She is seeing the doctor now; it was a condition of her release.
“The thorns?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says. Having plucked them from rose stems, she drove the thorns deep into her skin, pressing them like shark’s teeth, in a line up and down her arms. She pressed the thorns into her skin until the skin gave way and buried the thorn. And then she took off her shoes and pushed the thorns into her feet and walked from park to park, carefully collecting more thorns—“specimens,” she called them. Her wounds became infected, the infection spread into her blood.
“We almost lost you,” her mother said.
“I was right here the whole time, hiding in plain sight.”
“I see you are walking with a limp,” the doctor says.
“I am treading lightly.”
“Why thorns?”
“It runs in the family.”
She glances over her shoulder to see if the doctor is listening and catches him off guard.
Their eyes meet, and she looks away.
“Continue,” the doctor says.
She lies back; her fingers stroke the deep blue fabric on the doctor’s couch.
“My mother rearranges the furniture constantly. She is trying to re-create something that she remembers, but I’m not sure it ever really happened. She says she is getting closer. She is no longer young, but she gathers the energy to push the sofa around the room. And when she is done, she cries. It will never be the same again. It is always almost there, but not quite. She can’t put her finger on it—the light, the silence? Every day she tries a new combination, hoping the pieces will fall into place like the pin tumblers of a lock, hoping that there will be an opening and something will be revealed or recovered. ‘Where are you going with that?’ I ask as she moves a lamp from this table to that. ‘I am going back to where I came from,’ she says. ‘But it does not exist,’ I say. She makes still lifes, tableaux of how she wishes it were. ‘Is it the same sofa—the one from before?’ she asks me, now confused. ‘That’s what you’ve always told me.’ ‘I don’t know anymore,’ she says. ‘Maybe it came after the fact.’ She calls the war ‘the fact.’ My mother’s sofa is also blue.”
Finished for today, she gets up carefully.
The next time she visits the doctor, she notices a hair. She sees it as she is approaching the doctor’s couch, a blond hair like a golden thread, glinting in the light. She doesn’t know what to do—pick it up, stretch it between her fingers and pluck it like a harp string? She imagines winding it round and round a finger until the finger turns blue, pressing it against her neck like a fine gold wire. What to do? She pretends not to see it. She lies down on it—the blond hair beneath her own brown hair, the blond hair becoming for the time a part of her. But she can’t bear it. Whose hair is it? Does the doctor have sex on the sofa?
“My mother was born the day before the war ended. She was a girl without a father, a miracle. For a long time, she believed that—we all did. The fact is, during the war my grandmother was left at a Catholic boarding school. Her parents brought her there in the middle of the night, turned their backs and left. As she screamed for them, the nuns held their hands over her mouth. The way the story goes—he appeared in the garden behind the school. She pretended not to know what happened—but it’s possible she really didn’t know. It was a war. She was terrified they would die. The only thing that kept her sane was that the roses went on blooming. That’s where they found her—entangled in the rosebushes, pinned by the spindly arms of the prickly vines. He came into the garden, bent to smell the roses, and saw her. He pushed her into the roses. When he was gone, she remained trapped. She lay in the garden all night. She watched the sky grow dark, the stars come out. She looked up into the blue, the eternal, the unending, and the unnamable. She was asleep when they found her. Grandmother woke up, but only partially, it was as if she were under a spell, in a fog. We thought she would come out from under, but mostly she seemed baffled, like it all just didn’t make sense. As a child my mother knew that her mother hated her, but she didn’t know why or what she had done wrong. My mother kept herself hidden, in boxes or under the table, inside closets. She would pretend she was invisible. Later she would hide in the woods, behind trees, or in piles of leaves. She would play chameleon and practice shifting her skin to match the environment. When other children came to play, my mother would hide, and only after they left would she rush to the window, press her face to the glass, and look at them leaving. My mother found out when she was about thirteen; she doesn’t remember how, but she said it explained a lot. When she found out, she went on a nighttime rampage through all the parks of London and cut the roses. She brought back hundreds of roses. She filled my grandmother’s house with roses from bud to bloom to past their prime—cabbage rose, common rose, tea rose—each with delicate petals like human flesh, each with a perfume, a beautiful scent turned putrid. The theft of roses was a crime; the roses belonged to the city, to the people, and they were not for the benefit of just one. The story of the theft made all the papers. Her mother was horrified and threatened to turn her daughter over to the authorities. ‘I can’t have this. It is too much. You are doing it to me again. You are just like your father. You are the proof that you can’t escape your history.’ And together they cut the roses and their long, thorny stems into tiny little pieces and boiled them down.” She pauses. “Does anyone have a life of their own?” she asks the doctor.
He doesn’t answer.
Her third visit is different; there is something on the sofa—like a doily, or a napkin covering the little pillow. Is the hair still beneath it? Is it being hidden, kept safe? She lies back and says nothing. She looks at the room, the light through the windows, a lamp, part of a painting, an extra chair, and a table with a plant. She is thinking of her mother moving furniture, of her grandmother trapped in the roses. She stares at the plant—a beautiful white-and-purple orchid—and wonders, did the doctor buy it or receive it as a gift?
“Is it real?” she asks.
“Does it look real?” the doctor answers.
When the session is over, she sits up. The room spins, a kaleidoscope, blurring. She falls back on the sofa.
“Your time is up for today,” the doctor says. But she cannot get up. The doctor seems flummoxed—this has not happened before. He goes to his desk, rummages through the drawer, and finds a tin of hard candy. He offers her one; it is red and the shape of a rose. She sucks the candy and the succor works wonders. She dreams she is walking on water and it is raining rose petals.