He had never known her name. He had seen her face in the white light of the patrol car for perhaps ten seconds, and then again, flickering, in a lot of dreams. She'd been twenty-eight, maybe, and very thin, and he had remembered her eyes. That was what he had recognized on the bathroom floor. The eyes, and then her face changing when she saw him.
Three months after the hearing he had gone to the county health department and gotten himself trained as a community naloxone responder, which was a three-hour class that he could have taught in his sleep, and with the certificate in his pocket he had asked his parole officer, flatly, whether there was any rule against him carrying a kit. There wasn't. He had put up the coffee can the next week. People had taken it as a confession. He had let them.
The door of the consultation room opened, and the woman who came through it was tall and stooped and somewhere in her fifties, with half-moon reading glasses on a beaded chain and a canvas tote bag over one shoulder so stuffed with folders that it had lost its shape. She wore a gray cardigan with the sleeves pushed up and a hospital visitor sticker on it, and a lanyard with a county ID.
"Hi there," she said, to Emi, not to Lazaro. She sat down in the other armchair so that her face was about level with the boy's. "My name's Arliss. Arliss Duchene. I work for Chemung County, for a part called Child Protective Services. Do you know what that is?"
Emi's whole body had drawn in on itself. "You take kids."
"Sometimes," Arliss Duchene said. She said it the way Lazaro had said things in the room earlier, without trying to make it softer than it was. "Not as often as people think. Mostly what I do is try to figure out how to keep kids safe, and most of the time the safest place for a kid is with their mom or dad, with some help. That's what I want to figure out tonight. Is it okay if I ask you some questions?"
Emi looked at Lazaro.
It went through Lazaro like a current. The boy had called him a liar forty minutes ago, had hit him, had sat as far from him as the loveseat allowed, and now he was looking at Lazaro to know whether it was all right to talk.
"It's okay," Lazaro said. "Tell her the truth. All of it. Same as you told me."
Arliss Duchene glanced at him for the first time over the half-moon glasses, a quick professional look that took in everything and gave nothing away, and then she turned back to Emi and took a yellow legal pad out of the tote bag.
He listened to the boy tell it. The tooth. The puffy face. The soup. The clinic, the antibiotic, the thousand-dollar root thing that the insurance didn't cover. Crying in the bathroom on Sunday night. The lady at work who gave her something. "Just a half," his mom had said, "and lie down for one hour." The thump. The snoring that was wrong. Running out the door and down the stairs. The man with the can.