Part Six: The First Weeks
The emergency placement was approved. I filled out every form they gave me. I moved my tools into locked storage, installed a safety gate, turned my spare room into something that looked like where a three-year-old might live. Drew’s room was across the hall.
“Can Lily’s door stay open?” he asked, when I showed him the arrangement.
“Yes.”
“Mine too?”
“If that’s what you want.”
His shoulders came down. It was subtle — the dropping of a tension he’d carried so long he probably didn’t know it was there.
“Okay,” he said.
The first dinner, I put too much food on the table. Chicken, rice, vegetables, bread, fruit. Some irrational part of me thought abundance might make up for something. Lily went straight for the bread.
Drew stopped her. “Only take one.”
“She can have more,” I said.
He looked at the bread basket. “Even tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“What if we eat all of it?”
“I’ll buy more.”
“What if we eat that too?”
“Then I’ll buy more again.”
He took a second piece for himself. Slowly, as though testing the structural integrity of the offer.
After dinner I showed him the pantry. I opened the door and let him look at the shelves — the canned goods, the cereal, the crackers, the things that were just there, not locked behind anything, not rationed by anyone.
“If you’re hungry,” I said, “you tell me. If I’m sleeping, you wake me up. You don’t have to save food for Lily.”
His expression tightened. “Who’s going to?”
“I am. That’s my job now.”
He looked toward Lily, then back at me.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
The first night, neither of them wanted their doors closed. At two in the morning I heard footsteps in the hallway and found Drew on his crutches outside Lily’s room.
“I was checking,” he said, embarrassed.
“Checking what?”
“That she’s here.”
I looked into the room. Lily was asleep with one hand on the stuffed rabbit the hospital had given her.
“She is,” I said.
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“Reena got mad when we got up at night.”
I crouched until I was close to his eye level. “You can get up here whenever you need to. Especially at night.”
He thought about this for a moment. I helped him back to bed.
Three hours later, I heard the footsteps again.
I didn’t say anything.
