Page 81 of The CEO and the Mountain Man

He took a deep breath, letting it out as he handed me his phone.

I shared a glance with Beau, who sent me an encouraging nod as he gripped River’s shoulder. He was here for both of us.

I turned the phone over.

The first piece took my breath away.

It was a picture taken of a page in a thick, spiral-bound sketchbook.

At first glance, it looked like a bunch of angry strokes of nearly black charcoal on white paper. So much charcoal that the high-quality paper curled up at the edges.

The strokes, however, had a sense of direction. I followed the flow of the charcoal to a spot of negative space in the lower right-hand corner of the piece. There, doubled over in agony, was a rough sketch of a person. Being attacked by the dark on all sides.

“If it’s?—”

“It’s not too much, Riv.” I gestured to my tears. “Good art moves you.”

He seemed to accept that, and I scrolled to the next one. Another snapshot of his sketchbook, this page another depiction of the darkness that was attacking my son. This time it seemed to pull him under, as if into a deep, dark sea.

I almost couldn’t breathe.

I thought I knew. I mean … the black clothing, the endless tears…I thought I knew.

And yet my son, my precious, precious boy, had depths that even I hadn’t yet touched. That he’d wanted to shield me from his pain… I?—

I was glad we both had therapists on speed dial.

I felt like such a bumbling fool, dragging him out to Colorado, trying to fix a thing so dark and vast…

This isn’t about you.

I kept scrolling.

As I flipped through the pictures, though, two things were happening at the same time. The artwork itself improved from piece to piece, almost from the beginning. Rough, angry, hurt sketches slowly gave way to precision. Secondly, and much more slowly, the darkness began to lighten.

The character in his pieces, still little more than a rough sketch, began to stand up to the darkness. Eventually, the darkness receded. I realized, belatedly, that in each piece was a hidden date. Like a grief-stricken ‘Where’s Waldo’ with numbers. I scrolled back, finding and putting together the dates with the various, usually awful milestones.

The day he got home from the hospital.

His first day of physical therapy.

His last day of physical therapy.

The day he took the GED.

The rough character in his pieces became more refined until the sketches became recognizable as self-portraits. The portraits themselves morphed from pretty good to stunning in their detail.

Soon, I started showing up in his art. I gasped at the last piece, done only in charcoal, of my face. If you’d told me he’d taken a black-and-white photograph, I’d have believed you.

“Son, these are extraordinary. You are anextraordinaryartist.”

He lifted a shoulder. “I have a long way to go, but I’ve been following a bunch of charcoal artists online.”

I bit back the desire to once again beg him to reconsider art school. Instead, I asked, “What’s next?”

“Well,” he said, his voice shaky.

I grabbed the remote for the bed and adjusted it so that I was sitting up a bit more. Hoping he could see that if it was important to him, it was important to me.