It then occurred to Josephine that perhaps the boy had gone into her father’s bedroom upstairs. If her father found him there . . .
She had only a minute until Mr. Russing arrived.
She took the stairs two at a time, running so fast she developed a stitch in her side, panic rising into her chest as she tried to imagine what her father would do if he found the boy. She herself was forbidden to go inside Mr. Russing’s room and she was terrified that the boy had decided to hide there. She opened the door and peeked inside. The bedroom was the same stark, stale place it had always been.
At that moment, she heard Mr. Russing entering the front door downstairs. He cleared his throat, his version of “I’m home.” Luckily, he expected no response from her. She took a deep breath, darted into his bedroom, and checked the closet and under the bed. She looked out the window to the backyard, to see if perhaps the boy had returned there, but it was the same empty expanse of green it always was. Josephine felt a bit frantic. She turned around and gasped as she saw her father standing in the doorway.
The sight of him instantly reminded her that she was not wearing gloves. “I’m sorry, Father. I took them off just—” He turned and walked away before she could finish. She closed her mouth and followed him out of the room, his unspoken disapproval stinging her worse than thundering admonishments. She went to her bedroom and grabbed a pair of gloves from the drawer, brown and gray tweed.
Then she stiffly marched down to the kitchen and prepared the quickest dinner she could muster, a soup made from leftovers.
As she stirred the spontaneous stew, she considered the boy and what could have happened to him. She had left him alone only for a moment and their house was surrounded by dry, flat land that concealed nothing. How could he have gotten away so quickly? The only logical explanation was that the boy was hiding in the shed. It was such an obvious answer that she felt foolish for running so frantically around the house.
She threw open a cabinet, grabbed a bowl and spoon, and poured a thick serving of soup. She listened to make sure her father wasn’t approaching and then dashed out the back door. She crossed the lawn, the sloshing soup threatening to spill onto her gloves.
When she reached the shed, she carefully placed the bowl and spoon next to the door. She didn’t have time to check inside. She knocked on the door and then sprinted back to the kitchen, entering seconds before her father did. She immediately began pouring the remaining soup into bowls for their meal.
Dinner, as always, was a silent affair, but there was a new tension in the air. Josephine dared not look toward the shed, petrified that she would give away her secret. But she also avoided looking at her father directly, worried that if she looked him in the eyes, somehow he would be able to read her mind and would know all about the boy.
She gulped down her soup, mentally willing her father to finish as well. After what seemed like a lifetime, he finally put down his spoon and wiped his mouth with his napkin. Josephine felt her body begin to relax, but when Mr. Russing stood to leave the table, his foot caught on something. He raised an eyebrow, grunted “Hmmff?,” reached down, and pulled up a small leather suitcase from under the table.
Josephine sucked in her breath.
He began to examine the case more closely. Josephine, frozen in fear, waited to see if he would open it. She couldn’t imagine what it contained. Clothes? Schoolbooks? A wash towel? In her worst nightmare she saw her father opening the suitcase to find dozens of bats that would swarm the kitchen and poke out his eyes. She couldn’t explain where this dark vision came from—she just knew he mustn’t open the case.
She stood up from the table. “That’s mine, Father. I left it under the table by accident.”
He looked at her, suspicious.
“I’ll just go put it in my room, where it belongs.” She reached out and, with some force, pried the case from his grasp. She scampered from the kitchen and was halfway to the stairs when she heard an unfamiliar baritone. “Josephine . . .”
She froze. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard her father’s voice. She was torn between her urgency to get upstairs with the suitcase and the desire to stay and hear what her father wanted to say.
“Yes, Father?”
There followed a long, painful pause.
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
Nothing. As usual. The momentous occasion of him speaking to her had resulted in “nothing.” She sighed and trudged up the stairs to her bedroom, locking her door.
She sat on the floor and placed the suitcase in front of her. It was a plain brown case that had seen a lot of wear. There were no labels or tags to suggest to whom it belonged. She unlatched the rusty clasp and, with trepidation, opened the lid.
She blinked in surprise, for the suitcase was, after all this trouble, completely empty.
She was utterly confused. She had felt down to her marrow that something would be inside, something that would explain the small boy and their strange time together. And downstairs she had felt a deep sense of foreboding, as if her life had depended on her father’s not knowing the contents of this case. How could she have been so wrong?
The inside of the top of the case had a large pocket, where one usually expects to find loose change and old train tickets. She ran her hand along the inside of the pocket and was about to laugh at herself for such dramatic behavior when her finger touched the edge of something that felt like a playing card. She brought it out and saw that it was a worn photograph. She looked at it and suddenly felt dizzy, as if a hundred mosquitoes were trapped inside her head.
The picture was of her, standing in a summer dress in a strange garden. This was a photograph that to any outsider would not have been alarming, but it made Josephine feel as if a tiny nail had just been tapped into her heart. For in the photograph a large family surrounded her. She was flanked by brothers and sisters, the boys sporting the same lopsided grin as Josephine, the girls cursed with the same chaotic mess of hair.
In the photograph a proud father stood on the left, as far in spirit from Mr. Russing as an oak tree from a stinging nettle. And then next to the father stood a smiling woman holding a kicking baby. A mother. And Josephine knew as certainly as she had ever known anything in her life: This family belongs to me.
FOUR
The next day Josephine awoke and got ready for school like any other day. She brushed her teeth and washed her face, and she thought about brushing her hair. But when she looked at her huge straggly mane in the mirror, she decided there was no time. She changed into a plain white top, brown pants, and a pair of gloves so shiny that they almost seemed metallic. Josephine had no idea what they were made from, but they reminded her of the inside of an oyster.
Her father was dressed and out the door at 7:33, as he was every day, and as soon as he was out of sight, Josephine stopped getting ready for school. She had no intention of going today. Instead, she ran to the kitchen, grabbed the remains of a lemon cake, and wrapped it in wax paper. She then took off her walking shoes and got her rubber boots from the hall closet.
It was a cool morning and the leaves on the trees struggled against the wind. She stepped onto the back patio and stared at the shed. It looked harmless enough from here. The air was cool and electric, and she sensed a storm about to break. She had a brief moment of concern for her newly planted tomato seeds, but they could wait.
She trudged ungracefully to the shed and grasped the latch. For a moment it wouldn’t budge, and Josephine thought it had been locked from the inside. But as soon as the thought formed in her mind, the latch gave way and she found herself opening the door. The shed was darker than usual due to the overcast sky, and Josephine squinted in order to see all the way to the back. But she couldn’t. It was like . . . what? A word popped into her head, a word she’d recently learned in school: abyss. It was like an abyss.
“Hello?” she asked in a timid voice. She scolded herself for her meekness and tried again. “Are you in there? I’ve brought you cake.”
She stepped inside, and suddenly the door swung shut behind her. Blinded by the darkness, she put a hand out in front of her, afraid she might step on a rake. She willed herself forward, her breath heavy and loud in the stillness as she forced one foot in front of the other, trying not to think about spiders and snakes. Her outreached hand suddenly hit cold stone and she knew she’d reached the far end. There was no one in the shed.
Josephine felt a rush of sadness and, then, just as quickly, she felt a bit silly. How could she have believed that someone was living in her shed? Surely she was too old for such fantasies. She leaned against the stone, taking comfort in its coolness. Her eyes began to adjust to the dark and then something on the ground caught her eye—something shiny. She squatted and saw it was a spoon, and next to it sat the soup bowl that Josephine had left outside the night before. It was empty.
So the boy had been here! She smiled, knowing that her new friend was near.
Suddenly, the door to the shed flew open and a violent wind came barreling through the entire room. Josephine’s eyes and lungs were assaulted by dust and she began to cough, waiting for the wind to calm, but it refused. It just grew stronger and stronger until it seemed a small cyclone was inside the shed. Josephine covered her eyes and struggled toward the door, but the wind was so strong that she couldn’t progress forward.
A pot of soil smashed into the wall beside her, and a coiled rope unwound and came thrashing across Josephine’s thighs like a vicious snake. She yelled for help but knew it was futile. Her father was miles away.
Just when Josephine felt it couldn’t get any worse, a spade scraped its way across the middle shelf, turned its sharp edge toward her, and then flew at her head. She screamed and threw herself against the back wall, waiting for the spade to impale her. There was a flash of light, an explosive crack, and suddenly Josephine’s body tore through the back wall of the shed as if it were paper!
She plunged backward expecting to hit the ground, but her body kept falling. She saw nothing but blackness around her. She kicked her legs and waved her arms, but her hands had nothing to grab on to. She yelled, but there was no sound. Had the spade hit her? Was she dead? She felt icy cold, and she was terrified she was going to descend forever. Just then her body slammed onto something hard and solid. Her last thought before she passed out was I hope I didn’t drop the cake.
