This Is How It Always Is(24)

“Speaking of dancing, isn’t he sweet?” The principal nodded toward Claude and his knight errant. “Your youngest grooving with his robot.”

“First love,” said Penn. “Breaks your heart. Every time.”

“What’s he dressed up as? An engineer? An inventor?”

“Honestly?” said Penn. “He’s not dressed up as anything.” That crisp fall afternoon—not too cold, still bright, the air sweet with cookies and cider and leaves about to die—was very nearly the last time that was true.

“Is he doing okay?” said the principal. “Is he happy?”

Penn’s first concern. He tore his eyes from Claude to look over at the principal. “I think so?”

“I’m not so sure,” Dwight said gently.

“Is he … acting out? Falling behind?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. He’s smart. He’s bright. He’s well behaved. He’s a good little student.”

“But?”

“But for a five-year-old, he’s awfully quiet.”

“Sensitive?”

“Yeah, maybe. But he doesn’t seem to have many friends.”

“Shy?”

“Yeah, maybe. But his pictures give us pause. He does not draw himself as we would expect from such a bright child.”

“Lacks artistic talent?”

“Yeah, maybe, but he’s just fashioned a larger-than-life robot out of cardboard, tinfoil, and a balloon.”

“It’s a knight,” said Penn. “And I love it, but I don’t think it bespeaks artistic ability. Maybe the kid just can’t draw.”

“Maybe,” said the principal, “but I’d bet not.”

“What would you bet?”

“You’ll tell me, Penn. Whenever you and Rosie figure it out. Whenever Claude figures it out. Whatever it turns out your boys need, you know you have only to let me know. And maybe everything’s fine. Really. But, well, there are some warning signs. It’s good to start thinking about these things early.”

As far as things that went bump in the night, this was the scariest thing that had ever happened to Penn on Halloween.

Homeworking was suspended for the holiday. Snack was deemed redundant given the number of bat brownies and pumpkin bars consumed. There was halfhearted dinner. There was full-hearted trick-or-treating. There was an even-more-protracted-than-usual-owing-to-the-amount-of-sugar-ingested bedtime. Rosie came home, finally, exhausted. Penn wiped peanut-butter-cup remnants from his lips and handed her a folder.

“What’s this?”

“Claude’s artwork from the last year or so.”

“They gave it to you at school?”

“Some of it. Some of it I found in his room. Some of it was just lying around the house. I’d never really looked at more than one at a time before.”

She held the folder and she held his gaze, and neither said anything. She searched his eyes for something definitive—it’s really bad or we’re in real trouble or it’ll be okay—and finding none of the above, decided maybe it would be good news and took it. “Can I have dinner first?”

He handed the aluminum-foiled pumpkin over to her and went to heat leftovers. She tore apart an irritatingly small bag of M&M’s and opened the folder.

She smiled at what she found inside. Dozens of pictures. In crayon, in washable marker, a few all in green colored pencil. People with no noses but big eyes and big smiles. People whose hair was taller than the rest of them. Dogs with huge, toothy grins. Navy skies that took up no more than the top inch of the page. Penn came in with warmed-up pasta topped with butter and sliced hot dogs. She could think of nothing she’d rather eat.

She smiled at Penn. “I love them.”

“The pictures?”

“I’m so relieved. When you gave them to me, I thought … He’s no great artist maybe, but he has other talents. And he’s only five. I love his whimsy. I love the way he sees the world.”

“How about the way he sees himself?”

“What do you mean?”

Penn nodded at the pile of drawings. “Look.”

She looked through and found Claude in each one. He was wearing a dress. He was wearing a ball gown and four-inch heels. He had long brown hair or long blond hair or long purple hair or long rainbow hair. Sometimes he had a tail like a mermaid. Sometimes he had a silver necklace like his mother’s. That’s not what worried Penn, though, who’d ordered them carefully so Rosie could see the progression. In each picture, Claude seemed to be shrinking. He had a big family, yes, so it was hard to fit everyone on the page, and he was the littlest of them, true, but Claude got smaller and smaller. He was smaller than the smiling dog. He was smaller than the stemless flowers. In one, he had wings and was flying in the sky, and he was smaller than the clouds. In another, he was lying in the garden loomed over by a snail. In some, Rosie couldn’t even find him. She had to play Where’s Waldo until she located tiny Claude, half a centimeter high, behind the chimney of a house or in the corner of the chimp enclosure at the zoo. Or everyone in his giant family—including Jupiter, including the butterflies, including the house itself—had giant smiles, but Claude’s frown was so pronounced it dipped over the edges of his chin like a handlebar mustache. Or everyone else was in full color, and Claude had drawn himself in gray or once, worse, white on white. Or everyone was in clothes—hats, scarfs, sweaters, costumes, bathing suits, party dresses, and Claude was wearing nothing, not naked, just a stick figure, just an outline, just a sketch. And then, soon, Claude was nowhere. Rosie Where’s-Waldo-ed for fifteen minutes and failed to find him at all.