Part Six: The Fox
Noah arrived at 6:40 a.m.
I had been given a room to wait in — not the conference room, a smaller one with a couch and a lamp that was trying its best — and I heard him before I saw him, the particular cadence of his voice asking a question of someone outside, and I was at the door before the handle turned.
He was wearing his dinosaur pajamas, the ones with the small green triceratops all over, and he was holding a stuffed fox that I had never seen before. He looked slightly bewildered in the way of a child who has been awake too long and moved through too many unusual circumstances, but when he saw my face he came forward the way he always came toward me — without reservation, with his whole self.
I held him until he said, “Mommy, too squishy.”
I laughed. I was crying at the same time, in that particular way of extreme relief that resembled nothing so much as falling apart, except that you were also, somehow, being held together by the thing you were falling apart over.
“Where did you get the fox?” I asked.
“The lady,” he said. “She bought it at a store. It has a fluffy tail.”
I looked at Mara over his head.
“Ramirez,” she said. “Gas station, apparently. She said she owed him for waking him up.”
I looked at the fox. I looked at my son’s face, sleep-flushed and slightly confused and entirely, perfectly, unharmed.
“I like her,” I said.
