I clawed at the dirt, looking for some sign of my home, screaming through my blackened fingers until my voice choked down to nothing, and Cherub pulled me away. Even the foundation was gone.

Twelve

It was a putrid Sunday at Ebbets Field, and the Giants were down by three. I hated the Dodgers, I hated their fans, and I hated Ebbets Field—a cramped, meaningless little ballpark that struck me as Brooklyn personified: stunted, scrawny, ugly, and rude. I shifted in the hard wooden seat and tried to understand why I was there.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I got to Brooklyn. As the sun rose on my vanished home, I lay on my back in the dirt until the cold seeped through my clothes and I had to stand or go numb. I forced Cherub to go back to his pet shop and wandered west until I reached Bedford Street, where Bex Red lived in the narrowest home in New York, a three-story scarlet town house that was barely wide enough to hold its own front door. I knocked only once before the door opened, and she swept me into her arms, in a dressing gown sticky with plaster and lime.

“I heard the shots,” she said. “I saw the fires. Come inside. I’ll feed you some whiskey.”

Past the door was a stack of accordions. Eight feet wide and forty long, Bex’s first floor stored watering cans, cracked mirrors, wilted plants, typewriters, rosaries, vases, taxidermy, cellos, inaccurate globes, and poorly made pots. They were artifacts rescued from the homes of the vanished, kept by Bex in tribute until the constraints of the space forced her to make room for more.

“You don’t want an accordion, do you?”

I couldn’t say a word. I followed her through the stacks of neatly organized refuse to the second floor, where she thrust a glass of rye into my hand.

“It’s not Boulton’s,” she said. “Apologies.”

I raised the glass in a feeble toast and tried to take a sip. It slipped through my hand and cracked on the floor. I sank into the puddle of cheap whiskey, folded into myself, and sobbed. Bex, praise her, asked no questions. She helped me onto the couch, arranged me on a pile of pillows, and swaddled me in a wool blanket. I was asleep before she blew out the light.

I awoke looking at Washington Square. The sun was shining and the park was crowded, more crowded than I had seen it in years, with the moss gone, the trees stunted, the fountain full, and the arch gleaming. And on a bench just inside the western gate, a young woman in a tangerine dress sat with her mother, a delicate woman whose hair was just beginning to go white.

“It’s sublime,” I said, rising from the couch and leaning close to the canvas, which stretched from ceiling to floor.