Chapter 7: House of Memories

The bus let them off at the last stop before the river, beside a bench with no back and a schedule someone had peeled half off the glass.

Eliana stood on the curb with her bag hugged to her chest. The jar shifted inside it every time she breathed. On one side of the street was the rail yard, a long fence of chain-link with rows of empty freight cars behind it. On the other, the warehouses started, one after another, brick and corrugated metal, with loading docks that hadn’t seen a truck in years.

It smelled like wet concrete and something metallic. She didn’t remember that part.

“So this is where your uncle hung out,” Lexie said. She had her good hand in her hoodie pocket and the other one tucked inside her sleeve. “Cozy.”

“I don’t think he just hung out here… I think he worked here.”

“Doing what?”

“Music stuff? I don’t know.”

Lexie squinted down the street. “Which number?”

Eliana opened Tommy’s notebook to the page and squinted at the column. “Four-eighteen. I think. The eight could be a three.”

“Great.”

They walked. The numbers on the buildings were stenciled, or painted, or missing, so they counted the gaps between the ones they could read. A man in a reflective vest was smoking on a loading dock, and he watched them pass without much interest. Somewhere past the rail yard, a train horn went off, long and low, and Eliana felt it in her back teeth.

She kept looking for the door. It had been green. She was almost sure it had been green. She remembered being small enough that the handle was at her eye level, and Tommy’s hand on her shoulder, and the smell of machine oil when it opened. That was all. The rest was gone, like trying to remember a dream after breakfast.

Every door on this street was gray, or rusted, or covered in tags.

“You keep stopping at every door,” Lexie said.

“I’m looking.”

“For what?” Lexie kicked a bottle cap into the gutter. “Do you actually remember this place, or not?”

“I was like five.”

“So no.”

“Some of it.” Eliana’s thumb went looking for a pen cap. She’d bought a new pen that morning, and she found it in her pocket and clicked it once. “The door was green.”

Lexie looked at the row of gray doors, then at her, and for a second Eliana expected a joke. It didn’t come. Lexie just nodded, like that was a real piece of information, and kept walking.

Four-twelve. Four-fourteen was a gap, an empty lot full of weeds and a shopping cart on its side. Four-sixteen had a sign that said NO TRESPASSING in English, Chinese and Korean.

Four-eighteen was a narrow brick building squeezed between two bigger ones, three stories, with its windows painted over from the inside. The loading door was rolled down and padlocked. Next to it was a regular door, set back in the brick, with a row of old pipes running down the wall beside it.

It was gray. The paint had peeled at the corners, and underneath it, in the cracks, was green.

Eliana stopped walking.

“That’s it,” she said. “Somebody painted over it.”

Lexie stepped up and tried the handle. It didn’t move. She leaned back and looked up at the painted windows, then down at the lock, then at Eliana.

“Okay, Birdie,” she said. “Where’s the key?”

Eliana looked at the door, then at the notebook, then at the door again.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re Birdie. It says Birdie knows.”

“I know what it says.”

Lexie sighed and started checking without her. She ran her good hand along the top of the doorframe and came away with a fingerful of grime. She lifted the edge of a flattened cardboard box someone had left by the loading dock, kicked over a cinderblock, and crouched to look under the bottom of the rolled-down door. Nothing.

“Okay.” She stood up and wiped her hand on her jeans. “Read it again.”

“Key lives on the sixth string. The fat one. Birdie knows.”

“The fat one is which?”

“The low E. The thickest one, at the top.”

Lexie frowned at the door like it might answer her. “Did he have a guitar? Like, besides at shows.”

“He had two at his apartment.” Eliana thought of them leaning against the wall under the window, and the dust on everything. “One of them was missing a string.”

Lexie’s head came up. “Which one?”

“I didn’t look.”

“It’s the sixth.” Lexie said it like she’d already checked. “It has to be. He took the string off and dropped the key in through the hole. That’s what it means. The key lives where the sixth string was.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Eliana said.

“Why not?”

“It’s a spare key. The whole point is that it’s here.” She looked at the door. “If he lost his, he’d have to go all the way across town just to get in.”

“Maybe he didn’t want anyone finding it here.”

“Then why write down where it is?”

Lexie opened her mouth, then shut it. “Okay. You got a better idea?”

Eliana didn’t. She looked at the door, and at the notebook, and at the part about Birdie that neither of them could explain, and she had nothing to put in its place.

“No,” she said.

“Then it’s the guitar.” Lexie was already turning back toward the street. “Where’s the apartment?”

“Across town. Over the laundromat on Fifth.”

“Okay. So we go there, we get the guitar, we come back.”

“The cleaners are coming tomorrow,” Eliana said. “My parents hired them. They’re throwing everything out.”

“Then we go now.” Lexie counted the bills in her fist again, like they might have multiplied. “This is going to cost me the rest of this, by the way.”

“I didn’t ask you to pay.”

“You didn’t have any money.” Lexie shoved the bills back into her pocket and started walking. “We came all the way out here for a door.”

Eliana closed the notebook and followed her. The jar knocked against her ribs. Behind them the gray door sat in its brick, green showing at the corners, exactly where it had been for years, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking away from the right answer.

They were almost to the corner when Eliana slowed down.

It was still bothering her. A spare key across town was useless. A spare key was supposed to be by the door. That was the whole point of having one.

She opened the notebook and read the line again while she walked.

Tommy didn’t say things to be clever. He said them the way they looked to him.

“Eliana.” Lexie was a few steps ahead, turning around. “Bus.”

“Wait.”

She looked back at the building. From the corner she could see the whole front of it, the painted windows, the gray door, and the pipes running down the brick beside it. She counted them without meaning to. Six. The one closest to the door was as thin as a broom handle. The one on the end was thick enough that she couldn’t have closed her hand around it.

Thin to fat. Like strings.

“It’s not the guitar,” she said.

“What?”

She was already walking back, and then she was almost running, the jar knocking against her ribs. She heard Lexie swear and follow.

The sixth pipe was rusted brown and cold under her hand. She ran her fingers down the back of it where it stood out from the brick, as high as she could reach. Grit. Old paint. Nothing. She tried the seam where it met the gutter and came away with a fingerful of rust.

“Anything?” Lexie said behind her.

“No.” Eliana stepped back. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was just six pipes.

Then she crouched down to look at the bottom of it, and from down there the street looked familiar in a way it hadn’t standing up. She had seen it from this height before.

The concrete had been hot under her sandals. Tommy had patted down every pocket of his jacket, then his jeans, then his jacket again, and then he’d laughed and crouched down beside her so their faces were level. He smelled like coffee and machine oil.

“Don’t tell your dad.”

He’d reached behind the fattest pipe, down by the sidewalk, and come back up with a key.

Eliana put her hand behind the bottom of the pipe, an inch above the sidewalk. Her fingers found a spiderweb, and then a little hook screwed into the mortar.

There was a key hanging on it.

She pulled it out and held it up. It was small and brass and dull with dirt.

Lexie stood over her, breathing hard. She looked at the key, then at the pipes, then at Eliana crouched on the sidewalk.

“The sixth string,” Lexie said. “It’s the pipes.”

“He forgot his keys.” Eliana’s voice came out thick, and she cleared her throat. “He showed me where the spare was.”

Lexie didn’t say anything for a second. Then she held out her good hand, and Eliana took it and let herself be pulled up.

“Okay, Birdie,” Lexie said, quieter this time. “Open it.”

The key stuck in the lock, the same way the one at Tommy’s apartment had. Eliana jiggled it, and it turned, and the door opened inward with a long, dry squeal from the hinges.

The smell came out first. Dust, old coffee, and under it, faint and sharp, machine oil.

Inside, it was nearly dark. The windows had been painted over so thickly that only a little gray showed around the edges. Eliana found the light switch by feel. A row of bare bulbs came on overhead, one after another, and the room filled up all at once.

It was one long space, the width of the building, with a concrete floor, brick walls and a staircase at the back. It looked like two different people had moved into the same room and never agreed on anything.

The left side was Tommy’s. She knew it the way she would have known his handwriting. There were crates of records along the wall, a couch with a blanket thrown over it, three guitars on stands and a fourth lying across an amp with its strings loosened. Coffee cans full of picks and cables and screws. A workbench covered in tools and a disassembled pedal. The symbol was drawn on everything, in marker on the amp, scratched into the bench, painted badly on the brick above the couch.

The right side was somebody else’s. A rug, actually clean. A desk with the drawers shut. A bookshelf with the spines lined up. A small upright piano with the lid closed and a lamp on top of it with a fringed shade. Everything was square to everything else. There was dust on it, but less, like it had been wiped more recently.

Down the middle of the floor, where the two halves met, someone had laid a line of electrical tape.

Lexie stepped in behind her and stopped.

Eliana didn’t look at her. She walked to the left side, because that was where her feet took her, and stood in front of the couch. The blanket was the same plaid as the one at his apartment. There was a mug on the floor beside it with a dry brown ring inside. He had been sitting here. Maybe a month ago, he had been sitting right here with his coffee, and then he had gotten up and left and not come back.

She sat down on the arm of the couch, very carefully, like it might be rude.

Across the tape, Lexie had walked to the piano. She didn’t touch it. She looked at the lamp, and the fringed shade, and her hand came out of her hoodie pocket and hung at her side.

Cece had a lamp like that in her old apartment, the one Lexie used to sleep over at before everything got busy. Lexie had broken one of the fringes off when she was eight, swinging on it, and Cece had laughed so hard she had to sit down.

There was a gap in the fringe, about an inch wide, on the side facing the wall.

Lexie stood there and looked at it for a long time. Neither of them said anything. The bulbs hummed overhead, and somewhere outside a train went by, and the floor shook just slightly under their feet.

Eliana stayed on the arm of the couch until the train had passed. Then she got up, because sitting still in his spot was starting to feel like too much, and crossed the tape.

She told herself she was just looking. The desk on this side had a blotter and a cup of pens, all the same kind, all capped. The bookshelf had binders along the bottom row, with song titles on the spines in small, neat handwriting. She knew that handwriting from somewhere, and she didn’t know where.

There was a framed photo on the top shelf, turned a little toward the piano.

It was a woman in the front seat of a car, laughing, with her sunglasses pushed up into her hair. Eliana knew her face before she knew why. She had seen it on the TV in the cafeteria, on a junior’s T-shirt, on forty-one thousand people’s phones. Celeste.

Next to her, in the passenger seat, was a girl of about seven with a scowl and a blue ribbon pinned to her shirt. She was holding up her arm to the camera. On the inside of her wrist, drawn in black marker, were three rings and a lightning bolt behind them.

Eliana knew that scowl too.

She stood there with the photo in her hands.

The whole civics debate had been about Celeste’s estate. Who was owed what, and whether family counted for anything. Eliana had said the family gets the money and everyone else gets the songs, like it was a nice system, and Lexie had snorted. Then Lexie had said, so calmly, that nobody knew what Celeste wanted, and everyone just decided for her.

Eliana had thought she was being difficult. She had been talking about her aunt.

She thought she was supposed to say something now. People always said something. She tried to think what Hannah would say, and nothing came, and the longer nothing came the more any of it seemed wrong.

So she put the photo back where it had been, turned a little toward the piano, exactly the way she’d found it.

Behind her, Lexie had seen the whole thing.

She had been waiting for it since the bike racks, if she was honest. The moment somebody found out. She knew how it would go. The gasp, then oh my god, then the questions, what was she like, did you go to the Grammys, can you get me tickets. Then the look, the one that meant you had stopped being a person and become a fact about somebody famous.

Eliana didn’t gasp. She didn’t turn around. She just stood there with her back to Lexie, looking at the shelf, and then she went to the bookshelf and crouched down to read the titles on the binder spines, like that was the next thing.

Lexie opened her mouth. She didn’t know what she had been about to say. She shut it again, and put her hand back in her pocket, and didn’t know what to do with the rest of herself.

Lexie crossed the tape because she couldn’t stand still on her own side anymore.

Tommy’s side smelled stronger, coffee and oil and something burnt. She stopped by the amp with the loosened guitar on top. The lid of an open guitar case leaned against it, lined in faded red fabric, with a photo tucked into the elastic band inside.

She pulled it out without thinking.

It was this room. The couch with the plaid blanket, the crates of records, the bare bulbs. A man with a scruffy beard sat on the arm of the couch with a guitar across his knees and a bandage wrapped around his knuckles. He was grinning at the camera. Beside him, on the floor with her back against the couch, was Cece.

She wasn’t dressed like Celeste. She was in a gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved up and her hair in a knot, no makeup, and she looked exhausted. She was laughing anyway, with her head tipped back against the couch, like he had just said something stupid.

The bracelet was on her wrist.

Lexie’s other hand went to her own, through her sleeve, and found the charms.

“Eliana.”

Eliana came over and looked at it, and Lexie watched her face change.

“That’s him,” Eliana said.

There was a patch sewn on the shoulder of his jacket. Three rings, a lightning bolt behind them. It was the jacket she remembered, the one he wore to every family thing anyone had bothered to invite him to.

“She’s wearing the bracelet,” Lexie said.

“He looks so happy...”

Eliana couldn’t stop looking at his face. She had seen him at Thanksgivings and graduation parties, always at the edge of the room, always leaving early. In family photos he was the blur by the door. She had never seen him look like this, settled, like somebody wanted him there.

He’d had a friend. A famous one. He had never told anyone, and nobody in her family would have believed him if he had.

Lexie was looking at the hoodie. Her mom had said it a hundred times, and once this week, with the TV off: “She was always busy.” Lexie had always pictured tours, award shows, and a phone that rang all night. She had never pictured a warehouse by the river and a bandage and somebody else’s couch.

“My mom thinks she just got too famous to call,” Lexie said.

Eliana didn’t know what the right answer to that was, so she gave the only one she had. “My parents think he was a bum.”

Lexie almost laughed. It came out as air through her nose.

Then Eliana went quiet in a different way. She was thinking about the date on the folder her parents kept for Tommy, and the date on every news banner for three weeks.

“They died the same night,” she said.

Lexie looked up at her.

Neither of them said the rest of it. Lexie looked at the bandage on Tommy’s hand, and at the bracelet on Cece’s wrist, and then down at her own sleeve, where the burn was. Eliana’s bag was heavy against her hip, with the jar inside it.

Lexie held the photo a while longer than she meant to. So did Eliana, looking over her shoulder. Then Lexie tucked it back into the elastic band in the case, exactly where it had been, and neither of them mentioned that she had.

Eliana needed something to do with her hands. She set her bag on the workbench beside the guitar case and unwrapped the jar from her gym hoodie.

The salamander was curled in the bottom, dark and still. When the light hit it, one of the cracks along its back pulsed orange, faintly, and went out.

“It can’t stay in my locker,” Eliana said. “Someone’s going to open it eventually. And my mom goes through my closet when she’s mad.”

Lexie leaned on the bench and looked at it with open suspicion. “So leave it here.”

“By itself?”

“It’s a fire lizard in a salad jar. It’s not going to get lonely.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know it tried to eat your face.”

Eliana didn’t argue, but she didn’t put it down either. She looked around the room. Celeste’s shelves were too neat, and she had the strange feeling that putting a jar of anything there would be rude. On Tommy’s side, above the workbench, was a long plank shelf crowded with coffee cans, all the same red kind, all labeled in marker. SCREWS. PICKS. STRINGS. ??? One just said MISC and was full of bottle caps.

There was a gap at the end, about the width of a coffee tin, like something had been taken out of it.

Eliana reached up and set the salamander there, between the last can and the brick.

“Huh,” Lexie said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Lexie looked at the gap and then at the jar sitting in it. “It fits.”

Eliana pushed it back an inch so it wouldn’t fall. Through the glass, the salamander shifted, turned once in a slow circle, and settled with its face toward the room. One crack along its back lit up and stayed lit a little longer than before.

She didn’t say anything about it. Neither did Lexie.

Lexie was the one who broke the quiet. She pulled Cece’s pocket notebook out of her hoodie and dropped onto the arm of the couch.

“Okay,” she said. “So what did they actually do in here?”

Eliana looked at the jar on the shelf. “That, I guess.”

“With what, though? A salad jar?” Lexie started flipping pages. “There has to be more to it. Because if another one of those shows up, I’m not jumping in another pool!”

Eliana didn’t have an answer. But Tommy’s notebook had been right about the key, so she opened it on the workbench and started turning pages. Most of it was still arrows and half-words she couldn’t read.

Then, near the middle, there was a page that looked almost finished. Four lines of lyrics, with chord boxes drawn above them in pen.

back up, back downthis ain’t your townyou heard me oncedon’t make me twice

Underneath, he had written:

“I can play that,” Eliana said. “I think. It’s three chords.”

“You think it’s about one of these… things? Like the coal song?”

“Maybe.”

Lexie was already flipping through Cece’s pages. Eliana watched her slow down, then stop.

“Read me the first line again.”

“‘Back up, back down.’”

Lexie turned the notebook around. Cece’s handwriting, small and neat, in a column of its own:

They looked at each other. It was the first time either notebook had made sense of the other one, and for a second neither of them knew what to do with that.

“Okay,” Lexie said. “We… push?”

“Push what? There’s nothing here.”

“Then we push the wall. I don’t know. We practice.”

Eliana took the pick out of her pocket. It was warm from being next to her leg all day. She took the guitar with the loose strings off the amp, tuned it by ear, plugged it in, and flipped the amp on.

It came on with a hum, loud and low, the buzz of old wiring under it. One of the bulbs overhead flickered and steadied.

Lexie stood in the middle of the floor, right on the tape, and faced the far wall. “From the top.”

Eliana counted them in. She played the way she always played, at parties, on somebody’s back porch, when people asked. Easy downstrokes. A little smile, because people liked it when she smiled. Lexie came in on the first line loud enough to rattle the coffee cans, and she kept glancing over at Eliana as she sang, like she was making sure Eliana heard how much better she was at this.

They got through all four lines.

Nothing happened. The amp hummed. The wall stayed a wall.

“That was terrible,” Lexie said.

“You were yelling at me.”

“I was singing.”

“At me. It says to sing it at the thing.” Eliana’s face went hot. “And you kept looking at me like I was messing it up.”

“You were! You were playing it like a campfire song. You were smiling.”

“I always smile.”

“Yeah,” Lexie said. “I noticed.”

Eliana looked down at the pick in her hand. Her thumb found the edge of it and started pressing, over and over. She didn’t have an answer for that, and she hated that Lexie could tell.

Above them, the bulb flickered again, longer this time, and neither of them looked up.

The bulb went out.

Then the one next to it. Then the whole row, one after another down the length of the room, until the only light left was the gray around the painted windows and the little red power light on the amp.

“Great,” Lexie said in the dark. “Your uncle’s wiring.”

“It’s not my uncle’s wiring. It’s probably the breaker.” Eliana set the guitar down on the bench, very carefully, the way you put something down when you can’t see it. The amp was still humming. If the power was out, it shouldn’t have been.

Something was coming out of it.

It was small, the size of a marble, pale blue-white, and it slid out through the grille of the speaker like it was squeezing through a fence. It hung in the air a few inches from the amp and turned slowly, crackling very softly, like a sparkler a long way off.

Then there was another one, from the outlet on the wall. Then two from the dead bulbs overhead, dropping out of the glass like drops of water.

The hair on Eliana’s arms stood up. The air smelled sharp and clean, like right before a thunderstorm.

“Okay,” Lexie said quietly. “What are those?”

“I don’t know.”

There were a dozen of them now, drifting out from the walls, from the bench, from the strip of outlets under Tommy’s desk. They didn’t rush. They moved the way dust moves in sunlight, slow and lazy and pretty, and they were all moving toward the two of them.

One drifted toward Eliana’s face, and she didn’t step back.

It was beautiful. That was the strange part. It turned in the air in front of her, and the light inside it moved like something underwater, and she wanted very badly to touch it. Just to see. Her hand came up on its own.

Lexie grabbed her wrist and yanked.

“The hell are you doing!?”

The light snapped against Eliana’s fingertip as her hand came away, and a jolt went up her arm all the way to her shoulder. She gasped and pulled her hand to her chest. Her fingers were buzzing.

“I don’t know why I did that,” she said. “I just wanted to…”

“Then don’t!” Lexie hadn’t let go of her wrist.

The swarm had gotten thicker. Twenty, thirty, crackling in and out of the dark like fireflies. Lexie grabbed the red-lined guitar case off the amp with her good hand and swung it like a bat. It caught one of the lights square, and it burst in a little shower of sparks.

For a second it looked like that had worked.

Then the sparks pulled themselves back together. There were two lights now where there had been one.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me!”

She swung again, and there were four. One got through and touched her sleeve, and she yelped and dropped the case. It hit the concrete with a bang, and every light in the room seemed to turn toward the sound at once.

They backed up. The workbench hit Eliana behind the knees. Lexie bumped into her shoulder, and they stood pressed together against it, the lights drifting closer, not hurrying, filling the room between them and the door.

Behind them, the amp was still humming, louder now, buzzing in Eliana’s chest. The guitar lay on the bench under her hand, still plugged in. The pick was still in her other fist.

Up on the shelf, the salamander had pressed itself flat against the far side of its jar, as far from the lights as it could get.

Eliana looked down at the guitar under her hand.

She was still holding the pick. It had gone warm again, warmer than her hand could make it.

“Lexie.”

“What?”

“Sing it at them.”

Lexie turned her head. In the blue light from the swarm her face looked white and furious and very young. “It didn’t work.”

“We did it wrong.” Eliana picked up the guitar. Her fingers were still buzzing from the shock, and they didn’t want to close, so she made them. “Don’t look at me this time.”

Lexie looked at her a second longer anyway. Then she turned and faced the lights.

“Don’t smile,” she said.

“I won’t, don’t worry.”

She didn’t think she could if she tried.

The lights had stopped drifting. They hung in the air between the bench and the door, thirty or forty of them, all turned toward the two girls, crackling. The nearest one was close enough that Eliana could feel it on her face, a prickle like static on a TV screen.

This was Tommy’s room. He had sat on that couch with his coffee. He had hung his key on a pipe outside and laughed about it. He had gotten up one night and gone out to do something like this, and he hadn’t come back, and now these things were floating through his room like they owned it.

Eliana brought the pick down on the strings as hard as she could.

It wasn’t a strum. It was a hit. The E rang out through the amp, too loud and a little out of tune, and she hit it again, and again, every beat, all down, the way he’d written it. It hurt. The strings bit into her fingers on the chord and she didn’t care.

Lexie came in on the same beat, and she didn’t sing it. She screamed it.

back up, back downthis ain’t your town

She slammed her wrist down on the edge of the bench in time. It was the burned one, and it hurt like hell, and she did it again, and the charms on the bracelet cracked against the wood on every beat, sharp and bright, right on top of Eliana’s downstrokes.

you heard me oncedon’t make me twice

The air moved.

Eliana felt it go out of her, out through the guitar and the amp and the room, like the moment after a door slams when the whole house shudders. Every coffee can on the shelf jumped. The plaid blanket blew off the couch. The lights didn’t burst this time. They went out, all of them at once, like candles in a wind, and they didn’t come back.

One of the painted windows cracked from corner to corner. A thin line of real daylight fell across the floor.

Then the amp popped and died, and it was quiet.

Eliana’s ears were ringing. She was still holding the pick, and the guitar strap had slid off her shoulder, and she didn’t remember it doing that. Her fingertips were raw. Beside her, Lexie had both hands flat on the bench, breathing hard.

Lexie opened her mouth, and nothing came out but a croak. She tried again.

“Holy shit.”

Eliana opened her mouth to say something, and her arms went heavy.

It came all at once, the way the memory had outside, except it went down instead of up. Her arms. Her legs. Her head, like someone had filled it with wet sand. She put the guitar down on the bench because she couldn’t hold it anymore, and then she was sitting on the concrete with her back against the bench and no memory of deciding to sit.

Lexie slid down next to her a second later. Their shoulders bumped and neither of them moved away.

“I can’t feel my face,” Lexie rasped.

“Me neither.”

The line of daylight from the cracked window lay across their shoes. Up on the shelf, the salamander had uncurled and was watching them through the glass. Eliana watched it back for a while. She meant to say something about it. She meant to get up, and find the light switch, and figure out what time it was.

Her eyes closed instead, and she let them.