Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [211]
It is not easy to come to such a place—to feel as if there is something in you that should not continue on the face of this earth, something about yourself that should not survive your own life. Coming to that place, and to that sense of myself and my future, changed my life. I have not been the same since, and I sometimes suspect I will not be the same again.
I DECIDED TO GO BACK TO PORTLAND ONCE MORE—this time to find my brother.
Frank was the last family I had, and I had relinquished him. I had no idea whether he was happy these days or living homeless, whether he was sane or crippled. Too often in my life I had lost those I loved or cared about—sometimes because death took them, sometimes because they gave up their love for me, and sometimes because something in me made it easy to walk away, to withdraw in some irrevocable way from those who might love or need me the most. There were times when it was a frighteningly easy thing to do—something I did almost without thinking—just one of those shameful secrets about myself that I did not fully understand, but now wanted access to.
But the truth is, I missed Frank terribly. I had tried to find him from time to time over the years. I’d get reports that somebody had seen him working someplace, or walking down one road or another in Portland, but I could never track him down anyplace. The last I had heard about him had been a couple of years before. A friend had seen him doing some custodial work. By the time I called the employer, Frank had quit and was gone.
I had no idea what I would find when I found my brother, but I did know I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him, touch him, see that he was okay and attempt to be fair with him, even if it only resulted in his casting me out of his life for good.
I HAD BEEN IN PORTLAND A SEASON BEFORE I FINALLY FOUND FRANK. I had done everything I knew how to locate him, yet despite a lifetime of reading mystery novels, I wasn’t proving very good at the missing person business. I searched death certificates, I went to homeless shelters, I looked at the face of every man I passed on the street who could possibly be my brother. Then one night not long before Christmas, I was having dinner with Jim Redden, a friend who was a journalist and crime reporter. He offered to make some calls for me. The next morning, when I got up, Redden had left a message on my answering machine. He had found where Frank was living. It was ten blocks from where I was living, in northwest Portland.
I got dressed and walked over to Frank’s address. It may have been only ten blocks, but in those few blocks one walked from one world into another. The area of northwest Portland I lived in was an old part of town, filled with Victorian houses that had been refurbished. It was now an upscale district with shops, cafés, and bars—just another of those self-conscious, affluent bohemian neighborhoods that have sprung up in most American cities over the last decade or two. But as you walk north along 23rd Avenue, you begin to move into the area where the Victorians have not been refurbished—where old homes look simply like old homes, and you come closer to the fringes of northwest Portland’s industrial district. It was a part of town that had stood largely untouched and unloved since the 1940s, and where many older folks and several down-and-outers now congregated, hanging around corner grocery stores that had iron bars across their windows,