I slowly extracted myself from Jaden’s arms, and from between him and the boy. I didn’t see how I would get all of us out to Gravesend. Where had my resolve to help people here gone? It had disappeared when I saw the reality of the place. I guess in my head, it had been some clean little emergency room, and I’d been wearing a candy striper uniform. Numptie, I was always such a goddamn numptie.

I stood up straight. Jaden would know where I went. And he would be there to watch the boy until I came back. I wished I could say goodbye, in case things went wrong, in case we never saw each other again. Then I realized that I could. I leaned down and kissed him on the forehead as gently as I could. Jaden smiled in his sleep, but, other than that, didn’t stir. I quietly made my way to the door. A wave of tenderness washed through me seeing the same smile that had been making me happy for years. That smile was for me now, just for me, and maybe I was phrenic to leave it behind.

There were more people out there than there had been when we came in. I could barely walk down the hall for all the people. I fit my combat boots into spaces around the edges of mats and blankets. I passed by a man who was lying on the ground, restrained in zip ties. He squirmed toward me as I walked by, and I tried to look cool while I was getting away from him, but it was impossible not to jump and scamper. I passed by a nook off the hallway filled with shit and piss. The two were running in a puddle toward the rest of the hall. The smell was ’trosh.

“Hello?” I called into a room. I was looking for someone upswing, someone who might help me figure out a way out of there and to Gravesend.

I peeked inside the room. There were people huddled up all over it. As I looked around, I realized that the people I saw around me in the emergency shelter were the people I had thought were disappearing from the neighborhood. The people I had known the whole time I lived there. We were still there, it seemed, and in some fucked-up irony, we were the ones who had stayed after all. Well, here was the old neighborhood I’d been looking for. Here were the people. And all it took was a natural disaster hitting and everyone forgetting about us to bring us back out.