Billy was pretending to be an airplane, tearing across the field with two little ghosts on his back. When the game ended, he crossed the field and came back to us, smelling like grass and sweat. He sat, and Liz handed him the bottle, and the three of us stayed out for another hour together in our layers of sweaters and socks, watching the ghosts.

____________

The next morning, when I gave Lee the paints, his eyes grew wide and happy. “Yippee!” he said, and hugged the tin to his heart.

“I hope you’ll show me what you paint,” I told him.

“I will,” he said.

And all through that day’s lesson, I caught him in moments of quiet smiles, saw him touch the smooth handle of the brush with the tip of a finger, or feel the rough tooth of the paper. And I felt a gladness in my own heart that I’d given the gift to him, that I’d found this way to make him happy.

I am good, I thought. I am good.

___

Later, when I went to the house to help with dinner, Lee called me into the living room.

“Close your eyes and hold out your hands,” he said. I felt a paper placed into my palms. “Now open!”

He covered his own face with a pillow and hummed with anticipation as I looked at what he had given me.

A watercolor painting of the two of us, standing in the green field under a blue sky and a happy sun, holding hands. Our names were written in pencil below our figures. Mila. Lee.

“Oh, buddy,” I said. “This looks just like us!”

“It does?”

“It does! I love it. Thank you.”

“Oh, and I found this upstairs. I think it will fit.” He showed me a wood frame without anything in it, just the glass over a cardboard back.

“How perfect,” I said. “You just found it?”

“There’s a lot of stuff in that closet.”

I nodded, remembering that Julia had told me that same thing. The paint was dry, so I took the back off the frame and set the paper in. I pushed down the metal tabs and turned it around. There we were, Lee and me. “I can’t wait to hang this in my cabin,” I told him, and he gave me another one of the smiles I so loved.

___

I hoped Lee was doing better. That he was less haunted and afraid, and it had not only been celebrations and watercolors that had cheered him. But a few days later, his smiles were gone again. He was distracted during lessons, no matter how hard I tried to engage him.

“Soon, we’ll have two new friends,” I told him. “It will be so nice for you to be around other kids your own age.”