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“For who?”
“A lot of people who used to live here moved close by. They come back.”
“Okay.”
She led him uphill, toward the spire. “Stanley was born here,” she told him.
“In Centralia?”
“Here on this street. There were row houses. Michael told me. Stanley was supposed to be born in Bloomsburg, at the hospital, but his dad ran off and left his mom without any money, so she was afraid to go and then it was too late.”
“Did he move away because of the fire?”
“No, a long time before that. His mom remarried, and they went to some other town. Michael was born there. They didn’t buy the campground until later. Michael says Stanley wanted to come back because Centralia is hard to leave. I asked Stanley once if he thought it was because the place was special or if it was more that what had happened to the town haunted him.”
“What did he say?”
“He kind of grunted.”
They followed a road uphill, past power lines, and then ascended a steep set of stone steps that belonged to the church. Halfway up, Ashley turned around and sat down. Roman found a seat beside her, one step above.
They looked downhill, over the carpet of trees to the rise of the valley beyond. Everything green and quiet.
“My parents were refugees,” he said.
That was all. Just those four words. But it was the first thing he’d ever told her about himself voluntarily, and the words pinged against the pain she carried inside her, setting it resonating.
This was why she’d brought him here. If there was any place that felt to her the way Roman did, it was this one. Every time she visited, Centralia dredged up all these unstable emotions in her. Anguished empathy for the people who’d lived here and had to leave, and a sense of the earth itself, the loneliness of it, the confusion. She thought of hidden heat, of faith that kept burning, and it filled her with fierceness and longing.
And now, bound up with all that, she thought of Roman.
Behind her, he shifted and exhaled.
“You know the Mariel boatlift?” he asked.
“Sort of. A lot of Cubans came to Florida then, right? In the eighties?”
“Nineteen eighty. Castro opened the Mariel port and said ‘Anybody who wants to go, go.’ More than a hundred thousand Cubans came over, mostly in private boats. President Carter said the United States would welcome them with open arms, but he didn’t think there would be so many.”
Roman made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh, but it had no humor in it. “Maybe half of the people had family who met them in Miami or Key West, but that still left a lot of people with no one. The government stuck them in refugee camps. They sent a whole bunch to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.”
Wisconsin. There was the link.
“My parents hooked up at the camp. They were young, both of them alone. My mom was only fifteen. I was the first baby born to Mariel refugees on American soil.”
Born in 1981. That made him thirty-two.
“There was a picture in the paper. Patrick said my mom wanted to name me America, or George Washington. Libertad Roman Ojito Díaz was a compromise, so I guess I should be grateful.”
“Who’s Patrick?”
“He was my foster father.”
“Oh. Your parents …”
“Kind of a story there.”
She sat very still, because she felt its presence. This skittish narrative creature, drawn out by the quiet, the view. Drawn by the smell of her tears, the trauma of what had happened in the trailer.
