So many times, I have followed what I assume was her path. My mother would have taken the train and gotten off at Tremont Street. I have gone and stood on that corner of Piedmont Street. Now, it is hard to even find, or it was the last time Frank indulged me and went along, because it was icy and because he said I was way too old to be out walking around the city like that. There’s a parking garage and a hotel (the old Radisson, now something like the Revere). It’s the same geography, the same earth below all the glass and metal and concrete; it’s as close as I could get.

I always thought that if I stood very still and turned my ear just right that I might be able to hear it: the music, the clink of glasses and laughter, the screams slow at first and then rising, the roar of fire. There are people who claim to have seen ghosts there, and I have always wished I would. There is a pull more powerful than anything I can describe; it is not unlike the pull of homesickness, and the way that you can feel homesick for a time and a place even when you know that life was not good then. You might miss a particular tree outside your window or a sweater you owned at the time, or the place you liked to sit at the end of the day. You might miss the wave of hope that years stretching ahead of you lends even in the darkest of times. I think I will always think of that place, to get as close as life might allow.

That Sunday morning was cold and gray, and I remember going with my father from place to place and then finally sitting there in the lobby of Massachusetts General Hospital, the sky still misting while we waited there with all the others to eventually be sent across town. I overheard someone say that he wasn’t sure what to hope for, what was best to hope for in such a situation. There were many stories of those burned beyond recognition. There were people with the letter M on their foreheads, lipsticked in the frenzy and haste of the night before, marking who had been given morphine and who had not.