fine.”
He thrust the sheet out at me. Now that it was being offered, I was reluctant to take it.
But I did.
Jake had never been good at drawing straightforward, realistic scenes before, preferring his convoluted, unfolding battles instead, but he’d attempted one here. The picture was rough, but it was obviously an approximation of our house from the outside, reminiscent of the original photograph that had caught his attention online. He had captured the odd look of the place well. The curved, childlike lines stretched the house into a strange shape, elongating the windows, and making it look more like a face than ever. The front door appeared to be moaning.
But it was the upstairs that drew my attention. In the right-hand window he’d drawn me, standing by myself in my bedroom. On the left, there he was in his own room, the window large enough here to include his whole body: a smile on his face, the jeans and T-shirt he was wearing right now shaded with crayon.
And beside him, he’d drawn another person in his bedroom. A little girl, her black hair splayed almost angrily out to one side. Her dress was colored in with patches of blue, leaving the rest white. Little scrapes of red on one of her knees.
A corkscrew smile on her face.
Nine
After Jake’s bath that night, I knelt on the floor beside his bed so that we could read to each other. He was a good reader, and we were currently working our way through Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones. It was a childhood favorite of mine, which I’d chosen without thinking. The horrible irony of the title had only occurred to me afterward.
When we’d finished that night’s chapter, I put the book down with all his others.
“Cuddle?” I said.
He slipped out of the covers without a word and sat sideways on my knees, wrapping his arms around me. I savored the cuddle for as long as I could, and then he clambered back into bed.
“I love you, Jake.”
“Even when we argue?”
“Of course. Especially when we argue. That’s when it matters the most.”
That reminded me of the picture I’d drawn for him, which I knew he’d kept. I glanced down at his Packet of Special Things, which was under the bed now, so that if he were to drape his small arm out in the night he’d be able to touch it. But that in turn made me think of the drawing he’d done that afternoon. He hadn’t been pleased about showing it to me, and so I hadn’t asked him about it at the time. But in the warm, soft light of his bedroom, it felt like maybe I could now.
“It was a good picture of our house today,” I said.
“Thank you, Daddy.”
“I’m curious about something, though. Who was the little girl in the window with you?”
He bit his lip and didn’t answer.
“It’s okay,” I said gently. “You can tell me.”
But again he didn’t reply. It was obvious that, whoever it was meant to be, the little girl was the reason he hadn’t wanted to show me the drawing today, and he didn’t want to talk about her now either. But why not?
The answer occurred to me a second later.
“Is she the little girl from the 567 Club?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
I sat back on my heels, doing my best to hide the frustration I felt. The disappointment, even. For the last week, everything had seemed fine. We had been happy here, Jake had seemed to be adjusting well, and I had been cautiously optimistic. And yet apparently his imaginary friend had been following us all along. The thought made me shiver slightly—the idea that we had left her behind in the old house, and ever since she had been working her way slowly across the intervening miles to find us.
“Do you still talk to her?” I said.
Jake shook his head.
“She’s not here.”
From his own disappointment, it was obvious that he wanted her to be, and once again I felt uneasy. It was unhealthy for him to be fixated on someone who wasn’t there. At the same time, he looked so dejected and lonely right now that I almost felt guilty at depriving him of it. And also hurt that, as always, I wasn’t enough.
“Well,” I said carefully. “You start school tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll make lots of new friends there. And in the meantime, I’m here. We’re here. New house, new start.”
“Is it safe here?”
“Safe?” Why was he asking that? “Yes, of