I waited again, but it was still silent. I was starting to think that she might be playing a trick on me when the sound of static suddenly burst through the speaker on the walkie. The acoustic fuzz soon gave way to a voice.
Hey! You there?!
Josh?!
Yeah, man! This is so cool!
I looked up at my mom, and she was looking down at me with a warm smile on her face. Josh was still chattering away on the walkie-talkie — his sentences awkwardly punctuated in the middle by sharp pulses of static. My mom said, “Merry Christmas,” and bent down to hug me.
Our parents had pooled their money to get us these walkie-talkies. They were very nice — too nice for boys in the second grade — and were advertised to work across a range that extended past the distance between our houses; they also had batteries that could last for days if the walkie-talkie was on but not used. The walkies would only occasionally work well enough that we could talk across the city, but when we stayed over at each other’s houses, we’d use them around the house, talking in mock radio-speak that we had taken from movies, and they worked great for that.
Every now and then when I stayed at Josh’s house, we would manage to sneak away and continue our explorations in the woods, but these adventures were never sanctioned — my mom had told Josh’s parents that she didn’t want me going off into the woods. She said she worried that I might get hurt, and she just wasn’t comfortable with taking that chance when she was miles away, despite the fact that Josh’s mother was a nurse.
This restriction was usually fine since there were a good number of things to do at Josh’s house, and I liked being there. His parents were both nice, but were very rarely at the house at the same time since they kept different schedules. Josh’s mom was a nurse at the same hospital that put my arm in a cast when I fell from the tree, and his dad was a construction worker. He was a big man, but he also seemed genuinely kind.
He had caught us playing in the woods once when I was staying the weekend with Josh. When I begged Josh’s father not to tell my mom, he talked to me like an adult, even though I was only eight years old. He explained why he had to tell her and why I shouldn’t ask him to lie. Of course, I still didn’t want him to tell my mother, but the fact that he was willing to actually talk to me about it made it easier to accept.
My mom had screamed furiously at me and threatened to ban me from going to Josh’s house ever again. I couldn’t fully understand this severe reaction, but I didn’t want to lose Josh as a friend, so when I visited him, we played video games and played in his room, and Josh and I continued to be ferried to each other’s house almost every weekend. I never really thought about it, but the fact that our friendship didn’t atrophy when I moved away was mostly thanks to the efforts that our parents made.
Thanks to them, we were still friends when we were ten years old…
One weekend in fifth grade, I was staying at Josh’s and my mom called me to say goodnight; she was still pretty watchful even when she couldn’t actually watch me, but I had gotten so used to it that I didn’t even notice it, even if Josh did. She sounded upset, so I asked her if I had done something.
She told me that Boxes was missing.
This must have been a Saturday night because I was going home the next day since there was school on Monday. Boxes had been missing since Friday afternoon — I gathered that my mother had not seen him since returning home after dropping me off at Josh’s the day before. She must have decided to tell me he was missing because if he didn’t come home before I did, then I would be devastated; not only by his absence, but by the fact that she had kept it from me. She told me not to worry. “He’ll come back. He always does!”
But Boxes didn’t come back.
Three weekends later, I stayed at Josh’s again. I had spent every day after school walking around the neighborhood calling for Boxes, and listening, hoping to hear him. I could think of almost nothing but finding my cat and was noticeably downtrodden by his absence; he was my oldest friend. My mom told me that there had been many times when pets had disappeared from home for weeks or even months, only to return on their own; she said they always knew where home was and would always try to get back. I was explaining this to Josh when a thought struck me so hard that I interrupted my own sentence to say it aloud.
“What if Boxes thought of the wrong home?”
Josh was confused. “What? He lives with you. He knows where his home is.”
“Yeah, but he grew up somewhere else, Josh. He was raised in my old house. Maybe he still thinks of that place as home… like I do.”
“Ohhh I get it. Well that’d be great! We’ll tell my dad tomorrow, and he’ll take us over there so we can look!”
“No, he won’t. My mom said that we couldn’t ever go back to that place because the new owners wouldn’t wanna be bothered. She said that she told your mom and dad the same thing.”
Josh persisted. “Okay. Then we’ll just go out exploring tomorrow and make our way to your old house—”
“No! C’mon, Josh! Remember the last time we got caught playing in the woods? Even if your dad doesn’t catch us, if we get spotted, your dad will find out and then so will my mom! I wouldn’t be allowed to come spend the night anymore… my old house is just a couple neighborhoods away.”
We sat there silent in his room for a moment before I said what I think Josh already knew I was going to say.
“We have to go there ourselves… We have to go there tonight…”
It didn’t take that much convincing to get Josh on board since he was usually the one to come up with ideas like this, but we had never snuck out of his house before. While we waited until everyone was asleep, we discussed our strategy for getting there, while also debating how we would explain Boxes’ sudden appearance to our parents if we should happen to find him.
About an hour after Josh’s parents came in to tell us to go to bed, we crept out of Josh’s room to go find a flashlight. Josh knew that his dad had several, but he had no idea where he kept them; the garage seemed like the most obvious place. We moved silently through the house and eased the interior door to the garage open. It gave a faint squeak, and we paused before pulling it open and passing through the doorway.
I went to turn the light on, and Josh hissed at me. There was no real way that the light in the garage would have woken anyone in the house up, but when you’re attempting to be discreet, it’s hard to know where to draw the line. Suddenly, all actions become covert by default — like when two friends begin whispering, and after a while they find that their voices are still hushed, but they can’t remember why.
It was appropriate enough to comb through the garage in darkness, though; using light to find itself seemed like cheating anyway. Josh’s dad had hundreds of tools, and we both squinted, trying to see through the darkness to determine if one of them might be what we needed; if we had needed a wrench instead of a light, we would have been in business.
“Hey…” Josh broke the silence.
“What?”
“Hey man…”
“What?!” I whispered as loudly as I could.
“I can’t see anything in here.”
“I know. Me neither.”
“Do you have a flashlight I could borrow?”
There was a slight pause before he followed his joke with “Get it?” at which point my hands shot up to my mouth as I attempted to hold back the laughter that was building inside me. I had been in many situations before where I wanted to laugh but couldn’t; I was a veteran of those battles, but in almost all occasions I could permit myself a faint chuckle, or I at least would have the forbidding stare of my mother to anchor me. Here, my throat clicked and my body shook as I struggled to subdue myself.