Chapter Fourteen
The Family Drawing
Archer
The twins’ preschool sends things home in a folder. Permission slips, art projects, the occasional note about behavior incidents. I usually go through it after dinner while the twins watch their one allotted cartoon, sorting the papers into piles — sign, recycle, put on the fridge.
Tonight, the folder is already empty when I pick it up.
Sydney must have gone through it after pickup because the permission slips are signed on the counter, the flyers are in the recycling, and there’s nothing left except a single piece of construction paper that she apparently decided deserved a place of honor.
It’s on the fridge when I find it, held up by two magnets. I almost walk past it on my way to get water, but something catches my eye and I stop.
It’s a drawing. Crayon on pale construction paper, the proportions wildly off in the way that three-year-old art always is—giant heads, stick legs, hands like starfish. Five figures stand in a row on a green line that I think is meant to be grass.
Each one is labeled in careful teacher handwriting because Luke must have told her what to write.
DADDY is the tallest figure, which is accurate. Brown scribble hair. A big circle body.
LUKE is next to Daddy, smaller, holding what appears to be a book or possibly a brick.
LILY is on Luke’s other side, arms spread wide, yellow scribbles radiating from her head like she’s either wearing a crown or her hair is on fire. Both are plausible.
MOMMY is on the far left, separated from the group by about two inches of construction paper, which at this scale is a meaningful distance. She’s drawn smaller than Daddy and she’s smiling, but she’s alone on her side.
AUNTIE SYD is on the far right, next to Daddy. Close to Daddy. Their stick arms are almost touching on the page, and she’s drawn the same height as Luke, which means my son either thinks Sydney is the same size as a three-year-old or he ran out of room.
I stand in the dark kitchen — the only light is the one over the stove that I always leave on — and I look at this drawing, unable to move.
Not because of the five figures or the labels or the teacher’s careful handwriting, but because of the layout.
Mommy on one side, Daddy and Syd on the other, the kids in the middle, and the whole thing arranged with the instinctive logic of a child who drew what he sees every day.
Sydney put this on the fridge. She saw it before I did, and she didn’t mention it, didn’t make a thing out of it, didn’t bring it up at dinner. She just put it on the fridge and let me find it, and I don’t know if that’s grace or self-preservation or both.
I get my water and go to bed, but I don’t sleep for a long time.
Practice the next morning is a disaster, and the disaster is me.
I let in three goals in the first twenty minutes of the scrimmage.
The first one is a wrister from the point that I should track in my sleep — it comes through traffic and I lose it, and it ticks off my blocker and drops behind me.
The second is a breakaway from one of the younger guys, and I go down too early and he roofs it over my shoulder.
The third is a deflection that changes direction twice, and I’m still moving the wrong way when it hits the back of the net.
Coach doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. The look he gives me between drills says everything—that was garbage, and we both know it.
I tighten up in the second half, stopping the next twelve shots and making a pad save on a two-on-one that gets a glove tap from Zayden. But the damage is done, and everyone saw it. When practice ends, I sit in my stall, pull off my pads, and wait for it.
Ollie sits down beside me. He’s got a protein bar in one hand and a look on his face that tells me he’s been waiting for this moment since we hit the ice.
“So what’s going on with you?”
“Nothing. Bad practice. It happens.”
“Three goals in twenty minutes doesn’t just happen to you, Arch. You were somewhere else out there.” He takes a bite of his protein bar and chews thoughtfully. “Where were you?”
I pull off my chest protector and hang it in the stall. I could lie. I could say I’m tired, I slept badly, my hip is bothering me. All of those things are true on any given day.
“Luke drew a picture at preschool,” I say instead.
Ollie waits.
“There were five people in the family. Me, the twins, Mommy, and Auntie Syd.” I unlace my skates without looking at him. “Bree is off to one side. Sydney is next to me. Their arms are almost touching.”
Ollie is quiet for a beat too long, which is unusual for him. “He drew what he sees,” he says finally.
“Yeah,” I concede. Maybe.
“And what does he see?”
“He sees Sydney making his breakfast and reading him books and putting him to bed three nights a week while I’m at the arena. He sees her in the kitchen every morning and on the couch every night. She’s become part of the family.”
“And he sees her next to you.”
I scrub one hand through my hair. “Ollie.”
“I’m just repeating what you said.”
I shove my skates into the bag harder than necessary. “She went on a date last week.”
Ollie’s eyebrows go up. “A date?”
“Some guy from a coffee shop. She got her nails done, got her hair blown out, wore this—” I stop. “She looked, uh, she looked really good.”
“And how did that go?”
“I don’t know. She came home late and told me to go to bed.”
His eyebrows lift. “She told you to go to bed.”
“I was on the couch. I just wanted to make sure she got home okay. She walked in and said, ‘I’m home, you can go to bed now,’ and went upstairs.”
“That’s cold.”
“It wasn’t cold. It was—” I don’t have a word for what it was. Distant. Controlled. Like she was angry about something I couldn’t see, and I’ve been replaying it every night since, and I still don’t know what I did wrong.
“What are you going to do?” Ollie asks.
“Nothing. She’s my best friend. Nothing has changed.”
He gives me a hard look. “If you say ‘best friend’ one more time, I’m going to check you into the boards so hard your grandchildren will feel it.”
“That’s aggressive.”
“Arch, your son drew her into the family. She went on a date, and you couldn’t sleep until she got home. You let in three goals this morning because you can’t stop thinking about her. At what point does the ‘best friend’ thing stop being a description and start being a lie you’re telling yourself?”
I zip up my bag and stand. “I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re going to walk away from this conversation?”
“I’m going to walk away from this conversation.”
“Fine. But none of this is going to go away because you refuse to talk about it.”
I walk away. He lets me go, which is the kindest thing Ollie has done for me in weeks.
That night, we end up on the couch again, and I can’t focus on anything.
She’s reading. Some memoir she bought—a woman on the cover standing at the edge of something, trees or mountains, I can’t tell from this angle.
She’s curled into her corner of the sectional with her legs tucked up, barefoot, wearing leggings and one of my old t-shirts that she pulled from the clean laundry pile and hasn’t given back.
I’m pretending to watch TV. A documentary about something I couldn’t describe if someone held a gun to my head because I’m not watching it. I’m watching her.
She turns a page. Her hair falls across her face, and she tucks it behind her ear without looking up.
I’m still thinking about the date. About some guy she met who took her to dinner and got to sit across from her for two hours and look at her face in candlelight. I don’t know anything about this guy. I don’t know if he made her laugh or if he gave her a goodnight kiss at the end.
I don’t know if she’ll see him again. She hasn’t mentioned it. I haven’t asked.
Sydney is beautiful. I’ve always known this the way I know factual information—her eyes are brown, she’s five-two, she has slight curves and a big smile.
But knowing it and letting myself see it are different things, and somewhere in the last few weeks, the wall I built between those two categories has come down, and I can’t figure out how to put it back up.
She’s absolutely beautiful, and it’s killing me.
She shifts on the couch, and her foot slides across the middle cushion to rest against my thigh. Just her toes, pressing lightly against the outside of my leg through the fabric of my sweatpants. A small, accidental touch that she doesn’t seem to notice.
I notice.
I notice because my entire body goes still, every nerve ending rerouting to the four square inches of my thigh where her foot is making contact, and I am now a man whose full attention is on a foot. Her foot. Her bare foot against my leg, warm and light.
She doesn’t move it. I don’t move it. The documentary plays. She turns another page.
We sit like that for twenty minutes. I want to touch her. Her foot. Maybe her ankle. I don’t do any of these things because I am a coward and can’t say the word that would change everything.
“I’m going to turn in,” she says, pulling her foot away, and the absence of it is a physical thing I feel in my chest.
“Goodnight, Syd.”
“Night.”
She goes upstairs with her book. I sit on the couch, listening to her footsteps overhead and then the guest room door closing, and the house goes quiet.
I turn off the TV and walk to the kitchen.
The drawing is still on the fridge. Five figures on blue construction paper. Daddy, Luke, Lily, Mommy, Auntie Syd. Bree on one side, the rest of us on the other, Luke’s careful starfish hands reaching for the people closest to him.
I stand there in the dark kitchen, the stove light throwing shadows across the floor, and I look at my son’s drawing.
Five people. His family, as he sees it. And the thing that wrecks me—the thing I can’t stop coming back to—isn’t that he put Sydney in the picture.
It’s that the drawing looks right.
It looks like the truth.
And I have no idea what to do with it.