But he kept the map. He kept adding to it.
The thing that happened next happened on a Wednesday night, the third week of August, a little after two in the morning.
Ossie woke up because the house was too quiet. He didn't know how else to explain it, later. He just woke up and lay there and knew something was wrong. He got up and went out into the hall and the door to Aunt Yolie's room was open and her bed was empty and the front door was standing wide open to the night.
He didn't wake his mother. He would think about that later, too, with a hot shame in his stomach, but at the time all he could think was that the bench was a block away, and that he knew where she would be. He ran out in his pajamas and bare feet, down the porch steps, across Consaul Street in the yellow streetlight.
The bench was empty.
He stood there with his feet stinging from the pavement and his heart slamming and the whole dark neighborhood around him, and for one long, terrible moment he had no idea where she was. Then a porch light came on across Front Street, and a screen door slapped, and he heard Zoli's voice saying, "Néni. Néni, it's okay. It's me. Look, it's Zoltán."
She was in the Ferkos' side yard. She was standing at their back fence in her nightgown, holding a clothespin, looking at the Ferkos' clothesline as if it were her own and she had forgotten what she came out to do. Zoli was standing beside her in a T-shirt and gym shorts, talking to her in Hungarian, low and steady, the way you'd talk to a horse in a storm. Behind him, in the open back door, stood his father, Sandor Ferko, huge and rumpled in an undershirt, watching.
Ossie came around the side of the house. Aunt Yolie turned and looked at him and smiled.
"Oszkár," she said. "You are up late. Pista will be cross."
"Yeah," said Ossie. His voice was shaking. "Let's go home before he finds out."