The House That Wasn't There

On saying goodbye.

This is the house that wasn’t there. I visited it in winter for the last time. If I had known it was the last time, I would have stayed longer.

The house was on a peninsula between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. It is almost an island, but not quite. No man is an island, they say. They don’t tell you some men are peninsulas: distant even when you stand before them.

You can reach this region only by ferry. Detachment kept it unchanged: lost to both space and time. When you visit, you find a bygone place, a quiet place. I went there to be alone. I didn’t go to be abandoned, but that’s what happened in the end.

We found the house in January. My husband drove us to the dock: my hands were shaking, and not from the cold. Earlier I made my pitch for the journey. I wanted to see prairies carved in ice, and snow geese on the river. I wanted to see the bones of the land, the cliffs that bind the bucolic, the geology that keeps the score. That last part was closest to the truth. We boarded the ferry and the Mississippi crashed around us.

We disembarked and drove empty roads over rolling brown hills. Few visit Illinois’ third least populated county in the dead of winter. We passed icicle trees and ghost produce stands until the prairie loomed, a peninsula prairie, a preservation. It wasn’t dead; it was between seasons. We hiked through bitter grasses to the river where it was too cold to cry. I liked seeing my breath in the air; I liked the proof I was alive.

We drove until a village appeared, almost unaltered since the 19th century, when German immigrants came. The population today is 110; it never surpassed 300. I found a tiny red house with an open door. I stepped inside. Two cots lined the walls with a toilet between them. A plaque above the toilet said AMERICORPS. A laminated paper explained I was in a historic jail. It was built in 1876 and used as a drunk tank. I felt grateful the laminated paper was not a QR code. Outside the jail, a Budweiser sign stood by a tavern. Nothing moves in Brussels, Illinois.

I got out of jail and into the sleet. It was hard to walk but I wanted to keep going. We drove a short distance and saw a cemetery sprawling down a hillside. The sleet turned the sky sepia and merged with the stones. Stop, I commanded, I want to see.

I gripped the graveyard fence so that I didn’t fall and that’s when I saw it: an old white house between two roads, looming on a distant hilltop, with black windows like eyes. It made the landscape look haunted. It would have seemed natural, all this death, if it weren’t for that house: who lived there? Why there, why over the cemetery?

I needed to know. But the ground was ice, and we didn’t want to miss the ferry.

“Next time,” my husband said. I wondered when next time would be. I took photos with my phone and examined them in the car. When the ferry reached Missouri, cell service returned. My phone lit up with texts in Latin and Greek: Metastasis. Pleural effusion. Ascites. I longed for the timeless German of the village. I wanted to see the quiet old house, and learn who lived there, and why they lived so close to death.

* * *

By February, the peninsula was no longer an adventure, but a reprieve from a worsening condition. My excuse to go was still “snow geese.” Winter was ending and I wanted to see the migrating birds before they fled. But the real appeal was the journey: floating a river wide and blue as the sky to peopleless hills glinted gold. Thoughts and fears were mainland things; I dropped them at the dock like an unmoored anchor.

We found snow geese at last in a village called Gilead. They were lying in the woods in a bloody heap, their hearts torn out of their bodies. Local hunters assured me there was not a snow goose serial killer: snow goose sausage had been a delicacy here for centuries. Leaving Gilead, we passed a field of goose decoys, identical and unbloodied, and they scared me more. Imagine losing your heart to a trick like that.

We drove to Brussels to buy bread at Odelehr’s, the last open store. The lady at the counter told me to come back in summer, when the peaches were ripe and the valleys were green. I couldn’t fathom summer; summer was a void that blazed bright and blank in my mind. I walked outside — into the here and now, into the then and gone. The cemetery, no longer slick with ice, and the house that loomed beyond it.

“I’m going to walk out there,” I told my husband. It was ten degrees. “Wait for me.”

I walked to the bottom of one hill and then climbed up another. I worried I was on private property, but as I approached, it became clear the house was vacant. Or was it?

I moved carefully. I didn’t want to bother the house; I only wanted to understand it. The wood was rotting and the paint was chipped. Golden grass guarded the entrance, suggesting no one had been allowed inside for a long time. Some of the windows were boarded. But one window had Halloween decorations, and satellite dishes hung out back. Someone was there in October — an October — and someone cared enough to watch TV. Who lived there and when? Was there a family? Did they love each other?

The house lay near a field of graves. Did the occupant stare at the cemetery every day? Did they see it as a destination? If they saw me, would I be a burden, or a distraction, or just a stranger passing through? Another migrating bird, drawn to a decoy, foolish enough to risk its heart in the need for understanding.

* * *
We didn’t return until June. A million things happened to me in between, a million changes and conclusions, and all I wanted was to visit a place that stayed the same.

The land had come alive. Gone were the brown fields and empty roads. Now there were tractors, orchards, tourists on bikes. It was the 250th anniversary of the USA, and the 150th anniversary of Brussels, and its buildings were decked out in red, white and blue like a 20th-century child’s imagination. The corn was high and the trees were lush, covering landmarks I knew from bone-barren days and making them unrecognizable — but in a good way, one that offered sweetness and promise. We went back to Odelehr’s; I dared to eat a peach.

But when we returned to the cemetery, the house was gone.

At first, I thought it was a mistake. I thought trees were blocking it, or that the sweltering air blurred my vision. I ran down the hill, in disbelief at the view before me: a clearing so verdant and green, you would never know a house had been there at all. There was no trace of what had died, slowly, quietly, without telling its story.

I was so sure I was wrong that I checked my winter photos, squinting in the sun, struggling to see the past. The summer cemetery looked alien with its fresh flowers and polished stones. Maybe the house never existed, I thought wildly, and searched my photos again, trying to reconcile the mysterious old house with this blank new land, land neat and clean as a golf course.

I tried to take pictures that matched the angles of my old ones exactly, racing back and forth across the cemetery in 100-degree heat to do so, but it was as futile as reliving a memory. The house was gone: it was gone for good, it was gone.

Beneath the ground, the former inhabitants of Brussels; above them, bright blue sky and thick green grass and sunshine of relentless indifference. Sun that gave shadows to graves and lit up the spot of the house that wasn’t there. I will never know, I thought. I will never see it again; it is impossible now. There was something sick about the absence of a marker among so many graves. There was something sick about a clearing.

While searching my phone, I found old texts of one-sided conversations: inquiries to my father about chemo and clinical trials, questions left unanswered as the answers got too grim, scans from the oncologist that my mother sent because it was easier than explaining, medical terms that I stopped looking up in late March. You can learn everything wrong with a person’s body and never learn what’s in their heart.

I was on a plane to see my father when he died. We never said goodbye. I was too late then, and too late again now. I took pictures of the hilltop clearing to prove that a house once stood there, that I saw it and cared as it fell apart, and I fell apart with it. Low-resolution photos, I thought. This will never be resolved.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I only wanted three.

* * *

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The long road back. Winter 2026.