He spins in place, looking at me. Staring, really. I inhale sharply and draw back, as if by instinct. I’ve spent some time with him now, but I’ve never seen this look on his face before. Calculating, taking me in one detail at a time.
Not unlike Angela Lansbury tracking the squirrels outside our window.
I open my mouth, but he holds up his hand. “Stay still for thirty more seconds, please.”
“Ah…okay.”
Hopper closes the distance, continuing his strange examination. His fingers float over my nose, cheeks, brows, forehead, jaw, mouth, eyes, ears, all without touching.
As if memorizing the air around my features.
“Your mother didn’t drink while she was pregnant with you.”
I…What?
“Uh…no. She ate as healthy as she could. Save for the weird cravings, I think.”
“Your eyes,” he says, angling his chin up as he looks into them. “They’re what mine should’ve looked like.”
I don’t know what to do with that.
“Please look forward.”
I acquiesce, returning to my original position.
He walks around me. “My mother—your grandmother, I guess—she loved me, but she also drank a lot when she was pregnant with me.”
He gestures to his eyes the next time he’s in front of me, but I’m not sure what he’s pointing out.
“The downward tilt of my eyes isn’t genetic.” He hums as he takes another turn around me. “Fetal alcohol syndrome,” he finally says, answering my unasked question. “Yours look more like my brother’s. Your uncle. Half uncle, I guess.”
He blinks, slipping into pure focus. Or perhaps another dimension.
Swinging back to the table, he rips open the block of clay and carves off several thin slabs. Chasing something only he can see, Hopper begins systematically covering the lump of newspaper and masking tape, slapping the clay onto the rough, fragile surface with a dizzying cadence.
None of this is particularly aesthetic, but his confidence is mesmerizing. With just a few practiced moves—marking out feature lines, slicing in the cut of a cheekbone with his pinkies, hollowing out the eye sockets with a symmetrical sweep of his thumbs—a human head begins to emerge from the clay.
Pretty sure I just learned more about the artistic process in the last five minutes than I did in every single one of my college-level classes. Combined.
With a perfectly symmetrical, if featureless, head, he returns to the present.
Wiping his hands on the heavy apron, he grabs the edge of his table and pulls it back, the screech and scrape of metal feet against concrete jarring. Next, he grabs the roll of masking tape and lays out a large rectangle on the floor in the newly freed-up area.
He catches my eye. “I don’t want to have to interrupt your painting every time I need a reference, so please move your easel in front of me and stay within the taped lines.”
Not quite a command, but not quite a question either.
Fascinated, and with everything tilting off-center, I take the easel and my painting and set it up in front of him, centering myself within the taped border. Not only am I directly in his line of sight, but he’s also put me in a spot with better lighting.
“Thank you, my son.”
He’d already called me his son a couple of times, but hearing it now is a shock to the system. A part of me wants to clarify that I am first and foremost the son of Loyal Hitchens, but I can’t tell if that would hurt him or even register.
Before I can process any of that, his eyes meet mine. “Of course you are your father’s son. But you’re my son too. I hope that’s okay.”
“Uh…thank you? For acknowledging that. And yes…it’s okay.”
That felt true.
