Chapter 29
We moved out in stages, the way people move out of a disaster: a few boxes at a time, whatever the deputies would let us carry past the barricade, the rest left behind for the crews. Marlene went to her sister's first, and then to a condo on the other side of town with a balcony and no yard at all, which she said suited her fine after a yard had tried to swallow her house. I rented a duplex with a concrete driveway and a garage I did not use for anything but parking, because I could not look at a garage wall without seeing a diagonal crack open across it.
The street was fenced off with chain-link and warning signs that said things like RESTRICTED AREA and ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION IN PROGRESS, and the signs stayed up through the summer while the crews worked. They brought in venting wells and monitoring stations, and they drilled new boreholes that were not for injecting anything but for watching, and they pumped and sampled and tested the groundwater in a slow, expensive rhythm that the television stopped covering after the first month. The neighbors scattered. The young couple moved to another county. The man who had smelled the rain moved in with his daughter. The street that had been a neighborhood became a job site, and then, gradually, a place people drove past without slowing down.
I went back once, at the end of the summer, when the crews were on a break and the deputy at the barricade recognized me and let me walk the pavement. I had told myself I was going to say goodbye, but when I got there I found there was nothing to say goodbye to. The crater where my yard had been was fenced and graded, and the garage was gone, taken down by a crew in a single afternoon, and Marlene's patio was gone, and her roses were gone, and the white privacy fence was gone, and the only thing left that I recognized was the asphalt of the cul-de-sac itself, cracked in a long wandering line where the earth underneath had settled.
I stood on that asphalt for a long time, longer than the deputy probably liked, and I tried to find the spot where the survey pin had been. I could not find it. The pin, the post, the line we had fought over, all of it was gone, and the ground did not remember where any of it had been.
A remediation worker in a hard hat came over and asked if I was the homeowner from the corner lot, and when I said I was, he told me the monitoring wells would stay in place for years, maybe decades, because the waste moved slowly through limestone and nobody could promise when it would be gone. He said it kindly, the way people talk to you when they know you have already lost the thing they are measuring. I thanked him, and I thought about how fast the collapse had been, one single night, and how slow the cleanup would be, a lifetime, and how that was the shape of the whole story: a fast lie and a slow truth. That was the strangest part. I had spent thirty years thinking of that strip of land as mine, and then five years thinking of it as a secret, and then one night watching it become a hole, and now it was just a graded patch of dirt behind a chain-link fence with a sign on it, and it belonged to nobody.
Marlene met me for coffee afterward, at a diner halfway between her condo and my duplex, and I told her about the visit, about the pin I could not find. She listened, and then she said something I have thought about every day since. She said, "We spent years fighting over a line, Ray, and the line was never the point. The point was that somebody drew it on a map and told us to believe it, and we did, because believing it was easier than digging."
She was right, and I told her so. We finished our coffee, and we walked out to the parking lot, and she went one way and I went the other, and it was the most ordinary parting in the world, two neighbors who had survived the same disaster and who no longer lived anywhere near each other. I drove back to my duplex with the windows down, and I did not look back at the street, because there was nothing left to look back at, and because looking back had cost me enough already.