The drawing above the counter showed a green sky and she almost left because of it.
Not because it bothered her. Because she recognized it. She'd drawn it. She was sure of it — the way the sun had a face, the way the ocean was a single flat line, the way the figure on the beach had both arms up like they were catching something falling from above. She'd drawn that figure a hundred times in first grade, always on the beach, always with the arms up, and her teacher had asked her once, what is she catching, and she'd said tomorrow and the teacher had laughed and she'd hated the teacher for the rest of the year.
She hadn't thought about that in maybe twenty-five years. And now here it was, pinned above the espresso machine in a coffee house on South First that she'd walked into because it was 107 degrees outside and she needed water.
"Excuse me — who drew that?"
The barista didn't look up. "Been there since before me."
"How long have you worked here?"
"Too long."
She took her water and sat under the drawing. It was crayon on manila paper. The corners were curling. It wasn't signed but in the bottom right, in a child's handwriting, it said: for mama when she gets there.
She hadn't written that.
She stared at it and the espresso machine hissed and the hiss became surf and the dark room became bright and she was on the beach.
The heat hit first. Then the light — equatorial, straight down, no shadows anywhere. White sand that squeaked when she shifted her weight. Behind her, a low concrete wall with a mural she could feel without turning around, the way you feel someone standing too close on a bus. She turned around anyway.
The mural was wild — crammed with people, buses, animals, fruit sellers, a man on a bicycle carrying a door, a woman nursing a baby on the roof of a truck. And in the middle, bigger than everything else, a tree. Its branches held clocks instead of fruit and every clock showed a different time and under the tree a man was sleeping with his mouth open and one arm thrown over his face like the light was too much even with his eyes closed.
He was snoring. She could hear it over the waves.
"Hey," she said.
Nothing.
"Hey. Where is this?"
He moved his arm half an inch. One eye opened. It was the wrong color — not a color eyes come in, something between gold and green, the color of old glass bottles.
"Same place," he said.
"Same as what?"
"Same as where you were."
"I was in a coffee house."
"Yes."
"This isn't a coffee house."
"Also yes." He put his arm back. Eye closed.
She looked down. She was barefoot, which was wrong — she'd been wearing the sandals she'd bought at the airport in Lisbon three years ago that were falling apart but she kept wearing because she'd been happy in Lisbon. She could see her toes in the white sand and they looked like her toes but also slightly not her toes, the way your hands look in a dream, correct but unsigned.
A dog came down the beach carrying a shoe in its mouth. A child's sandal, red, buckled. The dog dropped it at her feet and looked at her with the unbearable sincerity of dogs.
"That's not mine," she told the dog.
The dog disagreed.
She picked it up. It was warm. Not sun-warm. People-warm. Like someone had just taken it off. She turned it over and on the sole, in faded marker, someone had written a phone number. She memorized it without deciding to. The dog sat down, satisfied.
She looked back at the mural. The sleeping man under the clock tree was gone. The tree was there, the clocks were there, the indentation in the painted grass where he'd been lying was there. But he was gone.
She looked at the actual man sleeping under the actual tree beside the wall. He was watching her now, both eyes open, wrong-colored and unblinking.
"You're in the painting," she said.
"I was in the painting. I heard you coming."
"You can't hear someone coming from inside a painting."
"You can't be on a beach from inside a coffee house." He sat up. He was very old and very thin and his white shirt had paint on it — the same blue as the mural's ocean. "You drew me," he said.
"I didn't."
"Green sky. One line for the ocean. Figure with her arms up, catching tomorrow. You drew that when you were six. You drew me into the tree and I've been here since." He said this without accusation, the way someone tells you what they had for breakfast. "It's been a while."
"That's not how drawings work."
"How would you know? You stopped." He stood. He was tall. The clocks on the painted tree behind him were moving now — she was sure of it, the minute hands creeping in different directions, some forward, some backward, one spinning fast enough to blur. "You drew the green sky because you could see it. Your teacher laughed and you stopped seeing it. That's the whole problem, the whole thing, right there. Someone laughs and the sky goes back to blue."
The espresso machine hissed.
She was in the coffee house. Her water had tipped over and was dripping off the table onto her lap and the barista was coming over with a rag and saying something she couldn't hear because her ears were full of surf.
The phone number. She still had it. She pulled out her phone and typed it in and stared at it. A 212 number. New York.
She called it.
It rang four times. A girl picked up — young, maybe seven or eight.
"Hello?"
"Hi. I — someone gave me this number."
"I know. Are you at the beach?"
A cold feeling. Not fear exactly. The feeling of a large thing moving slowly in deep water beneath you.
"I was. I think."
"I drew you a map but I put the sky wrong. I used green because I ran out of blue. But actually it IS green there, so it worked out." The girl's voice was bright and practical, the voice of someone explaining a completely reasonable thing. "The man under the tree says you're coming but you keep going back to the coffee place."
"Who are you?"
"You know who I am."
She did. She did and the knowing was a door opening onto a room she'd been standing outside of for thirty-one years, since first grade, since the green sky, since what is she catching and the answer that made her teacher laugh and the laughter that had shut something in her so firmly she'd mistaken the lock for a wall.
"The drawing says for mama when she gets there," she said.
"Yeah."
"I'm not —"
"Not yet. That's what the map is for."
The barista was mopping up the water. The pendant lamps were amber. Package tracking, logistics, the arrow of time from origin to destination — she could feel all of that, the ordinary sequence of the ordinary world, holding its shape around her like scaffolding. And under it, beneath it, the surf. The dog. The sleeping man who'd waited in a painting for thirty-one years because a six-year-old drew him there and then forgot.
"The sky is green," she told the barista.
"Whatever you say."
She looked at the drawing. The figure on the beach with both arms raised, catching tomorrow. She'd drawn that. A child she hadn't had yet had written for mama when she gets there. The phone number on the sandal connected to a girl in New York who knew about the map. The clocks on the tree all showed different times and they were all correct.
She finished her water. She walked out into 107 degrees. The sky was blue because that's what skies do when people are watching.
But she wasn't people-watching anymore. She was looking with the wrong eyes, which is to say the right ones, and just for a second, between the Starbucks and the parking garage, the sky flickered green.