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Dozens of them.
Scattered across the patio.
Covering the grass.
All of them bearing the same phrase that seems like it’s both mocking me and crying out for help.
HAKUNA MATATA DUDE
I stumble around the yard, gathering the pages, clutching them to my chest. One has somehow gotten snagged in the low-hanging branches of a tree on the edge of the woods. As I grab it and stuff it with the others, I spot the notebook itself sitting nearby on the forest floor. All but a few pages have been torn out. I pick it up, my gut churning.
These were some of my deepest, darkest thoughts, written down in the middle of the night. Now they’ve been defaced, scribbled over, tossed across the lawn. If this is Billy’s doing, it’s crueler than I ever expected of him.
And if it’s my doing, as Ashley suspects, then I’m seriously fucked in the head. Because I have no memory of doing this. Nor can I think of any reasonwhyI would do it.
But if it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Billy, then who the hell was it? The only way to find out is to, as sportscasters used to say when I was a kid watching Jets games with my dad, go to the videotape. Or, in my case, the trail cam.
I return to the tent and my phone, which now shows several new photos taken by the trail cam, all of them depicting me gathering upthe loose pages torn from my notebook. I swipe past them to the photo I saw this morning—the single page gliding over the grass. The one before that, taken several hours earlier, shows a raccoon crossing the lawn on the edge of the woods. After that comes another picture of me, an unflattering ass pic as I crawled into the tent late last night.
Between those three images is…nothing.
Either the trail cam malfunctioned, conveniently fritzing out for a few hours, or someone—Billy? me?—snuck up behind the camera and turned it off while the notebook was stolen and destroyed.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect it was Billy, because the time stamp on the most recent photo displays a very important date.
July 15.
Thirty years to the day that Billy was taken.
No wonder he resorted to such extreme tactics. He wasn’t being cruel. He was being urgent. All in an attempt to emphasize the importance of this day. And those three words on every page? Hisfinalwords? I suspect they’re to remind me of everything that happened on this night thirty years ago.
Not that I need reminding.
I remember everything.
Everything but one vital, missing detail.
I’m still looking at the time stamp on the phone when it hits me—the solution I’ve been circling around ever since that first baseball landed in the backyard. In fact, it’s been right there for decades, visiting me at night on a regular basis.
It’s not enough to simply keep having The Dream.
If I’m going to remember—truly, irrefutablyknow—what happened that night, I’m going to need more than that.
Instead of having The Dream, I need to relive it.
Friday, July 15, 1994
10:58 p.m.
“Uno,” Ethan says for the third round in a row. A rarity. Usually, it’s him losing again and again as Billy, a far better strategist, racks up the points. Tonight, though, Billy’s playing is lazy and distracted. Twice now, Ethan caught him forgetting to say “Uno” when he had one card left, which has never happened before. As he tallies their scores and sees he’s won his first game ever against Billy, Ethan feels not victory but disappointment. He knows he would have lost if Billy had been playing like his usual self.
“Rematch?” he says.
“Nah,” Billy replies, disappointing Ethan further. He’d hoped the answer would be yes, because playing a one-sided game of Uno means they wouldn’t be talking about what happened that afternoon, a topic they’ve expertly avoided so far.
Ethan had assumed it would be the first thing Billy mentioned when he entered the yard with his sleeping bag and pillow. He’d even braced himself for it, the apology already formed in his mind. Yet Billy didn’t bring it up when he crawled into the tent and unfurled his sleeping bag. So Ethan didn’t bring it up, either, even though it was totally weird not to.
The avoidance continued the rest of the night. When they ate the s’mores Ethan’s mother had made. When they roamed the edge of the woods trying to catch fireflies. During the entire game of Uno, in which Ethan constantly snuck looks at Billy, searching for signs he was mad at him. And while Billy looked no different, Ethan knew something had changed. He was quieter, slower, less animated. It was as if the old Billy Barringer remained stuck in that mausoleum and had been replaced with a newer model. One missing all the quirks that made Billy special.