If I can manage to help just one other person find peace and contentment, well then, I can die a happy man.

—Pioneer

The first time I laid eyes on Pioneer, I was just five years old. He went by another name back then, one closer to the kind the rest of us have, but I don’t know what it was anymore, since for as long as I can remember, we’ve called him Pioneer.

We lived in New York City back then, in the brownstone my parents bought just before my older sister was born. I remember the pink-and-white-striped wallpaper in Karen’s and my room and my sister Karen’s brown suede school shoes, the ones that she always left right in the middle of the front hall. My mom was holding those shoes when we found out that my sister had disappeared. Karen and I had been out in front of the house playing—well, fighting over what to play, anyway. Karen wanted to draw and I wanted to do hopscotch. I’d run in to tattle on her for pulling my hair, and when I came back with Mom, she was gone. No one saw anything. There were no clues to show where she’d gone or who might’ve taken her. There was only one bright yellow piece of chalk and a half-drawn picture of our family on the sidewalk out front. In the drawing, only our feet weren’t completed. I used to think that whoever took her made her stop there on purpose so we wouldn’t have a way to follow.

My mom cradled Karen’s shoes to her chest nonstop after that—when the cops showed up to ask questions, and especially a few days later, when the two big buildings downtown got hit by airplanes and the cops stopped looking for my sister and started looking for survivors.

Pioneer came to us not long after. I remember my father letting him in the house. The way he smiled seemed to brighten up the entire room. I hadn’t realized how dark it had become, even with the lights on, until he was in it. Something about the way his eyes filled with some unseen candlelight when he smiled made me think of Santa Claus or maybe even Jesus—even though he looked nothing like either of them. He was pale, with close-cropped black hair—nowhere near handsome, but he was kind. I could just feel it.

The few times my mom’s spoken about those days, she’s mentioned that Pioneer heard about us on the news. He’d told her that he couldn’t get Karen’s face out of his mind and that my mom’s pleas for help haunted him. When the towers fell and the world went crazy, somehow it was my family he felt drawn to. He thought that maybe helping to look for Karen might be a way to focus on one small piece of the giant tragedy surrounding all of us, that this might make it less overwhelming somehow. He offered to help continue our search, and for the next few weeks he made good on his promise. He even brought others along with him. Later, some of those people came with us to Mandrodage Meadows.

I’m not sure why we all took to him like we did. I think maybe we just knew he was special. My family was pretty shy. Quiet. We never needed anyone else around until one of us was gone. But we couldn’t find Karen on our own. We were too scared and sad to know what to do. Pioneer never seemed scared or sad. He seemed so sure of everything.

Almost every night, Pioneer sat with my parents in our kitchen for hours while my mom cried. I could hear their voices from my bed when I couldn’t sleep, when the emptiness on Karen’s side of the room seemed to grow until I was sure it would swallow me whole. I would concentrate on all of their voices, especially the deep tone of Pioneer’s voice, like it was the only thing keeping me out of that darkness.

The first time he talked to me, I was spread out on the living room floor underneath the window, where the sun kept the carpet toasty. By then it was the only place in the house where I didn’t feel frozen—inside and out. I was drawing the same picture over and over, finishing what Karen had started. I had to. If I hadn’t wanted to play hopscotch, if I’d only just decided to draw too, she wouldn’t be gone. I kept making my parents, my sister, and me, standing in a row on a thin green line of grass with our hands connected in an unbroken chain. I think maybe I thought that if I drew us this way enough, it would make Karen come back. She was there on the page. Our family picture was complete. She couldn’t be gone, not really, not for good.

I’d never been very interested in drawing, not like Karen, but for days I did nothing else. I was hoping that maybe she was just mad and hiding, making me pay for leaving her all alone. If I could only draw enough, she might forgive me and come home. Besides, I couldn’t help look for her. My mom wouldn’t let me outside, not alone—and after the towers fell, not at all. My mom and dad spent most days on their phones or staring out the window at the sidewalk. It was like they didn’t see me anymore, or worse, saw Karen instead. Nothing was the same. I didn’t know what would happen if we didn’t find my sister. I just knew that what everyone needed most was for me to stay quiet and be good. By the time Pioneer showed up, I had filled four whole sketchpads with drawings.

“What do you have there?” Pioneer asked on that first afternoon as he entered the living room and discovered me. He pointed at my pile of drawings.

I studied the ground and shrugged. I liked him, but he was a stranger, which made him scary.

“May I take a look?” he tried again, and this time held a hand out.

My mom tapped me lightly on the shoulder. Her face was puffy from crying. It made her look scary too. “Go on, sweetie, let him see your pictures.”

I took a breath and handed one of my notebooks to him without looking directly at his face. I concentrated on his hands instead. They were soft and his nails were shiny. It made me want to turn his palm over and see if the skin there was just as smooth.

Pioneer held the notebook up in front of him for a while, flipping through the pages. His eyes got shiny and wet, making the light in them extra intense. He whistled softly and let the corners of his mouth turn up in a gentle smile. “Looks like we have a budding artist here. I bet your sister would love these. She looks exactly like she does in her pictures.” He pointed at the mantel, where my favorite picture of Karen and me was.

I looked down at the black stick figure that was my sister with spirally yellow hair and no real nose to speak of and felt my lips turn up all on their own. Even I knew that my sister looked nothing like the twig girl I’d created, but somehow what he said made me picture her that way—less real missing girl, more smiley cartoon character. It made me want to laugh. It was like I forgot for just a moment that she wasn’t coming back. I bit my lip and my face twisted with the effort to smother a giggle, which made his lips turn up a little more.

“Go ahead, let loose with that smile,” he said softly. “You are just too sweet to look so sad.”

I scuffed a sneaker against the carpet and tried not to smile. It didn’t seem right, not when Karen being gone was all my fault. But then I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I looked up at him and grinned.