Becoming Neville

On the next hospital visitation day, Neville went downstairs for breakfast with the Muggle game he'd bought from the twins under his arm. He set it on the table and went to pour himself some tea.

"Is that for your Gran?" Harry asked.

"Um, not exactly."

"You don't think she'd care for dirty-word Scrabble?" grinned Harry.

Neville returned to the table, cup of tea in hand. "I don't know. Whenever I swear, she sticks my mouth shut. But of course she can swear whenever she likes."

"That's like with my aunt and uncle. They go mental when I swear, but they never do anything to Dudley."

"That's not very fair."

Harry shrugged. "That's life with the Dursleys. So who's the game for, then?"

Neville sipped his tea. He wished Harry would drop it, because it was a stupid idea. "I-I thought my mum might like it."

Harry cocked his head to the side. "Your mum."

"You know. Maybe she'll like the letters."

Harry considered this for several moments, then his face lit in a bright smile. "Neville, that's brilliant!"

Surprised, Neville said, "It is?"

"Of course! I can't believe we didn't think of it before."

Neville hardly dared get his hopes up, but he took it as an encouraging sign if Harry liked the idea. "You really think it will work?"

"I don't know, but it's certainly worth a try. Would it be all right if I came with you?"

"Sure."

Harry beamed at him. "Terrific. I think this is going to be a great day."

They could certainly use one, Neville thought as he stared into his teacup.

*****

Remus waited in the tearoom while Neville and Harry went to the fourth floor residents' ward. As they approached the nurse's station, Nurse Nettlethorne looked up at them, one painted eyebrow rising when she saw the box under his arm. "What's that you've got there, Mr. Longbottom?"

Reluctantly, he handed it over for her inspection. "It's a game."

"Your parents can't play any games," she said as she opened the box and poked through the contents.

"I know," Neville muttered. "But I thought my mum might like it."

Replacing the lid, she frowned at him. "Very well. But she can't play with this without supervision, and she won't be able to keep it. She might try to swallow the tiles."

"I know," Neville said sullenly as he took the box back.

Nurse Nettlethorne looked back and forth between Neville and Harry, as if she didn't approve of them. "Have a nice visit, boys."

Suppressing a scowl, Neville pushed the door open, Harry close on his heels.

"She's a cheery person," Harry muttered. "More like a prison warden than a nurse."

Neville didn't say anything. The description was too apt. He drew nearer to his parents' end of the room, where his mother sat in a chair by his father's bed, rocking back and forth and wrapping a lock of hair around her forefinger. When he passed into her line of vision, she looked up at him and shouted, "No tomatoes!"

"I know, Mum. Did they give you some for breakfast?" He glanced at Harry. "She won't eat red food. One time they gave her cherry pie, and she threw it all over Nurse Nettlethorne."

Harry grinned. "I bet it improved her looks."

Neville smiled and turned back to his mother. "You remember Harry, Mum?" But she wasn't paying attention to either of them. She was plucking strands of her hair out one by one.

"Please, Mum, don't do that," Neville said, touching the back of her hand. "Look, I brought you something."

He and Harry pulled up two chairs, and he set the box on his mother's bed. Her eyes followed his every move as he opened the box and poured all the tiles into the lid. Harry assisted him in flipping the tiles over, letter-side up. Then he laid out the board and pushed it toward his mother, arranging the lid with the tiles next to it.

"What do you think, Mum?"

Her eyes moved back and forth from the board to the tiles and back again. Slowly she reached for one of the tiles and picked it up, holding it in front of her, mere inches from her nose. It was a *J*. Neville held his breath, waiting to see what she would do - and hoping desperately that she wouldn't try to eat it.

Her nose wrinkled, and she threw the tile across the room. It landed on the floor and skittered under another patient's bed. She picked up another tile, an *O* this time, and threw it away as well.

"Quick!" Neville told Harry. "We've got to collect those tiles!" He and Harry scrambled to fetch them as she threw them away. Letters flew in all directions, and the other patients got into the excitement, shouting them on or trying to catch the tiles from their beds.

"Good shot, Mrs. Longbottom! This one landed in my pudding!"

"Ow! Trying to take my eye out, are you?"

"You, boy! One of 'em went under my bed."

"Here, Mrs. L! Chuck one at me! I'll catch it!"

Harry dove under the bed of a middle-aged witch with pigtails, who squawked in indignation. "I say! This is trespassing, young man!"

He crawled out from under the bed, dust in his hair, clutching a handful of tiles to his chest. "I sure hope she's not tossing these out in order. I don't know which ones came first."

"There are so many of them," Neville lamented, as a wizard extended a glass containing his false teeth and a letter *P*. "How will we ever sort them out?"

The claps and shouts died down, and Neville realized his mother was no longer throwing the tiles around. He and Harry found the last few tiles with the help of some of the patients, and headed back to dump the letters on the bed. His mother leaned over the board, arranging and rearranging a handful of tiles, lining them up carefully within the squares.

"Hang on," Neville said. "Maybe she only threw away the ones she *didn't* want."

He and Harry crept closer. Laid out in the center of the board was a 4 x 4 square of letters:

L L L E

E E A A

I I N N

F R K V

There was one extra tile, a *C*, which his mother was pushing around the edge of the square as if trying to find a place where it would fit.

Neville looked up at Harry and met his eyes.

"What do you think it spells?" Harry asked.

"I don't know. Would you go get a quill and paper from Nurse Nettlethorne? We can try to figure it out."

Harry nodded and headed out of the room while Neville stood behind his mother as she picked up the little wooden trays and arranged them around the tile square. But the *C* still wouldn't fit, and she pushed it around the edge with her finger, trying to find a place for it. Distressed, she rocked back and forth in her chair, eyes on the squares, moaning quietly.

Neville studied the tiles. Despite their grouping, something about them looked familiar, suggesting words to him. The top row looked like the end of his name, and the "FRK" on the bottom....

All at once it hit him. He didn't need a quill and paper to work out what the tiles spelled. He knew: FRANK, ALICE, NEVILLE.

"Oh, Mummy," he whispered.

The tiles blurred and swam before his eyes. He blinked, but his vision only worsened.

"Neville? Are you all right?"

He looked up to see Harry staring at him in concern, paper and quill clenched in his hand. But Harry was blurred, too, and that's when Neville realized he was crying.

"I know what it spells," he said, working around the lump in his throat. "It's us. It's our names: hers and Dad's and mine."

He wiped at his eyes, but he couldn't clear his vision. The tiles shifted and merged, one little unit, guarded from the world by a wall of wooden trays. She remembered him. She knew he was part of their family. He wanted to hug her, to bury his face in her shoulder and kiss her cheeks, but his mother seldom responded well to being touched. The love was there, but they couldn't share it. He couldn't break through the protective wall she'd built around herself to tell her he was there and he loved her.

Neville sat next to his mother, unable to stop his tears. He was vaguely aware when Harry left them alone. His mother moaned and rocked herself, while his father lay in the next bed, unmoving and oblivious. They were all together, yet still separated. It was so unfair. Yet somehow she knew.

He stared at the pile of tiles on the bedcover. Slowly he sorted through the letters, fishing out eight tiles and placing them one by one on the edge of the board. I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.

He held his breath, hoping she wouldn't throw them away. She stopped rocking as he laid the tiles out, and when they were all lined up, she stared at them for a long moment. Then she scooped them into her hand and placed them in the center of the board. When she was finished, the *C* was no longer left out. All the letters formed a perfect square of five by five tiles, enclosed within the trays.

L L L E U

E E A A O

N N I I Y

F R K V E

C I L O V

Her task complete, she settled back in her chair, eyes on the tiles, and began to hum. Neville recognized the tune.

It was his lullaby.

*****