He looked back through the boathouse door. Inside, Leo was explaining the dinghy to Emma in a serious undertone, one palm flat on the hull, like a boy blessing a boat.
"Mom," Nathan said. "Sit down. Please. Actually sit down."
"I'm standing in my own kitchen."
"Sit down anyway. There's something nobody told us. It's about Daniel. And it's about a little boy named Leo."
The silence on the line lasted so long that he checked the screen to see if the call had dropped. It hadn't. In the boathouse, Leo laughed at something Emma said, the sound carrying across the salt grass, ordinary and impossible.
"Go on," his mother said at last, in the voice he had not heard since the October night, seven years ago, when a police officer knocked on a door in Lake Oswego. "Tell me all of it. Don't leave anything out this time."
Chapter 7: Margaret Meets Leo
Margaret Reed arrived at Emma's flat on Tuesday evening carrying a casserole she did not remember making, a handbag, and seventy years of composure that lasted exactly as long as it took Leo to open the door.
He stood in the doorway in his socks, holding a drawing, and looked up at her with Daniel's eyes.
Not like Daniel's eyes. Daniel's eyes. The same dark blue, the same serious, considering stare Nathan remembered from across a breakfast table a thousand mornings ago, from a boy who had always decided what a person was worth before they finished their first sentence. Leo was deciding what she was worth. Margaret put out a hand, not to touch him — she had rehearsed, in the car, not touching him — but to the door frame, to hold herself up.
"Hello," Leo said. "Are you the grandmother?"
"I —" She looked past him, desperately, to where Emma stood in the little hallway, and Nathan behind her. "I don't know. Am I allowed to be?"
"You'd have to ask Emma," Leo said. "And me. Emma first, because she's in charge of visitors. Then me."
"Then I am asking," Margaret said, and, to Nathan's astonishment, she said it to the boy, not to the adults. "May I come in and be your grandmother? Not all at once. A little bit."
Leo considered. "You can come in for tea. Grandmother is a longer job."
They had tea, because Margaret had been raised in a world where tea was what you did with a catastrophe. Emma made it in mugs, put biscuits on a plate, and sat where she could watch Leo's face instead of Margaret's.
Leo took charge of the tea the way he took charge of everything that mattered, by issuing the terms. Margaret was to have the chair with the cushion because she was oldest, Emma was to sit where she could see the door because she liked it — "She does," he said, "she checks" — and Nathan was to make himself small, which, in a flat that size, meant the stool by the bookshelf and his knees up around his ears. Margaret bore the stool's indignity by watching Nathan fold himself onto it with an expression Nathan remembered from church when he was nine. "Your uncle," she told Leo gravely, "was exactly this tall at twelve. His brother used to put his schoolbooks on the high shelf to watch him climb." "Did Dad climb too?" "Daniel," she said, and the name did not stop her this time, "Daniel never climbed for anything in his life. Things were lowered for Daniel, generally by me, which was my mistake and his luck, and I am still deciding what it taught either of us."
He showed her the photograph, sliding it out of its sleeve with two fingers, and laid it between the mugs. "That's Dad. And that's Mum, and that's me, inside."
Margaret looked for a long time. Her hand, when it came, hovered and did not land.
"August," she said. "He told me he was working that August. On a boat out of Newport. He sent me a postcard of that rock." Her voice went thin and strange. "He was twenty minutes from a telephone the whole time, and he sent a postcard."
"He was going to tell you," Nathan said quietly. "In October. That's why he was driving home."
"Do not," his mother said, without looking up, "make it gentle for me yet. Let me have it the size it is, first."
Leo watched the adults the way children watch weather. Then, with the blunt kindness of his age, he changed it. "You can hold it," he said. "With two hands. It's stronger than it looks. Like Mum's cups."
So Margaret held the photograph of her dead son with his arm around a laughing, pregnant girl she had never met, on a beach she had driven past a hundred times, and she wept without covering her face, because Leo was watching and she understood, somehow, instantly, that covering it would be a lie told to a child who had had enough of them.
"I brought you something," she said at last, when she could. "I didn't know if I should. Your uncle said to wait, and your aunt — Emma — said to ask. So I'm asking. May I give it to you?"
Leo looked at Emma. Emma nodded, once.
From her handbag Margaret took a small, battered teddy bear in a knitted jumper, one ear repaired with thread of the wrong colour. "This was Daniel's. He was four when the ear came off. He made me sew it at the kitchen table and he supervised." She turned it over. "And this was his, too, when he was older. He drew in it on boats."
The sketchbook was soft with age, its pages full of pencil harbours, rope knots, gulls, a sailboat drawn and redrawn a dozen ways, improving. Leo turned the pages with his whole face close to the paper. On the last used page was a house — a small house above a beach, with a garden, and a stick figure in the doorway, and underneath, in Daniel's unmistakable scrawl: SOMEDAY.
"He drew our house," Leo said. "Before it was ours."
"I think he drew a hope," Margaret said. "And your mother made it real."
Before she left the subject of the sketchbook, Leo fetched his own drawing book from his room — a school exercise book with the corners gone soft — and opened it on the rug with the air of a boy laying down a hand of cards he was not sure of. Boats, page after page: boats with blue stripes, boats with flags, one enormous boat with a house on it and a dog. Margaret turned the pages slowly. Her grandson's line was not Daniel's — it was bolder, less patient — but on the last page he had drawn the harbour from his mother's mural, and beneath it, in Sarah's subject and Sarah's colours, a man and a woman and a boy on a dock. "Your mother taught you to draw the water," Margaret said. "Daniel never could draw water. He drew everything on it and left the sea out, like a stage with no floor." "Mum said water is just sky lying down," Leo said. "She said you draw the light on it and the water does the rest."
Later Emma made Leo brush his teeth, and the two women stood in the tiny kitchen while Nathan read a chapter of a library book about a lighthouse keeper, twice, because once was not the deal.