22

‘Do you still want to escape?’

The words strike me like a shudder. I can’t now imagine how I ever tried to leave, can barely conceive of the outside world as anything more than a theoretical concept. What was I thinking?

Barb is watching me cautiously, trying to pretend that she isn’t, chopping carrots without looking down at her hands. I’m afraid she’s going to draw blood.

‘No. I don’t.’

‘I’m glad. We were real worried about you there, for a while.’

‘I was worried about me too. Still am.’

I’ve been scraping this same potato for too long, well past its skin and into its flesh, but there’s something too soothing about its weight in my hand and the motion of the paring knife to stop.

‘You know nobody blames you for what happened. You weren’t yourself.’

My breath catches. Nobody but Don has spoken of this to me, not even Dale himself, his bruises now healed completely. Some part of me had clung onto believing that it never happened at all, because nobody spoke of it, though I know better than that. I am damaged, diseased, dangerous.

‘You mean when I attacked Dale.’

She winces, and I can see that it truly hurts her to remember.

‘I did attack Dale. Didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, honey. You did.’

‘Why?’

‘I wish I knew, sweetheart. I know that your heart’s in the right place, and I think you just got a little mixed up. It happens to people.’

My head throbs, like it has for hours. I keep wondering whether I’m coming down with whatever Tyra had – my brain is fuzzy, and light is almost unbearable, so much so that I squinted my way through the forest to Don’s cabin this morning. And I have the feeling, sticky and creeping, that I have forgotten something.

Our sessions have continued in the same intense vein – exercises in regression, Don steering my mind into half-forgotten places it refuses to go smoothly or quietly, memories stored behind a glass pane breakable only by force. If it’s not exactly force that Don exerts, maybe it’s closer to pressure, a psychological grip equal to the weight of his hands on either side of my ribcage.

I have never been thinner. Undressing last night I froze in mid-air, my arms raised, transfixed by the sight of my own chest, at the visible ribs through tracing-paper skin. My own smallness, my insubstantiality, is dizzying, all the more so when Don makes note of it. But my body no longer feels strong, muscles robbed of the new definition I’d noticed so recently, though I can’t truly remember how long it has been since that night I startled myself in front of the mirror, the night Jake disappeared.

My own body feels mysterious to me, and I have lost all grip on my mind. My thoughts have become treacherous, double agents whose loyalties remain a permanent mystery, and though I’m sleeping better my dreams feel invaded. I’m drinking Apfelwein again, despite Don’s reluctance – alcohol could disrupt my mental rhythms, he said, but I’d been craving it desperately for days and now in the kitchen the drink’s rich warmth is coating my jangled nerves, calming them by force.

‘Where did I go?’

‘What’s that?’

‘When I left, that day – where did I go?’

It’s a blank in my mind now, that day. All I remember is skin under my nails, and someone holding my arms behind my back, and the taste of coffee. I’ve tried and tried to get it back and with every try the details seem to fade more. My best current memory, the one I go back to and pray not to lose, is running with Tyra. After weeks of not speaking, not seeing each other, I’d scarcely believed it when she strode up to me with something of her old energy, looking determined.

‘Girl, I don’t know about you, but I am feeling way out of shape. When was the last time we hit the trail?’

I wanted to hug her, to hold onto her and the memory of what we both used to be, but I settled for smiling and saying too long, it’s been too long. I could have kept on running forever that day. The two of us perfectly in sync, moving alongside each other through the sun-dappled woods, so light on our feet we bounced off the forest floor.

The exertion seems unthinkable now. I feel weak, fuzzy, as though I’m coming down with something, my brain compressed in my skull. Over the past few days I’ve found light increasingly unbearable, the morning sunlight exploding grotesquely into my eyes when I stepped out of the carriage house this morning.

At least, I think it was this morning. It could have been more or less any morning.

I think it was also this morning that I woke up with Jake’s name on my tongue, and his broken body behind my eyelids. It was the kind of dream that is so indistinguishable from reality that you can’t trust your surroundings after you wake up, because if one world could disintegrate then there is nothing to stop this one from doing the same.

I’ve had this dream before, I think. I’m in the woods, all of us are, walking down a slope so steep it’s almost vertical, and we should be tipping over and tumbling into darkness but somehow we stay upright. The darkness has texture, weight, and grows heavier the deeper we go, like air growing thinner at the summit of a mountain, and by the time we reach the bottom my breathing is shallow. And there he is, Jake, snapped in half like a wooden puppet, draped over a tree branch that looks too thin to support his deadweight.

The dream goes on much longer, but his silhouette is the final thing I remember, when I wake up exhausted and reach for him. The worst part is that it takes me a long time, a very, very long time, to remember who it was that actually died in the woods. If someone told me now that Kris never existed, I’m not sure that I could convince myself otherwise.

Circle that night passes in a haze, histories and stories blurring into one another so that I can no longer remember if it was Abby or Sean or Dale talking about how flesh and blood doesn’t mean family, and how their own family never understood them. I can’t focus, my mind slipping into cracks, and I concentrate on smiling benignly as they speak. It’s all the same story. How is it possible that everyone here has the same story to tell? Everyone’s family abandoned them. Everyone’s story becomes the same. Everyone’s name becomes four letters. We are all here for each other, and we are nothing without each other.

We are nothing without each other. This has never struck me before as sinister, and as Don looks at me I don’t feel held so much as clutched. And I remember his hands on me then, the moonlight gleaming on the lake through the window as I pushed him away. Did I push him away? Did I lose consciousness? Was any of this real?

Everything is dark now. It takes a while for me to realize my eyes are open, and it’s the middle of the night, and I’m in my room, or at least what looks like my room. Everything around me has taken on the feeling of a dream, and I blink hard several times and wave my arms before me because as a child, this was how I woke myself up from dreams.

Nothing around me dissolves, and I can see the room now through the dark. It is my room, without doubt. And it’s at this point, as I gingerly raise myself upright, that my head explodes. It’s pain like I’ve never felt before, lightning bolts ripping upwards through my skull and I’m on my knees with the humbling force of it, pressing my forehead to the ground and praying, praying, praying for it to stop.

What time is it? I thought night-time from the dark outside my windows, but I can hear voices outside and there’s at least a fifty per cent chance they’re not in my head. My brain is a queasy shattered clock-face, its numbers all odd and its hands no longer pointing straight. It could be any time at all, and I could have been here for an hour or a day or a week.

The only thing I know is the memory of Don’s weight on me, pressing me down into the earth. Into the couch. And I find Jake’s knife beneath my pillow and now I am sure of two things.

‘Katy?’

Tightening my grip, I try to focus on the door as it swings slowly open, pain still humming around the base of my skull.

‘You all right, hun?’

It’s Tyra, crouching beside me with her face scrunched up in concern.

‘What time is it?’

‘Just coming up to eight. I tried to wake you for dinner, but you were dead to the world. You’ve been sleeping all day.’

Again. I don’t sleep all day, not ever, but here I seem to do nothing else.

‘There’s something wrong with me.’

My eyes refuse to focus but I try to hold her gaze, because I need her to understand and I think she does, I think she must. There’s something wrong with us.

‘I know,’ she murmurs soothingly, but I can tell from her tone that she’s missing the point. ‘When I came by earlier you said you got sick during your session. Had to leave early.’

Is that what happened?

‘Why did you move out of here?’ I ask, as I uncoil from the foetal position.

‘It was just time. Been wanting my own space for a while, truth be told.’

‘But your things were still here. For days, you weren’t here at night but you left everything. You said you slept at Don’s once.’

‘At Don’s?’ She laughs, too hard. ‘When the heck did I say that? That’d be something. No, I guess whatever I left here was just stuff I didn’t need. I’m sorry, though, I should’ve said something to you instead of just vanishing.’

‘You looked ill. Sick. For weeks, soon after you stopped sleeping here.’

‘It’s you I’m worried about right now,’ she frowns, pressing a hand against my forehead. ‘You think you’re coming down with something?’

‘Something. I don’t know how I got here.’

But I know where I need to go, and she can’t come with me. I tell her I have a session this evening and though it makes no sense, though I clearly don’t know what time of day it is let alone where I’m due to be, she doesn’t argue.

The forest feels changed as I walk through it, trying hard to move in a straight line, bundled in a hoodie two sizes too large. I see Mary in the trees, I think, but when I blink and look back she is gone, and the cold is too complete to be sure of anything, dulling my senses. I tried asking Sean what month it was once, and he looked at me with a kind of impatient pity, as though I’d asked for his star sign. At circle now we bundle up in layers and warm our hands around the fire, and I keep wondering when there will be snow.

When I arrive at Don’s cabin, a temporary wave of adrenalin propels me over the threshold and keeps me on my feet, my dreams giving me a story to tell.

‘I think Jake is dead.’

His frown is compulsive, like a twitch.

‘Why would you think that?’

‘I just had a feeling. This morning, and a few mornings before. Him not being here, disappearing like that, there is no explanation that makes sense if he’s alive. I think he’s been dead for a long time.’

‘Sit down. You look feverish.’

I feel feverish. Shaky and unsteady, close to delirious, and maybe I never did wake up this morning. If I close my eyes now, I could wake up in bed and be only mildly surprised, and it’s tempting because the light is unbearable here. Don pushes me gently down onto the couch, sits beside me with a hand pressed on my shoulder. I should not be here. But I have to know for sure, and this is the only way.

‘You know that Jake isn’t dead. There is no evidence to suggest that. This is your paranoia talking, and that’s worrying to me because I thought we were making progress.’

Were we? Nothing about my mind now feels like progress. Maybe I do have a fever, and maybe I’m wrong about Don. Please let me be wrong.

‘People leaving you and people dying are not one and the same, Katy. You have to learn that.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Let me make you some tea.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘No, you’re not. You need to put something in your stomach.’

I’m not sure that tea counts as putting something in your stomach. I’m imagining Earl Grey, almost salivating at the thought, the bergamot sharpness so vivid in my mind that I can smell it, but what Don brings me is different, black and almost bitter, with an edge of something like cinnamon. It feels heavy in my mouth as I swallow it, but everything feels strange to me nowadays, and this at least is warm. I should not be drinking this tea, just as I should not have been drinking the cider or probably eating the food, but am I paranoid? Just like my mum with the chemicals in the water.

‘You should eat,’ Don says, gesturing towards the obligatory Oreos perched on his table, and I pick one up obligingly. Finding it hard to imagine how I once desired them.

‘No appetite.’

‘Maybe you are coming down with something.’

He presses a hand against my forehead, pushes my hair back.

‘I used to love being ill. So much that I used to pretend sometimes, when I was young.’

‘Why?’

His voice seems both far away and too close, like an echo inside my skull. My head is pillowed on his thigh, though it’s too sinewy to really be a pillow, more of a headstone.

‘My mum was always great when I was ill. Even if she was in one of her bad times, if I was ill, she would rally and be there to take care of me. She was amazing.’

‘No child should have to feign illness just to get the attention of their parents. Your mother did a real number on you.’

I feel treacherous, now, because that’s not what I meant at all and somehow I feel my mum can hear this. She was always there, and my being ill only made it easier to notice. I want to explain all of this, but I don’t have the words, and I don’t think Don would listen.

My eyes are closed and I’m walking through ivory-pale slender trees. What I’m looking for are the train tracks, and I know that if I can only find the train tracks then I can pull myself along them like a length of rope in water, and gradually they will lead me out of here. But I can’t find them, and now there’s music in my ears, low and staccato like a schlock-horror soundtrack.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Mary?’

I can barely hear myself over the music, but he hears me. His hand in my hair goes still, rigid.

‘What about Mary?’

‘That she was your patient before,’ I whisper, the words feeling thick and mealy in my mouth. ‘The one who walked along the train tracks, she had a name like a bird, I think. Did they give her shock treatment? Did you touch her?’

‘Sssh. You’re not making any sense, Katy. Just close your eyes and rest.’

But this is what I’ve been forgetting. One of many things, I suppose, and already I’m losing track of why it matters, or when I last saw Mary. Stay awake. I have to know for sure.

‘Just rest.’

His fingers are feather-light as he pushes my eyelids closed.