He was intoxicated by Luke’s stories, and when things were awful, he thought of them: the garden where they’d grow pumpkins and squash, the creek that ran behind the house where they’d catch perch, the cabin—a larger version of the ones he built with his logs—where Luke promised him he would have a real bed, and where even on the coldest of nights, they would always be warm, and where they could bake muffins every week.

One afternoon—it was early January, and so cold that they had to wrap all the greenhouse plants in burlap despite the heaters—they had been working in silence. He could always tell when Luke wanted to talk about their house and when he didn’t, and he knew that today was one of his quiet days, when the brother seemed elsewhere. Brother Luke was never unkind when he was in these moods, only quiet, but the kind of quiet he knew to avoid. But he yearned for one of Luke’s stories; he needed it. It had been such an awful day, the kind of day in which he had wanted to die, and he wanted to hear Luke tell him about their cabin, and about all the things they would do there when they were alone. In their cabin, there would be no Brother Matthew or Father Gabriel or Brother Peter. No one would shout at him or hurt him. It would be like living all the time in the greenhouse, an enchantment without end.

He was reminding himself not to speak when Brother Luke spoke to him. “Jude,” he said, “I’m very sad today.”

“Why, Brother Luke?”

“Well,” said Brother Luke, and paused. “You know how much I care for you, right? But lately I’ve been feeling that you don’t care for me.”

This was terrible to hear, and for a moment he couldn’t speak. “That’s not true!” he told the brother.

But Brother Luke shook his head. “I keep talking to you about our house in the forest,” he said, “but I don’t get the feeling that you really want to go there. To you, they’re just stories, like fairy tales.”

He shook his head. “No, Brother Luke. They’re real to me, too.” He wished he could tell Brother Luke just how real they were, just how much he needed them, how much they had helped him. Brother Luke looked so upset, but finally he was able to convince him that he wanted that life, too, that he wanted to live with Brother Luke and no one else, that he would do whatever he needed to in order to have it. And finally, finally, the brother had smiled, and crouched and hugged him, moving his arms up and down his back. “Thank you, Jude, thank you,” he said, and he, so happy to have made Brother Luke so happy, thanked him back.

And then Brother Luke looked at him, suddenly serious. He had been thinking about it a lot, he said, and he thought it was time for them to build their cabin; it was time that they go away together. But he, Luke, wouldn’t do it alone: Was Jude going to come with him? Did he give him his word? Did he want to be with Brother Luke the way Brother Luke wanted to be with him, just the two of them in their small and perfect world? And of course he did—of course he did.

So there was a plan. They would leave in two months, before Easter; he would celebrate his ninth birthday in their cabin. Brother Luke would take care of everything—all he needed to do was be a good boy, and study hard, and not cause any problems. And, most important, say nothing. If they found out what they were doing, Brother Luke said, then he would be sent away, away from the monastery, to make his way on his own, and Brother Luke wouldn’t be able to help him then. He promised.

The next two months were terrible and wonderful at the same time. Terrible because they passed so slowly. Wonderful because he had a secret, one that made his life better, because it meant his life in the monastery had an end. Every day he woke up eager, because it meant he was one day closer to being with Brother Luke. Every time one of the brothers was with him, he would remember that soon he would be far away from them, and it would be a little less bad. Every time he was beaten or yelled at, he would imagine himself in the cabin, and it would give him the fortitude—a word Brother Luke had taught him—to withstand it.

He had begged Brother Luke to let him help with the preparations, and Brother Luke had told him to gather a sample of every flower and leaf from all the different kinds of plants on the monastery grounds. And so in the afternoons he prowled the property with his Bible, pressing leaves and petals between its pages. He spent less time in the greenhouse, but whenever he saw Luke, the brother would give him one of his somber winks, and he would smile to himself, their secret something warm and delicious.

The night finally arrived, and he was nervous. Brother Matthew was with him in the early evening, right after dinner, but eventually he left, and he was alone. And then there was Brother Luke, holding his finger pressed to his lips, and he nodded. He helped Luke load his books and underwear into the paper bag he held open, and then they were tiptoeing down the hallway, and down the stairs, and then through the darkened building and into the night.

“There’s just a short walk to the car,” Luke whispered to him, and then, when he stopped, “Jude, what’s wrong?”

“My bag,” he said, “my bag from the greenhouse.”

And then Luke smiled his kind smile, and put his hand on his head. “I put it in the car already,” he said, and he smiled back, so grateful to Luke for remembering.

The air was cold, but he hardly noticed. On and on they walked, down the monastery’s long graveled driveway, and past the wooden gates, and up the hill that led to the main road, and then down the main road itself, the night so silent it hummed. As they walked, Brother Luke pointed out different constellations and he named them, he got them all right, and Luke murmured in admiration and stroked the back of his head. “You’re so smart,” he said. “I’m so glad I picked you, Jude.”

Now they were on the road, which he had only been on a few times in his life—to go to the doctor, or to the dentist—although now it was empty, and little animals, muskrats and possums, gamboled before them. Then they were at the car, a long maroon station wagon piebald with rust, its backseat filled with boxes and black trash bags and some of Luke’s favorite plants—the Cattleya schilleriana, with its ugly speckled petals; the Hylocereus undatus, with its sleepy drooping head of a blossom—in their dark-green plastic nests.

It was strange to see Brother Luke in a car, stranger than being in the car itself. But stranger than that was the feeling he had, that everything had been worth it, that all his miseries were going to end, that he was going to a life that would be as good as, perhaps better than, anything he had read about in books.

“Are you ready to go?” Brother Luke whispered to him, and grinned.

“I am,” he whispered back. And Brother Luke turned the key in the ignition.

There were two ways of forgetting. For many years, he had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn’t want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly. But this method wasn’t effective: the memories seeped out anyway. The important thing, he came to realize, was to eliminate them, not just to store them.

So he had invented some solutions. For small memories—little slights, insults—you relived them again and again until they were neutralized, until they became near meaningless with repetition, or until you could believe that they were something that had happened to someone else and you had just heard about it. For larger memories, you held the scene in your head like a film strip, and then you began to erase it, frame by frame. Neither method was easy: you couldn’t stop in the middle of your erasing and examine what you were looking at, for example; you couldn’t start scrolling through parts of it and hope you wouldn’t get ensnared in the details of what had happened, because you of course would. You had to work at it every night, until it was completely gone.