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So when Charlie came down for breakfast the next day, she told him they’d be sharing space. He could keep on playing with his trains, but she was going to be at her worktable.

“Are you going to be drawing again?” her son asked.

“I think I might.”

Charlie looked pleased. “Are you going to draw Pierce?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. I started something the other day. I might see where that takes me.”

That, of course, had been that half-rat, half-wolf creation. She’d been thinking about him lately, wondering whether to direct her talents into this different, gloomier direction. Maybe it was something she had to get out of her system. Considering the kind of year she’d had, was it even reasonable to think that when she put pen to paper she’d draw a cheerful little penguin? She could wallow around in the dark for a while and see where it took her.

“So it won’t bug you if I’m in the room while you run your trains?” Annie asked.

Charlie shook his head. “Fine by me,” he said, stuffing a spoonful of cereal into his mouth, milk dripping down his chin. “But what about your puzzle?”

Annie said, “That puzzle may be what’s driving me back to work.”

If she’d had any fears that the toy train’s relentlesschuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffwould bother her, they were allayed very quickly. While not the same as the city’s background din, it served the same purpose. A kind of white noise that allowed her to focus on her work. And Charlie barely said a word. He lay on the floor, on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, and simply watched the train make loop after loop. Occasionally he would slow it down, bring it to a stop in front of the plastic railroad station, let imaginary passengers get on and off, then throttle it up again.

It was a great toy, Annie thought. Better than any video game, where you sat on your butt for hours on end, staring at a screen. With toy trains, you were playingwithsomething. But even as she hadsuch positive thoughts, she wondered how long Charlie would be captivated by this activity. How much time could you spend watching an engine, a few cars, and a caboose go around a loop of track?

It did get a bit repetitive.

One thing that had kept him engaged was the addition of several new buildings. The day before, Annie had given in to Charlie’s request that they return to the antiques store (still, in her mind, more of ajunkstore) in Fenelon where he claimed to have seen a number of model train kits. Sure enough, he was right. Someone getting out of the hobby must have cleared out their entire stash. Charlie found, some in the original boxes and others in clear plastic bags one would use to freeze pork chops, kits whose pieces could be snapped together to make houses, shops, a switch tower, a radio station, a town hall, and half a dozen common downtown structures. The shopkeeper let them have the lot for twenty bucks. Charlie was so excited by the haul that on the ride home he attempted to build an ice-cream stand and dropped some window parts between the seat cushions that Annie had to dig out later.

He had all of them built, and on his floor layout, within a couple of hours and was very particular about their placement. At one point, Annie had suggested swapping where he had put the town hall and the police station, prompting a curt, “No,” from Charlie.

So now Annie was offering no further input. Let him do what he liked. A subject she’d not revisited was what he’d said three days earlier, that this town was where John now resided. She’d been waiting for that other shoe to drop, wondering whether he’d have more to say about where Dad was spending the afterlife. But it had not, so far, come up again, and she had decided it best not to push.

Annie had tucked those sketches she’d drawn a few days ago under the pad of paper and discreetly brought them out for another look. She hadn’t decided whether she wanted Charlie to see them.Maybe she was being too protective. He liked monsters as much as the next kid, but there was something about this new creation of hers that was particularly unsettling.

She took a fresh sheet, taped it to the slanted table, with the intention of taking another run at it. The first attempt had been done with her eyes looking elsewhere, so this would be a more serious effort. She’d never considered, until now, doing a dark graphic novel, something for a totally different audience than she’d appealed to in the past. Unless, she thought wryly, she turned Pierce into an avenging penguin on a campaign to slaughter all the corporate overlords who’d contributed to global warming and the shrinking of the polar ice caps.

For her own amusement, she dashed off a Pierce wielding a machine gun with a word bubble that read, “Take that, motherfucker.” She chuckled to herself, took a moment to enjoy it, then crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

Back to the rat-wolf.

She started with his head. Concentrated on details. The shape of his snout, the menacing look in his eyes. She did a few quick lines to suggest whiskers. She went back to the eyes, narrowed them to slits. Yeah, that added a new level of creepiness.

“Whatcha doing?” Charlie asked, flipping over onto his back and looking at his mother.

“Nothing much,” she said. “Just trying out all these new pencils and markers. Fin set me up very nicely here.”

“Do you feel like a snack?” he asked, which actually meant that he felt like a snack, and wanted his mother to get him one.

“Go down and have a look,” Annie said. “And could you bring me back a Coke?”

Charlie departed, allowing Annie a moment to sit back and have a look at what she’d done.

“We meet again,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. She might have put it out of her mind for years, but she’d not forgotten what she’d imagined seeing through her mental window. The face of that man in Penn Station. His smile. It had seemed so real at the time, but she was a child, with an overly active imagination.

Annie leaned slightly over the table when she heard Charlie coming back. She wasn’t ready for him to see this yet. He handed her a can of Coke and nibbled on a chunk of cheese and a handful of crackers he’d found for himself. He flopped back onto the floor and continued what he’d been doing before.

Annie worked on the creature’s body for a few minutes until she noticed she was losing her natural light. She glanced up at the skylights. Where had the sun gone? A bank of clouds the color of ink had moved in.

“Looks like a storm coming our way,” she said to Charlie.

He looked up. “Whoa,” he said. “I’m going outside to look.”