Absolution. Even on the good side of town, a place where she had never been before, the Detroit air had a familiar smell. Isis couldn’t believe how familiar it was after a full decade out of its bounds. She’d been plenty of places: Massachusetts for college, Arizona for work, and now this summer she was living in England at Alfie’s place. But even now, Detroit rang of… something. Not home, per se, as she was too old and cynical now to remember much happiness here, her wounded pride and broken heart clinging only to the pain she had found within the city’s limits, but it was familiar. A house she had grown up in, where she’d received the same news over and over again: the person she loved was gone.
That was her upbringing, a little girl from a broken home on the wrong side of town. Somewhere along the way, someone else had died there, too: Isis herself. Her naivety was stripped in this town, when cops killed her father when she was three, when drugs took her sister away, when Jahmaal saved her life (and her daughter’s) by ending another, that of the father of her child, when her baby sister was taken from her. When she grew up and decided no more, a flight from Detroit ten years ago, a sin so old but for which she was still yet to repent.
Today, she would resolve her debt.
Isis had never purchased a car before, and she walked slowly around the lot, peeking into windows. She had been certain to dress nicely, remembering what people thought here of black people who poked around expensive places, and sure enough, after far longer than had to be the common experience, a salesman approached her. “What kind of car is the best?” she asked of him. “I want this year’s model, with all the best features.”
She did even better than that: the model for the year ahead, not explicitly released, but she had four years of practically untouched salary to offer. It was an SUV in a pleasant shade of dark red, with a sunroof and tinted windows. It was everything she had never seen, let alone touched, in all of her life, and she hadn’t driven in so long that she was terrified she would crash it before reaching its destination. But she she made it, driving cautiously (afraid of getting pulled over, for fairly obvious reasons) through town, watching the buildings that bordered her slowly grow more decrepit, broken by time and graffiti. The corners were occupied by women with dead eyes and exposed bodies despite the fact that it was early afternoon, but they seemed to be of little concern to the police. She could have sworn she saw a man in uniform disappear into a dusty condemned parking garage with one of these girls. Her stomach was a knot as these sights, along with the not-so-subtle drug deals she passed, reminded her of everything she hated about her youth, a time she did her best to forget had ever happened. The only good thing that ever came out of this place was Nevaeh, and that was because Isis got her out.
With startling memory, Isis found her destination. She pulled into the driveway, parked the car, and got out, a piece of paper and the keys in hand. No one seemed to be home, which was all the better; she wanted to repay them quietly, so a face-to-face conversation hadn’t been ideal anyway. Producing a pen from the back pocket of her jeans, she leaned against the side of the house to write a note:
I wish there could have been another way. I did what I had to do, but I am sorry for how it must have affected you. I hope this makes us even. The keys are under the doormat.
-Isis Carter.
The car she had stolen the night she left Detroit, the car she had lived in through college and for the first couple years after, until she got the job at Sonora--it had belonged to them, these neighbors across the street from her childhood home. Even without seeing them, she knew they were still here. For one thing, she recognized the half-mowed style of the yard, the impossible mess she could spy through the window. But for another, and perhaps more decisively, she knew they were here because nobody ever left Detroit unless they went to Heaven, Hell, or jail. She herself was a very, very rare exception who could have landed in either of the second two options. And still could, really.
Isis looked across the street at her old house, so run down, like the ten years had been a hundred. Certainly no one lived there anymore, with the gutters hanging down and the siding missing in patches, which made it a perfect place to go to Apparate down to the magical side of things and start the floo journey back to England. She crossed the road, shivering slightly as she passed the middle, the place where a distracted driver had not seen Sasha running while a distracted Isis tried to hold everything together in the house, before climbing the collapsing concrete steps up to the house. The door was unlocked, so she entered.
The furniture was all still here, just like it had been. It looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned since she had left, dust and filth strewn about. Isis couldn’t help but pause, glancing from the kitchen area, where she had been standing when she heard the sirens, back to the entranceway, from which Jahmaal had shot his gun at the father of her child. Her memories flooded back to her, and she felt hot tears sting the corner of her eyes. Her father. Kamri. Jahmaal. Deontay. Sasha. She had lost them all here. And it was here that she had left the only one remaining behind.
But not forever.
“Isis?”
She turned sharply, head directed to the source of the sound. An old, shrunken woman stood at the base of the stairs. Her heart dropped. “Mom?”