Her eyes were closed, but he could tell she was listening.
"Your mother. Tell me about her."
He had not talked about his mother to anyone in five years.
The caseworkers had asked in the early days, and he had given them the small, flat answers caseworkers expected.
After he ran away, there had been no one to ask.
He had not said her name aloud since the Greyhound bus pulled out of Toledo on a summer night when he was 12.
"Her name was Hannah," he said.
The name felt strange in his mouth.
It also felt good.
"Hannah Carter. Before she got married, she was Hannah Walsh."
"She had hair the color of wheat. That's what she always said. Wheat."
"She laughed like wind chimes. I don't know if that makes sense."
"It makes sense."
"She read to me every night, even when she was sick. Even at the end."
"She'd have me get up on the bed with her in the hospital, and she'd read from this book of fairy tales with a green cover."
"The pages smelled like her. Like her perfume. She wore the same perfume her whole life."
"I don't know what it was."
"Lily of the valley," Maggie said softly.
Eli stopped jogging.
"What?"
"Nothing, baby. Keep moving. Tell me more."
He started moving again, slower now.
He was confused.
He did not know why she had said that.
He kept talking because she had asked him to.
"She told me on her last day that I was going to build beautiful things. That's what she said."
"She said, 'Eli, you're going to build beautiful things.'"
"And I told her I wanted to build houses. Houses that were always warm."
"And she said, 'Then that's what you'll do.'"
Maggie opened her eyes.
"And you've been drawing them?"
"Yes."
"Can I see one? When we get out of here, will you show me?"
He looked at her.
She was very pale.
Her lips were the color of a bruise.
"Yes," he said. "I'll show you."
"Tell me about your father."
He shook his head even though she could not see it.
"I don't remember him. He died when I was six. I don't remember his face."
"What did your mother tell you about him?"
"She said he was a good man. She said he worked with his hands. She said he loved us."
He paused.
He was jogging in place very slowly now.
"She said he died saving people at the steel mill."
"There was an accident. He got three other men out before the second explosion."
"That's what she told me."
"I don't know if she made it up to make me feel better."
"She didn't make it up."
He stopped again.
"What?"
Maggie opened her eyes.
She looked at him for a long moment.
She looked at him the way a person looks at something they have been searching for a very long time and have just, in the worst possible circumstances, found.
"Nothing, baby," she said softly. "Keep moving."
He did not understand.
He did not have the strength to push.
He started moving again.
She watched him from the wall.
She watched the 90-pound body of a 14-year-old boy who was the son of a man she had held in her arms eight years ago in a burn ward in Pittsburgh.
A man who had asked her with his final strength to find his child.
She watched him.
Her heart did a thing it had not done in eight years.
It cracked the rest of the way open.
She closed her eyes again.
She did not say anything else.
She would tell him.
She would tell him when they were warm.