Friendswood Read Free

fence, this one cut open. As she made her way through the loose wire tines, they tore a hole in her shirt. She jumped down the incline.
    About a hundred more yards through dandelions and spear weeds, the remnants of old Rosemont splayed across the land and into the trees, all the ruins of her old neighborhood, knitted into the foliage. Bits of cement lay across the weeds and brush beneath orphaned telephone poles and lampposts.
    She followed the rain gutter that had once run alongside Crest Street. A dingy fire hydrant squatted in a patch of yellow wildflowers, a streetlight hooked over a wild-haired bush, and farther on, ten yards of old asphalt ran through the weeds. She spotted the shell of an ancient air conditioner with a bird’s nest on top of it, and a rusted metal rectangle on the ground that claimed NO PARKING BEYOND THIS POINT . She stepped off the asphalt back into the mud.
    A decade ago, just before they’d razed most of the houses—a leftover sign sat in Fred Borden’s yard: FO R SALE, 2-2-2, WITH 45 PLUS KNO WN TOXIC CHEMICALS A T NO EXTRA CHARGE . A security guard trolled theempty streets in a golf cart, windows mostly boarded up, doors padlocked shut.
    Now, at the edge of the woods where Autumn Street would have been, a square steel frame clung to cement, what was left of someone’s house, and an ancient garage freezer tilted against a tree, its door swung open. This used to be her block.
    On one of her early visits back here, inside a piece of door and marking the crumbled remains of her own house, she’d found the clover brass knocker. What else was left: a stump of brick chimney attached to a slab of concrete, three small stone steps that had once led to the front door. But nearly each time she came back, she found a different artifact in the ruins—an old beer bottle, a plastic lawn elf, a chair.
    She stepped up through the red thorns and down again into the weeds of the entryway, past the living room of grass and cinder block, and then she stood in her kitchen, where yellow weeds with sticky flowers clung to her jeans. She looked out where there used to be a window. The air had a kind of empty commotion. Over where the laundry room had been, she noticed a few birds, grayer than the old pipe where they’d landed, pecking at the cement. She felt the old upstairs ghosted above her, the bed where she’d slept with Jack, and Jess’s bedroom, with its window overlooking the street.
    In front of her, the oak tree she’d planted for Jess when she was a baby was strangely still alive, perfectly shaped like one you’d see drawn in bright colors in a children’s book, its leaves lush and healthy. Jess as a toddler used to walk around its base, saying, “Hear those birds?”
    She’d let Jess and her friends run all over that field, even as far as the warehouse when they were older. Cows would sometimes wander over—the grass yellow and dry in summer and winter, only green in the spring—where Jess found odd bits of pipe, fluorescent-colored scraps of rubber, tiny pink pebbles the size of coarsely grained salt, which she brought home with her in her pockets.
    Jess would say, “I’m heading out, Mom,” and she’d run, barefoot,through the door. That ugly field had seemed benign for so many years, fooling everyone with its open space and common weeds, its sorry-looking stooped trees.
    She hadn’t eaten since morning and felt weak, but the sun was lowering over the trees now, and there wasn’t much time. As she made her way to the other side of Banes Field, the ground slid beneath her steps. The dog was still barking, though it didn’t seem to have come any closer. She went through the first gate and down the slope that led to the land Taft Properties had bought.
    It was now marked out for construction with small wooden survey stakes topped with orange plastic flags. They stood out against the brown grass like bright