On the next page is a view of the street below their building, done from Isabelle’s bathroom window, Ruth can tell by the pattern of the curtains and the thin rails of the child guard that Isabelle has included in the picture. In the drawing it is a sunny day, and the shadows of the people on the street stretch long from beneath them, the people themselves, viewed from this angle, only heads and legs outstretched in a step.

Ruth hears Wilson’s footsteps coming down the hall, and she freezes. She hears the hall closet door open and her husband rummaging through a plastic bag. She considers calling to him, but she is afraid that if she did he might disapprove of this invasion of their daughter’s privacy. She returns to the sketchbook only after his steps have faded down the hall. She had expected drawings of fire and chaos, maybe, of crashing planes and car wrecks; instead, her daughter seems to draw simply what she sees. Or hears, Ruth thinks, remembering the picture of the lion from dinner on Wilson’s birthday. She flips through the sketchbook again and notices this time the picture of a field of oil derricks like grazing beasts with their heads to the ground. Ruth pauses over this drawing, trying to figure where it might have come from. This sketchbook is from April—and last April, she suddenly remembers, Wilson had taken a business trip to Texas to meet with clients who were in the oil business, and, she remembers quite clearly now, it was a Wednesday night when he got home, and he and Ruth sat in the kitchen while Isabelle prepared her spaghettini, and Wilson described driving down straight and endless roads through fields of these things bobbing their heads up and down, up and down, the sound of their groaning loud when he pulled over to check the map.

So Isabelle draws what she sees and what she hears, Ruth thinks. There must be something to that, something. If she herself were to draw the view of their street, she would have drawn the view alone, not the window in which the view is contained. And the apple tree—she would have drawn the tree in its entirety, and from the ground. And then the drawing of Isabelle’s desk—or is it of Maggie? Or is it of Isabelle herself doing what she does best? Ruth shuts the sketchbook, anxious already for Thursday, when she can give this sketchbook to the shrink. Thursday seems forever away, though; maybe tomorrow, she thinks, she’ll drop the sketchbook off at Dr. Steingold’s office so he has time to study it before Isabelle’s appointment. She wonders how long it will take before he can get her speaking again, because, she thinks, this doctor will get Isabelle speaking again, she is sure of it, feels it in her bones. She shivers with a surge of excitement.