Gated Read Free Page A

little too loudly, and we all start laughing.
    Any remaining tension in the air floats away. I give Marie a grateful look and she winks. I know that I owe it to her—and to Will, Pioneer, and everyone else, for that matter—to come around. These are my people. My Community. My family. I can’t trouble myself anymore with the rest of the world. Their fate was decideda long time ago—as was mine.

If I can manage to help just one other person find peace and contentment, well then, I can die a happy man.
—Pioneer
     

     
    The first time I laid eyes on Pioneer, I was just five years old. He went by another name back then, one closer to the kind the rest of us have, but I don’t know what it was anymore, since for as long as I can remember, we’ve called him Pioneer.
    We lived in New York City back then, in the brownstone my parents bought just before my older sister was born. I remember the pink-and-white-striped wallpaper in Karen’s and my room and my sister Karen’s brown suede school shoes, the ones that she always left right in the middle of the front hall. My mom was holding those shoes when we found out that my sister had disappeared. Karen and I had been out in front of the house playing—well, fighting over what to play, anyway. Karen wanted to draw and I wanted to do hopscotch. I’d run in to tattle on her for pulling my hair, and when I came back with Mom, she was gone. No one saw anything. There were no clues to show where she’d gone or who might’ve taken her. Therewas only one bright yellow piece of chalk and a half-drawn picture of our family on the sidewalk out front. In the drawing, only our feet weren’t completed. I used to think that whoever took her made her stop there on purpose so we wouldn’t have a way to follow.
    My mom cradled Karen’s shoes to her chest nonstop after that—when the cops showed up to ask questions, and especially a few days later, when the two big buildings downtown got hit by airplanes and the cops stopped looking for my sister and started looking for survivors.
    Pioneer came to us not long after. I remember my father letting him in the house. The way he smiled seemed to brighten up the entire room. I hadn’t realized how dark it had become, e thven with the lights on, until he was in it. Something about the way his eyes filled with some unseen candlelight when he smiled made me think of Santa Claus or maybe even Jesus—even though he looked nothing like either of them. He was pale, with close-cropped black hair—nowhere near handsome, but he was kind. I could just feel it.
    The few times my mom’s spoken about those days, she’s mentioned that Pioneer heard about us on the news. He’d told her that he couldn’t get Karen’s face out of his mind and that my mom’s pleas for help haunted him. When the towers fell and the world went crazy, somehow it was my family he felt drawn to. He thought that maybe helping to look for Karen might be a way to focus on one small pieceof the giant tragedy surrounding all of us, that this might make it less overwhelming somehow. He offered to help continue our search, and for the next few weeks he made good on his promise. He even brought others along with him. Later, some of those people came with us to Mandrodage Meadows.
    I’m not sure why we all took to him like we did. I think maybe we just knew he was special. My family was pretty shy. Quiet. We never needed anyone else around until one of us was gone. But we couldn’t find Karen on our own. We were too scared and sad to know what to do. Pioneer never seemed scared or sad. He seemed so sure of everything.
    Almost every night, Pioneer sat with my parents in our kitchen for hours while my mom cried. I could hear their voices from my bed when I couldn’t sleep, when the emptiness on Karen’s side of the room seemed to grow until I was sure it would swallow me whole. I would concentrate on all of their voices, especially the deep tone of Pioneer’s voice, like it was