Five-year-old Penelope Jane thrust a multi-colored drawing at my face. 

“Unicorns are real,” she said in the manner of absolutes reserved for young children.

I’d driven home, needing to see her, to touch my child, make sure she was safe. Stretched out beside her on one elbow while I waited for Nansi to break free from mom chores, I absorbed the wonder of this girl’s ability to scrawl with precision and grace and create lifelike images from imagination. 

“It appears this animal has a mysterious spike protruding from its forehead!” I declared in my best cartoon dad voice.

She yanked it back. “That’s his unique horn, Dad!”

The observation rang the surprise bell in my brain. I burst out a laugh. 

“Everyone knows this fact, Daddy. It’s like pudding. Unicorns have knacks for inventing wonderful desserts with their horns. They even use the unique horn to make rainbows you can walk to escape dragons.”

I stroked her soft hair, admiring the innocent beauty that concealed an artistic genius. “You just make my brain like jelly sometimes, Penny Pie.”  

“That’s disgusting,” she said. 

The similarity to her grandmother’s words struck a nerve. I shuddered and zeroed in on Penelope’s artwork. It was a wonder with enough horsepower to leave all other vexations in the dust. 

Except today. 

Today, it brought to mind another girl her exact age, lost in a cold mountain forest, searching desperately for a unicorn’s magic bridge. 

Unless the whole mess was nothing but Renée’s paranoid imaginings. Eureka policeman Gerulis made it sound like the sheriff up yonder wasn’t really thinking legal intervention. Family dynamics and all. 

Better to lose myself in Penelope’s art.

“Amazing,” I whispered. “Where does it come from?” 

A tiny finger went to her chin. “Ida Know, I guess,” she said after a moment. “Mommy told me about how she draw’d pictures during the Great Distressing.”

“Great what?” 

“Gray grandma Ida… she did it.” Those bright blue eyes shimmered. “Her family was so very poor, they didn’t got nothing in the house but some flour and beans.”  

“Like magic beans?” I prompted.

Penelope giggled. “No, Daddy. That’s a different story.” An idea lifted her chin. “Gray Grandma had to keep drawing a secret. She didn’t want nobody to know,” Pen continued. “They was afraid somebody would steal her and study her powers.” 

“Why would they do that?” 

“The parabolic air,” Pen replied, eyes growing wide and clear. “People breathed it and got scared of everything, even neighbors and cats and dogs who lived in that place for a hundred years. They thought it wasn’t God that made her a drawing person, it must’a been a curse or the devil.”

“Oh my,” I murmured.

“She traded drawings for flour and beans, and even got cans of fruit.” She looked at me intently. “They buy’d fruit in cans back then. Yuck. I like my fruit from gardens. Or the market section.” Her body trembled. “Gray Grandma Ida Know helped them eat food in the Great Distressing by drawing people and trading for food and money.” 

“Did it work?”

“Oh yes.” Pen nodded enthusiastically. “Her drawings was so good people gave a whole bunch of money for them and everybody around the world heard about it and came to see the young girl with the divining gift. That’s what Mommy says. Divining gift.” 

Wow. My own genetic miracle.

“I sure hope it happens to me,” Penelope said. “Except I don’t like fruit in cans.”

“Agreed,” I said with a chuckle. It warmed me to think that family protected Ida— a target for the dark side of the Universe. Only the good die young and all that terrifying jazz. A bright light that cast a darker shadow over Renée’s missing child, a girl Penelope’s age with apparently no one to look out for her. 

If Renée had the story right. 

My daughter stopped drawing to question her dad’s trustworthiness. “Quen says unicorns are not real.” The wrinkle in her small forehead dared me to agree with this blatant lie.

“Your brother’s imagination is limited by his admiration, Sweetheart. Let him be wrong.”

She hollered over my shoulder, “You’re just wrong, Quentin!”

“You’re a weirdo, Pen of the Pigs,” her brother yelled from directly behind me, his voice cracking like a whip in my ear. 

I flinched and blindly swatted backwards. “Boy! Whippin’ is still legal in this state.”

He giggled. “Sorry, Dad.” 

“Don’t be sorry.” I made a quick turn to grab him. “Be better. She’s five. You’ve got four years on her. Set the example.” 

“Sure, Dad.” He feigned retreat, then barreled in low, scooping my arm into a half nelson. 

We wrestled for twenty seconds before his grip broke. 

“Gaw, Dad!”

Nansi appeared in the doorway, dark hair and fair skin dominating the space with authority. “Don’t be so hard on him, Connor.” Her crystal blue eyes captured me with their paradox of desire and disappointment. 

“What? I’m—”

“Spend more time with them and they’ll be better behaved.”

Irritation thickened my tongue. Mother had busted the sale. Now Nansi wanted to bust my balls for playing with our kids. 

“I have to bring the bacon,” I said under my breath. But she’d vanished.

Quentin slapped my leg.

“Yeah, we need your time, dude.” 

Exasperation spun me like an ignition rotor and sparked an explosion. “Dammit, boy! I’m not your dude.”

His eyes widened with shock until it stretched his round face into an oval.

“You think food crawls out of the woods onto your plate?” The words came out of me like a prairie fire, burning every good thing in its path. 

Penelope curled into a roly-poly over her artwork.

Quentin’s body vibrated, eyes gone vacant. The frequency of resonance whirled up to something around a hundred hertz before his body stiffened for a millisecond. Then he shot out of the room like a rocket sled.

My torso had gone tight. I stretched my fingers and exhaled the tension. This situation was turning me into an ass-hat. Better get on track. Or learn to sleep at the office.

Penelope’s nose brushed the lines of her drawing. 

I rested a hand on the arch of her back. “Apologies, baby girl. Mommy’s right. I need to spend more time with you and your brother.” 

Her body unfurled. “Quen is a handful,” she said in a mimic of her mother.

I laughed, pulling her into the curve of my arm. 

“Aunty Renée and I used to fight over unicorns.” The floral scent of her hair dulled the edge of a few more nerves.

She giggled. “Did you tell her they were real?”

“Ha ha. Good catch you little genius.” I nuzzled her head. “No way. In our house, I was big brother in trouble. Grandma Lucy put me in a special time out.”

“Same as Quentin?”

“Exactly like Quent.”

“You got a whippin’?”

“A couple.” 

She shrugged me off. Her hand zipped across the page with plains and grass and hills rising in its wake. The perfect backdrop for her magical dancing horse. 

Nansi returned, Quentin in tow. 

I braced for the scolding. Her glare did the work, heating my shame a few more degrees.

“Please watch the kids,” she said. “Try not to frighten them. I’m busy with dinner.”

“My sister called,” I said, before she could disappear again.

She halted mid-turn. “What? You’re not going up there.” A statement, anticipating my reason for bringing it up.

“Might be a few bucks in it.” I glanced at the kids. “Mother kind of busted today’s deal with Johnny Horton Martin.” 

Nansi glowered at my feet. “So your sister managed to find trouble in the mountains? And you’re the one to fix it?” 

I grimaced. “Well, not exactly.” Although it was that, exactly. 

“Someone else can do it then?” She pinned me with a stare.

It was my turn to avoid her eyes. I watched Quentin admire his sister’s work. The scene gave me hope for his future character. “Says somebody kidnapped a kid,” I said.

Quentin cackled. “A kid got kidnapped,” he said too loud. Penelope tittered. 

I tried a glance at Nansi. “Doesn’t sound like the local cops are worried.”

Nansi’s eyes watered. “Are you sure this is a good time? It’s the holiday coming and all.”

“It’ll be a quick trip. Easy money.”

“You can’t, Connor. Please?” 

“Kid got kidnapped,” Quentin whispered. Penelope echoed, “Kid kidnapped.” The giggles ramped up.

A long breath and a longer exhale failed to provide a palpable way to sell it. I tussled Quentin’s hair. 

Quentin rolled on the floor, chortling, “kid got kidnapped, kid got kidnapped.” Penelope joined him. I wanted to tip over with them, carefree and spilling joy. Didn’t the world need to be safer for my own two children? 

“It’s a little girl, Nanse,” I said. “Same age as Penny. I can’t get her out of my mind.”

“There’s no one up there to help?”

I told her about the phone call with the Eureka PD.

Nansi posted a hand on her hip. “This isn’t one of your sister’s wild exaggerations, is it?”

I shrugged. “May very well be. How do I know unless I make the trip?”

Nansi lingered. “It’s not fair. Her stupid problems.” Her pout became a scowl. “What’s she thinking, asking you to just drop everything, your family, to run help her out?”

“You know Renée. Not a lot of thinking involved, I’m sure.” I stood and moved close, absorbing her emotional warmth. “I don’t have to go.”

She nuzzled my cheek and tucked her face into my neck. “She’s not playing fair, Connor. A little girl for heaven’s sake! How can you not go?”  

“I need to check with Johnny Martin. See if he can hold out on the sale until I return.”

Nansi shuddered. 

The kids wrestled, pretending oblivion, sneaking peeks.

“I’ll try Renée again, make sure this is a real thing.”

Nansi pushed away quickly. I swear her heels click-clacked down the hall as she abandoned it. Only we had carpet that ran from the playroom all the way to the kitchen hardwood. The imaginary sound left me feeling as worthless as the crunch of gravel under all those cars that weren’t rolling off the dealership lot.

My brain grasped for some unicorn magic. There was a little girl lost and alone in the mountains, if Renée wasn’t delusional. A little girl, very much like my daughter. 

The kids had settled down. Quentin sat next to his sister, listening to her stories of the mighty unicorn and its enchanting power.

How could I leave them for some kid I didn’t even know? Abandon responsibility as a father? A business owner? Impossible.