“Your resting heart rate was up this morning.”
“I was thinking of boats.”
She does not react. “Any nightmares?”
“Only the good ones,” I say cheerfully, and turn a page.
We talk about the weather. We talk about the garden. I talk, which is not the same as telling. She watches, which is not thesame as seeing. But she hears me sayArkagain and does that little throat-flinch and I know enough.
When they take me back to my room, I count the steps. I count the cameras. I count the badges on the staff at the main station: two blues, one white, one red. The red is a supervisor. The red is the one who can open most of the doors. His hair is immaculate. His shoes are sensible. He keeps his keys on his belt loop. The white isRalphthe blushing newbie.
By the second afternoon on the new schedule, I am very, very good. I thank everyone. I knit squares. I return the yarn neatly wrapped around the ball. I drink the tea. I pee on schedule. I hold eye contact for precisely the right number of seconds and never longer. I do not mention blood in the garden or men who make hands a problem. I do not ask for the wood chipper. I ask for the citrus fertiliser with aluminium sulphate because the hydrangeas are sulking and will turn the wrong colour without it, and when Doctor Callaway brings it to me herself I make the right kind of delighted sound and tell her she’s saved the day.
She smiles. Not because the hydrangeas will be blue but because she has saved a day. Whose day, she hasn’t asked.
On the third morning, she brings a notebook and a pencil and says, “If you have dreams I want you to write them down.”
“Even if they’re wet?”
She pinches the bridge of her nose, then nods, because she will not be flustered by me in front of herself. “Even if they’re…wet.”
“I don’t dream,” I say, arranging my face into something resembling honesty. “Not often. Not since…” I let the sentence trail. I lower my eyes. I make my mouth small. For half a second the room tilts and I am a little girl in a place that smelled of wax and hymnals, and it is not a performance. Then it is again. “Not since before.”
She watches the shadow pass and does not pounce on it. Another point. She sets the notebook on the bedside table. “Then write what you think about,” she says. “That can be more useful.”
“What I think about is not useful,” I say. “It’s expensive.”
“We have a budget,” she says. It’s almost a joke. It lands between us and we both look at it until it skitters away under the bed.
At therapy, she tries a different tack. “We’re going to practise naming,” she says. “Feelings.”
I look at her. “Pass.”
“Kayla.”
“Doctor.”
She sighs. “When you did what you did in the garden, what did you feel?”
“Blood splatter on my face.”
“I mean,howdid you feel?”
“Efficient.”
“Before.”
“Annoyed.”
“After.”
“Hungry,” I say, and when she glares I add, “For tea,” and she relents because she does not want to write the wordgleeon her form and have to look at it all afternoon.
She asks me to draw. I draw the hydrangea and the chipper and a man with no face. I draw a small boat with a roof and two doors, floating on an ocean that is just lines and negative space. I label it with block capitals:ARK. She looks at it for too long.
“Where did you hear that word?” she asks.
“Nursery school,” I say. “Rainbow, animals, drowning as a moral lesson. You know. Children’s stories.”
