Sam was awake half the night. Did he really want to do this?
He stumbled out of bed in the morning, and dressed. Mack was in the workroom. Sam took a breath. “I'm going to see Caroline. It's her last day.”
Mack nodded. “Nice. Go ahead. It's warm, sunny. A good idea.”
If Mack knew, really knew, Sam thought. He ate a quick breakfast of juice and muffins at Onji's, and asked for an extra sandwich for Caroline. “Her last day,” he said again.
Onji looked up, a roll in his hand. “A picnic. Good.”
Five minutes later, Sam was jogging along the road. Breathless, he reached the stores at the edge of town. Caroline was just ahead of him, wearing a purple hat, and a wooden necklace over her sweater. She grabbed his hand and tugged as she started to run. “We're late,” she said.
He'd never held hands with a girl before. Her hands were warm, and a little smaller than his. It made him smile even though he couldn't imagine how this day would end.
“We may have missed the bus,” she said. “We'll have to wait a half hour for the next one.”
They crossed the street in front of the bank, and went to stand at the stop in front of the Circle Diner. The bus was nowhere in sight. “I'll ask inside,” he said as Caroline bent to close the Velcro on her sneakers.
He poked his head in the door. “Did the bus leave yet?”
Tom at the counter hardly looked at him. “New York City or west?”
“West,” Caroline called in.
“Just missed it.”
Caroline rolled her eyes. “Let's go sit in a booth. I have plenty of money.”
He had money too, but he couldn't imagine swallowing anything. He followed her inside the empty diner and slid into the booth on the end.
They sat there, not talking, until Tom brought the hot chocolates Caroline had called for across the room.
Sam ignored his cup with the small marshmallows floating on top. “Tell me what's going on.” He leaned across the table.
She pulled out the notebook. “While you were doing nothing—”
“I looked at the map. I started at the towns along the St. Lawrence River and looked on the Internet, trying to link two things together with the phone information. The Children's Home and Clayton's. You know, the picture—”
“Of Mack and Lydia in front of the hardware store.”
“There's a town called Clayton.”
He took a breath.
“But that's not it. There's another town called Waterway.” She frowned. “Waterway? And there's a Clayton's hardware store, and—”
“The Children's Home.”
“Well, almost. There's an Eleventh Street.”
He sat back. They wouldn't find anything. He wanted to laugh with surprise and a feeling that was something like relief. Maybe he didn't have to know about himself. Maybe he could just stay with Mack, and Anima, and Onji forever.
Onji always talked about wild-goose chases. And this would be a neat wild-goose chase. They'd take the bus, and eat Onji's lunch. It was a great day, after all; the sun was shining. They'd have a last day they'd always remember. He picked up the mug of chocolate and downed it in one gulp.
She must have been thinking the same thing. She stretched. “Just think, we'll have this whole scoop of a day.” She hesitated. “One thing.” She leaned closer, her eyes so large, those freckles like constellations.
One thing. Her favorite thing to say.
“I might be wrong. And if I am, let's write this all out for you before I go.” She opened her notebook. “Begin at the beginning.”
The chocolate was suddenly a lump in his stomach, the marshmallows so gluey, he could still taste them on his tongue.
Caroline was holding a pen. “Okay. Go,” she said.
The beginning. “My parents died.”
The book was between them; she wrote at an angle. Parents. He could see that.
“I ended up in the Children's Home.”
“In the same town?”
In Mack's town, Onji's town. “Yes, I think so.”
Her head was bent, and he didn't bother to read what she wrote now.
“A terrible woman, a boy who took my boat. She slapped—Mean to all of us, I think. To the cat. I was so afraid for the cat.” Something tugged at the edge of his mind. Mack had built the toy boat for him, he was sure of it. He must have known Mack while he was at the home. How did that fit? He thought of footsteps in a castle. The sound of a hammer. Banging doors.
There was no time to tell Caroline more. The bus was pulling up in front of the diner. He left money on the table, and they boarded the bus, stopping to pay, in back of an old man carrying a fishing rod.
In one of the backseats, Caroline opened her lunch, a mess of a sandwich, two slabs of cheese surrounded by bread. “Horrible,” he said. “How can you still be hungry?”
“Good. I have lunch for you.”
They sat there, not talking. He watched the hills flatten out. The bus traveled along next to a fast-moving stream, and people fished from rocks along the way.
After a while Sam was hungry too, but not hungry enough for the meatball hero. He dug into the bag to find two packages of saltines. He handed one to Caroline, then leaned against the window, chewing.
Every once in a while, the bus stopped to pick up passengers or to let them off. The man with the fishing rod nodded to them as he got off at the back door.
And then the driver called out, “Waterway, New York,” and they went down the steps. Nothing looked familiar to Sam: not the stores on the main street, not the park with its benches at one end, not the wooden church with its square steeple at the other.
Caroline glanced at him. “I'm going into the bakery. I'll ask.”
“Don't. Suppose—” Was this the place? And if it was, he almost felt that store owners would see him: “There's that kid from the home, the kid from the boating accident.”
“Sam, it was years ago. Do you think you still look like the kid in the picture? Do you think anyone would know who you are?”
Before he could answer, she disappeared inside the store. He leaned against the brick wall, sun-warmed even this early in the day.
She was back. “There is a children's home, was a children's home. The baker told me how to get there. Amazing, isn't it?”
Sam felt the sudden heat in his face. He swallowed against the catch in his throat.
Caroline took his hand again, and they went down the street past the church and turned onto a small road that wound its way along in back of the main part of the town.
He walked more slowly, and then at the second turn, where trees began to meet over the path, he stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Just wait—”
“It's there, but it isn't. It was closed down years ago.” Caroline tugged at his hand. “No one's there, Sam.”
He walked with her up a lane that was choked with dandelions showing their yellow tops. Gravel, gray and scattered, crunched under their feet. He remembered the sound of that gravel. “Someone brought me here, carried me on his shoulder. I was crying, cold, and he put his scarf around me.”
“I'm sorry, Sam.” Her voice was low. “I'm so sorry for that little kid.”
He saw the scarf clearly, dark with flecks of red, felt the warmth of it against his cheek, but he couldn't see the man's face.
“Was it Mack?” Caroline asked.
“No, not Mack. I don't think it was anyone I knew.” He pieced it out in his mind. Steps. No one to take him, probably no family, and someone, a neighbor maybe, had brought him here. He remembered carrying the small sailboat.
Sam took a step, turned a corner. The building appeared suddenly in front of him. He stepped back, almost as if he'd been hit. It was really there, that terrible place, much more than a house, with its massive double doors in front, the number eleven over them, smaller doors on each end. Eleven, of course.
He leaned against a tree, almost forgetting that Caroline was watching him. He heard the sound of banging doors, the sound of shouting.
Sam waited for his breath to come back, staring at the place. Everything needed paint; boards on the front porch were missing.
He stopped then, his eyes going to the roof, pieces of slate cracked, but the two chimneys—
“My mother was teaching me numbers, I think,” he said, the blur of her face in front of him. “I turned my head over the man's shoulder, the day we came, and I saw it on the house, eleven, and then a pair of chimneys, so huge up there in the sky. They looked like the number eleven too.”
Just chimneys after all. Just the house number, the street number, of a terrible place that didn't exist anymore. And the woman who'd run the place was gone.
The doors were boarded. They walked around the back of the building and stopped to peer into the windows, to see rooms that were filled with broken furniture, dusty rooms that didn't mean anything. The kitchen was smaller than he remembered, the refrigerator gone, no boy with the flapping hands. Maybe he'd gone far away; he could be eleven now too. The poor boy who hadn't had a toy of his own.
“I don't belong here anymore. I think I never did,” he said. “It's not my place.”
He knew where he'd been, but what was most important was still missing. Mack.