If I couldn’t kidnap Perley back, I could kidnap the pills. Instead of moving from bottle to hand to mouth to throat to gut to bloodstream to brain, now they moved from cheek to plastic egg to yarn ball, and then, when I smuggled them home, the pills moved deep into a hole in the ground, out in the woods, buried and forgotten, so that even I couldn’t find those small deposits of metal and chemical, sulfur and chalk.
When Perley told me to send, I almost scolded him. Oh lord, I thought. ElfQuest. Always ready to show me I’m not good enough, and now it’s because I can’t read minds. I almost told him, This isn’t a comic book, Perley. This is real life. But then I thought, Why not? We were the same body once. Why shouldn’t we be able to see inside each other? So I willed it. I wouldn’t let it not work. I wouldn’t let doubt in. Half by code, half by mind reading, Perley and I embarked on our great project. I sent to him, mama elf to baby elf. He received.
Each visitation day, as March turned to April and the maple sap ran in the trees and the hills churned toward spring and toward the ninety-day review, Perley and I sat side by side in Pariah Park, stitching and winding and talking, fingers flying, the caseworker watching jealously from the sidelines. She’d begun to bring her own handwork, a crocheted purse that she said she’d been working on for years. I didn’t offer her a word of encouragement. It was her job to stay cheerful, not mine.
Eventually, she began to sit farther away, so finally Perley and I could speak almost freely again, though Perley insisted that sending was an easier way to talk to each other.
One day he said, “Did you hear that?”
“Were you sending?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“I didn’t quite get it,” I said. “Try me again.”
“I asked you where you put it,” he said. He looked toward the caseworker at the other end of the park, who was half turned away, absorbed in some uninteresting crocheting challenge. Still, Perley lowered his voice. That was one way my boy had changed. He’d gone from guileless to crafty in more ways than one. “Where do you put the medicine,” he whispered, “after I give it to you?”
“A hole in the ground,” I said, and Perley flinched. That was when he told me about the death portal, about the grave he saw sometimes. “I don’t see it so much now,” he said. “Now that we’re doing our project. But I don’t want it to come back. I don’t want to fall down that hole.”
“Piglet, you won’t,” I said.
“How do you know?” he asked me.
“Because,” I said, “I dig the holes, and then I put the pills down there, and then I fill the holes back up, and then I pat the earth down over them, and then I make a mixture of milk and earth and moss and I pour it over the place I dug, and where I pour this milkshake more moss begins to grow, and mushrooms, and soon no one can tell where that hole is, not even me. It’s not a hole anymore. It’s healed.”
He thought about this, his fingers still working. That day he was knitting a blue mitten, just one. It would never meet its mate. It would be unraveled. He asked, “Does Mama K know about our project? Will she come home so I can give her my report?”
“When Mama K comes home I will tell you right away,” I said. “You’ll be the first to know.”
Perley said, “Can I still come home even though I’m different now?”
I said, “And me, I’m your mama, again and again and again.”
Perley said, “I don’t want to come home unless Altemonte can come with me.”
I said, “Bring him.”
* * *
The visit after that, the redbuds were on the trees. It was the beginning of April, thirty-four days until the review hearing. Perley brought me one of his comic books. He handed it to me at the end of the visit, when we traded yarn, gray-green for ocher. “Check the last page,” he said, before climbing back into the caseworker’s car.