Terry invited her to a family meal on Sunday with Denise's approval. His oldest daughter, Megan, was seventeen and initially awkward around a girl whose story everybody seemed to know without knowing how to mention it. His younger sons were ten and twelve, more interested in whether Sky could draw the dragon from their favorite game. Sky drew the dragon with ridiculous mechanical wings, and within twenty minutes the children were arguing happily about where the rider should sit. At the dinner table nobody asked her to tell her story. Terry's wife, Elena, asked whether she wanted more potatoes, and when Sky said no, the plate simply moved on.
After dinner Megan showed Sky a folder of art-school applications. She wanted to study illustration but worried the fees and supplies would be more than her parents could manage. Sky looked at the sketches and found herself offering suggestions instead of apologies. Megan asked where she had learned to draw engines with such accuracy. Sky explained that she copied her brother's technical drawings for years because every machine looked like a complicated animal whose muscles had to fit together. Megan laughed, then asked whether Sky wanted to work on a poster with her for a community fundraiser.
Sky went back to the respite home that evening carrying a sheet of paper with Megan's phone number and a promise to talk about the poster at school. She lay awake looking at the ceiling for reasons that had nothing to do with fear. There were suddenly several ordinary futures within reach: a school art project, a garage mural, a possible room with a bookshelf, and an invitation to eat potatoes next Sunday whether she had drawn anything or not. Each was small on its own. Together they frightened her almost as much as losing them would.
The mural began on a cleaned section of the garage's far wall. Jimmy drew a grid on removable paper so the scene could be planned without covering old wiring, and Sky built the composition in pencil over several afternoons. She placed the founding riders beneath a wide open sky, their motorcycles stretched along a curve of road. Luther rode near the center, leaning into a turn with a fierce expression and a black helmet tucked beneath one arm. Behind him she sketched a smaller rider whose face remained blank, as though she could not decide whether the figure belonged in the past or the future.
"You keep avoiding the face," Jimmy observed. Sky wiped charcoal from her fingers. "I don't know what she looks like." "Looks like you, doesn't she?" "Not exactly."
She picked up another pencil and put it down again. "I know what I looked like when I was five. And I know what I look like now. But when I try to paint myself on that road with him, I don't know which one belongs there."