I can’t sleep. All I can do is think about Everyday Magic and that it’s real. I want to shout about the magic, and jump on my bed, and run around and give it to everyone. But it’s past my bedtime, so I can’t.
Instead, I decide to get a drink of water.
As I creep past Mom’s room, I peek in her door and see her turning her cell phone over and over in her hands.
I push the door open a crack more. “You should call him.”
Mom drops the phone like it’s a billion degrees. “Oh, Katydid. You scared me.”
I lean my head against the doorway and say it again so she can’t pretend she didn’t hear. “You should call Dad.”
“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
When it was time for me to break my first board, Sensei wrapped my hand and fingers in tape and told me to visualize breaking the board over and over. And then to strike hard and fast, and most importantly, to trust that he would hold the board completely still for me. Sometimes talking with Mom about Dad is like breaking that first board all over again. And so I visualize and visualize. But a part of me can’t shake the feeling that she’s not holding the board perfectly still.
“What if he’s waiting?” I ask. “What if he just wants to know we want him home? What if he really needs some peanut-butter cookies?”
“Katydid.” Mom’s hair falls into her face. “He left us. Not the other way around.”
“But maybe he—”
“No.” Mom stands up and walks to the door. “Katydid, no. He asked us to leave him alone.”
But I know Dad wasn’t thinking about peanut-butter cookies when he told Mom that, or he would have made an exception.
When I go back to my room, I spot the Harrises’ orange cat prowling around our bushes. I watch him slink between shadows and light, his dusty orange fur against the gravel. My fingers itch for something warm and fuzzy to cuddle.
The first note of Pathétique crashes through the house. It sends a shaking through my body that makes my hands clench into fists. I throw open the window, lean my head outside and feel the cool breeze on my neck.
“Fred,” I call. “Here, kitty, kitty.” He jumps up onto my window ledge, purrs as I scratch behind his ears, and then hops down, disappearing back into the orchard.
I sit on my bed, my insides still filled with the shaking and the up-and-down motion of the piano music. There’s no way I can sleep through this. I grab a piece of paper and dump my box of colored pencils onto my bed. After scattering them around, I find the orange one, twirl it in my hands for a moment, and start drawing.
My hands don’t move like Jane’s. She makes it look easy. Like drawing is just a bunch of quick strokes and dashes that all of a sudden form into a picture of something. I can’t draw like that. I have to go slowly, carefully. I close my eyes and imagine Fred. The orange face and orange eyes. The way his ears flick at every noise.
I stop drawing to examine the face on the paper.
It looks pretty awful, but I keep going anyway. Maybe I just need to color it in. First the bright orange like a sunset. Then the yellowish stripes.
I stop.
It’s not quite right.
Maybe some red. I add red around the yellow stripes.
Now it looks even worse.
I groan and pick up the whole piece of paper, ready to throw it away. But then a thought pops into my head. What would Jane do with this picture? It’s not hard to come up with an answer. I pull out each colored pencil and add more stripes. Blue stripes, pink stripes, purple stripes, until my picture is no longer of an orange tabby cat, but a rainbow cat. The kind of cat Jane would love.
I gently fold it up and put it in my backpack just as Mom plays the last notes of Pathétique.
Dear Dad,
Sometimes I wonder why we say you’re the one with depression when Mom and I are the ones being flattened into the ground.
Kate