Where We Are, page 8
Am I forgetting anything? The abandoned building in South Minneapolis. The white passenger van. The Living Lights Project. There’s not a lot of specific detail, but it’s important to remember everything I possibly can.
For so long, Micah thought the Prophet and the cult were funny—sad funny, cliché funny, old-Godzilla-movies funny. Then one day last summer he came to my house and told me his mom and dad had both quit their jobs, and he didn’t laugh. He didn’t text first, he just came over and knocked on the side door. Which is the only door, if you don’t count the enormous one that rolls up in front, which I don’t. It would have startled me except that by then he had his own knock. Not a knock so much as a slide of his knuckles back and forth across the ridged metal surface. Like the wind, if the wind had hands, was the sound of Micah’s knock. Is the sound of Micah’s knock.
He just stood there when I opened the door. I had to reach out and pull him in before someone saw him. He knew better than to stand there—he knows that no one can know where I live—and that’s how I knew it must be something bad.
“But how will they, like, buy groceries and pay the mortgage?” I asked when he told me they’d quit their jobs.
He shrugged, like that was the last thing that mattered. Which it wasn’t. Isn’t. It takes a lot of time and energy and scheming to earn your living. Trust me on that one.
“Maybe the Prophet’s paying the bills or something?” he said at last.
Things got a lot clearer later on, when we found out about the “audit” part of the Living Lights plan. How the Prophet and Deeson went through all the congregants’ finances and then told them how much each family was supposed to contribute. Which must have been a ton, right? I mean, if it was enough to buy the South Compound. A building in the middle of a big city, even if it’s abandoned, costs a massive amount of money.
Micah wasn’t clear on the whole audit thing, or how his parents would buy groceries. He was still being supported by his parents, like most people our age are. For example, my grandmother took care of all our bills. Even on her cafeteria-lady income, we always seemed to have enough money for food and rent. Once in a while, a trip to Target or dinner out at the Quang. How to afford things wasn’t something she talked about. She took care of it.
It was only after she died that I learned all that stuff, and I learned it the hard way.
At the end, my grandmother might have felt she lived an afraid life, but she didn’t show it. Although maybe she did? Maybe not having friends to the apartment, maybe always telling me to be vigilant and to protect myself and not to ask for help, or maybe not letting me have friends over was, in fact, showing she was afraid. This is the kind of thing I think about, now that she’s gone.
Focus, Sesame.
Walk down the alley, looking left and right for signs of abandonment. Scan garages and parking lots for white vans, even regular vans, and examine them quickly but carefully look for signs of a GOT HOCKEY? bumper sticker or a recently removed bumper sticker. Take care to look ordinary, and not as if you’re casing the neighborhood. Walk tall and straight and confident.
Even when things are ordinary, which they are the opposite of with Micah missing, routine keeps the days structured: Get up, dress, eat, tutor Vong, work on school assignments, walk the pups, meet up with Inky and Sebastian, see Micah, go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. That’s my ordinary routine. I would give anything to be back in it.
As I walk, I think about the Stones, and the Living Lights Project, and the Prophet. Why didn’t I do more to stop it, to convince Micah to stop it? I should’ve done more.
Because here’s the thing: bad things start slow, and you ignore them because you think they’ll go away. But they don’t go away. They grow and grow until they’ve taken root, and once something sends down roots, it’s hard to get rid of. It’s like what Micah taught me about potatoes. All you need to make dozens of new potatoes is a single old potato that’s grown an eye or two. You stick it eye-down in the ground and cover it with dirt and ignore it. Come back in a few months and dig. Prepare to be shocked.
You know what else started slow and took root? My grandmother’s heart disease. By the time we knew what was happening, it was too late. And by the time Micah and I knew how far gone his parents were, it was too late. In both cases, the blind eye of the potato had sent down roots and grown too big to remove. By the time Micah tried to talk to them, they were in too deep.
“They won’t listen to me,” he told me, late another night when he just showed up at my door.
“If they won’t listen to you now, Micah, what makes you think they’re going to listen to you after even more time goes by?” I pressed him. “I mean, what if they actually end up following this guy, like, wherever he tells them to go? And you end up following them, and then you’re all trapped in whatever this South Compound turns out to be?”
He kept shaking his head, like, I don’t know, I don’t know. That’s when I got scared. Really scared. It was a shiver that flashed through me, like, this shit’s real. And I know a lot about survival, but I don’t know how you haul someone back when their mind’s being controlled. It was clear that Micah knew—even if he didn’t consciously understand it—that his parents had gone beyond the pale. That was our term for it: gone beyond the pale. Side note: his parents were pale at that point, literally. They were pale and thin and quiet. They weren’t like that before, when I used to spend more time with them, before the blind potato eyes took over underground.
I mean, the Stones were board-game players. Old-school games like Risk and Scrabble and Monopoly. They would open a bottle of wine and pour a glass for all of us, even though Micah and I were underage—Micah is still underage—and play music and games late into the night. When I look back now, it’s like a Hallmark card in my mind, if Hallmark made cards for holidays called Family Game Night. The Stones were so happy playing games. What made them stop?
The fact that they just let go of that happiness and sank themselves into the Prophet’s bullshit scares the shit out of me. No, wait. “Scares” isn’t the word. It infuriates the shit out of me. Micah tried to tread a fine line. On the one hand he was all, The Prophet never fails to astound with his predictability, and It’s like he read a book called How to Become the Leader of a Stereotypical Cult, and on the other hand he was like, Don’t call them a cult, Ses. That’s insulting to actual cults.
Micah and I used to think that at some point things with the Prophet would get really serious, and then we would have to do something. We would have to be prepared. But looking back, we didn’t prepare at all. We weren’t ready.
It was kind of the same situation with my grandmother, too. I noticed that she was walking slower, that it was hard for her to climb the stairs to our apartment, but I brushed it aside. She must have sensed something wrong inside her, like she must have felt how hard it was to breathe, and how hard her heart was working, but she never said anything. Maybe neither of us wanted to worry.
What my grandmother died of: congestive heart failure by way of pneumonia, which I didn’t even know she had. Pneumonia that began as a cough that we ignored. Pneumonia that took root in her.
How she died: quickly.
How she prepared me for her death: not at all.
You learn a lot when your sole caregiver dies. Some of the things you learn are logistic.
If you’re under eighteen and your primary caregiver dies and you don’t have any other living relatives and you can’t stand the thought of living in a foster home, then you’d better be convincing when you conjure up a pretend aunt to take care of you.
It’s way easier to be convincing than you thought it would be, like even with your best friends, who when you told them you were living with your aunt and she didn’t allow any visitors, just accepted it.
You will receive Social Security survivor’s money every month.
Your grandmother’s belongings are now yours.
Rent is expensive.
If you’re on a month-to-month lease, your landlord can terminate your lease with thirty days’ notice and you’ll quickly need to find a place to live.
It’s not easy to find a place to live, because of the whole pretend-aunt thing.
You might have to make your own place to live.
Which you can do.
Some of the things you learn are about yourself.
You didn’t know you would miss her so much.
You wish you had known she was about to die.
You didn’t know how alone it would feel.
You didn’t know what it would be like to walk up the stairs into that apartment above the cobbler for the first time after she died and hear only the faint noises from Soren instead of your grandmother, moving around in the kitchen, and realize that…
She wasn’t there.
She wasn’t going to be there.
Ever again.
Anyway.
It’s not easy to find an apartment on your own when you’re sixteen. Ever hear the terms “credit check” and “first and last” and “security deposit”? They all mean the same thing, which is money, which even with Social Security I didn’t have nearly enough of. Even if I had a full-time job, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to afford even a one-room apartment.
The first two weeks, I slept at Inky’s house. Her parents came to my grandmother’s memorial service, which was held in Saint Paul, in the cafeteria of the school she’d worked in. Some of her coworkers from the cafeteria stood up and sang “Amazing Grace.” Everyone brought potluck. We ate off paper plates with plastic forks. I remember some of this. The rest of it Inky and Sebastian told me.
Everyone at the service was kind and sad. Everyone at the service shook my hand and told me how sorry they were.
I hate thinking about it. I try not to think about it.
“When does your aunt get to town?” Inky’s dad asked me. I had already spread the story about my aunt moving here from California to take care of me.
“Two weeks.”
“Do you want to stay with us until she gets here, mija?” Inky’s mom asked. “I mean, if it would be easier than staying at your apartment”—without your grandmother there, was the rest of the sentence, but she didn’t say it. I hesitated. My grandmother and I had always lived on our own together, and shouldn’t I be able to live on my own? But it was also true that the thought of being back in our apartment without her was awful.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
Inky has a blow-up mattress in her room. We dragged it out from under her bed and blew the dust off it. For the two weeks I was there, I didn’t sleep. Inky’s ceiling is covered with glow-in-the-dark stars, a remnant from when she was a baby, and I lay there and traced the constellations with my eyes. Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper are the only ones I knew, and they must be the only ones that Inky’s parents knew, because they were the only constellations up there. The rest of the ceiling is covered with random stars and crescent moons, and my eyes went from one to another while I thought and thought and thought about where I would live.
And then I figured it out.
There are a lot of abandoned houses in Minneapolis—in any city, probably—and I conjured a sixth sense for where they were. When you focus hard on something, you develop a sixth sense for it. Like if there’s a person you want or a person you’re trying to avoid, you suddenly find signs of that person everywhere. You can sense the trail of their existence from classroom to cafeteria to sidewalk. Your senses are heightened in a specific and particular way.
Same thing with abandoned houses. Once your goal is to find a good one, you zero in. Here are some clues: (1) grass or weeds higher than at the surrounding houses, (2) trash in the yard, (3) front steps that are worn down and/or broken, (4) a porch, or front door hanging awry or slightly open, (5) a porch filled with things, like chairs, that look broken, (6) windows partially obscured with boards or stacks of boxes.
There are more abandoned houses than you’d think.
But an abandoned house wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was a garage that belonged to an abandoned house. Because garages tend to be unnoticed. Garages line alleys, and alleys don’t have sidewalks, with neighbors watching you walk in and out.
If a house is abandoned, then its garage will also be abandoned. And a garage is a kind of house. People in other countries think of the United States as a place so rich that people build houses for their cars. When you think about it, they’re kind of right.
I’m not rich, but I guess I kind of am. Because I have a house that I live in for free.
My house is a single-wide garage in the East Calhoun neighborhood. I will not tell you exactly where it is. My house doesn’t look like it’s well-made—it’s covered with vines and the paint is peeling—but it is. It’s insulated, for one thing. It’s made of cement blocks covered with insulated green-painted boards. Its roof is made of tin, which is unusual in the Midwest, where asphalt shingles rule. The roof has a skylight. When it rains, the rain drums down and I love the sound. Micah loved the sound too. On the nights he stayed stays at my house with me, we lie in bed and listen to the rain.
Who would put a skylight in a garage? Who would insulate the roof, and the walls? What kind of person does that? Someone who cared, that’s who. Whoever made my garage-house put care and time and attention into it. They built it to last, and last it has.
The good thing about having a big pink apartment building next to my house is that I can walk freely up and down my alley. The apartment building is ugly—two and a half stories, the half story buried half underground and half above, the way a lot of apartment buildings are here, and pink, I mean, pink?—but it’s also beautiful because of the cover it gives me. Directly across the alley is the back of a large office building, windowless and brick. The big garage door of my house fronts the alley, but you can’t roll it up because the track is broken. The only way in and out of my house is through the service door, and the service door is hidden from view by the fence next to the apartment building.
I can slip through the narrow passageway between the shed—where they keep the apartment building’s lawn mower and snowblower and other equipment—and the back wall of my house. I can slip along the side of the fence from the street and cut across the service walk. Or I can walk down the alley to the apartment building, then along the fence, and cut to my door through the abandoned house’s yard. Multiple means of entry and exit.
Everyone thinks I live in the apartment building. Which makes sense. People are always moving in and out of big apartment buildings, and this pink one has dozens of units. Studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and each one an I-can’t-afford-it unit. Every month the vacancy sign out front changes, according to who’s moving out and what’s opening up. Everyone who sees me walking up and down the alley thinks I live there with a mom or a dad or some other relative who’s older than me and is looking out for me. Like Tom, the guy who always stands outside the fourplex six doors down from the apartment building and across the alley, smoking.
“Hey, Shelly.”
“Hey, Tom.”
Tom is a true smoker. Dedicated to the cause. Rain, snow, sleet, heat, he’s out. Micah and I call him Tom the Guy. He’s young. Youngish anyway. When I walk past him, I picture his lungs inside his body as grayish, not fat and pink the way the lungs of a youngish person should be. Watch the way a true smoker sucks in the smoke and breathes out the smoke and bends over to hack. Listen to the rasp in their voice, the way their laugh catches and splits in two on the upswing. Now imagine their lungs. Grayish and slender.
Tom the Guy thinks my name is Shelly and I let him. Shelly. Esme. Emmy. These are some of the names people think I am. Either people don’t listen too well, or they hear what they want to hear. Maybe both.
I furnished my house for free. Micah and I call it curbing. It’s best to go curbing at the very end of the month, because that’s when renters’ leases are up and when people move in and out of their houses and apartments. It’s also best to go curbing in a wealthy neighborhood, but wealth isn’t necessary. Poor people put plenty of things out in the trash too.
Something to sleep on, a mattress or a bed or a futon. Pots and pans and dishes. Blankets and pillows. Bookcases. A fan or a space heater. Quilts and blankets and afghans and more quilts and blankets to nail up to the walls for more insulation. And for pretty, because quilts nailed to all the walls of a house are pretty. Winter boots, a summer dress, art supplies, a laundry basket, a five-gallon bucket to set beneath the leak in your roof. Everything in the world is findable.
Most things I found myself. Some of them, like the Amish star quilt and the electric fireplace, the one that looks like a real fireplace with real flames but that’s actually a plug-in space heater, Micah found for me.
But how does she get electricity?
There are outdoor outlets everywhere. Some people don’t even know they have outdoor outlets because they’re camouflaged under painted hinged covers that swing up. Outdoor extension cords come in all different colors and they are more easily hidden than you’d think. I have two, a white one for winter and a green one for summer. Both plug into the hard-to-find outlet on the side of the apartment building’s storage shed. No one would notice the little bit of electricity I use, given how big the apartment building is, but I use it sparingly anyway. I’m trying to be a good neighbor.
But where does she go to the bathroom?
What does she do for water?
How does she stay clean? Does she stay clean?
If you’re picturing a filthy girl in a filthy hut drinking out of a five-gallon pail filled with rainwater, don’t. There’s this thing called the YWCA, with endless toilets and showers, and it’s five blocks away. And there’s Lunds grocery store and a bunch of coffee shops within a couple of blocks if you need a bathroom. A pail behind a curtain does the job the rest of the time. As for drinking water, anyone can buy a jug of water anywhere. People think it’s not possible that a teenager can live on her own and maintain any semblance of normalcy. But people are wrong.
