Juliette Kayyem - The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters

The boys were restless. We all were. It was April 2020, and we had been home, isolated, sheltering for just over a month. They were learning, if it could be called that, remotely after their high school shut down a few weeks before. Their older sister had returned from college, displeased that her freshman year would end taking classes from her bedroom at home. We were all stuck in our house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although I, as their mother, might occasionally admit it was special to hold them captive again, they found no such benefits in the situation. As far as the pandemic went, though, we were lucky. Our complaints derived from inconvenience, not wrenching sorrow.

Built in 1840, our rambling and cranky house took a bit of a beating with three teenagers back inside all day, every day. We had spent years tugging it into the modern era, but its bones were still old. It held up well enough for its ageuntil a fan broke.

In the boys second-floor bathroom, the ceiling covers what we had believed was a small crawl space. Above, on the third floor, is my daughters bedroom and a guest bedroom, with storage closets built in nooks and crevices around a slanted ceiling. Behind the closets, an architect had told us, were small crawl spaces that we could ignore, as they had been closed off for so long. So we had lived for a decade not really knowing what was behind those third-floor back walls that hid the space above the second-floor bathroom ceiling.

In April, the boys bathroom ceiling fan stopped working. They didnt tell me. They said they forgot. Instead, as kids will do, they continued to take long, hot showers, oblivious to what the lack of ventilation was doing to the plaster. I would later wonder, Did they not notice the paint chipping? The ceiling plaster eventually fell in a big clump, exposing the crawl space above on the third floor. But it was much more than that. A long, narrow space, only about four feet high, was discovered. Our masked handyman set a ladder and hauled himself up. There was nothing in there; no animals or furniture, no treasure. We found just a single mottled photo.

The photo captured a distinguished-looking man leaning on a railing, a red-tinted drape and chair behind him. There were a few words on the back, a name, a date. I was fascinated and very curious. Who was this man? I took the mystery to Twitter, where I knew online genealogists lurked. Surely someone would know what to do with this. Twitter delivered by the hundreds. There was a lot of speculation about the print, the card stock, and the tinting. In about an hour, Twitter sleuths found out where I lived (its that easy?) through property searches and worked backward from newspaper stories and historical documents. The photo was of a relative of the McCue family, who had lived in my home, their home, from 1917 to 1919.

I should probably admit here that my immediate obsession with this search was also a consequence of the pandemics manipulation of our time, of the concept of time. I, too, was home, distracted, not really myself, though busier than I had ever been. I no longer traveled; an airport fixture, I would not get on a plane for eighteen months. Still, I was not idle in 2020. My career in disaster and crisis management, preparing public and private entities for what they least expected, was in demand. Whether in academia, government, media, or the private sector, I like to say I have had many jobs but one career. I am like a storm chaserbut for disasters in general. I have a reputation for remaining calm when others do not, and my mantra has always been to pace the rage. I have low blood pressure, literally and figuratively.