Drawing Home

by Jamie Brenner

  Back in the bedroom, sitting on Henry’s bed, she read and reread the memoir, seeking comfort in the images of their time together but finding even that somehow hollow.

  She flipped to the back and checked the due date at the library. It was unthinkable that she would return it to be exiled to that records room. She decided she would make a sizable donation to the library, and certainly after that, they would overlook an unreturned book.

  With that settled in her mind, she placed it on top of the pile of belongings she would begin to pack later that day and noticed Penny’s drawing poking out of the book where she’d stuck it.

  She picked it up again, but an inconvenient thought suddenly struck her: As much as she wanted to keep the book for herself, she knew there was someone else who should see it. Maybe even someone else who should have it.

  She lowered herself to the floor and pushed the bed frame to release the hidden drawer. She took a drawing pencil and a sheet of paper from one of the notepads and began writing.

  Dear Emma:

  I know I hurt you and your family with my actions and I wanted, in a small way, to try and give something back. I don’t know if you were aware that your father and Henry were friends. I made the connection myself only recently. He is remembered here, in this book by Henry. I thought you and Penny might like to have it.

  Sincerely,

  Bea

  She wedged the note into the front of the book, then paced uncertainly in the room. She wanted to make the gesture, but she didn’t want to let the book go. She ultimately decided that it was more important to make the conciliatory gesture toward Emma than to keep the book. She hoped, desperately, to make things right.

  Bea put on a linen pantsuit, her pearls, and a straw hat. It was always easier to face a difficult moment when one was well attired.

  Again, she walked down the stairs, this time holding the book. The house was still quiet, but a quick look through the guest wing indicated that Emma had already left the house. Where could she have run off to so early? And then she thought about the flowers and realized she might be in the garden. The woman was always elbows-deep in dirt.

  Outside, it was already humid. She swatted away a yellow jacket. All this nature was wearing on her. She spotted another Manhattan transplant over by the water—her former assistant waved at her from the bow of his little boat. She ignored him, but he shouted her name. Oh, for heaven’s sake. She looked around for Emma and, not finding her, figured she might as well see what on earth Kyle wanted.

  “I’m not setting foot on that thing, so if you want to talk you’re going to have to get onto dry land,” she said from the dock, and she huffed impatiently while he disembarked.

  “You went on the water taxi,” he said. He was tan; his hair was bleached shades lighter from the sun. He looked like a different person than the one who’d driven her out to the house two months ago.

  “That man was a professional,” she said.

  “Well, so am I.”

  “You’re a professional what?”

  He nodded toward the boat. “I restored this boat. I’m living on it. Other people in town are hiring me to work on their boats.”

  “Well, good for you. So what can I do for you, Kyle? I’m quite busy.”

  “You were out here anyway.”

  “I’m looking for Emma.”

  “I don’t think she wants to talk to you.”

  “Don’t you start in on me too. I know it was not my finest hour, but I’ll fix it.”

  He bent down to adjust a rope hanging off the dock. “I believe you will, Bea.”

  “Finally. At least one person who doesn’t underestimate me.”

  “I definitely never underestimated you. I think, though, I underestimated myself the past few years in New York.” He stood up, looking out at the water. “It was time for a change.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve always said, one has to be the architect of one’s own life. And now I suppose if I ever need…boat renovation, I know whom to call. We all need to move forward.” She felt perspiration around her neck. Very damaging to pearls. “I need to get indoors.”

  She walked back up the dock.

  “Bea,” Kyle called out. She turned, shading her eyes with her hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Make things right for Emma.”

  Hadn’t she just said she would? How irritating. With a shake of her head, she continued making her way back to the house.

  She checked the kitchen and the living room and the breakfast nook. Emma was nowhere to be found, nor was Penny. She supposed she wasn’t the only one with the impulse to make herself scarce. It was going to be a long week for all of them.

  Emma’s bedroom door was open. She peeked inside, and when she was certain no one was there, she placed Henry’s book on the bed.

  Yes, they all had to move forward. She had hoped Henry’s drawings would give her a clue how to do that. But they had raised more questions than they had answered.

  She removed Penny’s drawing from the back of the book so she could return it to where it belonged in the loose manuscript pages of her graphic novel. Penny, the budding artist.

  With a sudden burst of clarity, she realized what Henry had wanted.

  She stood very still, holding Penny’s drawing of the four of them—Penny, Emma, Angus, and Bea—in the Windsong dining room. The scene of the absurd circumstance of their first meeting, the day she had learned that Henry had left his house to a child.

  Outside, a woodpecker hammered away at a tree. Bea told herself to breathe.

  Okay, Henry. I finally get what you want.

  She just hoped it wasn’t too late to make it happen.

  It was part of Emma’s new routine: Say good night to Penny, pour a glass of wine, and sit out by the pool until she felt like maybe, just maybe, she was tired enough to fall asleep. Tonight was a little different because, as she settled into one of the chaise longues, she had Henry Wyatt’s book propped up on her knees.

  Earlier that day, after Penny’s appointment with Dr. Wang, she’d returned to the house to change into lighter clothes before she ran out again to do more errands. But then she found the book. At first, spotting it against her stark white comforter, she thought it was something Penny was reading and had left accidentally in her room. The note sticking out was the only thing that flagged her attention to take a closer look. And once she’d read Bea’s words, she forgot about her errands.

  At first, she considered simply marching Henry’s book back to Bea’s room and leaving it there unread. She did not want to let Bea get to her, did not want to be manipulated into forgiving Bea for what she’d pulled. But the opportunity to look at Henry’s remembrance of her father, a friendship she almost could not believe had existed and that she had not known about, was too much to resist. And after she read the book, she was glad she hadn’t resisted. Oh, the drawings!

  Sketches of the two men fishing and boating and drinking at the bar at the hotel captured her father in ways she’d never witnessed. The true gift of an artist’s eye was seeing things no one else saw—things that not even a camera could pick up. It warmed her heart to get a glimpse of the happiness her father had experienced the last year of his life as he shared his beloved town with an outsider. She’d always thought of her father as the ultimate local, someone who would never mix with the summer people. And yet a stranger from Manhattan had walked into his bar and inspired a true friendship. It said something about her father’s generosity and openness that made her suffer the loss of him all over again. But it also made her think about the type of woman he’d want her to be.

  It was impossible, too, not to see Penny’s drawings in a whole new way. Her art wasn’t just a hobby or good therapy for her. She could someday do work that touched other people. The significance of her talent, the responsibility of it, felt suddenly weighty.

  She looked up at the sound of Kyle’s boat, the motor rumbling in the distance. It was hard to tell if he was coming or going unti
l the rustling of the tall, weedy grass bordering the stretch of beach beyond the pool clued her in that she was getting a visitor.

  “Hey,” he said, emerging from the shadows. “I hope this isn’t too much of an intrusion.”

  “Not at all,” she said, putting the book aside. The truth was, she’d been thinking about him. They hadn’t crossed paths since the day at the courthouse. She didn’t know if this was because she was running around getting things finalized for the auction party, because he was busy working, or because he was simply less interested in spending time with her now that they were firmly in the friend zone.

  But she did know that something inside of her soared just a little as he moved closer.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  “I actually need your help on the water.”

  “My help?”

  “Yeah. I’m ready to christen the boat. It’s bad luck to do it alone,” he said.

  “You sailors and your superstitions. Isn’t Sean around?” Why did she have to give him such a hard time? She was delighted to be asked. Would she ever stop being so defensive? One day she was going to push him too hard and he’d never come back.

  “Sean is home with Alexis. But aside from that, a woman is supposed to do the honors.”

  Was that true? More important, did she care?

  She slipped her sneakers on and fell into step beside him as they went down the stone path past the grassy patch to the gravelly sand. The ground was still wet from rain the night before, and her feet sank into it. When they reached the dock, she stopped for a minute to shake the sand out of her sneakers. Kyle turned on a flashlight.

  “It’s okay. I can see,” she said. The moon was nearly full and the reflection bounced off the water like the bay was lit from below. Still, he held out his hand and helped her aboard. It was peaceful and quiet, the only sound the water lapping gently against the sides of the boat.

  In the moonlight, she could see the gleam of the refinished floor. “I guess I can understand how you’d fall asleep here,” she said. “Though I don’t think I’d ever be able to.” Her words came out in a rush, and she realized she felt oddly nervous.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he retreated into the galley. When he came back, he handed her a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée. She recognized the vintage from Jack Blake’s collection.

  “This is an expensive bottle of champagne to spill over a boat.”

  “It’s a momentous occasion,” he said. “Come on—we need to stand in the right spot.” Again, he took her hand, and this time he led her to the bow. The boat just barely swayed underneath their feet. “So you’re going to have to lean over this edge and swing down with the bottle to hit the bow. No pressure, but it’s really bad luck if the bottle doesn’t break.”

  “I told you I don’t believe in superstition.”

  “They didn’t christen the Titanic. I’m just saying…”

  “Okay, okay—I got it. Make sure it breaks.” She raised the bottle.

  “Wait! You have to say something first.”

  “I’m really trying to be a good sport here but this feels ridiculous.”

  “We have to appease Neptune.”

  “Neptune? I thought the god of the sea was Poseidon.”

  “Neptune is the Roman name. Same god. Okay, I’ll make it simple for you. Just say, ‘I, Emma Mapson, christen thee’—then say the boat’s name.”

  “Fine. It’s your party. What’s the boat’s name?”

  “Lucky Penny.”

  Had she heard him right? “You’re naming the boat Lucky Penny?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in Penny, my daughter’s name?” She put the bottle down by her feet. “Kyle, that strikes me as a pretty large gesture.”

  “There is such a thing as a lucky penny, you know. And as we’ve established, I’ve never met a superstition I didn’t completely buy into. But I do think that Penny—your Penny—is lucky for me. If it weren’t for her and the house she inherited, you and I would never have met.”

  She smiled, a warm feeling filling her chest. Kyle bent down, picked up the bottle, and handed it to her. His fingers grazed hers, and she felt the floor beneath her move, though she was certain the boat was completely still.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Penny couldn’t get used to how freaky her leg looked now that it was out of the cast. It was shriveled and scaly and, most upsetting, covered in dark hair.

  “Your skin is very sensitive right now. Wait a few days before you shave it,” her mother told her.

  Now she was out by the pool, hoping that getting some sun would help the situation. Ugh!

  The weird thing was that she wasn’t as happy about having the cast off as she’d thought she would be. The cast had been like an anchor, keeping her still and protecting her from all her worst impulses. She was able to really focus on bossing back her OCD and working every day on Queen Bea. She loved creating the drawings so much that she didn’t want to finish it, but the final page rested in her lap.

  Her phone pinged with a text. Her friends seemed to be back in their old routines. Everyone’s punishment was over. Bruises and broken bones had healed. It was like the night of the party had never happened. Except Penny didn’t find Mindy and Mateo and the rest of them all that interesting anymore.

  Ignoring her phone, she ran her pencil along the edge of the paper, shading the background of the final panel. The depth of gray wasn’t coming through, and she realized that the sketch pad the page was resting on wasn’t a hard enough surface. She thought of Henry and his early gift of a drawing board.

  “Hey,” her mother called as she came up from behind her. She was dressed in shorts and a bathing suit and had a canvas tote over her shoulder. “I thought you wanted to go to the beach.”

  “I can’t go with my leg looking like this. I need another few days.”

  Her mother pulled up a chair.

  “Mom,” she said. “I’m kind of busy.”

  “Oh? What are you working on?”

  “My graphic novel. I’m literally finishing the last page.”

  The story ended in a way Penny hadn’t expected. She’d thought Queen Bea’s leaving would feel like the vanquishing of a villain, but it felt like just another loss. The last image in the book was Bea’s face in the window of a jitney that was pulling away from Main Street, and it almost made her cry. There had been moments this summer when she’d felt like her life was really beginning, that things had been set in motion with this house. But now everything was going back to the way it had been; she just lived in a fancier place.

  One part of the summer she didn’t include in the novel was the stuff with her father. It was too confusing. She hadn’t heard from him very much since the day in court, just a text here or there checking in with How’s it going, kiddo? She didn’t even know if he was still in town. She tried not to care.

  “You know,” Penny said slowly, “when Dad first showed up this summer, I thought, Okay, I’m going to have a father around. But the more time I spent with him, the less he felt like one.”

  Her mother sighed loudly. “I’m sorry, hon. But try to look at it like this: There’s the family you’re born into, and the family you create along the way. Sometimes that second family is even better.”

  “Like Angus?”

  “Yes. Exactly. Like Angus. And as you go forward in your life, there might be other people who play important roles. Would it be nice to have a perfect family? Sure. But it’s also nice to have room for the other people.”

  Penny had never voiced it to herself that way, not exactly, but yes—there were times when she wished for a perfect family. Or at least a regular family. It was the same nagging feeling she had at therapy: Why can’t I be normal? And then the house had happened, and she thought, Okay, I might not have normal, but I can have special. She understood now it was more complicated than that.

  “So,” her mom said with a smile, “when do I get to read that?”

 
“My graphic novel? Whenever you want. This is just the ending. You have to get the rest of it back from Bea.”

  Her mother looked surprised. “What’s Bea doing with it?”

  Penny told her about the contest and how she’d wanted Bea’s opinion on what drawings she should submit. And then Bea kept asking to see more of the panels. “I have to get the rest of the book back from her anyway so I can add this part,” Penny said.

  “I’m really proud of you for starting and finishing such a big project. Just think, at the beginning of the summer, you were having trouble completing even one drawing. After Henry died, you felt like you wouldn’t be able to draw again. And now look at you!”

  Penny nodded, trying to muster the enthusiasm to match her mother’s.

  “You don’t seem very excited about it.”

  Penny shrugged. “I thought getting the house and Bea leaving would be the happy ending. But now that it’s here, it doesn’t feel that way.”

  Emma climbed the stairs to the master bedroom Bea had so audaciously claimed for herself at the start of the summer. The truth was, Emma probably wouldn’t have been comfortable sleeping so far from Penny, not after all the years of their bedrooms being just a few feet away from each other.

  She’d barely explored this separate, more private wing of the house. She peeked into the office and the library and thought it really would be a perfect suite for Angus if he’d stop being so stubborn and agree to move in. “The house isn’t the enemy,” she’d told him. But she was starting to suspect it had nothing to do with the house. The house was just an excuse. Angus might simply be ready to move on.

  The bedroom door was ajar. Bea had set a garment rack next to the bed, and it was packed with clothes from end to end. Emma rapped on the door frame.

  “Bea? I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  She didn’t wait for an invitation. Bea sat on the bed folding her scarf collection. Emma stepped around the garment rack, noting the half-filled suitcases on the floor. “Bea, I haven’t had the chance to thank you for sharing Henry’s book with me,” Emma said. That wasn’t exactly true; it wasn’t so much a lack of opportunity as it was a hurdle to get over her anger at the Mark situation. “Those drawings of my father are priceless.”