Chapter 15
Ella
Tuesday
I said goodbye to my dad and ended our phone call.
We had spent about an hour keeping each other company.
He was stuck in traffic driving home from work, and I was pacing around the small telephone table in my living room.
I had called him when I got home from school, made my usual stop by the mailbox and found a letter from him.
My mom and brothers had already arrived home.
My brother Simon had interrupted me to ask where his Spider-Man socks were — I had no idea.
Too many socks and too many feet in the house.
My brother Theodore had peeked through the door to offer me a slice of the yogurt cake he had just baked.
And my dad had stayed on the line with me, no big news to share, just quietly living the day with me from afar.
We lived with an ocean between us. He had moved away a long time ago for a great job offer he had accepted after the divorce. I didn’t really recall a time when my parents were together.
Somehow, I missed memories of moments I didn’t even remember.
Not exactly of my parents being together, but of my dad being closer.
Physically closer. Even though we had never stopped being in constant and continuous touch through long phone calls and the letters we’d randomly write to each other about our days.
My father and I were never particularly skilled at outward displays of affection.
We were alike in that, often speaking love without words.
While we may have known how to describe feelings, there was an invisible barrier between comfort and vulnerability that kept us from expressing them out loud, where they might be caught by other ears.
Sometimes, I looked into my father’s eyes and recognized the unshed tears. Tears of emotion he also refused to let fall.
My parents were incredibly special. I wondered if I deserved them. They were both such amazing human beings that I couldn’t help but question whether life had been too generous with me.
One thing my father had done ever since my sister and I were little was quietly open our bedroom door at night, just a little, just to look at us.
Slowly, without making a sound. Without speaking.
And in that moment, I knew his heart simply needed to check that everything was okay.
And without words, he told me, “I’m happy to see you here. ”
Expressing ourselves had never come easy for either of us. It was hard with each other, too. I knew how much he loved me, and he knew how much I loved him. The reason had never been a lack of love. It was simply a different way of showing it.
Whenever I visited him, when my time there came to an end, he always walked me to the gate. He stood there, watching as I drove away, and I would see him in my rearview mirror. He never turned back first. He always waited until I was the one disappearing over the horizon.
When I was younger, it wasn’t me driving away. It was him. And I used to stand at my mother’s gate, arm raised, waiting for him to reach the curve in the road where he would slow down and wave back at me one last time, just before the turn.
That was our way of saying “I’ll miss you.” Without words.
The last time I visited, I left for my flight on a Sunday night. Before I walked out the door, my father hugged me twice. His smile was genuine and comforting. His embrace was strong and safe. We both smiled and held on. A hug that was a refuge, a hug worth more than a thousand words.
And that moment was our wordless “I love you.”
I walked through the CIC’s front gate, turned the corner into the garden, and saw Miss Amara and Miles coming my way, walking side by side, engaged in a deep conversation.
It was funny to find him here, with Miss Amara. I knew she always welcomed people. She took us all in.
Without intention, but with full curiosity, I caught the end of their conversation as I approached to say hello.
“And I do insist on paying you for your time with them, Miles. It’s nothing fixed or formal, but we have some funds, and we’ll make sure you get something as a temporary part-time helper.”
Maybe I was interrupting. I considered stopping my feet, but I was too close.
“Hi!” I smiled, and thought about assuring them I wasn’t trying to snoop.
But Miss Amara didn’t give me the chance, smiling right away. “Ella, dear, we’re just coming back from the Youth Club. You’re early for your shift!”
“I know, I was curious to see them at that workshop I read about happening today.”
“What do you do on your shift?” Miles asked.
“Oh, I stay with the little ones. I mean, the kindergarteners. Sometimes with the babies, other times with the ones who can already talk and run around. Today, I’m reading to those.” I lifted the book that I was carrying under my arm. “Challenging them to be still.”
He let out a soft laugh and nodded in understanding.
“Miles, why don’t you stay and go with Ella? You haven’t seen the kindergarten yet!” Miss Amara suggested. Miles looked at me before saying anything.
“Of course!” I assured him. “Want to join?”
“Yeah,” he smiled at my invitation. “Sure, I’ll join you.”
“I was wondering how you were adapting,” I said as we walked down the hall, after saying goodbye to Miss Amara. “And now I’m wondering what you and Miss Amara were doing at the Youth Club.”
“I’m good, thank you,” he said with a small smile, looking at the floor.
“And Miss Amara wants me to help her organize a sort of Music Zone for the youth. I’d meet them, figure out which instruments would be interesting to have at the Center, and give some music lessons to those who are interested. ”
“That’s a really good idea! Not everyone gets the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument. I think a lot of the kids would be excited about that!”
I hadn’t been expecting it, but I knew Miss Amara — she had plenty of cards up her sleeve.
She was my piano teacher, and she must have known that Miles played different instruments himself.
He was some sort of music genius. He’d had music classes at his old school, but it was like he didn’t need much to master an instrument.
It was his passion. I found out about it two weeks ago on our flyers walk.
He nodded, his lips lifted in a soft smile. “Well, it was all Miss Amara’s idea. And I don’t know if I would be a good teacher.”
I couldn’t tell if he didn’t feel like doing it, or if he was just doubting himself.
“Do you like the idea?” I asked.
He thought for a few seconds before answering, “I do like the idea.”
“Then maybe you could give it a try and see what you think. Think about whether you’d like it or not.
Don’t worry too much about whether they’d like you.
Because I assure you, you’ll always win over some little musicians, no matter what you do.
For them, you don’t have to be a professional.
You just have to be there and just… offer them your time. ”
I really believed what I was telling him. Children were easy, they weren’t strict or picky, they’d be happy with whatever Miles could share with them.
A theatrical voice interrupted us as we got to the kindergarten zone: “What color is your heart?” the workshop psychologist, Mary, said from inside the room. Miles and I leaned in the doorway to listen.
It was a workshop about emotions that the Community Center psychologists had prepared, and every family could sign up their child to participate. This first session was for 5-to-8-year-olds. I was curious to see what they would talk about.
“What colors would you use to paint your hearts today? And why?”
A kid shrank his shoulders. They were so cute when they were still so small that their shoulders reached their ears effortlessly.
“If your heart feels calm and quiet, you might choose blue. But if you’re super happy and bouncing like a trampoline, maybe yellow is the color for you!” Mary explained. “Feelings are like colors: there are so many of them, and none of them are wrong. They all belong in your heart.”
Learning to reflect and communicate about your emotions — that was the summary of this workshop. I felt like I should be seated there. This was a workshop that every human being should be part of. At every age.
“Now, we’ll all make our ‘emotion flower’. I have one for each of you. I’ll ask for the help of my two assistants.” Mary gave Miles and me a wide smile. She had spotted us in the doorway.
Miles looked at me with wide green eyes, as if to ask me if it was safe to step inside the room.
“Each petal has a different color, and each color represents a feeling. I would like you to look at those feelings and write, or draw, something that made you feel that feeling recently,” Mary continued.
I gestured for Miles to follow me, and he did, one hesitant step at a time. We both lowered ourselves to sit on the carpet, cross-legged like the kids. Mary handed out the paper flowers, each petal already painted in a different color.
Bonnie, a tiny girl with big brown eyes, who always asked me to braid her long hair, plopped down beside Miles and immediately handed him her flower. “I don’t know what to write,” she said, brows furrowed with serious six-year-old intensity.
He blinked at her like someone who had just been handed a puzzle with no picture on the box. I saw the panic flash in his eyes. His rat-in-a-room-full-of-cats expression made me quietly chuckle.
I leaned toward him and whispered, “Just ask her what made her happy this week. Start with yellow.”
He nodded, slowly turning back to her. “Uh… what made you feel yellow this week?”
The little girl’s face lit up. “I saw a frog in the garden, and it jumped on my shoe!” she grinned, proud.
Miles smiled back, visibly amused by her. “That’s very yellow,” he said.
“I saw a ladybug yesterday and she landed on my hand!” another little girl told Miles eagerly, stretching out her arm to illustrate.
One more kid behind him tapped his shoulder. “Can I please write on your back? I need a table.”
I snorted with laughter at Miles’s expression. And he became a human desk.
“Ella, my brother stole my yogurt and I felt… fire! So I think I should paint my whole flower red,” said Andy, a five-year-old little boy I’d known since he was born. He explained his deep yogurt anger to me, opening his arms to give me a hug.
“But you remember when your grandmother gave you cookies later that day? That should have made you feel a different color, right?”
“Yes,” he said, his little cheeks smiling at me. “That made me feel really happy and thankful.”
Just then, a little girl with two braids and socks that didn’t match, sat quietly beside me. She had always been very quiet. She spoke softly and had been really shy the first time I met her. She reminded me of my younger self.
“You wanna talk about this one?” I asked gently, tapping the gray petal, which meant sadness according to the legend.
She nodded, not quite ready to look at me.
“I felt gray when my hamster died,” she said in a small voice. “His name was Popcorn.”
“Popcorn sounds like a really good little friend,” I said softly, lowering my head so we could have a moment just the two of us.
“He was really soft. And he used to sleep in my hoodie pocket,” she added, with a quiet sniffle.
I passed her a crayon and asked, “Do you want to draw him?”
She started sketching right away, a puffy blob with tiny ears and a big smile.
When she finished, she looked at me. “He’s a star now,” she whispered.
I helped her write gray: when Popcorn became a star on the petal. And she rested her head against me.
Miles looked up at me across the circle while chatting with the kids. He had adjusted to being a living desk and part-time spelling coach. His eyes, still wide, now had a different glint in them. Awe, maybe. Or confusion as to how this chaos made so much sense.
One of the kids crawled into his lap like it was the most normal thing in the world. Miles froze. Then the kid looked up and said, “Can you help me spell ‘proud’?”
He did. Carefully. Slowly. Letter by letter. His face soft with focus.
And I knew, right then, that even if he didn’t believe it yet, the kids had already adopted him. Just like that. No interviews. No professional qualifications.
Just time, presence, and patience.