Behold Your Mother

Every night his mother holds out her arm in the dark and asks him to tell her that God is Love. Chris knows how many times is enough.

The Point, 1993. Chris is eight and his mother's only company. By day Evelyn counsels other people's children for the Board of Education. At night the laundry lies wet on both beds, and her son sleeps underneath it, behind a door she locks with a key on a shoelace. Chris counts everything, including the lies he tells to keep her safe.

He copies a stranger's novena to St. Jude forty times, asking to be thin, and slides every copy under a locked church door. That fall his grandfather begins to waste away, and Chris starts to wonder where his prayers are going.

His grandmother Anne is allowed in on Saturdays, as far as his shelf. By her phone is the number of the child welfare bureau, with one straight line through it. "If I call it, your mother shuts the door," she tells him. "Then I don't have Saturdays either."

So she fights for Wednesdays. One night a week Chris sleeps in dry sheets, six floors above the water. On Thursdays he goes back to Rachel Street.