"I want to tell you why," Celestina said. "I don't want it to be an excuse. It isn't one. But I want you to know why. I had Emi. He was three. He was with a lady who watched him for money, two streets over, she thought I was at work. I was supposed to pick him up at ten. And I came up out of that, out of being dead, I didn't even know I'd been dead, and there's a police car and a light in my face, and all I could think was, they're going to take him. They're going to put him in the system, the way they put me in the system. Six houses. I was in six houses between seven and seventeen. Some were fine. One wasn't. And I looked at that cop and I thought, if it's mine, they take him. If it's somebody else's, maybe I'm a victim and maybe they let me keep him. And you were right there, and you looked like—" She stopped.
"Like what I look like," Lazaro said.
"Yes." She held his eyes. "I did it in about one second. I didn't think about you at all. I didn't think about you for two years. And then I did, and I haven't stopped."
"You could've come and said so."
"I know."
"Any day. For four years. I was right there. You told your son to come find me if you were dying, and you never once walked down that alley and said you were sorry."
"I know," she whispered.
"Why not?"
It came out harder than he meant it to, and he heard it come out hard, and he did not take it back. He had been wronged by this woman. He had spent six weeks waiting to learn if he would go back to a cell, and six years being the man people crossed the street to avoid, and there were people on Lake Street, old men who used to nod to him from the porch of the VFW, who had never nodded to him again. He had told himself for a long time that it didn't matter. Standing at the foot of her stretcher, he found out that it did.
"Because I was afraid," Celestina said. "Same reason as the first time. If I came and told you, maybe you'd go to the police and tell them it was me. And they'd know I lied. And then they'd want to know what kind of mother I am, and they'd look at my record and they'd look at me and they'd—" She made a small gesture with the hand that had the IV in it, a gesture that took in the curtained bay, the monitor, the hall outside where Arliss Duchene was waiting with her legal pad. "This. I was afraid of this. Every day, for six years, I've been afraid of exactly this. And I thought, if I'm good enough, if I'm careful enough, if I go to every meeting and I keep every receipt and I never let anybody see anything, then this won't happen. And then my tooth broke."