“I enjoy when the rules are clear,” I say. “They aren’t. So we make them clear.”
I end the call and walk into my office to get the copy of last year’s audit I keep on paper. The audits are clean. We make sure of it. There are no numbers in them that tell anyone the onlynumber that matters: how many doors we opened at two a.m. and closed again before dawn.
At 13:28, I head for the interview room. Simone is in the anteroom with a carafe and a stack of cups and the look on her face she uses when she’s about to give a person a set of rules that will protect them from themselves and make them love her anyway. Aurora stands with her hands in the pockets of a cardigan that somehow makes her look older and younger at the same time. Her hair is back. Her mouth is set. She looks at me once and then away because we are not in a room where last night belongs.
“Ready,” Simone says to her.
“Yes,” Aurora replies.
“You’ll have a notepad,” Simone says. “No names, dates, or locations. If a survivor offers, you defer. You can ask process questions. If you want to ask a personal question, you ask me first. I will say no, most of the time. If you need a break, you raise your hand. If they need a break, we take it.”
Aurora nods.
“Do not describe rooms in any notes,” Simone adds. “Do not sketch anything you see in a margin. You can sketch later, from words only. This is not a room for art. This is a room for listening.”
“Understood,” Aurora says. The word is steady.
Simone looks at me. “You,” she says. “Furniture.”
“Best chair in the room,” I say. Reid’s line. Simone smiles.
We go in together. The survivor for the first session is a woman in her thirties who introduced herself to Simone last month asMiraeven though that’s not what we wrote on the forms. She picked the name, so we use it. She sits with both feet flat on the floor and her hands laced in her lap. Her eyes go to Aurora’s face and stay there long enough to decide she can tolerate it.
“This is Aurora,” Simone says. “She’s an artist working with us for a short time to learn how we do what we do. She’s here to listen.”
Mira nods once. “Okay,” she says. “I have a rule.”
“Tell us,” Simone urges.
“If I stop talking,” Mira says, “no one makesthat face.You know the face.”
“I do,” Simone affirms. “No face.”
“No face,” I echo.
Mira takes a breath and starts. Nothing in the next forty minutes belongs on any wall, anywhere. That’s the point. She talks about a kitchen with a floor that always needed mopping because men learn to spill and call it normal. She talks about a lock she didn’t install that never really latched. She talks about a kid who learned to sleep with shoes on because sometimes you run. She talks about the day she learned the wordsanctuarycould be a building and not a metaphor.
Aurora does what I asked her to do last night and what I want her to do now without me asking: she listens. She doesn’t make notes until Simone nods at her to write down a single sentence about process. She keeps her mouth closed except when Simone asks her directly if she has a question that will help Mira feel like she wasn’t speaking into a hole. She asks one. It’s good. It’s small. It’s not about art. It’s about how long it took before the sound of a door closing stopped sounding like a threat. Mira answers. It takes as long as it takes.
When the interview ends, Simone thanks Mira and gives her the piece I like best about this place: choices.You can sit with me now. You can sit alone. You can call someone. You can sleep. You can eat. You can walk the garden if you want to walk. You can stay here and stare at a wall if that’s what your body needs.Mira chooses soup. Simone walks her out.
Aurora stays in her chair. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at her hands like she’s checking whether they’re the same hands she walked in with.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not supposed to be,” she says. “But I am. That’s the part I didn’t expect.”
“That’s the part that means you’re suited to be in rooms like this,” I say. “You can hold without trying to fix.”
She turns her head. “That’s not what you want me to do in the studio.”
“In the studio, I want you to work,” I say. “Here, I want you to listen.”
“Those sound like the same skill with different verbs,” she says.
“They are,” I say. “You’re good at both.”
The second interview will be different. We will sit with a woman who wants to talk about the fact that the wordhomestopped meaning a place and started meaning a person, and then a person left and the word had to learn new math. The story will not be dramatic. It will not be fit for donors. It will be the kind of story that makes a house like this worth a budget line item.
