Again — studiously, it seemed — Mateo let a few beats pass, colored a few more strokes, before looking up with his exquisitely bored brown eyes. “No,” he said.
“We don’t have a TV in the house.”
Milly and Ava looked up. It was Sister Ellen, who ran the house, a stocky, short-haired woman in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a Yankees cap. “It’s a good thing,” the nun added.
“Not even for Sesame Street?” Ava asked. “You can’t deprive kids of Sesame Street!” She was half joking, Milly thought, but she also wasn’t — she was bossing. “Emmy, can you imagine if you hadn’t had Sesame Street? It’s the best babysitter!”
“You can’t miss something you don’t know that you don’t have,” Sister Ellen said lightly. “When these guys get placed in foster homes, the TV thing is out of our hands, but as long as they’re here—” She broke off. “That’s a policy I set. I’d rather they read. Or play, like they’re doing now.”
Amused, Milly watched her mother pretend to consider and respect this point of view. “Of course,” Ava said. “I just thought you might make an exception for Sesame Street.”
“No exceptions,” Sister Ellen said.
Chastened, Ava stood up and continued chatting with Sister Ellen. Milly turned back to Mateo. “Can I draw with you?” she asked him.
“If you want,” he said, not looking up. He was, what, four? Five? Milly considered him for a second from her perch a foot or two above him. She couldn’t really see his face, just that mop of curly black hair. He wore an oversize Yankees T-shirt (in fact, Milly noticed, several of the boys did; Sister Ellen, in her staunch Yankees fandom, had worked out some charitable thing where the boys got visits from the players and free shirts and hats) and painters shorts and sneakers that looked like they were from Old Navy. She noticed his little chubby hand and how it held the crayon (raw sienna) masterfully, loosely. She reached for a blank piece of paper and the box of Crayolas.
“Do you mind if I use burnt umber?” she asked him.
“Nope.”
She set to her drawing, plucking other colors from the box. She was delighted when she noticed he’d begun peeping over from his own drawing, with longer and longer glances.
“There,” she said, holding up her work. “What do you think?”
“What is it?” he said, not looking up.
“It’s you holding hands with a friendly monster.” And that’s what she’d drawn: her best rendering of Mateo, dressed as he was in this moment, holding hands with and smiling alongside a big, smiling, fluffy, blue-and-yellow-colored creature, a New York streetscape sketched in behind them.
He rolled his eyes at her piteously, as though she’d failed to comprehend him the first time. “Monsters aren’t friendly,” he said, then went back to his own drawing.
“I figured I’d make up one that was. The world’s first friendly monster! That’s okay, right?”
He didn’t bother to answer this. Milly sat there and looked at the top of his head. Then she looked at his picture. She could see his skill. She knew he had looked at pictures in books and instinctively knew how to recreate lines. She gave up trying to engage him and just watched him draw. Coolly, he didn’t acknowledge her once, though he certainly had to know she was still there.
Her mother and Sister Ellen came back in the room. Milly stood.
“So you’re an artist, your mother tells me,” Sister Ellen said. Milly was starting to see why her mother and Sister Ellen had ended up working so closely together the past few years. They were both bossy, blunt women who probably got things done very quickly.
“I am,” Milly said.
“She just started teaching at LaGuardia High School,” Ava said. It annoyed Milly slightly that her mother had seemed more impressed by Milly’s getting this job than any piece of art Milly had ever created. “That’s one of the best arts high schools in the city. And her boyfriend teaches at Art and Design High School.”
Sister Ellen seemed wholly unimpressed by this and cut to the chase. “The two of you could come out here Saturday afternoons and do art with the boys,” she said. “You could bring your artist friends. You could rotate.”
Milly glanced at Ava, who stood slightly behind Sister Ellen, smiling amusedly, wondering how Milly would handle the nun’s bossiness.
“It’s our day off,” Milly protested feebly. “But, I mean—”
“Well, you could come Sundays, then, after you’ve had a day off,” Sister Ellen pressed on agreeably. “Just for a few hours.” She gestured around at the boys. “They’re always here.”
Milly glanced at Ava, who shrugged slightly, as though to say, Don’t ask me, it’s up to you. Then Milly looked down at Mateo, at the top of his head and the chubby fingers holding the crayon.
“Of course we’ll come,” Milly said. She pulled her little black notebook and a pen from her bag, handed them to Sister Ellen. “Write your number here and I’ll call and we’ll arrange it.”
The nun took the little book and pen, looking quietly pleased with herself. “You won’t consider it work,” she said as she jotted in it.
Milly knelt down again and, in a flash, scratched the curly black head. “I’ll come back and we’ll draw more monsters together?”
He looked up at her, as though he was indulging her. “Sure, okay,” he said. “But I hate to tell you, there aren’t any friendly monsters.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that?” Milly asked.
He took a big breath, as though he was about to answer but then stopped to consider the question. “I’m pretty sure,” he said, nodding his head for emphasis.
Milly and Ava went to a Jamaican restaurant, got out of the stifling Labor Day — weekend heat into the A/C and ordered mint lemonade and jerk-chicken sandwiches. “You wanted to go there today just to see, um, Mateo?” Milly asked her mother.
Ava, her mouth full, shook her head. “We’re talking about replacement of a few of the boys back with their moms,” she finally said, dabbing at the corners of her mouth in a ladylike way with her napkin — an affectation Milly found funny and strangely touching.
“Are you serious?” Milly said. “Because of the new HIV drugs?”
Ava nodded. “Yep. That’s what everyone’s calling Lazarus syndrome. People are starting to live again. It’s a total mindfuck. And now they gotta figure out their lives. But it means, for a few of the moms, they want to try to raise their kids again. They’re not afraid they’re gonna die on their kids any time soon. So for some of them, we’re working on finding a group home where they can raise their kids together.”
“That is amazing,” Milly said. “Whoever would have thought. .” Words failed her.
“That people would finally stop dying?” Ava asked. “Not me! Fifteen years of death, death, death, then the people lucky enough to make it this far start getting better, stop looking like cadavers. Now they have to figure out how to pay their credit-card bills.”
Milly looked at Ava’s face: lined. Dark circles under the eyes. Hair gone gray and a middle gone thicker, as had her dad’s, even though Ava still called Sam her Elliott Gould and he dutifully still called her his Marisa Berenson. Seventeen years of drugs for Ava as well — drugs of a different kind: “My head meds,” Ava called them. And about a dozen awards since she’d started Judith House in 1990, including from the White House. The write-ups in the Times, New York magazine, Essence; the 20/20 segment; the Vogue thing where they’d styled her and put her in a Donna Karan gown alongside a half-dozen other “contemporary warrior women.”