She covered her tomato seeds with plenty of water, as Ms. Kirdle had instructed. As she packed the soil back into the hole, she began to converse out loud. Josephine had been talking to herself for years but often didn’t realize it. Most of the time, since she had no one else to talk to, she would tell her father about her day.
“Johnny Baskin’s been wearing the same socks to school for weeks and he’s starting to smell. Nelly Wipshill likes Brian Union but Brian likes Fiona Valley.”
She would imagine him nodding his head and laughing, as he had done that day when her mother had still been alive.
A twig snapped to Josephine’s right. She looked over, expecting to see a robin or a squirrel. But what she saw made her cry out. A small, barefoot boy with a suitcase in his hand was standing on the lawn, staring at her. He was an intense boy with hard brown eyes and small lips. Josephine caught her breath.
“You scared me to death!” she scolded him.
He continued to stare at her without answering.
“What are you doing here?” Josephine asked, squinting at him from behind her tangle of hair. There was something very strange about this boy.
He took a step toward her and put the suitcase down on the ground. He was a few years younger than Josephine. She couldn’t imagine why he would be wandering around alone all the way out here. “Are you lost?” She tried a smile.
He twisted his face and opened his mouth as if to respond, but no words emerged. Just air.
“I’m Josephine. What’s your name?” she demanded. But still nothing.
Josephine stood up, brushed herself off, and walked past the boy to the front of the house. He followed her like a loyal puppy. She looked up and down the dirt road, expecting to see his mother or father. But the road was empty. The next house was miles away. Was he some sort of runaway? She’d never seen him in school or anywhere else in town. She didn’t know what to do. She turned back toward the boy and for the first time noticed that he wasn’t wearing gloves. Definitely not local, she thought. He was scrawny and pale and looked as if he hadn’t had a good meal in a long while.
“Do you want some food?” she tried.
He smiled and nodded, so Josephine led him back to the house. They entered the kitchen and Josephine took off her mud boots. She pointed to a chair at the table. It was the one she usually used. Somehow she felt that if the boy sat in her father’s chair, her father would know about it immediately. Almost as if he had read her thoughts, the boy put down his suitcase and used it for a chair.
Josephine retrieved some leftover oatmeal from the refrigerator and began to reheat it on the stove. She added plenty of brown sugar and milk, the way she liked it herself, and set it down in front of the boy. He stared at it for a long moment and then stuck his nose deep into the bowl for a sniff. When he brought his head back up, he had oatmeal on his nose. Josephine giggled and the boy self-consciously wiped his nose on his sleeve and went back to staring at the oatmeal.
Finally, as if a switch had been thrown, he grabbed the spoon and began wolfing down his food, shoving it in so fast that Josephine was afraid he would choke. He finished the oatmeal in seconds and then used his fingers to gather the sugar that was left on the sides of the bowl. He licked them, ecstatic, as though he’d never tasted anything sweet before.
“You were hungry, huh?” Josephine asked.
He looked at her, more alert now, eyes shining. He nodded.
“How did you get here?”
The boy looked away from her, at the ceiling and then the floor.
Sensing his anxiety, she added, “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” She looked intently at him and he stared back, long and hard. It seemed to Josephine that he was trying to make up his mind about something. Then, in one motion, he got up from his suitcase and walked out the back door.
“Hey!” She rushed after him onto the patio. He was standing there, pointing, as tense as a rabbit near a wolf. She followed his finger, and when she saw what he was pointing at, she sucked in her breath.
“That’s where you come from?”
The boy nodded solemnly.
Josephine suddenly felt cold despite the sweltering sun. The boy was pointing at the shed.
THREE
After a moment of silence Josephine seemed to wake up. “You mean, that’s where you were hiding?” The boy shook his head. “You live there? In our shed?” He shook his head again: No. Josephine studied him, searching for signs of oddness. Perhaps he was slow or had been hit over the head with a shoe. His poor parents were probably out searching for him in the gloomy rain. She glanced up at the bright sun. In all the books she had ever read, if your child was missing, it was always during a gloomy rain. She looked back at the boy and he was staring at her again, his eyes big and questioning, as if he wanted something from her. There was something familiar about his piercing stare, but she couldn’t quite . . .
She had an idea. “Do you want me to read you a story?” Josephine always found it so comforting when Ms. Kirdle read aloud to the class; she thought maybe this boy would like it too.
He shrugged and Josephine decided he’d shown adequate enthusiasm. She led him back inside, her mind racing with the various titles she might choose. Should she read him some sort of adventure story with horses? (Josephine loved horses, although she’d never had the pleasure of riding one.) Or something less scary, like a love story? She really didn’t know what boys liked, since she’d never talked to one.
The boy clunked up the stairs behind her, and Josephine was keenly aware of how irritating her father would have found the brutish noise of his feet.
They entered her bedroom and she scanned the many bookshelves for her favorite books. The boy looked around the room with his mouth open. By his expression, Josephine wasn’t sure if he had ever seen a book before. She finally chose a short story about sailors and mermaids.
“You sit on the bed and I’ll sit over here,” she told him. She took her place in a rocking chair that had once belonged to her mother. The boy climbed happily onto Josephine’s feather bed, almost sinking out of view.
Josephine delicately opened the book and began to read in a voice similar to the one Ms. Kirdle used, calm and slightly mysterious. “Once upon a time, there was a sailor called Simian Swallow, and although he was a sailor, he was afraid of water. . . .”
The boy listened closely, his eyes shining. But by page ten, when Simian was fighting the Mermen of the Outer Depths, the boy’s eyelids were starting to droop. And by page fifteen, he was fast asleep. Josephine was so caught up in the story, she didn’t notice until he started gently snoring.
She quietly closed the book, marking their place, and watched the boy sleep. She wanted to help this boy, to keep feeding him and reading him stories, to teach him how to talk, even. If this boy didn’t have a family, then where would he go? Her house was plenty big. He could live with her and then they could play together, like she had seen other children do at school. They could play hide-and-go-seek and tag-you’re-it. They could walk to school together and share secrets. They would be brother and sister and best friends. Josephine’s heart trembled at the thought.
The problem, of course, was Josephine’s father. Mr. Russing wouldn’t want anything to do with a strange child, an urchin wearing no shoes or gloves who couldn’t speak. Josephine imagined her father swatting the boy away with a rolled-up newspaper. And why would he want another child around when he didn’t even want the one he had? Josephine’s mind swam with ideas. Maybe she could hide the boy temporarily, at least until she came up with a good way to approach her father.
Yes, I must hide him until I have a plan.
She knew her father would walk through the door that night at precisely ten after six, as he did every night. She left her room, went downstairs, and checked the clock in the kitchen. She had five minutes until her father arrived. She ran back up the stairs to tell the boy about her plan.
“I’ve had a wonderful idea—,” but before she could finish the sentence, she realized that the boy was gone. He was no longer in the bed where she had left him, and he didn’t appear to be anywhere else in the room. “Hello?” she called. “Where have you gone?”
She ran back down the stairs, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room. “Hello . . . little boy?” She felt foolish for not knowing his name.
She opened the front door, looked up and down the street, and saw dust rising where a figure was approaching. Her father!
