Down the street, brightly colored mailboxes peeked out from ranks of lilac and honeysuckle.
I felt rooted to my seat, unable to move. The back door creaked open and I watched James step onto the sidewalk, dazed. He took a few tentative steps before turning to me and waiting. I pushed my door open and tumbled out of the car and onto the sun-warmed road.
We descended the hill without a word, each of us holding our breath. Most of the houses we passed had signs of wartime neglect — curtainless windows, overgrown yards, peeling paint.
And then the hill flattened and we were there. I stared down at the base of our front gate, the white paint dry and chipped, exposing the graying wood beneath. Crabgrass and dandelions grew in untidy clumps. The gate squeaked as James opened it and stepped through to the other side.
“Look,” James said.
The grass at his feet was brilliantly green and the rosebushes that ran the length of the fence were voluminous and dotted with red and pink and white flowers. He climbed the front steps and stood framed in the front door.
I tried to call out to James as he reached out for the doorknob, but my voice was strangled in my throat. The door was locked, so he reached down into the bushes by the porch and, after searching a few moments, retrieved a small stone. He slid open its compartment and exposed a single brass key. Laughing to himself, he fit the key into the lock.
I thought of an ancient ship locked inside a glass bottle. What would happen if you broke the seal? Would all those accumulated years rush in at once, turning it to dust?
I called out to James as he turned the doorknob, but it was too late. The door swung open. He looked back at me and then stepped inside. I closed my eyes as his footsteps clicked across the wood floor.
“Cal, come on!”
The stones of the front walk passed slowly beneath my feet, giving way to brick stairs and then slats of blond wood stretching out before me, gleaming in the sun. I ran into the house, following the sound of James’s voice as he called for Mom and Dad. I moved from room to room, a giddy energy bubbling through me as I saw how little had changed.
The living room was a dim cave with thick brown-and-gold carpet. A TV sat at one end and at the other was the lumpy brown couch where Mom and Grandma Betty would drink wine while Dad played guitar. The kitchen glowed in shades of pink and yellow, with dishes sitting unwashed in the sink and stacks of mail teetering by the coffee machine.
“Mom! Dad!”
I threw myself at the door to our bedroom and there was our red shelf full of books and our stacks of games. Loose Legos were scattered across the floor between our beds in piles of red and yellow and green, like raw jewels. I bent over laughing, out of breath, wanting to throw them all into the air. I felt James in the doorway behind me.
“Can you believe it?” I said as I turned. “Mom and Dad are probably just out. They’ll be here any—”
James was holding a yellowing piece of paper. On the front it said JAMES AND CALLUM.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”
I paused, thinking of that crumbling ship, but then James pressed it into my hands. I unfolded a single sheet of paper covered in our mother’s neat hand.
Boys,
It’s been five years now and we haven’t heard a word about either of you. I can only pray that you found some way to stay safe until all of this is over.
The war seems to be going badly now and the last few years have been very hard on your grandmother. The rationing has made getting her medicine increasingly difficult, so your father and I finally decided that we had no choice but to try to get into Canada before they close the border for good. We’re leaving first thing tomorrow morning.
We never thought we’d have to leave the house you both grew up in. It’s sad how so many things that would have seemed unthinkable only a few years ago are now so commonplace. Maybe in times like these, all we can do is survive and hope for the day when we’ll be able to live.
We plan to head northeast toward Wellesley Island, where they say there are still people who can get us across. Where we’ll go after, if we even succeed, we have no way of knowing. The refugee camps near Ottawa are full and we hear that they’re pushing people farther and farther west. We’ll do all we can to leave word for you wherever we go.
We love you both and pray for the day when we’ll all be together again.
The letter slipped from my hands and fell to the floor.
“Cal…”
I found myself running back through the house and toward the front door. This time I saw the layers of dust and the empty shelves I had missed before and smelled the musty air of a place abandoned.
“Cal! Wait!”
I collapsed onto the front porch, my head in my hands, breathing in the cloying smell of the roses that had grown unchecked all around the house. The floorboards creaked behind me.
“It’s been six years,” James said.
I nodded but couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. James hovered a while and then he drifted inside. I looked up at the empty houses tucked in among the oaks and the grass-lined streets.
I remembered how the school bus would let James and me off at the top of the hill and we would race each other down the sidewalk, kicking at the russet piles of fallen leaves, before bursting inside and yelling for Mom. I remembered lying in the front yard in the summertime, the warm air around me full with the hum of Dad’s lawn mower and the smell of cut grass. I remembered our neighbors and our friends and how I ran thoughtlessly through the streets to the shores of the lake.
I tried to remember the bad things too, the unhappy things, hoping they would drive away the ache of the loss, but it was no use. As hard as I tried, all I could remember were the times I had been so happy.
It was after nightfall when I made my way through the dark house and slid open the door to the back porch. James had built a small fire in the middle of the garden and he sat reading by its orange light.
The grass in the garden was overgrown and the flowers had gone wild and weed-strangled. Our hammocks still hung between the twin oaks though they were threadbare, the white ropes frayed and gray with mildew. James sat on the crumbling stone border that surrounded the small pond.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked, setting his book down beside him.
“Walking,” I said. I drifted across the yard and sat down a few feet from James, staring into the flames at his feet. “Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. The Guttermans. The Bells.”
James pushed a tin plate my way. “Warmed up some of the rations we brought with us.”
It was spaghetti with red sauce and bits of sawdusty meat. I pushed at it with the plastic fork James gave me. “Guess we can go out tomorrow and spend some of Captain Assad’s money on real food.”
James said nothing. He cracked a branch in two and tossed half into the flames. It flared and crackled. Sitting on the cracked stone next to him was his copy of
“You’re going back, aren’t you?”
James poked at the campfire with a stick, arranging the coals. The fire surged and brightened.
“I was studying to be a beacon,” he said quietly. “I never said anything because I knew you wouldn’t like it. Beacon Quan told me he knew a place in Oklahoma that he thought would be good for my apprenticeship. It’s this town called Foley. It grows wheat and corn. Just a few hundred people living on farms with a small
