The Path to the Hare Ring
Dane left the den and came back with a small metal box.
“Is that it?” Liko asked.
“This is it.” One by one, Dane set the treasures on the coffee table: the ring with the red stone, the geode, and three little dolls with acorn caps.
“Saskia has the silver necklace,” Dane said. “But here’s everything else. Because once upon a time, a girl hid treasures behind a loose brick in an old chimney. And then she had to leave the woods, but the box stayed behind. And then time passed. And then Naomi became Nomi.”
“Until finally?”
Dane smiled. “Until finally, the girl’s best friends went looking for the box. Because they loved her.”
In a way only Ethan Hasen can, he listens to the story and looks at Nomi’s lost box as a game to play. A puzzle to solve. A literal treasure hunt.
“Road trip,” he says, showing Dane the battered, beloved copy of Mud Pies and Other Recipes. The first page embossed EX LIbrIS with childish handwriting beneath: Naomi Silver, 560 Violet Hill Road, Rhinebeck, New York.
“All we have to do is go there and get it,” he says, eyes lit up with adventure.
“Dude, it’s private property,” Dane says.
“So? We knock on the door, say who we are and what we need.”
“They hid that box seventeen years ago. There’s probably a new house built there now.”
“If there is, we turn around and come back. What’s the big deal?”
“It’s just…not a good idea. You go yourself.”
“It’s a great idea and you’re coming with me.”
Dane wants none of it—the idea of knocking on a stranger’s door and asking to take a walk in their woods is terrifying.
But Ethan has both tremendous patience and tremendous persuasion when he’s latched onto an idea.
Ethan never struggles on the path from concept to execution.
If he can envision it in his mind, he can make it manifest. He sees no reason why a method that works for his art won’t work for everything else.
He never visualizes potential obstacles, forks or detours.
The path is simple: Me see thing. Me want thing. Me create thing.
He does encounter one small hitch, which is an excuse for him and Dane to go driving off without Nomi. “Hardest part about being three and being always together,” he mumbles. “Two go off and it’s immediately suspect.”
“Always keep a lie simple,” Dane says. Something he learned during his painful childhood. And in the end, it’s he who comes up with the cover story.
“Ethan and I want to go see a Renegades game on Saturday,” he says.
“A what?” Nomi says.
“The new minor league baseball team that plays in Fishkill. Want to go?”
“Fuck, no.”
And that’s all it takes.
The Silvers’ place on Violet Hill Road is still there.
An old farmhouse much like Schoenfeld’s, but smaller and painted red.
Judy Silver’s legendary garden beds are crammed with flowers, tall grasses and thick mats of spiky iris foliage.
Dane is crammed with anxious dread when Ethan rings the doorbell, but Ethan’s ready with a missionary’s polite smile and a simple story: He used to live here and loved to play in those woods. Could he go look?
The story goes untold because nobody answers the bell.
“Well, we tried,” Ethan says, the congenial smile morphing to a shit-eating grin. And the two of them simply stroll into the woods.
Nomi described a forest to the boys, but this glade isn’t even fifty yards across.
Just a little woodland buffer between property lots.
But Nomi was young at the time, and nature is always magnified in the eyes of children.
Slopes are mountains, lawns are meadows, groves are forests and puddles are oceans.
The chimney has taken a hit in recent years: The top third is broken clear off and lies in mossy chunks on the ground.
Ethan and Dane go over the rest carefully.
Once. Twice. The third pass, they find the loose brick.
Ethan crows in triumph and Dane takes pictures as the box is pulled out with a shower of dead, dried petals.
It’s rusty, and the hinges squeal as Ethan raises the lid.
“Oh my God, it’s all here,” he breathes. “We found it. Look. Dane. It’s here.”
The ring. The geode. The three dolls. And the silver chain.
It’s all there.
Dane puts arms around Ethan. “I was wrong. It’s a really good idea.”
He’s all for giving it to Nomi straight away but Ethan disagrees. This has to be an experience. A journey to take Nomi back to childhood.
He designs a treasure hunt and heeds Dane’s advice to keep it simple: “You’re springing a big emotional surprise on her at the end. You don’t need to make the journey bigger than the destination.”
So Ethan makes the dozen notes left around the farm simple and direct:
Look on the back of the wind spinner.
Visit the Green Man on the side of the chicken coop.
Something is hiding in the towel basket by the pool.
Take the path to the Hare Ring.
Nomi follows the clues, occasionally smiling or grimacing at Ethan and Dane, who are following at a distance. “Hasenpfeffer, if I get to the end and the prize isn’t Richard Gere, it’s going to be unpleasant.”
“Lower your expectations,” Ethan says.
“You’ll be so underwhelmed,” Dane adds, although his heart starts to kick up as they follow Nomi along the path through the woods and emerge into the Hare Ring.
It’s wisteria time, and the perimeter is bursting with blossoms. In the center of the clearing, the stone block waits, patient and majestic. And to Dane, always a little eerie.
“Now what?” Nomi says, and Ethan points toward the block.
As they follow her, Ethan takes Dane’s hand tight.
Dane looks at him, heart absolutely hammering through his chest wall now.
He lifts their clenched fingers to his mouth and kisses them.
Ethan widens his eyes, mouths Holy shit over their knuckles.
He lets go and puts his arm around Dane’s shoulders.
He’s just a bit taller, and Dane fits perfectly beneath its drape as his own arm slides around Ethan’s waist.
Nomi approaches the block, on top of which is the file card box. She regards it, hands on hips. “What is…”
Then her hands fly to her mouth. Her shoulders hunch up to her ears and her whole body curls forward. She folds in on herself, shaking her head. She looks at the boys, eyes enormous over the steeple of her fingers and whispers, “No.”
Ethan and Dane hold perfectly still and silent.
“No,” Nomi says. “No. No. You didn’t… How did you… No. Oh my God…”
“Open it,” Dane says, unable to bear it any longer.
Her hands come off her mouth and rest on the box. “How did you get this? Where did you get this? What did you do…”
They boys come to her now, one on either side. “Open it,” Ethan says softly.
“I can’t.” She seems almost afraid of the box. “No. You didn’t.”
“We did,” Dane says. “Open it.”
She does. One glance inside and her face is back in her hands. She’s weeping in great shuddering sobs, fingers sliding up to dig in her hair. “Oh my God. Oh my God, how… How did you…?”
“You inscribed all your childhood books,” Ethan says. “560 Violet Hill Road in Rhinebeck. We just got a map and went looking.”
“We told you we were going to the Renegades game,” Dane says.
“I don’t believe it,” Nomi says, dragging the backs of her hands over her eyes.
Those hands shake as she reaches inside the box.
She takes out the ring first, with its little red stone.
“This was Katie’s,” she says tightly, sliding it onto her pinky.
“And oh my God, she put in this crystal. And…” She begins crying again as she takes out the little acorn dolls and clutches them to her heart.
“I can’t believe you did this. I can’t believe you did this for me. ”
Last is the silver chain, which rips Nomi in two, releasing a magnificent avalanche of sobbing laughter, interspersed with feverish words that sound like both celebration and confession.
“Oh God, this was my mother’s. Andy said not to give it away, it was treasure, I had to keep it always.
But the box was for treasure so I put it inside and we hid it and…
” She sways a little, and sinks onto her knees by the great stone.
“I promised him I wouldn’t ever give it away, but I did. ”
“No, you didn’t,” Ethan says, kneeling behind her. “You didn’t give it away, you just put it away. For a really long time.”
Dane has unclasped the chain. He kneels in front of Nomi and holds it out by the ends. “Your silver, my liege,” he whispers.
She wipes her eyes again and leans toward him. He fastens the necklace at her nape. Her fingertips caress its length along her collarbones.
“Thank you,” she says. “I love you. I love both of you so much.”
She cants forward against Dane’s chest. He holds her, while Ethan drapes over her back, his hands in Dane’s hair.
“That,” Liko said, “is a tremendous story.” He had the geode on his palm and was staring into its cavern of sparkly points.
“And I’m all told out,” Dane said, slapping his knees and getting up. “I’m going to bed. We can continue this tomorrow.” He checked his watch. “Or later today.”
Liko clicked off the TV and shut his laptop. “Would you say that was the moment you three fell in love?”
“I don’t know about the moment,” Dane said. “But if were unaware or pretending up until then, we weren’t anymore.”