“My picture… He took my picture…”
I began to feel physically ill from the guilt that this caused in me. I knew the man already had Josh’s picture — from when we played as boys in The Ditch. I supposed Josh hadn’t thought about that day since it happened; maybe he still thought those mechanical sounds were from a robot. Aside from Josh’s mutterings, not a word was shared between us as we hustled through the woods back toward Josh’s house.
We made it back into his room before his parents woke up. I didn’t know how to use his washing machine, and even if I did, it would have made too much noise. After my attempt to scrub the dirt out of my shirt and pants with water from the sink proved unsuccessful, I borrowed some clothes from Josh and reluctantly snuck back outside to throw the incriminating clothes into the large, green city trashcan that was sitting by the curb.
The fact that there were so many trashcans lining the neighborhood road told me that garbage day was somewhere nearby on the calendar, and when I lifted the lid to Josh’s trashcan and saw it filled with garbage bags, I was relieved that the day hadn’t already come. I hesitated for a second — taking a last look at the lizard on my shirt — then shoved the clothes underneath one of the bags and crept back around the house and through Josh’s bedroom window.
We sat in silence for a while, and it started to become uncomfortable. Finally, to break the quiet in the room, I asked him about the big bag in my old house and if it really moved — he said he couldn’t be sure. He kept apologizing about dropping the walkie-talkie at the house, but obviously that wasn’t a big deal, all things considered. We didn’t go to sleep that night. Instead, we sat peering out the window, waiting for the man with the bag, but he never came. We agreed to never tell anyone about what happened — no good would come from that. After a couple of hours, the sun pushed the darkness out of the sky, and my mom came to get me a couple of hours after that.
She asked me about the clothes I had on, and I told her that Josh had liked the shirt I had been wearing and asked if he could borrow it. She said that was nice of me. As we were pulling out of Josh’s driveway, my eyes lingered on the trashcan at the edge of their yard, and I caught myself whispering, “I thought I closed the lid…” I considered that the garbage truck might have just put the trashcan down with the lid open, but it didn’t matter. The evidence was gone, and I breathed easy.
Until very recently, my mother didn’t know about what Josh and I had done that night. Of course, I spared many of the details when I told her, but I thought that if I told her something she didn’t know, maybe she would reciprocate. By the end of the story, my mother’s eyes had glossed over. I asked her why she lied about bothering the new owners to stop me from going when there weren’t any new owners at all — why had she tried so hard to stop me from going back to our old home? She became irate and hysterical, and told me to get out of her house, but I just sat there, waiting.
When she realized that I wouldn’t leave, she sat back down, and she answered my question. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it harder than I thought her capable of and locked her eyes to mine. She whispered through clenched teeth as if she was afraid of being overheard:
“Because I never put any fucking blankets or bowls under the house for Boxes. You think you were the only one to find them there? Don’t you tell me that I lied to you about there being someone in that house, goddamn you.”
I felt dizzy. With those few sentences, I understood so much. I understood why she had looked so uneasy after she brought Boxes out from under the house on our last day there; she found more than spiders or a rat’s nest that day. I understood why we left almost two weeks early. I understood why she tried to stop me from going back.
She knew. She knew he made his home under ours, and she kept it from me, and as I walked out of her house, I could only think of what else she might know. I left my mother that night without saying another word. I didn’t finish the story for her, but I want to finish it here, for you.
When I got home from Josh’s house that day, I threw my stuff on the floor, and it scattered everywhere; I didn’t care, I just wanted to sleep. I woke up around nine o’clock that night to the sound of Boxes’ meowing. My heart leapt. He had finally come home. I was a little sick about the fact that if I had just waited a day, none of the previous night’s events would have happened and I’d have Boxes anyway, but that didn’t matter; he was back. I got off my bed and called for him — looking around to catch a glint of light off his eyes. The crying continued, and I followed it. It was coming from under the bed. I laughed a little thinking I had just crawled under a house looking for him and how this was so much better. His meows were being muffled by a jacket, so I flung it aside and smiled, yelling, “Welcome home, Boxes!”
His cries were coming from my walkie-talkie.
Boxes never came home.
Maps
Most old cities and the neighborhoods in them weren’t planned in anticipation of a tremendous population growth. Generally speaking, the layout of the roads is originally in response to geographical restrictions and the necessity of connecting points of economic importance. Once the connecting roads are established, new businesses and roads are positioned strategically along the existing skeleton, and eventually the paths carved into the earth are immortalized in asphalt, leaving room only for minor modifications, additions, and alterations, but rarely a dramatic change.
If that is true, then my childhood neighborhood must have been old. If straight lines move “as the crow flies,” then my neighborhood must have been built based on the travels of a snake. The first houses would have been placed around the lake, I’m sure, and while older, these houses were the nicest in the neighborhood. Gradually, the inhabitable area increased as new extensions were built off the original path, but these new extensions all ended abruptly at one point or another. All the neighborhood streets converged into a single strip of pavement that connected with the road into town; this was the only legitimate way either in or out of the neighborhood. A tributary, which both fed and drank from the lake, limited many of these extensions as it bifurcated the woods before passing right by The Ditch.
Many of the original homes had enormous yards, but some of those original plots, and all of the later lots, had been divided, leaving properties with smaller and smaller boundaries. An aerial view of my neighborhood would give one the impression that an enormous squid had once died in the woods, only to be found by some adventuring entrepreneur who paved roads over its tentacles, withdrawing his involvement to leave time, greed, and desperation to divide up the land between the roads among prospective home-owners like an embarrassing attempt at the Golden Ratio.
Our house was on a small rectangle of land, but we had a front and back yard. This was a luxury that would be eliminated over time as there were some residents who shared patches of land that were as big as the one upon which my house was placed. Even still, developers were carting in and assembling new modular homes, and families were continuing to park their trailer-homes on smaller and smaller lots; the neighborhood had been undergoing this expansion for a long time.
From my porch, you could see the old houses that surrounded the lake, and while these were all beautiful, the house of Mrs. Maggie was my favorite. It was an off-white, colonial-style house, though it was more modest than what that style typically offers. There was only one story, though a trinity of false windows extending off the lowest part of the roof convinced me that there were at least two. Her porch wrapped around her house all the way to the back where it grew an appendage that moved down a slightly sloping hill and became a dock once it settled on the water.