Part Four: Who They Became
Hugo was the one who thought before he spoke. He was quiet in company — not shy, which was a distinction he had established quite firmly by the time he was seven, telling a well-meaning teacher that he was not shy, he was thinking, and the difference was important. He had a private interior life that expressed itself in occasional and precise observations, in a quality of listening that made people feel heard in a way they could not always account for. He had his father’s jaw and my husband Michel’s eyes and a combination of qualities that was entirely his own.
He did not like speaking in public. This was true and specific and had been true since he was old enough to have a preference about it. Group presentations at school were something he prepared for with the particular thoroughness of someone who understands that preparation is the tax you pay for managing a thing you find difficult. He delivered them adequately and was relieved when they were over. He had told me once, when he was eleven, that the problem with speaking in public was not the speaking but the not knowing how people were receiving it — that private conversation gave you feedback and public speaking gave you nothing, and the nothing was uncomfortable.
Luc was the one who moved through the world with more velocity. He was the one who had opinions about everything and expressed them with a directness that occasionally startled adults who were not expecting that quality from a child and that I found, for the most part, deeply admirable. He was funny in the specific way of someone who has a genuine sense of the absurd — not performing humor but actually finding things funny, laughing at his own jokes but also at other people’s, which was rarer. He had friends easily because he was genuinely interested in people, which people noticed.
They were different from each other in ways that had emerged slowly and clearly over twelve years, and they were bound to each other in the way of people who have shared everything from the beginning, who have a history together that goes back before memory. They had a language between them that was not secret but was not entirely translatable — shorthand developed over years of proximity, references that compressed entire conversations into a word or a look.
They were twelve years old. They were, both of them, the best thing that had happened in my life since Théo himself, and the feeling was not complicated by the way they had come to me, because the way they had come to me was simply the way it had been, and what mattered was the twelve years that had followed.
