“It was late at night when it all happened and they released me first thing this morning,” I said gently. “Conrad’s a commander now, anyway, at the Fourth District. This factory that burned last night is in his territory, so he wants to find out what I know about it-he won’t believe it’s sweet nothing at all.”

In the end, we all went up to my apartment together, the dogs, the old man, Conrad. My neighbor bustled around in my kitchen and produced a bowl of yogurt with sliced apples and brown sugar. He even coaxed a double espresso out of my battered stove-top machine.

I stretched out on the couch, the dogs on the floor next to me. Mr. Contreras took the armchair, while Conrad pulled up the piano bench so he could watch my face while I talked. He pulled a cassette recorder from his pocket and recorded the date and place we were talking.

“Okay, Ms. W., this is on the record. You tell me the whole story of what you were doing in South Chicago.”

“It’s my home,” I said. “I belong there more than you do.”

“Forget that: you haven’t lived there for twenty-five years or more.”

“Doesn’t matter. You know as well as me that in this town, your childhood home dogs you your whole life.”

1 Remembrances of Things Past

Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the city’s southeast edge. It’s true my mother’s body, my father’s ashes, lie elsewhere, but I had tended both through painful illnesses down here. My cousin Boom-Boom, close as a brother-closer than a brother-had been murdered here fifteen years ago. In my nightmares, yellow smoke from the steel mills still clouds my eyes, but the giant smokestacks that towered over my childhood landscape are now only ghosts themselves.