After the fire, a police car was parked permanently in Logan Circle. It sat right next to General Logan and his horse. Together, the two stood guard over the neighborhood day and night. Following Frank’s arrest, the marauding men in black returned to the corners of the imagination that had created them, and eventually the police car disappeared as well. General Logan was left all to himself once again. As for Judith’s house, boarded up now with yellow police tape across the front door, it had returned to a state similar to the one she had found it in. I noticed that no one stopped to look at the house anymore. It was no longer beautiful. It no longer shone. I wonder even now if most of the people who live here don’t miss it. There was something nice to living in the shadows of a house like Judith’s. There are still pieces from the roof’s molding lying on the ground around me, and though the house is now abandoned and desolate in its appearance, there is enough evidence to remember that it wasn’t always this way.
From the steps, I can see across the circle, straight to the store. The front door is still open. It’s still too early in the evening for a crowd, but soon enough, one will settle onto the corner, regardless of whether the store is open or not. If I had to choose only one thing about the neighborhood that I would never want to see change, this would be it. There’s a safety in numbers that goes beyond any home. I’ve learned this only recently. It’s true that after the fire I opened and closed my store sporadically. But it was never because I wanted to see it close, as Kenneth had supposed, or because I wanted to lose whatever customers I still had. In the only letter I ever wrote to Naomi after the fire, I tried to explain what was happening. I tried to tell her that there wasn’t much point in holding on to a store, in holding on to anything, if in the end it didn’t matter to at least one other person than yourself. “You’re right,” I wrote. “I do indeed miss having you around the store. It’s hard to go back there every day now that I know you and your mother will never return. I can’t seem to find any reason to open it up in the morning.”
Of course I never mailed that letter. It reminded me far too much of the ones my uncle used to write. I still have it sitting under the cash register next to the letter she had sent me.
Judith never brought Naomi back to see what had become of their house. Perhaps she thought it would have been too tragic a scene for her daughter to witness. In her last visit back to the neighborhood, she took the time to stop by the store to say something resembling a good-bye. I closed the store for the afternoon so the two of us could take a walk back to the house. She said she didn’t want to see it alone again. We sat here on these steps in a mixture of sporadic sun and rain and talked about what Judith was going to do next. Of course I suggested that she rebuild, even if I never expected that she would.
“It’d be too much,” she said. “To go through all of that work again. It would feel like I was stuck in the past and I don’t want to live my life that way. It’s better just to start over.”
I quoted to her a line from Democracy in America, one of a series that she had used as an epigraph to her own book:
“Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced.”
“That’s one of my favorite quotes from him,” she said.
“I know.”
I didn’t have to add that it was because I had read her book.
“I still owe you a dinner,” she said. “Maybe once I settle into a temporary place, you can come over and join Naomi and me.”
That we haven’t spoken or seen each other since then is no surprise. It was enough to pretend, for just that afternoon, that our lives might intersect again.
What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.
There are approximately 883 steps between these steps and my store. A distance that I can sprint in less than ten seconds, walk in under a minute. It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what’s waiting for us now that we’ve returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one place and life to the next. We try to do the best we can. There are moments like this, however, when we are neither coming nor going, and all we have to do is sit and look back on the life we have made. Right now, I’m convinced that my store looks more perfect than ever before. I can see it exactly as I have always wanted to see it. Through the canopy of trees that line the walkway cutting through the middle of the circle is a store, one that is neither broken nor perfect, one that, regardless of everything, I’m happy to claim as entirely my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled Ethiopia during the Red Terror. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Page 21