“For twenty minutes,” I say, “I’m only yours.”
It costs something to say it with a senator talking on a screen I’m not watching. I pay it. She nods like that was the answer she wanted and didn’t know she was going to ask.
Back in the bedroom she pauses at the edge of the mattress and gives me a look that saysdon’t make a ceremony out of this; I don’t. I pull the sheet back. She crawls under, curls on her side, pulls my pillow into her arms, and closes her eyes like sleep is something she can actually do in pieces. I sit on the edge of the mattress, lean down, and kiss the back of her head where her hair is still damp. The smell of soap and rain and her knocks against whatever armor I woke up thinking I was going to put back on.
The phone buzzes again. I let it go this time. The house breathes. So does she. For a brief, impossible minute the world reduces itself to an early morning in a wing of a house on a bluff and a woman asleep with her hand on my pillow and me choosing to be here instead of downstairs drawing battle lines.
The twenty minutes go by too fast.
I collect my shirt from the chair, pull it on, button only the middle two because I can pretend to be civil, but I’m not going to dress for a man who eats camera time for breakfast. On my way out, I take one last look because I am a coward in small, human ways. She shifts in her sleep and makes a sound that is not a word. I feel it all the way through me like a reminder of a vow I haven’t said out loud.
Chapter 36 – Aurora
By mid-morning the rain quits like it lost an argument, leaving the grounds rinsed and slick. Everything smells like wet bark and cold stone. I don’t want my room or his halls or the humming glass corridor with its screens that say the world is breaking in polite fonts. I want somewhere with light and not a single person who expects me to be anything.
The north studio answers. Most of the residents are at sessions; an aide poked her head in, clocked my face, offered tea, and retreated when I said no thanks. The quiet here is honest.
I’m still wearing his shirt because it was closest and soft and I didn’t have the fight in me to choose a new skin. The sleeves are rolled twice; I keep pushing them higher and they keep falling. My leggings are streaked from last night’s studio.
There is a blank canvas propped on the best easel that doesn’t wobble. Blank is a lie; the longer I stare, the more it looks like a door waiting to be opened and slammed in the same motion. My hand already knows what it wants.
I set the jar of solvent near my left foot and line my paints in a row without looking at labels: raw umber, Payne’s grey, a sap green that will go muddy if I bully it but will glow if I let it breathe. I never start with charcoal when I’m this wired; there’s something about brush to canvas that slows the blood. The north light slants and throws a pale bar across the middle of the linen. It looks like a stair.
“Okay,” I tell nobody. “Let’s stop lying.”
I load the flat brush and pull a long vertical from the top edge down, letting the bristles chatter where the weave catches. It lands darker than I planned. The rhythm drops into my shoulder the way music does when you finally accept that your body will move whether you give it permission or not. When I step back, the bars are there, the suggestion of rails. I drag thebrush horizontally three times, connecting nothing to nothing. Stairs emerge out of emptiness like teeth in a mouth.
It’s automatic, the remembering. I don’t have to go looking. The first foster house after they split me from the group home had stairs that turned midway, two narrow landings, one window painted shut. My bed was a thin mattress with plastic under the sheet because a boy before me had been six and had night terrors, and cheap care doesn’t change bedding when kids change names. I slept with shoes by the door because I’d learned in the shelter that running without them cuts your feet faster than men catch you.
That house didn’t have a backyard you could use, just a concrete square with a chained grill. The stairs became my backyard. I used to sit halfway between floors because there I could hear everyone and no one could see me if they didn’t think to look up. At night the bulb at the bottom hummed like a bee deep in a bottle. The wall along the stairwell was an old off-white that had eaten smoke for years and liked it. When I touched it, it left powder on my fingers.
One afternoon I started drawing in the dust with my nail. First little things—lines, boxes, the outlines of windows. Then I graduated to the stub of a pencil filched from the junk drawer and sketched a door where there wasn’t one. The second week, I found a paint roller in the basement and a dried-out pan. It took me two days to talk myself into stealing the half-can of cream from the shelf behind the furnace. The color matched the walls poorly enough to be perfect—wrong on purpose. I told myself I was painting a way out. Twelve-year-old logic is mostly magic and survival wearing each other’s coats.
On the third day a woman from the county came to check headcounts and make sure we weren’t burning the place down. She smelled like hairspray and worry. I hid my roller, and my heart beat so loud I could hear the bass line in my ears. She left.I came back to the stairwell that night and painted the first piece of sky I ever let myself keep.
And then I was found.
The brush in my hand now is heavy with too much solvent, and not enough oil. I add a little linseed and carry a rail down past where the steps should turn. I ghost in the child in the corner without planning to—hair hiding her face because I didn’t know back then that painting eyes makes a person real and the real ones get erased first. My hand shakes when I go for the small brush to draw the crack along the baseboard; I remember that house could never keep baseboards straight. Cheap carpentry, crooked, and a mark where a shoe hit too hard.
I pull in a rectangle at the landing: the painted-shut window. It should be simple. Dark beyond, little light inside. But my stomach drops when I drag the grey downward and something clicks in the old part of my head—the click the back door made in the middle of the afternoon because the man in that house didn’t always go to work when he said. He liked to test the lock to see if I’d done it the way I was told. I was twelve and very good at following rules born from threat. I was also twelve and very bad at predicting the days when the rule wasobey or regret it.
A sound from years ago sneaks into the studio now: a key ring tapping the jamb, a sigh that isn’t tired, a man’s voice like a low laugh that skips the eyes. I paint faster to sand the memory down. The color bleeds where I shouldn’t have let it. The girl in the corner blurs at the edges.
“Not now,” I tell my body when my chest tightens. The room tilts one degree. It’s enough.
I set the little brush down. It makes a small, domestic ping against the tray and then topples, rolling paint across the metal lip like a broken clock hand. I go to pick it up and my fingers miss. A cold sheet slides under my skin from collarbone to wrist.My vision narrows. I hear my breath, but I can’t get it all the way in. I bend to ground myself because that’s what the therapists in the cheap offices taught me—head between knees, count tiles, name five things—but the floor swims and my knees meet it too hard, and I don’t register the pain because panic is louder.
“Not now,” I say again, only it comes out like air torn through a straw. My hands find my temples like I can press the memory out through the skull if I push. Tears wet the paint on my fingers, and the mix turns my fingertips a smeary rust. I hate this. I hate that I can tell my body what to do and it won’t listen. I hate that the studio has turned into a stairwell and I can smell cigarette smoke from a decade ago.
I hear footsteps approach. I clamp my eyes shut because I don’t want an audience for this and because the part of me that learned to hide early assumes safety lives in small invisible spaces.
“Ms. Hale?” Dr. Navarro’s voice is careful at the doorway, clinical concern wrapped in softness. “Are you alright?”
I try to answer politely,I’m fine, just give me a minute,but the words get lost between my nape and my tongue. She steps closer, crouches, then stands again fast.
“I’ll get Cassian," she says. “Hold on.”
The door hushes shut behind her. My pulse is a drumline I didn’t audition for. I press my palms to my eyes and see color bursts that don’t belong to the room. I try to breathe in over four and out over six like they taught me; my chest makes the first sound of a sob and then aborts the rest. The floor is cold and honest under my knees. The canvas breathes behind me like a large animal.
