Chapter 17

PRESENT DAY

 

Noah’s crabs with Cajun seasoning were the best crabs I’ve ever tasted, even though it was a lot of work digging out all that meat. Lily loved them too, to my surprise. I’m pretty sure she only tasted them to impress Noah, but then she couldn’t stop eating them. Lily’s palate is really being expanded—maybe when we get home, I can convince her to try some new things. Like chicken nuggets that aren’t shaped like dinosaurs. Maybe circular chicken nuggets.

After dinner, my father and Gwen go out to take a walk. They offer to let me come along, and I’m torn between not wanting to be a third wheel on their romantic midnight stroll and not wanting to be stuck in the cabin alone with Noah (and Lily, who doesn’t want to budge from the couch). I finally decide to stay behind.

It ends up being the three of us in the living room. Noah is reading in an armchair, Lily is flopped on her back, staring at the ceiling, and I’m sketching on my sketchpad. I almost started drawing Noah just out of old habit, but I stopped myself. I’m drawing Lily instead. Because it’s not like I don’t already have twenty billion sketches of my daughter during every moment of her life. I’ve even got a sketch of her using the potty stashed away somewhere.

“Mommy?” Lily’s voice interrupts me as I’m adding definition to her hair. Lily’s reddish-brown hair is easy to draw because it’s very straight and fine.

“Yes?” I ask, even though I know what’s coming.

“Mommy, I’m booooored!”

Lily is incapable of saying the word “bored” without drawing it out over several syllables.

“What about your new doll?” I say.

“I’m bored of that,” she says. She plops down on the couch next to me and frowns. “I wanna watch TV.”

I look around the room. “I don’t know if Noah has a TV.”

Noah pulls his eyes from his book to regard us briefly. “I don’t.”

I give her a pointed look. “See?”

Lily scrunches up her little face at Noah. “How come you don’t got a TV?”

He doesn’t even lift his eyes this time. “Because they rot your brain.”

“We have two TVs at home,” Lily informs him. “My favorite show is Spongebob Squarepants. It’s usually on all day on Saturday.” Please stop talking, Lily. “But I also like Gumball. And The Thundermans. And Ben Ten.  And Unikitty.  And My Little Pony.  And Teen Titans Go.”  Please, Lily.  “And Henry Danger. And School of Rock.” For the love of God… “And I used to like Princess Sofia, but I don’t really have time to watch it anymore.”

“I can’t imagine you would,” he murmurs.

“Look, there’s nothing wrong with a little TV,” I say.

He raises his eyebrows. “A little?”

“Hey, she’s my daughter, and if I want her to watch TV, she can watch TV!”

A wry smile plays on his lips. “Not here, she can’t.”

Good point.

I can see Lily is revving up for a tantrum, so to circumvent it, I quickly say, “Lily, why don’t you grab the extra sketch book from my luggage? There are some of your crayons in there too. We can draw together.”

I can see Lily thinking it over, deciding if this is acceptable. She must be trying to impress Noah with her obedience, because she skips off to our bedroom to retrieve the book. When she returns, she’s got the sketchbook, but not her crayons.

“The crayons are in the side pocket,” I tell her.

“No, Mommy,” Lily says. “I want one of your special pencils. I want to do a nice drawing, like you.”

I can’t suppress a smile. Usually Lily just likes to color, but occasionally she does express interest in learning how to draw. I pull a fresh pencil out of my pack and hand it to her as she sidles up next to me on the couch.

Lily leans her head against my shoulder as she works on her drawing. I get distracted from my own drawing as I watch her create a picture of a princess I’m almost entirely certain is Queen Elsa from Frozen. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to identify Lily’s artwork more specifically than “woman” or “dog” or “green blob monster.”

“I’m not good at drawing feet,” Lily comments as she draws the woman’s shoes at right angles to the body.

“Well,” I say, “the trick is you want to draw them just slightly at an angle to the body.”

She looks at me blankly.

“Here, let me show you.” I turn a page of my sketchbook and quickly sketch a picture of a girl. I draw her feet slightly slanted to the side as Lily watches in fascination. “Like this.”

“Oh!” She smiles happily and goes back to work. And she actually draws Queen Elsa a pretty good pair of feet.

I look up from my daughter and see Noah is no longer looking at his book. He’s watching us, an unreadable expression on his face. But when he notices me looking, he quickly drops his eyes and goes back to his book.

It’s funny—I always thought Noah never had much interest in me until that night he punched Derek in the stomach. But after we’d been going out a few weeks, he admitted he’d been thinking about me long before that.

“It was right after you cut your hand on that glass,” he told me. “I was jogging back to the dorm after playing basketball, and I saw you sitting in the grass, leaning against a tree. You had your sketchbook out and you were drawing a picture of the campus. You were so focused—you had no idea I was even there.”

I smiled at him. I had no idea he’d been noticing me at the same time I’d been noticing him.

“I watched you draw for a little while.” He smiled crookedly. “The picture you were doing… it was amazing. You were capturing all these little details that I never even would have noticed on my own. I couldn’t stop watching you, to be honest.”

Of all the things I’ve missed about Noah, one of the things I missed most was the way he looked at me when I was drawing.