If there was paper in the house, she filled it. Cats with eyelashes. Our house with nine crooked chimneys. Me with arms long enough to reach both sides of the page, holding a shopping cart full of milk and bread. She went through a pack of Crayola crayons every three weeks, wearing the blue and the pink down to fat little stubs while the silver wrappers peeled off in long, greasy curls.
So when she climbed into the passenger seat of my old Buick with no art folder on a Thursday afternoon, I noticed before she even clicked her seatbelt.
“Where’s your drawing, bug?” I asked, backing out of the Brookside Elementary gravel lot.
She shrugged and looked out the side window at the ditch weeds.
That was not like her either. Usually, she shoved three or four crumpled sheets of construction paper into my lap the second the door shut, chattering about which cloud looked like a tractor or why the lunch lady gave her an orange instead of an apple.
At home, she ate three saltine crackers and left the peanut butter untouched on the counter. The kitchen smelled like lemon dish soap and the raw chicken thighs I had forgotten to take out of the freezer that morning. I kept watching her little hands while she sat at the formica table.
She had a smudge of blue marker under her right fingernail, deep in the crescent where it never quite washed out during bath time.
I was wiping down the laminate when the landline rang.
It was 3:27 by the microwave clock.
Brookside Elementary didn’t call unless Maddie had a fever or lost a red mitten in the grass during recess. Mrs. Tammie Brooks had that careful, slow school-teacher calm in her voice that always makes you sit down before you even know why you need to.
She said, Mrs. Vargas, can I ask you something odd?
I said yes, and the sponge in my hand felt suddenly heavy with suds.
She asked about a game.
A quiet game.
A closet game.
My heart did a strange, heavy stutter against my ribs, but I told her I didn’t know what she meant.
Mrs. Brooks paused on the other end, and the static on the line sounded like dry leaves scraping across a concrete driveway.
She told me Maddie had drawn herself sitting inside a rectangle with a doorknob too high for her to reach. She told me that outside the door, the child had drawn a pair of square shoes with thick black laces. She told me that right above the door frame, in uneven letters that slanted down like rain, Maddie had written three words.
Don’t make sound.
My mouth went dry. I was standing right by the stainless steel sink holding a wet fork that I had pulled from the drain basket.
I said, We don’t play that.
Mrs. Brooks did not fill the silence. That scared me more than if she had panicked or raised her voice.
She said, Maddie told me the winner is the one who doesn’t cry.
I had to put the fork down because my fingers wouldn’t stay closed around the handle. It clattered against the bottom of the basin with a sharp, tinny ring that made Maddie look up from her crackers in the next room.
I am not a perfect mother. I work the pharmacy counter at the Kroger off Highway 9, and my shifts run stupid hours, ten to seven some days, closing duties that keep me counting pills until my eyes burn. My sister Paula watches Maddie three afternoons a week in her little double-wide out past the grain elevator. My boyfriend, Nick, had picked her up twice that month when I was stuck behind a flu-shot line that stretched all the way to the frozen food aisles. I started listing people in my head, running through names and faces like an inventory sheet, and I hated myself for making a list at all.
Mrs. Brooks told me not to question Maddie too much. She said to come straight to the school. She said the counselor, Mr. Patel, needed me to see the folder.
Maddie was standing in the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom while I grabbed my leather purse from the knob.
Am I in trouble? she asked, her small fingers twisting the hem of her yellow shirt.
I knelt down on the linoleum, and my knees popped like they always do when the weather turns damp. No, baby, I said.
She looked relieved for half a second, then confused, and that quick little shift in her face made me want to break something with my bare hands.
At the school office, Mrs. Janice behind the glass reception window would not meet my eyes. She just nodded toward the back hallway and whispered that Mr. Patel was waiting in room fourteen.
Mr. Patel had five heavy construction paper pages laid flat on his gray metal table, each one dated in stiff pencil marks in the top right corner.
The first was the closet.
The second was our living room, but the blue couch was the wrong color, turned upside down against a wall that didn’t have any windows.
The third was a red truck parked in a gravel driveway next to a pile of old tires.
My sister Paula drove a red truck. She had bought it down in St. Joe three years ago with money from our uncle’s estate, and the tailgate was dented right where her husband backing out of the shed had clipped the fence post.
I started to stand up, my chair legs screeching against the tile, but Mr. Patel raised one hand in the air.
He said, Before you call anyone, you need to look at the last drawing.
Then his office phone rang, a shrill, double-ring office tone, and Mrs. Brooks answered it from the doorway where she had been leaning against the frame.
She covered the black receiver with her palm and said, Maddie’s aunt is here, and she says she has a right to take her home.
The room smelled like damp carpet and the lemon spray the janitor used on the baseboards. I didn’t look at Mrs. Brooks. I looked down at the fourth page, the one Mr. Patel hadn’t turned over yet.
It wasn’t a closet. It wasn’t the living room.
It was the back corner of Paula’s utility room, right behind the old Maytag washer where the spare bucket of deer corn sat during hunting season.
Paula always kept the back door unlocked because she lost her house key in the clover patch back in August and never bothered to get a new one cut. Anyone could walk right in from the lane without knocking. Nick dropped by there sometimes to borrow her socket wrench set when he was working on his truck transmission in our gravel drive.
My breathing felt thin, like I was sucking air through a coffee filter.
Mr. Patel slid the fifth page across the gray metal table toward my fingers.
The fifth page didn’t have a closet. It had a white license plate with blue numbers drawn with such heavy pressure the crayon paper had torn right through the middle.
I knew those numbers by heart because I had stared at the back of that truck every Sunday after church while Paula dug around in her glove box for peppermints.
Three letters, four digits. The exact truck that Nick had borrowed three separate times that month because his own alternator was clicking and he didn’t want to spend the grocery money fixing it at the local garage.
Nick told me he drove straight to the salvage yard over in Corning. He told me he stayed out until six helping old man Henderson pull transmission parts off a rusted-out Ford.
He never went to Corning. Corning was forty miles the other direction from Paula’s place.
Mr. Patel didn’t say a word. He just tapped his fingernail against the corner of the fifth page, right where Maddie had drawn a little stick figure with a red bow in her hair hiding underneath a pile of dirty shop rags.
The winner is the one who doesn’t cry, Maddie had told Mrs. Brooks.
I sat there in that small, warm school office with the hum of the hallway fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and my hands started shaking so badly I had to tuck them underneath my thighs to keep from knocking the pencil cup off the table.
Paula’s truck was parked right outside in the school pick-up lane. I could see the rusted corner of her tailgate through the high wire-mesh window of the office door, sitting right behind my Buick with the engine idling and the heater exhaust puffing white into the crisp October air.
Mrs. Brooks was still holding the phone against her chest, waiting for me to say something, but my throat had closed up entirely.
I didn’t call the police from Mr. Patel’s desk. I didn’t run out into the hallway to scream at my sister through the glass.
I reached out with one finger and touched the blue marker line on the fifth page, right where Maddie had drawn the heavy padlock on the inside of the door that didn’t exist in our house at all.
Mr. Patel slid a small white tissue across the table toward me, but I didn’t pick it up.
He said, We called the sheriff’s department ten minutes ago, Mrs. Vargas. They’re already on their way to your sister’s place.
I just sat there staring at the little red truck in the drawing, realizing for the first time why Maddie had so much blue under her fingernails and why she never, not once, cried when I came home late from the pharmacy.
