That’s when I hear the metal door upstairs slam shut. My heart skips a beat. I reach down and take your small hand. It’s dry, and I can feel the fine dust from the concrete on it, like chalk powder. You follow me up the stairs, across the room to the door. It’s closed.

“The wind must have blown it shut.” I push the bar, expecting it to be locked and us to be trapped. But it pops open, and we are bombarded by the fresh autumn air, now much cooler than it was only minutes before, and the slate-gray sky above us. The wind is like breath.

I drop your hand and wrap the chain back around the door handle. When I finish, you reach up and grab my hand again, and we drift up the alley. Your hand feels even lonelier and smaller than it did in the dark, the alley feels lonely and narrow, and the sky, even as the clouds break up, seems lonely and tired. We pause at each street between the school and our house, look both ways, and walk across, my steps long and ponderous, yours short and sometimes turning into skips to keep up.

“Why did you go in there?” I ask you. “Places like that aren’t safe here in the city.”

You smile. “The woman from class. She was helping me with the map. And she gave me this.” You hand me a quarter. “See the year?” you ask, pride in your voice.

I hold the quarter up closer to my face, rubbing it to wipe away some of the grime.

1979. Forty years ago. The same year your father was born. The same year your grandmother left me. Dread seeps into my neck, my eyes, my hands. It’s a tightening, a filling up, a kind of heat. I’ve had this feeling before, this hollow sense of low-grade dread, and I realize it was that day forty years ago when I was lying on the sofa, John on my chest, and our friends came back across the water without your grandmother.

Without Mary.

On that morning, I stood holding John in my arms, pressing his body to my chest with one hand while cupping his head in the other. I navigated the sliding door with my elbow without putting him down and walked out onto the deck.

I keep seeing it now, over and over again. Shirley bent at the waist, crying and gasping for breath.

“Where is Tom going?”

“He’s going for help.”

“Mary?” I asked, not able to say anything else.

She shook her head. “There was an accident.”

“Grampy?” you ask me.

We are standing at the crosswalk. Two cars have stopped to let us walk, but I am lost, far away.

“Should we cross?”

I give a half wave to each car, and we pass between them. One of them roars behind us, formally registering the driver’s impatience.

“Almost there,” I whisper to you. I think again of the imaginary woman you have been talking about. “Pearl.” I pause. “Tell me again. Why were you in that building? You have to be careful. Sometimes abandoned buildings have people in them who might hurt you.”