“If she regresses in any way, wants to use a pacifier even, we should let her,” Grace told Arthur as she flipped through pages on the early years. “A bit of extra nurturing won’t make her more dependent, but it could make her more trusting. Think about it, honey. She hardly knows us, poor thing.”
Arthur put down his book with a look of resignation, anticipating what was to come.
“We need to sign those papers. Start the adoption process right away.” Grace sent him an imploring look. “Penny needs to know she has a home here with us forever.” She didn’t feel bad about playing the guilt card, not when it came to something as important as Penny. “The more secure she feels with us, the more she can rely on us, the better her emotional development will be. It’s all in this book.”
She showed him the cover.
“I need more time to think about it,” he said.
“What’s there to think about?” Her voice carried a note of desperation. “Penny came to us for a reason. I know it. I feel it in my soul.”
Grace gave Arthur’s face a gentle caress. This was a huge decision, and one he needed to make on his own terms. Before they could discuss it further, the bedroom door creaked open and in came Penny, wearing the penguin pajamas Grace had bought at Old Navy weeks before her arrival. She took quiet, cautious steps toward the bed.
“Mrs. Grace … Mr. Arthur…” She called them that because they weren’t yet Mom and Dad. “I made something for you,” she said in the smallest, most tender voice Grace had ever heard.
“Come here, honey,” Grace said, patting the bed before opening her arms wide. Over shuffled little Penny, holding a piece of brown construction paper in her tiny hand. She handed the paper to Arthur before falling into Grace’s embrace. Arthur had to unfold the paper to study it, which he did for a long time, saying nothing, until Grace saw his eyes had gone red and watery. He showed Grace the drawing Penny had done.
One look, and her heart burst open.
Despite Penny’s rudimentary artistic skills, Grace had no trouble making out what she had created. There were five figures—clearly meant to be Grace, Arthur, Penny, Ryan, and Jack—standing in front of a house, their little stick-figure hands overlapping to illustrate a chain. Above, in a scratchy blue sky decorated with a lemon-yellow sun, she’d written the words My Famile in green crayon—misspelled, yes, but heartrending as could be.
Arthur bit his top lip and said to Grace, his voice cracking a bit, “We’ll sign those papers. We’ll sign them in the morning.”
* * *
Grace didn’t explain the significance of that particular drawing to Mitch, allowing him instead to look at it and the others without any narration on her part.
“What’s this?” he asked after some moments of quiet contemplation. “I’m seeing it on her later artwork.”
His finger indicated a drawing of an anchor, tucked into the bottom left corner of a street scene of New York that Penny had copied from a book.
“When she was little, Penny told me she had a necklace with an anchor hanging down—I’m sure she meant a pendant—but she’d lost it. It was something she remembered having from her life with Rachel. I know she wasn’t wearing it the day we found her, so I bought her a replacement necklace after she told me about it, one with an anchor pendant attached. When she outgrew one necklace, I’d buy her another. Some years later, when she was probably eight or nine, she started drawing anchors everywhere—on notepaper, even on her walls sometimes—thankfully those were in pencil. Then she started to put them on her artwork, like it had become her trademark.”
Mitch studied the design closely, and he seemed perplexed by it.
“It’s not a normal-looking anchor,” Mitch said. “It has two stocks coming off the shank below the crown. I’ve done some boating, and the anchors I’ve seen only have one.”
He showed Grace the anchor drawing—as if she didn’t know it from memory.
She offered him a blank stare in return.
“I don’t know,” Grace said. “Penny made up the design as a kid. I didn’t really think much of it other than it was her take on an anchor, which she’s always had a thing for.”
Grace did a quick scan of the other pieces of artwork she’d brought. The quality of Penny’s drawings clearly improved with age, but the anchor design remained essentially unchanged.
“Is this the same design as the first necklace you bought for her?” Mitch asked, stroking his beard in thought.