My dad whistled. “Samantha the magnificent. I always knew you had magical powers.”
I felt my cheeks flush. That would definitely mess up dad’s painting. Hopefully, he was busy drawing my hands or something. “It’s not easy. It’s actually the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I can’t even begin to imagine anything more difficult than learning to read. But I totally love it. Arden used to read to me all the time when we were kids. Do you remember Arden?”
“The little girl with the long black pigtails who dressed in nothing but pink? How could I forget her?”
“No, that was Gabby. Arden has honey-colored hair. She got braces in junior high, but back in elementary school, she had a huge gap between her front teeth.”
“Oh yeah, I remember her. She was always reading. It was very intimidating.”
I didn’t understand my father. There was nothing even remotely intimidating about Arden. “That’s Arden, all right. She’s always reading. She used to read to me all the time. After you and Mom got divorced, I started going to her house every day after school. All she ever wanted to do was read, and I somehow conned her into always reading out loud. I loved the stories she’d read me.
“For a long time, I tried to convince myself that I only liked Arden, not the books. And I do like Arden — she’s the closest friend I’ve ever had, probably ever will have. But God, I loved those books. It’s still really hard for me, but the more I push myself, the better I get. I’m learning how to read. And I finally know I can live without Arden, without headphones, and someday I’m going to get to the point where I can read all those books myself.”
“My daughter is a superhero.” There was a strain in my dad’s voice. He wasn’t crying, but only because he was holding himself back. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Thanks.” I blinked my eyes. If I started tearing up, it would totally destroy Dad’s portrait. “For a while, I kind of assumed you didn’t care about me at all.”
“How could you think that? I love you more than anything in the world.”
“Then why did you leave? Why did you move to New Mexico?”
“The light’s really amazing in the desert. I’d been thinking about relocating for years.” He took a deep breath and touched his brush to the canvas. “But mainly, I left because of you.”
“And you wonder why I assumed you didn’t love me.” I was tired of lying still. My elbow hurt and I didn’t even care if moving would mess up Dad’s stupid portrait.
“My whole life, I’ve been a failure. I flunked out of junior high. I’ve been fired from every job I’ve ever had. I’ve managed to make an okay living selling artwork, but I still feel worthless. When you were born, I promised myself I’d change. I’d pull my act together and be a good dad. But I could never do it. You loved stories long before Arden started reading them to you. You used to come to me with picture books asking for me to read to you, and I didn’t know how. Knowing how much I was letting you down tore me up inside. I knew it wasn’t the right answer, but I drank a lot when you were little because it helped numb the pain of knowing how inadequate I am.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I saw the price tags hanging on the paintings at Dad’s gallery show and knew the portrait he was busy painting of me was probably worth a month’s rent. He was even listed in my art history textbook. My dad was a living example of a dyslexic success story. He’d done what Dr. Larson challenged me to do — he’d embraced his life outside the box and created something new and different and amazing.
“I’m not sure how much you remember, or what your mom told you, but the day I left I got in a car accident.”
“What?” No matter how hard I tried, I’d never been able to forget that day. And my memory was seriously lacking in crashed cars.
“You’d just been diagnosed with dyslexia and your teachers weren’t sure what to do with you anymore, so they made you stay after school for additional testing. I felt so bad for you. You were such a smart little kid, and I knew how horrible not understanding things can be. I wanted to help you, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know how to help myself. And the whole thing, it just made me thirsty. I drank a lot more than I should have, and then you missed the school bus because you were staying after school, so I had to drive in to pick you up.”
“I remember that you didn’t show up. I waited in the school office for, like, an hour, and then Mom came and got me.”
“I was too drunk to drive, but I got in the car anyway. I crashed into a tree two blocks from our house. The car wasn’t damaged too badly, and thankfully I didn’t hit any other people. After the accident, I just sat there in the car thanking God that you weren’t with me. What if I’d gotten in that accident on the way home from the school? I could have killed you. I know how hard it is to struggle in school. You had enough on your plate already. You didn’t need a drunk dad around to make things worse.”
I trusted my dad’s painting abilities enough to break my pose. I finally lifted my face and locked eyes with my father. “You really did leave because you loved me?”
“And I’ve wanted to come back every day since. But look at you. Your favorite pastime is doing homework. You’re a star, and I deserve none of the credit.”
“I wish you would’ve said goodbye.”
“I wanted to write you a letter, but, well, neither of us knew how to read.”
“So why did you come back?”
“I still talk to your mom sometimes. She told me how well you’re doing, and I figured you were safe. I can’t wreck your life anymore — you’ve got it too well put together.”
“I don’t have it that well put together.” I struggled to make friends and sound out two-letter words. But I was trying, and maybe he was too. “But I think knowing my dad would make things easier.”
“Yeah.” He set down his paintbrush and smiled. “I think knowing my daughter sounds pretty good too.”
My dad finished his portrait. He lifted the picture of the little girl on the beach off of its hanger on the wall and hung the new painting in its place. In this picture, a tall slender girl with straight brown hair and bright green eyes lay in a bed of numbers. A sharp line of determination pierced her eyes. This girl was a fighter. She could do anything, maybe even read.
“Don’t you want to keep it for yourself?”
“No, this one’s for you. Don’t worry. I’ll come back and paint another.”
“You promise? You’ll come back?”
“Yeah, I have another show in Seattle next week, and then I have to go back to New Mexico for a while. But I’ll come back. Eight years was way too long to stay away.”
“Maybe I can come visit you sometime. Christmas in New Mexico sounds kind of fun.”
“We can have a cactus Christmas tree.”
I’d spent the past eight years feeling like a failure, but my dad had spent the past forty years feeling the same way. It didn’t matter how many paintings my dad sold, or how many math competitions I won, we’d both always feel less than perfect. But it was time for us to learn how to be less than perfect together. “A cactus Christmas tree sounds great.”
N
ate came over that night. We had plans to go see a movie, but instead of rushing out the door, I beckoned him in. “Do you want to see my portrait?”
“Of course.” When he got to my room, he stood and stared, mesmerized. “It’s you. It doesn’t just look like you — it
is
you. Everything about it is exactly you. Like your dad somehow captured your soul on canvas. How did he do that?”
I slid my arm around his waist and leaned into him. “So you like it?”
“I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life. It’s…it’s amazing.”
“Maybe I’m biased, but I think it’s my dad’s greatest creation to date.”
Nate managed to tear his eyes off the masterpiece on the wall and look at me. “No.”
I remembered the price tags on the paintings at the gallery. The one of the ghost girl in the pueblos cost more than a new car. I guessed I had to agree that this small canvas of me doing homework could never fetch that kind of cash. “You really like his other stuff better?”
Nate leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “Samantha,
you
are your dad’s greatest creation.”
“Oh.” I lifted my chin and kissed Nate back. “Thanks.”
“So today wasn’t awful? No uncomfortable abandonment issues? Just you, your dad, and an artistic masterpiece?”
“It was really good. We talked a bunch while he was painting. We’ve never had a normal father-daughter relationship, and I know we never will, but it was a really good day. Probably one of the best days of my life.”
Nate turned back toward the painting. “By the looks of that painting, I’d guess it was one of the best days in your dad’s life too. I still can’t believe how much that doesn’t just look but actually
feels
like you. No photograph could ever capture a person’s soul like that. Your dad’s definitely in our art history textbook for a reason.”
I took Nate’s hands and led him away from the painting toward my bed. When he sat down, I planted myself in his lap, my legs wrapped around his waist. “Is it okay if we skip the movie tonight?”
His hands slid up my back, pulling me closer to him. “Sure. What do you want to do instead?”
“I thought maybe we could go to Powell’s.”
“The city of books?” Nate normally loved hanging out in giant bookstores, but ever since we didn’t have sex at prom, I knew he’d been hoping I’d change my mind. A part of me did want my first time to be with Nate — my first love. But graduation was only three weeks away. Nate was leaving for Dartmouth in a couple months, and I was staying here. Losing my virginity just so I could turn around and lose the guy I gave it to sounded painful, even if Kaitlyn said it didn’t hurt that bad.
I ran my fingers through Nate’s hair, pushing his bangs away from his eyes. “Today, while my dad was painting me, he wasn’t the only person who saw my soul. I think I actually understand myself now, for the first time ever.”
“Yeah?” Nate’s mind was back out of the gutter. He was looking at me, not with lust but with this intense longing to understand.
“The whole mental-math thing — it all stems from the paintings. Posing for a portrait is really boring — painfully boring. I still can’t believe my dad conned a toddler into posing for portraits almost every day.”
“You weren’t a normal toddler.”
“I know.” I brushed my fingers across Nate’s cheek. “Ms. Chatman says I have ADD. Maybe she’s right. I don’t know. All I know is that sitting still that long makes me restless. But instead of running around in circles with my body, I figured out how to run around in circles inside my head. When I was a tiny little kid, my dad would say, ‘Sit still for the next five hours,’ and I’d come up with the most complicated math problems I could imagine to keep my mind busy until he was done.”
Nate’s hands moved from my back to my head. He massaged my temples as if he were trying to push a button and unlock my mind. “Now you do mental math when you’re frightened or overwhelmed, not bored. What changed?”
“I got a little older. And I realized that there was another way to escape reality. Instead of entertaining myself with numbers, words were pretty entertaining too. Except I couldn’t do it. Everyone else could — everyone else did — but I was locked out. Illiterate. Dyslexic. Knowing that everyone else could read and I couldn’t made me angry and frustrated and scared. So I did math. I did math to prove to everyone else that I wasn’t stupid. I did math to prove to myself that I wasn’t brain-dead. I did math because it made sense when nothing else in the world did. I did math until I hated math. And then I kept on doing math because I was afraid I’d never be able to do anything else.”
“Math isn’t your way to escape fear — it’s the thing you’re afraid of?”
I broke eye contact with Nate. My fingers traced the lines of his neck, arms, and torso, and my eyes followed. “I’ve told you about my friend Gabby, ’cause she speaks Spanish, but I was always closer to my friend Arden. Arden’s only three months older than I am, but she basically raised me. My mom’s always been a workaholic. I probably see her more often now than I did in elementary school. And my dad…well, he’s my dad. Arden’s mom used to babysit me, so in a way, she was the one taking care of me, but it never felt that way. Arden was always the person I loved and trusted the most.
“She would read to me. That’s all we ever did. She’d read, and I’d listen, and it was magic. When we were together, it didn’t matter what was happening with my parents, at school, or with anything else. I didn’t matter. I didn’t exist. Arden’s words were so much better than the numbers in my head. They could take me places better than anything I’d ever dreamed of. I wanted to read all those books so bad, and I couldn’t do it. I tried and tried and tried, and I couldn’t do it. But it was okay, because Arden could, and she always took me with her.
“When my mom lost her job, I was really happy — not because it meant she was home more, but because we couldn’t afford the fancy house we lived in before. Arden’s family isn’t very rich, and when our finances fell apart, I convinced my mom to sell our house and move into Arden’s family’s apartment building. Arden’s apartment was right above ours. She’d sneak out her window every night and come down the fire escape to my room. She read me so many stories. She took me so many places and made me so happy, I forgot to feel lost and alone.
“Then my mom got a job up here, and we had to move. Losing Arden was worse than losing my dad had been. It broke my heart into a million pieces, not because I had to say goodbye to my best friend, but because I had to say goodbye to all those books I still couldn’t read myself. I was totally cut off again. Locked alone inside a head full of nothing but numbers.”
Nate held me tighter, pulling me closer. “What about audiobooks? You still listen to all your textbooks and other stories too.”
I nodded. “Yeah, sometimes Arden and I have different taste in stories. So she helped me figure out how to get audiobooks from the public library when I was still a little kid. And there are lots of other sites where I can get textbooks and other fiction pieces that they don’t have at the library. I’ve been listening to books read through machines for years. But it’s not the same. I don’t know what it is about Arden’s voice, but every story she reads becomes magic. That’s the main reason why I memorized them all — not just so I could trick my teachers into thinking I could actually read on my own, but because I didn’t want to let go of any of the magic.”