empty halls and gaping doors. And in the corner, nearly invisible, was a castle and a tower and a woman in the window with her hands pressed to her heart. The sisters, disturbed, called my father, and when he saw the drawing he turned white. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you remembered your mother so well.”
When I came home and Nicholas would not let me in, I did the next best thing-I surrounded myself with pictures of my husband and my son. I sketched the look on Nicholas’s face when he opened the door and saw me; I sketched Max where he sat in Nicholas’s arms. I taped these two on the dashboard of my car. They are not technically good, but I have captured the feeling, and that is something.
Today, while I was waiting for Nicholas to come home from the hospital, I drew from memory. I did sketch after sketch, using both sides of the paper. I now have more than sixty pictures of Nicholas and Max.
I am working on a sketch I began earlier this night, and I am so wrapped up in it that I don’t see Nicholas until he steps onto the front porch. He is haloed in soft white light. “Paige?” he calls. “Paige?”
I move in front of the porch, to a spot where he can see me. “Oh,” Nicholas says. He rubs his temples. “I just wanted to see if you were still here.”
“I’m still here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Nicholas crosses his arms. “Well,” he says, “it’s a little late for that.” I think for a moment he is going to storm inside, but he pulls his robe tighter around himself and sits down on the porch step. “What are you doing?” he says, pointing to my sketch pad.
“I’ve been working on you. And Max,” I say. I show him one of the sketches I did earlier.
“That’s good,” he says. “You always were good at that.”
I cannot remember the last time I heard Nicholas giving me credit for something, anything, a job well done. He looks at me for a second, and he almost lets his guard down. His eyes are tired and pale. They are the same color blue as mine.
In just that second, looking at Nicholas, I can see a younger man who dreamed of getting to the top, who used to come home and heal in my arms when one of his patients died. I can see, reflected, the eyes of a girl who used to believe in romance. “I’d like to hold him,” I whisper, and at that Nicholas’s stare turns dark and shuttered.
“You had your chance,” he says. He stands and goes into our house.
By moonlight, I work on my sketch. The whole time, I am wondering whether Nicholas is having trouble sleeping, too, and how angry he’ll be tomorrow when he’s not one hundred percent. Maybe because my attention is divided, my picture turns out the way it does. It’s all wrong. I have captured the likeness of Max-his sticky fists, his spiky velvet hair-but something is completely off. It takes me a few minutes to figure it out. This time, instead of drawing Max with Nicholas, I have drawn him with me. He sits in the curve of my arm, grabbing for my hair. To an outsider, the picture would be fine. But hidden in the purple hollow of Max’s outstretched palm is a faint woven circle of leaves and latticework. And in its center I’ve drawn the image of my running mother, who holds, like an accusation, the child I did not have.
Part I: Conception
chapter 1
When I least expected to, I found Mercy. It was a diner on a seedy side street in Cambridge, and its clients were mostly students and professors who wanted to go slumming. I was down to my last twenty. The previous night I had realized that no one in their right mind would hire me as a nanny without references and that I wasn’t going to get into art school on a smile and a song and my meager portfolio. So at five-thirty in the morning I squared up my shoulders and walked into Mercy, praying to a God I had wondered about my entire life that indeed this place would be my deliverance.
The diner was deceptively small and smelled of tuna fish and detergent. I moved to the counter and pretended to look at the menu. A large black man came out of the kitchen. “We ain’t open,” he said, and then he turned and went back inside.
I did not look up from the menu. Cheeseburgers, clam patties, Greek antipasto. “If you aren’t open,” I said, “how come you unlocked the door?”
It took several seconds for the man to answer, and when he did, he came right up to the spot where I was sitting and placed one beefy arm on the counter on either side of me. “Shouldn’t you be going to school?” he said.
“I’m eighteen.” I tipped up my chin the way I had seen Katharine Hepburn do it in old black-and-white movies. “I was wondering if there might be a position available.”
“A position,” the man said slowly, as if he’d never heard of the word. “Position.” His eyes narrowed, and for the first time I noticed a scar that reminded me of barbed wire, all snaked and spiky, which ran along the leme A…ngth of his face and curled into the folds of his neck. “You want a job.”
“Well, yes,” I said. I could tell from his eyes that he did not need a waitress, much less an inexperienced one. I could tell that at the present time he did not need a hostess or a dishwasher, either.
The man shook his head. “It’s too damn early for this.” He turned and looked at me, seeing, I knew, how thin I was, how disheveled. “We open at six-thirty,” he said.
I could have left then. I could have gone back to the cool T station, the subway where I’d been sleeping these past few nights, listening to the soft violins of street musicians and the crazy screams of the homeless. But instead I took the grease-spattered paper that was clipped to the inside of the menu, listing yesterday’s specials. The back was blank. I pulled a black marker from my knapsack and began to do the only thing I knew with confidence I could do well: I drew the man who had just dismissed me. I drew him from observation, peeking into a small pass- through that led to the kitchen. I saw his biceps curl and stretch as he pulled huge jars of mayonnaise and sacks of flour from shelves. I drew the motion, the hurry, and then when I drew his face I sketched it quickly.
I pulled back to see the picture. Spread over the broad forehead of this man I had drawn the outline of a strong old woman, her shoulders stooped from work and from denial. She had skin the shade of bootleg coffee, and crossing her back were the memories of lashed scars, which turned and blended into the distinctive twisted scar of the man’s own face. I did not know this woman, and I didn’t understand why she had come out on the page. It wasn’t my best drawing, I knew that, but it was something to leave behind. I placed the paper on the counter and went just outside the door to wait.
Even before I had the power to sketch people’s secrets, I had always believed I could draw well. I knew this the way some kids know they can catch pop flies and others can use felt and glitter to make the most creative covers for book reports. I always used to scribble. My father told me that when I was a toddler, I had taken a red crayon and drawn one continuous line around the walls of the house, at my eye level, skipping over the doorways and the bureaus and the stove. He said I did it just for the hell of it.
When I was five, I found one of those contests in the
I had been thinking a lot about my mother, much more than I had for several years. Part of it was because of what I had done before I left home; part of it was because I had left home. I wondered what my father thought. I
