Mrs. Delgado let me watch it on her kitchen table, with a plate of cookies she had made for the boy sitting untouched between us. The camera on her porch faced the street, and it had caught the truck of Rick pulling out of the driveway across from hers at dawn on the ninth of October. Brittany sat in the passenger seat with sunglasses on. In the back window was a small face pressed to the glass. Jace. Then the door of the truck opened, Rick said something, the face disappeared, and the truck drove off with the boy left standing on the lawn in his socks.
I put my hand over my mouth. Ten years old. Fourteen days alone. The video showed him standing there for almost a minute, looking after the truck, before he turned and went into the dark house. Mrs. Delgado said she had seen him later through her window, eating dry cereal from the box and doing his homework by the light of a flashlight. She had brought him soup twice. She said she should have called sooner, and I said she had called, and that was why he was alive.
The detective at the child abuse unit was a tall, tired man named Hooper. He watched the video three times, then looked at me and said, “Madam, I am going to need to ask you something. Did you know the mother was planning this trip?” I said I had not spoken to my sister in two years. He nodded. He said he was glad, because that would make my testimony clean. He said the district attorney would want to charge both adults, and that Jace would have to give a recorded interview.
A child asks for very little, only a light left on and an adult who is still there when he wakes.
The interview was in a small room with a couch and a box of crayons, and a gentle woman named Ms. Pang who knew how to ask. I waited outside in the hall. After forty minutes Jace came out with a drawing in his hand, a picture of a house with a yellow door and a girl in the window. He said it was the house of his Aunt Carla. He said it was where he wanted to live. I knelt down in front of him and I told him that I had thought about it a great deal, and that if the judge said yes, he could stay with me.
The text from the ex wife of Rick led to the part of the story I did not want to know. She had been a mother of two in Henderson, and after the divorce she had lost custody under circumstances she had never been able to prove. Rick had left her children alone for a weekend once as punishment. The county had closed the file. She sent the detective every message she had saved, every threat, every photograph. It was enough to reopen the older case and to show the court that Jace was not the first.
Rick and Brittany were arrested at the airport in Las Vegas on their return, in line at the baggage claim, tanned and laughing. Brittany saw the officers and her face fell like a curtain. She asked for her phone. She asked for her lawyer. She asked, finally, in a thin voice, who was taking care of her son. The officer told her the child was safe. She looked at him as if she had never heard of such a word and sat down on the floor of the terminal.
The judge in Clark County granted me emergency guardianship the same afternoon, and temporary custody after a hearing the following month. The criminal case moved quickly. Rick took a plea to child endangerment and received six years, because of the earlier complaint. Brittany took two years, with a requirement of parenting classes and counseling. She wrote Jace a letter from the prison for women. He read it twice and put it in the drawer of his nightstand. He said he would answer when he was ready. I said that was fine.
We left Las Vegas in November, two suitcases in my little car and a cardboard box of his things on the back seat. We drove to my town in Utah, a place with a mountain at the end of every street. His room is the one at the top of the stairs, with a window facing the east. On the first morning, he woke at five, out of habit, and came downstairs to look in the refrigerator. It was full. He stood there with the door open for a long time and the light on his face.
Mrs. Delgado sent him a package at Christmas. In it was a huge box of building bricks, the kind with a thousand pieces, the kind he used to play with on the floor of the dark living room. There was a note. It said, For the bravest boy I know. He sat down on the rug with it and built for four hours straight, a long wall, a tower, a door with a hinge. I made hot chocolate. I did not interrupt. He did not speak until suppertime, and then he said, “It is a house.”
He showed me. It had a yellow door. In the window of the second floor stood a small figure with long brown hair, and beside the house, on a tidy green plate, was a car with room for two. He pointed to each part and told me who lived there. The boy. The aunt. A dog we had not yet gotten. I nodded the whole time and kept my eyes on the little yellow door, because I could not see anything else. Then Jace leaned against my arm and said, quietly, “I am staying, right?” And I said, “You are staying.”
