June, from her bucket, said, "We're going to need posters," and Mr. Alderman, without looking up from his wrenches, said, "We'll need a lot of posters," and the shed, which had smelled of oil and old wood for as long as Eli could remember, suddenly smelled like something beginning.
That night, after the other boys in his room were asleep, Eli lay awake listening to the house settle. The boiler groaned somewhere below, the way it always did, and the wind moved the branches against the window, and Ben mumbled something in his sleep about a bicycle. Eli stared at the ceiling and thought about the day, about Garrett's phone call, about the riders who were coming, about June's voice saying you can't disappear this time. And then he did something he had never done before, not once in six years at the home.
He got up, knelt beside his bed, and pulled the small wooden box out from under it.
The box was plain, unvarnished, the size of a shoebox, and it had a lid that stuck slightly in damp weather. Eli sat on the floor with it in his lap, in the dark, and he did not open it right away. He just held it, feeling the weight of it, which was not much โ a few ounces of paper and feather and memory โ and feeling, at the same time, the weight of what he was about to do.
The next morning, in the empty hall where the light came through the high windows in long pale bars, he showed it to June.
He had chosen the hall because it was empty at that hour, and because the hall was the place where he danced when no one was watching โ not that he was going to dance now, but because the hall was the only room in the home that felt like his. June sat cross-legged on the floor opposite him, her red hair a wild halo in the light, and she waited without fidgeting, which for June was a mark of extraordinary respect.
These are mine, Eli said quietly, and he opened the lid.
Inside, arranged with the care of a person who has very few things and therefore arranges them very carefully, were three objects. A dog-eared paperback, its cover soft and faded, the pages swollen from having been read in damp places. A photograph, creased at the corners, that he had found on the ground outside a pharmacy โ a picture of a woman he did not know, smiling at someone outside the frame, with a yellow curtain behind her. And a blue jay feather, bright as a piece of sky, that he had picked up in the yard the previous spring.
June looked at them for a long time. She did not grab. She did not laugh. She did not ask a hundred questions at once, which was her usual way with everything in the world.
Can I touch them? she asked.
Eli nodded. His throat was tight again, the way it had been in the shed, and he watched as June reached out with one finger โ one careful finger โ and touched the feather first, lightly, the way you touch something that might break or might fly away.
It's so blue, she said.
It was in the yard, Eli said. "After the rain. I thought it fell out of the sky."
June touched the photograph next, tracing the edge of it without smudging the face. "Do you think she's someone's mother?" she asked.
I don't know, Eli said. "I think she was happy, though. Whoever took it, she was smiling at them."
June picked up the paperback last, and held it the way Eli held it, with both hands, and she read the title off the spine in a whisper, as if the book were listening.
I found the photograph first, Eli said, because the quiet of the hall had loosened something in him, and because June was listening the way she listened to things that mattered. "Outside the pharmacy, on the ground, when Sandra took us into town last year. It was face down in the dirt. I picked it up and I looked at it, and I thought โ I thought someone must have dropped it by accident, and that they would come back for it. Nobody came back. So I kept it."
He touched the edge of the photograph with his own finger, gently, the way June had. "And the book was in the donation box. The pages were already soft. I read it three times. The feather โ" He smiled, just barely, the rare quiet smile that most people never noticed. "The feather was the only one that was really mine from the start. Nobody lost it. It just fell. And I was there."
They're yours, she said, and she set it back down exactly where it had been, lined up with the edge of the box. "All of them. And you showed me."
Eli closed the lid. His hands were shaking, just a little, and he did not try to hide it, because June was looking at him the way she had looked at him in the common room โ like he was a person who had just done something brave, and not something small.
Thank you, June said, and she meant it in the complete way that June meant things, without reservation and without irony.