The Same Book

She'd found the window seat for herself, in the good light, with the book she'd been waiting all week to get back to. The snow was bright on the roofs across the street and the room was warm and she'd perhaps an hour before she was wanted for anything. She opened the book to where she'd left it and began.

The child came and sat down beside her. Not asking. The child simply arrived, the way she did, and folded herself onto the low stool at the older girl’s knee, and leaned in toward the open book.

The older girl kept reading. She'd learned not to stop the moment the child arrived. She kept her eyes on the page and her thumb at the edge of it, holding her place, and went on down the line.

The child wasn't reading. The child couldn't, not yet. The child was looking at the pages the way she looked at everything, with her whole face, taking in the shapes of the words she couldn't sound and the one small illustration at the foot of the page and the way the light came through the paper when the page was thin. The child reached out once and touched the corner of a page, not to turn it, just to feel the edge of it, and took her hand back.

The older girl felt the child there at her knee the way you feel a warmth on one side. She didn't look down at her. She knew that if she looked down the child would look up, and then she'd have to decide what her face would do, and the book would be over.

She'd sat at a knee like this once, her own sister’s, a book she couldn't read held above her, wanting the older one to stop and let her in. The older one hadn't stopped. She hadn't understood it then.

She kept her shoulders set and her eyes on the page and did the thing that had been done to her, and went on reading.

The child stayed. She didn't fret or pull at the older girl’s sleeve or ask to be read to. After a while she reached out and turned a page herself, two pages, going forward past where the older girl was reading, to a picture she wanted, and bent over it, and made a small sound to herself that had nothing to do with the older girl’s page.

The older girl found her place again and read on. The light held on the snow outside and on the paper between them, and the book lay open across the two of them, one thing, each with her own side of it.