Chapter Sixteen
I found out afterward what he’d been looking at.
While I was in Bernie’s office, a woman had come through the waiting room with two children.
She was in her thirties, in a raincoat, with a lanyard and a canvas tote and a folder under her arm, and the two kids with her were maybe four and seven, in coats that didn’t match anything, and she had them by the hand, one on each side, and she was talking to the front desk about a room.
It was a supervised visit. They do them there sometimes, in room six, because room six has a two-way and a couch and no sharp corners.
There was nothing wrong with it. That woman was doing a hard job well. The little one was chewing on the drawstring of her hood and the seven-year-old was standing dead straight with his shoulders back, looking at the floor.
My son took one look at that and knew exactly what it was.
He knew the coat. He knew the folder. He knew the specific way an adult holds two children’s hands when the children do not belong to her, and he knew what happens in a room with a couch in it, because that is where you sit while a grown-up you used to live with says things, and then you go somewhere else afterward, and sometimes the two of you go to the same place and sometimes you don’t.
He was six the last time he was in one.
By the time I came around the corner he had both hands clamped on the bench rail with the knuckles standing up, and his breathing had gone fast and thin and high in the chest, and it wasn’t moving any air.
“Jonah.”
I got down in front of him.
“Jonah, honey. I’m right here. Look at me.”
He didn’t. His eyes were open and enormous and pointed at something about four feet behind my head.
“Jonah, what happened. What’s the matter. Can you tell me what happened.”
I want to write that down exactly as I did it, because I did it wrong.
I am a clinician. I have a graduate degree and eleven years of training in how children’s nervous systems work and I have sat with dysregulated four-year-olds two hundred times and I knew every single thing that was happening in my son’s body at that moment, and I asked him three questions in a row anyway, because he was mine and I was frightened.
“Don’t ask him questions.”
A man’s voice, off to my left. Not loud. Perfectly even.
“He can’t answer anything right now. Answering is a job and he’s got no hands free.”
Somebody came down beside me and crouched, off at an angle, about four feet away. Far enough not to be over the boy.
He was in his forties. Gray in the front of his hair, an unzipped fleece over a polo with the Hollis sun on it, an ID clipped to his belt.
He did not look at me one single time.
“Jonah,” he said. “My name’s Dean. I work here.”
Flat. The voice you use for telling somebody the time.
“You’re at the Hollis Center on Vine Street. It’s eleven twenty in the morning. Your mom is right there on your left and she’s not going anywhere.”
Nothing.
“Feel the bench under you. It’s wood, it’s got a rail on the front, and it’s colder on the underside. You’ve already got your hands on it. Good. Keep them there.
“Now find me something blue. Just one thing. Out loud.”
Six or seven seconds.
“Door,” Jonah said.
It came out in pieces.
“The door’s blue.”
“That’s right, it is. Find me another one.”
“Chair.” Then: “The girl’s coat.”
“Good. Three.” Dean nodded at the floor, not at him. “Now breathe down into your stomach instead of up in your chest. Don’t take a big one. Small ones are fine. We’ve got all day, nobody’s waiting on us.”
It took a little over three minutes.
I know because I looked at the clock on the wall afterward and worked it out, the way you do.
His hands came off the rail. The color came back into his face in the wrong order, ears first. He blinked about four times fast and then looked around the room and figured out where he was, and then he looked at me.
And the first thing my son did, the very first thing, was apologize.
He got as far as “Sorry, I—”
“Nope,” Dean said. “Not for that.”
He stood up, slowly, still not crowding him.
“That’s not you being weak and it’s not you being a baby and it’s not something you did.
That’s your body remembering something it doesn’t have words for.
It happens to firefighters. It happens to people who’ve been in car wrecks.
It’ll pass, and every time it happens after this one it’ll pass quicker. ”
Jonah looked at him.
“How much quicker.”
Dean almost smiled.
“Depends on the kid. But you talked at ninety seconds, which is fast. You’re going to be all right at this.”
Then he looked at me for the first time.
“Dean Alvarez. Occupational therapy, I’m here Mondays through Thursdays.”
“Nora.” I was still on the floor. “Thank you. I didn’t know what to do.”
“You knew what to do. You just couldn’t do it, because he’s yours.” He shrugged. “Nobody can do it for their own. That’s not a character flaw, that’s just how it works.”
He glanced at Jonah, then at Ruby at the little table, then back.
“He watches her,” he said. “Even in the middle of that. You see it? He’s got his knee turned toward her the whole time.”
And then Jonah, who was still gray and still catching up, said:
“Do you have a real dad?”
Children go straight through the middle of a thing without knowing they’ve done it. I started to say something and Dean put two fingers up about an inch, and I stopped.
“The man who made me isn’t the man who raised me,” he said.
Flat. Ordinary. Same voice he’d used about the bench.
“The one who made me took off when I was four. I don’t remember him and I don’t have a photograph of him. The one who raised me showed up when I was seven and stayed until two years ago, when he died in a hospital in Akron with me sitting next to him.”
He put his hands in his fleece pockets.
“And here’s the part I’ll tell you because you asked.
Alvarez isn’t my blood name. That’s his name.
When I was nine he sat me down at a table and asked me if I wanted it, and he made it extremely clear that it was fine either way, and then he sat there and let me think about it for about four days. ”
“You said yes,” Jonah said.
“I said yes.”
Jonah looked at the floor.
“Blood is who you came from,” Dean said. “A father is who stays. Those are two different jobs, and it’s more common than people think for them to be two different men.”
His voice went down a little on the last part. Barely. Just enough that I heard the bottom of it.
Then he took his hands out of his pockets and that was the end of it.
He didn’t ask why we were there in the middle of a Monday.
He didn’t ask why there were two duffel bags in the back of my car in the lot, which he had to have walked past. He didn’t ask what the boy had seen, and he didn’t ask about the boy’s father, and he did not offer me a card or a number or a single word of sympathy.
He said, “Ma’am,” and nodded at Jonah, and walked off toward the mat room with a bin under his arm.
I have been offered a lot of help since October. Most of it came with a hook in it somewhere.
That man gave me three minutes and a sentence and then went back to work, and it was the most decent thing anybody did for my family that entire month.
Bernie caught me at the front door on the way out.
She had a different face on. She’d had it on for about ten minutes and had been waiting for me to finish with my kid.
“Shaw. Hang on.”
She took me two steps to the side, by the coat hooks.
“I got a phone call this morning. Before you got here. Woman named Corinne Tate, says she’s the guardian ad litem the court appointed for your two.”
I put my hand on the wall.
“Already?”
“Friday, apparently. She wanted your employment history. Dates, performance, why you left, whether we’d take you back.
” Bernie’s jaw did something. “I gave her the truth, which is that you were the best clinician who ever worked in that building and that I have been trying to get you back for three years, and I gave her the offer letter I just handed you, and I gave her my cell number and told her to call it any hour she wants.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s not why I stopped you.”
She looked at the floor for a second, which Bernie Halloran does not do.
“There’s already a statement in that file from him. Sworn. He filed it with the motion. She read me a couple lines out of it because she wanted to know if I’d contradict them, and I did.”
“What does it say.”
“It says you left the marital home in the middle of the night in a mental health crisis. It says you have no income, no residence, and no ability to provide. It says you’ve isolated the children from their father.”
“Okay.”
“There’s one more line,” Bernie said. “And I’d rather you hear it standing in my building than read it off a page in a parking lot.”
“Say it.”
She got it out the way you hand somebody something hot.
“It says that you formed an unhealthy attachment to those children as a substitute for your own inability to have any.”