Homecoming

The street is quiet now, empty, and the air is thick with summer heat; in the trees that line the silent street, the rhythmic chirp of the cicadas stirs the tepid air, and I breathe in the scent of the rain that fell last night. As I push open the driver’s door, step from the car, feel the heat of the pavement through the thin soles of my sandals and take in the familiar smell, the essence, the sticky, lukewarm aura of the weary old neighborhood, the sound of the door swinging slowly shut is the only noise to break the silence, and I lean against the car to gaze out at the charcoal street. I don’t bother going inside, since I know they won’t be there this time of day - by now, both of my parents will be at work, and I’ve just come to see the house one last time before they sell it. Before they move on, seven years after my younger sister left high school, and move into the vacation home they bought several years ago in my mother’s hometown-- before they leave this place forever, and I lose whatever claim to it I’ve held onto all these years. Before I lose a chance I didn’t know I wanted, until they called me to tell me they were moving - before it all melts into oblivion, the dry shell of a past cast off for bigger and better things, crumpling, withering and blowing away in the wind at long last. Before it’s all gone, and I can never come back...before then, I wanted to come here, if only to breathe it all in one last time.

I know things have changed, by now. As I reach the end of the driveway, the sidewalk coarse and hot beneath my sandaled feet, I gaze out at the place where I grew up, where I clutched a Disney backpack as I climbed onto the kindergarten bus and leaned half-asleep against a tree waiting, in the lamplit dark, to be shipped off to four years of high school. Where I climbed onto the electrical box and swung my feet as I listened to the older girls talk of middle school and watched the younger ones swing back and forth on the gliders hung from their swingsets, envying them all, wanting their friendship so much...where I watched them with grey-circled eyes each morning on the high school bus, flicking tired eyes away from the pretty Spanish girl who used to be one of my best friends and rolling my eyes at the streaky-haired, mascara-clumped freshman girl who never cleaned up the toys she left out at my house. This place used to mean so much to me, to all of us-- to Kelly Chao, who threw a plastic shovel at me when we were four years old, who was a problem child from an early age, who was shipped off to boarding school for most of her life and smoked crack by the dumpster when she attended my high school. Now, ten years later, their house is empty, and the For Sale sign swings sad and lonely in a faint summer breeze that stirs the balmy air - now, she’s been gone for three long years, the girl who had once been some semblance of a friend long dead of the overdose we all knew was coming and her parents, haunted by denial, gone in the wake of their only child. Across the street from the hollow house, another one stands tall and brick-faced, one of the largest in the neighborhood, a chandelier hanging from the arch above the double doors and two glistening new cars parked in the driveway-- the Carmine household, looking almost empty now, and so different from the place my sister and I traipsed over to so many lukewarm summer days for one babysitting job after the other. Now, Ross Carmine is seventeen, and I watch the lanky shadow of the seven-year-old boy I once played video games with light a cigarette on the porch; his chin bristling with blonde stubble and his eyes bloodshot and sad, he leans against the brick wall and releases a ring of heavy, lonely smoke, so much like that which billowed from the windows of that house nine years ago that it sends chills down my spine. Nine years ago, there were three of those kids - the precocious Ross, his bossy, five-year-old sister Rachel, and the shaggy-haired, always grinning three-year-old Trevor. Trevor, who never had a chance...who died, his hoarse cry stifled by the crash of a smoking rafter, his little blue room with the cedar bunk beds and the bin of plastic trucks going up in the thick, charcoal-scented flames that had engulfed the Carmine house that awful night. Nine years ago, a broken smoke detector and a faulty fire screen set the neighborhood ablaze, and the feral wail of Catherine Carmine filled the air as it went down-- as her son went down with it, trapped in the smoke-filled prison of his room, and their suburban dream shattered in his wake.

But there are no tears now. Now, Rachel Carmine is a cheerleader with a lipgloss library in her Coach handbag and a strut guaranteed to intimidate, and Ross a poetry-writing, nicotine-addicted burnout I know from my high school days is the height of normalcy-- now, their house is as beautiful as ever, and no one would ever guess that it wasn’t always that way. All the new faces, the new families who moved in after my sister and I left for college will never know their stories, because they’ll be too busy spinning tales of their own - the elderly woman who now sits on the front porch of the house across from ours, rocking back and forth on her rocking chair, will never recall the feet of the little girl who used to skip down the steps and knock on my door, calling for a sixteen-year-old me to play jacks with her and the pair of Korean adoptees whose house is, by now, home to a middle-school principal who’ll never know the faces they pulled or the way they danced. The neighborhood is growing, changing, just like the world around it, and as I gaze up at the balmy blue sky, I wonder if it’s blossoming or withering - if the change is for the better, this casting off of the past, or if the others will walk these streets one day and sigh. If they’ll come back, all the rest of them, and wonder where it all went-- if I’ll see them again, any of them, the wispy-haired, big-eyed Madelyn I watched bloom from a sweet-faced toddler into a waiflike artist over so many nights of popcorn and Disney movies, bills pulled from the wallets of grateful parents and wet walks across freshly-cut lawns in the middle of the night, the dark-haired, almond-eyed Jessica who went from my favorite babysitter to a single mother living with her parents, the countless buyers of my Girl Scout cookies and the parents of the boy who ran away when I was ten. The Puerto Rican sisters who used to be our best friends, who shared so many swimsuit-clad sprinkler games and and cold cereal munched in our treehouse, who wore braces and glasses as children and miniskirts and highlights as teenagers, who went to Catholic schools and had sweet smiles and who had big, beautiful brown eyes - eyes like those on the little girl I see plopped down in the grass of the house next to ours, chewing on a leaf from the lush pair of trees that were just saplings ten years ago, and who grins and burbles when she sees me walk slowly by. Those on the silky-haired, coffee-brown woman planting daisies in the flowerbed behind her, glinting in the sun as she lifts her sunglasses and turns her gaze to me...smiles, flicking faintly at the corners of her lips, and friendly as she always was, waves.

I wave back. And I realize, with a smile of my own, that some things never change.