The beds were harder, the children, and I kind of messed it up, but I mostly focused on him, watching where he started each new line. I wished he’d have let me video the process, so I could go back and see exactly where he set his pen, but I was already committing it to memory. I was good at this, I think, knowing when I needed to remember something for later.

He did the hands last, and I followed along, and they looked close enough. I knew I’d practice. I’d make it a thousand times before I showed it to Mazzy, if she even asked. She knew something was complicated about the poster, that someone else was involved, and I would have to say that I’d copied it from someone, someone from years before, or I’d say that I found it in an old book, or that I found it in our house, or something. I could figure out that part.

When he was done, he took a deep breath, really considered the drawing. “This feels so weird,” he admitted. “I don’t draw like this anymore. I like it.”

“Could you do it again?” I asked.

“Again?” he replied, looking at me.

“One more time,” I told him.

“Okay, sure. One more,” he said, and started again.

I didn’t even try to copy him. I just watched him draw.

And then he was done. I took it and put it with the other one. I nodded. “Okay,” I said, but he got another piece of paper. And he started to draw.

After about ten minutes, he had sketched this forest, these trees, stripped of leaves, the limbs thin and sharp. And then he drew a clearing in the middle, just enough space to suggest an opening. And then he stopped. He looked at me, and I nodded. It was good. Keep going.

And he drew this little house, like a fairy-tale cottage. I was about to tell him that I thought it was enough, that I liked it, but then, all around the house, on the floor of the forest, he drew what at first I thought were brambles. But he kept building and building and building, and I realized that they were flames, a fire, and it wound around the cottage, but not so near that it would harm the cottage, and not so far that it would burn down the forest. It was this circle of flame, properly demarcating the world, what was inside and what was outside.

“Do you want this one?” he asked when he was done.

“Yeah,” I said. I’d take all of it. I would take anything.

And we sat there in his room, the house humming. I knew I needed to leave soon, to get back to my life, to let him stay inside of his own. But it was hard to leave.