Near day’s end Ms. Avery came, saying there was somebody outside who was too shy to come in. I put on my coat and went out. At first I didn’t see anything but falling snow, but then I saw Hargrove, hunkered down next to Mr. C’mere under the sculpture Henry had made for me.
I walked out toward them. “Hey, Hargrove,” I said.
“Hey.” He stood up, hands in his pockets.
“That was a good thing you did for Sister,” I told him.
He nodded but stared at his feet. “How is she?”
“Fine. Ms. Booker’s looking after her. Is your daddy mad?”
He looked off toward the end of drive. “Mad doesn’t describe it.” He went quiet for a few seconds, then mumbled, “He’s sending me away.”
“What!”
“To school.”
“Oh.”
He pulled a small brown sack out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. He turned away as I took off the paper. My red journal. “Sorry I took it,” he said. “Sorry about the cabin, too. Wasn’t me who tore it up, but I don’t guess that matters.”
“It matters,” I told him, and then we just stood there together watching it snow.
I remembered what Harlan had said to me about Mama, the good her dying had done me. Maybe being sent off to school would be the best thing that could happen to Hargrove. Maybe getting away from his daddy would give the art- and animal-loving boy inside him a chance of coming to light. Like me getting away from Mama. But I didn’t know Hargrove well enough to say that out loud.
“You’re a good drawer,” I said instead. “You ought to keep doing it.”
For the first time he looked at me.
“You want to come inside?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Okay if I stay out here and look around?”
“Sure it is.”
“See ya,” he said, waving a little, wandering off toward the sculptures in the side yard.
“Don’t be a stranger,” I said back.
He and Ms. Avery left a little while after that, and soon the others left too, and it was just Henry and me, Fred, Maud, Franklin and Helen. We sat by the fire wondering about Wil. I brought down his little carvings from my room, and we passed them carefully from hand to hand as if they were holy objects. Everyone marveled at Wil’s exquisite work, Henry most of all. He said how grand it was to have another artist in the family and wondered if Wil had any notion how really good they were, far better than anything he’d done at Wil’s age. Maud got quiet then, saying Wil made her think about my daddy, Owen, and whether she’d done right by him, giving him up.
I listened some while they talked, but I felt far, far away. I was mourning Wil’s loss as much as Bessie’s, maybe more. Though Wil wasn’t dead, I felt cheated of him.
I tried to convince myself that he wasn’t gone for good. I knew what the north woods meant to him. Since the morning Wil left, I’d walked up to the cabin every day I could, sure I’d find another little carving waiting for me, warm ashes in the fireplace, the bed slept in, any sign he was still around, though I found none. Sometimes I’d think I had glimpsed him in the trees because of a flash of white, a boyish trick of the light, but a second later I’d know otherwise.
I wondered if he’d be a picker for the rest of his life. Move from backwater to backwater. Never learn to read or write. Never know who or what he was. Not that there was anything wrong with picking soybeans or strawberries. But I couldn’t help but wonder what, if given the knowledge and the chance, he might do with his life. Never knowing—to me, that was the worst loss of all.
I must have been tired, because that was the last thing I thought before I fell asleep. One minute I was sitting with everybody in front of the fire, and the next thing I was waking up to find my head in Henry’s lap and Henry drawing on my cast, sketching a picture of Mr. C.
“Is everybody gone?” I said.
Henry nodded. “The snow’s getting deep. It’s just the three of us now,” he said, nodding at the far edge of the hearth rug where Mr. C’mere lay fast asleep.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, and his tail swished.
Then suddenly it hit me. It must’ve been Henry’s drawing of Mr. C that did it. I sat bolt upright, wide awake. I got up like I’d been shot out of a cannon, sending poor Mr. C bolting out his little door. I raced up the stairs to my room.
“Are you all right?” Henry called from the foot of the stairs.
“I got to see something,” I hollered back, and started searching. I was a human tornado. I jerked open drawers, pulled the sheets and covers off my bed, the pillows off the window seat, the books off the bookshelves, trying to remember the last time I’d seen it. If it was still here, it was somewhere in this room. If it was gone, there was only one reason.
I searched every inch of the closet and shimmied under the bed with the dust bunnies, Henry all the while calling from the bottom of the stairs, “Zoë! What’s wrong? What in God’s name!”
“I’m looking for something!” I shouted.
“Do you want me to help you find it?”
“I don’t want to find it!”
“What on earth?”
“Never mind!”
I looked everywhere in that room, not finding it anywhere. I knew it was the one thing Wil had taken with him, though he’d left everything else—his whole life—behind him.
I took the banister, sliding straight into Henry’s arms. “He took the book! He took the book!”
“Who are you talking about?” Henry said. “What book?”
“Wil,” I said, as though it was as obvious as red paint on a barn. “The book about the Japanese boy.
