He sits on the front porch and watches, without knowing why. There's a reason somewhere in there, Elliot thinks, wryly, but at the moment, he doesn't want to try and find it, so he doesn't. And instead, he sits there and watches. The street is quiet enough at this time of the day, and he's managed to get away from work early enough that he'll actually be home to sit at the table with everyone. As it is, there are a good number of kids playing, and it is this lot he watches, rather than anyone else.
"You're gonna look like some kind of stalker if you don't quit staring like that," Kathleen remarks, as she wanders out onto the porch, carrying a glass of lemonade that her mother told her to bring outside.
"Almost everyone on this block knows that I'm a cop; I'm not going to look like a stalker," he says, and takes the glass from her. "Finished your homework yet?"
"Nope. Still working on it. Hopefully I'll be done in time to come out here for a while." Kathleen disappears back into the house, the door slamming behind her. Elliot rolls his eyes; he's told all four of them not to slam the door a million times over, and yet it always seems to happen. He decides to ignore it.
He blinks, once, as the sun gets in his eyes, and as soon as he can see properly again, he sees that not only has Kathleen vanished, but her brother has appeared in her place.
"Liz says to come and ask you why you're sitting out here staring at everyone, 'cause she didn't wanna walk all the way up here," Dickie informs him, before climbing into the other, unoccupied chair. "So, why are you watching us?"
"Because no one else is out here to do it," says Elliot, and almost hopes that his only son will leave it at that, but no dice.
"No one's ever out here, unless you count Mom," Dickie points out. "Nothing ever happens, anyway."
Out of the mouths of six-year-olds, Elliot thinks, and says nothing. He wonders for a moment if Dickie has been taking a line out of either Maureen's book or Kathleen's, and is perfectly convinced that nothing really does happen in their neighborhood. And then he hopes that this really is the case, because he knows that on the next block over, Queens SVU nailed someone two days ago, someone who'd never been suspected of anything. But then, Elliot thinks at this point, show me a first offender, and I'll show you someone who's never been caught.
"You'd be surprised," he says, finally, and leaves it at that, because, after all, he's talking to a six-year-old, and there are some places that he is not going to go.
Silence lingers for a long moment until Dickie speaks again. "What's a pedophile, anyway?"
Elliot stares at him. It would have been one thing if it had been a comment such as the one that Dickie had made on the playground while the investigation was still going on, but now that it's over, it's another thing.
"Why do you want to know?" he asks, finally, trying to find some way, any way, to get out of answering this question.
"Because one of my friends said that's the kind person you go out and catch," Dickie says, with an air of impatience as if he's explained this before, which, Elliot remembers vaguely, he actually did.
"Did you ask this friend of yours what it means?" he asks, and Dickie shakes his head.
"No. I don't think he was supposed to know that word, 'cause he was all quiet and stuff when he started talking about it."
Of course he was, Elliot thinks dryly, What kind of parent would want their kid to know at six years old what that is?
"Someone who hurts kids," he says, finally, an answer that's probably going to demand more detail later on, but for now, it's an acceptable one. "In a nutshell, that's what it is."
"Oh." Another silence. Elliot gives his son a sideways glance and decides to go on.
"You haven't heard anything else about it, have you?" he asks. Dickie shakes his head.
"Nope. Just that. And that was even before you came to my class and talked to everyone."
"Some kids know a lot more about the other side of things than they should," Elliot remarks.
"Why?"
"Because that's just the way life is. Not everyone grows up like you and your sisters are."
"That's kinda messed up."
One of Kathleen's lines, Elliot thinks, amused. "Yeah, it is. But life's not exactly perfect, and it's not exactly fair, either."
"But why does it have to be that way?"
He wonders when he started getting to the point where conversations with his children took on a deeper meaning than school and life, and friends, and boys (in Maureen's case, anyway), and decides that he doesn't want to know.
"I don't know. It just is. Sometimes everything goes right, and sometimes everything goes wrong."
"Like Mom when she has a bad hair day?"
"Yeah, something like that." Elliot trails off and looks back towards the street. Someone's started a makeshift game of kickball with three driveways as bases, and theirs is one of them.
"Lizzie's shoes are untied," Dickie remarks, changing the subject as he looks towards where his twin sister is, and then, "She's gonna fall."
Sure enough, she does, but gets right back up, and her knee is skinned, and bleeding slightly, but she doesn't notice as she goes running off.
"Are you gonna keep watching us?" Dickie asks, sliding out of the chair and looking down to make sure his own shoes are tied.
"Yeah, I'm gonna keep watching. You two pay attention; your mom's probably going to come out here soon."
And Dickie nods, and leaves and Elliot watches him go, because there's nothing else that he can really do except for that. He can think, still, but he doesn't particularly want to…after that conversation, he doesn't really want to think about much of anything. The door opens, and Kathleen reappears, pausing briefly to say once again that he looks like some kind of stalker before going to referee the game, like she does, because Maureen's at that age where breaking a nail means the end of her life as she knows it and can't be bothered anymore.
The phone he'd brought outside with him rings, and he answers it, because he wants something to distract him, and hopefully, this will be it.
"I have a question for you," says Olivia's voice on the other side of the line, and Elliot sighs.
"Fine," he replies, "What is it?"
"Why is it that kids always seem to know much more than they're really letting on?"
He bites back the desire to laugh at this, because her question fits the experience he's just had, and he watches as a squad car goes down the block for no apparent reason, because the lights aren't flashing, and maybe they're doing the same thing he is and just keeping an eye on things. He watches as the kids move to let it pass down the street, and then as they go back to their game while it turns the corner. And then he remembers Olivia on the other side of the line.
"Because they listen and they hear things a lot better than we think they do, and then we have the fact that most of 'em have older siblings," he replies, and Olivia does laugh, the same way he'd been trying to keep himself from doing so.
"Thought so," she said. "You know, it almost bothers me, the fact that kids nowadays know so much that we don't know they know."
"And you don't even have kids," says Elliot, mock-seriously, and he can just see her in the back of his mind, rolling her eyes.
"You don't have to have kids to be worried about it," she says, and he nods, even though he knows she can't see him.
"I know," he says, "Trust me, I know." He pauses and then goes on. "But then again, I think the reason they don't let on that they know these things is because they're afraid of what will happen if we find out they know."
"Such as your son asking you if you'd been out catching pedophiles?" Olivia asks, because he told her about that little comment, and Elliot sighs.
"Kind of like him asking me flat out what a pedophile is, about five minutes ago," he says. "I gotta tell you, sometimes it scares me."
"That kids in general know more than they let on, or that your kids know more than they let on."
"Both."