She was awake.
She was making the smallest sounds.
The crying one.
I stood up, and my legs did not work, and Daniel caught my elbow, and I crossed that courtroom and the social worker placed my daughter in my arms for the very first time.
Two weeks late.
I put my face against her head and I breathed her in and I could not make a single sound.
And then a small hand tugged my sleeve.
Eli.
He was holding his pickle jar.
He looked up at the social worker, and then at the judge, and then he held the jar out toward the front of the room, to no one and everyone, and he said, in his clear eight-year-old voice:
“I have sixty-one dollars and forty cents.
Is it enough?
I want to buy her back.”
Judge Ellison, silver-haired, twenty-six years on the bench, put her hand over her eyes.
