Hour after hour Joey lay quiet, unmoving, waiting in the dark closet, for what, he wasn’t sure. The house remained stone silent, and he felt certain he was alone, but his fear kept him motionless. The man had left him a thin blanket, a pillow so flat that it barely cushioned his head against the hard wood of the closet floor, a bottle of water, and a funny-shaped plastic thing with a handle to pee in.
Sometime, maybe late in the morning, the four-year-old simply couldn’t stand it any longer. The darkness had worn on him until his nerves pricked his body, as if he lay on a bed of nails. He had to do something, find a way out of the closet and home.
His first push against the door was tentative, soft. No movement. Gathering his strength, he pushed harder and then harder again. After taking two steps back, all he had room for in the closet, he rushed forward, hitting the door the way he’d seen the police do on TV, with his shoulder. Like a rag doll, he tumbled backward, hit the back wall with a thump, and then dropped to the floor. The door hadn’t budged.
“I want to go home!” he screamed. “I want to go home!”
In the closet, Joey sobbed, while from the house he heard only quiet.
Long minutes passed. An hour or more later, he’d collected himself, calmed his crying. He thought about the closet and wondered. The night before, when the man let him out, Joey decided he should have taken a look, to see if there was anything inside that could help him. He hadn’t felt anything, but maybe he could find something to pry the door open. On his knees, the boy desperately felt about the floor, his hands spreading over the rough, uneven boards, searching but feeling nothing but the old wood planks that made up the floor. Then he stood and ran his hands over the walls, from the floor to as high as he could reach on his tiptoes, hoping for a light switch, something, anything that could help. All his soft, small hands encountered were cracks in aging plaster.
Finally, he reached up, thinking maybe something hung, like in his closet at home, clothes on hangers maybe high over his head. If he found one, maybe he could use the hanger to get out. But all Joey’s outstretched arms encountered was the sticky hot closet air, stagnant and smelling of his own urine. That was until he stretched high on his toes, waving his arms, jumping up and up, reaching. Finally, he touched something soft, cloth. On instinct, he pulled back, afraid. He waited and thought. Then, in the darkness, Joey jumped again, grabbing at whatever the cloth thing was and pulling it toward him, hoping to bring along a hanger with his prize. Three more tries and a supple round object fell into his arms, furry and familiar.
For the rest of the day, Joey sat, knees crossed, in the center of the closet, clutching what felt like the stuffed animals he had lined up on his bed at home. He buried his face in it and cried. Holding it brought modest comfort as he waited for something, anything, to happen. At times, he talked reassuringly to his only friend. “My momma and poppa are looking for us,” Joey whispered. “They’ll come and beat up that bad man. Then we can go home.”
Gradually, he fell asleep.
When the door jerked open and light poured in, Joey felt confused. Curled in a ball on the closet floor, holding his hard-won trophy against him, he looked up at the man.
“Have a nice morning?” he said, an amused smile on his face. Joey stood up and stumbled out of the closet. It was then that the man focused on the toy, in the light a worn, dark brown teddy bear with black shoe-button eyes. “How did you get that?”
Joey didn’t know why, but he felt the way he did when his momma caught him coloring on his bedroom walls. “It was in the closet. Up above,” Joey said, flinching at the anger in the man’s eyes.
Seething, the man put out his hand and waited. At first Joey held the toy tighter, afraid but not wanting to give it up. Moments passed, until he reluctantly put the bear in the man’s hand.
“Is that your bear?” Joey asked, looking beseechingly at the man, then at the object that had given him brief solace in his closet prison.
“It belonged to a little boy,” the man said matter-of-factly.
“Where is he?” Joey asked. “Is he your little boy?”
“In a way, he was mine. In fact, he’ll always be mine,” the man said. Joey couldn’t decide what the man meant, but then he smiled down at him and explained in a cool, uncaring voice, “The boy who owned this bear is dead.”
“Did he get sick?” Joey asked.
“You could say he got very sick, all of a sudden,” the man said. For a moment, he was quiet, staring down at Joey, inspecting him as if he were somehow subhuman. “What’s important here is that this is my bear. Not yours.”
As Joey watched, the man returned to the closet, and Joey looked up at a shelf he hadn’t been able to see in the dark, one the bear’s long, skinny legs must have been dangling from. To get a better look, Joey took two steps into the room, and what he saw frightened him even more. On the shelf, the man sat the teddy bear beside a battered baby doll, dirty, with one eye missing. Then, next to the doll, Joey saw something familiar, something red and yellow, with his name written in black marker on the side.
“That’s my truck!” he demanded, reaching up toward it, although the shelf towered over him, out of reach. “I want it. Give me my truck!”
“It used to be yours, but now it’s mine,” the man said, gazing down at him. “I like to call these my souvenirs.”