"Daddy, everyone else at school wants to grow up and go somewhere else to live, but I just want to stay here with you and mom and then you can teach me how to draw." The little girl´s dad laughed and picked her up. She smiled, her dimpled cheeks reflecting the vivacity of her bright orange dress.

"You can live here as long as you want. But we´ll have to leave our little house sometimes so we can make visits to all the art museums where people are admiring your masterpieces." The little girl giggled.

*****

The crooked lines on the blackboard were thin, dusty, and white with a smudge of pink. Those chalky lines haunted her as she leaned as the brick wall that dug sharply into her back. She knew those lines because she could see them in her mind, standing out among the others on that old blackboard. The other children would look at the blank, black backdrop and fill it with pictures and flowers and people. She, however, would draw nothing. The little girl used to love drawing and wanted to be an artist, but once her dad left, she gave up her dream of seeing her paintings in a museum. The woman leaning against the brick wall saw herself as a little girl in the bright, sunny classroom, staring at the blackboard, unable to draw anything as long as she saw those thin, dusty lines. It was as if the little girl could not move past them.

Leaning against the brick wall, she lifted her face upwards, swallowing to avoid the tears and the little girl. For so long, the pain had been so, so close, screaming with overwhelming silence. She thought about the city and its brilliance, about the warm bokeh surrounding the roads of jumbled taxis and romantic dinners and slow jazz. The world flashed and reverberated with lights and beauty, but her life was the same scene: the one where she was held motionless by the chalk while all the other young people enjoyed themselves in the sunshine. They enjoyed themselves because they knew how to be alive.

Her hands trembled, dropping the heels she had carried as she ran barefoot. The ground near the brick wall was rough and sandy--chalk. She saw the little girl at the blackboard in her mind again. On the girl´s thin frame a white dress and a limp, slender pink necklace hung heavy. She hated every bit of that girl, every bit of her stringy brown hair and skinny fingers and those ugly bare feet on the wooden boards of the classroom. The little girl was so young, so full of vitality, and yet so old. The oldness of the little girl scared her. Her hands continued to tremble as she realized that, although the stringy brown hair and bare feet and skinny fingers had vanished as the stage makeup and hair spray clouded her appearance, inside was that chilling oldness. That chilling sense of knowing rejection very, very intimately

For hours, she struggled with the question of why her father left until a numbness filled her body and she relaxed, collapsed against the brick wall. She was the victor and the victim of the battle. But she knew that nobody could run away to the pain of the past forever, and she had songs to sing and dances to dance and shows to act in. So she would put on the hairspray and makeup and smile and live in a blur of music and lights.

*****



"...and I´ve always, oh, told myself, I´ve always told myself..." the sound of her beautiful, soprano voice echoed. "...oh, what we gotta do is find myself, oh, this marvelous life! ... Ooooohh, these white lights, oh, these mar-ve-lous white lights, staring at the sky, knowing oh I know why there´s these white lights against this marvelous pink, pink, setting-sun sky... oooh!..."

Her voice suddenly cut off and she sat down on the edge of the stage, crossing her legs and nervously curling her hands over her knees. She tried to relax and continue practicing, but she couldn´t. The theater was her life. The theater´s doors revolved around and around, and they would never stop. The makeup would come on and off and on and off, but she could only grow older. Suddenly, she realized that was what she feared the most.



*****

Two hours later she stood on the rough, wooden floor of the theater´s backstage. She absently hummed a slow harmony full of high notes and thought about its words. One day, we´ll make a masterpiece...one day, we´ll make a song, a song of beauty...oh, my-- Suddenly, she realized that this song was the one her father used to sing to the her, to the little girl.

Without even thinking, she opened the backstage door, went down the three steps to the sidewalk, and pushed through the dense crowd of theater-goers jostling to buy tickets. It was the song that...daddy sang to me on the last night. Raindrops fell quickly. And then... in the morning, he was gone. Her bare feet on the glistening pavement pounded harder, harder, harder. As if... he had forgotten. He promised to help me be an artist. To draw the things I saw that were beautiful. I wanted to be an artist so badly. And then when he left, I didn´t draw anymore. That was what I did with him. She didn´t know where she was going, or what she wanted. Maybe it was my fault he left. My fault that he left something beautiful and gave me a ruin. That he took our beautiful life and left, and all we had was broken pieces. Was it my fault that, after he left, I became that person I hated, the girl standing at the blackboard haunted by the fact that her father, the one she loved the most, left her and her dreams?

She stopped; she was at the door of her childhood home. She knew it instantly, its dull candlesticks and rough, dinged floors. The walls were once painted with bright colors, with the exciting, new love that only lovers can share, but reds had faded to pinks and bright yellows to cream. The home looked barren.

All she needed was a glimpse of that old life in order to fully experience its rich memories. Everything was happy until the night when her father sang the song to her and tucked a beautiful piece of art under her pillow as she slept. Then she was alone.

She quietly closed the door behind her. A streetlamp flickered on. As she walked down the sidewalk, she passed street artists drawing their pictures on easels with bright, bold oil paints. One painted a setting sun, the purple and gold and red hues mixing and melding the past with the present. Another drew with charcoals, his picture devoid of color but full of life and vitality and youth. Others drew beautiful people and beautiful heirlooms, the remnants of a happy existence. At the end of the row was a little girl, one who had long admired the masterpiece-makers. It was the same little girl from the chalkboard, the one with the stringy brown hair and skinny fingers, but here, in the nighttime streetlamp glow, the little girl didn´t seem as old as she did before. The girl never dared to speak to the artists but always watched, learned, observed. She always waited.

Tonight, however, the little girl was talking with one of the artists, showing him her drawing, a penciled sketch of a girl with pale, pink cheeks on a clean, white notebook. In the artist´s face was her father´s kind look of full attention and total approval. The little girl´s eyes darted nervously; she was afraid that the picture was flawed. The artist only smiled as he dipped his brush in a vibrant orange acrylic and colored the hair of the girl in the sketch, bringing it alive just as she turned the corner and walked down a new street. The one on which she knew that her father left, but approved of her. She didn´t need anything more than that.

Her own memories didn´t flood back. She couldn´t see the name anymore, her name written with the chalk in the pink and white, the name her father had called her, once. The girl wasn´t motionless at the blackboard, either. As she kept walking, she knew that the show was over; she had missed it. Now, however, she had a new song to sing. She was able to sing it, now, and finish the line. ...a song of beauty, oh my-- She breathed in. Adaline.