The outdoors welcomed him in a way that the inside of the house never did. The large rooms, even with their vaulted ceilings, sprawling layouts, and sweeping views through massive windows couldn’t compare to the air and the trees and the architecture of the Earth.
Nature drew him. It called whenever he ran outside, flying from the wide steps into the breezy Maine mornings, the pines shushing and whispering to themselves. He would stand under them some days and listen to their language, trying to discern a pattern, some telltale sign that there was more than the wind at work in their branches. Sometimes needles would drop from far above and land in his hair and on his shoulders, resting there until he plucked them away, always smelling their fresh scent before letting them fall to the ground.
But the sea was where he would always end up. The cliffs that bordered their hundred acres was highland, surrounded by a wrought iron fence that stretched in a half circle beginning at the south cliff edge and ending at the north. The property ran out into a jutting peninsula like a tongue tasting the ocean and dropped away sixty feet or more in places before leveling to a coastal shore of great, flat boulders. Quinn learned to climb down the precarious cliffs when he was only seven, his father coaching him from below, placing his feet into holds that he couldn’t see until he knew the crevices by touch, finding them without effort and knowing in his heart that he could descend the bluffs in the darkness of midnight with ease.
The flat stones worn smooth by the constant embrace of the tides were his thrones. He sat upon them, governing an army of sea creatures who had hideous countenances and who worshipped him because he was the most handsome of them all. Sometimes the fantasies would fade and he would gaze out across the rolling waves, far into the horizon that hurt his eyes if he looked too long. Such amazing distance the world contained, the immensity of it all, like looking at a grain of sand upon the beach among all the others and seeing that the single grain was him in the world, nameless and adrift in the mercy of life.
Most days he spent in the solarium on the north side of the house. When the structure had been built, two years after his birth and a year and a half after his mother had left forever, his father had planned on it being a greenhouse full of foliage that he could keep blooming throughout the harsh northeastern winters. But the plants had withered despite the insulation and good sunlight, and his father had removed all but a select few of his favorites, leaving the space to become what it was now, Quinn’s classroom.
Teresa had been a teacher. She normally said she’d been a teacher in her former life. When Quinn asked her what she meant, a sad smile would crease her face, touching her kind eyes, and she’d say she would tell him someday. She’d also let slip a mention of her own son, and when Quinn asked further about him, she firmly guided him on to his next chapter.