The House Mia Kept Drawing

“No,” Mia answered, dragging the dark pencil through the middle of the upstairs window.

“Did your mom show you a photograph?” I asked.

“Nope.” Her eyes stayed on the page, her hand moving with careful purpose.

I leaned closer. “Then how did you know what the place looked like?”

She stopped and touched the pencil to her chin. Her small face tightened with concentration, as if the answer were just out of reach.

“It’s already in my head,” she said. “Like a movie I can watch when I shut my eyes.”

I glanced at the heavy mark across the window. “And what does that line mean?”

“The paint,” Mia replied, as calmly as if she were naming a color. “They painted the window closed. You can push, but it still won’t open.”

A chill dampened my forehead. I knew that window: Mark’s bedroom, on the second floor of the Whitaker house.

Arthur had sealed it with paint when Mark was young. I knew the detail, and now my daughter was drawing it as if she’d seen it herself.

Mia had been an infant then. There was no sensible way she could remember.

I rose too fast and felt the room tilt. “That’s a lovely picture,” I managed. “You can keep working on it.”

I went to the kitchen and filled a glass from the tap. The water was gone in a single long drink, but my unease remained.

I wanted Sarah home. I wanted to hear her thoughts, though I couldn’t imagine what either of us might say.

At six-thirty, the front door opened. Sarah came in still wearing her blue clinic scrubs, her badge clipped near the collar.

Fatigue shadowed her eyes. She dropped her keys in the bowl, bent to kiss Mia’s hair, then leaned heavily against the island.

“Three patients came in right as the shift was changing,” she said, pressing her fingers to her temples. “Please tell me there’s wine.”

“There is.” I poured her a glass, trying to keep my hands from betraying me. “Mia’s watching a movie upstairs.”

Sarah accepted the drink and examined me over its rim. After six years together, she could read the worry in my face.

“What happened? You look like something’s broken and we’re about to pay for it.”

“Nothing’s broken.” I reached for the manila folder I’d brought back from school and placed it beside her glass.

“Mrs. Gable wanted to talk after class,” I told her. “Mia isn’t in trouble. She’s been making these during free time for a couple of weeks.”

Mrs. Gable had noticed the repeating house and explained that the class was trying a project about early memories, using guided visualization. She hadn’t suggested Mia had remembered anything real.

Sarah opened the folder with a tired sigh. “If this is about her cartoon dragons on the bus again, I already told Mrs. Gable where she gets that idea—”

Her words cut off. The kitchen went so quiet that the refrigerator’s steady drone seemed suddenly enormous.

The color left Sarah’s face. Weariness gave way to something sharper as she stared at the first drawing, her fingers suspended above the paper.

She slid it aside and studied the next, then another. At the last school picture, the one with the oak and the initials, a broken sound escaped her.

She stepped back from the island, one hand lifted toward her mouth. “Where did Mia get these?” she whispered, staring at me.

“She made them, Sarah.”

“No.” She shook her head hard. “I mean, who showed her? Where could she have seen that house?”

“She says it appears in her head. Like a movie. She thinks it’s a dream.”

“That can’t be.” Her voice climbed, and she pointed at the drawings with a shaking finger. “Look at the porch light. That crack is exactly where Arthur hit it with his golf club, two weeks before I left.”

Mia had been ten months old then. Sarah told me she’d barely been able to understand what was around her. She should not have been able to hold on to that image.

“I know,” I said, moving nearer and trying to keep my own fear from feeding hers. “She also told me the upstairs window had been painted shut.”

Sarah retreated until the refrigerator stopped her. She clutched the wineglass, her grip so tight I feared the stem might give way.

“They’ve found her,” she said, struggling for breath. “Arthur and Eleanor. They’re showing her pictures. They’ve been getting close to her at school.”

“Sarah, wait. The school is secure. Mrs. Gable is with Mia during the day. The Whitakers don’t know where we live.”

Tears gathered in Sarah’s eyes. “Then explain it, David. How can our seven-year-old be drawing the home of my dead husband?”

I had nothing to tell her. I stepped forward and gathered her against me. She shook hard, her forehead resting against my chest.

Over her shoulder, I looked at the drawings spread across the island. I held my wife as the family’s past somehow breached our home.