The House Mia Kept Drawing

The breach, if there was one, had begun under our own roof. I bent close to Sarah and promised that I would discover how Mia had learned those details.

I waited for the house to settle. At nine, after the monitor carried the steady hush of Mia’s sleeping breath, I eased myself out of bed and left Sarah alone in the dark.

The corridor was unlit. I reached Mia’s room and opened the door with care, while the glow from the stars overhead washed her walls in a dim green.

She lay folded beneath her pink blanket, not moving. I watched her for a moment, then reminded myself that I wasn’t hunting for anything supernatural. I needed an ordinary explanation.

A photograph might have slipped into a book. Some object could have traveled with her from somewhere else. I began at the shelves, removing her storybooks one at a time.

I examined their pages and covers without finding anything. Beneath the bed waited only scattered Lego pieces and a stuffed bear gone gray with dust.

I searched the closet next, feeling inside the pockets of her winter jackets. My heartbeat thudded so insistently that I felt like an intruder pretending to belong in his own house.

At last I turned to the little white desk. Mia’s sketchbook rested where she had put it, and I lifted it without letting its metal coil rasp over the tabletop.

I passed the picture of the window and another showing our dog. On the final sheet, there was a drawing she had made that evening, before she went to sleep.

This time she had drawn the inside of a room, not a house. The viewpoint sat near the floor, as if the person seeing it were crawling across the room.

A rug covered part of the scene, its surface patterned. Nearby stood a massive coffee table, its wooden legs thick and dark, with a sofa at the edge of the page.

A woman sat there. Mia had worked over her figure with forceful strokes of charcoal and gray, but left her face blank. Only a tangle of gray hair remained.

In the woman’s lap, Mia had drawn something unmistakable: a rectangle, silver behind and marked on its front by a bright blue square. An iPad.

For a second, I forgot to breathe. The image offered an answer, but the answer opened a door onto something I had hoped was finished.

Mia hadn’t simply imagined the old house. She had seen an image of it. The figure wasn’t Mrs. Gable, and it couldn’t have been Sarah.

I shut the sketchbook, holding on to a suspicion that chilled me. Maybe the past had not returned through a dream. Maybe someone had placed it before our daughter.

I carried the book back toward the kitchen, its wire edge digging into my hand. My pulse kept a slow, insistent beat as I walked.

Sarah still stood beside the refrigerator, arms locked across herself. She stared down at the crayon pictures spread across the island; the wine in her glass remained untouched.

“Sarah,” I said softly. She jerked her head around, leaving the drawing of the damaged porch light behind. “Did you find anything?”

I answered by laying the sketchbook on the counter. I slid it beside the other pictures and turned it so she could see the new one clearly.

The floor-level view. The patterned carpet. The oversized table. The gray-haired woman with the tablet in her lap. Sarah’s gaze moved across each detail.

Her exhale came out brittle. She shut her eyes, and I feared she might fold. I reached her in time and held her by both arms.

“Look carefully at the room,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Does it remind you of anywhere?” She opened her eyes and studied the page again.

Her stare paused on the gray marks, then traveled to the rug. “That’s their den,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Arthur and Eleanor’s.”

She described the old Persian carpet in the back room, dark blue and maroon, then the oak table Arthur had inherited. It had been so heavy it took two hundred pounds to make it.

“And the woman?” I asked, gently. Sarah seized the counter’s edge; her hands shook. “Eleanor. Her hair turned gray after Mark died. She wouldn’t cover it. She said it should show what she felt inside.”

Sarah looked at me, terror bright in her eyes. “She’s getting to Mia, David. Eleanor must be showing her pictures of the house. Of Mark.”

I tried to keep us grounded in what we knew. “How could she get past the school, Chloe, and us? How would she reach Mia with an iPad?”

“I don’t know!” Sarah’s voice broke. She wondered aloud if Eleanor waited by the playground fence or found Mia when Chloe took her to the library on Tuesdays. The possibility took shape: Eleanor might be secretly reaching our daughter with photographs of the house.