The Name She Drew
For the grown-up reading along
Naming is claiming, and this book slows that moment down until a child can see all of its parts. Allison does not invent Uni's name. She uncovers it, in the word she has said at the doorway every morning without hearing herself say it. The friends and neighbors around her model different kinds of help: Tansy, Juniper, and Maren offer names that belong to their own worlds, Alder trusts what repetition already knows, and Keeper Quill, who could settle it in a second, refuses on principle, because writing things down is not the same as deciding them. The King answers the only question that matters with the story of Allison's own name. If your child has ever named a stuffed animal or a pet with a word that simply arrived, they have already done what this book honors. The drawing at the front is Allison's real marker drawing, photographed and framed for the page.
The Name She Drew, in full
Rain had come down all night and was still coming at breakfast. It stood across the courtyard so thick the far door was only a shape.
Out at the wild end the den lantern was still lit, a small orange smudge behind the water. Princess Allison watched the unicorn put her head out into the rain. The light lay along her wet shoulder in a stripe.
"Uni is up," said Allison, with her nose on the glass.
The rain was keeping her in, so she filled a big sheet of paper with more of it. Blue dots, hundreds, pressed hard until the marker squeaked. Then she drew herself in the middle of it, orange and small, arms straight up. She did not give herself an umbrella, because she did not want one.
Then she drew the unicorn beside her.
A round green face, smiling all the way across. Two little purple ears straight up. A body like a big pink egg, pressed until the pink came up shiny.
The mane took longest. It looped and looped, purple and orange and green and pink and blue, one color riding up over the last.
Long green legs into dark green bushes, and a tail scribbled off sideways on its way somewhere. At the bottom, blue mountains and a pink meadow.
Last, she turned the paper over and wrote three orange letters on the back, without stopping to think about them. UNI.
The King stood a long while behind her chair. "That is her," he said.
"That is her in the rain," said Allison.
Somebody knocked. Keeper Quill stood on the step, rain running off her hat brim, her ledger buttoned inside her coat. "Dry since the day I got it," she said, and patted the buttons. "I am on my rounds. Has the unicorn told you her name yet?"
She opened the ledger flat on the table. Between two full lines sat the empty space she was keeping for a name.
"She has not told me yet," said Allison. Uni was only what she called across the garden. A name for Quill's ledger ought to be grander than that.
"Then come and listen with me," said Quill. "We can ask along my rounds, and finish at the den."
Allison pulled her boots on and folded the drawing into her coat. Then she held out her hand. Quill's shoulders were already dark with rain, and Allison's coat was new and dry. Quill handed her the ledger.
They went out past the roses. Every rose held all the water a rose can hold, and hung low.
The lane ran down to Tansy's, where the honey went into the jars slow as slow. "Name her for something sweet," said Tansy. "Nobody ever minded being named for honey."
Allison carried that one to the end of the lane and tried it in her mouth. It was a good name. It belonged to a jar.
Juniper leaned out from under a dripping hedge and whispered one. It had eleven parts, took two breaths, and went on so long a blackbird left the hedge before the end.
Allison did not try that one anywhere. It would not have got through a doorway.
The rain came down harder after the bridge. Allison walked with her arms crossed over her coat, the drawing on one side of the buttons and the ledger on the other.
Maren sat at her window seat. Her cushion was down at the den, and she had not asked for it back. "Name her something soft," she said. "Something you could say with your face in a pillow."
Allison held Maren's suggestion all the way up the hill road. It was soft, and it was kind. But when she pictured the unicorn coming toward her, it was not the name she wanted to call out.
Where the hill road ran out into the mountain track, Alder came down through the mud. "On the mountain we let a wild thing come back three times," he said. "After the third time you already know what to call it."
"She has come back a hundred times," said Allison.
"Well then," said Alder, and went back up his track.
On the way down they sheltered under an oak. Allison's socks were wet through, and she had three names now, and not one of them would come when she called. Quill took her ledger back and wrote down the wren they had seen by the bridge.
"What would you call the unicorn?" asked Allison.
"I do not name them," said Quill. "I write them down."
The King was standing at the gate. He had been out there long enough for the rain to get through the shoulders of his coat.
"Daddy," said Allison, "how did I get my name?"
The King crouched down to her. "We looked at you for a whole day," he said. "Then we said the thing we had been calling you since the morning."
She went down the path to the wild end with her hand over the drawing inside her coat, Quill behind her. The trough had run over, and the clover above the doorway dripped in one line.
Inside the den it was dry. The unicorn had the middle of the wool bed, legs folded under. Mac the young cougar had got there first, in the driest corner.
Allison dragged Maren's cushion into the second driest corner and set it down flat.
"Who is that for?" said Quill.
"The King," said Allison. "He sits on floors."
Then she knelt in the wool. "Will you tell me what you are called?"
The unicorn put her nose into Allison's hair and breathed out, warm, once. That was all.
So Allison took the drawing out of her coat. It had gone warm in there. One bottom corner had found the rain, and the pink meadow had run into the blue mountains.
The letters on the back had stayed dry. She turned it over and held it up.
Quill leaned in and read the letters out loud. "U. N. I."
"Uni," said Allison. It was what she had said at breakfast with her nose on the glass, and at the doorway every morning before that. It was what she called when she wanted her friend.
"Is it short for something?" said Quill.
"It is short for mine," said Allison.
Mac reached over and patted the paper twice.
Boots came down the path. The King ducked under the clover and found a cushion set out for him in the second driest corner. "Well," he said. He looked at the cushion, and at her. "Well, well, well." And he sat.
Quill opened the ledger on her knee, looked at the three letters on the drawing, and copied them into the space she had been keeping.
The unicorn came up out of the wool, put her nose down to the page, and breathed. Her breath dried the ink.
"Uni," said Allison, to hear how it went in the room. The King put his hand on the top of her head and left it there.
The ledger stayed open on the boards where the lantern reached it. The next line was empty.