Before Amir could answer, my father appeared with a pair of quilts I’d never seen and a new pillow, too. As soon as they were spread on the floor, Amir lay on top of them and covered himself with the big blue coat.
“You’ll be all right,” my father murmured to the boy. He didn’t seem surprised that Amir hadn’t brushed his teeth or changed into pajamas. When he turned off the light, moonlight flooded the room. “Get some sleep, and in the morning, we’ll show you around the property. You’ll like it here, Amir. Horseshoe Cliff is a wonderful place for children.”
I was feeling tired myself and it didn’t seem like my father was paying attention to me, so I followed Amir’s lead and climbed into my bed without brushing my teeth or changing into my pajamas. Pal looked at me with his ears all perked up and expectant, but I shook my head to let him know not to jump onto the bed until Dad had left.
“Good night,” said my father, kissing my forehead. The door clicked shut and Pal immediately leaped onto my bed and curled himself around my feet. I turned onto my side and watched Amir. His eyes moved below his eyelids in a way that made me think he was not yet asleep. I longed to reach out and touch the blue coat, to knead it like dough below my fingers. New York must have been very cold to need a coat so big.
“That’s a big coat,” I could not help but whisper.
“It was my mother’s,” Amir whispered back without opening his eyes.
“Oh. Was your mother very big?”
Amir was quiet for so long that I thought he had fallen asleep. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. What a strange day I’d had. First my father had left on a mysterious errand. Then Bear had locked me in the closet for hours. And now an orphan had come to live with us, bringing not much more than his mother’s enormous coat. Had my own mother been big or small? I wondered. There was a stack of her clothes on the top shelf of my father’s closet. I would lay them on the floor in the morning, I decided, to see how big my mother had been.
“She wasn’t very big,” I heard Amir say then, so quietly that I wondered if the words had come from my own lips, if I’d drifted off to sleep and murmured the answer to my own question. But when I rolled back onto my side and looked down, I saw that the boy’s eyes were dark jellyfish in shimmering twin seas. I felt a connection to him that I could not explain. On an impulse, I reached out my hand to him, and he held it.
