She had become aware that a man sitting a few feet away from her was sketching her brother—or possibly pretending. She couldn’t see the paper. It was well into April, but the day was cloudy and bitter, so there weren’t many children or mothers around. Tommy had been drilled by her parents on the necessary suspicion of strangers, no matter how nice they seemed (especially if they seemed too nice), and already (if only because the man had a ponytail, a silver bracelet, and wore a girlish paisley jacket she might have liked to own herself) she had assessed this one as a possible pervert. She didn’t feel unsafe—the playground was a fishbowl, surrounded by sidewalks and traffic—but she was on alert.
She slumped back and raised her eyes to the branches that crisscrossed overhead. Their tiny budlets had sprung forth just this week; furtively glancing sideways, she saw how the limey glow tinted the man’s blond hair ever so slightly green. He had a squarish little beard to match. The word beatnik drifted through her mind. She’d heard her father say, to one of his musician friends, that the era of the beatnik was over. He sounded sad.
She nearly slipped off the bench when the bearded man spoke.
“Looks like you’re avoiding something.” He did not look up from his drawing, but he was speaking unmistakably to her. They were the only people on the bench.
“Excuse me?” she said, because pervs could not be ignored.
“The book in your lap,” he said. Now he laid his sketch pad aside, between them, and Tommy could see that the drawing was a good one, even upside down.
“I’ll get to it,” she said, using her oldest voice.
“I don’t mean to be nosy,” he said, “but I saw your name. It’s the same as the last name of some famous authors. Who wrote a book about Greek myths.”
Tommy knew it was time to go. It gave her the willies that he was looking at her name on the cover of her workbook. She would have to drag Dani off the slide and bribe him to go back home or he would protest; they’d hardly been there fifteen minutes. Dani knew how to make a scene like nobody else. She would have to use her allowance to buy them a Sky Bar or a jumbo Tootsie Roll. But because she hated the man’s condescension, she answered him. “I have that book. Everybody I know has it. The name is different. It has an apostrophe and an e at the end.” Decisively, she put her workbook into her book bag.
The man laughed softly. “So it does.”
She stood and called out, “Dani, let’s go! It’s too cold.” She pulled down her skirt, conscious of her yellow tights. Her father was always saying her skirts were too short, her mother telling him not to “die on that hill,” an expression that Tommy found ominous. It sounded like war talk, like something her social studies teacher would mention when he talked about Vietnam during current events.
Predictably, Dani ignored her, not even pausing in his ascent to the top of the slide. He sat, stretched his arms out wide, and pushed off.
“Your brother?”
Tommy struggled not to answer the man. This did not deter him.
“He’s quite nimble. And fearless.”
“Dani!” she called. “I’ll buy us something chocolate!” She wondered if the man would now offer to buy them both chocolate: the classic lure. If he did, should she go to the package store across the street and ask the man at the counter to call the police?
“People who aren’t parents or guardians aren’t supposed to be here. There’s a sign on the gate,” she said. Better to warn him off directly.
“Who says I’m not a parent?”
Maybe he was a perv, but he also had the look of one of her father’s artistic friends, the people he jammed with on Saturday nights: from the peace-sign patch sewn onto his jacket to the black high-top sneakers. Were the paint stains on his ragged jeans for real, or were they a ruse?
“Where’s your kid then?” She felt her own pulse, hot in her throat.
He smiled steadily at her, but he raised his hands in surrender. She noticed how smudged they were with pencil and ink. “Well, you caught me there, my friend. I come here just to draw. I’ve seen you and your brother before.”
Enough. Tommy walked over to the slide. “Hey. Come on. Really. You can choose the candy.” Finally, she had her brother’s attention. She was thankful when he took her hand and let her lead him toward the gate.
“But I get two and you get one,” he said. “Or I get the big half.”
It took an enormous effort not to look at the stranger again as they left the playground. He remained on the bench, but she could feel his eyes following her, along with his amusement, as she latched the gate. She could tell he knew exactly what she was thinking. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
The next day she made Dani go with her to the library, where, as he did too often, he angered the librarian: this time not by playing with the buttons on the elevator or racing up and down the aisles but by sneaking away while Tommy was hunting for a book, setting off a ruckus that was instantly identifiable as a cascade of volumes tumbling from their shelf.
The day after that, a day of buoyant warmth, she had no choice more logical than the playground. Dani found a schoolmate in the sandbox, and they set about digging a pit with the friend’s toy tractors. Tommy took from her book bag the one novel she had managed to check out of the library before they were given the boot: The Return of the Native, ostentatiously above her grade level. She settled onto the shadiest bench along the iron fence. Dani’s friend was with his mother, so she could immerse herself happily in the sure-to-be-tragic scene of Egdon Heath.
“Hello.”
The voice came from above and behind her, on the other side of the fence.
The man with the sketch pad.
She frowned and tried to resume reading.
“I brought you something—or, really, it’s for your brother.”
“We don’t want anything from you,” she said, without turning around again.
But he was slipping something through the rails of the fence, to her left: a book with a colorful jacket. Attempting to hide her curiosity, she took it. The title was The Boy Who Was Afraid of Being Afraid. The author’s name was Mort Lear.
“Would you let me come in without calling the cops on me?”
“Why should I?” But she twisted to face him.
“That’s my book. I mean, I wrote it.”
Tommy turned the book over; opened it. There was no photograph of the author. “How do I know that?”
“My word,” he said. “And this.” He extended his sketch pad through the fence. Hesitantly, she took it. At first she saw no sense to the gesture. And then she realized that he meant her to compare his sketches with the illustrations in the book.
The illustrations were, she had to admit, graceful and enticingly dark: not goofy or clunky like the condescending art in so many children’s books. She turned around and said, “I don’t know why you keep pestering me. I’m too old for this book anyway.”
“Well, first, Miss Daulair, the book is for your brother, not you. And my ‘pestering’ is also about your brother, not you. All I want is to draw him for a few days. Here. In the playground. Without your treating me like I’m a hoodlum.”
“Why does it have to be my brother?” she said. “Don’t you have friends with kids?” She barely held back from saying, Or maybe you don’t have friends.
“I like the look of your brother,” said the man who claimed to be Mort Lear. “Or what I mean is, I like the look of him for a new book I’m writing—and drawing.”
“Are you going to try and make him pose? Because good luck with that,” said Tommy. “He’s not going to do what some stranger tells him. Not even if I tell him.”