The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(10)

But then, Annabel.

As storm winds howled outside, Dorothy took a plush bath towel that was hanging from a bedpost. She dried her hair and wiped mascara from her cheeks as she watched her daughter draw. Even when Annabel strayed from the lesson plan, for instance, creating a bird when the program asked for a cactus flower, the digital art instructor clapped her hands and said, “?Excelente! Eres una gran artista.”

“Good job, Baby-bel,” Dorothy added.

“Ah-ma!” Annabel shouted. She jumped up and ran into Dorothy’s arms.

Dorothy smelled the familiar lilac shampoo in her daughter’s hair, felt the softness of her warm cheeks as she kissed them again and again. As she held her daughter, Dorothy felt an updraft and downdraft of emotion at the same time, a swirling tornado of happiness and guilt. Happiness and elation from seeing Annabel’s sweet, innocent face, and spiraling guilt and shame for having thought, even for a moment, that she could hurt herself and leave her daughter without a mother.

“Sit, Ah-ma, sit,” Annabel pleaded, tugging her mother’s arm with both hands. Then she tapped the screen and called up a gallery of drawings, swiping through them. “Look, Ah-ma. I drew them all for you.”

“For me?” Dorothy asked as she tried to appraise the drawings one by one. “Slow down, Baby-bel.” If a voice could smile, hers would be beaming with parental praise. “Are these all yours?” Dorothy couldn’t help but notice how Annabel ignored all the tracing assignments and created her own artwork instead.

That’s my girl.

Annabel nodded vigorously, the pride on her cherubic face mimicking that of her digital instructor. Then the program and Annabel both crossed their arms and said in unison, “Un artista debe ser un inconformista.”

The program tipped her head in a moment of stern confirmation.

Dorothy caught herself nodding in return as though the program were a real person, the two of them quietly acknowledging Annabel’s nonconformity. Dorothy remembered being forced to write metrical poetry in college and how she too refused to comply. The free-verse poems she wrote instead earned her a D from her professor, but were among the first Dorothy had ever published, many of which were still in print.

Besides, a lesson plan for toddlers is like a swimming plan for cats.

Annabel swiped back and forth through her drawings and Dorothy could see the faint guidelines of a house, a tree, a simple mountain with clouds—the images that children were supposed to follow—but Annabel’s were different. She’d ignored the outlines and instead had drawn a face that looked like a monkey, a strange shape that looked like either a tobacco pipe or maybe a fat golf club, and a ship at sea.

“These are wonderful,” Dorothy gushed. “I wish I could draw as well as you. At your age, I was finger-painting all the colors of the rainbow into a muddy mess.”

“I remember their stories, too,” Annabel said as her smile vanished.

“Really?” Dorothy flipped through the drawings, then pointed at two figures on the ship. “Who is this? Is this Mommy and Daddy?”

Annabel shook her head. “That’s me. And a boy. A very sick boy.”

Storyteller, indeed. Dorothy stared at the drawings. She looked at the strange shape, the one she couldn’t quite figure out. “And what’s this?”

Dorothy watched as her daughter pressed her palm to the screen, which flashed twice, allowing Annabel to continue working on the drawing.

“This is an unfinished obra maestra,” the program scolded in Spanglish. “You interrupted her before mi estrella could finish her masterpiece.”

Dorothy ignored the program. She felt spellbound as she watched Annabel add two vertical triangles to her drawing, long and slender, top and bottom. As her daughter worked furiously, Dorothy was reminded of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and how he wrote his classic poem “Kubla Khan” in an opium-induced delirium, but his flow had been interrupted and the poem was never finished. Legend had it that Coleridge fell asleep atop a book called Purchase His Pilgrimage, a tome that chronicled his travel to faraway places. Dorothy felt in strange communion with Coleridge, especially since last month she’d exhausted the capacity of her longtime therapist, who recommended Dorothy for some kind of new, bleeding-edge epigenetic treatment.

While Annabel continued drawing, Dorothy watched the golf-club pipe-thing transform into something else. Something familiar. Something she herself drew as a toddler, almost obsessively. So much that Dorothy’s teacher had been concerned, thinking she had OCD or was somewhere on the autism spectrum. But that was years ago and Dorothy never kept those drawings, let alone shared them with Annabel.

“Ahhh,” the program said. “Very nice. It’s un avión.”

“It’s not an airplane,” Annabel said and pointed to the mouth and jagged teeth. “It’s a sky tiger. Or maybe a flying shark.”

Annabel added a figure of a man on top.

Dorothy froze, unblinking. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, goose pimples rising on her forearms. “Who’s the man riding the sky tiger?”

“Not a man. That’s the boy.”

“Boy?” Dorothy asked.

Annabel pointed. “That’s the boy who’s looking for me.”

Before Dorothy could ask her daughter more questions, the lights flickered once, twice, and then the entire building went dark.