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Woowoo!

A whistle! How cool was that?

Seconds later, she was at the studio door. The engine, followed by a series of cars and a caboose, was zipping around a large loop of track. Charlie had not only assembled that, but he had put together all the building kits he’d found in the Tide box. He had linedthem up like a street front. A fire station. A bakery. A restaurant. A church. They looked like snap-together kits, which explained how he was able to construct them so speedily.

Charlie sat cross-legged, the transformer in front of him, his hand on the throttle. His head moved with the train, following its every move.

“It’s fantastic!” Annie said.

Charlie glanced over his shoulder at his mother and smiled broadly. “I love it!”

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

“It sounds so real,” she said. “Make the whistle go again.”

Charlie pressed a button.

Woowoo!

Without turning his head, Charlie said, “I need more buildings.”

“I don’t know where we would get—”

“Where I got the bike,” he said. “I saw some there. They were old and kind of busted and stuff, but they’d be good. I need to make the town bigger.”

“Okay, then,” Annie said. “Why don’t we go back there tomorrow. We’ll get lunch, make an afternoon of it.”

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

“You know what place this is?” Charlie asked.

Annie tried to think like a child. What could a few plastic buildings represent in a kid’s imagination?

“Is that New York?”

“Nope.”

“Uh, is it the town where we got the bike? Is it Fenelon?”

“Nope.”

“I give up. You tell me.”

Charlie turned and looked at her. “This is where Daddy lives now.”

Twenty-Three

It began as an itching in her fingers.

Annie noticed it two mornings later as she was drinking her coffee. It started in her fingers and radiated up her arms and began to spread, ever so subtly, throughout her body. At first she thought it was a caffeine rush, that those coffee pods she was going through at an alarming rate were giving her the jitters, but then she recognized this feeling for what it really was.

She needed to go back to work.

Her body, as well as her subconscious, were ganging up on her, telling her it was time to stop sitting around.

It was time to create.

Annie had suspected this time might come. She was, in the very core of her being, an artist, and an artist could only put things off for so long. She had been through a period of self-recrimination over the death of Evan Corcoran, and moved on from that to an even darker period of grieving John. Not surprisingly, the so-called creative juices had not been flowing during those times, and at least she’d felt no guilt about that. It wasn’t just Pierce the Penguin who’d been put up on the shelf. Anything Annie might ever produce was up there next to him.