Quietly, unseen, she backs away from the doorway and hurries down the hall to her bedroom. She takes her sketchbook from her desk drawer and goes to sit on the radiator underneath the window, where earlier she’d left the National Geographic her father had given her. She looks at the sketchbook in her lap, which was waiting on her bed for her after dinner. She hadn’t doubted even for a second that it was what it was, and her certainty then surprises her now, because it was the last thing she expected to see there. She pictures the places it has been: in the shrink’s dark desk drawer, on the corner of his desk for her to take or leave, in her mother’s hands, and then safely in a plastic bag swinging home through the cold to lie waiting on her pillow. She pictures her mother quietly setting it there, maybe even pausing to sit on the edge of Isabelle’s bed, and she is overcome all over again with a gratitude that feels very much like sadness.

She sets the sketchbook aside, opens the National Geographic, and rests it in her lap. The heat blowing from the radiator flutters its pages, but she doesn’t move. She turns to the page of African symbols once again, and she studies them carefully for a while before closing the magazine and lowering it to the floor. She tears from her sketchbook a single white sheet of paper and lifts the charcoal she has set on the windowsill. Carefully, she begins to draw the design she has memorized from the list of them, a line that chases itself endlessly around a square, looping back over itself at each corner and then rushing again forward. Mpatapo, it is called, the knot of reconciliation.

PART II

II

CHAPTER NINE

NINE

Friday

I

She sets her charcoal down and looks at what she’s drawn so far, which isn’t much for the hours she’s been working. In the open space framed by the symbol she drew last night, she has begun to sketch the image of her parents as they were by the fire: the two of them joined hand to hand; the long, slender length of her mother’s neck, her fist against her forehead; the fire-cast shadows; the looming Christmas tree; her father’s outstretched hand, the white space of his palm, which she cannot bring herself to fill in. Everything else she has done from memory, but she is afraid to do the palm from memory. Because it wouldn’t be from memory; she does not know the lines of her father’s palm. It would be from imagination, and this to her seems not only inaccurate but dangerous. What if she were to somehow curse her father by giving him a short life line or an unlucky love line? She does not want to take the chance.