The teacher came up at a run, her long cardigan flying, her red glasses crooked, without the clipboard. Ezinne Oduya had sat in a conference room with the school psychologist and the speech pathologist and Brooke and a woman from the county in January, at a long table with a box of tissues on it, while the psychologist explained the words selective mutism and the woman from the county explained, carefully, as little as possible about why the girl had a new name. She stopped six feet away and stared at Juno, and her hand went up to her mouth.
"She talked," she said. She said it to no one, to the air. Then she said it to Brooke. "Ms. Garvey. She— Juno, honey, you talked." Her eyes had filled up, behind the crooked glasses. "That was her. That was her voice. I've never heard her voice."
Rodney Prentice looked at the teacher. "Never?"
"Not once. Not since she started in January." The teacher pressed her fingers against her lips, hard, like she was trying to hold something in. "She writes on a whiteboard. She nods. She's brilliant, she reads at a sixth-grade level, she does everything, she just doesn't— she hasn't said one word in this building in ten months. Not to me, not to the other kids, not to the speech therapist. Not one." She laughed, a wet, astonished sound. "And she just yelled it across the whole playground."
Rodney looked down at the girl. The girl looked up at him. Her arms were trembling with the effort of holding them out, but she held them out.
He had been doing this for twenty-three years, and somewhere in the back of his mind there was a voice that sounded like his old sergeant and that was saying, very reasonably, It doesn't prove anything. Kids love who they love. A kid who doesn't talk can still be talked to. You saw the Pomeroy boy call that man Daddy. And the voice was right, as far as it went. It was always right as far as it went. But he had stood on the porch on Hickory Street, and he had seen what Trey Pomeroy did after he said Daddy. He had told himself for years that he had not seen it, and then for more years that it had not meant anything, and it came back to him now standing in the yellow leaves with a little girl's outstretched arms an inch from his gun belt. The boy had gone down the porch steps holding his father's hand and walking toward the blue Pontiac, and the whole way, the whole length of the front walk, he had been looking back. Not at his father. Over his shoulder, at the nineteen-year-old babysitter in the doorway with her hand over her mouth. He had been looking back at her the way you look back at a lit window from a dark road.
Kids told you. They didn't tell you with their mouths, mostly, because nobody had taught them yet how to say the words, or because somebody had taught them very well not to. They told you with which way they looked. They told you with which person they put their body in front of.
This girl had not run to her mother. She had run to stand between her mother and him.
He did not need the photograph. He glanced at it anyway, on the laptop screen in the open door of the cruiser beside him, because he was a careful man and he would have to write a report. A woman with cropped dark hair and no makeup and a sunburned nose stared out at him from under the bad light of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles office, not smiling. She looked exactly like the woman kneeling on the sidewalk. She looked, in fact, like the same woman on a worse day.
Very slowly, because of his back, and because of the girl, Rodney Prentice bent his knees and lowered himself until he was crouching on the sidewalk, which put his eyes a little below Juno Garvey's. His knees cracked like kindling. He rested his forearms on his thighs and let his hands hang open between them where she could see them.