Outside the Lines: A Novel

David began to emerge from the fog the day Eden brought him his second bowl of chicken soup. “Daddy?” she said. “Are you all right? Are you ready for some soup?” She paused when he didn’t answer right away. “Can I come in?”

“I’m okay, baby,” he said. His voice cracked from lack of use. “Just leave the soup and I’ll get it in a bit. I need to rest a little more.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come back for the bowl later.”

He could do this. He would get out of bed for his daughter. He would take the pills Lydia brought from the pharmacy and he would be the kind of father and husband his family needed. He waited until he was sure she had gone back to the house and then forced himself to roll over onto the cold floor. The icy cement sent a shock through his body, as though his heart had been jolted by electric paddles. Good. He needed it. He crawled over to the door and unlocked it. Eden had left a tray with an enormous ceramic bowl of soup, a half-eaten sleeve of saltines, and in a slender glass vase, a small lavender crocus from their front-yard flower bed. He’d planted those bulbs with her the previous fall.

“Let’s create the Garden of Eden!” he had said. The two of them loaded into his car and headed to the home store, where Eden spent an hour hand-picking over a hundred individual bulbs she wanted to blossom in their yard the next spring.

“They’re kind of ugly,” she commented as she turned over the various tubers in her hand.

“Yes,” he told her, “but they grow into something fresh and beautiful.” It gave him hope that such loveliness could spring forth from something so seemingly deformed.

She appeared doubtful. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Eden persisted. “When? How long until we see them?”

“Good things come to those who wait,” he promised, though he doubted the truth of his words. He had waited for too many things in his life that had never come—success with his painting, a mind that didn’t scream at him with black, sinful thoughts. At what point would he completely give up hope?

Now part of him ached to forget the soup and climb back in bed. There was a flash of movement at the kitchen window. He glanced up and saw his daughter’s slight frame behind the white gauzy curtain. She’d been watching for him, making sure he did what he said he would do. His bright paintings mocked him, depicting vivid emotions he didn’t remember ever having felt. A flat affect, his doctors had called it.

“As opposed to what?” he asked one of them when they described his depressed behavior this way. “A bumpy affect?”

The doctor didn’t laugh. Neither did Lydia, who was in the meeting, too.

“Do you know what it’s like trying to communicate with you when you get that way?” his wife asked him. “When you’ve totally checked out? Nothing I say or do matters. All that matters is you and the sadness you feel. What about my sadness, David? What about your daughter’s?”

David had shrugged. He knew they were hurting, but there wasn’t room inside him for their pain. His was too big. It blotted out everything in its path. Maybe, if he was lucky, it would blot him out.

As he picked up the tray, David sighed and locked the garage door again. He forced himself to sit up on the bed and take small sips of the soup his daughter had made him. It was good. Wonderful, really, for a ten-year-old girl. It heartened him to know her creative talent with food came from him. It had to, since Sunday morning pancakes were pretty much the height of Lydia’s culinary aspirations.

After eating, he pulled the covers back over his head. The vodka was gone but he managed to sleep anyway. The next thing he knew, Eden was knocking at the door again.

“Are you awake, Daddy? I brought you more soup.”

His eyelids still felt weighted, but he managed to get upright and let his daughter inside. She stared at him with enormous, round eyes, then promptly wrinkled her nose. He reeked, he knew. “Come in,” he said. “What day is it?”

“Monday.” Really? David thought. I could have sworn it was still Sunday. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

“It’s a teacher’s workday,” she said. She came across the threshold, careful not to jostle the tray she held in front of her.

He closed the door behind her. “Isn’t their work to teach you?” David realized the irony of his asking this, considering the number of times he had purposely kept Eden out of school. He was selfish, he knew, wishing she weren’t home, wishing he could avoid her completely. Another item to add to the long list of his flaws.

She set the tray down onto his workbench. “I guess not today.” She stuck her hands in the pockets of her puffy red ski jacket and looked around. “Brr. It’s cold in here. You want to go in the house?”

“Not just yet.” David took a spoonful of soup. “Mmm.”

Eden’s face lit up with her smile. “Really? You like it?”

“It’s very good, Bug. What’s the green stuff?”

“I chopped up some of the fluffy stuff on the end of the fennel stalks and put it in.”

“The fronds?”

“I guess so, if that’s what it’s called. I tasted it first to make sure it wasn’t yucky and it sort of had the same licoricey flavor as the bulb, so I thought it might be nice to not waste it.”

“Good idea.” David finished the soup, ever conscious of his daughter’s watchful gaze, how her eyes flitted back and forth from him to the four empty gallon bottles of vodka on the floor.

When he was done eating, he smiled. “Want to snuggle?” he asked her. “It would help us keep warm.”

“You mean in here?” Eden glanced at the messy bed and wrinkled her nose again.

David nodded. “I guess it doesn’t smell too good, huh?”

Eden pressed her lips together into a thin line and shook her head; he could tell she didn’t want to say anything that might hurt his feelings. They never talked about his disappearing acts into the studio, why he shut himself away. He wasn’t sure he could find the words.

David sighed. “Well, how about I come into the house and get cleaned up then? We can snuggle after that.”

She grinned. “Okay. I made cookies, too, but I left them in the house.”

“Sneaky girl. There’s incentive if I ever heard it.” He chuckled, the first amusement he’d felt in days. He was a little amazed he remembered how to smile.

He slipped on his tennis shoes and went into the house, happy that Lydia was at work. He knew she hated leaving Eden alone with him when he was like this, but with no school and no money to pay a babysitter, she didn’t really have a choice. At least, not until he sold a painting. He moved slowly, but at least he was moving. Stepping inside felt foreign to him, like he was returning from a long trip. Everything looked a little unfamiliar.

After his shower, he came downstairs to find Eden in the living room on the couch. There was a plate of cookies on the coffee table, along with a tall glass of milk. She patted the cushion next to her.

“Want to watch TV?” she asked.

“Nah, let’s talk instead.” He sat down next to her and pulled her into his arms. She snuggled into his chest and he leaned down to breathe her in. He stroked her hair and she released a heavy sigh.

“Tell me the story of how you and Mom met,” she said.

David closed his eyes. “You’ve heard it a thousand times.”

“I don’t care. I like it. I want to hear it again. Please?” She hugged him with all her might.

“Oomph!” he exclaimed, and his eyes popped back open. “Okay, okay. I give up. I’ll do it!” He felt her smile against him.

“Do you want a cookie first?” she asked. “They’re chocolate chip.”

“With nuts?”

“No nuts.”

“Because we’re nutty enough already?” he teased.

Eden didn’t respond and he felt her stiffen a bit in his arms. He wondered if Eden thought he was crazy. Or maybe someone had told her he was. Or that she was, because she was his daughter. The thought of her enduring this made his heart ache.

“I’ll have one in a little bit, Bug,” he said. “I’m still full.” He sighed. “Let’s see. Your mom fell in love with me the minute she saw me.”

“Daddy! No, she didn’t!”

“Oh, right. I forgot. Sorry.” He paused, unsure if he felt up to going back in time. But Eden asked for so little. And considering his behavior over the past few weeks, he owed her. He was in the spot he rarely reached anymore: not too high, not too low. He’d better take advantage of the time while he could. They settled in and he told the story the way he knew she loved to hear it.

“I was seventeen the day I first saw her,” he said. “I was sketching portraits down on the waterfront trying to make enough money to get my own apartment. I’d been living at my grandmother’s house since my parents died and my welcome was wearing thin.”

“Your parents died in a car crash,” Eden said.

“Yes, they did.” They abandoned me, David thought, but then immediately redirected his attention to continuing the story. “So I went to live with my grandmother. But she had already raised her children and got sick of me eating her out of house and home pretty quickly.”

“Like I do,” Eden said, interrupting. “I have the same appetite as you, Mom says.”

“Yes, you do. Now, shush. It was a hot day in August and your mother was with a few of her friends. One of them dared her to come over and ask me to sketch her. She was wearing a peasant blouse and cutoff jean shorts and had the most beautiful skin and the longest, thickest blond hair I’d ever seen. I called her Rapunzel, which made her very angry. She got these two perfect red circles on her cheeks. I thought she was adorable. I couldn’t wait to sketch her.”

“Why did it make her angry when you called her Rapunzel?”

David took a deep breath and blew it out before answering. He tried not to think about the irony of what he was about to say. “Because she didn’t want me to think she needed to be saved.”

“Oh.”

“So, anyway, I did the sketch, and it turns out she didn’t have enough money to pay for the picture and her bus fare home. And what did I tell her?”

“You told her she could have the sketch for free if you could take her out on a date.” Eden knew this story by heart. “And she said yes because you had the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. But she didn’t tell you that until later.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. But she also said yes because she knew it would tick her father off.” David nudged Eden. “Your mom is a bit of rebel, you know. Her parents were very strict, so dating a hippie artist such as myself was her way of proving the point that she could do whatever she wanted.”

“You were a hippie?”

“Well, not an actual hippie. But I had long hair and wasn’t going to be a lawyer or some other straitlaced professional, so that was enough for your grandpa to take issue with me.” David remembered how Lydia told him that their love was strong enough to withstand her father’s disapproval. How she said it was strong enough to withstand anything. Neither of them could have imagined him plunging to such depths. That he would cheat on her, yell at her, accuse her of trying to kill his creative genius with tiny white pills. She never considered the possibility she would end up putting him in a mental ward when he couldn’t stop talking about wanting to die.

“But he liked you eventually, right? Before he died?”

“No, sweetie. He didn’t. But your mom loved me, and that was enough.” For a while, it was enough. David longed for those days filled with tender looks and touches from his wife. Images flashed in his brain: the two of them dancing in the kitchen while the dinner he’d made her simmered on the stove; brushing the tangles from her long blond hair before bed; the tears sparkling in her eyes when he unveiled the first portrait he’d painted of their infant daughter. Back when Lydia was his muse and he was her rebellious hero.

Now he closed his eyes again. Fatigue rushed over him. The lithium he had taken before his shower coursed through his blood; the world took on a familiar but fuzzy filter. This was the prologue to becoming a stranger to himself. “You know the end of the story, don’t you? Why don’t you finish it?”

Eden twisted her face up toward his and he willed his eyes open and gave her a smile. “C’mon,” he said. “I always tell the ending. It’s your turn.”

“Well,” Eden recited, “you went on a date to the park. You didn’t have a lot of money so you walked there with a picnic basket and a blanket. You found a tree big enough for shade and you talked for hours. You fell in love with the way she slapped both of her hands over her mouth when she laughed at your jokes because she was embarrassed that her front teeth were a little crooked. She fell in love with the way you talked with your hands and pulled hers away from her mouth so you could see her smile.”

“And then what?” David asked.

“You kissed her,” Eden said.

“And what else?”

“You got married and had me.” Her voice was quiet. David held his breath, waiting for her to finish the story. When she didn’t, he leaned down and rested his head against hers.

“And we lived happily ever after,” he whispered, hoping that somehow he could find a way to make those words come true.