The Forgotten Sketchbook

The Forgotten Sketchbook

The pencil broke the moment Maya touched it to paper.

That wasn't unusual. Pencils broke around her all the time. It was as if the lead knew it didn't belong near her hand and made a quick escape, snapping cleanly above the wood, dropping in two pieces onto her desk, onto the carpet, onto the floor of every classroom she'd ever sat in. Her father used to say it was bad luck, the way her pencils split. Her mother said it was because she held them wrong. Maya suspected it was because she wasn't supposed to be using them in the first place. A pencil knew. A pencil could feel the future of a page, and it had already decided Maya's pages were doomed.

She was fourteen years old. She had decided, sometime around age nine, that she could not draw. The decision had not been sudden. It had arrived like weather — a slow front moving in, gathering pressure, dropping one cold drop at a time. A teacher who said, "Try drawing it instead of writing about it." A classmate who held up her sketch and the room went quiet the way rooms went quiet when something was beautiful. A brother, two years older, who could draw a perfect horse in thirty seconds and didn't understand why Maya cried when he tried to teach her. By the time she was eleven, Maya had the answer to every art assignment her mother mentioned. "I'm not good at art." She said it the way other kids said, "I'm allergic to peanuts." Calm. Final. A fact of her body.

It was July. The summer before high school. Her grandmother, Nanu, had died in March, two days after Maya's last piano recital, while the flowers were still alive in the kitchen and Maya was still wearing the dark green dress she'd chosen for the concert. Nanu had been ninety-one, which Maya's parents kept saying was a long life, and they said it gently, but Maya had not been ready. Nobody had told her that you could know someone for fourteen years and not be ready. She had thought you were either ready or not, like a door either open or shut. She had not known there was an in-between where you walked forward anyway.

The funeral had happened on a Wednesday. The house had smelled like lilies and something colder. Maya's mother had cried in a way she never cried in front of the children — short, sharp, swallowed sounds, like she was trying to keep them inside her chest. Maya's father had held her mother's shoulders and looked straight ahead, at nothing. Maya's brother, Theo, had not cried. He had stood at the edge of the family group with his hands in his pockets, fourteen and a half, too old to cry and too young to know what to do with his face.

The will had been read in May. Most of Nanu's things went to Maya's mother. Some jewelry went to an aunt in Lisbon. A clock went to a cousin in Toronto. Maya and Theo had each been left a small amount of money, to be saved for "their futures," which their parents decided meant college. The house itself was to be cleared and sold by August, because that's what people did with houses when the person who had lived in them was gone — they cleared them and sold them and pretended the clearing was just paperwork.

Maya's job, on the third Saturday of July, was the attic.

"You don't have to do it today," her mother had said, but the way she said it meant that Maya did have to do it today. Her mother had been like that lately, full of sentences that meant the opposite of themselves. *I don't mind* meant *I mind so much my teeth hurt.* *It's fine* meant *I am holding onto something with both hands and I can't let go.* Maya had learned to listen to the second sentence and respond to that.

The attic was at the top of a narrow staircase behind the kitchen. Maya had climbed it maybe ten times in her life — once when she was five and looking for treasure, a few times with her mother when Nanu asked them to bring up a winter coat, and once after Nanu had a fall and Maya was sent up to fetch a blanket. Maya remembered that night because the light in the attic had been off and she'd had to feel her way across the floor in the dark, and somewhere a clock had been ticking, although no clock in the attic had worked in years.

Now the light worked. Maya had pulled the string by the door, and a single bare bulb had flickered on, casting a yellow circle onto the floor. The attic smelled like mothballs and dust and something else, something that was harder to name, something she had not been expecting: paper. The smell of old paper, the kind of smell you get in libraries that have been closed for a long time, where the books have had their own thoughts and are breathing them out into the air.

The attic was not large. It was the kind of attic that exists in houses built in the 1930s, with sloped ceilings that came down low on either side and a wooden floor that complained under every step. There were cardboard boxes, taped shut. There were two suitcases, one soft and one hard, both old. There was a coat rack with three coats on it, all of them smelling faintly of a perfume Maya didn't recognize but her mother might have. There was a wicker basket full of photo albums. There was a sewing machine on a small table, its pedal curled like a sleeping animal.

And against the far wall, where the ceiling dipped low enough that Maya would have to crouch to reach the top, there was a cabinet.

It was small. About the height of Maya's hip and a little wider than her arm span. It was made of dark wood, possibly walnut, with a door on the front and a small brass lock. The brass had gone green in places, the way brass goes green when it has been waiting for years. Maya had never seen this cabinet before. She was almost sure of it. She had a strong memory of the attic from when she was five, hunting for treasure, and there had been no cabinet in that memory. There had been a rocking horse and a stack of National Geographics and a globe that didn't spin anymore, but no cabinet.

Maya walked over to it.

The lock was not a real lock. That was the first thing she noticed. It was a fake lock — one of those ornamental brass clasps with a tiny keyhole that looked like it should open something important but in reality only opened itself if you pressed the right place. She pressed it. The cabinet door swung open on a small, oiled hinge that made almost no sound.

Inside the cabinet, there was only one thing.

A sketchbook.

It was bound in leather — soft, dark brown leather that had been handled so often that the color had worn away along the edges, leaving pale lines where someone's hand had gripped it year after year. The leather smelled like the attic and something else: a faint, mineral smell, like a pencil. The book was about the size of a small notebook, maybe eight inches tall and six wide. The corners were soft. The cover had no title, no name, no decoration. There was only a thin, faded line of gold around the edge, almost gone.

Maya picked it up.

It was heavier than it looked. Not heavy like a dictionary — heavier like a book that's been through a lot of weather. The leather was cool under her fingers. She could feel the grain of it, the tiny bumps where the skin of some long-ago animal had been imperfect, the places where the dye had taken better than others. She could feel that this book had been held. She could feel that someone had loved it.

She opened it.

The first page was empty. Not blank — empty. There was a difference. A blank page is waiting. An empty page has given up. This page had a thin yellow rectangle of light on it from the bulb above, and the paper had gone slightly grey around the edges, the way paper does when it has been left alone for years and years. There was no date. There was no name. There was nothing written.

Maya turned the page.

The second page was not empty. There was a drawing on it — a sketch of a window. Just a window. Four lines for the frame, two crossing lines for the cross of the panes, a curve at the bottom where the windowsill was. The drawing was unfinished. Maya