On the wall of an apartment in a city by the sea, far away from Cameron’s Creek, there hangs a picture. It is a portrait of a small boy in a Superman costume with his arms around an old red dog called Blue. The boy’s name is Perry Angel. His other mother looks at that picture every day.
It reminds her of the time she spent with Perry and his new family, the Silks. She remembers the art exhibition where she looked at Perry’s pictures of things she’d never seen before. She thinks of sipping tea poured from a teapot with a cracked spout, and of eating Armenian Love Cake under the boughs of the Cox’s Orange Pippin. She recalls a studio and the pictures on its walls; portraits of Annie’s children who had come from the quiet dark inside her; the children she had kept and the one she couldn’t and the empty space where Perry’s had hung, for just one night. Sunday Lee notices the way Annie’s brush has stroked the canvas and she understands that only love could make a picture like that. She also remembers the poem painted on the door of the house at the Kingdom of Silk and wishes she had known about it sooner. She is glad that Perry will grow up knowing the words of that poem, for she is certain Nell will teach him. And the last thing Sunday Lee remembers is the promise Annie and Ben made, that when Perry is old enough to understand, they will show him the photograph she has given them. The one she had kept in her wallet since she was sixteen years old. Then Perry will have a story of his own to tell and will know he has been held in his other mother’s arms.
