St. Agnes's Home for Children — Somerset, England | Spring 1985
Two years old, and he had already learned that the pond was the best thinking place.
The other children were loud. Not badly loud — just the ordinary loud of small people who had not yet learned to separate the inside of their heads from the outside of their mouths. They ran the courtyard in packs. They argued over the wooden train set in the common room and cried when they fell and called for the Sisters and were held and recovered and did it all again. They were, in every way the Sisters understood childhood, completely normal.
Alen watched them from the garden with the same quality of attention he gave everything: patient, thorough, genuinely interested in the data. He had worked out, sometime in the past six months, that the way they moved in groups had a logic to it — there was always one who decided the direction, and two or three who followed first, and then the rest came along — and he found this interesting in the way he found most things interesting, which was completely and without judgment.
He just didn't particularly want to participate.
The pond was better. The pond had dragonflies and tadpoles and the particular quality of light in the late afternoon that made the water look like hammered silver from one angle and dark green from another, and it had reflections that moved in ways he could predict if he watched long enough, and it was quiet, and quiet was where he thought best.
He was sitting at the edge of it on a Tuesday in April, legs crossed on the wet grass, watching a dragonfly hold perfectly still six inches above a lily pad while its wings moved faster than he could see individually, only as a blur, and he was thinking about the problem of the wings — how something could work that hard and stay so still — when he heard footsteps on the gravel path and then on the grass, and looked up.
Sister Margaret was watching him from the kitchen window again. He could see her silhouette against the glass. She watched him most afternoons. He did not find this worrying — he found it a data point about how adults responded to children who did not behave the way the framework expected. She was not unkind. She was uncertain. Those were different things.
He looked back at the dragonfly.
* * *
Kitchen — St. Agnes's Home | Same afternoon
"He's doing it again," Sister Margaret said. She had been wiping the same section of counter for two minutes without noticing. "Just sitting there. Staring. He hasn't moved in forty minutes."
Sister Agnes came to stand beside her at the window. She looked at the small figure by the pond — the oversized woollen sweater, the blonde hair, the absolute stillness of him in a world that was generally in motion — and felt the particular feeling she always felt looking at Alen, which was not quite worry and not quite wonder and lived somewhere between the two.
"He's peaceful," she said.
"It isn't natural," Margaret said. "Two-year-olds don't sit still like that. They don't — observe. Like he's taking notes."
Agnes did not answer immediately. She had held him on his first night, in this kitchen, with the lamp throwing a yellow circle across the table and the storm finally quiet outside, and she had looked into those blue eyes and felt something she had never felt holding a child before — the specific sensation of being considered. Assessed. Not by a baby. By whatever Alen was already in the process of becoming.
She had never told anyone that. She wasn't sure anyone would understand it.
"He's waiting," she said finally.
"For what?"
Agnes looked at the boy by the pond. He had tilted his head slightly — following something, she thought. The dragonfly, maybe. Whatever he was looking at.
"I don't know," she said. "But I think he'll recognize it when it arrives."
* * *
St. Agnes's Home — Gravel driveway | April 1985, 14:17
The car was a dark green Jaguar, recently serviced and driven carefully, which told Sister Bridget — who handled the front reception and had opinions about what cars said about people — that the woman driving it was both successful and not extravagant about it. She parked it neatly, got out without checking her appearance in the side mirror, and crossed the gravel with the purposeful walk of someone who had learned to move through the world efficiently because time was limited and there was always more work.
Dr. Jessica Richard was forty-one years old. She had a virologist's hands — precise, always slightly chapped from the washing — and a humanitarian's posture, which was the posture of someone who had spent years bending toward people in chairs lower than her own. She was wearing a good coat and sensible shoes and carrying a leather document folder that she had owned for fifteen years, and she looked, in every outward way, like exactly what she was: a well-regarded scientist who had come to assess a potential funding project.
The Mother Superior met her at the door. They walked the building together — the medical wing, the dormitories, the common room where six children were engaged in an argument about a wooden train — and Jessica made appropriate notes in the margins of the funding documents and asked appropriate questions about the facility's operational budget and medical supply chain.
She was good at the appropriate questions. She had been good at them for five years, since Jason died, since the house in Edinburgh became the place where the music used to be. She had learned that if you kept moving and kept asking appropriate questions, the silence did not accumulate the way it did when you stopped.
She was halfway through a question about the pharmaceutical supplier when she stopped.
Through the window of the common room, across the courtyard, she could see the garden. And in the garden, beside the pond, a small figure in an oversized sweater was sitting so still that for a moment she thought it was a garden ornament.
"Who is that?" she asked.
The Mother Superior followed her gaze. The sound she made was not quite a sigh — more the quiet exhalation of someone who has thought about a particular thing many times and not yet resolved it.
"That is Alen. He came to us in February 1984. Left at the gate in a storm." She paused. "He has a half-locket with his name on it and no other record. No family we have been able to trace."
"He's very still."
"He usually is. The Sisters worry he's unhappy. I think — I think he simply experiences things differently to most children." Another pause. "He is not unhappy. I am certain of that. He is just — somewhere we cannot quite reach."
Jessica was not listening to the last part. She had already excused herself and was crossing the wet grass.
* * *
She did not approach him the way adults generally approached small children — with the lowered voice and the exaggerated friendliness of someone performing accessibility. She came like a person who had decided to sit by a pond, which was what she did: she sat down on the wet grass beside him without announcement, ignored what the dampness was doing to her coat, and looked at the pond.
Alen did not flinch. He did not look up. He continued to watch the dragonfly, which had shifted position slightly since she sat down but was still doing the thing with its wings.
Jessica looked at the dragonfly too. She had a virologist's eye for biological anomaly, and the wing mechanics of odonata had always struck her as one of the more elegant engineering problems in the natural world — four wings operating independently, each adjusting in real time to maintain position against wind variation, the whole system operating at frequencies that put the energy expenditure models completely at odds with the observed outputs.
"The wings," she said quietly. Not to him. Just thinking aloud. "The way they hover. The energy cost of it shouldn't be possible by standard models."
Alen turned his head.
Jessica looked at him for the first time at close range, and the thing she had noticed through the window — the quality of attention in his face — landed differently up close. His eyes were a vivid, specific blue that she had no reference point for in a child's face, and they looked at her with the considered, unhurried interest of someone who had decided she was worth examining.
He looked at her for three seconds. Then he looked at the dragonfly. Then he raised one small finger and pointed at it, with the precision of someone indicating a specific data point.
"Fast," he said.
Not baby-talk. Not the approximate sound of a word being attempted. The word itself, correctly deployed, meaning exactly what it was supposed to mean.
Jessica felt something loosen in her chest that she had not known was tight.
"Yes," she said. "Very fast."
She looked at the pond. He looked at the pond. The dragonfly moved to a different lily pad and they both tracked it without comment, and the afternoon light came through the garden wall at the low angle of English spring that makes everything look slightly more important than it is, and neither of them said anything for a minute.
Then Jessica said: "My name is Jessica. I used to sit by a river in Scotland when I was working. Looking for things."
Alen looked at her. "What things?"
"Answers, mostly. I was a scientist. Scientists are always looking for things they cannot see yet." She tilted her head. "What are you looking for? In the pond."
He considered this. She could see him considering it — the slight shift in his expression that was not confusion but the specific look of someone giving a question the weight it deserved.
He put his hand against his chest. Under the sweater, she would learn later, there was a half-locket on a chain — his only possession from before, the half that said
ALEN
in small engraved letters, which Sister Agnes had placed there herself when he was old enough to wear it without pulling it off.
"Me," he said.
One word. Two years old. Jessica Richard, who had spent fifteen years developing the controlled affect of a scientist presenting findings and five years developing the controlled affect of a woman who had decided not to feel too much, sat by a pond in Somerset and was briefly undone by a single syllable from a child who was looking for himself.
She did not let him see it. She breathed through it. She looked at the pond.
"That's a good thing to look for," she said. "It takes most people their whole lives."
He turned back to the dragonfly. She turned back to the dragonfly. And that was how it started.
* * *
She came back the next day. The Mother Superior opened the door with an expression that suggested she had been half-expecting this and had not entirely decided what to do about it.
Jessica had brought a model airplane kit. The box said
ages 8 and up,
which she had noticed and decided was not relevant information.
She brought it to the garden, where Alen was in his usual place by the pond, and sat down and opened the box without explanation. He came to look. He did not ask what it was — he looked at the pieces the way he looked at everything, cataloguing, working out the logic of it.
He sat down.
She handed him a piece. He turned it over in his fingers, examined the connection point, looked at the other pieces in the box, and placed it correctly without trying it wrong first.
"You've done this before," she said.
"No." He picked up another piece. Examined it. Set it against the first one.
"Then how do you know where it goes?"
He thought about this seriously. She could see him working on an answer that was accurate, which was different from working on an answer that was easy.
"It tells you," he said. "If you look right."
She watched him work. His hands were two-year-old hands — small, still slightly rounded with the softness of early childhood — but they moved with a precision that did not match their size. He sorted pieces not by shape but by function, by what they were
for,
and he assembled them in the order that made structural sense rather than the order on the instruction sheet, because he had apparently worked out the structural logic independently and found the instruction sheet's approach suboptimal.
After twenty minutes he had half an airplane and had not made a single error.
Jessica sat on the wet grass with her arms around her knees and watched him and thought about Jason, who had believed very firmly that intelligence was not a property of particular people but a quality of particular moments — that anyone could be brilliant, briefly, when the conditions were right, when the problem was the right problem and the mind was the right mind for it. He had said this in their kitchen in Edinburgh, gesturing with a piece of toast, and she had argued with him on scientific grounds, and he had laughed at her and said she was proving his point by being brilliant at arguing.
She thought about that. She thought about the boy in front of her, who was not experiencing a brilliant moment — who was simply, consistently, operating at a level that had no business existing in a child who had spent the past year by a pond watching tadpoles and waiting.
"You're not just smart, are you," she said.
He didn't look up. He was fitting the fuselage together with both hands, keeping the pressure even.
"I don't know," he said. "What's smart?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again. She was a virologist with three published books and a research chair and she did not have a satisfactory answer to that question, and she was fairly certain a satisfactory answer to that question did not exist, and she thought that was probably the correct response for a child who was asking it genuinely rather than rhetorically.
"A good question," she said.
He nodded, as though this confirmed something, and went back to the airplane.
* * *
She came back five more times in April. Six times in May. She brought books — not children's books but illustrated scientific texts, the kind with cross-section diagrams and genuine data, because she had watched him look at a picture book and clock the moment, thirty seconds in, when he had extracted everything he was going to extract from it. She brought a magnifying glass. She brought a collection of pressed insects in glass frames, which had been Jason's, and which she had kept because she could not make herself give them away, and which she now handed to a two-year-old who held each frame at precisely the right angle to see the specimen detail and did not smudge the glass.
She brought herself. That was the other thing she brought. She came and sat by the pond and talked to him the way she had talked to Jason — without simplification, without performance, as one thinking person to another. She told him about the river in Scotland. She told him about the structure of viruses, in terms he did not have vocabulary for yet but which she could see him filing away anyway. She told him, once, about Jason — about a man who had thought that being alive was the best argument for anything — and Alen had listened with his particular quality of complete attention and then said, after a pause:
"Where did he go?"
and she had said
"Away,"
and he had looked at the pond and said
"That's sad"
with such complete and uncomplicated sincerity that she had had to look at the sky for a moment.
She talked to the Mother Superior. She talked to her solicitor. She talked to herself, in the Edinburgh house, in the room that had been quiet for five years, and for the first time the quiet felt like a question with an answer rather than a question with no answer.
By June, the paperwork was done.
* * *
St. Agnes's Home — Iron Gates | June 1985, 09:40
It was a clear morning, which England does rarely enough that it feels like a specific gift when it happens. The light was the particular gold of early summer, and the garden was in full colour, and the iron gates stood open for the first time since Alen had arrived.
Sister Agnes had tied his coat buttons herself. She had done it slowly, the way she did things she wanted to remember, and when she was finished she had held the lapels for a moment and looked at his face and he had looked back at her with those blue eyes and she had said
"You be good, now, Alen."
and he had said
"I will"
with the precise sincerity he brought to every statement he considered true.
Sister Margaret had not come to the gate. Agnes understood. Margaret had her way of handling things she found difficult, and this was it.
Jessica was waiting at the car. She had driven up that morning and she was standing in the particular way she stood when she was trying not to look like she was managing something — very straight, hands in her coat pockets, looking at the garden wall.
Alen walked to the gate. He stopped at the threshold — just for a moment, just a beat — and Agnes thought he might look back, and prepared herself for that, and he did not look back. He looked up.
He looked up at the sky, at the clear June morning, at the light that was doing what English light does when it finally arrives — making everything it touches look like it was put there deliberately. He looked at it for one long second.
Then he walked through the gate and took Jessica's hand.
His grip was, as it had always been, stronger than it should have been. She had noticed this the first time, on their second meeting, when he had taken her hand without announcement to show her something at the far end of the pond. She had noted it and said nothing and felt something she had been trying not to feel for five years, which was that the house in Edinburgh could still have warmth in it if she let warmth back in.
She let it.
They walked to the car together. She opened the passenger door and he climbed in with the careful, precise movements of a child who approached new physical situations the way he approached everything else — working out the logic first, then committing. She buckled his seatbelt. He examined the buckle mechanism with his fingers, worked out how it released, filed it away.
She got in. Started the engine.
He looked out the window at the gates — still open, the garden visible through them, the pond at the far end catching the light. He looked at it the way he had looked at the sky: like someone taking a long, unhurried photograph with the part of the mind that keeps things.
"Ready?" she said.
He looked at her. Those eyes — vivid, clear, attending — and in them something she was still learning to read: the specific quality of a person who has understood something important and has decided it is real.
"Yes," he said.
She pulled out of the drive and onto the lane, and Somerset opened up around them — the fields, the hedgerows, the particular green of England in June that doesn't exist anywhere else in quite the same way — and Alen turned from the window to face forward, and he did not look back at the gates.
He was not a person who looked back. She would learn this about him, over the years that followed — that he faced forward, always, with the patient attending calm of something that had decided the future was more interesting than the past. He would have questions, later. About the locket. About where he came from. She would answer them as honestly as she could, which was honestly enough for a child, and she would worry about the fuller honesty when the time came for it.
For now, there was the road and the morning and the boy beside her.
He had been Alen, foundling, Somerset, no family traceable. Now he was Alen Richard, and he had a home, and a woman beside him who was still learning how to hold the kind of warmth she had put away five years ago, and who was already, without having quite decided to, holding it again.
Jessica drove. The radio was off. In a while, she thought, she might turn it on — she might let music back into the car the way she was letting other things back in — but not yet. For now, the quiet was enough. It was, she found, a different kind of quiet than the one she had been carrying.
This one had someone in it.
* * *
At St. Agnes's, Sister Agnes stood at the gate until the car was out of sight. Then she went back inside.
She passed the common room where the other children were at their usual noise — the train set, the argument, the ordinary joyful chaos of a house full of small people. She walked through the kitchen. She went to the window that faced the garden.
The pond was there. The lily pads. The particular quality of light on the water that she had watched him watch, a hundred afternoons, with that attending calm.
The garden was empty.
She stood there for a moment with her hand on the window frame, and she thought about his first night — the lamp, the wool blanket, the half-locket with his name, the blue eyes looking at her with that quality she had never been able to name. She thought about what he had been waiting for, all those afternoons by the pond.
She thought he had found it.
She went to set the kettle on.
END OF CHAPTER NINE
Chapter Ten to follow...