Boy in the Box

Gene, who had now gone silent, sitting in the tall grass, wet with the boy’s blood and cold condensation. They returned with a thick, airtight plastic trunk from Conner’s truck, a military-grade storage container meant to keep gear outdoors for long periods of time, immune to water, rot or rust. They brought shovels and a pickaxe from Bill Flood’s barn. It was two in the morning and freezing, but they were sweating, digging, chopping through the stony soil, digging deep enough that it wouldn’t be found. The sealed trunk ensured bears couldn’t smell the body or that a wayward hunting dog wouldn’t bring a boy’s desiccated hand back to his owner instead of a turkey. They laid the boy in the trunk, bending him into a fetal position so he fit. Conner locked and sealed it, and together they dropped the trunk into the ground beside the massive wild raisin bush where they found him.

The work took all night and by the end they were dead tired, dazed and no less guilty.

It was all for nothing, Jonathan thought. Here he was now, sitting before Conner and Michael in the East Side Tavern, his childhood friend dead, his own life in shambles under the burden of that one night, and now he was being told he had to go back and relive it – to dig it all back up.

A tree falling in the forest may or may not make a sound, but the death of a child reverberates the world over with or without a witness.

Jonathan felt the world drop out from beneath him. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s too much. I don’t think I can do this.”

“They’re going to be clearing out the forest and digging up the ground,” Michael said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“I can’t, it won’t matter.”

“It will matter,” Conner said. “Everything we have now, our families, our lives, will be gone. It’s still out there, and they will find it, and it will be all too easy for the cops to figure out who it was.”

For years afterward, Jonathan had scanned missing person reports, news sites, online databases, anything he could find for a sign of the boy they buried in a box in the woods. He was sure the others had as well, trying to see if and when the axe would fall. He combed through the seemingly inexhaustible lists of the missing, the vanished, the ones who had been given up on by all but their parents, and even the parents – grown so weary of the search and not knowing – were relegated out of news reports to poor webpages where their child was nothing more than a needle in a haystack of other special and forgotten children. He looked through them for years. He pictured each boy with a giant star-shaped cavity in his face, and each time that horror anchored his guilt. There were plenty of boys who resembled the boy in the woods, but the details were all wrong; a kid who goes missing in Colorado probably has little chance of showing up in the middle of Coombs’ Gulch near the Canadian border. Not impossible, but not likely.

But even more convincing than the lack of any picture, and without any bit of rationality, was that none of them felt right; there was not that blazing moment of recognition where the ancient, evolutionary part of the brain that puts faces together cries out and says, “That’s him.” Even though Jonathan couldn’t quite be sure of his features, there was something inside him that screamed he would know the boy when he saw him. It was the same something that made him shake his head when he gazed upon some other black-haired boy who wandered away from home never to be seen again.

Despite years of searching, there was no record of a similar-looking boy missing in that area. No reports of pleading and terrified parents. No news stories of a body being uncovered in a remote part of the Adirondacks. It was as if he’d never existed, and in one way it was a relief, but in another, more tragic way, it was worse. Had no one cared enough to look for him? Was he a tortured creature totally alone in the wilderness? Jonathan eventually gave up the search. After this long, if there was no sign of him in the world, there probably never would be.

It made him question his sanity, whether the incident that night had even occurred, whether they had somehow all just imagined it together – one drunken, shared hallucination.

But no. That was impossible. The gunshot was deafening. The eyes in the night were bright yellow. The steam rose from the bloodied hole in his eye socket and curled in the night air. He could remember the goddamned smell of it. Jonathan’s life was a spent shell of what it should have been, and Gene was dead by his own hand – a rifle shot under the chin. It was all too real to have been imagined.

“There’s never been any report,” Jonathan said.

“You think we don’t know that?” Conner said.

“It won’t matter once they find it,” Michael said. “We don’t know for sure there hasn’t been a report, and it won’t matter. Once they find it they’ll have to investigate. They’ll figure out cause and approximate time of death, and the first goddamned person they’re going to ask is Bill Flood. It will probably take them a week before they’re knocking on our doors.”

“I just don’t think I can go back there,” Jonathan said.

Michael turned his head away, sighing with frustration, perhaps disgust.

“This is not about us,” Conner said. “It’s about Mary and Jacob. It’s about Madison and Aria.” Conner looked at Michael. “It’s about Annie and the family you’re trying to have. This blows open and our lives are over. Maybe we were wrong with what we did, but admitting to it now would just be worse. We owe it to the people we love