The box of maps was either under the bed or in the closet. He got on his knees on the rug but found only a few boxes of old Christmas decorations under the bed. Closet then. He went to the closet and opened the door. On the shelf above all the winter coats, he found several plastic storage bins.
He took them out and piled them up by the bed. He sat down on the edge and pulled off the first lid.
Sketchbooks. All his old sketchbooks. He knew he needed to be looking for the maps, but he couldn’t help himself. He took the books out and checked the inside covers for the dates penciled there. In his sloppy teenage penmanship, he found October 7, 2006, scrawled inside the cover of one book. That was the month he and Jeremy had started spending all their free time together. He rarely looked through his old sketches. He didn’t mind the art, but he avoided the history. Especially from that year with Jeremy before they were lost. He opened the sketchbook to the middle and found a sketch of Martha, Jeremy’s poodle. Another one of Jeremy’s old house decorated for Christmas. A sketch of a breakfast Jeremy had dubbed Still Life with a Tudor’s Egg & Cheese Biscuit.
After that, several pages of nothing but sketches of Jeremy sitting at the piano.
So many good memories from that year they’d been inseparable. If only it could be this easy to get his missing memories back. Open a book, turn the pages, and there they are…
He heard footsteps and looked up. Jeremy stood in the bedroom doorway. Rafe immediately shut the book.
“Dinner ready?” he asked.
Jeremy said, “Not yet. But I want to give Emilie an archery lesson after dinner. Any chance there’s a kids’ bow in the house? She can’t use mine. It’ll kill her.”
“You still hunt?” Rafe asked. True, that year they’d been friends Jeremy had gotten pretty good with a bow. His father, for all his faults, had been a great teacher. But he never expected Jeremy to keep it up.
“You don’t want to know the answer to that.”
“I asked.”
“No, I don’t hunt anymore, but if I’m looking for a body, I’ll take my bow with me in case coyotes or vultures are—”
Rafe didn’t need to hear another word. “Yeah, I get it. Shit. How are you sane after all that?”
“Who said I was?”
“True.” Rafe caught himself staring at Jeremy. “I guess you can’t tell me how you do it, right?”
“Right. Wish I could. Come with us tomorrow, and I will.”
“I’ll talk to Mom after dinner,” he promised. “I think her bow’s in the shed. It’s only twenty-five pounds.”
Jeremy nodded but didn’t leave. After an awkward silence, Rafe said, “I haven’t found the maps yet.”
“They’ll turn up.” Jeremy peeled himself off the doorway and came inside, sat down on the floor among the boxes.
“What’s all this?”
“My entire childhood in pencil sketches.”
Jeremy dug out a sketchbook that looked different from the others—thicker, beat-up pages sticking out from the binding at odd angles.
“This is the one your dad ripped apart,” Jeremy said. He opened the book to a sketch of himself, aged fourteen, sitting on the front porch of his mother’s old house on Park.
“Yeah,” Rafe said.
Jeremy flipped through the pages.
“Who taped it back up? You?”
“Had to have been, but I don’t remember doing it.”
“What’s the last thing you do remember?” Jeremy asked.
“I don’t remember the day we got lost,” Rafe said. “I remember most of the day before, but…not all of it. I remember asking to stay the night at your house. Then all hell breaking loose.”
Asking to stay the night at Jeremy’s had been a mistake. His parents had a strict no-school-nights rule, but Rafe had argued the next day wasn’t real school, just an end-of-year field trip to Red Crow State Forest. His mom had said yes. His father had said no. When Dad said no, it was no.
So, Rafe had been sullen and silent during dinner, picking at his mother’s meatloaf. His dad returned this silence with surliness.
“What do you do at his house that’s so much better than what you can do at ours?”
Rafe knew better than to answer that.
When he’d eaten as much as he could stomach, he’d taken his sketchbook out of his backpack to work on a drawing he’d started that weekend.
“Son, stop doodling and help your mother with dishes.”
Doodling? Rafe did not doodle. He drew. But did his father ever once call it drawing or sketching or art? No. Always doodling.
“I’m busy,” Rafe said. “Why don’t you help her for once?”
Fifteen years later, he could still hear that chair hitting the floor and still see his mother’s face, more shocked than he was when his father leaned across the table and smacked him so hard his eyes watered.
His mother gasped. He could hear the gasp right now, ringing in his ears. Chair scrape. Chair hitting the floor. Slap. Gasp.
But that wasn’t all. His dad grabbed his sketchbook and flipped through it. He didn’t like what he saw. Burning with shame, Rafe watched his father tearing the pages out of his sketchbook. He couldn’t do anything but sit miserably at the kitchen table and beg his dad, Stop, please, please stop it, I’m sorry. I’ll do the dishes. Please…
