“All babies cry.”
“All the time.” Drew used the red crayon to change the flat mouths of his family to bloody downturned frowns.
“Some babies cry more than others,” Lacey observed. She couldn’t tell much about her baby’s face in the ultrasound, so she drew a slight lift in his mouth, not quite a smile but a disposition to smile. Then she used the white crayon to touch up the highlights in the image. The illusion of three dimensions appeared under her hand. Drew left his own picture, having whirled a scarlet cyclone over his family, and stood next to her.
He was so real. She felt heat from his body, or maybe it was cold, or an electric charge—some palpable change in the quality in the air around him. He leaned against her left arm. She felt the cotton of his T-shirt against her skin, the yielding of his muscle, the solid bone beneath, the sturdy, resilient texture of boy. She cherished these moments with her noisy boys, when they dropped their shielding energy and let her touch the sweet child within. Soon he would hold her hand. Even as she thought it, she felt his fingers crawl into her palm. He had the prickly, grimy feel of a child who played hard and had no time for soap, with an overlay of warm sugar.
“I like your picture,” he said. “How do you make it look round?”
“Here, get a new piece of paper, and let’s start with a circle.”
She taught him to use the lighter and darker colors over the construction paper’s middle shade to turn the circle into a ball, and to draw the lines and angles of cubes and pyramids. Was he doing something like this in her mind, creating an illusion of surface, reality, wholeness? She pushed the thought away: to deal with him, she had to accept him as real. “Now you decide where the light’s coming from,” she said, “and let it be the bright side of your pyramid. Where do you think the shadows will go? Light moves in a straight line,” she reminded him, just before he put the shadow in front of the lighted face, and he moved the brown crayon. “What’s your baby sister’s name?” she asked.
“Dor.othy.”
“That sounds good together, Drew and Dorothy. Do your brothers’ names begin with D? David and Donald?”
“No.”
“Dexter and Dennis? Daryl and Dwayne? Help me out, kiddo. On Dasher, on Dancer, on Donner and Blitzen?” This would have drawn a smile, however grudging and shy, from even the noisiest boy. From Drew, nothing. “Doc and Dopey? Dimplecheeks and Droopydrawers? I’m running out of options here.”
“James. Matthew.” Drew pushed his pyramid drawing away. “I want to draw some more circles. Can I have the green paper?”
Drew, Dorothy, James, Matthew. If he’d give her the family name, she could search for them online. “Here you go. Have you always lived here?”
Drew gave a sullen don’t-ask-me hunch and scrawled a lopsided oval on his green paper. “I messed up,” he said. “I want another piece. I want to draw a green ball.”
“That was the last green. You want orange?”
“Green.” He looked at her drawing of the baby, which she was now touching with specks of purple to bring out contrasting lines in the eyelids and the curled hands. “I can draw on the back.”
“This one’s mine. See how the baby’s head looks round? It’s just the same as the ball. When you can shade all the shapes, you can draw pretty much anything.”
“I want green!”
He snatched at the paper. She was ready for him and whisked it out of reach. “You can have it if you tell me something,” she said. “The name of somebody who lived here before me.”
“That lady. The one with the kid, they came here selling stuff. The one that goes next door for violin lessons. She lived here once.”
“CarolAnna? Is that who you mean? CarolAnna lived here?” And she’d never said anything, not when showing the house, not when Madison told her story. What was she hiding, what did she know?
“We used to play tag. She said I was her best friend. Then she went away, they always go away, nobody ever stays. Give me the paper.”
Lacey gave him the picture of her baby. He turned it over, drew another rough oval, and said, “I messed up again!” He tore the paper in half and crumpled the pieces. “I hate this dumb stuff!” he yelled, and he was gone.
Lacey gathered the pieces of the torn picture and all Drew’s sketches and threw them away, except the picture of his family, which she slid into the green binder. She chose light blue paper and the gray crayon and started drawing the baby again.
She put the picture in Eric’s laptop case. Later, when he found it, he thanked her and promised to put it in a frame in his office. Then she was embarrassed because that was a thing a little kid would do. Look at this picture I drew for you. He was gone all day, twelve, thirteen, fifteen hours, coming home only to sleep. Nobody should have to work this hard. It wasn’t like he was appealing death sentences on the eve of executions. She didn’t put him through law school so she could be married to an empty bed. She had to talk to him.