We pulled up in front of the now shut-down Greyhound station and parked. It was clean and sparse, and I could barely imagine the horror of what went on that day, the scenes of blood and fire and hell. We walked toward the building and stood in front of the brick façade, a pewter greyhound still poised on the top right of the building, stretching in its eternal leaping posture. A storyboard—orange, red, and white—stretched down the edge of the structure. We looked at every board, read every quote, and gazed at each picture until we reached the end of the story, which of course only started a new story not written on those walls.

We sat on a bench and I turned toward him. “Wow.”

“Not much else to say, is there?”

“Hutch, tell me about your parents now. Where are they?”

He looked at me for the longest while, so I thought he wouldn’t answer, and then he exhaled. “It doesn’t—in some weird way—seem possible that you don’t know everything about me. That you don’t know …”

I looked at the ground as if I needed to study the cracks in the concrete.

“They both died six years ago, Ellie. Mother drank herself into oblivion, and Dad had a heart attack a few months later. As much as it seemed that they couldn’t live with each other, the truth is he couldn’t live without her.”

I closed my eyes and leaned into his shoulder. “I am so sorry for you.”

He placed his hand on top of my head. “I know.”

After the silence ebbed away, we stood as if on cue and walked back to his car.

The archives room of the library was empty yet somehow still demanded hushed voices. Hutch spoke to the librarian while I wandered around and looked at the framed photos of Alabama dignitaries, mayors, and governors.

Hutch returned with a few rolls of film. “There’s more than we could ever go through in one sitting, but I think I narrowed it down to the local and Bayside papers. If your mother would be in anything, it would be those.”

“Okay.”

He threaded the microfilm machine and handed me another roll. “You take this one.”

I sat at the machine next to him, and together we scrolled for over half an hour before I stood and stretched. “Nothing,” I said.

He looked up at me, grinned. “Don’t give up so quickly.”

“I’m not … .” I squeezed his shoulders and sat back down, scrolling through grainy black-and-white photos of that awful day when the Freedom Riders were beaten and left bloody in the streets. My heart rose up and stretched toward compassion.

I reached over for Hutch. “Oh, what humans do to one another.”

“It’s awful,” he said, still looking into his viewer. “And worse is, we do it over and over again in different forms with different reasons. History.”