His First Choice

“Mommy’s bookshelf.”

Relief flooded her so thickly Lacey sat back. She grinned for real. Then it occurred to her that his father could have told him to say that, could even have rehearsed it with him this morning on their way to see her.

“Was she in the room?”

He shrugged again, and she realized her question could be confusing. In the room when he first misbehaved by climbing where he’d been told not to go? Or when he fell?

“Before you started to climb, I meant.”

He shrugged again. And rather than upset him, she let the matter drop.

Levi finished the puzzle. At her invitation he wandered around the room, touching things. A plastic tic-tac-toe board. A car track with little cars—not as elaborate as the one he had in his room at home, but still worth a little boy’s notice.

Lacey put the puzzles back on their shelf, washed her hands in the sink and sat at a pint-size plastic picnic table. “You want a snack?” she asked, holding out a shortbread cookie she’d just taken from the cupboard.

He looked at the cookie, shrugged and pushed a car on the track.

“What kind of ice cream did you get last night?” His father had told him that they’d have some.

“Chocolate. I get chocolate. Daddy gets ’nilla.”

Leaving the cookie on the table, she sat down on the floor with him. “In a cone or a bowl?”

He shrugged again.

“Do you ever eat so much it hurts your stomach?”

Another shrug.

There were games she could play with him, activities designed to give her insights into his psyche. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to resort to something that formal. But...

“Let’s play a little game,” she said, leaning back against the wall. He seemed happier when she gave him his space.

He didn’t seem to have heard her.

“Levi, will you play a game with me?”

“Then can I go back to my daddy?” Those blue eyes were wide and sad as he looked at her.

“Yes.” It was the only answer she could give him. Her purpose was not to make him unhappy. Or to make him dislike her, either. They needed to work together, Levi and she, to make certain that he was safe. Even if he didn’t know that.

“Okay.”

“So this is a talking game,” she started. “You can still play with your cars while we do it.”

Picking up another car, he had one in each hand and circled one around the track.

“So in this game, I tell you one of the best things that ever happened to me, one of my happiest times, and then you tell me yours. Okay?”

He nodded.

“So, one of my happiest times was when...” She’d been ready to give him the rote—the memory she’d chosen long ago for this exercise, the same one she used every time.

And then she stopped. He wasn’t exhibiting any need to confide in her, didn’t seem to need an excuse to open up, and he certainly wasn’t going to care about her and her identical twin sister playing a trick on their fourth-grade teacher.

Not at that moment, at any rate.

“When I was little, my twin sister and I were picked to do some television commercials,” she told him. “The best one was when we got to ride on the hood of a sports car for a little bit, right on the track.”