Jonah and Merrick House

Prologue

On the last night the parents were anyone at all, the kitchen at Merrick House kept the kettle on until morning.

You will want to know, before anything else, who the parents were, so here it is, plainly. They were seven mothers and fathers who could each do one thing that most people cannot. One of them could hear the sadness inside a person, the way you hear a song through a wall. One could take away fear, for a while, and hold it herself. One always knew when somebody was missing, even if the whole world had forgotten them. Small, strange, gentle knacks — not for making money, not for winning wars. Knacks for helping. They had all grown up in this very house, learning to use them, taught by the small old woman who was, at this moment, standing by the door in her cardigan, watching them come down the stairs.

And you will want to know why they were leaving. That is plain too, though it is not pleasant. Long ago — before they were parents, when they were only clever students — the seven of them and three others had built something together. It was meant to help the whole world at once, and it had gone wrong instead, the way very big plans sometimes do, and what they had built turned out to be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Too dangerous to use, and too strong to destroy. So they had broken it into pieces, one piece each, and sworn to keep the pieces apart forever.

But one of the ten wanted it. He had been the cleverest of them all, once, and their friend, and now he was neither. He wanted the pieces gathered back into one, because whoever held the whole of that broken thing could do whatever he liked to the whole world, and no one anywhere would be able to tell him no. He had his own piece already. And he was coming for the rest — not tonight, and maybe not this year, but coming, as certainly as winter, and he took people the way winter takes gardens.

He had taken two of their friends already. And he had taken their little boy besides — a boy of four, who had done nothing at all — simply because the boy was standing close when he came. That was the lesson the parents had learned, at the worst possible price: he takes whoever is standing close. So tonight, out of love — and you must remember it was love, whatever it looks like — they were making sure that when he came for them, no one would be standing close at all.

Their plan had three parts, and each part cost them something.

First: they would hide their pieces where he would never, ever look. Not in banks, not in caves, not under floorboards — he was far too clever for hiding places. They would hide the pieces inside their own children, tucked away like a seed inside an apple, wrapped up in a gift so the piece would stay warm and safe and secret. He could not find a piece hidden in a sleeping child, because a small child is the one thing in the world he never bothers to look at twice. The children were very small — the oldest barely three, still baby-heavy, still smelling of milk and sleep — and they would not feel the pieces at all, not for many years, not until the gifts woke up inside them, the way seeds wake in spring.

Second: the children could not stay here, at the house, all together, no matter how much everyone wished it. Seven ordinary children in seven ordinary towns are invisible — nobody looks twice at one more child in one more town. But seven remarkable children gathered in one remarkable house would be a lighthouse, and he would sail straight to it. So the children would be scattered: to children's homes, to foster families, to ordinary streets, to ordinary lives. Being nobody special was the best hiding place on earth. It was also, of course, a lonely one. The parents knew that. It is why every one of them was crying, quietly, in the way grown-ups cry when they don't want to wake anybody.

Third — and this is the part you must understand, or nothing else will make sense — the parents themselves had to disappear. Not just move away. Disappear entirely. Because a mother visiting a child is a signpost pointing at that child, and the man was very good at reading signposts. So the parents would walk away tonight and let themselves forget: their children's faces, their children's names, the road to this house, all of it — because a man cannot follow a trail that nobody remembers, not even the people who made it. They would go on living somewhere, ordinary and safe and empty, never knowing why their arms felt light and wrong. Forgetting was the price. They paid it on purpose. That is the kind of love this story is about, and it does not look like love from the outside, and it was.

So: up and down the crooked stairs the grown-ups went, one at a time, and lifted seven sleeping children out of seven small beds, and held them in the dark, and said the things you say to someone too little to remember them, in the hope that some part of them remembers anyway. Then they laid the children down, and gave each child their gift, with the piece hidden inside it, and the children slept straight through the giving, which was the mercy of it, and the whole house held its breath to keep from waking them.

By the door, the small old woman watched them come down for the last time, and did not say it will be all right, because she had never once lied to them and did not intend to start on the last night. Her part of the plan was the fourth part, the part nobody had dared ask her for, the part she had offered. She would watch. She would spend the years watching seven far-off towns the way a lighthouse keeper watches the sea, and on the day any child began to shine — because hidden things wake, and waking things can be seen — she would go and fetch that child, and bring them here, and keep them, behind the one door in all the world that the man cannot open.

“And then?” said one of the fathers, at the end, because someone had to.

“And then you will walk out of their lives,” said the old woman, “and I will hold the door shut.”

So that is what they did. They walked out into the dark in seven different directions, and they forgot, and by sunrise not one of them could have told you what they had lost, and every one of them woke for years afterward with the feeling of having set something down somewhere and being unable to think what.

The children woke the next day in seven different towns, in beds that were not theirs, and cried for people they could not name — because they were too little to have kept their parents' faces, and that, too, was part of the plan, the cruelest and kindest part. They grew up scattered, and ordinary, and alone. They grew up believing that no one had wanted them.

Remember, whatever happens, that this was the opposite of the truth. They were not abandoned. They were hidden — every one of them a hiding place with a heartbeat — and what their parents tucked inside them stayed hidden too, waiting, the way a seed waits, for the day it would wake. Whether the parents were right to do it — whether any of it was right — is a question you may keep, because everyone in this story keeps it, and no two of them ever answer it the same way.

Far away, on a dark road going nowhere anyone would think to look, one mother who had refused the plan — for there was one, and her reasons were her own, and you will hear them one day — walked fast with a sleeping girl against her shoulder, and did not look back.

And in the old house, in a room that smelled faintly of the sea, and then in all the rooms, the lights went out one by one, until the whole place looked, from the road, like somewhere nobody had lived for years. Which was the idea.

The old woman sat down in the dark kitchen to wait. She was very good at waiting. Hidden things wake slowly, and in their own order, and the children would come back to her one at a time, over the years, each on the day their own gift first stirred — a girl here, a boy there, a knock at the world that only she would hear. Ten years she would keep that watch, from the first spark to the last of them. And she spent the first hour of it knitting, and if her eyes were wet, there was no one left to see.

Chapter One

The Boy Who Heard Rain Indoors

Jonah Pryce had been at the Fairbridge Home for Children long enough to know all of its rules, including the ones nobody said out loud.

The said-out-loud rules were posted in the front hall in a plastic frame: no running on the stairs, lights out at nine, respect the property and each other. The unsaid rules were more useful. Don't take the chair by the radiator, because that was Big Davey's chair. Don't ask Mrs. Trask questions after four o'clock, when her patience went home even though she stayed. And never, ever unpack all the way — keep something in your bag, always, because you could be moved with a day's notice, and the ones who unpacked all the way cried hardest when the day came.

Jonah was thirteen, and he had kept something in his bag at four different homes now. He was small for his age and quiet for any age, with dark watchful eyes and a way of standing at the edges of rooms that made adults use words like withdrawn on his paperwork. He had read his own paperwork once, upside down on a caseworker's desk, and learned that he was a solitary child who struggles to form attachments, which had interested him, because he did not struggle at all. Not forming attachments was the easiest thing in the world. You just remembered that everything was temporary, and it did itself.

On the first Saturday of every month, Fairbridge had Visiting Day, and on Visiting Day, Jonah performed his own private ceremony, which he had never told anyone about and would have denied under torture. He combed his hair.

That was all. He combed his hair, and he sat where he could see the front door without looking like he was watching it, and for exactly two hours he permitted himself to imagine that this would be the Visiting Day somebody came for him. Not a foster placement — those were arranged in offices, on weekdays, with folders. Somebody for him. He was too old to believe it and he believed it anyway, the first Saturday of every month, for two hours, and when the door closed at four he put the belief back in his bag with everything else he wasn't unpacking, and got on with things.

If you had told Jonah Pryce the truth — if you had sat him down in Big Davey's chair by the radiator and told him that thirteen years ago somebody had wanted him so much it broke them — he would have laughed at you, politely, the way he laughed at all adult nonsense. He would have said: then where are they?

It was a fair question. He would get an answer eventually. It was not one anybody could have guessed.

The trouble at Fairbridge began, as trouble usually does, with something small: Marcus Webb's bed was empty on a Tuesday morning.

Marcus was eleven, gap-toothed, and famous for two things — an encyclopedic knowledge of football statistics and a snore you could hear through a wall. He was the closest thing Jonah had at Fairbridge to a friend, which meant Marcus talked and Jonah listened, an arrangement that suited them both. On Monday night Marcus had been explaining, at length, why this was finally going to be his team's year. On Tuesday morning his bed was made — made, which Marcus's bed had never once been — and his shoes were gone, and Marcus was gone with them.

“Run off,” said Mrs. Trask, at breakfast, in the flat voice of a woman reading from a card. “It happens. He'll turn up.”

The other children nodded, because it did happen. Kids ran. Everybody knew a kid who'd run.

Jonah opened his mouth to nod along, and didn't. Because something was wrong with the room, and it took him the whole of breakfast to work out what it was.

He could hear rain.

Not outside — outside was one of those scrubbed blue mornings that turn up in early autumn like an apology. The rain was inside. It was very faint, a grey hiss at the bottom of everything, like weather happening in the walls, like a radio playing static two rooms away. He looked around the breakfast table to see if anyone else could hear it. Nobody so much as glanced up from their toast.

It rained indoors, quietly, all through breakfast. It rained through morning chores. It was raining in the corridor outside the boys' room, and it rained hardest of all — Jonah stopped dead when he noticed this — near Marcus's stripped and empty bed.

He stood beside the bed for a long time, listening. The sound wasn't rain, he decided finally. It was like rain the way the sea is like a shell held to your ear — a resemblance, a rumor. Underneath the hiss there was something else, something with a shape to it, and the shape was the worst part, because Jonah recognized it without ever having heard it before, the way you recognize your own name in a crowd.

It was the sound of missing someone.

He didn't have better words for it than that, then. Later he would learn its proper name, and learn to hear the difference between fresh grief and old, between grief that was healing and grief that was stuck, between a person's sorrow and a place's. Later he would learn to walk into a room and know, before anyone spoke, exactly what everyone in it had lost. But that Tuesday he was just a boy standing beside an empty bed, listening to a sound nobody else could hear, and what the sound told him was simple and impossible and he knew it the way you know things in dreams:

Marcus hadn't run away. Marcus was missing — and somewhere, somehow, the missing had been left behind in the building, like a coat on a peg. You didn't leave the sound of missing someone behind if you'd packed your bag and made your bed and walked out grinning toward a better life. The sound meant something had been taken.

Jonah went to find Mrs. Trask, and got as far as her office door, and stopped with his knuckles an inch from the wood.

Because what exactly was he going to say? Marcus didn't run away, I can hear it raining in the walls? He had read his paperwork. He knew what happened to boys who said things like that. There was a different building for boys who said things like that, and it had softer walls and fewer doors, and once you went there you did not come back to a place as ordinary as Fairbridge.

So he lowered his hand, and went back to the boys' room, and sat on his own bed across from Marcus's empty one, and did what he was best at in all the world.

He kept it in his bag.

The rain went on falling where no rain was. And two hundred miles away — though Jonah could not have known it, and would not have believed it — an old woman in a cardigan stopped knitting in the middle of a row, and lifted her head, and tasted the air like a sailor reading weather.

“There you are,” she said softly, to nobody, in an empty kitchen. “Oh, there you are at last.”

“Lovely,” remarked the teapot, pleasantly. “I'll want warming, then.”

She was already reaching for her coat.