We had a great breakfast that morning. At the home, we would get a breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs once a month. Pancakes were less of a rarity — we would have them once a week or so. But that day we had both, plus oatmeal and juice and English muffins, which were usually reserved for someone else. Grownups, apparently.

While thorough in his work, it seemed that my doppelganger was less than perfect in his removal of evidence. The two staff bedrooms were left barren of any personal effects. Even the beds were stripped. There were no clothes, no books, no jewelry or cosmetics, not even a bar of soap in the soap dish. In the office, the files all seemed to be in order, but there were blank spaces where names or signatures had once been. On the walls there were void spots where pictures must have once hung. A perusal of the home’s photo album would reveal similar gaps. And yet, in spite of all these omissions, the removal was not complete. Not quite. There were odd details like the empty bedrooms and the English muffins — things which couldn’t logically belong to us, and yet we had no recollection of whose they were. And there were what Lucinda called “contextual holes,” little gaps seemingly in reality itself, like continuity errors in a bad TV show. The most of glaring of these was the fact that we were there at all. A bunch of kids left unsupervised in an institution like the home? It just didn’t make sense.

Dr. MacHale had come and gone. He rang the front doorbell around two in the morning. We were still all out back looking at the mountains, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. Robert said that we shouldn’t answer, that it might be the cops or somebody from the County. Todd pointed out that neither the police nor Social Services were likely to give up and go away if no one answered the door.

MacHale was delighted when he saw Todd, and understandably terrified when he saw Raymond. Of course, he was really there to see someone else. Just another contextual hole. I think he had come in the hopes that he would remember who it was when he got there. But that person was gone. None of us could remember her. We didn’t even know for sure that her was the correct pronoun, although there was a certain logic which insisted that the missing person was a woman. Or maybe there were several missing adults. There was just no way of knowing. She was gone; the were gone. The operative word was gone.