I-96 is quiet while Libby drives east from Lansing, into the big same-y smear of suburbs north and west of Detroit. What must be thousands of abandoned cars still line the route, those whose drivers were abruptly bodily assumed into heaven—or whatever. Most of them have been pushed to the shoulder of the road by now, and in a few places an effort has clearly been made to start towing them away. Libby wonders what’s going to happen to all of them. Can you recycle a whole car? She’s heard of an artist in Grand Rapids who wants to use the abandoned vehicles, the cars and bikes and trucks, to make a huge memorial sculpture, but she’s not sure how she feels about the idea. Empty vehicles speak of absence, and those who have gone have left so much behind, too. It doesn’t matter; the Cleanup demands too much time, too much energy, from all of those left behind. Maybe there will be space for art again, someday. But that’s a very empty “maybe” right now.
She goes to her brother’s house first, which is both more painful and less. No one has broken in yet. Hard for would-be thieves to know, without surveillance, which houses have been emptied and which haven’t, and there’s no shortage of targets right now. A bowl of curdled batter sits on the counter, reeking of neglected dairy. Nascent Saturday morning pancakes? Fortunately the pan never made it to the burner; otherwise the house probably would have burned down long before Libby stopped by. There’s a pile of clothes by the stove, and another one on a stool at the counter. Libby retrieves her sister-in-law’s wedding ring from the pretty little dish beside the sink. She has a sister in Seattle, another of those who remain, who asked Lily to find it. After a moment, she collects her brother’s too. The rings belong together.
She lingers by the bookshelf, taking down an autographed copy of a book by her brother’s favorite author and putting it in her bag. Family pictures in the hallway: him and his wife at their wedding, in the church Libby grew up in. Both of them beaming at their baby shower, with Libby grinning down at them from behind. Plenty of other, older photos, portraits of the whole family together, but these two are the ones Libby wants.
Last of all, she stops in the second bedroom, the one that hasn’t quite completed its transition from office to nursery, and never will. Important documents are in the (unlocked) safe, and there’s no sheet on the mattress in the freshly-assembled crib.
On her way out, she sits, for a moment, on the stoop. The criteria for who was collected four days ago seem to be simple: those who believed they would one day be swept off the Earth, were. Some of those who remain accept that it was a specific sort of Heaven that did the collecting. Others assign blame elsewhere: a manifested psychosocial religious phenomenon; atheistic aliens with a sly sense of humor; an improbably deft worldwide psy-op. Whatever happened, a part of Libby had hoped that, somehow, her brother wouldn’t have gone. Not by choice. Not if it meant leaving her. She fingers the warm golden ring in her pocket, then roots around in her purse for the car keys.
At her parents’ house, the garage is open and both cars are gone, but the house itself appears intact. She half-expects her key not to work when she offers it to the lock. But it slides true with familiarity; the same door, the same doorknob, after all these years.
First she goes for her mother’s Kitchen Aid stand mixer, robin’s egg-blue with the dough hook attachment; her pretty teacups too, the ones Libby and her brother weren’t allowed to drink from until they were twelve. Past the kitchen the walls are even more laden with photos. There’s only one Libby wants, a photo of her and her brother on Christmas morning, when they couldn’t have been more than six and nine. She’s in some others—school pictures, a family vacation—but none of them as an adult.
She wishes she knew. She wishes for reports of UFOs or satellite footage of a massive gathering somewhere in the Sahara. Right now, she’d even be grateful for an “I told you so.”
There’s no point in visiting her old bedroom, which has a TV and the old living room couch in it now. In her brother’s bedroom, which in comparison is pristinely preserved, except that the old twin bed has been replaced by a full, she rescues a stuffed polar bear and the scrapbook box shoved deep into the closet. The scraps of her memories and his are mixed together there: a Bible verse competition ribbon and a basketball medal and report cards and a jumble of postcards and letters and drawings. After some consideration, she puts the lid back on and takes the whole thing downstairs, setting it next to the rest of her collection.
There’s a pile of clothing on her dad’s recliner in the living room, but that’s the only one Libby sees, even on a second circuit of the house. Maybe her mother was about to step into the shower; maybe she was at the grocery store, or out for a walk, or visiting a friend. Or maybe—and this wonderful, terrible thought stiffens Libby’s spine—maybe, she had a moment of doubt. Maybe she’s out there somewhere, wondering who’ll be waiting for her when she finally makes it home.
And maybe she’s not, and Libby will never find out either way. She loads up her car with the kitchen goods, the photos, the memories. Some things just aren’t for knowing; it’s a skill that Libby is still working on, to recognize those things when she sees them. When she’s finished, she closes the door behind her and leaves it unlocked. She decides to try I-69 on the way home, to see how many cars still linger on the roadside there.