Tim Murphy - Christodora

Jared looked back at her, eyes narrowing. “You do?” he asked quietly.

“A lot.”

He was recoiling, she could tell. “I thought you wanted our own family.”

“It’s not that I don’t,” she said, sort of lying. “It’s that — this just came up. He just came up.”

Jared looked a bit dazed, slowly shook his head. They dropped the topic.

The next three Saturdays, she went out to see the boys alone, but the fourth Saturday, Jared said, “You mind if I come with you?”

As they were approaching the home, he asked, “How’s the prodigy been?” It was probably the first time he’d mentioned Mateo since their dinner conversation.

“He’ll have something waiting to show me,” she said.

Mateo did. The piece was of about eight kinds of different-colored birds, all with big smiles, flying around in the sky over the tops of palm trees. Sand and water were below, with smiling crabs on the sand, smiling fish below the water.

“Everybody’s smiling in your piece this week!” Milly exclaimed. “That’s not like you.”

“This piece is called Paradise ,” Mateo explained. “It’s different from here, so everybody smiles.”

“Even the crabs,” Jared pointed out.

“You don’t come all the time,” Mateo noted to Jared.

Milly and Jared laughed. “Sometimes I sleep late on Saturdays,” Jared confessed sheepishly.

They worked with the boys for ninety minutes, and when they were getting ready to leave, Jared lightly took Milly’s arm and asked quietly, in the foyer, “Do you still want to foster Mateo?”

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Do you?”

“It’s not going to kill us. We can try it.”

“Let’s go talk about it,” she said. They went and had brunch in the neighborhood. “Why did you change your mind?” she asked him.

“I didn’t change my mind. I just needed time to sit with the idea. And I think it would be cool to do, if you still want to do it. And if it doesn’t work—”

“It’s not so easy just to dump a child back in a boys’ home,” Milly said.

Jared seemed to consider this for a long while. “I can take his brooding,” he finally said. “He doesn’t have to be crazy about us and affectionate. We’ll put him in kindergarten in the neighborhood and introduce him to the kids in the park, and if he misses Ellen and the boys at the home in six months to a year, he can go back. I can take anything from him — as long as he doesn’t bite us or attack us with a knife.”

Milly laughed. “He’s not the biting or attacking type. He’s too cool for that. He’ll just freeze you out with a look.”

They started walking back to the home, passing by a discarded pile of Christmas trees. Milly looked up at Jared. “I love you,” she said.

He tightened his grip around her shoulders. “I love you, too.”

They went back inside and told Sister Ellen they wanted to foster Mateo.

She smiled a slow, triumphant smile. “I’d hoped you guys would come around,” she said. She walked them into her office.

They went through the application process with the city fairly quickly. They had the resources, the credentials. They had the dedicated bedroom. They would receive some government money they could put toward child care when they were at work. They could hire Elysa, their actress friend in the building, to babysit him. One Saturday, after they were done working with the boys, Ellen brought them and Mateo into her office and closed the door.

“Milly and Jared want to be your foster parents, Mateo, my dear,” she said. Her voice rasped. Milly couldn’t believe it — the tough gal was tearing up!

“Would you like to go live with them in the East Village, in Manhattan,” Sister Ellen continued, “and have your own room, and you can come back here with them on Saturdays and see me and the boys and do art with us still?”

Mateo opened his mouth slowly but said nothing. Milly, smiling at him, was terrified. Was he going to reject them? Maybe he’d be happier here, even if he wasn’t the most extroverted boy in the house. He continued to say nothing.

“We have a really nice room for you,” Milly said. “You can paint the walls and. . it can be like your own studio.”

He actually seemed to tsk and roll his eyes in annoyance! Milly was devastated.

“That’s not what I want,” he finally said, sounding plenty annoyed. “I want my real parents.”

Milly and Jared looked at each other. How had they not had this conversation with Sister Ellen? They looked at Sister Ellen.

“Mateo,” Sister Ellen said, “we had this talk, remember? We don’t know who your dad was. And your mom died when you were a little baby. She was very sick.”

“I think probably she just got lost in the city and she’s better by now and you just need to look for her,” he said with startling confidence.

Milly took Jared’s hand and squeezed it. She hadn’t considered how hard this was going to be. Sister Ellen got up and went and knelt by Mateo and took his hand.

“Sweetie,” she said, “your mom is really gone. She died. She can’t come back.”

“Nuh-uh, I don’t think that—” he began in an eminently reasonable voice. Then Milly felt a knife twist in her stomach as she watched his face suddenly contort and he erupted into sobs. “That doesn’t make sense,” he bawled. “That doesn’t make sense. She’s just lost.”

“Oh, baby,” Sister Ellen said. She took him in his arms, where he continued sobbing in her neck — a wild, bewildered sobbing. Milly wept and Jared put his arm around her. The four of them stayed like this for at least a full minute before Ellen mouthed to them, “I’ll call you,” and they slipped away.

Milly cried two blocks on, Jared’s arm around her. Finally she wiped away her tears and laughed. “So much for that!”

“Give it time,” Jared said.

Sister Ellen called them later and said to forget the conversation and to keep coming as usual on Saturdays. Mateo knew it was an option and he would either come around or not, and she didn’t want him to ever feel she was pushing him out of the house. When they went back the next three Saturdays, Mateo wasn’t there — he didn’t want to participate. For the first time, he had chosen to go off with the group that went to the playground Saturday mornings and played basketball and such. This killed Milly, weighing heavily on her all the intervening weekdays.

“He doesn’t want us,” she told Drew over the phone.

“He’s mourning his mother,” Drew told her. “It’s not about you.”

By late February, Mateo had come back to the art group—“He’s an artist, not a basketball player, and it finally caught up to him,” Sister Ellen said, chuckling — but made it clear to Ellen he really just wanted to do his own thing and not be bothered by Milly and Jared. Milly went alone, Jared busy with other commitments, and those weeks when she did not allow herself more than an unreturned smile, hello, and good-bye to Mateo and otherwise pretended he wasn’t there were excruciating. How strange that she had ended up staking her happiness on a five-year-old boy’s acceptance! With no other choice, and feeling slightly traitorous, she opened herself up more to the straightforward enthusiasm and affection of Tranell, the Mariano Rivera freak, whose warmth was, frankly, a balm to her. Tranell was sweet but he was no Mateo, especially when he insisted on drawing the same bad drawings of Rivera over and over again, with only minor variations in athletic stance or facial expression.

“He asked about you this week,” Sister Ellen told her when she came the following Saturday. “He asked if you’d be coming.”

“I don’t believe you,” Milly said dourly.