I sit with what just happened for a moment. I said yes because Opal wanted me there. That’s the complete reason. I said yes because she looked at me and asked, and I wanted to say yes.
Because I knew it would make her happy.
Tuesday evening is mild and clear, the kind of night that makes the city feel like a set design for something pleasant. Lena is in a dark green dress that does something wicked to my ability to concentrate, and Opal is in her good shoes she saves for special nights.
The school smells like industrial cleaner, crayon wax, and the staleness of a building that contains several hundred children for six hours a day and has absorbed it over many years. The hallways are lined with artwork—laminated drawings, watercolor paintings, and collages that range from the impressively representational to the gloriously abstract. In an art gallery, the latter would pull in thousands of dollars.
Opal yanks me by the hand from piece to piece and tells me which ones are hers, which ones are Bea’s, and which ones belong to a boy named Marcus. He draws rockets very accurately because his dad works at an aeronautics company.
I’ve never been to anything like this. I’m aware of this in the anthropological sense that I’m sometimes aware of ordinary things I’ve missed. It’s the way someone might notice they’ve never been to a county fair or a Fourth of July parade, things that exist in the general background of a normal life that mine has not been.
I follow Opal through the corridor, let her narrate, and try to calibrate my responses to the appropriate register, which I estimate to be somewhere between genuinely interested and not alarmingly so. Don’t want to give the other adults the impression that I’m with this little girl for nefarious purposes.
I’m used to being assessed with those eyes. The ones who expect the worst from me at all times.
But no one here seems to think anything of the fact that I, Dario Spinelli, am here with a little girl I am not related to. That I’m examining children’s art with a careful eye. That I’m not hunting someone here.
These people don’t know me. That’s probably why they’re not glaring.
Lena appears at my elbow at some point and says, quietly and without looking at me, “You’re doing fine.”
I didn’t ask. She knew anyway. She always does.
Opal’s classroom is at the end of the second-floor hall, decorated for the occasion with additional artwork and a small table ofbaked goods that Opal steers us to before we’ve even located her teacher. She selects a brownie with the seriousness of a sommelier and hands me one without asking if I want it.
It’s very sweet and not particularly good, and I eat the whole thing.
Her teacher is a young woman named Ms. Callahan. She’s too chirpy. She is fundamentally cheerful energy personified. She shakes my hand and tells me Opal is one of her most creative students and also one of the most emphatic. A diplomatic way of saying Opal has a lot of opinions.
“We know,” Lena says, with a smile that she’s wearing for the teacher but that reaches me at a different frequency. She’s mildly annoyed. But if I didn’t know her, I’d never see it.
The portfolio is on a small table at the back of the room, labeled with Opal’s name in her handwriting—large, careful, still learning the loops. Inside are drawings, small written assignments, a smattering of doodles, and a page of arithmetic done in pencil with the corrections in a different color. In the middle of the portfolio, on a page she’s decorated with a border of stars, is a drawing of the apartment.
She’s drawn the living room, identifiable by the couch and the bookshelves. Three figures. One small one on the couch—Opal, I can tell because she’s drawn herself with her pencils in her lap. One on the couch next to her, honey-blonde hair, which is Lena. And one in the armchair by the window: tall, dark-haired, a book in his hands.
Under the drawing, in her careful handwriting:My family.
My family. I am in her picture of her family.
I’m vaguely dizzy.
She drew me in the armchair with a book, which is where I sit when I’m in the living room in the evenings, which apparently she noticed and thought worth including in the picture of her family.
Something in my ribs pulses hard.
Lena, standing beside me, goes quiet. I can feel her reading the drawing and reading me reading it, and I don’t look at her because I’m not sure what’s on my face right now, and I need another moment before I’m willing to find out.
Opal appears at my elbow and takes my hand. “That’s you,” she says, pointing to the tall figure in the armchair, in case I missed it.
“I see that.” My voice comes out even, much to my surprise.
“You always have a book, so I put a book.” She considers the drawing for a moment, critically. “I was going to put your doctor bag, but it didn’t fit.”
“The book is better. Good call.”
She squeezes my hand once and then releases it to go find Bea, who has arrived with her parents across the room. I watch her go. This five-year-old has decided, without asking anyone’s permission, that I am part of her family. She stands across a classroom next to her best friend and grabs her arm and starts talking immediately. Happy as she can be. Healthy, thanks to me.
I said yes because she wanted me here. And standing here with a mediocre brownie in my stomach and a child’s drawing in my hands, I understand that was the right answer.
