The Corner of Fifth and Memory
The taxi dropped Emma at the corner of Fifth and Hartwell, and for a long moment she simply stood on the sidewalk, suitcase handle biting into her palm, and let the city happen to her. Steam curled up from a vent near the curb. A woman in a red coat brushed past with a takeout coffee, muttering into her phone about someone named Gary who had ruined everything, and somewhere above, a pigeon complained to no one in particular. Emma breathed it all in—exhaust and roasted chestnuts and the particular mineral smell that came before rain—and felt something in her chest crack open, not quite pain, not quite relief. Something in between, the way homecomings always were.
She hadn't planned to feel anything at all. That had been the plan, actually: arrive, unpack, write. Nothing sentimental about it. Her aunt Ruth was wintering in Portugal for four months and needed someone to water the ferns and keep the radiator from flooding the floor again, and Emma needed a place far from her apartment in Albany where the walls had begun to feel like the inside of a coffin lined with rejected drafts. A trade, clean and practical. She'd told herself that on the train, three separate times, as if…