Who Says You Can’t Go Home?
Peter was driving home: not his home, the condo he had bought in Hawaii near where he worked at the hospital, but his childhood home on an island just south of Detroit, right in the middle of the Detroit River, connected to the rest of the state by two bridges. For some unfathomable reason, he had agreed to attend his tenth high school reunion at the aptly named Grosse Ile High School.
Peter had left the island immediately after graduation to attend college in Ann Arbor at the university there, graduating seven or eight years later from the School of Nursing with his degrees, including the Peace Corps Master’s International concentration, and the Nurse Midwifery program. He’d spent twenty-seven months in the South Pacific islands delivering babies and teaching basic health care to new mothers. He’d loved it.
After all that, he’d moved to those other islands, the ones as far as you can get from the U.S. of A., and thus his family, yet still be technically in America, ending up on Maui.
It was summer, and it was roasting. He was missing two weeks of great surfing to come to this reunion, but a couple of his old friends had said they were going, and he was curious. How had everyone turned out? He himself was in great shape, looking at twenty-eight very much like he had at eighteen, only with muscles and a tan. His once-brown hair had bleached to blond in the sun, and he was rather proud of it. He had to smile at his own vanity, but he had worked hard to get where he was, both financially and physically. His smile faded though as he crossed over Middlebelt Road, wishing he had gone home a different way. There had been a horrific air crash here, at this very overpass, and his father had been rushing his mother to the hospital up Middlebelt Road just minutes before the crash. If they had been only a few minutes longer, none of them would be here today.
Fuck. He just realized that since today was his birthday, that it was exactly twenty-eight years ago today. He took the next turn-off and headed south and east toward home. It didn’t help his mood that the radio was telling him to expect the heatwave of the century over the next couple of weeks.
His black mood didn’t last long, however, as the sights and places he used to know so well appeared, surrounded by new and, to him, obtrusive ugly places that had no business being there. He changed the radio until he got an oldies station and the tunes of his youth came out, soothing and then blasting him back into a good mood.
He’d been home a few times over the years, and his parents and younger brother and sister had come to visit him, but this was the first time he would connect with the rest of the story, so to speak, that place of evil and mystery: high school, and junior high too, God forbid, and the people he’d known back then, good and bad. Mostly bad.
Downriver, as the area directly south of Detroit was called, was a whole different world from what he was used to in Hawaii, and also entirely different from the city of Detroit. Downriver was a collection of a dozen small towns, some rubbing shoulders and streets with each other, and others more like rural villages with fuzzy edges slowly growing, like mold, closer to each other. There were highways like I-75 and plenty of smaller routes nobody had ever heard of. There were, he remembered from studying local geography in junior high, eighteen small communities all in Wayne County, of which Detroit was the county seat. Many people had come there to work in the steel factories and for a while, every boy who grew up in the area, who wasn’t a farmer already, figured he had a career at the mill or auto plant waiting for him after high school. He and his classmates had loved the part about it being a very active area with a hobby of rum-running during the prohibition era.
Although many famous sports figures came from the area, only the actress Lucille Ball and the actor Max Gail rang bells for Peter, who was still disappointed to not find his own name in the Wikipedia listings of famous people from the area. Someday, he figured, they’d figure it out.
“So what have you been up to?” they’d ask him at the reunion dance, and he’d reply…Oh shit, here’s Trenton, now which way is the free bridge? Ah there it is. Oh lord I’ll be home in ten minutes.
Peter drove across the bridge, upon which he’d first driven in Driver’s Ed class, mortally terrified by how narrow it was. Across the bridge, around the turn, and up West River Road he went, to the house he grew up in. It was set back from the road, the channel right across the road, and the house almost invisible now with newly grown trees. How much it had changed in the four years since he’d last been here. He could only shake his head. He pulled his rental car up next to another rental and an old beater he assumed was his brother Dick’s. His father’s two cars would be, of course, in the garage sitting slightly behind the huge house.
