Drawn

  Wait a minute. If this is Uncle George and Aunt Millie’s house, which one is Kitty’s? I checked one of the envelopes. I looked at the mailbox again. The addresses matched. “That’s weird.”

  I rang the doorbell and held my breath. Minute after miserable minute passed. I rang it again.

  Please be here, Kitty.

  A chain rattled. It stopped, then rattled a couple of more times.

  “Kitty?” I called.

  “Keep your pants on,” came a man’s voice.

  The doorknob turned and the white paneled door swung open.

  “Morning, young lady. What can I do for you?” he yelled. “You sellin’ cookies?”

  A very old man in plaid golf pants peered at me. Gray stubble prickled his face and outlined a long, white scar from his temple to his jaw. The thick glasses perched on his nose made his eyes look twice as big as they should, like the bulging globes atop a praying mantis. I’d only seen him once before, dressed in a black suit for Nonnie’s funeral.

  “I like them coconut ones,” he nodded hopefully.

  “Uncle George?” I asked.

  I looked at him, then looked back at the mailbox.

  “Name’s George. Who are you?” he yelled at me again.

  “I’m Juliet Brynn. I’m Nonnie’s—Carolyn’s—granddaughter.”

  “Carolyn’s granddaughter?” he tipped his head up and looked at me through his bifocals. “Why, yessir, I remember you. What in the name of Sam Hill are you doing all the way out here?”

  “I came to see Kitty. Kitty Brandon.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My pen pal. Your neighbor.”

  He scratched his chest. “Don’t have no neighbors named Kitty. Or Brandon.”

  “Yes, you do. This is her street.”

  “I don’t think so.” He put his glasses back up and sniffed hard enough to wrinkle his nose.

  “Well, this is the address I have for her.”

  He leaned back into the house. “Mother! Mother, do you know anything about someone named Kitty?”

  “Yes, George,” came a warbly voice from somewhere in the house. “I’m coming!”

  “Well, there you have it,” he said. “Come on in, Carolyn’s granddaughter.”

  * * * * *

  Uncle George closed the door behind me as an elderly woman in a lime green flowered bathrobe picked down the stairs one at a time. A pair of bifocals hung from her neck, suspended on a chain of little beads.

  “Well now,” she said, a little breathlessly. “Who’s this then?”

  “This is Jennifer,” he said.

  “Juliet.”

  “She’s Carolyn’s granddaughter.”

  Her face lit up. “Oh, my! Yes. I remember you, from the funeral. Land sakes, I wouldn’t have expected to see you today.”

  “I’m looking for Kitty,” I told her.

  “Kitty?”

  “She’s says she’s got a pen pal named Kitty.”

  “Who’s Kitty?” she asked.

  “Kitty Brandon. Your neighbor,” I explained again.

  “Brandon?” Aunt Millie scratched her cheek. “I don’t believe I know any Brandons.

  “Kitty and I have been pen pals since fourth grade. This is her address.” I dug into Catherine’s bag. “Look! These are letters I wrote to her.”

  She fingered through them. “Well, if you sent these, how is it you still have them?”

  I didn’t really have an answer for that.

  “She got my address from you. She had a school project.”

  Aunt Millie shook her head. “I’m sorry, dear. I have no recollection of any Brandons. Do you know Kitty’s mother’s name?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know any details about her family, actually.

  Except one.

  “She has a brother named George,” I said.

  “Well, what do you know about that?” Uncle George said.

  “Oh, pooh,” she slapped his arm with her fingertips.

  “Do you know who I mean now?” I asked.

  “I think you must be confused about where you met this girl,” Aunt Millie said.

  A hard lump formed in my throat and I looked past them both, into the living room.

  Lacy white doilies covered the backs and arms of the chairs. Bright afghans in clashing colors lay folded over the couch and love seat. Glass beads and gold tassels hung from the edges of the lampshades.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Look.” I pulled the last envelope I’d done for Kitty out of my own bag. “Isn’t this the right address?”

  She squinted at it, then took it out of my hand. “Yes, it is.” Then she lifted her bifocals to her nose and squinted at it. “My goodness, look at that.” She handed it to Uncle George, who also squinted at it.

  He looked over into the living room, then back at the envelope again. “Well, ain’t that somethin’?”

  I scootched over beside them. The hawk in the tree branches. “What about it?” I asked.

  Then I followed his gaze. Over the fireplace hung a painting identical to the one I’d drawn on the letter, a hawk about to dive on a small chipmunk in a moonlit, winter woods.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  Aunt Millie and I followed him into the living room. He held the envelope up to the painting. “Always did love that painting. I bought that, oh, some sixty years ago now, at some little artists’ shindig at the county fair.”

  “That’s uncanny,” Aunt Millie said.

  “Kitty described it to me,” I said. “She asked me to draw it.”

  “That’s an awfully good recreation,” Aunt Millie said.

  “Maybe I saw a print of it somewhere.”

  Uncle George shook his head. “Nope. No such thing. Not unless you been here before. The young fella who painted this died not long after. This piece never went nowhere but here.”

  “We tried to sell it a few times,” Aunt Millie said as she shuffled into the living room. “See if it might be worth a little bit. But nobody wanted to pay anything for it. Most someone offered was, what? Fifty, sixty dollars?”

  I stepped closer, right next to the hearth. “Look at the tree trunk,” I said.

  She smiled. “You spotted that right on, didn’t you? We always wondered whose initials he’d drawn carved into that tree. They weren’t his, anyway.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  The man nodded. “Look at the signature. Don’t match.”

  The artist scrawled his signature in white at the bottom corner of the painting. “C.K. Brandon.” Brandon.

  I squinted to make out the aged letters inside a choppy, etched heart.

  I gasped.

  J.B. + D.S.

  CHAPTER 39

  Tiny yellow and pink tea cups rattled on the tray Aunt Millie carried in from the kitchen. She put it on the coffee table in front of me and Uncle George reached over from the sofa to take a cookie. She slapped his hand. “Guests first, Georgie.”

  “Awful sorry you came all this way for nothing,” he said, and snatched a cookie as Aunt Millie put a cup of tea in front of me with two shaky hands.

  “I don’t get it.”

  Aunt Millie sat down. “You seem a little young to be traveling all alone.”

  “Just how old are you?” Uncle George demanded.

  “Fourteen.” I looked down at my knees.

  “Sweet heavens.” Aunt Millie leaned forward. “Do your parents know where you are?”

  The tea and the cookies, and Uncle George’s and Aunt Millie’s kindness, the cold, tired ache in my head and body and the long, dark distance behind me crumbled everything inside me like November’s dead leaves underfoot. Even my last-hope lifeline had evaporated.

  My shoulders collapsed, I dropped my face into my hands, and a sob tore out of me.

  “Dear heart.” Aunt Millie clucked her tongue. “Now, it can’t be all that bad.”

  “Here,” Uncle George growled and scooted the tea tray c
loser to me. “Have a cookie.”

  “George, for heaven’s sake,” she whispered. She tapped the table between us. “You give me your phone number and I’ll call your parents and tell them you’re all right.”

  I sniffled in mucus. “They don’t care.”

  “Oh, now.” She clucked her tongue again. “How could you think a thing that?”

  She asked, so I told her.

  It came out in sobs and hiccups. The divorce and the accident. Damon, and Jack Pierson. The drawings and the voice in my head. I left out the magic gum, because out of everything that sounded the most stupid. Completely insane.

  But then, why should I care what they thought? I had nothing and no one, not even Kitty, and if they sent me to an asylum it didn’t matter because it would feel like home as much as either of Dad’s or Mom’s new places.

  I laid my head back against the chair. My scalp pulsed and my chest and throat ached. My face burned, hot and moist. And Uncle George and Aunt Millie stared at me with wide eyes and half-open mouths.

  “My goodness,” Aunt Millie exclaimed.

  I looked at George.

  He just stared at me for a while, then shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, ‘You’re a lunatic’.”

  Aunt Millie put her teacup on the coffee table. “You say you draw pictures and then they happen?”

  “Sort of. If I can draw it, I can make it come true.” I thought about the roll of money. “But even then, stuff doesn’t always work out the way I meant it to. It’s kind of a stupid thing. Useless.”

  “It’s not a thing. It’s a gift. And if God gave it to you, it ain’t useless,” Uncle George said.

  “God doesn’t do stuff like that,” I argued.

  “Says who?” he barked.

  I wiped my thumbs under my eyes.

  Aunt Millie folded her hands in her lap. “Have you asked God why it doesn’t always work?”

  “I know why. It doesn’t work if I can’t draw. I can’t draw if I can’t see the pictures.”

  She took her glasses off and cleaned them on a napkin. “But you said you have a photographic memory. There must be some hindrance to it, then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe,” she put the glasses back on her nose, “you can’t draw things you shouldn’t be drawing.”

  “In other words, God’s not gonna let you use it against him,” Uncle George growled.

  “Against him? I wanted to save my parents’ marriage. Our family. And I couldn’t draw it.” I looked up at the painting again. “How can that be against God’s will? To keep them from divorcing?”

  Uncle George opened his palms. “Because that’s not your kettle of cats.”

  “My what?”

  “Your business.” He grimaced at me. “It’s not your dog to neuter.”

  “George!”

  I looked back up at the painting. “You sound like Damon.”

  “Must be a young man of exceptional wisdom.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, then?”

  “Grow up.” He leaned back in his chair.

  “What the heck?”

  He snorted. “Who promised you an easy time of it?”

  “Now, George.” Aunt Millie put her hand on his arm.

  “She’s got a bone to pick, I’ll pick it with her.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Where’d you get the idea you’re always gonna get everything the way you want it?”

  I couldn’t believe this guy.

  His voice shot up like a soprano. “‘It’s not fair! No fair!’”

  “Well, it’s not fair!” I yelled back. “They’re being selfish jerks!”

  “So are you,” he growled.

  So many words raced to the front of my mouth all at the same time, they all sputtered as I tried to get one out.

  “You ran away, didn’t even have the courtesy to tell anyone where you went, you’re complaining about a gift from God,” he pointed at the ceiling and almost shouted, “because you can’t make it serve your own self-centered purposes, and you want us to feel sorry for you.”

  Aunt Millie leaned over to him but looked at me. “This isn’t what she needs,” she whispered.

  “Sure it is! She don’t need no pity.”

  I stood up and shook till I thought I might explode.

  “You gonna run away again?” he asked.

  “Maybe I will!”

  “Why not get a little grit instead, and say, ‘It ain’t all about me’.”

  “I don’t think it’s all about me!” I yelled.

  His voice dropped about a thousand decibels. “Then why are you actin’ like it is? Now sit down.”

  I sat down.

  “You listen here,” he said. “You’re gonna have a lot of times when life’s just crap slapped on a cracker. That’s the way it is.”

  I rubbed at the bandage over my right forearm. “Why? Why does it have to be like that? Why did Damon’s mom have to die? And my parents split up? Why does God let stuff like that happen? He could stop it!”

  Aunt Millie shook her head. “Why, that’s not God’s fault. That’s just living in a world that’s full of wrongdoing, Juliet.”

  “Oh, come on! Damon’s mom was a missionary. A missionary, for crying out loud! She had two kids, and a husband. God took her out because she wasn’t perfect? Because she ‘sinned’?”

  “We all sin,” Uncle George said. “Every gol darn one of us since the first time two people had a choice to make. Sin’s a poison that corrupts everything, and it’s everywhere. Mine, yours, your parents’, the king of the People’s Republic of Bonga-Wonga’s.”

  “It’s not fair.” I sniffed and put my teacup in my lap, just to give my hands something to do.

  “No, it’s not fair. But you might just as well get used to it.” He pointed at my arm where I rubbed it against the chair. “That itch?”

  I nodded. “It’s going to scar.”

  “Ach, scars ain’t so bad. They remind us that whatever happened didn’t kill us.” He ran his finger along the scar on his face. “This itched like the dickens when it got to healing.”

  “How’d you get yours?”

  “I was just a kid. ‘Bout your age.”

  George.

  * * * * *

  I put down my teacup. “You’re George. Kitty’s brother George.”

  “That’s Uncle George to you. And I got no sister named Kitty, neither.”

  “You got that on the river, didn’t you?”

  He squinted at me.

  “Your canoe tipped over and a tree limb cut you.”

  The whites of his eyes spread, like an egg when it’s fried.

  “Yeah.” I sat up straighter. “I know about that. Kitty told me. You two went looking for blueberries.”

  “There weren’t no Kitty,” he insisted. “I was alone. Carolyn was just a tyke, and Ma and Pa said she couldn’t go with me.”

  “Then how do I know about it?”

  “Carolyn probably told you,” he argued.

  “No, Kitty did.” I tapped my fingernails on the table. “You saw deer, two deer, before you tipped over.”

  He opened his mouth, then turned away and stared off into nothing. His eyebrows drew together.

  “Then after you swamped you swam to shore and waited hours before your parents found you.”

  A low whistle slid through his teeth. “By golly, I haven’t thought about that in years. Almost seventy of ‘em.”

  “George?” Aunt Millie put her hand on his arm.

  His eyes went far away and he sighed. “Catherine. Catherine pulled me out of the river.”

  “Catherine?” Aunt Millie shook her head.

  “She came out of the woods, all khaki and green, like some backwoods scout. Hair as red as a sunset.” He rubbed his cheek. “Pulled out a pack of matches, she did. Taught me to build a fire and stayed with me till my folks came. Probably saved my skinny hide.”

  “
I never heard that part of the story,” Aunt Millie said.

  “Ma and Pa found me asleep next to that fire.” His eyes focused on a lakeshore, far away and long ago. “I told ‘em about Catherine, and we looked around a fair bit, but never found any trace of her. They said I’d been dreamin’.”

  “So Catherine is Kitty?” I tried to make sense of it all. “But that would make her…”

  “Older than me,” Uncle George finished my thought.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It just might.” Aunt Millie folded her hands under her chin. “If you believe in angels.”

  Angels?

  * * * * *

  I did a quick sketch of Catherine on the last blank page in my sketchbook and showed it to Uncle George.

  “Oh, that’s her all right. A bit younger when I saw her, but I’d know that face anywhere.”

  “So, Kitty—Catherine—she’s a grown-up. She’s not even a kid.”

  Aunt Millie tapped the pad of her first finger against her lips. “I don’t believe angels have ages, Juliet. Not like we do. Angels are—timeless.”

  “Ain’t you ever heard of entertainin’ angels unaware?” Uncle George asked me. “You could meet one looks like an old man, a toddler, a clerk in a dollar store. You just never know.”

  “But why? Why would Catherine want to be my pen pal?”

  “There must be something God knew you’d need. A special watching over,” Aunt Millie said.

  I thought about Nonnie’s letter. The prayers she’d written the day I was born.

  Uncle George sighed. “Sure like to talk to Catherine again. ’Specially now.”

  Could I do it? Other than the money on the train, it hadn’t worked in a long time.

  My fingernails scratched at the doilies on the armrests of my chair. “I could try to draw her here. Make her come.”

  Aunt Millie sat up straight. “Can you do that?”

  “Sometimes it works.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture Catherine.

  “Yeah. I can still see her. If this is from God, then I guess he must take away the pictures if he doesn’t want me to draw them.”

  “Well, land sakes. Let’s give it a try,” Aunt Millie said.

  As I filled in the sketch with Uncle George’s face beside Catherine’s, I spoke the picture. “The words make it work,” I explained.

  “Of course they do.” Uncle George nodded. “‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.’”

  A shiver, a warm one, rushed through my nervous system. I’d only ever felt that from Damon.