Tim Murphy - Christodora

Mateo was silent, tracing finger patterns on his tablet. “So why’d you never tell me that?”

“I thought it was obvious. I thought it was obvious every single day I held your hand and walked you through this park. Mateo, those first years with you were the happiest years of my life.”

He looked up. “They were?”

“Yes, they were. But then you hit a certain age and I think suddenly you started asking yourself all these questions—”

“I did! I did!” he said, worked up. “That’s when it started, when I was fourteen or fifteen.”

“Yes,” Milly continued, “and you know? You know what? We should have sensed it; we should have gone to therapy with you instead of sending you yourself and putting it all on you. We should have talked this all out then. But—” Milly was smudging away tears now; she felt rather overwhelmed from suddenly putting words to something she hadn’t fully understood at the time. “I guess I was just scared of you and I stepped back. It was wrong, it was wrong. Then the drugs started, and then I was really scared.”

Mateo looked at Milly, eyes wide. “Those years are, like, such a blur to me,” he said. “Just, like, years lost.”

“And then suddenly you were in the sober house in California and you said you weren’t coming back. And when a boy grows up and says he wants to be set free, what can a mother do?”

Mateo snapped his mouth shut, considered. “You really thought of yourself as my mother?”

“You are absolutely thickheaded!” she exclaimed.

Mateo laughed. “Well, I don’t know if Jared saw it that way.”

Oh God, thought Milly. Now he’d gone and said the dreaded J-word. “Well, I’m not speaking for him,” she said firmly. “I’m speaking for me. Millimom. The bleeding heart.”

Mateo looked at her sidelong. “You do have a bleeding heart, you know. It used to drive me fucking crazy.”

“Well, it drove—” Milly caught herself before saying the J-name herself. “It drove him crazy, too. He used to mock me for it and tell me I was a pushover.”

“Do you talk to him?”

“No,” she said. “Well, through lawyers.”

“Can I go back to my original question?”

“What was that? I can’t even remember at this point. My head is swimming.”

“Can you forgive me for being a fuckup and wrecking ten years of your life?”

She looked at him again. I can’t believe I raised this man is all she kept thinking. This is the boy who elaborately matched his frites to his condiments? Who kicked his feet against his butt while he drew? My God, she thought, with a catch of fear in her throat. Life is zooming by, slipping out of my fingers like salt, more than halfway gone.

“I’m just glad it’s over,” she said. “It’s really over?”

“It’s really over. I mean—”

“I know, I know,” Milly stopped him. “One day at a time, that’s how it goes. Drew’s told me that a million times. Just for today.” She said it in kind of a singsong, and he laughed. “But it’s still really over, right?” she asked again.

“Yes.” He shrugged. “It’s over.”

“Well,” she began, “then I forgive you.” She paused. “I can’t believe you thought all those years we took you in out of pity . If that’s what you were really thinking, then it explains a lot.”

He looked at her keenly. “There wasn’t just a little bit of pity in there?”

She opened her mouth, about to protest. Then she considered. She held her open hands aloft. “Mateo, what can I say? I am a middle-class, old-school-liberal Jewish New York woman. A dying breed. Look at my mother!” she pleaded.

“That’s exactly what I mean!” he said.

“I know what you mean. But I don’t think pity is quite the word I’d agree with. I visited you with Bubbe and I saw a little boy without a home, who’d lost his mother, with a lot of talent. And it just so happened that I needed you and I didn’t know it yet. And the more I came back, the more I fell in love with you.”

Finally, Mateo managed to look at her with a yielding softness in his face. He made a fist and held it toward her.

“What’s that?” Milly asked.

He frowned. “It’s a fist bump. Remember the Obamas and the fist bump?”

“No one’s ever offered me a fist bump before.”

“Well, here you go.”

Milly made a fist and bumped it against Mateo’s.

He smiled. “Not bad. That’s a start.”

“Not a bad start?” Milly asked.

“Not a bad start.”

They sat there silently for a moment. Milly felt at once deeply contented and wiped out, like she’d just run a marathon. There were a million other things she wanted to say, to ask him about, swimming in her head, but somehow she couldn’t grasp onto one of them. Then something occurred to her.

“I have something upstairs I need to give you,” she said.

Wariness flashed in his eyes. “I don’t think I’m ready yet to see the apartment after all these years.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You mean the scene of your sculpture demolition?”

He held a hand up to his forehead. “Oh, shit, please not that.”

Milly erupted in laughter. “You don’t know what perverse joy that memory has given me these past few years. Once I got over the initial horror.”

But her remark seemed to discomfit him. “I owe him an apology,” Mateo said.

Milly regarded him keenly. Then she sighed. “Sometimes I think I do, too,” she said.

“For what?”

But she shook her head. “It’s too much to go into now. And suffice to say, sometimes I think I don’t, so. .” She trailed off. “Anyway, just wait here a second.”

In the lobby, she smiled sheepishly at Ardit while she waited for the elevator.

“Reunion,” he said.

“Ish,” she replied.

Upstairs, she pulled the Polaroid from between the pages of a book on a shelf where she’d safe-kept it, then tucked it in a small manila envelope from her desk. Back outside, she sat down beside him again and handed it to him.

“You’ve gone a long time without this,” she said.

He glanced at her, then opened the envelope. He looked at the Polaroid, then buried his face in his hand. Then, only then, she noticed the small letters tattooed on his fingers. I, S, S , and Y .

“Issy Mendes,” he said, his face still buried away.

She sat closer to him, put an arm around him, and nestled his head on her shoulder. “Yes indeed,” she said. “Thank you, Issy Mendes.”

Three days later, Milly walked down to the UnderPark. “I’m Mateo Mendes’s mother,” she told the security guard.

“Yeah,” said the security guard, waving her through. “He told me to look for you today.”

Milly walked down a sloping old concrete passage that slipped suddenly underground into musty darkness, old wood and stone on both sides of her and above. Then the passage opened into a garden the size of a parking lot, full of an eerie sunlight filtered down from above. There were workers everywhere, laying down paving, carrying greenery, hoisting beds of tile up onto scaffolding.

“This is unreal,” she exclaimed to the guard. “Whatever happened to the old, abandoned Lower East Side that nobody cared about?”

“That place is long gone,” he said. He led her to a far corner of the garden, which had been cordoned off with sawhorses. Half of one wall shimmered with tens of thousands of tiny silvery-blue-and-green painted leaves.

Mateo was up on a scaffold, his back to her.

“Mateo, your mom’s here,” the guard called.

Mateo turned. “Hey!” he shouted down, waving. He and Char climbed down, wiped their hands on rags, walked over to Milly. Mateo pulled back a sawhorse so that she could enter their workspace.