of his singularity is almost upsetting, almost too profound to be real.
He slides off the bed, aware of the irony of feeling like the absence of telepathic connection across a continent is the unrealistic part of this evening. His parents are moving downstairs; he can hear their footsteps, hear the occasional spike of raised voices. They’re not quite arguing, but their conversation has definitely taken on a strained tone. He can’t make out words with his door closed. Under the circumstances, he’s not sure he wants to.
Carefully, he crosses to the closet. This time, when his questing fingers find the loose board, he pulls it up, revealing the treasures beneath. A few books that had been too grown-up for him, once upon a time; a dictionary of profanity purchased at the used bookstore down by Harvard Square, hiding it inside his coat and rushing home with it, red-faced and glancing around constantly, sure someone knew he was smuggling something he shouldn’t have into the house. Other boys his age hoarded dirty pictures and copies of Penthouse. He hid books about the origins of words he wasn’t supposed to know.
There is a layer of the more common detritus of boyhood. A bird’s nest, almost disintegrated with time. A rock-hard bar of Hershey’s chocolate. A few interesting rocks. Some shells, a bone—he doesn’t know what from—a slingshot, a handful of comic books. Ordinary things, from an ordinary childhood. A few of them seem old-fashioned now, but so what? He loved them once, enough to hide them here, where he wouldn’t need to worry about them being accidentally swept up and thrown away by an adult who didn’t understand their significance.
Under the spindrift remains of his childhood is a folder, yellowed with age, curling at the edges. Carefully, Roger works it loose and opens it. Inside are a few papers his younger self was particularly proud of—an essay about seeing the Red Sox win a game, a spelling worksheet where he had corrected the teacher—and a small pile of crayon drawings. The first, labeled ROGER M., AGE 4 in his already meticulous handwriting, shows a boy he assumes is meant to be him standing in a field, holding hands with a girl. They’re both smiling.
In the next picture, the girl is gone. It’s just the boy, standing in the same field, a frown on his face. Around him, over and over, Roger has written a single sentence:
How many times?
How many times?
How many times?
The words fill the sky and cover the field, covering everything but the sad little boy. Roger looks at the two pictures, trying to reconcile them with what he remembers of his childhood. He doesn’t remember drawing them. That’s not unusual—how many people remember the things they drew when they were four?—but they must have been important to him, for him to have hidden them away. For him to have transferred them into this cache. More, he must have known about Dodger, on some level, to have been drawing her. There’s no doubt it’s her in that first picture. Her features are crude as only a crayon figure in a child’s art can be, but the smile goes up higher on the left than on the right and her hair is the dingy reddish brown that red crayon always looked like to him, and he knows. And he knows that, based on the date, he drew this picture three years before the day Dodger had a headache and said hello to the boy on the other side of her mind. He knew.
“Roger?” His mother’s voice is sweet, almost saccharine as she shouts up the stairs. “Can you come down here, sweetheart? Your father and I have something to show you.”
“In a minute, Ma!” he shouts back, and starts to put the pictures back in the hole in the floor, alongside his other treasures.
His phone rings.
He’s almost forgotten it: it’s an artifact of the present, not the past that drapes around this house like a shroud. He pulls it from his pocket and blinks. Dodger’s number is on the screen. He doesn’t know why she’d call him when she could as easily close her eyes and ask for his attention; maybe she’s assuming he’s with his parents by now, and wouldn’t be able to answer her. No matter. He presses Answer, raises the phone to his ear.
“You need to call Dodger right now,” says Erin. There’s no greeting, no pause to find out who she’s talking to: she knows who’s on the