Chapter 2
Chapter 3 - The Milk Crate Under the Tracks
For two days after the gala, I did what I always do when something frightens me.
I worked.
I answered emails at eleven at night, I rebuilt a campaign budget that did not need rebuilding, and I let every meeting run long so I would not have to sit still with the question I could not answer.
Lily asked for Noah at bedtime on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and on Thursday.
"Where's Noah, Mama?"
"I don't know yet, sweetheart.
I'm trying to find out."
"Okay," she said, every time, like it was a promise I had already kept.
On Friday morning I called my office and told them I was taking two personal days.
Then I drove to a drop-in shelter on Wilson Avenue that an event volunteer had mentioned in passing.
The woman at the front desk sent me to a social worker named Marcus Reed.
He was maybe fifty, built like a man who had spent half his life carrying boxes, and he did not smile when I said the word homeless.
"You're the fourth person this week asking about that boy," he said.
"The fourth?"
"Reporters from two stations and one man in a very nice coat who wouldn't give me a name.
I told all of them the same thing.
I don't hand kids over to strangers."
"I'm not a stranger to him," I said.
"He stood my daughter up out of her wheelchair on Saturday night.
I want to know who he is so I can thank him properly."
Marcus looked at me for a long moment.
"Noah doesn't sleep here," he said.
"He comes in for a shower and a sandwich when he wants one.
He's been on his own since he was small.
Eight, maybe nine years old when he first showed up."
He said Noah slept under the L tracks near Lawrence Avenue, in a spot behind a boarded-up storefront.
He said Noah had never once asked the shelter for money or for food to take with him.
He asked for one thing, and he asked for it every time.
"He wants somewhere dry to keep a picture," Marcus said.
"That's it.
That's the whole list."
I went that evening and found nothing but a flattened cardboard box and a milk crate.
I went the next evening and found a plastic bag of men's socks someone had left, nothing else.
On the third evening I brought two cups of hot chocolate because it was forty-one degrees and dropping, and I sat in my car at the corner of Lawrence and Winthrop like a woman waiting for a bus she had no schedule for.
At seven-forty, a small figure in a gray hoodie came up the sidewalk with his hands pushed into his pockets and his chin down against the wind.
I got out of the car.
Noah stopped walking when he saw me.
He did not run.
He looked at my coat, then my face, like he was deciding which one told him more.
"You're Lily's mom," he said.
"I am."
"Is she okay?"
"She's been asking for you every night since Saturday."
He nodded slowly, as if that made sense to him in a way it did not make sense to me.
Then he walked past me, sat down on the milk crate, and reached into the front pocket of his hoodie.
He pulled out something folded into a square no bigger than a card, wrapped in a piece of clean plastic.
He unwrapped it in his lap, careful, the way you open something that would tear if you hurried.
It was a photograph of a newborn baby in a hospital blanket, pink and white, eyes squeezed shut.
I had that exact photo.
I had it in a frame on the shelf in Lily's room.
I had taken it myself on the second day of her life.
My hands started shaking so hard I had to set the hot chocolate down on the sidewalk.
"Where did you get that?"
May you like
Noah closed his fingers over the photo and put it back inside the plastic.
"I'm supposed to give it back when I'm twelve," he said.
