PART 4 – “The Wrong Way Home”
James didn’t cry when Shadow disappeared the second time.
He just sat there, quietly tracing the edges of the folded snowflake in his lap, as if by touch alone he could keep the dog’s shape in his hands.
Carol stayed close.
She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t remind him that it was below freezing. She just wrapped a second blanket around his shoulders and settled onto the cold stone bench beside him.
He hadn’t spoken in nearly two hours.
Finally, as frost gathered at the tips of the grass, James said, “He left something behind.”
Carol looked up.
“A sign?”
James shook his head. “No. A memory.”
The next morning, he insisted on walking the long path behind the chapel. It was a narrow trail—uneven and rutted, bordered by winter-bare dogwoods and wind-rattled bird feeders. Residents rarely used it once the cold came in.
But James seemed to know exactly where he was going.
Carol followed a few steps behind, wrapped in her father’s old coat, hands tucked in her sleeves.
About halfway down the trail, James stopped.
He knelt.
And brushed the dirt away from a small, half-buried stone.
It was round and smooth, about the size of a biscuit. A child’s name was scratched into it in faint red ink.
“Ruthie.”
Carol crouched beside him, breath visible in the cold.
“Is this a grave?”
James shook his head.
“She carved it after Mama died. Said she didn’t want to forget where she’d cried the first time she understood what forever meant.”
He closed his eyes.
“She brought me here. I remember now. Gideon sat right there. She said, ‘This is where I’ll leave my sadness, so it doesn’t follow me forever.’”
Carol touched the stone gently.
“Did it work?”
James smiled, faint and distant.
“Only until she left.”
Back at Magnolia Glen, something shifted.
James no longer wandered.
Not in body, at least.
But something inside him began to stir—like a tide changing direction. Some days he was sharper than ever. Other days he sat in silence, staring out the window as if waiting for something just beyond the frame to reappear.
He still carried the penny.
Still traced the ridges of Ruth’s letter with a reverence Carol couldn’t describe.
He drew again, too.
Dozens of pages. All of them scenes from memory.
One of Nadine in her wedding dress, holding a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace. One of Carol on her first bicycle, training wheels crooked. One of Ruth, hair in a ribbon, holding hands with a boy Carol didn’t recognize.
But the most common sketch?
Shadow.
Drawn again and again, from different angles. Sometimes walking. Sometimes waiting.
Sometimes leading James forward on a leash that looked more like a thread of light.
One morning in late December, James knocked softly on the activities room door.
Etta, surprised, looked up from a cart of board games.
“Mr. Wilder? Can I help you?”
James smiled.
“I’d like to teach a class,” he said. “Drawing. Memory sketching. You think anyone’d show up?”
Etta blinked.
Then beamed.
“I think they’d line up.”
The class met every Tuesday morning.
James called it Memory in Motion.
“Even if you can’t remember something until the pencil touches the page,” he told the group, “that still counts. That especially counts.”
He had a dozen regulars by mid-January.
One drew her childhood horse.
Another sketched the kitchen wallpaper from her first apartment.
One woman cried softly while tracing the outline of a boy’s face. “I never got to see him grow up,” she whispered. “But I remember this—his little chin.”
James just nodded, gently. “Draw him as many times as you need.”
Then one Tuesday, Carol walked into the room and froze.
James was drawing Shadow again.
But this time, the dog was standing on a porch. The same sagging porch of the house where James had grown up. The same porch where they’d found him asleep that first time he disappeared.
The house was rendered in meticulous detail. So was the sky. The fall leaves on the lawn. Even the way the steps dipped to one side.
But it was the boy on the porch that made her throat tighten.
Small, maybe seven years old. In overalls.
Holding out a hand toward the dog.
“Is that… you?” she asked softly.
James didn’t look up.
He just kept drawing.
“That’s the day Gideon found me,” he said. “After Mama died. I went missing for hours. Everyone thought I ran away. But I was just trying to get to her grave.”
He paused.
“Gideon followed. Stayed with me the whole time. Even after it got dark.”
Carol’s hands curled around the back of a chair.
“I thought I made it back home on my own,” James continued.
“But now I remember—he led me the whole way. I just didn’t know it.”
That night, Carol took the sketch and framed it
She hung it by the window in his room.
James stared at it for a long time before bed.
“He never left,” he whispered.
Carol tucked the blanket higher around his chest.
“No,” she said. “He just found a different way back.”
But winter wasn’t finished.
And neither was memory.
On the final day of January, James stood at the entrance to the walking path, eyes scanning the horizon.
“I heard him,” he told Etta. “In the wind.”
Etta didn’t question it.
She helped him into his coat and boots.
He took his sketchbook and his gloves.
And whispered, “He’s waiting for me.”
PART 5 – “The Wrong Way Home”
The sky that morning was the color of steel.
James Wilder stood at the edge of the walking path in his navy peacoat, wool cap pulled low over his ears, sketchbook clutched to his chest. His breath came in short, visible puffs. He looked both alert and far away—like a man who had just remembered something too big to carry alone.
“I heard him,” he said again. “Shadow’s out there.”
Etta buttoned the last clasp on his coat. “Where do you think he went, Mr. Wilder?”
James didn’t hesitate. “To the old train depot.”
Etta blinked. “The one they tore down years ago?”
James turned to her then, eyes sharp and clear.
“No. The real one. The one still standing in my head.”
Carol drove them in her Subaru.
She didn’t ask why.
She didn’t try to explain that the train depot had been converted into a strip of townhomes in 2009. That the only thing left of the original building was a rusted signal post and a forgotten stretch of track swallowed up by weeds.
James stared out the window as they passed the edges of Lexington, nodding as if each street corner said yes, you remember me.
Shadow had always walked these edges.
Carol had tracked the dog’s routes after every disappearance. They always circled the same three anchors: the house where James grew up, the field near the broken fence line, and the hollow near the depot ruins.
A triangle of memory.
James called it his compass.
When they parked beside the overgrown lot, James stepped out slowly, leaning on his cane.
The air smelled of cedar and frozen earth.
Carol watched as he walked toward the slope where the old tracks vanished into a thicket of saplings. He moved with unusual certainty, as if he were retracing steps he hadn’t taken in seventy years.
Then he stopped.
And knelt.
The sketchbook fell open beside him, its pages ruffling in the breeze.
Carol approached quietly.
James was staring at a shallow divot in the earth.
“Here,” he said. “This is where she put it.”
“Who?”
“Ruth.”
He reached into the hollow and pulled out something small. Rusted. Round.
An old dog tag.
Carol took it gently from his hands.
It was brass, scratched nearly smooth—but just legible:
GIDEON – 1951
James didn’t speak on the drive home.
He held the tag in one hand, thumb gently circling its surface.
Carol glanced over once and saw him smiling—not with joy, exactly, but with a kind of quiet completion.
Like someone who had finally remembered the beginning of a story he’d spent decades trying to finish.
That night, James couldn’t sleep.
He sat at his window, wrapped in a plaid wool blanket, watching the wind worry the branches outside. The framed sketch of Shadow and the boy on the porch hung behind him like a silent witness.
Then, just after 3 a.m., he stood.
Walked to his desk.
And began to write.
Not draw.
Write.
In careful, shaky script, he filled a page. Then another.
He didn’t stop until the sun began to rise.
Carol found him asleep in the chair, pencil still in hand.
She didn’t wake him.
Instead, she picked up the top sheet of paper and read the words aloud in a whisper.
To whoever finds this—
If you’ve lost something, walk it back.
Follow the path that tugs at your bones.
The dog will meet you there.
He remembers more than we do.
And if you can’t find your way—
He’ll bring the map in his eyes.
—James Wilder
Tears blurred her vision.
She pressed the page to her chest.
James began fading after that.
Not all at once.
But the light that had come back into him with Shadow’s presence began to dim. The clarity unraveled. Some mornings he didn’t recognize his room. Once, he asked Carol if she was his sister. And then cried when she told him the truth.
Still, he walked.
Every day.
Even without Shadow, he walked.
He called it the dog’s shift.
“I’ll walk it until he comes back to clock out.”
On the first full thaw of spring, the daffodils bloomed behind Magnolia Glen.
James stood beneath the oak tree at the end of the walking path, his coat unzipped, the old dog tag hanging from a red ribbon around his neck.
“I think he’s almost home,” he told Carol.
She wrapped her arms around him.
“Maybe you are too.”
James didn’t answer.
He just looked into the distance, smiled faintly, and said:
“I hope he knows I remember him now.”
PART 6 – “The Wrong Way Home”
Spring held on like a breath.
The garden behind Magnolia Glen flushed green and gold. Tulips opened near the fountain. The crabapple trees dropped pink petals like forgotten confetti. The world felt younger somehow—except for James Wilder.
James, at 78, had begun to retreat again.
The spark that Shadow had stirred in him flickered. The names he had remembered—Nadine, Ruth, Carol—faded faster now. Some mornings, he called his daughter “teacher.” Other days, he didn’t speak at all.
But he still walked.
Even when his knees ached. Even when his balance swayed. He walked the same paths Shadow once had. Slowly. Stubbornly.
He called it keeping the trail warm.
Etta noticed something strange.
James never got lost anymore.
Before Shadow, he’d wander out and forget the way back. But now—even with his memory fraying again—he always returned to the same bench in the east courtyard. The one where Shadow used to wait for him.
As if the dog’s scent still lingered there.
As if something unseen was still guiding his feet.
Carol began writing down his sketches.
Each time he remembered something new—even briefly—she’d sit with him and ask him to draw it. A mailbox. A barbershop. A tire swing. A woman in saddle shoes with windblown hair.
She labeled them with dates. Places. Names.
“Just in case,” she said quietly. “For when the remembering stops.”
One day, James handed her a sketch of a boy and a girl on a dock. Their feet dangled over the water, and a dog lay between them—ears up, watching the lake.
Carol blinked.
“Is that you and Ruth?”
James smiled.
“No. That’s me and you. But Shadow put us there.”
He grew more poetic as he declined.
Words came like riddles, drifting out of sleep and into daylight.
“He left the door open behind him.”
“The stars are different when you’re followed.”
“Memory’s not just in the mind. It’s in the feet.”
Carol wrote every one down.
Even when they didn’t make sense.
Especially then.
One afternoon in late April, James vanished again.
But this time, he didn’t take a coat.
Didn’t bring his cane.
Didn’t even wear shoes.
They found him sitting in the mulch beneath the oak tree, hands buried in the earth like he was trying to dig his way into the past.
Etta knelt beside him.
“Mr. Wilder? Are you cold?”
He looked at her with the faintest flicker of recognition.
“I’m not cold,” he said. “I’m home.”
After that, Carol moved into a short-term guest suite on the second floor.
She cooked him oatmeal in the mornings.
Played Johnny Cash after dinner.
Some nights, they said nothing at all—just sat by the window, watching the wind through the budding trees.
Once, he reached over and squeezed her hand.
“You’re the only one he stayed for,” he said.
“Who?” she asked.
James just smiled.
And looked at the corner of the room like he saw someone standing there.
On May 9th, he had a fall.
It wasn’t dramatic—no ambulance, no panic. Just a slow collapse in the hallway, his knees giving way like sandbags losing shape. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t seem hurt. He just lay there, blinking at the ceiling.
When Etta and Carol helped him up, he whispered, “He’s at the end now. I’m just a few steps behind.”
Carol kissed his forehead.
“We’ll walk the rest together.”
James closed his eyes and nodded.
That night, he slept for fourteen hours.
When he woke, he didn’t speak.
He simply pointed to his red sketchbook, still resting on the nightstand.
Carol opened it.
Inside was a single unfinished drawing—a man walking down a trail of light, with a dog just ahead of him.
No leash.
No need.
Just trust.
At the bottom, three words were scrawled in his shaky script:
“Wait for me.”