TWENTY-THREE YEARS AGO
THE SECOND HOME
THE phone tree worked.
Eli arrived at the Russos’ house that night with a backpack full of clothes, and the knowledge that his stay was temporary. A place for him to wait while the authorities tracked down a living relative, one willing to collect him.
Mrs. Russo met him at the door in a robe. It was late, and the Russo kids—there were five of them, ranging in age from six to fifteen—were already asleep. She took Eli’s bag and led him inside. The house was warm and soft in a lived-in way, the surfaces scuffed, the edges worn smooth.
“Poor thing,” she clucked under her breath as she led Eli into the kitchen. She gestured at the table for him to sit, and continued to murmur, more to herself than to him. The sound she made was so different from his own mother, whose whispered words had always been tinged with a hint of desperation. My angel, my angel, you must be good, you must be light.
Eli lowered himself into a rickety kitchen chair and stared down at his hands, still waiting for the shock to come, or go, whichever it was meant to. Mrs. Russo placed a steaming mug in front of him, and he curled his fingers around it. It was hot—uncomfortably so—but he didn’t pull away. The pain was familiar, almost welcome.
What now? thought Eli.
Every end is a new beginning.
Mrs. Russo sat down across from him. She reached her hands out and wrapped them over his. Eli flinched back at the touch, tried to pull away, but her grip was firm.
“You must be hurting,” she said, and he was—his hands were burning from the mug, but he knew she meant a deeper, heavier pain, and that he didn’t feel. If anything, Eli felt lighter than he had in years.
“God never gives us more than we can bear,” she continued.
Eli focused on the small gold cross that hung around her neck.
“But it’s up to us to find the purpose in the pain.”
The purpose in the pain.
“Come on,” she said, patting his hand. “I’ll make up the couch.”
* * *
ELI had never been a good sleeper.
He’d spent half of every night listening to his father move just beyond the door, like a wolf in the woods behind the house. A predator, circling too near. But the Russos’ place was quiet, calm, and Eli lay awake, marveling at the way eight bodies under one roof could take up less space than two.
The quiet didn’t last.
At some point Eli must have drifted off, because he started awake to raucous laughter and morning light and a pair of wide green eyes watching him from the edge of the couch. The youngest Russo girl perched there, staring at him with a mixture of interest and suspicion.
Four loud bodies came crashing suddenly into the room, a cacophony of limbs and noise. It was Saturday, and already the Russo children were running wild. Eli spent most of the time trying to stay out of their path, but it was hard in such a crowded house.
“Weirdo,” said one of the boys, knocking into him on the stairs.
“How long is he staying?” asked another.
“Don’t be un-Christian,” warned Mr. Russo.
“Gives me the creeps,” said the oldest boy.
“What’s wrong with you?” demanded the youngest girl.
“Nothing,” answered Eli, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.
“Then act normal,” she ordered, as if that were such a simple thing.
“What does normal look like?” he asked, at which point the girl made a small, exasperated sound and stormed away.
Eli waited for someone to come and get him, take him away—though he didn’t know where they would take him—but the day passed, and darkness fell, and he was still there. That first night was the only one he spent alone. They put him in the boys’ room after that, a spare mattress tucked in one corner. He lay there, listening to the other boys sleep with a mixture of annoyance and envy, his nerves too fine-tuned to let him rest among the various sounds of movement.
Eventually he got up and went downstairs, hoping to steal a few precious hours of stillness on the sofa.
Mr. and Mrs. Russo were in the kitchen, and Eli heard them talking.
“Something’s not right with that boy.”
Eli hovered in the hall, holding his breath.
“He’s too quiet.”
Mrs. Russo sighed. “He’s been through a lot, Alan. He’ll find his way.”
Eli returned to the boys’ room, climbed back into his bed. There, in the dark, the words repeated.
Quiet. Weirdo. Creep.
He’ll find his way.
Act normal.
Eli didn’t know what normal was, or even what it looked like. But he’d spent a lifetime studying his father’s moods and his mother’s silences, the way the air in the house changed like the sky before a storm. Now he watched the way the Russo boys roughhoused, noted the fine line between humor and aggression.
He studied the confidence with which the oldest—a boy of sixteen—moved among his younger siblings. He studied the guileless innocence the youngest played up, to get what he wanted. He studied the way their faces twisted into a pantomime of emotions like annoyance and disgust and anger. Most of all, he studied their joy. The way their eyes lit up when they were gleeful, the varying tones of their laughter, the dozen ways their smiles shone or softened depending on the exact nature of their delight.
Eli had never known there were so many kinds of happiness, let alone so many ways to express it.
But his study was cut short when, just two weeks into his stay with the Russos, Eli found himself uprooted again, deposited with another family in another house.
Act normal, the Russo girl had said.
And so Eli tried again. Started fresh. It wasn’t a perfect imitation, not by far. But it was an improvement. The children at this new house still called him names, but the names had changed.
Timid, quiet, weirdo had been replaced by strange, curious, intense.
Soon came another family, and another chance.
Another opportunity to reinvent, to modify, to adjust aspects of that act.
Eli tested his theater on the families as if they were an audience, and used their feedback, the immediate, constant feedback, to tweak his performance.
Slowly strange, curious, intense had been refined, honed into charming, focused, clever.
Then something else changed.
Another car pulled up, and took him away, but this time it didn’t drop him off with another of his father’s flock.
This time, it took him to family.
THE FIFTH HOME
PATRICK Cardale did not believe in God.
He was John’s estranged nephew, the son of a dead aunt that Eli had never met. Patrick was a professor at a local college, married to a painter named Lisa. They didn’t have children. No one for Eli to mimic. No curtain of normalcy or noise for him to slip behind.
Eli sat on the sofa across from them. A captured audience. A solo act.
“How old are you?” asked Patrick. “Twelve?”
“Almost thirteen,” said Eli. It had been more than six months since Pastor Cardale’s accident.
“I’m sorry it took us so long,” said Patrick, hands between his knees.
Lisa put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll be honest, it wasn’t an easy decision.”
Patrick shifted. “I knew you’d been raised a certain way. And I knew I couldn’t give you that. John and I, we didn’t see eye to eye.”
“Neither did we,” said Eli.
He realized he was making them uncomfortable, so he smiled. Not too wide, just enough to let Patrick know that he was okay.
“Come on,” said Lisa, rising. “I’ll show you to your room.”
Eli rose to follow her.
“We can find you a church,” she added, leading him down the hall. “If it’s important to you.”
But he didn’t need a church. Not because he’d given up on God—but because church itself was the one place Eli had never felt Him. No, God had stood with Eli at the top of the cellar stairs. Given him each of those families to learn from. Led him here, to this house, and this couple, this new chance.
His room, when they got there, was comfortable and clean. A double bed, a closet, a desk. A pair of framed pictures hung on the wall over the desk, anatomical drawings, one of a hand, the other a diagram of a human heart. Eli stopped before them, studying the lines, startled by the intricacy, the elegance.
“You can take those down, if you don’t like them,” said Lisa. “Make the space yours. Put up posters or whatever boys your age do.”
Eli glanced toward her. “How long am I staying?”
Lisa’s eyes widened in surprise. Her face was an open book—that was the phrase people used. Eli had never really understood it until he looked at Lisa.
“As long as you want,” she said. “This is your home now.”
Eli didn’t know what to say to that. He’d been living in increments of days, weeks, which wasn’t really living, of course. Now, his future stretched before him, measured in months, years.
Eli smiled, and this time, it almost felt natural.