Nothing was the same. The streets, the buildings, the sounds. He wasn't the same, either. His joints ached, his back was hunching, he felt like he could barely control his shuffling feet, only staying upright with the aid of a cane. He was not the boy who'd run along these streets, little brother in tow, to make to the distribution center.
Those days were long gone. A history torn down, built over. And the boys running past him in the street, painfully familiar, but total strangers, only heightened the sense of loss. His life spent, long years flying by as if in seconds, in retrospect. The whole world had changed. And not for the better.
The world was a cold, commercial, overcrowded, loud place these days. Two world wars, a depression, and a whirlwind of changing laws and fortunes had utterly transformed the city he'd known. He couldn't see the sky some days, for the height of the buildings, and the cars zipping past forced those who refused to risk life and limb in them to cling to the sides of buildings as they roared along. And the longer he lingered on, the fewer connections he seemed to have with this place he didn't recognize.
Les had been quick to sign up, when the US finally entered the first world war, leaving behind a wife and daughter when he didn't come home. He had done his best to help his brother's widow and his niece, but he had a wife of his own, and three little boys all in a row, and when Martha and Annie moved out west, he lost track of them. It had been years since he'd heard from Annie, longer still since he'd seen either her, or her mother, and he regretted that, deeply. He had let Les down, not taking better care of the woman he'd loved.
And then there was Sarah. The oldest of them, and frankly, the smartest of them, the brightest of them. Had she been born into this new world, she would have been able to do so much more. And she might not have fallen in love with a man like Jack Kelly. Who stole her heart, and ran away, never to come back. Sarah had waited for him. Years. A lifetime of waiting for a man who would never come back for her, who had walked away from her without a second glance, who had never even bothered to contact her, let her know he was alive, let her know he'd moved on. She'd died, alone, still waiting, still believing he would come home for her. It broke his heart, to see her, towards the end. Frail, and sick, slowly fading away, never giving up hope, blindly, stupidly trusting that Jack actually loved her.
Little wonder he hated even the memory of the boy who'd been his best friend, who had broken his sister's heart. One long summer, through to fall, Jack Kelly burst into their lives, and changed them all, forever. He had little doubt that he would never have gone into journalism, if not for Jack. He wouldn't have had his small adventures, the trips he'd taken, here and there, chasing stories, if not for having gotten involved with the newsies. It had shaped his life, his path. And not just his, Les, and Sarah's paths, too. His whole family had changed, because of one chance meeting one hot summer day.
The strike had been the starting point, and everything changed from there. Not that it actually changed anything it had set out to change. In the end, it hadn't. There were concessions, but many of the boys who had been on the edge of not surviving on what they managed to make were pushed past that edge in the winter that followed. He heard about it, second-hand, but not from Jack, who had long since vanished into the train yards, and from there, to anonymous western wilderness. Jack was gone, and he and Les were back in school. The loss of their leader, and his second-in-command hadn't helped the situation for the boys. Without him, they floundered, like Sarah did. Like he did.
But Jack's disappearance had forced him to step up a bit, or it felt like it did. He had to be the brains, and the voice, even if he wasn't a newsie anymore. He started writing, then, and with Denton's help, began to get his writing published. It took off, took over his life.
A life that flew by, so fast. One story to the next, and in the end, he'd never gotten around to telling the stories that had mattered the most to him when he started. The forgotten boys, the ones who didn't get to grow up and live their lives. He still remembered their names, although their faces were starting to get a big fuzzy. The ones who'd died that first winter after the strike, the ones who'd made it until the war, and died overseas, the ones who got caught up in the growing criminal culture, killed in mob fights, gunned down in the streets. There were very few of them left, fellow strikers, a small handful who had been somehow blessed with long lives. Blessed, or cursed, he wasn't sure.
Most days, actually, forced to look back on lost friends, lost family, a lost world, he was pretty sure his long years were just a curse. It was somehow fitting, for all of his personal failures, not able to save Les, or his family, not able to do anything for Sarah, or the other newsies, for those failures, he would be the last to go, forced to bear witness to passing of everyone else he had ever loved.