“For seven years she was forty minutes from here,” his grandmother whispered, touching his knee. “We only found out three weeks ago. The detective matched her DNA to yours. Your mother and I have been going to see her every day since. We didn’t tell you because—”
“Because we wanted to be sure,” Lisa finished, cupping Jeremy’s face. “And because her doctor said sudden shocks aren’t good for her yet. And because we wanted you to be the one to decide when to speak. We thought— we thought if you were ready to speak tonight, you were ready to know.”
Jeremy was crying so hard now he couldn’t see. The drawing was getting wet.
“She’s alive?” he choked out. The words were a prayer and a wound and a laugh all at once. “Janice is alive?”
Lisa nodded, tears pouring.
“She’s alive, baby. She’s twelve now. She can’t speak yet either. Not really. A few words. But she draws. She draws you. Every day she draws you. Two stick figures by a lake. She remembers you.”
Jeremy made a sound that was half sob, half laugh, loud and cracked and completely unpracticed. He pressed his forehead hard into his mother’s shoulder, then pulled back, looking frantically at the door.
“Can I— can I see her?” he asked, his voice breaking on every syllable. “Right now? Can we go right now?”
His grandfather was already grabbing his coat from the banister, his grandmother was grabbing her purse with shaking hands.
Lisa held Jeremy’s face and kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his hair, like she could make up for eight years of untouchable silence in one minute.
“Right now,” she promised.
The drive to Sunny Hills was quiet except for Jeremy’s breathing in the back seat.
He held the blue drawing on his knees with both hands and stared out the window at the dark streets passing under streetlights, his reflection ghosted over the glass. He hadn’t spoken again since asking to go. He didn’t need to.
Lisa kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror and reaching back to squeeze his knee.
When they arrived, the building was low and warm, with soft yellow lights in the windows. A nurse at the front desk smiled like she had been expecting them and led them down a hall that smelled like laundry and crayons.
She stopped at the last door on the left. It was half open. Inside, a small lamp glowed.
A girl sat at a low table in pink pajamas, her dark hair cut short and even, her back to the door. She was drawing, her tongue stuck out a little in concentration, her left hand moving slower than her right.
Jeremy stopped in the doorway. His whole body went still.
Lisa crouched beside him and whispered, “It’s okay. Go slow.”
Jeremy took one step. The floor creaked.
The girl looked up.
She had his eyes. His nose. His face, but smaller, paler, with a thin white scar at her temple that disappeared into her hairline.
She stared at him for a long second, her mouth slightly open.
Then her eyes went very wide.
Jeremy knelt down slowly, so he was at her height. He held out the blue drawing with a shaking hand.
“Janice?” he whispered, his new voice cracking on her name for the first time in eight years.
Her lips parted. She made a small, soft sound. Her hand lifted, hovered, then touched the paper, then his fingers.
She stared at his face, and tears filled her eyes all at once.
“Jer—” she said, the sound thick and slurred but unmistakable. “Jer—my.”
Jeremy broke.
