We get to Labelle at around five, which makes us late because Culler takes a wrong turn and we have to double back. Labelle is smaller than Branford. That combined with Culler’s memory means we find the abandoned house easily. At least we don’t lose a lot of time.

It’s in a rough-looking part of town. Every time I glimpse people wandering this street they all look sad, and I feel sad for them. I don’t know why that makes me homesick, but it does. Culler can’t get enough of photographing me walking it. He tries to explain it to me. He says something about the juxtaposition, how determined I look against this dying place, but I don’t get it. But I love how passionate he sounds about it, I think.

“You sound like you’re getting it back,” I tell him, nodding at his camera.

His face turns a shy red.

The house is at the very end of the street and God, it’s depressing. It could be the most depressing place yet. I studied the photograph my father took of it first and the photo is exactly what I’m seeing now, like he didn’t have to try at all to bring the bleakness through.

He just took the shot.

It’s sad when a place that has probably seen family, love, and death turns to nothing. It’s rotting and worn. It looks like something bad happened to it that it just couldn’t recover from.

It’s … see-through, almost. Solid, but its guts are on display. The windows on the first floor are boarded up, the ones on the second are broken. The doors have been ripped away. We approach the house carefully, looking up and down the street. This is the most public place we’ve had to visit, and we don’t want to get busted for trespassing or anything.

I keep thinking about what Culler said—I could get him in a lot of trouble, maybe.

We walk the overgrown path. Culler steps aside and I enter the house first. The floors are cheap wood, old weathered faces beneath our feet; something you’d cover with carpet, but the carpet is gone now, has been gone a long time. Ripped up.

Culler starts taking photographs. Of me.

He shadows me, at first, while I look around.

The hallway is a wreck. To the left, there are stairs. To the right, two rooms. Garbage litters the space, forming a trail to the back door—or the hole where the door used to be. Stained yellow wallpaper falls off the wall. Black mold—I think—edges down from the ceiling. I peer into the first room to the left. The kitchen. It’s even worse off and there is no way we’ll be able to get inside to look there. There’s garbage everywhere. Random pieces of wood, lumber. Old plastic toys, which I can’t quite figure out. The floors are linoleum, something seventies, I think. The counters and cupboards must have been white a long time ago, but they’re completely stained and the doors are hanging off the hinges. The drawers have been taken out and thrown on the ground.

The living room is slightly less disastrous. It’s littered with empty booze bottles, another space for people to come out here to hide and drink, and there’s a couch next to the wall with a number of questionable stains all over it. There’s a space next to it where a fireplace used to be. An old chandelier hangs from the ceiling by a thread. It smells terrible.

It’s hard to breathe in here.

“Where do we start?” I ask Culler.

“You take the upstairs and I’ll take the downstairs,” he says.

“Okay.”

He takes a photograph as I climb the rickety old stairs. I keep close to the wall. The banister doesn’t look very stable.

Upstairs is somehow less derelict. The sun shines in through every broken window and I can hear kids playing down the street, outside. There’s a bathroom, except there’s a hole in the floor where the toilet used to be and the porcelain sink has been shattered. Two bedrooms. One has delicate-looking wallpaper, faded yellow, with white flowers on it. The other bedroom is all peeling paint, so much so that if I squint, it looks like the walls are melting. I’m wandering around that room and taking it in …

I’m not even really looking for it when I find it.