So I trained.
I'm a court-appointed special advocate now.
A volunteer, and then, this year, a paid one.
I sit with children in the exact machinery that almost swallowed my daughter, and I make sure someone in the room is watching only out for them.
I keep Eli's pickle jar on my desk at the advocacy office.
Sixty-one dollars and forty cents, still in it. I never spent it. I never will.
New advocates ask me what it is.
I tell them it's the price a child thought he had to pay to bring his sister home.
And then I tell them the actual price, the one that mattered:
A little boy who paid attention.
A little boy who saw a thing no one wanted him to see, and who did not look away, and who believed his sister was alive when every adult in his life told him she was gone.
Grace is walking now.
She follows Eli everywhere, on fat unsteady legs, saying a version of his name that isn't quite his name yet.
He is endlessly, boundlessly patient with her.
Last week I found the two of them on the floor of the yellow room, the stuffed rabbit between them, and Eli was whispering something to her, and I stopped in the doorway to listen.
"I saved up for you," he was telling her, very seriously, the way you tell someone a thing they need to know.
"A whole jar.
But it turned out I didn't need money.
I just needed to tell the truth."
Grace grabbed his nose.
He laughed.
And I stood in the doorway of the room we painted pale yellow, and I understood that my son had taught me the only thing worth knowing.
You can't buy back the people you love.
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