The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow by Quinn Sinclair Read Free Book Online Page A

until the oven clock read after midnight that Peggy was able to lift herself from the kitchen stool and wash out her coffee cup and ashtray. She went directly to Sam's room. She found the pad on his worktable. Even in the dark she could tell how he'd lined it up squarely in the middle, the edge of the fat Jumbo pad precisely parallel to the edge of the butcher-block top that Hal had fashioned into a table where Sam could do his hammering. But Sam never hammered on this surface. He used it instead to support his pad as he labored over his daily drawings under the good light from the architect's lamp Hal had later clamped to one corner.
    Peggy put the pad under her arm and went to the third bedroom. It was here that Amanda or Abigail would sleep when the time came. In the meanwhile the room would serve as a kind of office. She pulled the cord to turn on the light in the closet, and then she felt around on a high shelf for the cigar box in which she stored some of the smaller tools she sometimes needed for the artwork she did at home.
    She found the loup, the eyepiece she looked through to magnify the dots in a half-tone. With the loup in her fist and the Jumbo pad under her arm, she went back to the kitchen. She drew the stool up to the baker's table and sat down. She found the page she was looking for. Yes, there was a face there, where the driver sat behind the windshield. She picked up the loup and set it down over the windshield of the squared-off vehicle that was plummeting through space.
    She had to move her head back and forth to bring the lens into focus.
    She saw it now, the inking so huge through the glass it was like worms, some curving, some coiled. She moved the loup around, sliding it back and forth across the paper so that she could orient the eyes in relation to each other. The tiny circles Sam had drawn to form the pupils leaped up like thick black doughnuts, the paper at their centers like small fields of squashed white leaves.
    She sat there in the roaring silence of minutes that lengthened into the howl of a stone-dead hour, again and again lowering her head to peer into the loup, again and again raising it to gape blindly at the blazing wall of tile.
    Each time she bent her head to the loup, she begged God to make it change.
    But it was always the same. One doughnut stared straight back at her. But the other had been shaped into an oval—to show that the eye had wandered to the side.
    When she focused finally on the police launch in the final frame of the drawing, she broke down and wept in a terrible outpouring of both terror and relief.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Whatever good Pensacola had done, it was all behind her now. Peggy woke dog-tired when the alarm clock went off. Muted as its signal was, to Peggy it was a snarl, some know-it-all reproaching her for staying up so late.
    She pushed at Hal, and then she dragged herself to Sam's room, for the first time noticing it wasn't the old short trip.
    "Rise and shine, St. Martin's boy!" she sang out, detesting the note of false—almost hysterical—good cheer in her voice.
    She waggled his naked foot like a dust rag and raised both Levelors to let the light finish the job. Then she hurried to the kitchen, poured orange juice, and got the coffee on. When Hal came in, eyes half-closed, hand out in front of him like a blind man feeling his way, she held out a cup for him, took him by the shoulders, and turned him around.
    "Make sure the scholar's up and getting dressed."
    He answered with a snuffling sound and a little comical wave.
    ***
    After breakfast, she recombed Sam's hair while he rolled his eyes in despair, groaning the word Mom at every third stroke as if it had an extra syllable. Then she double-knotted his shoelaces and ran to the front door to kiss Hal before he left for work. She almost fell and broke her neck on her way back to Sam's room having forgotten entirely that the hall, was still strewn with their luggage.
    "Let's see," she said, determined to be