the letter, the sketchpad, and the pencil case to the bus stop, and waited for the bus. Ever’s letter was on top of the sketchpad, between the smooth cover of the notebook and my palm. I would open it later, read it later.
Without conscious volition, the sketchpad opened, my fingers flipped pages to a blank white rectangle, and then a pencil, the dark outlining one, began moving over the page. The back of a mail truck appeared, a hand reaching for a mailbox. Details appeared, filled in. The truck itself became blurred, smudged and smeared, out of focus, while the hand and forearm gained clarity and sharpness and detail. The cords of the forearm, the gnarled knuckles, the fine graying hairs on the back of the hand and fingers, disguised shapes of letters clutched in the fingers.
A guttural diesel bellowing announced the arrival of the bus, and I boarded, paying the fare and finding a seat near the middle against the window. The bus resumed forward motion with reckless speed, and I watched the road flit and blur, holding the notebook open to my drawing of Jim’s arm.
My heart was a stone in my chest, my stomach a knot pulled tight.
I had to walk half a mile from the bus stop to the hospital, and my feet dragged. I pushed through the doors, passed the reception desk to the elevators. As the doors whooshed open, I had trouble swallowing. Whenever I blinked, my eyes felt heavy and hard and damp.
By the time I got to room 405, I couldn’t breathe. Dad was in the chair beside Mom’s bed, where he always was. He was bent over her, face to her knees, one of her hands clutched in both of his. Her palm rested against the back of his skull. Her index finger twitched.
I stopped in the doorway, watching a private moment. I was intruding, I knew I was, but I couldn’t look away.
“Don’t go, Jan.” I heard Dad’s voice, but it wasn’t even a whisper—it was broken shards of sound ripped from his throat, sorrow made word.
I drew them. It was automatic. I sketched Dad, his huge broad back hunched over, the bed and the thin bumps of Mom’s skeleton and skin beneath the blanket, her shoulders and neck tilted against the bed back, her hand on his head, one finger slightly curled against his shaved scruff. I stood there in the doorway and drew the same scene over and over and over. Neither of them saw me, and that was okay with me.
I lost count of how many times I drew them there, until my pencil went dull and a nurse nudged me aside with a cold hand on my forearm.
Then Dad sat up and turned around and saw me. His face contorted, twisted, his private grief morphing into the concern of a father.
“Don’t…don’t cry, Cade.” Mom’s voice, thin as a single strand of hair.
I hadn’t realized I was, but then I looked down and saw that the page I’d been drawing on was dotted with droplet-rounds of wetness, and my face was wet, and the lines of my sketch were wrong, distorted and angular and just…wrong.
“Why?” I wasn’t sure what I was asking, or of whom.
Dad only shook his head, and Mom couldn’t even do that.
“Show me something…you drew,” Mom asked me.
I flipped through the sketches of them, past hands and eyes and doodles of nothing and a bird on a branch and a winter tree like roots in reverse or an anatomical diagram of arteries or bronchioles. I found the duck I’d drawn at Interlochen, the best one, the final one, and I gently tore it out. She was too weak to take it, so I tucked it into her hand, into her fingers, pinching her thumb and forefinger around the middle at the edge. She gazed at it for a long time, like it was fancy piece of art at the Louvre.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a duck, Mom.” I was supposed to act normal, I knew. Protest, argue like always, act like a petulant teenager.
“It’s…a beautiful duck.” She smiled, teasing me with her eyes and her voice. “Quack.”
“Quack.” I sniffled, a laugh and cry at once. Mom