Free Devotion by Maile Meloy Page B

handsome and dark-eyed, quiet and popular and effortlessly confident. He was a natural athlete. When they played catch, some of the boys adopted a showy flourish of elbow and knee, to make sure everyone was watching. With Manuel, you barely noticed the ball leave his hand. He was an efficient creature, with no wasted movement, and no apparent care for how he was seen.
    Eleanor thought of her gay art history professor joking, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make
women
.” She wondered sometimes if Hattie identified as a boy. But she thought Hattie just wanted to be Manuel, and Manuel wore T-shirts in solid colors—like the green one Eleanor had left at the new house, and the red one she had forgotten to wash.
    â€œI don’t want that one!” Hattie cried, pushing away a blue-striped shirt with a sailboat on the front.
    â€œHattie, please. We’ll be late for school.”
    â€œNo!” Hattie cried, throwing the striped shirt to the ground. Eleanor picked it up and tried to wrestle it over Hattie’s head, but her daughter was surprisingly strong, and squirmed and fought free. She threw her naked torso onto the bed and sobbed heartrendingly into the quilt, her tiny vertebrae countable down into her jeans.
    Eleanor wanted to cry with her. But she was the mother now, which was confusing. She had so recently been the daughter, allowed to fling herself facedown and weep. She wanted to ask if this was how Manuel would behave—cool, collected, unflappable Manuel—but she would only sound peevish and ineffectual. She had new compassion for her mother, especially when they weren’t in the same room together. You just couldn’t win, as a mom. She went to brush her teeth and let Hattie cry it out.
    In the mirror, there were shadows like thumbprints beneath her aching eyes. The rats had invaded her dreams: the ghostly touch of fur against her cheek.
    Back in the bedroom, Hattie had taken the dirty red shirt from the hamper and put it on. She turned, wet-eyed and solemn, quietly triumphant in her red shirt.
    â€œI am Manuel,” she said. “Why is Hattie crying?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Eleanor said. “I guess because she was sad.”
    It was always unsettling, this transformation into the idealized boy in the correctly colored shirt, but Eleanor would take it if it got them out the door. She had known that she and James might produce a strong-willed and visual child, but she hadn’t expected this obsession with color and identity, or the struggle that would be daily life.
    In the chaos of the school drop-off, Eleanor caught sight of the real Manuel, standing by the steps. He was wearing a blue shirt. No stripes, no sailboat, but blue! Hattie didn’t seem to notice. She didn’t need to talk to Manuel because she
was
him now, calm and sure. She looked an inch taller as she carried her pink backpack inside.
    Eleanor drove to her new street and parked to study the neighborhood. The yellow bungalow was there, still neat and unassuming on the east side of the street, dwarfed by the huge sycamore. The neighboring house to the south was a newly built stucco number with a clay tile roof. The builder had used every possible square foot, as usual, and the house was boxy and top-heavy, crowding the lot.
    On the north side, beyond the sycamore and a wooden fence, was a two-story blue clapboard house, with a peaked roof and peeling paint. The picture window had heavy gray curtains hanging closed against the sunny fall day. The broker had warned Eleanor that two ancient sisters lived there, and when they died, it would be a teardown. In full rationalizing mode, Eleanor had decided that the tall fence would block the noise and the dust.
    It was easy to choose which house to approach, when one looked like a witches’ den and the other like a Taco Bell. She rang the doorbell of the boxy new house and heard the chime echo inside. After a minute a woman