters, will my memories simply be plastered over one sunny day?
I still have my key, and people say to let myself in. But after all the years of being afraid someone might break into the house, I can’t now be the intruder. An era is over, my mother says at least twice a year, when the iconic places in the Village fall victim to inflated rents, when someone we’ve known forever dies. But we’re the era now, and we’re ending.
The landscape is always changing. Behind every new store is an old one, behind every person is an entire lineage, and inside all of us are choices we make again and again until we decide to make better ones.
* * *
Now I’m late, and I rush down the street just as a cavalcade of young mothers three abreast push their carriages toward me. I step off the curb and into the gutter, the same one I sank into when my mom told me Melissa died. They pass and I watch their backs grow distant. I am not a part of that world, and I never will be. Neither will Melissa or Etan or Jonathan. We are all just moments in time, a blink in a trillion-year history, even if our existence sometimes feels endless. While I’ll never know if the life I never got would have been better than the life I have now, I do know the lives Etan, Melissa, Jonathan, and Jimmy never got would have been.