Part 9 – “The Girl with the Yellow Crayon”
By the new year, Naomi’s drawings were everywhere.
Taped to lockers. Slipped into cubbies. Hung with magnets on refrigerators across Ash Grove. No two were alike. Some showed quiet things—a single feather in the wind, a pair of shoes at a bedside, a sunrise no one noticed. Others carried names: kids in her class, a janitor who hummed old country songs, the bus driver who cried when he got his.
Each one had a message in Naomi’s blocky, honest handwriting:
“You matter.”
“I see you.”
“Keep going.”
“I remember.”
It started when Evelyn pinned one to the staff bulletin board.
Then another teacher asked for one.
Then the local library.
And then, without planning, it became a thing.
People wrote back.
Sticky notes tucked into her backpack. A box of cards left on Angela’s porch. A short article in the Ash Grove Weekly called her “The Yellow Crayon Girl”—a name Naomi didn’t quite understand, but accepted with a quiet smile.
What they didn’t know was that she still whispered every word to Sully before putting them down.
She’d sit at the window, sketchbook in her lap, and say, “This one’s for Mrs. Jacobs. She cried behind the library desk yesterday.”
Or: “This one’s for Tyler. He misses his dad.”
And she’d wait, just long enough for the wind to shift or the tree branches to tap the pane. That was how she knew Sully was listening.
Angela noticed.
She didn’t speak of it often, but once, after watching Naomi place a drawing in the mailbox addressed to “Whoever needs it,” she whispered: “You’re turning your pain into light.”
Naomi only nodded.
“I learned from him.”
One morning, Naomi found a letter tucked into her backpack.
It wasn’t signed.
Just a simple sheet of lined paper, folded into a square:
I didn’t talk for a long time either. My brother died, and I thought if I stayed quiet, I could stay close to him.
But you helped me speak again.
Thank you for the picture of the cloud. I taped it to my ceiling. I think he sees it.
There was a drawing beneath the words—a rough pencil sketch of a dog, not Sully, but someone’s.
Tail wagging.
Eyes soft.
Naomi folded the letter carefully and slid it into the old tin where she kept Sully’s sticker and bracelet.
Then she began a new drawing.
A pair of clouds—one shaped like a boy, one like a dog—drifting over a field of wildflowers. And below them, a small girl looking up.
She didn’t sign it either.
Just left it on the front steps of the school with a Post-it:
“For the boy in the cloud. She sees you too.”
Angela was asked to speak at the school board meeting that February.
Not as a teacher or foster parent—but as Naomi’s guardian, and as witness to what the girl had become.
The auditorium was half-filled, mostly teachers and town officials, but the air shifted when Angela read the note Naomi had written for her to share:
I didn’t think voices came back once they left. But they do.
And even if they don’t, you can still say things in other ways.
Love can live in a dog. In a color. In a picture. Even in a goodbye.
I miss Sully, but I’m not alone anymore. Because now I can draw the way home.
The room sat in silence for a long moment.
Then Evelyn stood.
Then Tanya from child services.
Then everyone else.
Angela sat down, heart full and aching, and felt something shift—permanently.
Not in Naomi’s life.
But in the town’s.
They didn’t see her as fragile anymore.
They saw her as the girl who survived—and who taught them how.
Naomi was asked to create a mural for the school hallway that spring.
She stood in front of the blank wall for hours before she made her first mark.
It wasn’t a dog. Or a tree. Or even a crayon.
It was a small, open door.
Beyond it: sky, roots, stars.
Beside it: a child with no face, so any child could step in.
At the bottom, in letters bigger than she’d ever drawn before, she wrote:
“Some things return when we remember.”
She never said who helped her paint it.
But Angela swore she saw her lips move once while she worked, as if speaking to someone just out of sight.
Later that night, Naomi slipped the yellow crayon into a box, along with a ribbon, a stone, and a dried sunflower.
On the lid, she wrote:
“For when I forget again.”
Then she placed the box in the closet, high on a shelf.
And returned to her sketchbook.
Not to revisit the past.
But to draw what came next.
Part 10 – “The Girl with the Yellow Crayon”
Final Chapter
Spring arrived with the sound of wind chimes and the scent of lilacs drifting through the screen door. Naomi stood barefoot in the garden, the hem of her dress brushing against the soil as she dug a small hole beside the maple tree—Sully’s tree.
She placed one seedling inside.
A marigold.
Yellow, of course.
Angela watched from the porch, hands wrapped around a chipped coffee mug. Her heart ached, but not the way it used to. It was the ache that came with witnessing something fragile turn strong.
“You want help with the rest?” she called.
Naomi looked up and smiled.
“I want to do this part.”
So Angela stayed where she was, letting Naomi have her moment.
When the last marigold was planted, Naomi brushed the dirt from her hands and reached into her jacket pocket. She pulled out a folded drawing—creased from being read, held, maybe even wept on.
It showed the tree in full bloom, golden flowers circling its roots like stars. And lying at its base, eyes closed, tail curled gently—Sully.
She tucked the drawing between two stones at the base of the tree and whispered, “I didn’t forget.”
Then she stood.
And walked toward the future.
It happened at the grocery store, of all places.
A small whimper.
A shuffle of paws on linoleum.
Naomi turned, and there he was.
Not Sully.
But something about him—something in the eyes, maybe—held the same silent depth.
He was smaller, with patchy fur and a crooked tail, and so timid that when she stepped forward, he shrank back beneath the magazine rack.
“Hey,” she said softly, kneeling.
The dog looked up.
And stayed.
Angela returned from the checkout lane to find Naomi sitting on the floor, palm out, the dog’s head resting gently in it.
“Is he lost?” she asked.
Naomi didn’t look up.
“No. He’s waiting.”
Angela crouched beside her.
“Waiting for what?”
Naomi smiled.
“For someone to draw him home.”
They brought him to the shelter, just to be sure. No chip. No tags. No reports. The workers called him “Lucky,” but Naomi named him something else.
“Echo.”
Because he wasn’t Sully, not even close. But he carried the sound of something that had once been.
Not a replacement.
A reminder.
That love doesn’t end.
It just echoes.
Naomi’s drawings changed after that.
More light. More open space. More faces turned outward, not inward.
She still drew Sully sometimes—especially when the world felt heavy or the sky too wide—but mostly now, she drew beginning things: seeds, doorways, first steps, eyes meeting for the first time.
One day she drew a picture of herself holding Echo’s leash at the edge of a cliff. In the sky above them, Sully ran across clouds shaped like wings.
The caption read:
“He’s not gone. He’s just ahead of us.”
Years later, long after most had forgotten the girl with the yellow crayon, a mural remained in the hallway at Ash Grove Elementary.
The open door. The faceless child. The stars.
Beneath it, a plaque had been added:
Dedicated to Naomi Lynn Carter and Sully —
for teaching us that silence is not the end,
and love always finds its way home.
Teachers pointed it out to new students each fall.
Sometimes, when a child came in quiet or scared or freshly bruised by life, they were handed a drawing.
One of Naomi’s.
Reprinted over the years.
Still bearing the same crayon strokes.
Still signed, simply:
“For you. I remember.”
And in a quiet home at the edge of town, where yellow marigolds bloomed year after year beneath a tall maple tree, a box sat on a shelf.
Inside: a crayon, a photo, a scarf, and a love so lasting it didn’t need to be spoken.
Naomi never opened it again.
She didn’t have to.
She had already drawn her way home.
[The End]
Thank you for walking this journey with Naomi and Sully. Their story may have ended here—but the echoes, like all true things, go on.