They watched him watch the window.
“What’s he looking at?”
“I don’t know. The city.”
They could see him resting his chin on the windowsill and whispering into his long fingers.
“The city? He’s never seen the city.”
“Exactly.”
He was counting buildings. They stood tall and gray and quiet as far as he could see. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten, he breathed, and closed his fingers into fists and started over. He thought if he could just look between the buildings and find a hole small enough to look past the city, he would see his old house with the old trees and the old leaves.
When they had moved, when the car was burdened with all the possible luxuries of modern life, when they locked the door and at last walked out into the sudden rain, he had stepped on one of the leaves from the tall red-leafed tree watching the roof of the house and sniffed back a sudden scent of tears. There was a tire swing in the back that he wished he had left swinging, swinging back and forth so he could have seen it from the side of the house as they pulled out. But the picture framed in the back window was just the red-pink leaves resting on the roof. He had to imagine the tire swing swinging. He had never had any friends. Just the tree and the tire swing.
When Mom had shown him his new room, he could only see the great tall window at one end, without drapes or decoration, and the gray buildings and he saw under the window a crack in the wall and a hole in the wood floorboards. He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.
“Did you know you can grow a tree from a seed this big?” Grandpa had said, before he went away to heaven. James had put both his hands in Grandpa’s and pressed the seed into his fingertips.
“That’s it?” he asked with big eyes.
“That’s it.”
He had put it in that little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds should go. “Mom says you have a green thumb.”
He laughed. “Do I?”
“Mom says.” But when Grandpa held his thumbs out, they looked old and brown and waxy.
“She just means I can grow things.”
When Mom and Dad left him alone in his new room, he fished the seed out of his little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds go and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and dropped his seed into the hole under the crack in the wall.
At first there was only a tiny green tendril, curled lovingly over the lip of the floor knot, a single paper-thin leaf drinking in a whole window pane full of gorgeous yellow-glowing sunlight. Surprised, he had tucked the leaf back in and moved his wood chest over it. But when he closed his eyes that night, he saw the leaf under the floorboards, caught reaching up for a sunlight that would never reach down, caught between spider webs and the insect corpses of the underground. He shivered and caught his breath and scrunched his legs up to keep his feet under the blanket. And the next morning he pushed the chest aside and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and put his eye to the knot, and when he saw what he saw there, under the floorboards, he blinked.
There were two leaves now, and they were reaching towards the wall underneath where a glob of sunlight was dribbling out like honey. The light-green tubed tendril unwinding itself towards the glow. There was something about it that James thought was beautiful.
From underneath the floorboards, one could see the single eye in the hole shut tight, and James imagined the tall pale window pane framing a great swaying tree, once a fledgling vine, now coming up out of the floorboards like a dream from Dr. Suess. And he had put it there with his own fingers, pushed it into the thick brown gnarled knot in the floor beneath the window and tamped it down with one of Mother’s silvery-shiny forks that only guests could use.
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