I cross the threshhold, halt in shock. The people to whom my parents sold this house never loved it. It got shabby, was sold again and again. A year ago, we heard there'd been a murder here. And now the place is gutted -- kitchen cabinets, living room carpet, bookshelves, fireplaces, hardwood, brick, even the drywall stripped away, everything taken down to the frame.

"Water damage, that's all I know," says a workman, on his knees at the end of the main hall and looking uneasily at my mother, who teeters on the boards and dirt that now make up the floor.

I crane my head, looking for signposts. As in a dream, I recognize the shape of empty rooms, dusty pink tiles in a nearby bathroom. In the den, my mother's prized peg-and-groove wood floor is intact beneath dust and debris.

"Do you want to go in further?" I ask her.

Beyond the bend in the hall where the workman crouches is the bedroom where she slept for two decades, beside a man who is now dead. She shakes her head mutely; nothing she could see is worth risking a fall. "Thank you," I tell the workman softly; once again, his hammer rises. Outside the front door, my father's geraniums, the third generation grown of cuttings from a plant on my grandmother's Brooklyn windowsill, hang on, weedy and brown, but alive.

I help my mother into the car, drive off in silence. The urge to see old homes is quirky and eccentric, all right, also sappy and maudlin, but at heart, it's radical -- an attempt to defy time. Two decades after I lost my first love, the Hollywood home he'd rented during our breakup went on the market. At an open house, I saw my face framed again in his bathroom mirror. Years after my family left the tract house where I was a child, a former neighbor, baby-sitting for the new owners, let me back in. I stood in my old bedroom, face pressed against the window, eyes closed -- the position I'd held night after night when I was 10, listening, in terror, for the sound of Russian planes coming with bombs.

To go back is to reinhabit, for a moment, selves lost in the past. And it's to say that the relationship between person and place isn't merely a question of title. You always belong to a house you know well enough to navigate in the dark, and it will always belong to you. When you go in the door, it will know who you are.

But there's no recognition to be found in the raw wood and dirt of a dream home that's become someone else's fixer. Three months after visiting the house with my mother, I drive by once more. The new owners have added a second story and a soaring entryway, their own announcement of middle-class arrival. The house is no longer recognizable at all, no longer, in any way, mine. I won't be going back again.

And yet when I dream of being young, when I raise my father from the dead and bring the family together, I see shag carpet, smell chlorine and dried flowers; once again, I'm standing inside those walls. I'm trapped in that house, forever caught and held there, even as it has moved on without me.

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