I’m five months pregnant with my first child. It’s January 2011; I’m in Los Angeles for a job interview. On the day I’m supposed to fly home to Ben, my cell phone dies. My flight has been delayed because of a storm in Atlanta. Somehow I’ve also managed to lose my phone charger. I don’t want to fly without a phone, so I decide to walk the mile to the nearest Sprint store before my shuttle leaves for the airport.
I grew up in Los Angeles, but I’ve only been downtown a handful of times: a few visits to Olvera Street, center of the old pueblo, with Le Lyçée and Marilyn; once to catch the train to go to college almost twenty years ago. For the past few days, I’ve walked around my downtown hotel in the sun, relishing the January weather I remember from childhood—not the Midwestern snow and ice I’ve lived in for the past ten years. I’ve had fun reading directional signs meant for tourists and commemorative plaques, learning things about my hometown I never knew. I’m enjoying my walk this day, pausing to contemplate old buildings and their architectural details, smiling at excited Clippers fans headed to the game at the Staples Center. And that’s when I see it.
It’s a sign for South Hill Street, and I realize it must be the same one: the street name printed in mimeograph ink on Michele’s death certificate, the address of the empty lot where her body was dumped. I’d known it was close to where I’d be staying, but I hadn’t known it would be this close. It hadn’t occurred to me, until now, that I should visit it. Actually, if I’m being truthful with myself, it had. While I was packing, I thought I should take a copy of her death certificate, just in case—but something in me was too scared; something in me had refused. And now here it is.
I turn left and am suddenly in another world. There are no Clippers fans, only a few homeless men asleep on the sidewalk, a private security guard trying to rouse them. The tall buildings block out the sun, and in the shadows, I’m cold. I stick out with my interview suit, shiny new red shoes, the little pregnant belly. This is the Jewelry Mart district, but none of the stores are open on a Sunday. The restaurants and cafes are closed too; only the occasional car drives by. My pace slows; it’s as if I’m walking in a fog—an invisible fog only noticed by me, but still thick and hard to get through. I am suddenly, completely, deep within myself. I walk toward the 600 block. Will the empty lot still be there, or will something have been built over it? How will I know when I’ve gotten to the right place? There will be no marker to tell me that I’ve found it, no memorial plaque or tourist-information panel with a friendly icon. No knife and fork for “restaurant” or wineglass for “bar.” I smile a little, even in my trepidation. What icon would they use, anyway, for a crime scene? A chalk outline, a knife, a hangman’s rope?
How many other bodies, I wonder, have been found in this area, the Fashion District, the Jewelry Mart, the Historic Core? What other unmarked spots are there in the history of this place? No one has put up a plaque at the spot where a girl bought her quinceañera dress, or where a shopkeeper had a heart attack, or where a small boy discovered his love for wonton soup. I wonder what it would be like to mark them all—all the moments of all the lives lived here. The street takes on new color in my imagination: I see it plastered with Post-It notes—blue and yellow and pink sticky notes on every door, every inch of sidewalk, all the light posts—commemorating first kisses, purses stolen, ears pierced, hearts broken. Lives begun, lives ended.
I can’t find 610 South Hill Street. There is a building at 620 and one at 608, with only a small, sealed-off space in between. The buildings look to have been built in the 1920s or ’30s, long before my mother’s death. Perhaps I have the address wrong, although it is burned into my memory: 610 South Hill Street. Perhaps I’ve already passed it somehow. Was it that parking lot a hundred yards back—the earth on which she’d lain paved and repaved, the lines repainted a dozen times in the thirty-four years since she died, the asphalt once more cracking, the lines once more fading? Should I double back?
I realize then my mistake. I summon the image of the death certificate in my mind, its slightly blurry type. It was 610 North Hill Street Place. Another twelve long blocks away—something like a mile—and still I’m not sure where it would be. I consider walking there to look, but I don’t know the neighborhood between here and there. Already on this empty street I’ve felt like an easy target with my suit and my pregnant belly. The new shoes gave me blisters yesterday; now there’s a little pool of blood at the back of my shoe, and the raw spot on my heel stings with every step. And I have a flight to catch.
I’m furious with myself. Why hadn’t I planned this? Why hadn’t I packed the address after all, ordered a cab, driven there? What kind of daughter am I? Suddenly I want nothing more than to be at that spot—that spot where my mother’s broken body, fully clothed but for her missing right shoe, was discarded like trash. But I have a flight to catch, a stupid phone charger to buy, a mile to walk back to the hotel.
I turn on Sixth and resume my walk to Broadway, coming to the suddenly bustling blocks that surround Grand Central Market. I hope the Sunday crowds of little children and their parents, the cops on their bikes, the street vendors, the tourists, don’t notice the tears in my eyes. I keep imagining my mother, Michele, walking these blocks. I imagine her spirit beside me, seeing what I see; imagine her noticing the sweet little girls in frilly dresses, the wood shavings on the sidewalk outside the Central Market, the sweet smell of a panadería. But of course she probably never had reason to walk these streets. Her ghost isn’t here, I remind myself. Why would it be here any more than it would be at her grave, if she had a grave, or the place she died, or the Hollywood Center Motel where she lived, my first childhood home?
But then I think perhaps she is here somehow; perhaps the very act of searching, of thinking of her, has summoned her to my side. I stop in the middle of a busy sidewalk in downtown LA, on Sixth Street, somewhere between Hill and Broadway. I imagine her next to me, in front of me, behind me; I imagine her where she is as close to me as she can get, where she can see and know everything there is about me. I want her to know every good thing that’s happened to me since I last saw her. I close my eyes for a second and stick my hand out a little, as if to hold hers.
Mom, I think, but that doesn’t sound right. Michele, I’m here. I’m going to have a baby. It’s a little girl. I just wanted to show you.
I wait a moment, then walk on, leaving no mark behind me.