Chapter 47
He still ran every morning. It had been a constant for so long that he could barely remember a time before it, though intellectually he knew he had not run seriously before England, before the cold mornings when the canal path was the closest thing to silence available.
In Kingston the running had a different quality. The air was different warm, more complex, smelling of the city and the green things growing through it. He ran the perimeter of Hope Gardens in the early mornings when the light was still gold and the dew was still on the grass. He ran the residential streets of his neighborhood, past the yards waking up, past the school vendors setting up, past the women in their doorways with their tea.
He was twenty-eight now and his body was different from what it had been at eighteen not weaker, but different. He had learned its language better: when to push and when to ease, the particular kind of tiredness that meant training and the different kind that meant rest. He had stopped running competitively years ago. This was not for competition. This was for clarity.
He worked things out while running. He processed the complicated things the student who was struggling, the department meeting that had gone badly, the research question he was circling, the conversation he needed to have with Nia about the thing they had not quite said yet.
He and Nia had been talking, carefully, about children. Not directly not yet but in the adjacents of the conversation, in the 'when someday we' framings that accumulate over time until they become a more direct question.
He ran and thought about his mother at twenty-three, sitting at the table by the window writing about the child who had reorganized the world around himself. He thought about what it had taken from her to raise him the specific cost of it, the specific beauty of it. He thought about what he had to offer.
He ran home on a Thursday morning and found Nia at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and an expression that told him something before she said it.
'Marcus,' she said.
He sat down across from her.
'I have something to tell you,' she said.
He waited.
She told him.
He held the information for a moment let it settle, let it become real, let his whole understanding of the next decade rearrange itself around this seven-word sentence.
Then he reached across the table and took her hand.
'I know we were still thinking about it,' she said.
'I know,' he said. 'I've been done thinking for months. I was waiting for you.'
She looked at him.
'Really?'
'Really,' he said. 'I'm ready. Are you ready?'
She turned his hand over and held it properly.
'Yes,' she said.
He called his mother from the doorway, the way he had called her from doorways his entire life.
When she heard, she was quiet for one moment.
Then she said: 'Good. Now everything makes sense.