fastened her seat belt as tightly as possible, unfazed by the squirming bundle of “I don’t want to” fighting the process, then I pointed out the window with relief and said, “See, Shay? You can still see the mountains.” And there they were, right outside the window. By any other standards, they were merely large hills. But having lived in the plains of Illinois all our combined lives, they might as well have been the Swiss Alps to Shayla and me.
SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER
“What are you drawing, Shayla?” Dana asked. She overflowed a child-size chair next to the small desk where Shayla bent over a brownish piece of paper, her brow furrowed in concentration. She hadn’t looked up when we entered. She hadn’t stopped drawing.
“Mountains,” she now said, quite unnecessarily. On her paper, the dark outline of mountain ridges split the space between earth and sky. She’d started to fill in the lines with greens and browns and blues, sometimes coloring just outside the edges of the shapes in a rush of creative zeal.
“Have you ever seen a mountain?” Dana asked gently, her face just inches from Shayla’s. I stood at a safe distance, feeling tall in this miniature space where furniture seemed shrunken and pictures hung just above waist level on the walls. It was a room designed to make children feel safe. It had an entirely different effect on discombobulated grown-ups like me, whose inner world was suddenly unrecognizably askew.
I’d hesitated for a long time before entering Dream Acres, a small, family-owned farm that doubled as a foster home for children needing temporary housing. I’d lingered on the front steps, ignoring Dana’s prompting. This was a pivotal and irrevocable moment in my life. Whatever happened after I passed through the wide, welcoming front doors would be largely out of my control. And control was a critical issue for me. It always had been. I’d discarded my violin when it had proved too hard to master. I’d given up on being a ballerina when teachers had started planning my career. And I’d declared myself a dedicated single when romantic relationships, most of them imagined, had exhausted my limited supply of optimism.
So, facing a moment of overwhelmingly human proportions in which any form of control and predictability was impossible, I’d stood on the steps before my encounter with Shayla and briefly but frantically considered fleeing from the unmanageable.
“I saw them in Heidi,” Shayla answered Dana’s question, drawing me back to the present with a voice fluffy and soft as rabbit’s fur. “When she’s living with her grandpa in the wood house on the mountain.”
Dana looked up at me as if inviting me to join in their fledgling conversation. I shook my head and took a small step back, inexplicably unbalanced by the too-low paintings on the walls and the too-small artist entering my too-full life.
Dana was a natural. She coaxed answer after answer from Shayla, affirming her talent and revealing her heart.
“You’re very good at drawing, Shayla.”
Her button nose went up and down as she nodded.
“Would you like to see real mountains someday?”
“Yes.” She sounded like she’d been taught never to say yeah.
“And what mountains would you like to see?”
“Volcanoes.”
“Volcanoes!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do you want to see volcanoes?”
“Because they’re big and have the fi-yoh stuff that comes out of them.”
“The fire stuff? Like lava?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that a volcano you’re drawing now?”
“No.” The word stupid was implied in Shayla’s tone of voice. “I told you. It’s Heidi’s mountain.”
“Oh,” Dana said with a smile. “I should have remembered that.”
“My dad taught me how.”
“He taught you how to draw mountains?”
The honey-blonde curls, like a wheat field in the wind, bobbed as Shayla nodded. “Uh-huh.” She looked at Dana for the first time, her blue crayon poised above the sky. “He’s not here anymore.”
Dana nodded and smiled gently. “Do you miss him?”
Shayla went back to her coloring with renewed focus. She nodded and took in a quick, clenched breath. “He’s not coming back.”
I looked around the room for an escape route and wished Shayla’s mountain were real. What I wouldn’t have given to lose myself in the dense foliage of the trees covering its flanks. But in this warm sitting room where the sun and surfaces danced golden rays over drawings and toys and brightly colored books, the only plausible direction to go seemed downward. So, feeling the bottom drop out of my life as my stomach churned and my throat clenched, I took three tentative steps to Dana’s side and sank onto the carpet next to the