The tree had reached the window.
When Ada went to sleep, a nurse had needed to point it out: a sapling held upright by two stakes in the clinic courtyard. Now a branch pressed against the glass, thick enough to support a child.
An old man sat beside her bed.
He was rubbing the seam of his trousers between finger and thumb.
"Leon?"
He looked up.
She knew the movement before she knew the face. At eight, he'd rubbed any piece of fabric he could reach when he was trying not to cry.
"How old?"
"Sixty-eight."
The branch scraped the window.
Ada looked down at her hands. She remembered using them to button Leon's school coat the morning she went in. They hadn't changed.
She had been thirty-one.
He put a cup against her lips. She drank, spilled some and tried to apologize. He had already found a towel.
"They said that might happen."
His hand shook more than hers.
She wanted him to climb into the bed. She could remember the weight of him asleep across her legs so exactly that the narrow chair seemed a mistake somebody ought to correct.
"They found the treatment?"
"Yes."
"After all this time."
He folded the wet corner of the towel inward.
"Eighteen months."
She waited.
"It took eighteen months," he said.
In the courtyard a leaf tapped the glass.
"Then why?"
He reached for the bag beside his chair and took out a change of clothes. Soft trousers, a shirt with buttons large enough for her to manage.
"The clinic was sold. Before the treatment came through."
"But the contract."
"They kept the storage part."
He placed the clothes at the foot of the bed.
"Treatment was another company. Waking you was another. You couldn't leave until all three were paid."
Ada looked toward the open door. A nurse passed with a tray, smiled at them and kept walking.
"Nobody called?"
"They called."
Leon picked a loose thread from the shirt.
"When I was nineteen, we nearly had it. Then they moved you to the new storage wing and added the transfer. At thirty-four, I paid for the treatment. I thought that would be enough."
"I was cured?"
"Yes."
"And they left me there?"
"The storage bill was still running."
She tried to sit up too quickly. He caught her shoulder, and for a moment they were both holding each other upright.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"You didn't know."
He sounded practiced at saying it.
From the bag he took a photograph in a cheap frame. A boy in a school sweater stood beside a woman on a beach. The woman had a scarf tied over her hair. Leon's new front teeth were too large for his mouth. One of the baby teeth had been loose the week Ada went into suspension.
"June," he said.
"Who is she?"
"My foster mother. Then she adopted me."
Ada's sister had agreed to take Leon for a year. Ada remembered the conversation: a year, perhaps two, then they would see. Her sister had already had three children and a husband who counted portions.
"She kept your name," Leon said quickly. "She said you were coming back."
Ada touched the boy's face through the frame.
"Were you happy?"
He took time to answer.
"Yes. Mostly. I was a child."
She nodded too many times.
Beside his chair stood a small round container wrapped in a cardigan. He moved it closer with his heel when the nurse passed again.
"We can start now," Ada said.
She heard how bright she'd made her voice.
"You can tell me everything. Where you lived. What you did. Did you get married?"
"For a while."
"Children?"
"A daughter. She's in the north."
"I'd like to meet her."
"She'd like that."
Ada was making a list in her head. School, first job, wife, daughter. If she could arrange the facts, perhaps she could find a place among them.
"What made it possible now?" she asked.
Leon looked at the container.
"June had a policy."
"She paid for me?"
"She helped all along. Sold the house when she retired. We rented together after that."
"I must thank her."
His thumb returned to the seam of his trousers.
Ada understood before he said it.
"The insurance paid out when she died."
He lifted the container onto his knees and unwound the cardigan. It was glazed blue, with a line of pale sand-colored waves around the lid.
"She was ninety-one. She used to say she wasn't going until you woke up."
"Leon."
"We knew what the policy was worth. For years we knew. She kept making jokes about it. I asked her to stop."
He looked at the framed photograph.
"She wanted to be here when you opened your eyes."
Ada held out her hands.
He bent forward, and she thought he was coming toward her.
"I miss my mother," he said.
For one confused, grateful moment, she thought he meant the waiting was over.
Then he drew the blue container against his chest.
Ada let her hands rest on the blanket.
Outside, the branch moved in a wind she couldn't feel. She tried to imagine the woman growing old while she remained thirty-one, the two of them approaching this room from opposite ends of a life.
Leon was crying with his mouth shut.
Ada moved carefully to the edge of the bed until she could sit beside his chair. She put her hand on his shoulder.
"Tell me about her."
He shook his head, unable to speak yet.
She stayed there. After a while he leaned against her, still holding June, and Ada held the weight he could spare.
