She Draws the Family With Five

Children's drawings are propaganda for the fridge, and my daughter's had a consistent cast: Mummy with enormous hands, Daddy the height of the house, herself, the cat rendered as weather. And one more. A girl, taller than my daughter, always in a yellow triangle dress, always at the edge, always holding her hand.

We assumed 'imaginary friend' and admired the composition. It was her teacher who finally asked the question we never had, at pickup, in that light teacher voice: 'And who's the big girl in yellow?' My daughter, without looking up from her shoes: 'That's my sister who came first. She shows me how to do things wrong so I do them right.'

I laughed politely and then sat in the car park for twenty minutes, because I am an only child of an only child, and my daughter has no sister, and the phrase 'came first' had gone through me like cold wire.

I asked my mother that weekend, meaning to make it a funny story. My mother did not find it funny. She put down her cup and was quiet for a long, deliberate time, and then she told me what nobody had told me in thirty-four years: there had been a first baby, before me. A girl. Stillborn at eight months, in a spring my parents never spoke of again. They had a name for her ready, and my mother said it out loud in her kitchen for the first time in decades, and it is a name my daughter had already used — I checked her preschool workbook that night, where the class had labelled their drawings, and there it was in backwards letters over the girl in yellow.

The drawings stopped that year, the way these things stop. The last one in the folder shows the yellow girl waving, from further away, and my daughter marching confidently ahead.

She's wrong-then-right about everything now, self-taught. Or so we're all agreeing to say.