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My mother wiped her cheeks and turned to the window as if she couldn’t stand to look at either version of me. “There’s a term for it. Genetic sexual attraction. It’s when blood relatives meet for the first time as adults and there’s an overwhelming sexual magnetism between them. I had hoped that since you had memories of Henry from when you were little, it couldn’t happen. Clearly, I was wrong.”
“Mom, that’s crazy. What you’re suggesting is crazy.” Even now, I was still desperately clinging to the hope that I could spin this, that I could somehow convince her the painting was the extent of our physical relationship.
“Just tell me the truth, Paige. Has he fucked you?”
I nearly burst into giggles at the realization that my father’s restraint—infuriating as it was—had inadvertently saved me the burden of lying.
“No, he hasn’t.” I wasn’t sure if she believed me but asking would only undermine my insistence.
She made her way back to the workbench, giving the futon a wide berth as if its presence alone was enough to make her sick. She cried silently for over a minute, then rubbed her eyes and said, “If I had known keeping you apart would only drive you closer together, I’m not sure I would’ve done it. But I couldn’t risk him hurting you.”
I moved around to the opposite side of the workbench. “You’re saying you made him leave?”
“He didn’t tell you?” She choked out a laugh. “Of course, he didn’t tell you.”
“Well, someone had better tell me, because I am sick of being kept in the dark about my own childhood.”
I sat on the stool across from her and waited. I waited a long time. Finally, she wiped the tears from her cheeks and met my gaze.
“Yes,” she said. “I made him go.”
Six years’ worth of pain and anger lodged in my throat. I squeaked, “Why?”
“To protect you.”
“Protect me from what? He’s my father.”
She reached under the table and pulled out the shopping bag. “See for yourself.”
Chapter Seventeen
My mouth went dry as cotton. This was it, the piece of the puzzle I had come all this way to find. Was I ready to know it?
Hesitantly, I reached into the bag and pulled out a stack of sketchbooks. The pages were old and frayed around the edges. I took a deep breath and drew back the cover on the top book. The pencil lines were smudged from having been compressed, but the shape they made was unmistakably that of a sleeping child.
“Who is this?”
“You,” she said.
I turned the page. There I was, around age two, in duck-themed pajama bottoms, then again, curled around a stuffed clown fish. Me wrapped in moon-and-star sheets with one foot off the mattress, my head just south of the pillow. I closed the first sketchbook and moved on to the next, then the next. It was the same thing. Sketch after sketch of me asleep in my old twin bed, from the time I was little to around the age of eleven.
“My dad drew these?”
She nodded.
I watched myself grow up across the pages, saw my limbs lengthen and my hair darken, my face and figure sharpen. My father couldn’t always afford the safest or most spacious living arrangements, so rather than set me up on his couch, he’d crash on the sofa-sleeper in our den. He would've had to have been slipping into my room every weekend, quiet as a ghost, for almost a decade to capture this progression.
My mother wrung her hands like she was trying to squeeze the blood from them.
“I knew you were sitting for him during the day,” she said. “I thought that was the extent of it. I got up to use the bathroom one night and noticed your door was closed. You always left it cracked. When I peeked inside, I found Henry sitting by the foot of your bed with a sketchpad. The thought of him alone with you in the dark while you were helpless made me…uncomfortable, to say the least.”
The bottom sketchbook was only halfway full. I recognized the sheets in the first drawing from the year I’d turned twelve—the same year my father had left without so much as a Catch you later.
“I asked Henry how long he’d been going into your room at night. He said not long, a few months. I told him I didn’t want it to happen again and he assured me it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, I stopped over at his place to pick something up and I found these. He’d lied to me.”
I flipped to the very last drawing: me on my stomach with my arm dangling off the edge of the bed and my hair fanned out across the pillow. Obviously, my father had been coming in to draw me a lot longer than just a few months, but that wasn’t enough of a reason to banish him forever. “I don’t see what this has to do with him leaving.”
My mother closed her eyes and pressed three fingers to her lips. She looked fragile, more so than usual, like she’d shatter if I tried to pick her up.
