The Dragon Mother Returns: Taking Back Everything That Belongs to My Daughter novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Sketchbook

The show was on Saturday afternoon, in a white gallery on Chapel Street in New Haven.

Every student had one wall.

Paisley had two.

Matthias stood in the doorway taking it in: wine in plastic cups, parents in good coats, students in black.

"Everyone is wearing black," he said. "Is somebody else dead?"

"It's an art show."

"Ah. So yes."

"Don't make a scene," I said.

He looked down at me. "Me?"

"Fine. I won't either."

Paisley's walls were at the back, under the best light.

DEEP WATER, said the vinyl letters. PAISLEY KEEL.

She was standing in front of them in a white dress, holding court for a ring of students and one older man with a gray ponytail, who I guessed was a professor.

My grandmother's emerald brooch was pinned at her shoulder.

She hadn't seen us.

I walked along her walls slowly, the way I'd walk through a hotel I was thinking of buying.

Twelve drawings.

The humpback, rolling.

The right whale's tail.

A minke calf under a dock.

A sperm whale diving, drawn from underneath, the light coming down through the water in long charcoal strokes.

I knew every one of them.

I had seen most of them on my kitchen table, upside down, while I was on the phone.

Since she was ten, Clara has hidden her initials in every drawing she makes. Tiny. In a barnacle, a wave, a fold of a sleeve. A game we used to play on the rare Sunday I was home. Find the C.O.

I found it in the humpback's flipper.

I found it in the bubbles behind the calf.

I found it in the tail, on the fourth barnacle from the left.

At the end of the second wall hung the last drawing.

A woman walking away across a tarmac in a black coat, small, from behind.

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