Awkwardly you manage to turn the Honda Civic around in the narrow street, drive back in the direction of Delahunt, slowly, leaning over the steering wheel, peering at house numbers. Oncoming headlights are blinding. It is too late! Too dark! What a bad idea this is. Brake your car, back up to let another driver through the narrow street, with excruciating slowness.

Hoping that he won’t scrape the side of your vehicle. For you have no business here, on Howard Street.

Like dirty water the futility of the search washes over you. Never will you share with Tyrell Jones the logic of this naïve quest.

At last! On one of the dour narrow brownstones built only a few feet from curb is the numeral twenty-nine. To your disappointment the house is darkened.

“Oh. God damn.”

Still, you get out of the car. You knock on the door. As if you might entice whoever is inside, hiding in darkness, to declare herself to you.

Elsewhere on the block is the glow of warm lights within houses, mysterious lives. Drumming music, TV voices uplifted. More headlights threading their slow way along the narrow street.

Another driver, a woman, having parked her car in a nearby driveway, sees you on the front step of the rowhouse and approaches you. For a confused moment you think that she might be the friendly woman from the Greyhound bus, the woman whose concern for you made you cry, then you recall that Sarabeth lived in Port Oriskany. This woman is no one you know and she is much younger than Sarabeth and not smiling as Sarabeth would smile.

“Ma’am? You’re looking lost, can I help you?”

“Yes, thank you! I’m looking for Ethel Johnson.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Johnson? Ethel? She used to live here . . . twenty-nine Howard Street.”

Smiling so hard, your face aches. The woman stares at you, frowning.

You repeat your awkward query. You consider uttering the name Hadrian Johnson—but do not.

Politely the woman asks if you are from the—(you can’t decipher the word, perhaps a proper name)—you tell her, “I don’t think so. No.”

No idea how to identify yourself. No idea really why you are here in this neighborhood you know nothing about and where no one knows you. Your head is wracked in pain, your knees are shaky. You cannot—quite—absorb what it means that this very day you were beaten, kicked. Cursed. And if you were to meet Hadrian Johnson’s mother Ethel, what could you possibly say to her?

So many cards you’d written to her, and thrown away. Perhaps that is best, to write, and throw away. Your yearning, your inexpressible longing. Maybe best, to spare the murdered boy’s mother a reminder of her loss, after so many years.