Kyra heard her
mother come home and felt comforted for a moment, and then she remembered the
sketchbook on the end of her bed that she had been trying to avoid all night.
She told herself that she had forgotten to put it away this morning but after
the sudden feeling of unease when she looked at her last sketches came over
her, she put the book down and left the room.
She gave it only a
passing glance now as she shifted her eyes over to the antique dresser drawer
where she usually kept it. The dresser had 5 drawers, 3 long on the bottom with
2 shorter drawers on top. With its antique yellow colour, each corner of the
drawer faces had black leaves attached to each other by an aged, frayed golden cord
that was used to pull them open. The top left drawer was where her sketchbook
was kept unless she was using it. Drawing had been something that her father
had gotten her into at a young age. He fed off of her excitement when he would
bring her home more art supplies. When he brought her felts she almost floated
to the ceiling. Kyra had tried painting but that had been a bust as she
couldn’t grasp blending the liquid colours in a way that would make a pretty
picture the way they were supposed to. Now she loved charcoal.
From her spot on
the floor where she sat with her back against the door she could see the first sketch
she ever did of her dad ripped from the first sketchbook he gave her. He gave
her a new one every year that was bound in leather so that she only put her
most perfect drawings in those ones while she would practice in the ordinary
cardboard covered ones. She was on her 4th book now. She had taken
the picture that she had drawn of him feeling so proud and happy with her work
and taped up above her head on the wall above her bed so she could see him
always before she slept. All of the lines were squiggly and dramatic as she
tried to show him how good of an artist she was at nine…she wasn’t that good then
but he smiled and was enthusiastic about the job she had done. After that she
practiced all of the time. All she would do was draw for hours and hours Practice
made her better and now Kyra Dune could not remember a time when she didn’t
draw.
She leaned forward so she
could unfold her legs from underneath her to stand. They were numb from sitting
on them for so long and pins and needles started to form as soon as she
uncrossed them. She thought about her mother downstairs.
‘I should talk to her’ she thought ‘talk
to her and tell her how much I miss daddy’.
Kyra hadn’t spoken
since just after her father’s funeral where she told Savannah to sit up
straight and take the hair out of her mouth at St. Paul’s, sitting right up
front with her mother and Cyrus. It wasn’t a big church but it fit the few
friends and family that had attended.
Even her Great
Uncle Dominic had come surrounded by men as he always was. She remembered
seeing one or two of them before when she visited the pawn shop he owned on the
other side of town. The tall red-blonde haired one whose voice never rose above
a whisper any time she had seen him had leaned in and said something in her
Uncles ear. She noticed that his eyes never stopped moving around the room no
matter what he was doing.
The funeral seemed
to take forever for Kyra that day. All of the endless ‘I’m sorry’s’ and
condolences lost their feeling after she had watched them lower her father’s
casket into the ground. That was when the talking stopped and the silent tears
began. Her mother’s knees buckling as Cyrus held her against him. Savannah
sitting in the grass getting her dress dirty while she looked for a 4 leaf
clover, the white calla lilies resting on the top of the big box her father’s
lifeless body was in. There was no viewing and that was good because Kyra
didn’t want to see that. Everything was too painful to talk about so she just
stopped trying to get the words out at all.
Now she wished she
could say something…anything… that would make her mother happy, but when Kyra
opened her mouth and tried to form the words nothing would come out. She wanted
so badly to tell her that she loved her and she tried over and over again when
Skye would ask her questions but she just couldn’t get her voice box to work.
The disappointment
she saw on her mother’s face at those times broke her heart and Kyra felt
powerless against her body when she tried, so most times she gave up on the
effort. She gave up drawing
because she would hear its voice in her head. A stern voice, an awful one telling
her that she was not to say a word. It was a dark presence for her and at first
she thought it was her father’s voice in her head and the happiness bloomed in
her so fiercely that she thought it was a sign of something good. In the
beginning it was soothing to her but as time went on it changed into something
sinister and dark that crept in and scared her.
Kyra knew she
needed to tell her mother. ‘Write it down!’
her brain would scream at her and she would pick up a pencil but the words
never appeared. What would she say? They would think she was sick or crazy,
that’s what the voice would tell her. “They
will lock you away and never come back.” It would say “You and I together…forever.” There was no way she was going to let
that happen so she could only draw and didn’t want to anymore. It wanted her to
draw too.
He would just come closer.
She didn’t know how long she was staring at the
sketchbook from across the room, her feet dragged her forward to the bed once
she got there through no will of her own she leaned over and her fingers brushed
the leather cover. It felt cold and distant not full of the joy and warmth that
it used to hold for her most of all the comfort. She decided not to dawdle
about it, picked it up and crossed the room to her dresser where she yanked the
draw open and dumped it in on top of the her other drawing tools.
She wished her mother was here. She wished her father was here.
Kyra looked in the mirror and started to cry.
