Jackson

Jackson Cooper had never seen the sun.

Not properly. Not the way he understood other children saw it — standing in it, feeling it, the direct warmth of it on your face that people in books described as though it were one of the best things. He'd seen it from windows, in the way you saw the edge of something you weren't allowed near, the light changing at the curtain hems from black to grey to a pale flat white and then back again. He knew what time of day it was by the quality of the light at the edges of the curtains the same way other children knew it by the clock.

Morning light was white and cold.

Afternoon light was warmer, yellower, it came under the curtains rather than through them and lay in thin lines on the hallway floor that he would sometimes sit beside but never in.

Evening light was his favourite. The way it went orange and then red and then finally, properly dark, the dark that meant the day was done and the house could breathe.

He did not think of this as deprivation. He had nothing to compare it to.

His days had a shape.

He woke when he woke, which was usually around six, his body having sorted itself into a rhythm that was slightly out of step with the world outside — later to sleep, later to rise, pulled by some gravity toward the nocturnal hours he'd been born into in this house. He came downstairs. MM was always already up or had never been down, it was difficult to say — she moved through the night hours the way he moved through the day ones, naturally, without effort, and by morning she was usually in her chair by the window or in the kitchen or standing in the hallway in that still way she had, present and unhurried.

She made his breakfast. This was the one domestic routine she maintained with complete consistency regardless of anything else — whatever else was happening, whatever the state of the feeding or the planning or the long quiet machinery of their life, she made his breakfast. Eggs mostly. Sometimes porridge. Once a week something more elaborate, pancakes or french toast, things she'd learned from a cookbook she'd had for longer than he could imagine, the spine repaired with tape three times over.

He ate. She watched him eat with the particular attention she gave to things she cared about.

They talked.

This was the centre of his days and always had been. MM talked to him about everything — the history she'd lived through, the things she'd seen, the way the world had changed across the span of her life in ways that Jackson could only hold abstractly because he had no frame of reference for before and after, only the version she described. She talked to him about science and mathematics and language with the same unhurried thoroughness she brought to everything, sitting across from him with the amber light between them, and he learned in the way he imagined plants learned, turned toward the source without quite knowing he was doing it.

She had taught him to read when he was three.

By the time he was five he'd read every book in the house, some of them twice. MM had a lot of books. They were everywhere — shelves built into every wall of every room, stacked on surfaces, in orderly piles on the floor in the places the shelves had run out. Old books, most of them, the kind with soft covers and yellowed pages that smelled of something deep and good. He'd read all of them indiscriminately, without guidance, taking what he could from each one and leaving what he couldn't yet reach, returning to the ones he'd left when he was older.

He'd been to school for eight months.

School was the only thing that had never fully made sense to him.

He'd wanted to go.

He'd asked MM about it first when he was five, having read enough books to understand that children went to places where other children were and things were taught and this was considered important. MM had listened to his case — he'd made it carefully, the way she'd taught him to make cases for things, with reasons not just wants — and had been quiet for a while and then said that she would think about it.

She'd thought about it for a year.

When he was six she'd said yes.

He understood now, with the better understanding of eight, what that yes had cost her. What it meant for a woman who couldn't go outside to send her child into the world outside every morning and receive him back every afternoon. The degree of exposure it involved, the names on forms, the contact numbers that rang out, the careful negotiation of visibility. She'd done all of it because he'd asked. Because she'd thought about it for a year and concluded that whatever the risk was to her, keeping him from the world was a larger risk to him.

He thought about this sometimes. The calculation she'd made. He didn't have a word for what it made him feel, not yet, but it was large and it lived in his chest and it made him want to be worth it.

School had been, for a while, the best thing he knew outside the house.

Lucas had been his first real friend.

He'd known, going in, that he was different. MM had prepared him for this, gently and honestly, the same way she prepared him for everything. You've grown up differently to them, she'd said. You know different things and you don't know some of the things they do. Neither of those is a problem. They're just true. He'd carried this into the classroom on the first day and it had helped, mostly.

Lucas had sat next to him in week two.

It hadn't been a dramatic thing. Lucas had just sat down and started talking — about a game he was playing, about something Oliver had said, about the project they'd been given — with the natural, unself-conscious ease of a child who'd never really had a bad social experience and therefore expected all social experiences to be fine. Jackson had responded and Lucas had kept talking and by the end of the day something had formed between them that Jackson recognised from books but hadn't experienced before.

By week four he'd known Oliver and Isla and Charlie too.

They'd been kind to him in their noisy careless way, the way children were kind when they weren't thinking about it, when the kindness was just the default setting before anything complicated came along. He'd eaten lunch with them and played with them at break time and walked to the gate with them at the end of the day and stood there alone afterward watching them get collected while he walked home by himself and it had been fine. It had been more than fine. It had been, he thought, what being a person in the world outside the house was supposed to feel like.

He'd told MM about each of them individually.

She'd listened to every description with her full attention and asked careful questions and he'd felt, telling her, the particular satisfaction of bringing something from outside into the house and finding it received.

He thought about that now. About how thoroughly he'd brought them into the house, how much of Lucas and Oliver and Isla and Charlie MM now knew because of him. He thought about the specific irony of this and couldn't find a word for the feeling it made.

It had changed in July.

He couldn't identify a single moment. That was the thing that had made it hardest to understand and then hardest to explain to MM. There hadn't been an argument, a falling out, a moment he could point to. It had been a process, like erosion, one small thing and then another and then another until the shape was different and he couldn't quite remember what the original shape had been.

Oliver had said something about his house in early July. Just a comment, something he'd overheard a parent say probably, the way children absorbed adult observations without knowing they were doing it. Jackson lives in the weird house, the one with the curtains always closed. He'd said it without cruelty, just as a fact, and the others had looked at Jackson waiting for a response and Jackson hadn't known what to say because it was true, and his not knowing had left a gap that the group had moved into and slowly, over the following weeks, filled with something he hadn't put there.

The questions had started. Reasonable questions at first — why were the curtains always closed, why had nobody ever met his mum, why did he always walk home alone. He'd answered as best he could, carefully, the way MM had taught him to handle things that required care. But the answers weren't satisfying to eight year olds who wanted simple explanations, and the unsatisfying answers became a source of fascination that curdled, in the way that fascination sometimes did, into something less friendly.

By August the questions had become observations.

By September the observations had become a game he wasn't playing but was the subject of.

He'd sat with MM in the amber light in October and told her all of it and she'd listened without interrupting and he'd felt, telling her, the specific exhaustion of having carried it alone for two months without knowing quite what it was.

She'd said: I'm sorry. She'd said: It isn't your fault. She'd said: What would you like me to do?

He'd thought about it.

He'd thought about the parents. Gerald at the school gate with his worried face. Jessica walking past in the mornings. Grace on her phone. Kate with her sharp eyes that saw too much. He'd watched them the way MM had taught him to watch things, carefully and completely, and what he'd seen was a group of adults who knew something was happening and were doing the calculation that adults did, the one that weighed their comfort against someone else's difficulty and found their comfort heavier.

He'd thought about what they deserved.

He'd thought about what MM needed.

He'd said: those four. The parents of those four.

MM had looked at him for a long moment.

Are you sure? she'd asked.

He'd been sure.

He wasn't sure now.

He'd helped her set the crates on the evening of November 13th.

He'd climbed the ladder and fitted the mechanism to the ceiling framework, handing him components from below, her voice steady and instructional, and he'd done it carefully and precisely the way he did everything. He'd climbed down and looked at the hallway and thought about the four parents walking into it tomorrow and what would happen after.

MM had said it wouldn't hurt them. Containment, not harm.

He'd believed her.

He still believed her, technically. The crates hadn't hurt them. They were frightened and cold and behind bars but they were whole and alive and their hearts were beating, he could see that from where he stood, he could see Jessica's hands on the bars and Grace with her back straight and Gerald pressed against the far side and Kate.

Kate, who was looking at him.

Kate, who had said you've always known.

He looked at the bag on the floor. He looked at his mother's face. He looked at the four parents in the crates.

He thought about Lucas.

Not the Lucas of the last four months, the Lucas who said things at the gate and laughed with Oliver and looked through Jackson with the practiced ease of someone who had decided not to see. The Lucas of before. The Lucas of week two and week four and the months in between when Jackson had eaten lunch with him and walked to the gate with him and told MM about him in the amber light in the evenings with the uncomplicated happiness of a child who had found something good.

He thought about Lucas growing up without a mother.

He knew what that was.

He didn't know it the way the children in the books knew things, academically, from a distance. He knew it from a bridge in Elling in the cold March dark, from the blanket that had been warm and wasn't anymore, from whatever it was that had existed before MM and which he had no memory of but which lived somewhere in his body as a kind of permanent low weather, the background hum of a thing that had happened before he had words for things happening.

He knew what it was to be left.

He looked at Jessica in her crate. Lucas's mum. He looked at Grace and Gerald and Kate — Oliver's mum, Isla's dad, Charlie's mum. He looked at their faces and thought about four children and thought about the bridge and thought about the blanket.

MM moved.

A small movement, just a shift in her weight, a rearranging of herself in the direction of the crates, and Jackson felt it the way he felt all her movements, with the specific attunement of a child who had grown up in a quiet house where small movements meant things.

He looked at her.

She was looking at the parents. Her eyes moving across them slowly, assessing, the hunger visible now in a way it hadn't been before, that quality he'd seen before in the long years of understanding gradually what his mother was and what she needed. He'd seen it before and been able to hold it separately from everything else she was, to file it in the category of this is just how things are, the same way he filed the curtains and the amber light and the nights she didn't come downstairs until after midnight.

He looked at her looking at them.

He thought about Lucas.

He thought about you've always known.

He thought about what MM had done for him on a bridge in Elling when she could have walked past, when there was no reason in anything she was to stop for a child that wasn't hers, and she had stopped and she had picked him up and she had carried him home and she had not once in seven years made him feel like a thing she'd collected.

She loved him. He knew this the way he knew the house, completely and without question.

He also knew what she was about to do.

He looked at the crates.

He looked at Kate's bag on the floor.

He looked at his mother's face in the amber light, patient and hungry and certain, and he felt the thing in his chest that he didn't have a word for yet, the large thing, and he thought about worth it, about wanting to be worth it, about the calculation she had made when she said yes to school.

She had given him the world outside.

He stood in the hallway and thought about what that meant.

He took a step forward.

MM turned to look at him.

He didn't look at her. He looked at the crates, at the four parents, at Kate's face watching him with that sharp attention that saw too much, and he kept walking until he was standing in front of the nearest crate and he crouched down and picked up Kate's bag from the floor and held it for a moment.

Then he looked at his mother.

She was watching him. Completely still. The patient attention she gave to everything she loved.

He looked at her for a long time.

"I know what you need," he said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted. He tried again. "I know. And I'm sorry. I don't—" He stopped. "I don't know how to fix that part."

MM said nothing.

"But I know what this feels like." He held the bag tighter. "I know what it is. What they'd feel. The kids."

The hallway was completely quiet.

MM looked at him the way she'd looked at him his whole life, fully and without flinching, and he looked back at her the same way because she'd taught him that too, to look at things directly, to not look away from what was true.

"I named them," he said. "I know I named them. I'm not—" He swallowed. "I'm not saying they were good to me. They weren't." He looked at the crates. At Jessica. "But their kids didn't do anything."

Something moved across MM's face.

Just briefly. Just enough.

He stood up.

He walked to the nearest crate and found the release mechanism on the side, the one he'd fitted himself the night before, and he pressed it.

The door swung open.

He moved to the next one.