He said absolutely nothing on the subway — he could have been riding alone, giving just perfunctory nods when Milly or Jared said something to him, such as how much they thought he was going to like the art supply store around the corner from them, or the great art teacher at the kindergarten he’d be going to. He said nothing to Ardit, the super, or the other building staffers at the Christodora, all of whom had been expecting his arrival for a month now. He said nothing in the elevator, nothing in the apartment, nothing even upon entering the former study/guest room they’d furnished into a boy’s bedroom, careful not to decorate or paint save for a few superhero posters, so Mateo could make all the decisions himself and create a room entirely his own.
“You can figure out how you want to make your room, my friend,” Jared said. “What colors, what pictures.”
Mateo sat down tentatively on the bed. Milly caught his hands trembling. “Can I take a nap?” he asked.
“Right now?” Milly asked. “Do you want to go see the neighborhood? It’s really nice outside.”
“I’m tired. I wanna take a nap first.”
“Take a nap,” said Jared. “Get comfortable in your new room.” Jared gently drew Milly out of the room.
“Can you please close the door?” Mateo asked.
“Sure,” Jared said. He closed it behind them, leaving it slightly ajar.
“All the way?” Mateo called back.
Milly and Jared looked at each other. Then Jared shrugged and fully closed the door. Milly put her arms around herself and walked, in a daze, to the kitchen, Jared following her. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked down six flights at the boys playing basketball in Tompkins Square Park. Jared brought them each a glass of water.
“He’s in shock,” Jared said quietly. “Give it time.”
“I’m in shock,” Milly said.
They sat there, holding hands across the table. “We can’t leave our own house on a Saturday afternoon,” Jared said in a low voice full of amazed amusement. He started laughing quietly, gripped her hand. “What the fuck have we done?”
Milly smiled a little, shook her head. “I hope you don’t hate me for this.”
They heard a high, hiccup-y sound. Milly kicked off her shoes and, in stocking feet, padded to Mateo’s door, then padded back. She took Jared’s hand again. “He’s crying,” she whispered. “Really softly, like he doesn’t want us to hear him.”
Jared came around the table and raised her up, held her. “This is going to take time, Milly.”
All through 1998, with the whole soap opera of Monica Lewinsky in the news every day, Milly watched while Mateo glacially adjusted to his new life. Mateo made friends in kindergarten, at the playground. Mateo had playdates. Mateo had white friends, Mateo went with Milly and Jared to galleries and performances, Mateo went to Montauk and saw the beach for the first time and fell in love with the waves — and with crabs, just like the ones he’d drawn. (Real crabs didn’t smile, though.)
Milly and Jared would take Mateo back with them to Ellen’s home at first, and then after about six months, he said, with no fanfare, he didn’t want to go back anymore. Milly and Jared looked at each other, thought it best to leave it at that. Milly went back herself to do art with the boys a few more times, then finally had to tell Ellen she didn’t have the time anymore. She was now a mother, or some approximation of a mother, in a nuclear family, and she was feeling the closing in of priorities that all parents feeclass="underline" that sense of letting go a bit of engagement with the broader, bigger issues of the world; that sense — which seems so solipsistic from the outside, but so utterly inevitable from the inside — that the world of the home was a crowded and challenging enough universe in and of itself.
One Sunday night, in the summer, they took a train back from Montauk. Milly and Jared carried Mateo upstairs in the elevator and put him to bed with sand in his hair, because he’d fallen asleep in the cab home from Penn Station. The next morning, Milly went to change the sheets in his little bed and she found, jammed between the mattress and the wall, a beat-up snapshot of a game-looking Latina with moussed hair and a leather jacket and a denim miniskirt, posing with some guy and a boom box.
She turned it over and read the date stamp: 04/14/1984. She turned it back around and stared at it intently. Neither Sister Ellen nor Mateo had ever mentioned this picture to her. But she didn’t have to think too hard to realize that it was likely Mateo’s mother, Ysabel Mendes, of whom her own mother had often spoken.
Milly scrutinized the woman’s face — not especially pretty but not ugly, either; eyes large and alive — looking for signs of Mateo. Mateo was lighter than his mother. He’d certainly received her wild curls, though. Milly felt tenderness for the woman, and gratitude, and also burning curiosity about exactly whom she’d gotten with to make Mateo. I hope you know he’s okay, she thought, talking to the picture. My mom took care of him for you. You can relax.
Later that afternoon, Milly was in the drugstore and bought a frame for the picture. She got home and took the frame into Mateo’s room and intended to put the picture in the frame and place it on Mateo’s dresser. But as she began to, she thought better of it. She found some photos she had just had developed of all of them at the beach and put one in the frame and set that on Mateo’s dresser instead. She left the photo of his mother tucked between his mattress and the wall, just where she’d found it, and never said a word about it to Mateo.
Occasionally in the coming years, when Mateo wasn’t home — and amid an overall new happiness and sense of purpose Milly felt upon being a mother, which settled deeply and comfortably into her bones and went a long way toward dulling the quiver of dread she’d lived with most of her life — she’d slip into his room and examine the photo and ponder the final years of Ysabel Mendes.
Twelve. Born This Way (2012)
On the street in front of the apartment in Westlake, Hector got in his long-term rental car, shaking. You are so fucking high, he told himself. The deep, deep-down survival voice told him that if he didn’t take a Klonopin right now, he was going to do something very, very bad, like drive the car over the first cliff he saw. He found the pill in the front pocket of his jeans, chewed it carefully and thoroughly, washed it down with the rest of a sticky bottle of Gatorade lying on the floor of the car. The pill wouldn’t kick in for thirty minutes, he knew, but he still had to act fast. He pulled out his cell, started to dial 911, then noticed that the young, skinny twink he’d been with had left his own cell phone on the seat of the car. All the better, then. Hector picked it up, punched in 911. The woman on the other end was immediately barking for his name, address, phone number, location.
“There’s three people fucked up on drugs in an apartment on the corner of West Second Street and South Union and I think one of them is overdosing. You have to send EMTs.”
“Sir, what is the address and number of the apartment?”
He didn’t know. “It’s right at the corner of West Second Street and South Union. It’s off-white with a flat roof.”
“Sir, what is your name? Are you at the scene, sir?”
“I told you where it is, you just better get there,” he said.
He tried to hang up but the call, an emergency call, wouldn’t let him. He backed up the car to the building, where he noted the address and spoke it into the phone. He couldn’t remember what buzzer they’d buzzed only — when was that? How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes or three hours? The sun was rising in the east, pushing dazzling grades of red and gold into the sky, the neighborhood still silent. He threw the phone onto the small plot of lawn in front of the building.