by Nancy Star
know which ones to throw back, which ones to drop into
the bucket that floated beside them.
After that haul, both of them had several false alarms,
pings that turned out to be knots of deteriorating plastic.
Pings that were broken shells. Pings that were clumps of
seaweed mixed with particles of crab.
Lane didn’t mind the false alarms. The sun was still
warm and the breeze was still cool and the basket was
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filling up and the family clamming in the distance was
sending out echoes of laughter that sounded like bells.
They were walking back to shore when Lane said,
“What a perfect day.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.
“I’m not used to days like this.” She hadn’t meant to say
that either. “I can’t remember how long it’s been since
I’ve relaxed.” She laughed and felt a hand on her shoulder.
When she turned, Nathan was staring at her. As if it
were happening without her will, she felt her chin rise
toward him. He blinked, surprised. His eyes, the color of
the sea, were not happy. It wasn’t going to be that kind
of a day.
That was a relief. She hadn’t wanted it to go that way.
But still, why sad? “What’s wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m not worth it.”
“Not worth what?” she asked. “Not worth being my
friend?” She didn’t want him think she thought the day
was anything more than that, two friends shopping for
dinner in the sea. She brightened her voice. “I think we
have enough for dinner, don’t you?”
Nathan peered into the bucket and counted. “I believe
we do.” He smiled. “Perfect number of clams. Perfect
day of clamming with a friend.” He held on to the end
of the lanyard attached to the basket and pulled it behind them as they walked to the shore.
Despite their attempts at reassuring each other that
friendship was all they were looking for, both of them
were silent as Nathan transferred the clams from the wire
basket into a cooler of ice in the car, silent on the drive home, silent as they carried the cooler inside, silent in
the kitchen as Nathan put the clams into a large bowl
and then poured in seawater from a container he’d filled
at the bay.
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“Now they have to soak,” he said. “Takes a few hours
to purge the grit.” He slid the bowl onto the bottom shelf of her refrigerator and closed the door. He looked at the
floor and then the ceiling and then met Lane’s eyes. “I’ve got to talk to you about something.”
“No you don’t. We had a lovely day. We have a lovely
friendship—”
“It’s not about that. There’s something I need to show
you. I’ll get it. It’s in my car.”
h h
h h
Nathan put the stack of papers he’d brought in from his
car on the kitchen table. They were drawings, she saw
when she looked closer. Henry’s drawings.
“Where did you find these?”
“Henry gave them to me. First he showed them to me.
Then after I looked at them and admired them, I asked if
he’d shown them to you. He said no, so—” He stopped
and quickly clarified, “He shook his head no, so I asked
if I could have them. I thought you should see them.
Maybe you think that was wrong. Dishonest. Taking
them so I could show you.” Lane didn’t know what to
think, yet. “They’re beautiful drawings,” Nathan said.
“But why I think you should see them is they tell a story.
Which I don’t understand.” He tapped a small figure in
the picture that was on top. “This is Henry, right? Curly
hair’s the giveaway.”
Lane moved closer. The figure was Henry. He was
standing beside a hole, holding a shovel. An upside-down
shovel. “Oh. Yes. At his father’s gravesite. Someone offered him the shovel. Someone I didn’t know. And Henry spun
around and buried his head in my coat.” Lane could feel
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the anger she hadn’t let herself feel that day because on
that day if she let herself feel anything, she would have
fallen apart and she’d needed to stay strong, for Henry.
She had no idea who it was who offered him the shovel.
She forgot about it almost immediately. She was good at
that, forgetting things.
But Henry hadn’t. He’d memorialized it in this draw-
ing, with changes. In the drawing he actually did take the shovel and then held it upside down so that it was raining dirt, small specks of dirt, a gentle rain of dirt, into the hole that was the grave where his father lay. Except—what
were those crossed-out lines in the grave?
“Oh.” She took a step back. The dirt was piled on
top of a head. Henry had drawn a rough sketch of his
father’s head; he drew it as if Aaron had been buried
standing straight up, the top of his head poking out of
the hole like a too tall Alice in Wonderland, stuck in a
tiny house.
“Oh,” she said a third time. She touched the eyes of
a person standing beside Henry. “That’s me.”
“Do you know who this is?” Nathan pointed to a
roughly sketched man standing in the distance, body
turned toward the grave, head facing front.
There wasn’t much detail on the face, but Lane saw
the pencil mark on the man’s cheek and knew, it was
Aaron; Henry had drawn his father as a guest at his own
funeral. “That’s Aaron. He had a dimple on his right
cheek. He used to tell Henry that was where was he
kept his personality. Then one day Henry asked why he
didn’t have a personality—since he didn’t have a dimple.
So Aaron told him his personality was in his curls.” Her
finger traced over Aaron’s face.
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“There’s two more,” Nathan said after a moment. He
slipped the drawing on top to the bottom of the pile, so
Lane could see the next one.
In the next drawing, the boy, Henry, was standing
beside a woman, Lane, on a small patch of grass under a
cluster of trees.
“That’s outside his old school,” Lane said. “Where
parents wait at dismissal time. He’s got the balloon.”
She’d forgotten about that, how his teacher had called
her to say the children voted on a going-away present for
Henry and a balloon won. Except the school had a rule
against balloons, because of a student in another grade
who had a latex allergy. “His teacher asked if I would
buy a balloon for the children to give to Henry outside
at pickup time. The children planned everything. Mainly
Milo. Henry’s best friend.” She stopped for a moment. It
seemed so far away, a time when Henry had a best friend
named Milo. A time when Aaron was alive and Henry
was still speaking. No one at that school had made a fuss
about his silence. Why had they moved? She looked back
at the drawing. “The kids were so sweet
that day. When
school got out, Milo raced over and took the balloon
from me and raced back to where Henry was standing
and presented it to him. And then all the children circled around Henry and started singing. It was a clapping song.”
She sang, remembering it, her voice quiet and slightly off key. “Goodbye old friend. Come back again. Goodbye
old friend, dear Henry.” She wiped at her eyes.
“So you see a happy moment?” He studied her face
as she nodded and then seemed to measure his words.
“Okay, well. What I see is this.” He put his finger on the string that came out of the balloon. “See where it goes?”
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Lane traced the string with her finger, starting at the
spot where it began at the bottom of the balloon high
above Henry’s head, and following it down to his hand,
to his torso, out the other side of his torso, into her. She placed her hand over her chest. “It goes into my heart.”
Nathan nodded. “Here’s the last one.”
She wiped at her eyes again and looked at the last
drawing, a jumble of scratchy lines.
“When I asked Henry if I could have the pictures,
he didn’t want to give me this one. So I told him it was
my favorite, that I loved the way it captured action. Like frames in an animated movie. He gave me the others and
kept this one, until the next day. It was almost like he
needed time to think about whether it was a good idea
to give this one to me.”
“He needed to dream on it,” Lane said.
Nathan didn’t ask what she meant. “I felt bad telling
him it was my favorite. I have a strict policy about lying.
I don’t lie. Been there. Done with that.”
“It’s okay,” Lane told him. “Not all lies are the same.
I’m an expert on lies. I became an expert for my column.
There’s a whole vocabulary about lying. What you did, that’s a noble lie.” Nathan looked dubious. “It is. A noble lie is when you tell a lie for a greater good. You told that lie to help Henry.” She looked back at the drawing. “I
don’t understand this.”
Nathan pointed to the figure farthest away from the
action. “That’s Henry.”
“Right. Standing on the doormat. In the hall, out-
side our apartment. In the city. And inside are…” She
counted. “Six people.”
“No. It’s two people. You have to look at this as three
panels of action with the same people in every panel.
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Same man—see how he’s wearing the same striped blue
shirt in every panel?—and same woman.”
Lane looked closer. Like the man, the woman wore
the same shirt in all three frames. A patterned shirt. “He took his time with this. All the little red boats. All the tiny white sails.” She looked at the man and took a sharp
breath when she noticed his mouth. His only feature
was a wide open mouth with sharp pointy teeth. “He’s
terrifying.” Her gaze returned to the boy. “Henry has
no mouth.”
“Henry is crossed out.”
How had she not noticed that? She took it in, the
monster man in her apartment, arm raised in every frame
except for the last frame where the woman was on the
floor, as if she’d just been hit. While Henry stood outside on the sisal doormat. Henry, intentionally crossed out
with a firm X. She looked at Nathan. “Aaron never hit me. He never threatened to hit me.”
“I don’t think she’s you.” He pointed to a figure she
hadn’t noticed. “I think that’s you.”
She looked at the figure she’d missed, a woman in
the upper-left corner of the page, far from the action. A
woman sitting at a desk. “Yes. That’s me. I’m working.
Henry’s in the hallway. Aaron’s in the apartment hit-
ting someone. Brielle? I feel sick.” She hurried to the
bathroom and closed the door and stood, hand against
the wall, waiting for her stomach to quiet. When it did,
she returned to the kitchen. “I have to tell Henry you
showed these to me.”
“Of course,” Nathan said.
“He might be angry that you showed them to me.”
“I know.” Nathan stood up. “I’m going off-island
tomorrow for a week. With luck, by the time I get back,
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he’ll be ready to forgive me. If not, that’s okay. You have to talk to him about this. It’s not a choice. If Henry’s upset I showed them to you, so be it. I’ll take one for the team.”
It was only after he left that Lane wondered, when
had they become a team?
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After Nathan came back with his favorite recipe for spa-
ghetti and clams, after they cooked and ate and talked
about their days, Sylvie retreated to a chair by the win-
dow to watch the darkening sky and Henry drew, with
Nathan doodling beside him, at the dining room table.
At the sink, as Lane scraped food off plates and scrubbed
the pots, her mind remained stuck on how best to ap-
proach Henry about the drawings temporarily hidden in
the top drawer of her bedroom dresser.
The problem was that when she had time to really
examine them, she thought they had the feel of dreams-
capes. The settings were real: gravesite, school-dismissal spot, hallway outside their apartment. But the rest, the
action, felt exaggerated, as if the drawings were render-
ings of dreams. Did she—did anyone?— have the right
to demand that Henry explain his dreams? Or did she
have an obligation to ask? Roxie had told people more
than once, When it comes to our children we can’t afford to take chances. But Lane now wondered, what if the opposite was true? What if her fretting was hurting Henry?
What if her taking a chance was what he needed? The
question felt urgent.
She stepped away from the sink and closing the door
gently behind her, went outside to the deck where she
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pressed Doctor Bruce’s number. A recording answered.
Doctor Bruce is unavailable. If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.
As she hung up she whispered, “You shouldn’t have
left us,” and then laughed that now, after months of hating him, she was finally missing Aaron. She knew exactly why.
Even when they were barely speaking, even when every-
thing he did was irritating, even when they disagreed on
minor details of child-rearing—should they or shouldn’t
they arrange for Henry to go on a late-over?—Aaron was
her partner. His love for Henry—and for her—had been
fierce. But okay, Aaron wasn’t here. Doctor Bruce wasn’t
here. She was on her own. As usual.
Except she wasn’t alone. She had Roxie. She was Roxie.
And she could hear Roxie now, telling her, You’ve got this.
You can navigate through this, for Henry. You always do. No matter how much doubt or fear or guilt or grief—yes, grief—you have, you find your way. Maybe you don’t always take the most direct route. Maybe you take jug handles and detours. But you get there. Because you’ve got a North Star and his name is Henry.
Follow that and your gut won’t let you
down. Now off you go.
h h
h h
Her first Tell Me That Story offering was about her af-
ternoon clamming expedition with Nathan.
“Yes,” Henry said. “I want that one. Tell me that story.”
She was careful to include lots of details about the
clamming part. How the bottom of the bay felt so sandy
and smooth. How she’d gripped the rake so hard she felt
the beginnings of blisters on her palm. How a shellfish
constable had sloshed over to check that they had their
license. Henry was particularly interested in that part, that 372
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they needed a license to get clams. She described what
the constable wore. “Rubber overalls that started on his
feet and went straight up, like boots that stretched from
his toes to his shoulders.”
Henry had laughed at that and then stopped. He
studied her face. “Did someone die?”
“What? No.”
“I can tell something bad happened. Because your Tell
Me That Story is about how you got clams for dinner
but your face is about, Something Bad happened. Maybe
something Super Worst Possible kind of bad. And your
teeth are making a noise. Are you Sad? I don’t want you
to be Sad.”
Now she could hear it too. She was making little
tapping noises, biting down on her teeth. He noticed
everything. “I’m not sad. I didn’t know I was tapping my
teeth.” She paused. “But it might be because…” Henry
closed his eyes. “Are you up for a talk right now? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, if you are.”
“Can I be up for a listen? With my eyes closed?” She
told him he could. He rolled away and turned on to his
side. “Okay. You can start now. I’m listening.”
When Lane imagined how this would go, she pictured
presenting the drawings to Henry, one at a time. It would
be much easier letting the drawings speak for themselves.
“You know what, buddy? I’m going to run to my room
for a second. There’s something I want to show you.
Okay?” She waited. “Henry?” No answer. “You awake?”
She stroked his curly hair and gently kissed his head, but he didn’t stir. He was asleep.
She quietly slipped out of the bed and went to her
room and took out the drawings and stared at them. It
felt to her as if Henry knew exactly what she wanted
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