Page 39 of Drawing Home
When it was finally light outside, she padded down the floating stairs. She desperately wanted someone to talk to about all of this. Sadly, Kyle was all she had.
She knocked on the closed guest-bedroom door. Kyle opened it, wrapped in the bed comforter. His thick head of golden-brown hair was mussed and he looked startlingly young. She thought how very ancient she must seem to him. Sometimes, she saw this on his face. And then she wanted to shake him, to say,Just you wait—it happens in an instant!
“Bea, it’s the middle of the night,” he said, scratching his head.
“No, it’s first thing in the morning. Meet me in the kitchen. I’ll put the coffee on.”
Some rooms of the house reminded her of Henry more than others. The kitchen was a sharp reflection of his personal taste, with its concrete countertops in dove gray, industrial-like metal islands, black-granite sink, and ultramodern acrylic bar stools. There were odd eclectic touches, like the scuffed brown Hamilton coffeemaker that had to be thirty years old. Kyle had taken one look at it, declared it unusable, and gone out to buy a sleek new Cuisinart programmable brewer (she’d warned him not to come back with one of those god-awful pod devices). In the kitchen cabinet she discovered Henry’s collection of vintage ceramic Russel Wright plates.
She scooped the coffee into the stainless-steel brewer, poured the water, and got it started, ignoring most of the many buttons. She looked wistfully at its old neighbor sitting neglected a few inches away on the counter. She reached out and touched the beige handle of the glass pot, wondering if Henry had used it his last morning in the house.
“Okay, what’s so important?” Kyle said, now dressed in cargo shorts and a hoodie. He pulled two mugs out of the cabinet.
The coffee bubbled and hissed its way into the glass carafe. Bea leaned against the counter, too excited to sit at the table. “I think the drawings in town are clues. They mean something.”
Kyle nodded, eyeing the machine. When it was finished he filled the two mugs, handed one to Bea, and took a long sip of his own. “Bea, I hope you take this in the right way, because I’m trying to help you here: I think that’s wishful thinking.”
“Kyle, you can take this howeveryouwant: You don’t know what you’re talking about! Why would he spend his final year or so drawing pieces and giving them away? Essentially scattering them around town?”
“How do you know they are that recent?”
“They’re dated.”
Kyle seemed to consider this. He walked from the kitchen to the dining room and stared at the dining table that was perfectly aligned with the infinity pool on the other side of the glass wall, the two symmetrical and perfect in a stunning example of grand design. “So what do you want to do, Bea?”
“I want to find every drawing that’s out there. I need your help scouring this town.”
Chapter Seventeen
In the early days of motherhood, Emma had wanted nothing more than sleep. Now all she wanted was more time with her daughter.
Emma missed the mornings when Penny was just a little girl and climbed into Emma’s bed before it was light out. Penny would tuck her warm little body against hers, and once she was settled, her breathing would become slow and steady while Emma, fully awake, counted the few hours she had until she had to leave for work.
Now it was impossible to see Penny before work unless Emma woke her, risking her potent adolescent wrath in the process. But today she had to do just that.
If her own mother had been around, she might have warned Emma that the hardest stage of being a working parent wasn’t when your child was small, although it had felt that way at the time. The reality was that at that point, any responsible adult’s supervision would do. For years, knowing that Celia and then, when Celia was gone, Angus was with Penny was enough to give Emma peace of mind and her daughter a sense of security. The tricky part was when a kid hit middle school and high school, and that adult supervision wasn’t needed. Well, it was needed, but not in the same way. Someone had to keep track of Penny’s friends, her moods, the overall temperature of her life. Emma should be that person, and lately, she felt she simply wasn’t doing a great job.
She stood outside Penny’s closed bedroom door, rapped lightly twice, and opened it. “Pen?” she said, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed. Penny was curled up on her side. When awake, Penny was starting to look like a young woman. But when she was asleep, her profile, the delicate slant of her arched nose, was the same face of her infancy. Emma remembered looking down at the tiny bundle in her arms, just six pounds, six ounces, for the first time. She had a little pink cap on, and her eyes were closed tight. Emma had never seen such perfection.
She touched Penny’s shoulder, then shook it gently. “Pen, come downstairs and have breakfast.”
Penny groaned, pulled the covers over her ears. “I hate working at the historical society. It’s the summer and I’m in a windowless room staring at a computer screen all day. Why can’t I just stay here while you’re at work? I won’t get into any trouble.”
“It’s not that I think you’ll get into trouble, Penny. It’s not good for you to sit around with nothing to do. You know that only makes your anxiety worse.”
“Honestly, Mom—being there feels like a punishment.”
“It’s not a punishment. And Penny, helping out at a nonprofit organization is important. Come on. Remember what I said about trying to stay positive. Find one thing each day to make yourself happy.”
Penny sat up and pulled the comforter over her knees. “Okay, this would make me happy—Robin wants to see the house. So does Mindy.”
The house? Oh. Of course other kids had found out. People talked. She was in the newspaper, for heaven’s sake.
“Well, no one is coming to the house yet.”
Penny crossed her arms. “Why not? It’s our house.Myhouse. Why can’t I show my friends?”
Emma sighed. “Penny, I don’t have time to think about the house right now.”
