I smile. It must be a nice day today if I scheduled a walk. I leave the clinic and head toward the harbor, inhaling the fresh air. I’m going for a walk. I’m going for a walk. I also have a reminder that buzzes me on my phone. You are taking a walk. The cool breeze feels good on my skin, and the clear sky is pale blue above the snowcapped mountains. I keep to the same path when I walk in town, through the pedestrian tunnel that runs under the railyard, down the boardwalk along the harbor, to the inn, turn around, go back through the tunnel, take a left down Whittier Street, past Whiskey Pete’s, and up Blackstone Road to the Buckner Building. It’s not a long walk, but it’s enough to stretch my legs and something I can easily do on my own.

I don’t know what it is about the Buckner Building, but I feel a pull to it, a kinship. It was a place I started going to after Mom left, where Tate and I went often because it was the only place we could truly be alone. And now it’s just a nice way to end my walk. I reach the top of the hill, stand outside, and look up at the Buckner, a long stretch of concrete stained black, the building stark and pale against the deep-green vegetation that surrounds it. It took several years to build the nearly 275,000-square-foot military building, which included everything from barracks, a movie theater, a bowling alley, hospital, jail cell, even a bakery and a radio station, all connected by elevators and wide stairwells. It was completed in 1953, cost millions of dollars to build, and seven years later it was abandoned when the military deemed the Whittier port strategically unnecessary. I did a project on it in high school, and even now I can remember trying to wrap my mind around why adults would build something so big, so substantial, so useful and then walk away like it meant nothing. Then again, I could relate, and instead of buying into the rumors that it was haunted, I felt sad for the building and for every year it stood there empty and alone.