* * *
Christmas morning came up white and blinding, the sky scrubbed blue, every roof on Holloway Lane wearing a foot of new snow like frosting on a sheet cake. Joey got Lazer Tag. He screamed so loudly when he tore the paper off that Mrs. Kowalski next door, she told Rosemary later, thought someone had been murdered. He spent the next hour stalking his father through the downstairs with the plastic pistol, the sensor strapped over his pajamas like a tiny bulletproof vest, the house full of the electronic warbling of imaginary deaths. Paul got a sweater and a Browns calendar. Theresa got a Polaroid of Joey in front of the tree, taken that morning by Lena, and wept, because Theresa wept at anything. Rosemary opened her presents one by one, folded every sheet of paper, and said thank you, honey, it's lovely, in exactly the same voice for each, and did not once look at Lena.
It was Joey who found the boats.
He went out to the porch at ten to check on the fort and came back in with snow to his knees and a look on his face that Lena would remember for the rest of her life. In his mittens he held a small wooden boat about eight inches long. It was a sailboat, carved out of some pale fine-grained wood and sanded so smooth it felt like skin, with a mast made of a dowel and a sail cut from a piece of white canvas, and painted on its transom in tiny careful red letters was its name: THE LIAR. Tied to the mast with a bit of string was a card.
FOR JOEY, it said. BEST SHOT ON HOLLOWAY LANE, WORST ALIBI. MERRY CHRISTMAS. — D.R.
"There's one at Kevin's," Joey said in a small voice. "On his porch. I saw it from the fort. And one at Moose's." Moose was Marcus Whitfield, the biggest of the three, the one in the silver jacket. "Kevin's is called THE CANNON, because he threw the last one. Moose's says THE LOOKOUT." He turned the boat over in his hands. "He made them. He told us he builds boats. Real ones, big. I didn't believe him."
"That's nice of him," Theresa said, looking at Lena over her son's head.