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Ten minutes later, we joined the rush hour traffic heading east on I-90 across Lake Washington, fighting a stiff breeze that whipped waves against the bridge. I peered in the rearview mirror occasionally, but no one on the backseat was talking. Whatever thoughts we were lost in, we were lost in together.

Ed turned the Seattle map over and examined the streets on the eastern side of the lake, his finger drifting over Bellevue and down to Renton. I could see him tracing our route, but it was several miles before he pointed to an exit sign and I pulled off the highway. As we turned to face another long, grueling incline, I could feel Immovable vibrating oddly, and I almost felt sorry for her. Hilly Seattle is a cruel city for a car that should have been retired years ago.

After another mile I saw a cemetery on the right—nothing but headstones and manicured lawns, flanked by evergreens. I signaled to turn, but then Finn jutted between the front seats and pointed to the left instead. I didn’t have time to ask why, and as soon as I’d crossed the oncoming traffic and realized he’d directed me into a trailer park, I wanted to curse. But by then he was telling me to stop.

I jammed on the brakes and glared at him, waiting for an explanation. Finn just pointed past me to the shack outside my window: a tiny, dilapidated clapboard house surrounded by a flagging chain-link fence.

“You don’t mean ...” I began, but Finn was nodding.

I dragged myself out of the car and felt my entire body deflate. Tufts of weeds filled holes in the cracked asphalt, and I kicked up stones and dust as I stepped toward the fence. I laced my fingers through the chain-links, icy-cold and battered. The house inside had been painted once, but it was flaking off. In its place, someone had spray-painted graffiti, but that only made the shack appear more neglected.

I was able to walk the entire perimeter of the fence in about twenty seconds. I did another circuit, hoping somehow that I might mysteriously stumble upon the rest of the house—the part where a family could live without being on top of one another the whole time. But there was nothing more to see. The house was tiny, smaller by half than Josh and Will’s garage. Whatever the source of Jimi Hendrix’s genius, it evolved in a place of poverty.

The rush of cars on the busy road beside us provided a wall of white noise, drowning out the crunch of footsteps and the scratch of voices. Somehow it felt right, so I closed my eyes and savored the peacefulness. When I opened them again, Tash stood beside me, slouching, like the bristling energy that kept her alive had seeped out somewhere between the car and the fence. She wrapped her arm around me and leaned her head on my shoulder.

“He grew up in there,” she said, her words distinct so close to my ear.

I nodded.

Tash took a deep breath, exhaled hard. “The greatest rock guitarist in history grew up in this house. Do you understand that?”

I didn’t, of course, not really; but at the same time, I did. I got the notion of someone transforming the way an instrument could be played just like I got the way that Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollack could change art, and William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway could change literature. I told her so.

Tash snorted. “Yeah, well . . . let me know if their houses are falling apart, stuck on the edge of a trailer park, okay?”

“It’s not fair,” I agreed.

“No, it’s not. His home should be a museum. It’s a holy relic. It’s ...” She squeezed her left hand through a gap in the fence, willed herself a few inches closer. “Nothing’s sacred, you know?”

“I know.” I wrapped my arm over her shoulder and pulled her closer. “How did he die?”

Tash cleared her throat. “Drug overdose. He was only twenty-seven, same as Kurt Cobain. Can you believe it? Twenty-seven years old.” She bit her lip. “What would you do if you knew you only had nine more years?”

I stared straight ahead, tried not to blink as my eyes dried out in the cold wind and the house became blurry. The sun was setting,