He had been watching the world through glass his whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not because anyone told him to. Not because he was shy, exactly, or broken in any of the ways that adults whispered about when they thought he couldn’t hear. It was simply that windows made sense to him in a way that rooms full of people did not. Glass was honest. It showed you exactly what was out there without asking anything back. You could press your face against it and look as long as you wanted and the world on the other side never got tired of being watched, never shifted uncomfortably, never asked why you were so quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His name was Theo. He was seven years old. And he was on a Greyhound bus heading from Indianapolis to a town in Tennessee he had never been to, to live with a grandmother he had met exactly twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His mother had explained it at the kitchen table three days ago, in the careful, simplified language adults use when they are telling children hard truths they haven’t finished understanding themselves. Words like temporary<\/em> and just until<\/em> and she’ll take good care of you, I promise.<\/em> Theo had listened. He was good at listening \u2014 better at listening than most adults understood, because they tended to confuse quiet with absence. He had understood more than his mother intended him to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He knew temporary<\/em> sometimes meant a very long time. He knew just until<\/em> was a door being left open so no one had to say closed.<\/em> And he knew, in the wordless, animal way that children know the things adults try to hide, that his mother was very tired in a way that sleep wasn’t fixing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So he had packed his backpack \u2014 three shirts, his library book about deep-sea fish, the small stuffed rabbit named Gerald that he was too old for and brought anyway \u2014 and he had let himself be walked through the bus station and settled into the window seat and kissed on the top of his head. He had watched his mother stand on the sidewalk outside the terminal as the bus pulled away. She had waved. He had pressed his palm flat against the glass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He kept it there until she was too small to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the bus was somewhere in southern Indiana, rain beginning to streak the window in long diagonal lines, and Theo watched the flat farmland scrolling past and thought about deep-sea fish. Specifically about the anglerfish, which lived in total darkness and carried its own light. He found that interesting. He found it interesting that something could live in a place with no light at all and simply make its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The woman in the seat beside him had fallen asleep an hour ago, her head tipped back, mouth slightly open, a paperback novel collapsed across her chest. On Theo’s other side was the window and the rain and the gray Indiana afternoon. He had the particular aloneness of someone surrounded by people who are all somewhere else in their heads \u2014 which was, he had learned, the most complete kind of aloneness there was, and also somehow the most manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was hungry. He had a peanut butter sandwich in his backpack that his mother had made that morning, wrapped in wax paper the way she always did, with the crusts cut off because he didn’t like crusts, a small detail of care that made his chest do something complicated when he thought about it. He took out the sandwich and ate it slowly, looking out the window, watching the rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A rest stop in Kentucky. The bus groaned to a halt and most of the passengers shuffled off, stretching and reaching for phones. Theo stayed in his seat. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass and looked at the parking lot, the gas station, the gray sky pressing down on everything like a lid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A woman outside was struggling with an umbrella that had turned inside out in the wind, and a man walking past had stopped to help her without being asked \u2014 just stopped, set down his bag, worked the umbrella right-side out with patient, unhurried hands, gave it back, and kept walking. The woman called something after him. He raised one hand without turning around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theo watched this for a long time after the man was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He took out his library book but didn’t open it. He held it in his lap and thought about his grandmother, whose name was Nora, and who had sent him a birthday card every year with a twenty-dollar bill and her handwriting in blue ink \u2014 big, looping letters that pressed deep into the paper, the writing of someone who meant what they wrote. He had kept the cards in a shoebox under his bed. He had never told anyone that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He thought about the house he was going to. He had seen it once, when he was four, and remembered almost nothing except a porch and a smell of something baking and a cat, gray and enormous, that had sat on the arm of a chair and watched him with the same patient attention he gave to windows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n