The kid sat there on the planks of wood in the dark with his hands around his knees, Horntail lolling on his arm. The kid was a mess. His eyes and nose were running up a storm.
Charlie squatted down next to him. “They’re all looking for you, you know.”
“Our room is different.”
“What?”
“Our room. The stuff is gone.”
“What stuff?”
“The lizard books. My glove and my bats and my championship trophy.”
“Oh, you mean Tommy’s stuff. Well, we had it there for a while.”
He was afraid to look him in the eye. Did the kid have some kind of power like a weird kid in a movie? Maybe he saw dead people. Maybe the ghost of Tommy liked to hang around him. He didn’t much care which it was; it was all spooky and he wanted no part of it. He wanted to get this kid down into the house and out of his life.
“How come you took my stuff away?”
“I didn’t. Papa made Mama do it. He said it wasn’t good for me once I came back here.”
His face brightened. “You came back, too?”
“Well, I was staying at my grandma’s, you know, for the first six months or so. While Mama and Daddy were out looking for—for Tommy.”
Those long months at his grandma’s. He hadn’t thought of them in years. Kneeling on the shag carpet, Grandma’s gospel music playing on her old record player, wondering what was happening back home, if they’d found his brother yet. They never talked about that. “If anything happens we’ll be the first to know,” she’d said, “so let’s leave those folks alone to do what they have to do. All we can do is pray that he’ll come home.” She was bad off already by then, her feet swollen so much she could barely get down out of the armchair to kneel. He couldn’t pray, though. He was too scared.
“Who took care of Horntail?” the kid said.
“I took him with me to Grandma’s,” he said, and started to laugh. “I let him loose on her carpet one time just to freak her out. She didn’t like that one bit.”
“Nah, she hates lizards.”
“Yeah.”
“And snakes.”
“Yeah.”
He looked down through the branches. He could see the lights from the police flashlights moving through the fields and the woods. They were looking for the kid, but the kid was floating high up above all that, the kid was somewhere else entirely.
“I’m sorry I broke your sub,” the kid said.
“My sub?”
“Your submarine that Papa gave you.”
“Oh.”
The last time he’d seen Tommy. That last day. They’d had a big fight. His dad had come back from a long tour and he’d brought Charlie a shiny new submarine and Tommy had gotten only a book and, boy, was he mad. Tommy wanted to play with his sub, just one turn, he kept saying, but Charlie never had anything Tommy wanted, it was always the other way around, and he loved his shiny new sub that Tommy wanted and he said, “No way.” He said, “Get your own stinkin’ sub.”
“Just one turn,” Tommy had said.
“No,” Charlie said. “It’s mine and you can’t even touch it.” And Tommy had grabbed it out of his hands, right then, breaking the periscope in two.
“Anyway, I’m sorry about it,” the kid was saying now.
“That’s okay. It was my fault. I should have let you try it,” Charlie said. It occurred to him that he was talking to the kid as if he were Tommy. That was followed by another thought (the thoughts were hitting him like blows, one after the other, making him see stars) that only he and Tommy knew that Tommy had broken the periscope. He had meant to get his brother in trouble for it but he had disappeared before Charlie had the chance. He looked out in the dark through the rustling branches and felt overcome with vertigo; he sat himself down on his bottom and pushed his long legs out across the floating floor. Look: here was his body, his legs covered with goose bumps, his shiny shorts, his high-tops.
“I broke it ’cause I was mad. It was so nice,” the kid said. “I never had a sub like that.”
“That’s okay.”
Charlie was sitting there with his mouth open. It occurred to him he ought to close it. “You’re him, aren’t you?” he said, wondering at the words as they came out of his own mouth. “How can you be him?”
“I don’t know how,” the kid said.
They were silent. The kid ran his palm over the spikes on the lizard’s back.
“Thanks for watching Horntail.”
“It’s nothing,” Charlie said. He was proud of himself, all of a sudden, for keeping Tommy’s lizard alive all these years. He felt his whole body flush with pride, like when he was a kid and he’d thrown a good pitch and Tommy had said, “Good pitch, Charlie!”
The kid stroked the lizard up and down his sides, Horntail looking back at him with its yellow eyes. He wondered if it had missed Tommy and recognized him now or if it was just another day for the lizard.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Charlie said finally.
“You didn’t do it.”
“I maybe coulda stopped it though.”