The first one was four pages long, and it was about intake and shoelaces and Izzy not being able to say his own birthday, and it was true, every word, and I read it out loud to myself in the car in the driveway and didn't recognize my own voice. The second one was a single paragraph about the waiting room and her face through the glass, and it was also true, and I tore it up, because I wasn't sure it was mine to give. The third one is on the kitchen table right now, half-finished, under the lighthouse magnet that I took off the refrigerator to hold it down.
Izzy read it last night. All three, actually; he found the torn one in the recycling and taped it back together. He sat at the table in his swim club sweatshirt, the new one, Halverton East, with the falcon on it, and read them in order, slowly, the way he reads everything.
"What are you going to say?" he asked.
"I don't know yet."
He nodded. He picked up a pen, and for a second I thought he was going to write something on it, and I didn't stop him. But he just held it.
"She'll be in the courtroom," he said. "And you'll be in the courtroom. And I'll be in the courtroom."
"If you want to be."
"I want to be." He put the pen down. "I want to hear what you say. Whatever it is."
"Even if I can't make up my mind?"
"You'll make up your mind," my son said, without a single block, and got up and put his bowl in the sink and went to bed.
The light behind the mirror in my car is still pulsing in the driveway as I write this. I can see it from the kitchen window, slow and blue, the way it pulsed every night that fall while a woman with a flashlight walked past it and never once wondered what it was. It's not watching for anything in particular. It never was. It just keeps what happens in front of it, without deciding what any of it means.
That part, it turns out, is up to me. I have until Thursday.