Part Nine: The Choice
Leo thought about his grandfather’s apartment, which was small and warm in an unreliable way — the radiator worked in October and failed in December and worked again in February for reasons that neither of them had ever identified. He thought about the train tracks that were audible from the bedroom window at night, which he had always found, despite everything, oddly companionable — the sound of things moving through the dark toward somewhere.
He thought about Kowalska Street and the woman who had walked away without giving her name.
He thought about Sofia, four days old, breathing now with the steadiness of something that had been close to stopping and had been returned.
He thought about the feeling — he had no better word for it than feeling — of walking into that room. The certainty that he was stepping into something he didn’t fully understand, combined with the certainty that the understanding could wait because the action could not. He had been afraid, in the specific way of someone who knew the stakes and was choosing to act anyway, which was different from not being afraid and was, in his limited but carefully observed experience, more reliable.
He thought about Richard’s offer.
He thought about what it would mean to live in a house in the northern district with a room and a school and meals at regular intervals, and he tested the thought for its truth — whether it was something he wanted or something he thought he should want, whether the difference mattered, whether he could tell.
He thought about belonging.
He had a sense — not yet formed enough to be a thought exactly, more like a direction — that the thing Richard was offering was not the same thing as belonging, that belonging was something built differently, over time, out of smaller materials: shared meals and known jokes and the specific knowledge of someone’s habits that you only got from proximity and attention. That it could not be given as a fact but only developed as a truth.
He thought: I can learn that. That is something that can be learned.
He looked at Richard.
“My grandfather comes too,” he said. “Or I come on Sundays and Thursdays. One or the other.”
“Sundays and Thursdays,” Richard said. “And any other day you need.”
“And I go to school by myself. I don’t need — I don’t want someone taking me.”
“Understood.”
“And if it doesn’t work — if I try it and it doesn’t feel right — I can say so.”
“Yes,” Richard said. “That is always true of any arrangement.”
Leo looked at him for a moment longer.
“Okay,” he said.
Richard nodded, once.
“Then we’ll start on Monday,” he said. “That gives us the weekend to arrange things.”
He stood, and Leo stood, and they shook hands across the small table — the man who had built things and the boy who noticed things, which were, Richard thought, not such different skills when you examined them closely.
