“We have to cross here,” I said.
As quickly as we could, we moved through the water and onto the opposite shore. The earth sloped into the water here, so we were able to simply walk out of it and back onto familiar ground. We took off our swimsuits and were desperate to get into dry clothes that would shield us from the biting chill of the air. I slid on my shorts, but there was something wrong. I turned to Josh.
“Where’s my shirt?
He shrugged and gestured toward the water, “Maybe it got knocked into the water and floated into the lake?” As he motioned, I saw one of the pieces of our Styrofoam raft floating in our direction — back toward the lake.
I told Josh to go back to my house and to say that we were playing hide and seek if my mom was home. I had to try to find my shirt.
I ran behind the houses and peered out over the water while scouting along the shoreline. It occurred to me that with any luck I might find the map too — if the raft had floated this way, then maybe the map had. I was moving fast because I needed to get home, and I was about to give up when my concentration was interrupted by a sound coming from just behind me.
“Hello.”
I whipped around. It was Mrs. Maggie. In the porch light, she looked incredibly frail, and the usual warmth that wrapped her manner seemed to have been snuffed out by the chill. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her without a smile, and so her face looked strange to me.
“Hi, Mrs. Maggie.”
“Oh! Hi, Chris!” The warmth and smile had returned to her, even if her memories had not. “I couldn’t see it was you in the dark there. What’re you doing out so late?”
“J-j-just playing with a friend…” Now that my rapid movements had stopped, the cold had started to creep into me again, and I could feel my teeth chatter against themselves. I was beginning to feel weak; each breeze seemed to drive the icy water on my skin through it and down to my bones.
“M-Mrs. Maggie…” I thought for a moment and collected myself. “Mrs. Maggie, c-c-an I come inside? I just need a t-towel.” My head began to swim.
“Not right now, Chris. Your… bother, how do I put this?” She seemed to search for the words, as I half-heartedly searched for my missing shirt and any scrap of paper that might be the map. She spoke out again at the same time I did, and her voice fell dully on my ear.
“Mrs. Maggie, have you seen—”
“—om’s home!”
I felt the world drop out from under me. “Mom’s home!”? Had she just said that? She was still talking, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. I abandoned my search immediately and ran around the side of her house. I could hear Mrs. Maggie running through her house parallel to me. My legs felt weak, but I pushed them hard against her concrete driveway. My stomach twisted when I saw my mom’s car in our driveway, but then I remembered that she hadn’t taken her car. I thundered down toward the street and could hear Mrs. Maggie walking briskly across her frozen yard behind me — the ice-covered grass snapping and crunching beneath her feet — but I didn’t look back.
Instinctively, I ran around the house and went to the backdoor. I eased it open. I couldn’t hear anything — no yelling, no talking, not a single sound. I slid into the bathroom that connected to my bedroom and cracked the door open. I heard Josh yell, and I flung the door open the rest of the way.
“You scared the crap outta me!” he protested.
“Is my mom home?”
“No.”
The tightness in my stomach relaxed, and I could feel my whole body slump a little in relief. Had I heard Mrs. Maggie right? I supposed that it wasn’t very surprising that she could be wrong about mom being home when she had trouble remembering what my name was. Josh had already changed his clothes and was looking much more comfortable than I felt. I went into my closet, stripped the wet clothes off, and put some dry ones on. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that my mom came home. We’d actually gotten away with it, even though we’d lost the map.
“Couldn’t find it?”
“No, I looked hard, but I didn’t see it. I saw Mrs. Maggie, though. She called me Chris again. She’s pretty scary at night.”
“Don’t you ever make fun of her like that. Understand?!” Josh whispered in a mocking tone so that my mom wouldn’t overhear.
We both laughed, and he asked me if she had invited me in for a snack, joking that the snacks must be terrible since she couldn’t even give them away. I told him that she hadn’t — that I had actually tried to invite myself in and been rejected — and he was surprised. As I thought about it, it really was surprising. Nearly every time we had seen her, she had invited us in for snacks, and here I had invited myself, and she said no. But she had evidently thought that my mom was home, so maybe it wasn’t so strange that she didn’t want me to come in.
The subject turned to what had happened in the woods. We discussed it at the lowest possible volume; we were no longer sure about what we had heard. When Josh mentioned the Roman candle, it occurred to me that the lighter I had taken on the raft might still be in my pocket; even if we had gotten away with our secret mission, if my mom found a lighter in my pocket, the penalty would be severe.
The fact that I had thrown my watch into the water and would have to explain why I no longer had it was slowly presenting itself to my attention, but I subdued its nagging while I grabbed the shorts off the floor and patted my pockets. I felt something, but it wasn’t the lighter. I squeezed it and felt it crinkle in my hand. From my back pocket, I removed a folded piece of paper, and my heart leapt. The map? I thought desperately. But I watched it float away. As I unfolded the paper, my palms began to sweat as I tried to understand what I was seeing.
Drawn on the paper inside of a large oval were two faceless stick figures holding hands — one much bigger than the other. The paper was torn so a part of it was missing, and there was a number written near the top right corner: either “15” or “16.” I nervously handed Josh the paper and asked him if he had put it in my pocket at some point, but he scoffed at the idea. I put the question to him again, hoping he would change his answer — that he had just forgotten that he’d done it. He denied it again and asked why I was so upset. I pointed toward the smaller stick figure and what was written next to it.
It was my initials.
Josh kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening anymore — my eyes were stuck on the piece of paper. I had to continuously and actively refocus my vision, which would blur as my mind meandered trying to make sense of it. I put the drawing in my collection drawer, and Josh went home the next day.
I had always attributed the odd exchange with Mrs. Maggie to her being sick — the product of a mind too young to understand and a mind too old to remember. She was such a lonely woman, and although I was too young to appreciate that fully, there must have been some part of me that did, because I never went out of my way to correct her when she called me by the wrong name.
That night was the last time I saw Mrs. Maggie. It was the last time her yard would be transformed into an arctic kingdom by her poorly timed sprinklers. But, as a kid, you just accept that people come and people go. That’s just the way the world is — they have their own lives, and as they live them, sometimes that takes them out of yours. Only later do you look back and ask yourself: what happened? Where did they go?