THE GIRL AT THE WINDOW

Claire climbed the slope to the knoll above the cave, sat down in the grass, crossed her legs, and tried very hard not to cry.

She did not manage it. She had never been good at that part.

Down in the zendo, she had felt him watching her as she walked away. She had not turned to see his face. She had seen it once already that evening, when he leaned close and told her that what she had done was unforgivable, and she did not think she could survive seeing it twice.

So she came here, to the place where he had sat alone for two months before Boston. It was the only place on the mountain that still felt like him.

She closed her eyes and straightened her back, the way he had taught her.

And because the mind does what it wants on a cushion, or on a hill, it went back.

It went back, first, to a window.

She was twelve, barefoot, standing at the front window of the white house in Brookline, watching a man in a borrowed gray suit stop under the magnolia tree by the gate and close his eyes. She remembered the exact moment she started running. She remembered the cold stone on her feet, and the knot of the bracelet coming loose in her fingers, and the way he had knelt down to her height.

Then I’ll keep it. Always.

She had not known his full name. Mr. Pierce told her that night: Francis Xavier Armand. Once a lawyer, now a monk, at a monastery in California with a name like something out of a fairy tale. Dharma Mountain.

She had written it on the inside cover of her math notebook. Then, a week later, ashamed, she had scribbled it out.

She had written it again the week after that.

She was nineteen the first time she saw the mountain.

By then the safe houses had begun, a network of shelters for orphaned children, founded with the money the court awarded them and with his name on the papers, and she and Anna sat on the board as trustees, two serious young women in borrowed blazers who had been those children once. When the board met for the first time at Dharma Mountain, Claire told herself she was going for the meeting.

She knew it was a lie before the plane left Logan.

He met them at the gate himself. He was older, of course, and thinner, and his head was shaved, and he wore the old patched robe that had been his teacher’s. He bowed to Mr. and Mrs. Pierce. He bowed to Anna. Then he bowed to her, and smiled the same strange smile she remembered from the hall in Brookline, happy and sad at the same time.

And she saw the bracelet on his wrist.

He had kept it. Seven years, and he had kept it, just as he promised.

She did not hear a word of the board meeting.

She stayed for the summer. Then for a year. Then, in the way these things happen, she simply stopped leaving.

He taught her to meditate. He taught everyone, but it felt to her as though he taught her. He showed her how to sit, and how to breathe, and how to come back, gently, every time the mind wandered off. In those first years she was often angry, at her parents, at the insurance company, at the whole unfair machinery of the world. He would listen to all of it and then say, very kindly, You didn’t come all this way to stay angry, Claire.

She loved him the whole time.

She loved him the way you love the sun, without any hope of being loved back in the same way, because the sun does not love anyone in particular. It just shines on everything. That was what he was, on the mountain. Compassion without edges. Kindness for the man at the gate with the tumor, and for the boy with the bleeding, and for the trucker in the kitchen, and for her. All exactly the same.

She knew he did not see her the way she saw him. To him, she would always be the little girl who ran barefoot down a path. She told herself that it was enough to be near him.

It was almost true.

Then came the months he spent in the cave.

She watched him climb this slope every morning for two months, and come down every evening a little thinner, a little brighter, with something in his eyes that frightened her. She heard Yun arguing with him in the office late at night, in a voice she had never heard Yun use. She heard the words overload and circuit.

On the morning he left for Boston, she walked him to the gate.

She had decided to tell him. She had rehearsed it for a week. Then he turned to her at the gate, and put his warm hands on her shoulders, and said, Look after the children while I’m gone, and she lost her nerve completely and said only, Come back soon.

He never called.

She found him at St. Catherine’s.

Yun had told her what to expect. He had told her what she must not do. He believes it is 1995, Claire. In his mind, you are seven years old. He’s never met you. If you tell him, you could lose him for good.

She had promised.

And then she walked into the dining hall of a homeless shelter on a cold night and saw him sitting alone at a crooked table, in a ruined suit, staring at a bowl of watery soup as though he did not know what it was. And every part of her wanted to run across the room and throw her arms around him and tell him who he was, who she was, everything.

Instead she picked up a folded piece of cardboard and walked over and said, Here. Lift your end.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

It got harder.

On the train, when he shook with cold and she pulled him against her, she had to pretend she was a stranger keeping a stranger warm. In the dark, with his heart beating against her cheek, she had to listen to him call her by her name and know that he did not know it. And when she kissed him, she knew that she was kissing a man who did not remember her, who could not have chosen her, who would perhaps never forgive her when he did.

She kissed him anyway. She was not proud of it. She was not sorry, either.

But she had stopped there. That much, at least, she had managed. Whatever else might happen between them would have to wait for a man who knew her name.

On the hill above the Mississippi, with the whole river spread out below them and his arm around her, she nearly told him. The words were in her mouth. It’s me. The girl at the window. I gave you the bracelet. I have loved you since I was twelve years old.

But he had looked down at her with an expression she had waited half her life to see, and he had said that, for the first time he could remember, he felt complete.

And she could not bring herself to take it away from him.

On the knoll, the light was going. The air was turning cold. Below her, the stream ran under the little wooden bridge, and somewhere in the cloister a door banged shut.

She opened her eyes.

She thought about leaving. Anna would drive her. She could be in Redding by midnight, and in Boston by tomorrow, and she would never have to see that look on his face again.

Then she thought about the thing he had taught her, years ago, in the zendo, when she was nineteen and angry at everything.

Only this.

Not the past, which was over. Not the future, which might never come. Only this hill, and this evening, and this breath. And whatever came up that path next, she would meet it here.

So she closed her eyes again, and straightened her back, and sat.

Below her, someone was running across the wooden bridge.

She heard Yun shouting from somewhere behind, and then footsteps on the slope, coming fast, scattering stones, the uneven, out-of-breath footsteps of a man pushing fifty.

Then, very close, her name.

“Claire!”

She did not open her eyes right away. She let herself have one more breath. Just one. The last breath of the girl at the window.

Then she opened them, and smiled.