“There’s a big difference between being fine and being well, Emma.” Dr Foster leaned her chin on her fist and spoke softly. “Everyone wants you to be well, happy, and healthy, just remember that. Especially Aiden.” She got to her feet with a deep groan, rubbing her knees. “These old bones. The cold sets in these days. Just you wait.” She winked at me. “And how are we getting on over here, Aiden? What have you drawn for me?”
Aiden lifted his picture and I broke out into a smile. Just the fact that my son had held up his own artwork was enough to make me feel joy. But Dr Foster wasn’t smiling at all. I got up from my seat, cradling my belly, and made my way over to the other side of the room. It was there that I saw what Aiden had drawn.
Like his first piece of art, there was no shape, only chaos. This time he’d chosen two red crayons to complete his piece. The red crayon lines spread from one side of the page to the other, like his first drawing in the hospital. But there was one difference to this piece. In the centre of the picture, Aiden had drawn a set of white, sharp teeth. They were open wide, ready to chomp down on its prey. My first instinct was to snatch the drawing out of his hands, screw it up and throw it away. But I didn’t. I nodded and I smiled, but all the time I felt as though ants were crawling over my skin.
18
I left Aiden’s distressing art with Dr Foster, uneasy about letting anything that sinister into my home. But, as she’d informed me on the way out of her office, Aiden needed some way to express himself. While he was unable to do so verbally, he needed another outlet. Drawing would be excellent therapy for him. Back in the car, before we set off, I leaned against the steering wheel to compose myself. I knew what I had to do, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it.
“Okay, Aiden. Let’s get you home.”
We managed to avoid the reporters on our way into the house, and after we’d had a lunch of ham salad sandwiches—I was taking Jake’s advice about eating healthily—I sucked in a deep breath and opened the garage door.
There was a reason why our car was always parked outside the house on the drive. It wasn’t that we didn’t use the garage, it was that the car wouldn’t fit. Rob was right about the house being absent of colour, and that was because all the colour had been left in the garage. This was where we created. This was our artistic home.
I flicked on the switch and it all came to life.
“It’s okay, Aiden, you can come in. It’s all safe.” I wanted to open the front to the garage to let in the sunlight, but I was all too aware of the reporters still hanging around our house. We had to make do with the light from the kitchen doorway. “I want to show you something.”
The walls were lined with canvasses. Most of the paintings were mine, created after the flood and spanning up to a few years ago when I finally let go and accepted Aiden’s ‘death’. After a deep breath, I held Aiden’s hand and walked him around the garage. It was strange to hold his hand now. It was so much bigger than the hand I’d held ten years ago. Though he appeared so much younger than the young men at school, I had to remember that he was a teenager now. He was almost an adult.
“This is you and me,” I said, pointing to a portrait of a young girl with big eyes holding a tiny baby in her arms. “I was scared when you arrived, but I loved you so much that it didn’t matter. This is you in your Superman cape.” I grinned. I’d painted it from memory six months after Aiden’s disappearance. There was something painful in the reds and the aggressive brush strokes, but I’d captured Aiden’s cheeky face perfectly. Then, I moved onto another portrait and the smile faded. “This is a difficult one. I was in a bad place back then. I missed you so much that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt useless.” It was a zoomed in portrait of my own face. I was snarling. My eyes were sunken. My skin was red and patchy. There were dark, bruised marks above my cheekbones. This was from a year after the flood. I was angry.