Charleroi is presented as both a nearby town and a place where the English family’s private losses meet the Mon Valley’s larger landscape of rivers, cemeteries, and abandoned industry. Seen from the riverbank or from the hill outside its hospital, the town anchors memories of Isaac English’s mother and Lee’s worry about Isaac’s disappearance.

Setting Along the River

On Isaac’s night walk, Charleroi appears across the dark river, its lights spreading over the hillside. He recognizes the cranes near Lock Four as the place where his mother was found in the lock channel, after she had been missing for two weeks. The location turns the river from a feature of the landscape into a point of painful knowledge: Isaac recalls that the autopsy found water in her lungs and imagines her gathering the stones that weighed down her coat. His thoughts connect the town’s visible lights with the unresolved circumstances of her death and his own effort to make sense of it.

The town also lies within the river corridor Lee and Henry travel north through from Buell. Henry drives their Ford Tempo, which he has outfitted with hand controls, along the narrow road. From the car, Lee sees the opposite bank rise steeply from the water, thick with trees and vines, with exposed red-brown rock and a small white rowboat resting in the shade. River and hillside make Charleroi part of a broader setting in which natural growth remains conspicuous even where industrial structures persist.

Industry and Ruin in the Valley

The drive north brings Lee past the old coal chute stretching along a hillside on steel supports. Its rusted floor is open to the sky. An iron suspension bridge crossing the river is sealed at both ends, its structure pocked with rust; farther on, an immense powder-blue, steel-sided factory stands behind a chained gate, its smokestacks streaked red-brown. Lee thinks of rust as the feature that defines the place, while recognizing that the observation is hardly unique. The sequence gives the area a material history of industrial abandonment without making Charleroi itself synonymous with a single ruin: the town belongs to a valley where trees, river, and derelict works occupy the same view.

Hospital, Cemetery, and Lee’s Guilt

Outside the Charleroi hospital, Lee waits in the sun on a hill overlooking the town and the immense cemetery across the river. The burial ground stretches across an entire hillside and seems larger than the town below. The view prompts a surge of guilt as she thinks about Isaac, who has been gone for nearly two days. She reasons that he may have stayed in Buell by choice: he had visited her in New Haven, where her former boyfriend Todd Hughes offered to help with his college application, but Isaac did not accept her later invitations to visit again. Lee considers whether those visits placed pressure on him and reconsiders her own assumptions about choosing a college and leaving home. Charleroi’s elevated view thus frames her effort to understand her brother’s decisions without knowing where he is or whether he will return.

Narrative Significance

Charleroi recurs at the meeting point of family memory and regional change. At Lock Four, Isaac’s thoughts turn the river landscape into an intimate record of loss; on the road, Lee sees the beauty of the valley alongside the rusting infrastructure that marks its industrial decline. At the hospital, the town and the cemetery give physical scale to her fear and remorse over Isaac’s absence. These settings do not resolve either sibling’s uncertainty: they make visible the landscape through which each tries to live with it.