New Town, Old House

The moving van arrived at half past nine in the morning.

Lena watched it from the back seat of the family car. Her mother was at the wheel. Her father, who had driven up two days ahead, was waiting on the kerb of the new house. The new house was older than the old house. It had ivy on one wall. It looked, to Lena, like the kind of house that already had its own people in it and was politely making space.

Lena had cried for most of the previous month. She had cried saying goodbye to her best friend Hanna. She had cried packing up her room. She had cried, very quietly, on the long drive north. Today, she had decided, she would not cry. There was nobody in this new town to see her cry, and crying alone was the worst kind.

She got out of the car.

She helped carry her boxes into her new bedroom. The bedroom faced the lane. The lane was narrow and bordered with old hedges. Across the lane was another house — about Lena's parents' age, redbrick, with a small garden. In an upstairs window of that house, there was a face.

A face Lena's age. Watching.

The face did not duck back when Lena saw it. The face just kept looking. Steadily. Curious, but not unfriendly.

Lena stared back for a moment. Then she carried her box inside.

By lunch the moving van was empty. By dinner the kitchen was working. By bedtime Lena was lying in her unmade bed, surrounded by stacked boxes, listening tothe new sounds of the new town. A different sort of bird in the morning. A train, far off. The clock in the church tower, which Lena's mother had said was a bell of a kind that did not exist in their old town.

In the window across the lane, the curtain was open. The face was not visible now. But the light was on. Somebody else was up too.

Lena, who had not planned to wave to anyone, found her hand drifting up to the window.

She did not wave, exactly. She just put her palm flat on the glass.

A second later, in the window across the lane, a small palm appeared on the inside of the other glass.

Then the light went out.

Lena went to sleep, that first night, with a small unfamiliar feeling in her chest. Not happiness. Not yet. Something more careful: a small held promise.