Page 95 of Drawing Home
She walked the pencil over to the Lucite desk in the corner, where she found an open box of Faber-Castells. She slipped the offending object inside, then picked up a spiral drawing pad. Underneath, she found a pile of loose sketches.
The first was a detailed and rather flawlessly rendered black-and-white drawing of Windsong. She wasn’t surprised to find a picture of the house; Windsong would inspire even a fledgling artist. But she didn’t know quite what to make of the words on the top of the page written in bold strokes:Queen Bea.
She moved it aside for the next page, the drawings divided into panels. The top left corner featured another sketch of Windsong along with some text:First came the house. Then came Bea.Next, a cartoonish but undeniably accurate rendering of Penny and her mother sitting on a bed in an unfamiliar room. The drawing of Emma included a dialogue bubble:Sometimes, good things do happen.Another drawing of Windsong followed, the house as seen through a car window.
The bottom of the page featured the interior of the house. Penny, Emma, and Bea stood in the dining room, the infinity pool visible outside the window. Bea shook her head at Penny’s depiction of her, the exaggerated pouf of her hair, her pin-striped pantsuit, and her pearls rendered absurdly large. In the drawing, Bea’s arms were crossed, a stern expression on her lined face. Her bubble of dialogue readInterlopers!
Bea pored through the sketches, more than twenty of them, that pieced together the drama of the past few weeks. No one was spared Penny’s savage pen; there was Kyle, Angus, her father, and a woman named Dr. Wang.
I’ll be damned. How many times had newspapers and magazines asked Bea to explain how she knew when an artist had “it”? She always gave the same response:The hairs on my arms stand on end. Well, they were standing.
The doorbell sounded.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Can I not have one moment of peace in this house?” So much for quiet country living. This place was like Grand Central Station! She put the pages back the way she’d found them and then went down the hall to deal with the disturbance.
When she saw that the disturbance was Angus, she felt slightly less irritated for some reason. “Well, hello there. You’re about an hour late. Emma and Penny already left.”
“I should have figured. I usually take Penny to the fireworks because Emma’s working. I guess she didn’t need me this year.” His disappointment was palpable.
How thoughtless of Emma. Truly, the woman had no consideration for others. “In that case, I think you should be thankful you’re off the hook. There are far more civilized ways to spend an evening. I have reservations at a delightful restaurant in town and I insist you join me. Dinner is on me.”
“I appreciate the offer but—”
“It’s the least I can do to thank you for educating me about the town.”
“Hmm,” he said. “And you don’t consider this consorting with the enemy?”
“You know what they say,” Bea said with a teasing smile. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Marine Park was alight with fireflies. Emma pointed them out to Penny, who sat next to her on a beach blanket.
“Yeah, Mom, I see,” Penny said, shifting around and trying to get comfortable with her leg extended. “I hate this cast.”
“Well, think about that the next time a kid asks you to get into a boat. Or a car, for that matter,” she said. A few feet away, Penny’s third-grade teacher waved at them. “Look, Penny—Ms. Lowen is over there.”
The entire town had turned out and there was something about sitting next to her daughter, surrounded by people she’d known all her life, that comforted her. Nights like this gave her a sense of continuity. As much as things changed, some things never did.
She’d considered inviting Angus along or even Kyle when she spotted him working on his boat earlier. It had been steadying to have him by her side at the lawyer’s office. But in the end, she decided to make it just a mother-daughter holiday.
“Mom?” Penny said. “I was thinking about our conversation last night.”
Emma bit her lip. This was the last thing she wanted to talk about. But she also didn’t want to shut down the lines of communication. If Penny wanted to talk about the situation with her father, so be it. “Oh? What are your thoughts?”
“Maybe he just wants me to visit him more. Like in New York or LA or any of those cool places. That could work, right?”
Emma felt like Penny had slapped her. “I thought you said that you didn’t want to live with him!”
“Idon’t. I saidvisit. Like, so I can get out of town sometimes. I’m bored, Mom.” She looked around. “I’m not like you. I don’t belong here. I don’t even have anyfriendsat this point.”
The first fireworks burst overhead, ending the conversation. The crowd reacted with a collective, delighted gasp. Penny, completely oblivious about how much she had just rattled Emma, stared up at the sky, her face rapt.
Let it go,Emma told herself. She closed her eyes, choosing a memory over the kaleidoscope of lights in the sky. She thought about fireworks of long ago, a night when she sat on her father’s shoulders in that very park, has big hands anchoring her while she looked up, up, up. Her mother had probably been by their side, but all she saw in her mind’s eye was her dad. A few months later, he was gone.
It was a Sunday morning when she found out her father had died. She could still hear the hollow sound of her mother’s voice calling her into her bedroom. Even at eight years old, Emma had the intuition to know something was terribly wrong. The words her mother used at the time felt vague and inadequate:Sudden death. Painless. He didn’t suffer.Later, when she was older, the technical termbrain aneurysmfilled some of the gaps. But even now, as a grown woman—a parent herself—it was hard to understand how it could have happened, how she could have lost him in an instant. She hadn’t felt a true sense of security since.
Pop!
She opened her eyes, willing herself to feel joy instead of sadness, to look at the lights instead of dwelling in the dark. Next to her, Penny had her eyes fixed on the sky, a big smile on her face. And Emma reminded herself that while the universe took, it also gave.
