He thought about Edward's children, who were now adults with children of their own, and who he saw at funerals. He thought about the work. He thought about the firm he had built starting in the back room of a borrowed office in 1979 and the way it had become over the decades, the kind of firm that did not need him to be in the building for the building to keep running. He thought about the foundation he had started in 2003, because his accountant had suggested he ought to, and because he had not at the time known what else to do with money that was accumulating faster than he could find uses for it. He thought about the foundation's most recent annual report, which had been, when he read it, the report of an organization that did good work, but did not particularly know him.
He had been, he understood now, a stranger at his own foundation for some years. He thought about the boy. He thought about the boy a great deal. He thought about a child who had watched a tree lean for a week and had told two adults about it and had been ignored by both and who had then stationed himself near the tree to do for strangers what the adults had not been willing to do for the street. He thought about what it took to be 8 years old and to have decided in the absence of anyone deciding it for you that the job of looking out for other people was your job.
He thought about the small careful way the boy had held the granola bar. He arrived at his building a little after 4:00. The doorman, a man named Reuben, who had been there longer than Arthur had, opened the door for him and made some small remark about the weather and then looked at Arthur's face more closely and said, ""Mr. Mercer, are you all right, sir?" "I had a near miss with a tree this morning, Reuben."" "My God, sir, should you not be at a hospital?" "A paramedic looked at me.
I'm all right." I'm only tired, sir. "I am going to bring you a glass of water upstairs." "Thank you, Reuben. That is kind."
He went up to his apartment. It was on the eighth floor. It had a view of the park that he had paid a great deal of money for and had over the years looked at less and less. The apartment was clean because a woman named Enz came twice a week and made it so. And it was quiet because there was no one in it but him.
And it was, he understood suddenly, and with some force, the apartment of a man who had not had a real conversation inside its walls in possibly nine months. He sat down on the sofa. He did not turn on the television. He did not pour himself a drink. He sat in the very particular quiet of his own apartment at 4:00 in the afternoon, and he thought about a small boy who was at that exact moment riding in the passenger seat of a patrol car with a backpack from behind a dumpster on his lap.
On his way to a house with a yard and a fence and a dog named Pepper, he thought for the first time in a long time that he might have been wrong about a great many things. Reuben came up with the water. Arthur drank it. Reuben withdrew. The apartment was quiet again.
After a while, Arthur picked up his phone. He scrolled past Estelle's name. He scrolled past his attorney's name. He scrolled until he found the name of a woman he had not called in 11 years. He pressed call.
Helena answered on the fourth ring. ""Arthur."" "Helena." There was a silence on the line of the kind that exists only between two people who have not spoken in a long time and who have in the time they have not spoken neither stopped loving each other nor figured out what to do with the fact. "You sound strange," she said. ""Are you all right?"" A tree almost fell on me this morning. A boy pulled me out of the way. The boy is 8 years old.
He has been on the street since March. I have spent the last several hours arranging for him to go somewhere safer than the street. And I have spent the last hour sitting in my apartment thinking about what I am going to do with the rest of what I have. And I have, after some thinking, arrived at the conclusion that one of the things I would like to do with the rest of what I have is to call you and tell you that I am sorry. A pause.
"Arthur." I am not asking for anything, Helena. I'm not asking to see you. I'm not asking to write letters. I am calling because I should have called 30 years ago when I realized I had been wrong and I did not because I had decided at the time that the dignified thing to do was to leave you alone.
And I have in the last hour come to the conclusion that the dignified thing and the right thing were not the same thing and that I owed you the call. Helena was quiet for a long time. He could hear very faintly the sound of a kettle somewhere in the background of her life in Edinburgh, where it was 9:00 at night, and where she had, he knew, because he had once asked an acquaintance and then felt ashamed about asking, married a man named Ian in 1996 and had been married to him ever since. "Arthur," she said finally. Her voice was not cold.
It was not warm either. It was the voice of a woman who had spent 33 years working out what she would say if Arthur Mercer ever called her and who had now discovered that the thing she had worked out was no longer quite right because the man on the telephone was no longer quite the man she had been preparing the speech for. I do not know what to do with this telephone call. She said you do not have to do anything with it. I do not want anything from it.
I wanted you to have it. That is all. You said a boy pulled you out of the way of a tree. "Yes." "Tell me about the boy."
So he told her. He told her about the corner of Sycamore and Linden. He told her about the voice at his elbow. He told her about the granola bar and the dumpster behind the church on Hadley and the way the boy had said since March. He told her about Estelle, whom Helena had met perhaps four times during their marriage and had liked very much.
He told her because she asked about the call to Estelle and about the conversation that had followed about the house and about the money. When he was finished, Helena was quiet for a long time. "Arthur," she said, "do you remember the conversation we had in the kitchen on Cumberland Street in 1989? "I remember every conversation I had with you in any kitchen in any year, Helena." That is a lovely thing to say, and I do not entirely believe it, but I will take it.
The conversation I am thinking of is the one where I asked you whether you wanted children, and you told me that you did, and I told you that I did, and we agreed that we would, and then we did not. We did not because you said we should wait until the firm was steadier. and I said, "All right." And then we waited until I was 37 and you were 41. And by then, I had stopped asking and you had stopped saying anything. Do you remember that part?
I remember that part. I have thought in 33 years about that part more than is healthy. I have made my peace with it mostly. Ian and I did not have children either for reasons that were our own and not yours. I am telling you this because I want you to hear what I am about to say next without thinking I am saying it to hurt you.
I am not. "Are you ready?" "I am ready." You are 67 years old, "Arthur." You have by your own description in this telephone call just decided to do something about a boy who is 8.
That is not nothing. That is in fact the largest thing I have heard you describe wanting to do in any of the years I have known you. I want you to do it carefully. I want you to do it slowly. I want you to do it in a way that is for him and not for you.