“You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.
“That’s not really the right pun, Kane.”
He rolled his eyes. “Throw me a bone?”
“Better, but your jokes are a little far-fetched.”
“Mom, please. Do I have to go back to school looking like this?”
The question flipped her from Pun Mom into Clinical Psych Mom, which Kane was ready for; she taught psychology to freshman at St. Agnes, and these flips happened a lot more since the incident.
“While a haircut is not a good enough reason to not return to school, your father and I have been meaning to discuss the option of homeschooling with you. That is, if you feel like the pressure of returning would be a further distraction. Is that something you’d like to have a conversation about?”
Kane’s usual gloom closed back over the fleeting brightness he’d just felt. Dread rose up within him like bile. Perhaps the only thing worse than returning to school was spending even more time trapped here. It creeped him out the way the house changed in the late summer’s heat, with doors clicking open and rooms taking big breaths when the breezes hit. Plus, his mother wouldn’t go into her job, maybe fearing he might hurt himself. Kane imagined himself as a rare bird: well loved, but still caged.
“No, I’ll go back. Just…not yet. Okay?”
His mother considered him, then flipped out of psych mode.
“Perhaps going back to school will be the perfect thing for your…”
“What? Another pun?”
“I can’t. I’m your mother.”
Kane crossed his arms. “Say it.”
“Melan-collie.”
“You’re sadistic.”
She laughed, and, because he was not entirely heartless, Kane laughed, too. Then she booted him from her office with a cheery “Dinner is at six, bitch.”
Kane wandered through the house. The urge to read The Witches came over him, but it’d been lost to whatever had chased him down the night he met Ursula. He considered going back to Sophia’s room, but she’d closed her door. Doing some writing in his journal about his fear of school was always an option, but he didn’t think that’s what Dr. Poesy was interested in. Really, he should be searching for clues and do what he’d been avoiding since he’d gotten home from the hospital.
He should explore his own room.
Kane pressed his forehead against the door, hand hovering over the knob. He’d only entered his room for a few minutes each day, to grab clothes or a book, but then the sheer discomfort of being surrounded by all that stuff drove him out. Most of his things he recognized, but some things were entirely foreign. He hadn’t told his parents this yet, or even Sophia, but it proved that much more than the summer was missing from his memory. Whatever happened to him, not all of him had made it back. Maybe not even most of him. So who did that make him, the boy against the door? The boy afraid to enter, trapped outside his own life, afraid to discover just how much he had lost.
Kane reminded himself, again and again, that he was not an egg. Whoever he was, he needed to figure out his own story. Perhaps that was the key to finally coming home.
The door creaked as he entered.
It was a large room shrunken by clutter on every surface. Kane tamped down the prickling unease and began with his desk. It was a waste of half-read books and comics. There were half-filled sketchbooks and half-finished crafts. A birdhouse, half-painted, waited in a dried pool of its own colors atop some newspaper. Kane didn’t own a bird. He did own a fish, though.
“Hey Rasputin,” he said to the fishbowl. The black betta regarded him nervously, then slid behind a miniature castle.
“Me, too.” He pinched a few flakes into the bowl and tried to imagine what it was like to have your food magically appear above you, without warning. Then he thought about how he knew the fish’s name, but not where it was from.
Kane moved on to the bookcase, a heavy mahogany beast anchored to the wall because he used to climb it. Kane poked through the knickknacks on the shelves and marveled at what was probably the early signs of a hoarding habit. There were jars of shells from the Connecticut coast, ceramic mugs crammed with bristling paintbrushes, plastic superhero figurines prized from cereal boxes, dingy stuffed animals with threadbare smiles, a milky-eyed antique camera, a handful of sea glass placed meticulously into a figure eight, and books. Countless books, spines cracked and pages spotted and covers peeling and corners rounded. The titles whispered to Kane, bidding for his attention, but he resisted the urge to open up one and close himself within. That was the old Kane. The new Kane needed to focus on the real.
He ran his shaking hands over it all, searching for the holes in his memory. There were many, and without the patina of nostalgia, everything felt like junk. Useless junk.
A few tears creeped from the corners of his eyes, but he pushed them back across his temples. It was not just sadness he felt, but homesickness. He was homesick for a place he could no longer visit, for a home that was no longer his. Then his eyes fell upon the old jewelry box on the very top shelf.
It had been his grandmother’s, willed to him when she passed. It was a fitting gift. Kane had always loved to rip open the drawers when he was a toddler, taking the jewels out of their velvet coffins, until one day he managed to lose the key. His grandmother, who loved pranks, told him this meant she’d have to blow it up, jewelry and all, and start her collection over. Kane was so hysterical about it he begged his father for a hammer to crack it open. The tool was solemnly supplied and, to Kane’s delight and his grandmother’s amusement, just one tap did the trick. It wasn’t until years later that his grandmother showed him—and only him—that applying pressure to the topmost drawer’s upper-right edge opened the compartments without much fuss. The lock had never worked.
She had called the heirloom her treasure chest.
One room over, Sophia’s scale shifted into a minor key. Chills swept over Kane’s skin as he remembered the chatter of crickets on the path, and Ursula’s words all over again: Check the treasure chest.
The viola’s minor scale peaked. Kane dragged the jewelry box to the floor, his hands grazing the familiar ridges until he found the pressure point, and pushed. Something clicked and he eased open the top drawer, half expecting something horrible to crawl out. A swarm of locusts, or some Pandora-style curse. Instead what he found was…
More junk.
A pair of gold-handled sewing scissors, bunches of thread, and a small pincushion shaped like a raspberry stared up at him from a worn velvet backdrop. But in the next drawer he found a photo of two people: the first was curvy and tall, with an untidy knot of red curls and sporting a goofy smile. Her arm was flung around the other person’s shoulders with chummy familiarity. Undeniably, unmistakably, it was Ursula Abernathy.