He tried first with a leaf.
It was not a good leaf.
Too dry at the edges, too brittle through the middle, half-curled already into the beginning of its own decay. But it had blown against the yard wall and stayed there, caught in the crack between two bricks, and Severus had looked at it while bringing in coal and thought, with the sort of quiet violence some ideas used when entering him: Now.
Not because the leaf mattered.
Because Lily had made things happen as if the world leaned willingly toward her hand. A flower opening. A twig lifting. A leaf spinning above the roots as if the air itself had taken her side. She had done it with delight, with curiosity, with the simple bright wanting that seemed always to run close under her skin. And he had sat by the river and watched and known, with a certainty too large to be argued with, that what moved easily through her came to him only through darker doors.
He had not stopped thinking about that.
Now it was late afternoon, the house empty of Tobias for another hour at least, the yard damp at the edges and the sky beginning its long grey descent toward evening. The coal scuttle stood by the back step. The leaf waited in its crack.
Severus put the scuttle down.
The yard smelled of brick, ash, and the faint bitter trace of old rain lifted by cold. Washing lines crossed above him like pencil marks. The wall beyond the gate shut out most of the street, leaving only the upper air and the chimneys and the far breath of the mill. It should have felt private.
Instead it felt like examination.
He looked at the leaf.
Then at his hand.
Then back at the leaf.
He did not know precisely what Lily did. That was the problem. Or rather one of them. She had no method he could steal, no words, no sequence beyond the dangerous simplicity of wanting it and then somehow not standing in the way of it. Severus had tried to describe the force between them in terms of pressure, nearness, wrong air, the world listening. None of those words helped now.
He held out his hand.
Nothing.
He felt foolish at once, which made him angry, which made the whole attempt suspect before it had properly begun. Lily would not have felt foolish. Lily would have looked at the leaf as if it were possible by definition. That, too, seemed part of her advantage.
He lowered his hand.
Started again.
This time he tried to want the leaf toward him. Not fear it. Not command. Only imagine it moving lightly from the crack into his palm as the twig had moved to Lily's hand. The yard remained itself. The washing line trembled once in a breeze too small to matter. Somewhere beyond the wall a child shouted and was answered. The leaf did not stir.
Severus drew in a slow breath.
Perhaps it was the wrong leaf.
The thought irritated him immediately because it sounded like excuse.
He glanced toward the back door. The kitchen window reflected only the yard and his own shape, small and dark and stiff in posture. No witness. Good.
He crouched and chose another.
This one lay near the drain, flatter and fresher, green still surviving at the stem though the rest had gone yellow-brown. He set it on the brick ledge where he could see it properly. More like the willow leaves by the river. More like something Lily might have managed with. He hated himself for thinking in those terms and could not stop.
Again he held out his hand.
Again nothing.
He stared until his eyes watered in the thin cold.
Nothing.
The world did not answer. No small wrongness in the air. No pressure. No slipping of objects toward decision. Only him, the yard, the ledge, the leaf.
He thought of the riverbank.
Of Lily saying maybe it was because he was always waiting for bad things.
At the time the sentence had gone into him like light through bad glass, bending and damaging at once. He had not known what to do with it because she had made it sound so simple, as if one might choose not to. As if waiting were a habit and not a structure holding up whole parts of the self.
Still.
He looked at the leaf and tried to want without fear.
That was the instruction now. Or the experiment.
No pressure. No emergency. No one shouting his name from inside. No anger. No danger. Only wanting.
He tried to think of the leaf rising because it would be interesting if it did. Because that was enough reason for Lily. Because a happy thing ought not be beyond the reach of a gift if it was truly the same gift at all.
The yard seemed to listen politely and remain unchanged.
Nothing.
His hand dropped.
A hot small humiliation opened in his chest. Ridiculous, because no one was there to see. Worse, perhaps, because no one was there to see. Failure in private became absolute in a way public failure sometimes did not. There were no witnesses to misinterpret it kindly. No laughter to make it smaller. Only the thing itself.
He stood.
Went to the back gate.
Opened it just enough to look into the street.
Grey pavement. A pram further down. Mrs. Kirkby's curtain. The Evanses' front window dark for now. No Lily.
He shut the gate again.
The leaf still sat on the ledge exactly as he had placed it.
He wanted very suddenly to strike it away with the heel of his hand and be done.
That thought stopped him.
There.
Anger. Frustration. The beginning of pressure.
He recognized the shift in himself with sick familiarity. The tightening at the back of the throat. The heat under the skin. The world narrowing to an object and a feeling and the dangerous possibility that something might answer after all.
He stepped back from the ledge at once.
"No," he said aloud to the empty yard.
The word vanished into brick and air.
He did not want that answer. That would prove only what he already feared.
He stood there breathing through the little heat until it lessened. Then looked at the leaf again.
Still nothing.
The whole thing was absurd. A child in a yard trying to will dead matter into motion because another child had made the world behave differently by a river and now he could not bear the difference between them. It would have been laughable if there had been anyone to laugh.
Instead there was only the afternoon and the mills and the kitchen window and the certainty growing, patient and terrible, that whatever lived in him did not come when invited kindly.
He picked up the leaf and put it in his pocket.
Not because it had earned saving. Because leaving it on the ledge felt like admitting too much to the yard.
Later, by the river, he tried again.
This was worse and better.
Worse because the river belonged to Lily now in some unspoken way as much as to him, and so every failure there occurred under her invisible comparison. Better because the place itself loosened things. The bank was broader than the yard. The willow gave movement to the air. Water did not stare the way walls did.
He went alone after school, telling no one.
The path held the memory of earlier rain in the lower patches, but the bank by the willow had dried enough to sit on. Grass seeds clung to his cuffs when he crossed it. The river carried pale light in stretched grey strips beneath the cloud. No one else was there. The reeds whispered. Far off, a dog barked and then gave up.
Severus sat.
A willow leaf lay near the roots, thin and narrow and exact. Better than the yard's leaf. Better by any standard he could imagine.
He picked it up.
Held it in his palm.
Closed his fingers around it and then opened them again.
This was where Lily had made one spin.
Not on purpose, she would have said. Not exactly. But that was only Lily's way of preserving wonder around the edges of fact. The fact remained that the leaf had moved because joy and curiosity in her did not obstruct the strange force; they seemed to invite it.
Severus placed the leaf on the ground.
He tried again to want lightly.
To want as if wanting were enough.
To imagine it rising not because the world must answer him or because silence would shame him, but because a leaf in air was a harmless lovely thing and why should harmless lovely things not happen to him too.
Nothing.
The river moved on.
He shut his eyes.
Perhaps that was the problem. Watching too hard. Lily often seemed half to forget herself in the moment before things happened, as if self-forgetting were part of the mechanism. Severus had almost never forgotten himself in his life. Not in rooms, not on streets, not in his own bed listening for the house. Still, he tried.
Eyes closed. Breath steady. The shape of the leaf held in imagination, light enough to lift. The willow above him whispering. The current. The mills.
Nothing.
When he opened his eyes, the leaf remained where it was.
A gull crossed the river and cried once, offended by everything.
Severus laughed.
Only once. Bitterly. Not because it was funny. Because the alternative was some childish form of despair too embarrassing to permit even alone.
He picked up a stone.
Flat. Good weight.
For one stupid second he almost threw it at the river simply to break the experiment cleanly. Then he saw what he was doing and set the stone down again, more carefully than necessary.
This could not become anger. Not if he wanted the answer honestly.
So he sat very still and tried to think what happy would mean.
That, too, was part of the difficulty. Joy was not absent from his life. It existed. In books. In the precision of a good explanation. In the moment before weather turned when the air arranged itself exactly as he had predicted. In seven skips impossible on one stone and then simple in Lily's hand. In a badly burnt birthday cake eaten entire because it had been made. In Lily listening. In the river when the mills stood back just enough. These things were real.
But when he reached for them inwardly, calling them up to make the leaf move, they felt too fragile under examination. Too conscious. Happiness observed in itself became performance. Lily seemed able to inhabit joy. Severus, looking for it, only seemed to disturb it.
He remembered the cake.
The absurd sugar. The burnt edge. Lily knowing it was bad and bringing it anyway.
He remembered her by the river, shouting when the stone skipped seven times, as if triumph itself had no shame in it.
He remembered the lane behind the chapel, her saying that's all right when he did not know enough words for strange things.
He remembered, unwillingly, the way she had looked at his bruise.
Not the bruise. Him.
The moment broke there.
Because tenderness and exposure lived too near each other in him. They always had. Call one, and the other answered.
The leaf on the ground did not move.
Severus bowed his head.
No one would ever know how much this failure hurt, precisely because nothing dramatic had happened. No crack. No falling. No spoon across wet wood. No witness. Only a boy by a river trying to bring a leaf into the air by means of happiness and finding that whatever in him listened for the world could not hear joy as command.
He sat for a long time after giving up.
The sky lowered. A breeze turned the water darker. Somewhere behind him children shouted and went away. The willow leaves made their dry continuous sound. Ordinary afternoon passing into early evening. He did not move until the cold reached through his sleeves and forced the body into time again.
Before leaving, he picked up the leaf.
Folded it once between thumb and forefinger.
Then let it go into the river.
It landed without grace and was taken at once.
The next day Lily found him near the chapel wall with mud on one cuff and silence in his shoulders.
"I was practicing," she said brightly, before he had said anything at all. "With the flower."
He looked at her.
"It doesn't always work," she added. "Only sometimes."
The sentence struck him oddly. Perhaps she meant only to comfort herself for inconsistency. Yet he heard in it, for a second, a possibility of mercy extending beyond her own case.
He said, because he had to say something, "I was practicing too."
Lily brightened. "Were you?"
He nodded.
"With what?"
The true answer rose and stopped.
Not because it would have been dangerous. Because it would have been unbearable to say aloud: I tried to do what you do. I tried to make something happen from happiness, from wanting without fear, and it would not come for me.
So instead he said the nearest survivable thing.
"Nothing much."
Lily studied him.
Then smiled, not convinced, not unconvinced, only willing to leave the door where it was. "All right."
He hated and loved that answer in equal measure.
The failure remained with him for days after. Small. Quiet. Private. More wounding for all three. No bruise to hide. No accusation. No event another person might observe and interpret incorrectly. Just the knowledge that he had gone alone to the river and reached for joy as a mechanism and found his own gift closed to it.
He would not speak of it.
Not to Lily. Not to his mother. Not to himself in any words larger than necessary.
But afterwards, whenever Lily made a flower open or a leaf spin or a twig come lightly to hand, something in him answered not only with wonder now but with the memory of the stillness in the yard and on the riverbank, and of the leaf that had refused him under every kind invitation he knew how to offer.
End of Chapter 25