Chapter 79: Leonard's Mysterious Journey
NYU Medical Center
"Third time this month," someone said.
"Their family keeps ending up here."
"When a marriage falls apart, everything else follows."
"It's always the children who pay for it."
Adam heard the gossip without seeking it out and looked across the waiting area at the Coleman family.
Several months had passed since John Coleman's mistake. Adam had almost forgotten about them until recently, when the family had become the hospital's recurring topic again.
The sequence of events, as pieced together from various sources, was this: Coleman's wife had cremated the miscarried child, kept the ashes in the garden, planted something over them, and spent weeks looking at the flowers as though they were her daughter. Grief took its own shape in different people.
Then had come the drinking. Then the intervention. Then the adoption — a little girl they'd taken in to, as the hospital staff put it, fill a space that couldn't be filled that way.
Since then: a broken bone. A car incident involving their deaf daughter and a parking lot. Now their son was in surgery after a fall from a structure in their backyard, serious enough that the word "coma" was being used in the hallway.
John Coleman sat apart from his wife in the waiting area. His wife sat with the hollow quality of someone who had been blamed enough times that she'd started accepting the blame.
Adam was watching the family from a distance when something else caught his attention.
A little girl was sitting near the Coleman family, very still, very composed. Pigtails. Black ribbon at her throat, matching ones at her wrists. She had the self-contained quality of a child who had decided to observe rather than participate, and was very good at it.
Adam was about to look away when she turned and looked directly at him.
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then her expression shifted into a smile — completely uncomplicated, warm, the kind of smile that belonged on any child's face.
Adam returned it with a gentle nod and looked away.
He kept walking.
The feeling that had passed through him in those two seconds was familiar in a way he didn't like. The same quality he'd sensed in Amy Dunne at sixteen — that particular quality of someone who was paying more attention to everything around them than they wanted you to know.
In a child.
Stay away from the Coleman family, he told himself, and meant it.
He went to finish his shift.
Meanwhile — New Jersey
Leonard Hofstadter had been sitting on the autographed copy for two days, showing it to everyone at school and in the comic store with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been doubted and vindicated.
This was no longer sufficient.
He wanted to go further.
New Jersey and New York had a relationship that New Yorkers and New Jersey residents argued about constantly — the distance was short, the transit was functional, and many New Jersey residents worked in the city and had essentially adopted it as their own. Leonard had been to New York before. He could find an address. He was thirteen years old and considered himself more than capable of a solo train trip.
He did not tell his parents.
He found the apartment from the return address on Adam's package, took the train, navigated the subway, found the building, and knocked on the door of apartment 20B.
Monica answered.
She looked at the thirteen-year-old with glasses standing in the hallway.
"I'm looking for Adam Duncan," Leonard said. "I'm his friend from New Jersey."
Monica took in his expression — slightly nervous, clearly proud of himself for navigating here independently — and decided she liked him immediately.
"Adam's volunteering at NYU Medical Center," she said. "Do you want to wait here?"
"I'll go to him," Leonard said.
Monica gave him directions to the hospital, watched him write them down carefully, and sent him on his way.
NYU Medical Center
A nurse brought Leonard to where Adam was wrapping up.
"Adam!"
Adam turned. Took in the sight of Leonard standing in a hospital corridor in New Jersey in his school jacket, holding a notebook with Adam's address written on the cover.
"Leonard."
"I got the book," Leonard said. "Thank you. I wanted to—" He stopped himself from saying I wanted to show everyone you're real. "I wanted to come say thank you in person."
"Give me five minutes to hand off my shift," Adam said.
Leonard nodded and looked around the hospital with the curiosity of someone cataloguing everything for future reference.
He was turning to look at the nurses' station when someone walked directly into him from the side.
He stumbled. Looked up.
A little girl with pigtails and black ribbon at her collar looked at him with a sharp expression, then turned and walked away quickly.
"Sorry," Leonard said automatically, to the space she'd already vacated.
He stood there for a second, processing.
Then, feeling guilty in a way he couldn't fully justify, he went after her.
End of Chapter 79
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