“You’ll paint them over my dead body,” Jeremy said.
Rafe hated that he liked that, hated it enough that he pretended he hadn’t heard Jeremy say it.
“You made this too?”
Jeremy stopped at the fireplace mantel to examine a carved wooden crow.
“Yeah.”
“When did you start sculpting?”
“It’s just whittling.”
“This is not whittling. This is a sculpture. Did you teach yourself or what?”
If Jeremy was awed by one little crow carving, he would lose his mind over the sculpture garden in the back of the cabin.
“I started a few years ago,” he said, “when painting didn’t, I don’t know…it wasn’t enough anymore.”
“No, I get it,” he said.
A framed photograph sat on the mantel next to the crow, Rafe’s parents on their honeymoon in 1989, back when his dad had a motorcycle, long hair, and a beard, and his mother wore sundresses and cowboy hats.
“Your dad looked good with a beard. You don’t,” Jeremy said.
“You sound like Mom. She won’t even let me in the house until I shave.”
“Your mother was always the brains in the family. How is she?”
“She’s good.”
“I sent her flowers after the funeral.”
“I know. She appreciated that.”
Without being invited, Jeremy sat on the sofa beside Rafe’s bow and quiver.
“You’re still shooting with your dad’s bow?”
“It does the job,” Rafe said. He stayed standing, not wanting Jeremy to get too comfortable.
Jeremy drew an arrow from the quiver. He looked at the broadhead tip and then at Rafe. “What were you hunting out there? Dragons?”
“Poachers.”
“You didn’t kill them, did you?”
“They were baiting a mother bear and her cubs trying to fatten up for winter. I just scared them off.”
Jeremy eased the arrow back into the quiver. “Then I admire your restraint.”
He reached for the chain on the old lamp with the taped-up cord but instead picked up a red trolley toy. He smiled.
“You still have this?” Jeremy spun the trolley’s wheels.
“Of course.”
“Mum kept mine too.”
During the six months of their disappearance, the police had asked their mothers to make public pleas. Go on TV, they said, and talk about the boys. In case they’d been kidnapped, that was the point of the exercise. Rafe’s mother had held up picture after picture, including a Polaroid of him watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, mesmerized, wearing only a diaper.
When they were finally found, Joanne Rogers, Mr. Rogers’s widow, sent the signed trolley toys to the hospital with a note welcoming the boys back home. People worldwide sent them gifts: clothes, videogames, teddy bears, money for college. The red trolley to the Land of Make-Believe was the one gift Rafe kept.
“I guess you heard Mum died. Stroke—”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Rafe said. “Dr. Cox was always nice to me.”
“You never used to call her Dr. Cox. She was always Mum to both of us.”
“That was a long time ago,” Rafe reminded him.
Jeremy spun the wheels again, set the trolley back down, and met Rafe’s eyes.
“I thought you were going to art school. Didn’t you apply a few years ago?”
Rafe didn’t ask how Jeremy knew that. Every year on November 18, the anniversary of the day they’d been found, their mothers called each other. Rafe’s mother would’ve told Dr. Cox, and Dr. Cox would’ve told Jeremy. During those first few anniversary calls, Rafe had asked to speak to Jeremy, but he would never come to the phone. After the third anniversary, Rafe had stopped asking.
“I was thinking about it, but then Dad died.”
