I looked at Novo, and I was so ready to call him cruel, so close to getting it wrong, but his eyes were full of tears too, so I bit my tongue, and held still, and just watched. He steadied himself to guide Henry down, and the old man landed lightly in his arms. So insubstantial and frail, hardly more than a heap of clothing. His panic vanished. He rested his head on Novo’s shoulder like a child, and Novo folded over him, a bird in sleep, and they were quiet, and they glowed like soft bulbs, there on the stopped lawn, their heads together, just touching. They made a circuit, and the current that passed through them was silent and lit with bliss.
I don’t know how long it lasted. I got lost just watching. Even to see it was the prize. When it was over, Novo opened his eyes, and in the time it took for him to blink the world sprang forward, catching up with itself like a piece of pulled elastic, stretched tight to its absolute limit and then let go—the birds circling, the ants seething, the nodding flowers and shivering leaves. Henry was at his window again, order restored, curtains fluttering, Charlie Parker hopping on the sill. He and Novo were still watching each other but there was no hint of cold stone anymore. All I could see in the air between them was a trace of hot light, fine as thread, and glinting like fire.
Novo reached for my hand again and held on to it, and my veins ran with warm honey. He laughed softly to himself and shook his head slowly from side to side, one hand still on mine, the other cradling his own cheek. He didn’t speak.
“Novo,” I said. “What just happened?”
Quick pulses of light still surged beneath his skin. The look on his face said he’d just seen a miracle, this miracle boy. I remember thinking that must mean there are infinite levels of wonder, like a never-ending staircase, so that everyone gets to look up at something like that, whoever they are, and I really hoped I was onto something. I really wanted to be right.
Novo hadn’t spoken. “Can’t you tell me?” I said, and he shook his head and his voice was soft and quiet when he said, “Not yet.”
Under the high sun, his shadow was pure light. He was the magnifying glass, focusing the heat onto pinpoints of ground that simmered and caught behind him. The same pure light was coming from where Henry stood, billowing out into the morning in clouds of dazzle and luminous smoke. Novo picked me up suddenly and swung me around so the rest of the garden was a blur of color. He was a disco ball on the ceiling, setting off quick bouncing sparks of fire all around us. When he put me down, the light pouring from Henry’s window began to splutter and fade, faintly at first and then with gathering speed. I could still see the bright thread, but the thick clouds were diffusing into the sky, a paintbrush dipped in water.
I pictured the Henry I’d met, stuck in those rooms with that dodgy bird and that rank soup and that rickety old laptop, pretending to travel. How could an old man like that have such an impact on this boy?
Novo was still looking up at him.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I’m wondering what I can do. I’m hoping he’s all right.”
“He never leaves the house,” I said. “I mean, never.”
“No. He can’t.”
“Oh, you knew that already?”
He smiled. “I’m not even sure.”
All the people in the garden, helping themselves to things, and not one of them looked up and saw the thread of light, those brilliant, fading clouds. Not one of them noticed the tiny fires that peppered the lawn. It’s staggering, the things we miss when we’re not searching for them, but facing the wrong direction, looking down.
“Am I the only one who can see this?” I said, and Novo looked at me then, his arms still round my waist.
“Yes, Jude,” he said. “You are the only one.”
He moved and his shadow moved and the tiny fires followed. They burned a hole in one of Mrs. Midler’s evening dresses. They ate through someone’s raincoat, the plastic blistering and puckering in the heat.
“You’re setting fire to everything,” I said. “Look.”
“Am I?” he said.
The garden began to empty around us, people drifting away with their new junk, the party suddenly over. Upstairs, Henry’s window rattled shut.
Novo said, “I’d like to check on him. Let’s go back inside,” and the glow in him faded too. All the fires went out at once and his shadow went back to what it should have been, same as everyone else’s, just an absence of light.
FOURTEEN
The house was dead quiet and we filled it with sound. Our steps on the floorboards, the creak of us on the stairs. Novo breathing, a seashell sound, in and out, soft and constant. I could hear Henry’s ticking clocks. His door was wide open for a change, bright sunlight streaming onto the landing in strong, straight lines like someone had marked it there with a ruler.
He was feeding the gulls. Three of them clashed and wheeled outside his window—wild and powerful that close up, their wide wingspan, their sharp, watchful heads.
“Henry?” Novo said.
He didn’t turn round. “Come in, both of you. Come in.”
Charlie Parker tried to fly through the walls when we went in there, went at it like a fly at a window, wings hammering away.
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “It’s okay, Charlie. Calm down.”
I looked at Novo. I asked him, without speaking, what that was about, and without speaking, he said he didn’t know. We watched as Charlie Parker panicked and Henry made clicking noises and held a thin strip of fish out the window. One of the birds angled sharply in the glare and snatched it out of his hand with its precise beak. The pins on the big map of the world glinted in the bright light.
“Don’t be scared of him, Jude,” Henry said. “He won’t hurt you.” And I couldn’t say then, in that moment, if he meant the feeding bird or Novo.
“I’m not scared. I’m not scared of him at all.”
“I’ve known these gulls since they were young,” Henry said. “I knew their parents and their grandparents. Every year they come and visit. I can tell by their markings. The red spot on this one’s beak. That one’s mottled wing. They are seven or eight now. Did you know that seagulls can live to be fifteen?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“It’s in their nature to come back,” Henry said. “Even a caged bird turns like a compass when the time comes. And it’s in my nature to stay here and wait.”
Novo still hadn’t spoken. He was watching Henry so carefully, with so much focus, same as the seagulls at the window. They cut and hovered at a distance, responding to his every move, the exact same height in the sky as his bony, outstretched arm. They cut and hovered, and Novo watched, and it seemed like nothing else in the world was happening that was more important than that.