"Do you understand the difference?" "I do." I am not certain you do. I'm going to say it again in a different way. There is a temptation, Arthur, for men in your position to find a child like this one and to put him on a shelf inside the rest of their life as though he were the missing piece that completes the picture.
He is not a missing piece. He is a person. He has his own picture. Your job, if you have a job at all in his picture, is to be one figure in the background of it holding the lantern while he walks. Not the lantern, not the road, not the destination, the hand that holds the lantern.
"Do you understand now?" Arthur sat on his sofa in his quiet apartment on the eighth floor and he closed his eyes and he understood that he had called the right person. "Yes," he said. "Now I do." "Good.
Then I am glad you called." "Helena?" "Yes?" "Are you happy?" A pause, a short one.
"Yes, Arthur, I am." "Are you?" "I have not been." I think I might be about to be for the first time in a long while. "Then I am glad about that too."
"Call me on Saturday after you have seen Estelle." Tell me what she says. I would like to know. "I will." Goodbye "Arthur."
Goodbye Helena. The line went dead. He sat for a long while on the sofa. The room was darker than it had been when he sat down. He had not noticed the light going.
He stood up eventually. He went to the window. He looked at the park. He did not, of course, see the boy from the window. The boy was four miles away in a kitchen in a house in a part of the city Arthur had only been to twice, eating a bowl of soup that Estelle had made from a recipe her own mother had taught her, with a dog named Pepper asleep on the floor beside his chair.
But Arthur standing at the window felt for the first time since he had been roughly 30 years old that he knew where in the world the next part of his life was going to take place. Arthur did not see Ren for nine days. He had been prepared after the conversation with Helena to wait considerably longer. He had been prepared, if necessary, to wait forever, in the sense that he had understood from Helena's voice on the telephone that the waiting was part of the thing, and that a man who could not wait was a man who had not understood what the boy was for, which was to say not for anything. He spent those nine days doing several things.
He went to his attorney's office on Thursday morning as promised. He sat across from Marcus Hanson, who had been his attorney for 28 years, and he explained what had happened on Tuesday and what he intended to do about it. Marcus listened the way Marcus always listened, which was without interruption and with one pen tapping very softly against the edge of a yellow pad. When Arthur was finished, Marcus said, ""Arthur, before we discuss the structure, I want to ask you one question, and I want you to answer it honestly. Are you doing this because the boy saved your life?
Or are you doing this because you have realized on the occasion of your life having been saved that you would have done it anyway if you had known the boy existed?" Arthur thought about this. "The second one. The first is the occasion. The second is the reason."
"Good answer. We can work with that. Tell me what you want." He told him. He wanted a trust established for Estelle's house size so that the house would never have to take a child it could not afford to take and never have to refuse a child for reasons of money.
He wanted a second trust established for Ren specifically to take effect if and only if Ren chose at the age of 18 or any age thereafter to make use of it with terms that allowed Ren to decline it entirely if he wished and walk away owing no one anything. He wanted a third instrument established that he did not yet have a name for, but that he described to Marcus as a way for the foundation to begin doing the kind of work the foundation had not until now been doing. He wanted Marcus to start drafting all three. Marcus said, ""Arthur, this is going to take some months." "I am aware.
Start anyway."" He spent a portion of each day on the telephone with people he had not called in some time. He called his niece in Phoenix who was 41 and worked in pediatric occupational therapy and who had the last time he had seen her told him about a program in her hospital that worked with children who had been removed from their homes. He had said at the time that it sounded important. He had not at the time asked her any follow-up questions. He asked them.
Now the conversation lasted an hour and 40 minutes and at the end of it his niece was quiet for a long time and then said, ""Uncle Arthur, are you all right?"" And he said, "I am Cassie better than I have been. I will explain in time." He called Doris at his attorney's office and asked her to come to lunch with him on Friday. He had known Doris for 22 years and had never had lunch with her once. She accepted with the careful neutrality of a woman who had decided long ago that whatever the men in good coats wanted to do with their time was their business.
At lunch he asked her about her children of whom he had heard her speak only in passing over the years. And he listened to the answers with the attention he had failed for 22 years to give them. When the lunch was over, she said, ""Mr. Mercer, I am not sure what this lunch was about, but it was a nicer lunch than I had expected when I accepted it." and he said, ""Doris, I'm 67 years old and I have only just figured out that I have been failing for some decades to ask the right questions of people who deserved them. I'm trying to repair some of that. Thank you for coming."
She looked at him for a moment and then she said, ""Well, all right then, Mr. Mercer."" And she did not say anything more, but Arthur saw as she walked away from the table that her shoulders sat a little differently than they had when she sat down. He did not call Estelle. He had said he would come on Saturday. He came on Saturday. Estelle's house was in a neighborhood that Arthur had been through perhaps three times in his life and never on foot.
It was a yellow house with a white porch and a fence around a yard with grass that had been allowed to grow a little wild on purpose because Estelle had once told him children needed places where the grass was tall enough to be interesting. The dog Pepper was on the porch when Arthur came up the walk, lying in a square of sunlight with the particular boneless commitment of an old dog who had decided that nothing on this porch was going to require him to stand up again ever. Estelle opened the door before he reached it. She was 71. She had been a small woman when Arthur had met her at 31, and she had become over 40 years somehow smaller and more solid at the same time, like a stone that had been weathered by long use into the exact shape of itself.
Arthur Estelle, he is in the back. He is reading. He does not know you are coming today. I did not tell him because I did not want him to spend the morning waiting. He has spent enough mornings waiting in his life so far.
"That was wise." I am going to walk you to the kitchen. You are going to sit at the table. I'm going to go and tell him that you have come and that he can come and say hello if he wants to and that he does not have to if he does not want to. Then we will see what he chooses.