“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 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?”