"And your mom told you to go find him," Arliss said. "Instead of calling 911."
Emi's chin came up. "She said if I ever called 911 you guys would take me away."
Arliss wrote that down without any change of expression. "Did she say why she thought that?"
"Because it happened to her." The boy said it simply, the way you'd report the weather. "When she was little. Her mom was sick, too, the drug kind of sick, and somebody called and the police came and they took her and she went to a lot of different houses. Six houses. She said she would never let that happen to me. She said, no matter what, she would never let anybody do that to me."
Lazaro watched Arliss Duchene's pen stop on the page, very briefly, and then go on.
"Thank you, Emiliano," she said. "That's a really important thing to know. Can I ask you about home now? About regular days?"
She asked him about regular days. Who made breakfast. Whether there was food in the fridge. What time his mom got home from work. Who picked him up from school on the days she worked late. Whether he'd ever been left alone overnight. Whether his mom ever yelled, or hit, or forgot to come home. Whether she slept a lot in the daytime. Whether there were people who came over to the apartment that he didn't like.
Emi answered every question, carefully and completely, in the voice of a child who had sat through a lot of things that were explained to him as grown-up stuff and had decided, a while ago, that the only way to get through them was to pay close attention. His mom made oatmeal. On Fridays they had pancakes. There was always food, though sometimes it was mostly rice and beans at the end of the month. She worked at Arnot Hills, the nursing home, taking care of old people, and she got home at four. On the days she worked doubles, Mrs. Laskey downstairs used to watch him, but Mrs. Laskey moved to Binghamton in August, so now he went to the after-school program at the Y until six. He'd never been alone overnight. His mom didn't hit. She yelled sometimes, like when he left his wet towel on the bed. She went to meetings on Thursdays. She had a gold coin with a six on it.
"Okay," Arliss Duchene said finally, and wrote one more line, and capped her pen. "You did great. Better than great. I'm going to go talk to your mom now, okay? And then I'll come back."
She stood up. At the door she paused and looked back at Lazaro, and this time her look stayed on him longer.
"Mr. Prewitt," she said. "Could I have a word with you in the hall?"