Scarlett’s eyes light up and she swings her feet back and forth, and it’s only then that I realize her feet don’t actually touch the ground.
“Do you need another seat?”
She shakes her head no, undaunted by conversation, crossing her legs and practically becoming one with the chair.
Seconds later she’s coloring a tiger pink and an elephant green, and I do everything I can to suppress a smile.
Without taking her eyes off her coloring book she reaches for her water glass with bonded hands, taking it with the heels of her palms and bringing it to her lips to drink before sitting it back in place, as she goes right back to coloring.
My initial impression that she needs a paternal figure is right, or so it seems. But now there’s a burning question in the back of my mind, one that hit me when I first saw her and one that I saw again today, standing out in her work.
I need to make sure my hunch is right, but I also don’t want to jar her out of her mental space, especially here in public. I’ve worked with a lot of artists and know how shattering it can be to pull them out of a headspace they’re in when they’re not ready. It’s best to let this happen on her terms, not mine.
“Sweetheart.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“What brought you to Miami?”
“It has palm trees and pretty colored buildings and it’s warm.”
I pause, bringing a finger to my temple.
“Were there any other reasons?”
“Yes, one more.”
“Can you tell Daddy what the other reason is, angel?”
“To find out what happened to my daddy, Daddy.”
“What do you mean?”
I lean in closer trying to control my anticipation but my suddenly bouncy toe under the table is doing its best to give me away.
“My mommy and my daddy used to live in Miami, but my daddy went crazy and my mommy left before I knew him.”
“And now you’re trying to find him?”
“Mommy said he died, but I’m not sure if mommy’s telling the truth or not. I think mommy hates his guts so she just told me that so I’d quit talking about him.”
“Where’s your mommy now?”
“She’s an angel.”
I was getting in over my head way too fast, and I wasn’t qualified to go down this route, nor was it ethical to ask her questions like these when she was in this state. Maybe she wouldn’t want to share this kind of information if she was the feisty Scarlett I knew, and not the little girl that was sitting next to me.
“I don’t know my daddy. His name isn’t on my birth certificate so all I know is that he used to live here and mommy says he’s dead. But I don’t trust her. Mommy liked to fib sometimes, especially about daddy.”
“Okay, princess,” I say, needing to end this as I watched her draw a tiara around the elephant’s head before she busts out in giggles. “That’s enough. We can talk about something else.”
“Good because talking about mommy makes me tired. I had to make all the decisions for both of us before she took too many of her bedtime pills and didn’t wake up.”
Way too much information, but I was having a hard time getting her to stop talking while managing my rage. How could a parent do that, especially when they’d been blessed with such a little angel?
She was my beauty, and I was to be her beast, but this was no Disney flick. This was real. This was as intricate as one of Lena Little’s books on Amazon, a resource I’d picked up last night as I tried to better understand the dynamic that was happening between us.
As I watch her color it suddenly hits me that her art was a way to have the childhood she missed out on before. Anything at anytime and anyplace was her canvas. The ingredients to a masterpiece wasn’t the paint or the brushes or the pencils or the tools of whatever medium she chose to express herself in. The tool was her little space. And when she was in her little space she had fire in her eyes, passion in her soul, and love in her heart.