THE BOY WHO KEPT A PLACE

The Boy Who Kept a Place

A Story About Mika, Mischa, and the Treehouse Built for Later

For every big brother who has ever looked at someone small and thought: one day, I’ll show you everything.

Mika Soren was nine years old, and he had two lives.

The first life was the ordinary one. School, homework, breakfast, dinner, the walk to the library on Saturdays, the football he kicked against the garden wall when he had a lot of energy and nowhere to put it. This was the life that happened in the daytime, in the parts of the world that other people could see.

The second life happened mostly in his head.

In his second life, Mika had been to every continent. He had climbed the kind of mountains that had names in old languages. He had navigated rivers and crossed deserts and found things in jungles that no one had found before, and he had written about all of it in a journal with a dark green cover that he kept on the shelf beside his bed. The journal was not one journal — it was six, because he filled them quickly, and the shelf was running out of room.

People who didn’t know Mika thought he was quiet. People who did know him understood that he was not quiet but simply elsewhere — present in the room, eyes open, apparently paying attention, but actually several thousand miles away and moving fast.

His mother called it the explorer look. His father called it being Mika. His teacher called it could you please come back to us, Mika, we’re doing fractions.

None of them were wrong.

The thing that had recently changed Mika’s second life — the thing that had rearranged all the furniture of it, moved things he thought were fixed, added something brand new that he hadn’t planned for and couldn’t now imagine living without — was small and loud and smelled of milk and had arrived eight months ago in a blue blanket.

His brother.

Mischa Soren. Eight months old. Currently asleep in the room next to Mika’s, making the small snuffling sounds that Mika had learned to distinguish: the I’m fine, just dreaming sound, and the I’m about to wake up and announce it sound, and the something is wrong, come now sound.

Right now, it was the dreaming sound. Mika stood in the hallway outside the slightly-open door and listened for a moment, the way he had got into the habit of doing, and then went back to his

room satisfied.

He sat on his bed. He opened Journal Number Six.

He wrote: Mischa is eight months old today. He can sit up by himself now if you put him somewhere steady. He laughs when you make a surprised face. He likes it when I read to him, I think — he gets very still and watches my mouth. He grabbed my finger today and held on for a while and I didn’t move until he let go.

He paused. Then he wrote: I didn’t know it would be like this. I thought a baby would just be a baby. But he’s already a person. He’s already Mischa.

He closed the journal.

Outside the window, the big chestnut tree at the end of the garden was doing what it always did in the early evening — catching the last of the light, moving slowly in whatever small wind was passing through. Mika looked at it the way he always looked at it. The way you look at something you are planning.

He had been planning for a long time.