Chapter 4 Sycamore Street

The street had kept its name and lost almost everything else. Maggie drove out on a bright, cold Sunday in late October, following the navigation voice until it had nothing left to say, and parked under the sycamores themselves, which turned out to be enormous, older than the houses, their mottled trunks shedding paper-thin curls of bark onto the curb like the street molting out of one decade and into another. In 1984 there had been forty-one households between the crossing and the railroad embankment. Now the block held duplexes where singles had stood, a paved-over lot where a corner grocery used to be, and house numbers that no longer matched the canvass map photocopied in her folder -- the city had renumbered the east side in 1991, a clerk told her later, for the emergency dispatch system, as if saving lives were worth erasing addresses. The canvass pages themselves were some of the saddest paperwork she had ever read. Two uniforms, officers Brand and Kessel per the header, had knocked on every door over three shifts beginning October the twentieth, and their summary ran to three sheets of increasingly tired handwriting. Nobody heard anything. Nobody saw anything. The entries shrank as the pages progressed, starting with full sentences and ending with initials, the handwriting of two men who understood around door thirty that they were collecting nothing but apologies. Still, the early pages held gold, if you read them against the grain. At 106 Sycamore, an Eleanor Prue reported that her porch light, which she switched off at bedtime as a matter of principle, had burned through the entire night of the fifteenth because, she told the officer, something kept setting off the dog. At 121, a thirteen-year-old named Dale Wicker stated that he had seen the curtain in the Harper kitchen move at ten past six on the morning of the sixteenth, an observation the officer recorded without comment, as though curtains were beneath the dignity of a major investigation. Maggie walked the block twice with a recorder running, capturing what producers call room tone and what she thought of as a place telling you how loud it actually is. Sycamore Street at midday sounded like wind in high leaves, a distant leaf blower, somebody's television through a screen door. At the far end, where the crossing used to be, the bus shelter was gone; a low metal bench sat on the concrete pad instead, bolted down, facing the wrong direction according to nobody, since direction only matters if someone remembers the original. She stood on the pad and looked up the block toward number 114, counting doors, and the geometry arranged itself in her head with an almost audible click. The current owners of the Harper house were a couple in their thirties who had bought the place four years earlier and renovated it from the studs, which meant, the wife explained cheerfully from the doorway, that whatever happened here happened to a different house entirely, underneath the one they lived in. They had a baby asleep upstairs and a mortgage they liked very much, and when Maggie asked whether the history bothered them, the husband shrugged with the practiced lightness of a man who had decided the question's price long ago. Every old street has a story, he said. Ours has better trees than most. She thanked them, declined tea, and did not tell them about the basement floor, which by all rights should have belonged to a museum or a court, and instead belonged to a nursery. From the sidewalk she called Dale Wicker, now fifty-one, an HVAC sales manager living outside Kansas City, whose number Rosa had pulled from a alumni mailing list in under an hour. He remembered everything, and he remembered it sideways, the way memory stores things that were never officially important. Sure, the Harper thing, he said. I gave a statement. A cop wrote it on a little notepad leaning on my bike. What I never told anybody -- because who do you even tell -- is that autumn, the Kessler family's dog went crazy every morning for like six weeks. Barking straight up the fence line, not at the sidewalk. Dogs don't bark at nothing, lady. That fence backed onto the rental. Which rental? Maggie asked, already knowing, wanting to hear it in a stranger's mouth. The yellow one, two doors down from the Harpers, he said. Tenants came and went. Quiet guy in it for a while there, kept to himself, had this way of standing on his porch like he was waiting for a parade. Then everybody moved around at the same time, like musical chairs, and after that the dog settled down. He laughed, embarrassed by the shape of his own memory. You're going to think I made half that up. Everybody thinks dogs and weather are decoration. Rosa Ibarra spent that evening with the maps, because maps were her instrument the way microphones were Maggie's. She scanned the 1984 canvass diagram and the current plat, aligned them by the railroad embankment, and overlayed the lot lines in red. Then she called Maggie, and her voice had the careful flatness she reserved for findings she did not enjoy. Stand on the rental's front porch, she said. Sightline runs clean across the Harpers' driveway, straight to their kitchen window. Rotate ninety degrees, same sightline terminates exactly at the bench where the bus stop used to be. Whoever stood on that porch owned both the house and the schedule of the woman who lived in it. I am not saying anything, Rosa added, in the tone of someone saying something. I am saying the geography has an opinion. At dusk the street went amber and long shadows stepped off the porches and lay down across the lawns. Maggie set her recorder on the bench at the end of the block, checked the levels, and spoke the outro she had drafted on the drive out. This is Sycamore Street, she said to listeners who would never stand here. Forty-one families once. Sycamores older than all of them. Somewhere along this block, for a season, every schedule was known to someone patient, and the only witness who ever came forward described a woman checking over her shoulder for a bus that would arrive at seven-oh-three. On weekdays, give or take the weather. The recorder light glowed red in the gathering dark, and halfway up the block, behind the hedge of the yellow house, a porch light came on, steady and unexplained, and stayed lit while she packed her equipment. ---