“Yes. An electronic bracelet.”
Claire frowned. “I don’t remember what that means. What it was.”
“There was so much in the community that isn’t part of our lives anymore. But that’s what our memories consist of: small things,” Jonas said.
“My bicycle. I haven’t seen a bicycle since then. Except the one in the museum. That was—”
“My father’s bike. I stole it. It had a seat for Gabe.”
Claire nodded. “Yes. In my memory I can see him riding in it. He held a toy.”
Jonas laughed. “His hippo.”
“He called it Po, didn’t he? It’s coming back now.”
“Yes. Po.”
Now she could almost hear and see it: the dimpled hands clutching the stuffed toy; the high, happy voice. “Did you take the hippo with you when you escaped?”
Jonas shook his head. “I couldn’t. It all happened so fast. I discovered they were going to release . . . No. Not release. They were going to kill Gabe. I took him and fled. And I had to take food. There was no room for anything else.”
“I would have gone with you, if I’d known. Things would be different now if I had.” She shifted on the bench and rubbed her sore hip. “I wish—” But then she fell silent.
Jonas was quiet. He didn’t reply.
“I was so frightened of birds,” she said suddenly. “Of their feathers and beaks. Then Einar brought me one, in a cage, as a pet. I named it Yellow-wing.”
“Einar? He was the one who—”
“Yes, the one who prepared me for the climb out.” Her eyes went to her feet, thick and bunioned in primitive sandals. She pulled them back beneath the bench to hide them. He knew she was remembering how limber she had been then, how balanced and sure.
“I loved Einar,” she told him.
“Do you wish you had stayed?” Jonas asked her after a moment.
“No,” she said firmly. “But I wish it had not been Evil that brought me here.”
Jonas helped her up from the bench, his hand under her arm. They had been sitting together for a long time, and Claire was stiff. She stretched slowly and took a deep breath.
“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at her with concern.
She nodded. “I’ll be all right in a minute. My heart’s fluttery sometimes. And I’m just a little slow to get moving.”
Jonas continued looking at her. “I remember you,” he said, after a moment.
“We never spoke to each other,” Claire pointed out.
They began to walk slowly. He was seeing her home.
“No. But I saw you. My father mentioned you—the girl who came now and then to the nurturing center, and played with Gabe. He pointed you out to me one time. I think you rode past on your bike, and he said, ‘That’s the one.’”
“It seems so strange, to realize who you are. He pointed you out to me: ‘That’s my son,’ he said. He told me your name. It brings it all back, those days in the community.”
“I don’t think about it anymore. I’ve made a life here, where it’s so different.”
“So has Gabe.”
Jonas nodded. “He doesn’t remember the community.”
“It’s just as well.”
“I’m not certain. It frustrates him, not having a past, or a family.”
“So he’s wondered?”
“More than wondered,” Jonas told her. “He has a passionate need to figure out his past. I try to tell him what he wants to know, but it’s never been enough. That’s why he’s building the boat. I told him we had lived by a river, perhaps this same river. He’s determined to find his way back.”
They both fell silent.
“Then we must—”
“Maybe together we—”
They had both spoken at the same time, and they were both saying the same thing: We must try to tell all of this to Gabe. Together we can help him understand. But there was not time to discuss it. They were interrupted by the shouts of boys, excited, perhaps alarmed. The noise was coming from the riverside, the place where Gabe had been working for weeks on the little boat.
Seven
Gabe hadn’t wanted an audience for the launch. He wasn’t certain the boat was completely ready, and he didn’t want to be humiliated if anything went wrong. His plan was to sneak away alone. Yesterday he had moved the boat closer to the water, shoving it across some underbrush. Now it was lying on a low, muddy section of the bank. The paddle was resting diagonally inside.
The picture in his book, the book he had borrowed from Jonas, showed the lone man in the ocean, lying doomed in his small boat. His arms were taut and muscled, but useless; it was clear that the huge waves were going to be the ruin of him. He had no paddle, Gabe had thought, looking intently at the painting. Maybe he lost it. Or maybe he forgot to bring one? There was no way the man could save himself in that overwhelming sea. He needed a paddle.
For a foolish moment Gabe focused intensely and tried to veer into the picture of the painted man, to know how it felt to be afloat, to be about to die in the sea—and to know it while safe himself, able to end the veer when he chose. Just to feel the fear briefly, and the movement of the churning waves.
But it didn’t work. The man was not real. He was the painter’s idea of a man, simply daubs of paint, nothing more. A painted man who needed a paddle.
Gabe was proud of the paddle he had made. He was proud of the entire boat, but he realized it was a rough, primitive construction. The paddle was different. He had felt very fortunate to have found a slender young cedar that broadened at its base: just the right potential for his plan. Carefully he had cut the tree down and then shaped the paddle from its trunk. It seemed to take forever. But he carried it back and forth to Boys’ Lodge and was able to work on it there in the evenings: carving carefully, smoothing, shaping. His friends, even those who ridiculed his boat, were impressed with the paddle, with its sweet, cedary smell, its graceful curved edges, and the sheen of its wood now that he had rubbed it with oil.
“Can I carve my name on it? Just small, but so you can remember me?” Nathaniel had asked. Gabe had agreed, and watched while his friend carved his name meticulously.
Then Simon asked, and Tarik, and others. Even those boys who had made fun of his project now took pains to add their signature.