“Daddy, you’re not even looking.” Audrey held up her paper, which appeared to be covered in stick figures and hearts.
“Sorry, sweetheart. That’s beautiful. Who are all these people?”
“That’s me and Alice. That’s you and Emily.” She pointed to each figure. “And this is us at the baseball game.”
My heart squeezed. “That’s really nice, Auds.”
“Emily said she’d teach me how to draw better faces. She’s really good at art.”
“She is.”
Audrey went back to her drawing, and I sat there turning over the puzzle pieces I had. Trying to fit them together into something that made sense.
The make-up thing, for starters. It had seemed so small at the time, barely worth noting, but I kept coming back to it. Emily was an artist. She lived her life in color. I’d seen the way she looked at light hitting the trees, or the vibrant mess of paint on her canvas.
Yet she wouldn’t touch the stuff for her own face.
I’d seen all of her friends at her art show. If my memory served, they all wore at least a bit of make-up, some of them more than others. So yeah, with Emily, it didn’t seem like it was just a preference. It felt deliberate, like a hard line she refused to cross.
“Daddy, can you open this?” Alice held up a bottle of glitter.
I twisted the cap off and handed it back. “Here you go, monster.”
“Thanks.” She went back to her unicorn, completely absorbed.
And then of course there was the other puzzle piece Emily had shown me at her show. My mind vividly recalled her standing there in that dress, looking so proud and so nervous all at once. Her painting hanging on the wall, this beautiful thing she’d created. And then she’d said it. So casually, like it didn’t matter.
They aren’t really interested in my art, Cam.
The look on her face when she said it was burned into my memory. The practiced neutrality of it. The way she’d tried to brush it off like it was fine, like she was used to it. But I’d caught the flash of hurt underneath.
What kind of parents made their kid feel like her passion, her talent, didn’t matter?
I mean, fuck, my parents would show up to the circus if I told them I was learningtojuggle.
My hand clenched around another glitter glue bottle. The plastic creaked under the pressure. I forced my fingers to relax before I exploded the casing and covered the kitchen table in orange grape-colored sparkle sludge. I shifted in my seat, too restless to keep still.
“Daddy, look!” Alice held up her paper, now covered in so much glitter it was hard to tell what the unicorn even was anymore.
“That’s great, Al. Very sparkly.”
She beamed and went back to adding more glitter, because apparently there was no such thing as too much.
My thoughts circled back, darker now, to that day in her yard. Finding her locked inside the shed, hearing her panicking, screaming. Getting her out and watching her collapse onto the grass, sobbing so hard I thought she might break. The way she’d crawled into my lap when I’d touched her, clinging to me like I was the only thing keeping her from falling apart completely.
And I’d felt so fucking helpless. All I could do was hold her and wait for it to pass.
“Can we have a snack?” Audrey asked, not looking up from her drawing.
“In a bit. Finish your picture first.”
“Okay.”
The scars.
Christ, the scars.
I had to swallow hard, to push down the lump that formed in my throat.
