Like Russian Dolls

Michael sat out on the make-shift patio just off the back of the house. Its scramble of interlaced masonry stones extended towards the edge of the woods, right to the point where the cropped grass came to an end and everything beyond was just one vast space of dirt and brush and roots. The wind played the strings of branches while an operatic howl rose and dropped in tune with the movement. Michael sighed nervously and glanced over his shoulder, peering into the darkness that always seemed to swallow the woods regardless of the time of day.

“Misha, what are you doing?” his grandmother asked in Russian when she emerged from the house carrying a basket of freshly washed laundry. He rolled his eyes at her Russification of his name as she walked over to the clothes line that hung taut over the yard. She placed the basket on the ground next to her and gazed at him through the late-afternoon humidity.

“Drawing,” Michael responded in English without looking up. For a moment the insect chirping of the cicadas emerged from its monotonous hum, becoming loud and obvious, ringing in his ears, before receding back into background noise.

“What is it?” she asked as she walked over, a towel folded over one arm and a few clothes pins attached to the sleeve of her house dress. “Ah a very tall boy with fancy straight hair! What a face!”

“It’s a tree,” he corrected as he ran more green lines out from its top.

“A tree?” she paused and crinkled her brow. “Maybe you can change it,” she suggested, “a boy with green hair. It would make such a beautiful picture.”

Michael ignored her and turned his attention to the car pulling into the driveway. At first he thought it was his parents coming to pick him up, take him back home to the City, if only for a few days. He longed for a temporary respite from the wet country air, that grass-bark-mold aroma that aggravated his asthma and made him get up in the middle of the night. Sometimes, with the house absolutely still and only the sound of a distant drip coming from a leaky showerhead, he would descend the stairs to the living room. There he would throw himself onto the couch to watch the infomercials that played out like long soap operas about consumerism and teenage angst. More than anything he wanted his parents to take him back, just so he could spend a last few days in the apartment they would soon be moving out of. Things were already being packed away in boxes, in preparation for their relocation to the suburbs. He imagined his toys lidded-off, placed into dark tombs sealed with the sort of plastic tape that made a screeching noise as it was unrolled along the top of the cardboard folds. Somewhere in Queens a little room was being stripped of its history, undergoing an unrecording of time. When the next occupant arrived he would never even know that a boy once lived there, and in some small way, he thought, he would cease to exist.

But when he spotted his grandfather’s black Volvo he looked back down to his picture.

“You caught all the fish?” asked his grandmother as his grandfather stepped out of the car.

“Bah,” his grandfather waved her comment away. “Who needs fish when you find something even better?” He popped open the trunk and from among the mess of polls and pieces of tackle, he pulled out a small orange bucket. “Come look,” he said as he walked over to them and placed the bucket on the grass next to the laundry basket.

His grandmother looked down at it. “What is it? A rock?” she asked.

“A rock? A shmock.” His grandfather reached in and pulled out a small green shell. “It’s a turtle!” he announced.

“Where is his head?” wondered Michael. “Where are his feet?”

“Ah, he’s hiding right now. Maybe asleep.” His grandfather tapped on the top of the shell. “Matryoshka, come say hello.” He turned his attention back to his small audience. “You know why I named him Matryoshka?” There was a tinge of cleverness in his voice. “Because when I find him, I think ‘it’s just empty shell,’ but then I look inside, and I see there is something more!” Neither Michael nor his grandmother had anything to say in response. “So Matryoshka, you understand? Like Russian doll. You open and there is also doll inside.”

With that pronouncement, Matryoshka pulled a sleepy head out of his shell and grinded his jaw indifferently.

“What are we going to do with it?” Michael’s grandmother asked, already in near-hysterics, having skipped over practically every stage of psychological unease between nervous and insane.

“Keep him in the basement, of course.” He placed Matryoshka onto the ground and the three of them watched as he stuck out his wide feet and started plodding along, back towards the car.

“The basement! I need another animal in the house? I already have you. What do we need with a turtle? Who’s going to take care of him?”

“Misha will, yes?” He turned to Michael. A glint of perspiration gliding along the side of his nose looked like the soft dampening of tears.

Michael shrugged. “I guess.”

---

But for the first couple of days, Michael was too nervous to go down into the basement. It was a dark place one could only enter by way of precariously rickety old stairs that felt hollow and loose under his feet, as if his small body could fall right through and onto the grey, prickly cement underneath. He had never been down there alone, only ever accompanying his grandmother on her seemingly constant visits to the laundry machine, or his grandfather’s forays in search of loose screws or buttons or other oddities that sat in crusty old jars lining the shelves of collapsing antique furniture left by the previous owner.

   

Eventually, it was a sense of responsibility for Matryoshka’s well-being, albeit one that was dropped onto his shoulders by someone else, that drove Michael to the edge of the stairs and the dim yellow light that glowed at their base. With a bowl of water in one hand and a loose piece of chicken in the other, Michael descended to the shrill compression of the wooden boards underneath his feet. The stairs were cold and damp and by the time he got to the basement floor, he sensed the temperature difference that the dark and stone helped to create.

“Matryoshka!” he yelled towards one corner, as if expecting an old friend who was going to emerge with a smile and a hug.

   

He shook his head at the echoing of the long, strange-sounding name.

   

“Matty!” he corrected, calling towards the other corner, but still not moving from the base of the stairs.

   

When he didn’t get the welcome he had expected, he pulled in a big gulp of air and stepped further into the basement. At the far end, a set of short windows – placed high, right up against the ceiling – revealed the edge of dirt and grass outside the house. A few beams of white light streaked through and illuminated floating dust particles that passed through the still air, spinning stars in the galaxy of the contained space. Decaying shelves ran askew against one wall and were piled up with books placed horizontal and perpendicular and diagonal, most displaying titles in a Cyrillic script that Michael couldn’t read.

   

“Can I help you?” said a deep, low voice from the other side of the room.

   

Michael jumped and turned simultaneously, poising his body to face in the direction of the voice. Some water flipped out of the bowl and landed at his feet.

   

“You scared me,” Michael called out to the voice, as he stared down at the floor and looked for a sign of movement. His eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the low lighting.

   

“I’m sorry,” answered the voice, sounding sincere in the apology. “It’s just that I’ve been on my own for so long now. What do you have there? Is that for me?”

   

“Yes!” answered Michael. “Some water and some chicken!”

   

“Chicken? Turtles don’t eat chicken. You’re not that bright, are you?”

   

Michael looked at the chicken dangling in his hand. “Oh…I thought…” he started saying as he turned to look back at the ground and spotted Matty taking short, contemplative turtle steps towards him.

   

“That was rude.” Matty shook his head at himself. “Maybe I’m just in a bad mood.”

   

“Will you drink the water at least?”

   

“The water I will drink,” answered Matty, his voice rising to a level of mild satisfaction that, Michael imagined, must represent the high-point of a turtle’s range of excitement.

   

Michael made his way over in three strides and sat himself down on the spiky cement floor. He placed the bowl down in front of him and watched Matty stick his head past the edge and lick at the water with his tongue.

   

“And you are?” asked Matty, trying to show interest in his question but mostly distracted by trying to get at the liquid, which was low enough in the bowl that he had to strain his neck to reach it.

   

“Michael. My family calls me Misha but I don’t like the way it sounds. Michael is what they called me at school.” He scratched his knee absent-mindedly and considered whether he wanted to say more. Matty was, after all, very much a stranger, and even though Michael often brimmed with thoughts and emotions he wanted to share with everyone he came across, to spill his heart at every opportunity, he was sharp enough to know that not everyone wanted to hear what he was thinking. “I’m moving at the end of the summer,” he continued, unable to help himself, to hold back this additional piece of information that was always on his mind. “To a new school. A new town.” He paused. “I wonder what they’ll call me there.”

   

“I see,” answered Matty, “That’s never an easy thing. To pick up and leave, to start a new life.” He contemplated what Michael had said. “And who am I?” he wondered.

   

“You’re Matty,” Michael giggled. “What a funny questions to ask.”

   

“Sometimes it’s easier to just ask instead of trying to figure it out yourself.”

   

Matty picked his head out of the bowl and stretched back the corners of his mouth into what Michael assumed might be a smile. Matty’s eyes narrowed into thin lines.

   

“How can you live down here?” wondered Michael, taking another moment to take in the layout of the basement, most of which still lay shrouded in dark corners.

   

“Well, it wasn’t really up to me. But it’s not too bad,” reasoned Matty. “It’s sort of comfortable actually. After all it has plenty of places to hide and go to sleep. No one to bother me. Figure I’ll stay a little while.”

   

“But what do you eat? How do you survive?”

   

“I manage,” answered Matty, stepping away from the bowl and shaking his head free of a droplet of water that clung to the top of his head, beading on his rough skin. “We all find a way to get by somehow.”

   

Michael nodded without really knowing why. He wanted to show Matty that he understood.

   

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and take a little nap.”

---

“How is our friend doing?” asked his grandfather a few afternoons later, just as he was walking past Michael in the yard. He carried his flimsy orange bucket towards the kitchen, filled with fish to be gutted.

   

“What friend?”

   

“Matryoshka,” his grandfather reminded him. "The turtle.”

   

“Oh, he’s fine,” Michael responded and then looked away towards a neighbor’s dog barking at him through the fence.

   

“Ah this dog!” his grandfather shouted through the noise. The dog suddenly stopped barking and tilted his head to the side, contemplating this shirtless man with the round belly, green visor, and large Italian designer glasses. “Great,” he said to Michael. “You’re taking care of him?”

   

Michael nodded. “I brought him some water and some food.” Michael paused. “But why did you bring him?”

   

“I don’t know. Maybe I think you would like a pet. I had a turtle when I was a boy also, in Russia.”

   

“What was his name?”

   

“Matryoshka! You see, is a good name, much history.”

   

“What happened to him?” asked Michael. “To your turtle I mean.” He picked at the scab of an old mosquito bite on his arm.

   

“I don’t remember so good,” his grandfather said as he looked back at the silent dog that was now lying on its belly and panting. “He stay with me a long time. I feed him and take care of him. I grow up. I leave home.”

   

“And then?”

   

“And then?” his grandfather shrugged. “I think he’s old. He dies.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You don’t remember more?”

“Other things happen, and then you don’t think about a turtle so much.” He smiled. “You ask me to tell you more about the story of how I meet your grandmother,” he tilted his head towards the house, “I know everything. I remember excellent.”

Michael looked back towards the dog that had started barking again, but this time at a squirrel that had caught his attention.

   

“That dog is going to make me crazy,” he said to Michael as he disappeared into the house. “Tonight,” he shouted from behind the screen door, raising the bucket up to eye-level, “we eat fish.”

---

Michael’s parents came to visit for a weekend, and on-cue, as if to signify some greater emotional or psychological condition swirling in the universe, a hurricane decided to visit along with them. A hurricane named Bob.

As the wind whipped up outside, tossing leaves and branches into tumbleweeds that rolled across the backyard, Michael made preparations for disaster. The whole of the woods swayed and lurched, the trees creaked as if they would all topple at any moment. On the news he overheard word of possible tornados and after having seen them on the Weather Channel, he was fully confident in their power to uproot whole towns and grind them into rubble hundreds of feet above the ground.

   

“We need to hide right now,” he said to his family, flashlight and radio and water bottles tucked under his arms; the additional supplies of Motts apple juice, Fruit Roll Ups, and a loaf of bread, all tucked away in his He-Man backpack. “We need to get to the lowest place in the house.”

   

His parents sat together with his grandparents out in the sun room, laughing and eating with the TV on in the background.

   

“Calm down,” said his father. “Everything will be fine.”

   

“Here, have some potato knish,” said his mother, extending a fork with a piece of potato knish at its end, her other hand just underneath, ready to catch any wayward crumbs.

   

“Has anyone seen the bread?” his grandfather asked, looking behind his chair as if he might find it there.

   

“I’m serious,” intoned Michael. “We have to get to the basement.”

   

“The basement?” His grandmother looked up from her food, as if only now understanding what he was asking of them. “But it’s so dirty down there.”

   

“That’s the only place where it’ll be safe.”

   

“Go go.” His father motioned at him with his hand. “Go set everything up for us and we’ll come soon to hide with you.”

   

 A new sense of resolve swept over Michael. He passed through the house looking for other items that might serve as useful for survival purposes. He found a couple of screwdrivers and a wrench. He grabbed a towel and stuffed it in with everything else in his bag, making sure not to crush the juice boxes. His book of drawings he hugged to his chest, deciding that it was probably his most valued possession and that he was ready to sacrifice all else if only he was able to save this one thing.

   

When he got to the basement he shut the door tightly behind him and then ran to the bottom of the stairs.

   

“Matty!” he yelled as his feet hit the cement floor.

   

“What’s all that noise?” asked the turtle as Michael spotted him walking between the legs of a dresser.

   

“It’s a hurricane.”

“Ah a hurricane,” Matty took in the information. He turned his neck to look towards the squat windows. “What’s a hurricane?”

“It’s wind and rain and lightening. It’s clouds, darkness, and just other bad stuff. But no one will listen to me. I’m telling them it isn’t safe but they just sit there and act like everything is going to be fine.”

   

“Well,” started Matty, turning around and going back under the dresser to explore its underbelly further, “what can you do?”

   

Outside, very nearby, there was a rumble of thunder. The light bulb at the base of the stairs flickered.

   

Michael turned on his flashlight and pointed it at Matty’s tail just as it disappeared.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “You have to help me convince them, show them that they’re wrong. I have to do something.”

   

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Matty said from under the dresser.

   

“But you’re smart. You know the things to say.”

   

“It doesn’t work that way.”

   

“How does it work then?” Michael was growing impatient with his friend. He dropped down to the base of the dresser and pointed the flashlight underneath it. Matty’s eyes glowed as the beam passed across his face. “Why won’t you help me?” Michael leaned forward and peered at him.

   

“I’m just a turtle.”

   

“And I’m just a boy!” Michael retorted.

   

Matty chuckled. “That means so much more than you can even understand.”

   

And true to Matty’s words, Michael didn’t understand. “What am I supposed to do?” he continued.

   

“You’ll see,” answered Matty. “One way or another, you’ll manage.” He shrugged and then pulled his neck back into his shell. With his head snuggly inside, he closed his eyes.

   

Michael sat back and brought his knees to his chest. He turned the flashlight off and sat in the dimness, listening to the wind whistle through the trees and past the house and into the little cracks along the frames of the windows. The rain hammered onto the glass and collapsed into streaming rivulets that pooled on the outside, looking for access points in the foundation so that they could seep in and fall further, deeper into the ground.

   

After a few moments, when the sound of the hurricane became so complete that he couldn’t hear it anymore, Michael got up and walked back up the stairs to his family.

---

The hurricane passed without much incident other than a few downed trees that fell harmlessly onto empty roads and shingles that flew off of roofs and lodged themselves in chain-link fencing. There was one tree that fell on a car, but in that scenario the car had been empty, so it was all pretty much the same thing except for the added dramatic effect of bent steel and shattered glass.

He, his father, and his grandfather spent the next day clearing the yard of leaves and twigs. Above him, when he glanced up towards the tree canopy, all Michael could see were more leaves and twigs, endless amounts of them, so that he didn’t understand how the trees could shed so much and still be as dense as they had always been.

“I wish my hair was same way,” his grandfather responded when Michael shared this observation with him.

   

His parents made plans to return to the City and he was going to be left, once again, with his grandparents, left to count down the days until the end of the summer and the move into the new house.

   

“Can I come back with you? I want to be in my room.”

   

“But it’s so much better here,” his mother explained. “Here you have the fresh air and the beach. What do you have there? Just hot streets and smelly garbage.” She breathed in the air as if to solidify her point. “Delicious. I wish I could stay here all summer.”

   

“I like the City smell more,” Michael lied.

   

“And almost everything is packed up already anyway. There’s almost nothing that’s lying around, it’s all in boxes.”

   

“That’s OK. I don’t need much.”

   

“We’re both working,” his father chimed in. “There’s no one at home. Here you have your grandparents and you can speak with them all day.”

“They just talk about laundry and fish.”

“Well, in the City you would be by yourself all day, staring at the TV, and there would be no one to watch you.”

   

“I’m old enough to watch myself,” noted Michael.

   

“Can you mount a picture frame on the wall? Can you fix a leaking pipe or change a fuse?”

   

Michael thought about this for a second. “No,” he decided.

   

“Then you’re not old enough to watch yourself,” his father concluded in his own way of reasoning through things.

   

With that, his father added some final items to the trunk and started the car.

   

“We’ll see you soon,” he said from the rolled down window as he began to back the car out of the driveway. “We’ll come right after the move.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was passing between the edges of the fence, so as to avoid clipping the side-view mirrors, which he had done on several occasions in the past. “And then we’ll all leave together to the new house and you’ll stop complaining about how the air is too fresh for you here.”

   

When the car had disappeared down the road, Michael went around trying to distract himself. He sat down to draw and started flipping through his picture book. He stopped at the picture of the tree he had been working on the other day and looked at it carefully. It seemed to him that maybe his grandmother had been right, maybe he had been drawing a boy with green hair the whole time and just didn’t know it.

   

Everything was moving too quickly, the summer had just started and now it was almost over. Soon he’d be in a new place with new people who were total strangers. He didn’t understand why his parents had decided to move, why the City suddenly wasn’t good enough for them. He was perfectly happy in their apartment. He had friends, a school he knew and was used to. And now everything would change and no one had bothered to ask him if he was OK with all of it. They always claimed they were moving because of him, for him, so that he could have grass and trees and be able to ride a bike without stopping at every block to make sure cars weren’t coming. But maybe he didn’t need all that, maybe he didn’t want it.

   

Michael considered the picture of the tree, or the boy, or whatever it was, and then he tore it out of his drawing book and crumpled it up. Confronted with a fresh page, he started drawing again.

   

“What do you think?” he asked Matty down in the basement when he had finished his picture.

   

Matty contemplated it. “Is that me?”

   

Michael nodded.

   

“That’s not too bad,” Matty decided and smiled. “Except you made me bigger than I really am. I’m quite small you know.”

   

“It’s just so you can see the details better. Like the tiles on your shell.”

   

“I would take it with me if I could.”

   

“You don’t have to leave,” suggested Michael, suddenly getting excited. “You can stay here and then when we move you can come with me to the new house. I’ll buy you a tank so you can be in the sun all day instead of in a dark basement.”

But as soon as he said it, he knew how Matty would respond.

   

Matty shook his head and took a deep, exasperated breath. “I’m sorry, I can’t come with you.”

   

Michael ran his fingers along the picture and felt the bumps on the paper, the thicker clumps of crayon that rose out of the lines he had traced and retraced.

   

“You have to go your way, and I have to go mine. That’s just how it is. You can’t keep a turtle like me around forever.”

   

“Not yet. Don’t go yet.”

   

“When the time is right.”

---

The final weekend of the summer finally arrived and Michael’s parents returned. The night before they were to leave for the new house, Michael’s mom sat on his bed and tucked him in.

   

“Are you excited about tomorrow?”

   

“Yes,” he lied, and then turned to face the wall.

   

“You’ll make so many new friends, your room will be bigger. And there will be stairs! You love stairs.”

   

Michael did love stairs, that part was true. He loved the way you could run up and down them and it was always like entering a new world, climbing or descending into a place that was totally different from the one you were just in. As much as the basement of the summer house was a dark and scary place, it was also a magical place, so starkly separate from the warm fabrics and curtains and wall paper, from the normalcy of everything else. He thought about Matty down there, emerging from under furniture and stalking the center of the floor, looking up towards the narrow windows that reminded him of what lay beyond the house, of where he had come from and where he was going back to when the time came for him to leave. Then he pictured the funny way in which Matty would stomp his thick legs and feet before aiming himself towards a corner so he could slink behind some new cabinet or dresser.

   

“Goodnight,” his mom said, and kissed him on the side of his forehead. “Tomorrow everything will be different.”

   

The next morning Michael opened his eyes and threw off the sheets from the bed. Light condensation had gathered during the evening and made the windows sweat from the inside. He went to the bathroom and started brushing his teeth. In the mirror, he surveyed his pajamas, the pattern of little yellow sailboats that dotted the white cotton top and bottom, and felt a sudden annoyance with how stupid and childish they looked. He considered changing before heading downstairs but then got lazy and decided against it. These pajamas lived in the summer house anyway, leftovers from a younger him who had spent previous summers here, sleeping in the same bed and sitting at the same outdoor table to draw his pictures.

   

Today, when he came into the living room, he found his whole family sitting around and fervently watching the events unfolding on TV.

   

“Misha! You are up!” said his grandfather. “Come, look what is happening.”

   

Michael turned his attention to the TV and saw images of an open square flooded with people. The square was outlined by funny-looking buildings, their tops all rounded and radish-like. The people shouted, they held their fists in the air. There were tanks and soldiers interspersed throughout the crowd, as if they too had just arrived to participate in the festivities. Some of the soldiers danced with the plain-clothed people, others stood on top of their tanks and just watched what was going on. One young soldier stuck his hand through a hole in a red flag, making a “V” with his fingers.

   

“It’s about time,” his grandfather continued.

   

Michael didn’t understand. “What’s going on?”

   

“The Soviet Union is collapsing,” his father told him matter-of-factly. “They are protesting.” He inhaled deeply and took it all in, then bent his head to take a sip from his coffee mug.

   

“What happens now?” Michael asked his family.

   

“Who knows?” answered his father. “We have to wait and see.”

   

Michael just kept staring at the images on the screen, he listened to the commentator’s voice roused into emotional exposition. Then he noticed something from the corner of his eye and turned his attention to a slow-moving Matty, making his way, focused and directed, from one end of the living room to the other.

   

“Even Matryoshka is celebrating with us!” said his grandfather.

   

“That creature,” his grandmother shook her head. “You had to take it out of basement and let it walk on my clean floor?”

   

“This is special day.”

   

“Good. Special day. You are going to clean my floor?”

   

Michael’s grandfather fell silent just as Matty reached one side of the living room and now ricocheted himself off the wall with every step, bouncing alongside the molding at its base. Eventually he reached a corner and kept walking into the wall, as if he would just suddenly find more floor to move across.

   

“Our friend is stuck,” his grandfather noticed. He got up from his seat, picked Matty up and turned him in the other direction. The turtle continued his plodding in the same manner, heading back to the side of the living room he had previously come from.

   

Michael’s family continued watching the news as Matty meticulously worked at crossing the living room, moving closer to Michael with each step.

   

“Now is the time,” he whispered when we got to Michael, stopping at his feet. “I think I have to be going.”

   

“Now?” asked Michael. “You can’t leave now. Everything is happening so fast.”

   

“It’ll always be this way. It can’t be helped.”

   

“I’m scared, I don’t want you to leave.”

   

Matty went silent for a moment, and turned his head to look out of the much larger and wider window of the living room. The sun was already sparkling through the white lace curtains and Matty’s diminutive body cast a stout shadow across the wooden floor.

   

“I can do this one thing,” he eventually said, glancing back at Michael.

   

“What thing?”

   

“If you take me outside and let me go on my way, I’ll make sure everything will be OK.”

   

“You can do that?”

   

“Yes,” Matty quickly answered. He looked away towards the window again, adding a sense of gravity to his words.

   

Michael considered the promise and its possibilities. He glowed with excitement at the thought of a guarantee about the future, coming at just the time in his life when he wanted, more than anything, to know that everything would work out. Michael bit his lip. Then he crouched down, picked Matty up, and carried him past the TV and out of the living room.

   

“Where are you going?” asked his grandfather.

   

“I just want to take Matty down to the basement,” Michael answered. “I think he’s scared of all the noise from the TV.”

   

“OK.” His grandfather smiled. “You know what to do. He’s your turtle.”

   

Michael moved past the rest of his family and then as he approached the door to the basement, he quickly turned away from it and whisked Matty outside. He was careful not to let the screen door shut loudly behind him. When he was far enough away from the house that he could no longer hear the sounds from the living room, he placed Matty down on the grass and stepped back.

   

Matty closed his eyes and breathed in the air just as the wind passed a warm breeze over them.

   

“I imagine this is farewell,” he said to Michael, and then started trudging towards the bushes that lined the edges of the property, separating it from the disorder of the surrounding woods.

   

Michael watched him silently. He occasionally glanced around him as if expecting that something would suddenly change in his world, that Matty’s promise would create an immediate effect that he would feel. But so far nothing felt different, nothing felt solid and assured, the way he wanted it to be. Everything seemed as unknowable as it always had, as it had the entire summer.

   

Just as Matty was about to disappear into the deep and rich space of green that hugged the small summer house with its trimmed lawn and patio and arranged flower beds, he turned back to look at Michael one last time.

   

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

   

“What do you mean?”

   

“About what I said,” answered Matty. “About telling you that I could make everything turn out OK.”

   

“You mean it won’t be OK?” Michael was confused, he felt a panic in his chest. The move and its consequences, the new home and life that awaited him, it all loomed once more as a dark and empty place he was descending into. There was no promise, no certainty.

   

“It might, but the truth is I can’t say one way or another.” He smiled. “You’ll just have to live through it and see for yourself.”

   

“So what happens now?”

   

“I’m not exactly sure,” answered Matty. “But I know you’ll manage.”

   

With that, he continued on his way, his slow and thoughtful steps carrying him into the woods. At first Michael could hear the crunch of leaves, the rustle of movement from something that could not be seen. And then there was nothing, just a young boy standing alone in a yard, looking out over a vast and unknowable world that had always been there, but which he had never ventured into before.