Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “No movies with children.”

  She called Jared from Kyla’s friend’s apartment that night. He was making himself pasta and then going to Green Day with Asa and some of his other friends.

  “We’re going out somewhere ourselves,” she told him. “We haven’t decided yet.” She was lying; she felt basically fine except for a little crampiness, but she was in no mood to sit in a crowded restaurant and maybe run into people. Kyla flashed her the tiniest look of reproach.

  “You’ll be home tomorrow after work, right?” he asked her.

  “Of course I will,” she said. “We’ll cook together.”

  She and Kyla watched silly movies till midnight, then slept together in Kyla’s friend’s comfortable queen-size bed, spooning just as they’d done that night at Milly’s Brooklyn apartment before Kyla went to rehab. Milly hadn’t slept with anyone but Jared in three years, since that window of 1993–1995 when she and Jared weren’t together and she’d dated a little, and now Kyla’s soft, slim body and the cinnamon smell of her hair were comforting, and she slept long and well for the first time in weeks. They went to Tartine in the morning for breakfast before Kyla hailed a cab on Seventh Avenue to go to JFK.

  They embraced. “Thank you for being such a good friend,” Milly told Kyla.

  Kyla cupped Milly’s face between her cool palms. “I love you, Millipede. I’ll call you when I’m home.”

  Milly went in and did her half day of work, as had been planned, her heart strangely bursting at the opportunity to see her new students again and assign easels. She still felt that sense of good fortune and happiness as she shopped for dinner after work, and when she came in the apartment and saw Jared in front of his laptop at the kitchen table, some hummus and pita bread beside him, she felt not guilt and remorse but love and contentment, dropping the bags to go sit in his lap, put her arms around him, and kiss him a long, long time.

  “You and Kyla had sex and she obviously rebooted your libido,” he said, face flushed. “I’m lucky she’s in your life!”

  She laughed. “We did not have sex! We snuggled but we did not have sex.”

  Fall turned into winter and she continued going to Sister Ellen’s home on Saturdays, sometimes with Jared, sometimes without. There were the Thanksgiving art projects, the Hanukkah art projects, the Christmas art projects. She woke up on Saturday mornings happy, dying to fill her bag with art supplies and hop on the train. She loved walking in the sunny room now because the boys cheered and went wild when she came in. All except Mateo, who, immediately upon seeing her, would smile quietly and go sit off by himself at a little table he had designated as his personal art area, out of which he would carefully pull the projects he had been working on that week to show Milly. He waited patiently, professionally, for Milly’s attention, his arms folded, watching her every move as she set up the other boys. Milly knew that he knew that they were mere prologue to him, Milly’s star student, and he was right. Milly adored him, but she never let herself show it too much because Mateo made it very clear with her that he wanted them both to keep a cool tone.

  On December 20, the Saturday before Christmas, Mateo turned five.

  “We’ll have his cake at dinner tonight,” Sister Ellen said. Then Sister Ellen looked at the wrapped gift that Milly had brought for Mateo with Sister Ellen’s approval. It was his own paint set.

  “Do you want to foster him?” Sister Ellen asked her.

  Milly felt like her eyes popped out of her head. “What? Be foster parents?”

  “It’s not adoption,” Ellen said calmly. “It’s a trial-basis thing. Your mother would retain legal guardianship for the time being. If it doesn’t work out, he comes back here.” She paused. “How can I give that boy the opportunities that his talent deserves as he gets older with a whole house to run?”

  Sister Ellen scared Milly a little. It seemed like she could read minds, or hearts, because it was as if she knew that Milly had been running this scenario over and over in her head nearly every day for the past month. She found herself taking her cue from Ellen and being strangely, bluntly honest: “I do want to,” Milly said. “But I don’t know if Jared does. He wants us to have our own baby.”

  “Who’s to say you couldn’t?”

  Milly said nothing.

  “I will tell you this,” Ellen continued shrewdly. “I know parents who’ve fostered, then adopted. They thought they couldn’t do it because they didn’t have enough money or time, or they wanted their own kids someday. They thought it was going to close up their lives. And what happened was their lives exploded open. Before their eyes.”

  Milly nodded, taking this in. She glanced over at Mateo, who sat with his arms folded, project in front of him, kicking his legs off the chair into the air, watching her with an air of patient expectation.

  She giggled at Ellen. “Just look at him. He knows he’s my star student.”

  Ellen smiled. “Plus,” she added, “it’s his birthday.”

  “Well, you’ve planted the seed,” Milly told Ellen.

  Ellen gave her a two-second massage on one shoulder. “I know the seed was already there,” she said, walking back into the kitchen.

  Milly went over to Mateo. “Hello, my friend,” she said. “I hear it’s someone’s birthday.”

  “It’s my birthday,” he corrected her, no patience with her coyness. “Will you look at this?”

  “Will I look at this what?”

  “Will you look at this please, Milly?”

  “Thank you, that’s better.”

  That night at dinner with Jared, after telling him about Mateo and his latest work and how he’d reacted to his gift (concern that all his favorite colors were included, followed finally by a cautious thank you), Milly dropped the bomb oh-so-lightly.

  “Sister Ellen asked me if we’d ever consider fostering Mateo,” she said.

  “Are you serious?” He tossed off the question so lightly, Milly knew that he had not ever even remotely considered the idea. Mateo existed to him in a little cozy pocket of an occasional Saturday, something way out in the sporadically visited right field of his life. He wasn’t in there taking up space all the days in between. “It must be a whole second job for her trying to find actual homes for those little guys.”

  She said nothing, scrambling for what to say next, which, in a few moments, alarmed him.

  “Did you tell her we’d consider it?” he asked, already incredulous.

  She shrugged. “I told her I’d mention it to you.” She was trying to sound light, ingenuous.

  “Would you really want that? I want to have our own kids, Milly.”

  She panicked. How long could she go on obfuscating like this with him? “I’m scared of having our own kids,” she blurted out. “I’m scared of having a depressed, bipolar kid. I can’t watch that all over again, in my own kid. And what if the whole experience makes me worse, in some hormonal chemical way, and I go down the tubes while we have a child to raise? Here is a child who already exists who could use this home.”

  Jared’s jaw dropped lower and lower, ever more deeply stunned. He made a staccato sound to talk, then stopped. “You really think that kid isn’t going to be trouble?” he finally asked. “His mother died of AIDS, Milly. We don’t even know who the father is or God knows what was wrong with him. At least we know ourselves and our families.”

  “It’s just fostering; it’s not a lifelong commitment.”

  “You see him every Saturday, Milly. I barely see you Saturdays now.”

  Milly felt herself getting worked up, approaching tears, for reasons she couldn’t fully understand. “We have a room that could be his,” she pressed on. “He could have his own room. His own easel in his own room. Now that I know him—” She crumpled a bit. “I think about him all the time, Jared.”

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

  “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 Kyla over the phone.

  “He’s mourning his mother,” Kyla 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.

  “My advice would be to go about your business with the other boys and let him come to you.”

  Milly did just that, happily lapping up Tranell’s affection. It was Mariano Rivera time again—this time Mariano Rivera holding hands with the Easter Bunny. When she looked up, Mate
o was standing over her, looking impatient, paper in hand.

  “I can’t do this,” he said.

  “Do what?” Milly tried to sound casual, as though he hadn’t just frozen her out for a month.

  “This.” He showed her a picture in a comic book of what looked like a Tyrannosaurus rex and a giant beetle with menacing antennae, locked in a complicated death grip. He was trying to copy it; she could see his paper with its tentative first lines, scribbled out in frustration.

  “Give me a second to finish with Tranell and I’ll come over,” Milly said. She certainly couldn’t just drop everything because Mateo finally acknowledged her. That would send him the wrong message.

  Mateo frowned and walked back to his self-appointed art table. Five minutes later, Milly came over.

  “With a picture like this,” she told him, “you have to look at the primary lines, the major thick lines in the picture. See them?” She lightly traced over them with her finger. “Take a clean sheet and try to recreate those primary lines and I’ll do it alongside you, okay?”

  They both began. Milly set to her sheet. At one point, she looked up and found him staring at her with what she thought actually looked like tenderness and some amusement. “What is it?” she asked.

  “You still want me to come live with you?” he asked.

  Inwardly, Milly took a deep breath, careful to modulate her joy. “The offer is still wide open if you want to come,” she said. She tried to sound not too desperate. But then she couldn’t help adding: “I think you’d like the East Village a lot. There’s a lot of artists and a lot of fun things to do.”

  “Would you mind if I leave if my mother comes back?”

  This caught Milly short. Had she assumed that in the intervening weeks he’d accepted the truth? She put her hand over his hand. “Of course you can leave if your mother comes back, sweetheart.”

  He looked at her hand, then her face, then her hand. Slowly, he put his other hand on top of hers. He smiled at her, as though he had finally come to terms with a difficult decision. “Can I bring my paints with me?”

  “You can bring your paints with you,” she said, her voice breaking. “You can have your own room and your own easel.”