Was I ready to see the whole picture?
Hesitantly, I reached into the bag and pulled out a stack of sketchbooks. The pages were old and frayed around the edges. I took a deep breath and drew back the cover on the top book. The pencil lines were smudged from having been compressed, but the shape they made was unmistakably that of a sleeping child.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“It’s you.”
I turned the page. There I was around the age of two in duck-themed pajama bottoms, then again, clutching a stuffed clown fish. Me wrapped in moon-and-star sheets with one foot off the mattress, my head just south of the pillow.
I closed the first sketchbook and moved on to the next. It was the same thing. Sketch after sketch of me asleep, first in my old twin bed, then in what appeared to be my father’s bed, from the time I was little to around the age of eleven.
“Mason drew these?”
My mother nodded.
I watched myself grow up across the pages, saw my limbs lengthen and my hair darken, my face and figure sharpen. Back then, my father couldn’t afford the most spacious living arrangements, so he would crash on the couch and let me sleep in his bed. He would've had to have been slipping into his room to draw me every weekend, quiet as a ghost, for over a decade to capture this progression.
“I knew you were sitting for him during the day,” my mother said, wringing her hands like she was trying to squeeze the blood from them. “I thought that was the extent of it. Then I found a sketchbook in the trunk of his car—he’d let me borrow it while mine was in the shop. I saw that he’d been drawing you in your sleep. The thought of him sitting there, watching you in the dark while you were helpless made me...uncomfortable, to say the least.”
The bottom sketchbook was only halfway full. I recognized the pajamas I was wearing in the first drawing from the year I’d turned twelve—the same year Mason had left without so much as a Catch you later.
“I asked Mason how long he’d been drawing you at night,” she said. “He told me not long, a few months. I said I didn’t want it to happen again, and he assured me it wouldn’t. A few weeks later, I stopped over at his place to pick something up and I found these. He’d lied to me.”
I flipped to the very last drawing: me on my stomach with my arm dangling off the edge of the bed and my hair fanned out across the pillow. Obviously, my father had been coming in to draw me a lot longer than just a few months. But surely that wasn’t enough of a reason to banish him forever.
“That’s it? He lied to you about drawing me?”
“It was enough.”
I squinted at the pages in front of me. “I don’t understand.”
My mother closed her eyes and pressed three fingers to her lips. She looked fragile, more so than usual, like she’d shatter if I tried to pick her up.
“I didn’t grow up like most people, Jett. My parents were wealthy—and I don’t just mean they were rich. I mean we had old money. Our house was a historic Victorian mansion sitting on hundreds of acres of untouched land that’d been handed down for generations. We had a name that meant something to the town we lived in.”
She pressed a hand to her stomach, then took another bite of granola bar, chewed and swallowed.
“My mother homeschooled me for ten years,” she continued. “After she got sick, my father hired tutors, music teachers. I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t a relative or an employee the entire time I lived there, and I only left the property once when my appendix burst.”
I stood with my mouth hanging open. I’d never heard the story of my mother’s upbringing, and hearing it now, I could hardly wrap my brain around the strangeness of it.
“My father let most of the staff go after my mother died. The place became a tomb. The housekeeper could hardly keep up, so she closed off the parts of the house that no one used. I used to sneak into the old drawing room to get away from—”
She closed her eyes.
“To get away from what?” I asked after a long stretch of silence.
“Our groundskeeper demanded my father let him hire an assistant to help with the mowing. That’s when Mason came to live with us, in the groundskeeper’s cottage. He was nineteen. I was fifteen. He was the only person remotely close to my age I’d ever met besides my cousins, and we hardly ever saw them.”
My mother began to pace, scuffing her boots with each sharp turn. She looked deep in thought, like she’d fallen down a rabbit hole inside herself. The next time she spoke, it was like a levee had burst, and the only way out was through her mouth.
“We were broken people, Mason and me. His mother had given him up for adoption, and the foster-care system hadn’t done him much better. Of course, my father forbade him to speak to me. That lasted all of a week. We began seeing each other in secret. Then I got pregnant.”
My whole body went taut. Pregnant?
“Mom, are you saying...”
“I couldn’t raise a child in that house,” she continued, ignoring me. “I knew we had to leave. I told Mason my father would kill us both if he found out we’d been sleeping together, so we made a plan to run away. We left the day after my sixteenth birthday.”