It was dark by the time we reached Chicago. At least, the massive highway billboards kept informing us that we were in the Chicago area, but we spent at least an hour in stop-and-go traffic on the rain-slick freeway, the sort of rush-hour mess that really shouldn’t exist at night, on a weekend.
Mom took a random exit, and we went inside a Burger King to use the bathroom. There were two stalls, but only one had a working latch. Mom went first, and when I came out, my hands only half-dry from an ineffectual air dryer, Mom was sitting in a booth with her cell phone against one ear and her free hand jotting down an address on a napkin.
When she hung up the phone, she said, “I was right. They haven’t moved. I mean, all those years, and they’re still in that run-down house. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything so depressing.” She folded the napkin neatly and stood. “Think I’ll grab a burger to go. You want something?”
I shook my head. How could I eat with all this uncertainty?
In the car, Mom plugged the address into her cell phone and passed the phone over to me so I could navigate while she took quick bites of her burger.
“I knew it was somewhere around here,” she said, executing the turns as I called them out.
“We’re not going to call first?” I asked.
“We’ve been calling,” Mom pointed out. “It’s not like he’s dying to return our calls.”
“Not Dad,” I protested. “I think that we should call them. Grandpa and Grandma, I mean.”
She crumpled the wrapper from her burger and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t call them Grandpa and Grandma. They aren’t your real grandparents.”
“That’s right, they’re my fake grandparents.”
“Olivia. Look, tomorrow or whenever this is all over, you can ask me questions or yell at me, or whatever you want. Tonight, let’s just get to your dad and make sure everything’s okay.”
“That’s why I thought we should call. To make sure everything’s okay.”
Mom slowed for a turn. According to the directions on her phone, we were 1.3 miles from our destination. “I’m not hoping for a friendly chat.”
My heart was hammering around in my chest cavity as Mom made a final left turn. We were on a residential street, with houses close together on small lots and cars parked along the curb on both sides of the street. “This place has really changed,” Mom mused, straining to see in the dark.
“Changed good or changed bad?”
“Oh, changed for the good. It used to be a lot of falling-down houses and chain-link fences.”
There were still a few of those around, I noted, but the cars parked in driveways were decent-looking minivans that could fit a whole soccer troop in their backseats, next to the occasional sporty hybrid. Mom was scanning for the house number on one side of the street, but I was craning my neck for a glimpse of our teal-green Explorer, without any luck.
“There it is!” Mom pointed to a house that was basically falling in on itself. She slowed directly in front of it, and since no one was behind us, we stopped to stare. A bare bulb over the porch illuminated, but barely, a rusty screen door, sagging porch steps, a concrete walkway from the curb that was so cracked and uneven it was an invitation for a stubbed toe, or worse. A lone shutter hung from a small window, and I wondered if its mate had fallen into the shrubs below, where it was even now rotting away into nothing.
I fought back a lump of vomit that was lurking at the back of my throat. Someone I knew—my father—had lived in this house? Suddenly, this all seemed like a very bad idea, another wrong turn on this crazy road trip. If I clicked my heels together three times, would I end up back where we’d started? Dad wasn’t here. Maybe we’d read this whole situation wrong, and Dad hadn’t been here and wasn’t going to be here, and yet, we were here. Unannounced, uninvited, unexplained, about to barge in to the most unwelcoming house I could have imagined.
“Let’s go,” I whispered frantically, and Mom, misunderstanding, said, “Geez, Liv. We can’t just leave the car in the middle of the street. Let me find a place to park.”
We had to drive for a few blocks before we could find a spot that could accommodate a Volvo station wagon, and then we hiked back down the street, with Mom urging me forward. How was she so fearless? If Dad really was in their house with a gun—even if it was unloaded—I was more and more convinced with each step that it wasn’t the place for me. But Mom was determined, clutching her purse strap with one hand and me with the other. Soon we were back in front of the broken-down house, standing on the cracked concrete at the curb.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” I said, trying not to whimper. Right then my mind was flooded with about a billion things I wanted to write in my Fear Journal, like dark spaces and roofs caving in, not to mention the sudden memory of my ninth grade English teacher reading from The Fall of the House of Usher.
“There’s a light on inside,” Mom pointed out.
“But it’s late. They’re probably asleep. Maybe we should come back in the morning.” Or never.
“This will be the first time I’ve interrupted their lives in almost thirty years,” Mom said. “I guess they’ll just have to live with that.” She led the way up the walkway, paused at the screen door hanging slightly open and reached around to rap, hard, on the front door.
Nothing. I felt relief wash over me. In maybe twenty minutes we could be at a decent hotel, tucked into clean white sheets, watching House Hunters. We would call Dad again, and I would leave a longer message repeating how sorry I was for saying that I hated him, and maybe telling him a joke or two so he would know everything was okay. Or I would just say “Love” and wait for him to call back with “Elephantine.”
Mom knocked again, harder.
There were footsteps inside the house.
“I’m going to throw up,” I whimpered, but there was no time. The door swung inward, and the woman standing there, looking lumpy in a few layers of cardigans, smiled as if she were used to strangers appearing on her doorstep on a rainy night.
“Hello, Kathleen,” my grandmother said. “And this must be your daughter.”