Epilogue: Monday Morning
He walked to school by himself.
The route was twenty minutes, through the market square and past the old post office and along the canal path where the trees were doing their autumn work, losing their leaves with the specific indifferent abundance of trees that had no interest in the feelings of observers.
He had memorized the route the day before, on Sunday, while Richard’s housekeeper had shown him the house with the particular care of someone who understood that a new person in a space needed to learn the space before the space became theirs. He had walked the route twice, timing it, noting the landmarks.
Twenty-two minutes, he had found, at his ordinary pace. Twenty if he walked faster. He chose to walk at his ordinary pace.
The school was brick and three stories and had a courtyard where children were already moving in the patterns of social groups that had been established long before his arrival and would require time to understand. He stood at the gate for a moment and observed the patterns — who moved toward whom, which spaces were claimed, which were genuinely open.
He was good at this.
He went in.
The teacher, a woman named Ms. Bartczak, had been briefed that he was joining and had the particular manner of someone who had decided to treat him ordinarily, which he appreciated more than the alternatives.
He was shown to a seat.
He sat.
He looked at the room — at the other children, at the arrangement of desks, at the window and what it showed — with the attentiveness he brought to new situations, storing what was useful, filing what wasn’t.
The child at the next desk looked at him.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Where were you before?”
He thought about how to answer this.
“Not here,” he said.
She considered this response with the seriousness that some children brought to the obvious.
“Fair,” she said, and turned back to her notebook.
He almost smiled.
He took out the notebook that had been in the bag that had been on the desk in the room that was his now, and he wrote the date at the top of the first page in the careful, precise handwriting he had taught himself from a workbook he’d found outside a library three years ago, and he waited for the lesson to begin.
Outside, through the window, the canal path he had walked twenty minutes ago was doing its ordinary morning business — cyclists and dog walkers and a man with a newspaper who stopped at the bench and sat down with the specific intentionality of someone who had been planning this bench all morning.
Ordinary things.
Leo watched them for a moment.
Then he turned back to the page.
Ready.
