Smoke Signals

            The downtown street was transformed, but it was hard for Allison to say how. She turned a corner and something felt wrong, and distant. Everything looked slightly out of focus. She had been down these sidewalks hundreds of times, but now the buildings glared at her from where they stood. The bright red crepe restaurant to her right was angry and mean, out of place with her memories. Allison stood there, and blinked. She inhaled, and then coughed.

            The smell was missing. That smell that was somewhere between popcorn and dirt, that meant that she was here. She desperately searched for it, but there wasn’t even a hint of it on the air. Instead, the air was hostile and empty, and it made her want to march back to her car and drive until everything was unfamiliar again. But Allison was meeting her old high school friend, and it was too late to cancel.

            She started walking, and the momentum helped everything stay blurry. It was easier to ignore the Italian cookware store that had popped up where your favorite taqueria used to stand if you walked past it like it didn’t surprise you. Maybe if she placed her feet like she knew where she was, passersby would believe that she belonged here . . . if that was what she wanted.

            When the Thai place finally came into view, Allison felt physically relieved. She realized that she was holding her shoulders up as though in a permanent shrug, and she let them drop. Allison took a deep breath and grabbed the handle, pulling the glass door open.

            “Hello! Welcome!” the hostess said, smiling through thickly-painted eyeliner.

            “Hi,” Allison said, and pushed a smile onto her face. “I think my friend is already here. Can I just . . .?” she pointed to the dining room and the hostess nodded primly. She spotted the tiny blonde sitting halfway across the restaurant and gestured to the hostess that they knew each other. Then she made her way over.

            “Hi!” Ashley said, the syrup practically dripping off her voice. “How are you? It’s so nice to see you!” She stood up and held out her arms to Allison, who dutifully entered them. They hugged, Allison painfully aware of the amount of space between them. When she was finally released, Allison took her seat across from Ashley and did a quick study of the woman in front of her.

            Ashley was one of those people who was always unbelievably pulled together. Today, her hair was perfectly straightened, one side tucked behind her right ear in a casual-seeming gesture. The makeup on her eyes was identical on both sides, and her lips looked like they came in that unnatural shade of pink. Her turquoise dress rested on her tiny frame as though it was made for her, and there wasn’t a wrinkle in the whole of the fabric. Allison ran her index finger below the edge of her own winged eyeliner.

            She pushed the smile back onto her face. “I’m doing well,” she said, trying to fill the conversational space. “It’s good to see you too. It’s been, what, six years?”

            “Seven,” Ashley said, and seemed to smile at the correction.

            Allison was already ready to leave. “Well, you look well,” she said clumsily.

            Ashley nodded. “I am. I really am.” She picked up the menu in front of her and made a show of looking at it. “Things have been so busy at the agency, but it’s nice when I can get away for a little bit.” She said this absently, in response to a question Allison hadn’t asked. Allison suppressed a sigh. She should have agreed to meet up for something shorter, like drinks or coffee.

            When their yellow curry and Thai samosas were on the way, Ashley launched into a story about work, something about a model that had gotten lost on her way in. This transformed into another story and another, and before Allison knew it, twenty minutes had passed without her saying a word. She waited for a question to come her way, but so far one didn’t seem forthcoming. She ran her fingertip along the rim of her glass.

            Allison glanced over to the couple sitting at the table behind Ashley. The woman was looking down at her plate, her thin wrists working at cutting nothing. The man laughed loudly, apparently at something he had said, and took a sip of his drink. Allison glanced back and directed her eyes to the way Ashley’s left eyebrow moved up when she spoke. Her words gently came back into focus.

            “. . . and that’s when I threw down my folder and ran into the bathroom. I didn’t realize until I got there that I hadn’t had anything but that cupcake all day, and the whole thing was probably, like, low blood sugar or something.” That perfect smile crept back onto Ashley’s face, and a pause rested between her words. It wasn’t a question, but it was enough.

            Allison was going to say something related to Ashley’s story, but at the last moment her thought derailed. She glanced down at her water glass and collected herself. “Does all of this feel different?” she said.

            Ashley’s composed expression slipped from her face momentarily as her brow moved into a furrow and she said, “What do you mean?”

            “Like, the way things are. Nothing here feels right. Has it all changed, or were we just too young to notice it before?”

            “And I say again,” Ashley said, a tinge of irritation entering her voice, “what do you mean?”

            Allison looked into her old friend’s eyes and tried to make her understand. “I’m not comfortable here. It’s like the air is too clean or something.”

            “The air is too clean?”

            “It doesn’t smell right.”

            “Because it’s cleaner?”

            “No, it’s just . . . that’s not the problem, it’s just not . . . familiar anymore . . .?”

            The expression of disbelief on Ashley’s face did not make Allison feel better. She grasped for the first example her brain could conjure. “Like that pretentious fucking crepe place down the street. Since when has that been there?”

            Ashley’s mouth set into a line. “Have you ever eaten there? It’s actually pretty good.”

            “That’s not the point, that’s not the point at all . . .” Allison could hear her words come. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere, but she couldn’t stop herself now. “I just wanted some things to stay the same.”

            “What, for people to be scared to come down here? At least now the businesses can be successful. Which is good for the economy, and all that.” A silence fell over the conversation, and Allison found herself trying to remember what they had been talking about before.

            Ashley’s pseudo-intellectual defense made Allison realize she wasn’t going to be heard, no matter how well she explained herself. She wanted to continue arguing, but there wasn’t a point. Neither of them wanted to budge. Ashley sighed audibly, and raised her right hand until a passing waiter made eye contact with her. “Can we get the check, please? Thank you,” she said, unable to keep the clip out of her voice.

            “I’m sorry, Ashley, I didn’t mean to make things weird.”

            “I know, Allison, it’s okay,” Ashley said, although she wouldn’t look Allison in the eye. “I think you just need to accept that sometimes things change. This town is finally getting the facelift it needed. That’s not a bad thing.”

            “But . . .” Allison felt herself getting sucked back in. “What about everybody who lived here before? What happened to them? Things are so much more expensive now and—“

            Ashley grabbed the check from the waiter and ripped the booklet open. She pulled a bill from her designer purse and laid it down. “This was fun,” she said, with no enthusiasm whatsoever, “we should do this again sometime.” She briefly looked Allison in the eye before marching out of the restaurant.

            Allison sat there in shock. She felt the blood rushing from her face.  She wanted to throw up, or cry, or something. Instead, she pulled out her wallet and paid her portion of the check.

~

            As she walked back down the street to her car, she mentally divided the businesses into three categories: the new ones, the old ones that were brave for sticking around, and the old ones that were traitors. The last two categories were not based on one rationale, but rather decided in the moment when she saw something familiar and felt a stab of resentment, or not. Allison would see the line of people snaking around the corner of her favorite old diner, somehow surviving in this economic era, and feel overwhelming hatred for those who thought they could ever love it the way she did.

            These things sat here, prostituting themselves to new clients. Of course they did. They needed to. The people running them needed to keep their businesses afloat if they wanted to make rent. Allison knew this even as she felt fury run through her veins. These things didn’t belong to her and so, as she was pushed farther and farther away by the skyrocketing housing prices and cost of living, it wasn’t her place to complain. This was the way the world worked.

            And still, she hated it. She hated the helplessness she felt at the hands of these circumstances. Allison could rationalize what was happening around her for days, and it wouldn’t diminish this feeling. If anything, it made this feeling worse. The world kept turning regardless of what she did to stop it, and the things she loved could be taken from her at random. Reminders of this drove her to the edge, they drove her—

            And suddenly, Allison couldn’t walk anymore. She needed to run, so she started running down the street. Past the women with their tiny dogs having lunch in between charity events, past the obliviously dressed newly wealthy. Every time her feet hit the pavement, the sharp jolt through her body reminded her that she was still real. She needed to get to her car, but she knew she wasn’t going home yet.

~

            Allison was going to rip off a scab, one that had been forming for quite some time. It was going to be painful, and she knew it. Still, her morbid curiosity had finally gotten the best of her, and so she was driving as fast as she could without getting pulled over. She was being dragged into the past and, what was much worse, she was letting herself be taken willingly. It wasn’t going to be good, but while she was walking along that now-unfamiliar downtown street, not looking had become too much.

            If she didn’t know the names of the streets, she might not have been able to find her way. Allison wanted this to be because everything had transformed in the years since she left, but was forced to admit that it might be because of how young she had been. She made two wrong turns before finding the right street. She drove down it, reached the end, and turned around. This had to be wrong, and yet it couldn’t be. It was in the right space, it was the right street name. The elementary school she had attended was three blocks away, just like she remembered. So where was it?

            Allison drove to the middle of the street and stopped. She got out of her car and spun around. It was only when she was facing away from where it should be that the facts arranged themselves. There, across the street, was the old man’s house. What had his name been? It was one of those consistent details about her childhood that had slipped away as soon as she closed her eyes. The sight of the house’s fake brick façade made Allison’s stomach lurch. She slowly turned back around and looked at the building in front her.

            It was a two-story complex, surrounded on both sides by buildings exactly like it. There was nothing significant about its architecture, it was just another empty, boxy design. It was built to house people, not to last. As far as she could tell, no one was living in the apartments yet. They were just sitting there, as if pulled off an assembly line and placed in a neat row. The faux mahogany door shone. Allison imagined someone getting up every morning to polish it, hoping that this act would attract new renters. For some reason, this was the thought that brought tears to her eyes.

            The scab had been ripped off, and she was bleeding profusely. Gone was the overgrown yellow daisy bush that had stood next to the driveway. Gone was the basketball hoop and gone was the gate. Gone was the area that they had called “the courtyard,” even though, in reality, it was a fenced-in concrete space with a sticky jasmine plant growing at its center.

            The house her mother had affectionately referred to as “the oven” during the summer, due to the stifling insulation that forced them to seek cooler environments in the afternoon. The house where they had converted a garage into another bedroom. The house with the roof that they had climbed onto in the middle of her mother’s dinner party. The house where the bad thing happened. The house with the planters in the back filled with flowers straight out of Dr. Seuss. This house had been swallowed up by the earth and now only existed as a memory. It had been torn down to make room for the few people that could afford to live in this area. It was a casualty of the rise of new wealth, something that only jealousy coupled with desire could have destroyed.

            In short, it was gone.

~

            Allison didn’t realize what she was going to do until she was lying awake that night and it occurred to her. Then she understood that it began happening the moment she had decided to go back. The moment she laid her eyes on the pristine white paint accompanied by light blue trim, and her vision had gone orange, then red. There was an insistence in her, an attachment that couldn’t be refused. Everything she did from the time she pulled on her wrinkled jeans to the moment she stepped over the threshold of her apartment, both arms weighed down, she did robotically.

            The drive was shorter than she expected, but then, her thoughts were nowhere, not even on the task at hand. She felt light, something that almost mimicked happiness, but held itself back. For the first time in weeks, Allison was satisfied. This both scared and pleased her and made her want to drive faster, but she stayed just under the speed limit. When she got back to the building, she had to contain herself.

            She knew that the security cameras would catch her, but it didn’t matter. If that had mattered, she wouldn’t be here. She worked quickly. The efficiency that Allison possessed in this moment surprised her, the steadiness of her hands keeping her calm even as the potent smell crept up into her nostrils. She looked around at all she had done and felt like nodding in approval. This was right. It had to be. She lit the match.

            At first, Allison was disappointed, and a little frightened, at how quickly the spark didn’t spread. The flames lingered where she had thrown them, only gently licking at the siding of the building. She held her breath until they caught the gasoline and spread. She nodded to herself and turned to cross the street. She wanted to watch from a distance.

            And then, for a moment, she wanted to take it back. This was someone else’s dream that she was ruining, someone’s hard work. It may have been boring and predictable, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important to them. Allison pushed these thoughts aside. No, it was a symbol for everything that had been taken away from her. And besides, it was too late to take it back.

            She was content as she watched the flames spread. She’d thought she would be filled with glee, but instead it felt like an acknowledgement of the end of something. Her home had been torn down. It no longer belonged to her, or to anyone. The beating heart of this town was being reduced to ash, and no one reached out their arms to stop it. Nobody had the means to do so.

            She was still standing there on the sidewalk, considering this phenomenon, when she heard the first fire truck. She wanted to close her eyes and let the siren run through her, but she also didn’t want to miss the end. Allison didn’t tear her gaze away from the fire, not until she was pulled away with smoke-stung eyes.