For a second nothing happened. And then Theo's face — the face he had been holding shut since he was five years old — came open all at once, and he made a sound Andre had not heard from him since he was a baby, a high, broken, astonished sound, and he folded against his father's chest and cried. Not the fine, controlled shaking of that first night. Real crying, loud and wet and hiccuping, the kind that soaks a man's shirt through.
Andre held him on the hallway floor for a long time.
The next night Theo slept in his bed. The night after, Andre found him in the hall again, and carried him back, and said nothing about it. It went back and forth like that through Christmas. By January, it was mostly the bed.
The blue notebook stayed in the backpack. Theo wrote in it less. Some days, Andre noticed when he peeked — and he did still peek, and he knew he'd have to stop — there were only two words.
Dad home.
XI
The hearing was in February, in a small courtroom on the fourth floor of the county building, with a radiator that knocked like someone wanted in.
The prosecutor had offered Vanessa a plea: one misdemeanor count of child endangerment, eighteen months of probation, a parenting course, a psychological evaluation, and counseling for as long as her counselor said she needed it. The Children's Services finding had already come down — substantiated, neglect — and her name would sit on the state registry for years. She had lost her job at the insurance office when they ran the background check for a promotion. Bernadette told Andre all of this in the hallway in a low, flat voice, the way you'd read off the weather.
"You don't have to be in there," Bernadette said.
"I know."
He went in anyway. He sat in the back row in his one good jacket. The kids were at school, which was where he wanted them.
Vanessa stood at the table beside her lawyer. She had cut her hair short. It made her look younger, and tired. When the judge asked if she understood the charge, she said yes. When the judge asked how she pleaded, she said guilty. And then, when the judge asked if there was anything she wished to say, she was quiet for so long that her lawyer touched her elbow.
"My stepson told the truth," she said. "I want that on the record. I said he was lying, and he wasn't. He was eight years old and he told the truth, and I'm the one who didn't." Her voice did not break. She had clearly decided it would not. "I thought I was teaching them something. I was doing to them what was done to me. That isn't an excuse. I know it isn't. I'm trying to understand it so I don't ever do it again."
She did not turn around. She did not look for him. Andre was grateful for that, and also, in some small place he did not examine, sorry.
Two weeks later, an envelope came to Bernadette's office. Inside was a second envelope, sealed, addressed in Vanessa's precise handwriting: For Theo and Lulu — whenever they're ready, if they ever are. And a note on a separate card, for Andre: I don't expect you to give it to them. I just needed it to exist somewhere other than inside me.