I pack the way I left five years ago. Fast and Practical. Nothing I will regret leaving behind. Two changes of clothes. My laptop. My mother's hospital paperwork. I do not pack for a long stay because I am not staying long. One week. Handle what needs to be handled. Come back to Portland. Come back to my life. I tell myself this three times before I zip the bag.
The cab to the airport smells like pine air freshener and old coffee. Portland passes outside the window at five in the morning, empty and rain-soaked and unbothered. A city that does not need to perform for anyone.
I watch it disappear and think about the first time I ever saw Voss City. I was twenty years old. Damien was driving. He took a wrong turn, or maybe he didn't, and suddenly we were on the high bridge over the north end of Voss and the whole city was below us in the dark. Lit up. Enormous. Certain of itself. I pressed my face to the passenger window like a child. He slowed the car down without being asked. That was Voss City at twenty: possibility. A skyline that felt like a promise. I stop thinking about it as the cab pulls up to Departures. I grab my bag and step out into the cold.
The flight is two hours and twenty minutes. I spend most of it staring at a contract I have already read twice we land at 11:42 at night. From above, Voss City looks exactly the way I remember it. I had hoped it would look smaller. Duller. The way things from your past look when enough time has passed. But it doesn't. It looks exactly the same size it always was, lit up and deliberate in the dark below the plane. My hands are flat on my thighs. I am fine. I have always been good at fine.
Baggage claim is loud even at midnight. I collect my bag, follow the signs for ground transportation, and push through the exit doors. The air outside hits me first. Voss City has a particular smell at night: rain on warm asphalt, exhaust, and something faintly metallic underneath. I had convinced myself I had forgotten it. I hadn't. I join the taxi queue. Three cabs. Two. One. I get in and give the hotel address without meeting the driver's eyes. He pulls into traffic and I watch Voss City come through the windows block by block. Wet streets. Lights reflected in long orange streaks on the road. A glass office building that wasn't here five years ago. The city has changed in the small ways cities change when you are not watching. But the bones of it are the same. Still his city. I look at my lap for the rest of the drive.
***
The hotel is a budget place on the east side. I made the reservation under a different name because I am not certain who in this city still talk to whom. Sarah Vane, That's The name I could think of
The woman at the front desk doesn't look up. She slides a keycard across the counter and tells me checkout is at eleven. I take the elevator to the fourth floor, find room 412, and let myself in. A bed. A window. A bathroom. I set my bag on the chair by the door without unpacking it. Check the door lock. Check the window latch. Old habit. I sit on the edge of the bed and look out at the city. Cars on the wet street below. A restaurant still lit up across the road. Two men in suits leaving a building with no sign on the door. Normal. Ordinary. The city of a man I have spent four years not thinking about.I lie down without changing. Set my alarm for six. Close my eyes.I don't sleep for a long time.
I'm up at six, showered and dressed by six-thirty. I eat a granola bar standing at the window, check the map on my phone. Mercy General is twenty minutes from here. I head downstairs, push through the glass doors, and flag a cab at the corner. The morning is cold and grey, the kind of sky that can't decide whether to rain or just threaten it all day. Very Voss City. The driver takes a detour around road works near the hospital and drops me at the main entrance from the north side. I pay him and step out. Inside, Mercy General is quiet in the way hospitals are always quietly working. I give my mother's name at the front desk and take the stairs to the third floor. The corridor smells like antiseptic. I follow the room numbers to the end and stop outside the last door. I stand there a moment longer than I need to. Then I push it open.
My mother is smaller than I remember. She has never been a small woman, but she is lying in that bed with monitors on her wrists and she looks like something has been taken out of her.
"Elena."
Her voice is still hers. That helps.
We talk about the surgery, the timeline, the doctor. I ask the right questions and write things down. I have always been better in a crisis than in ordinary life. She watches me write.
Then: "You look tired." She said
"Red-eye flight." I answered
"That's not what I mean."
I look up. She has the expression she always gets when she knows more than she is saying.
"I'm fine, Mom." I replied
A trolley rolls past in the corridor. Somewhere a phone rings and stops.
"He knows you're here," she says.
The pen in my hand goes still.
"Who?"
But I already know. I have always known that this city and that name would find each other the moment I stepped back inside its borders.
Her eyes close. The medication pulling her under even mid-conversation.
"Damien," she says softly. Like a name she has been holding for a long time.
Then she sleeps. And I sit beside her with a pen I am no longer writing with, in a city I swore I would never return to, and understand for the first time that one week was never going to be enough. This city does not let go of people. It never has.