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.
“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, Mateo 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.”
“Why are you crying?” he asked her, a note of frowny disapproval in his voice.
Milly brushed away tears with the back of her hand, embarrassed. “Because I’m happy,” she said, all her defenses down.
He took back her hand and put it on his again and rubbed it in a curious, reassuring way. “You’re a nice lady,” he said.
She laughed, which, amid her tears, became a bit of a snort. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a nice boy.”
For a few seconds, neither of them said anything.
“So,” Milly finally said, pulling herself together. “We’ll talk about it after with Sister Ellen, okay?” But he’d already gone back to his drawing.
In just one month, after an afternoon of good-byes at Sister Ellen’s where everyone was crying for one reason or another — the boys because Mateo was leaving them behind, Ellen because Mateo was leaving them behind, Milly a bit because the heartbreak of the scene was just too much for her, everyone, really, except for strong, dad-like Jared and curiously matter-of-fact Mateo, who exuded the cool, quiet entitlement of someone who was about to have his own room — they took him home on the subway, all his worldly possessions of his five years, including many, many drawings and paintings and a bit of clay sculpture, fitting in a duffel bag and a box.