The water threatens to rise up and take me as I describe it, but Dr. Hancock urges me to go on. I can tell it’s one of the steps I’m supposed to take on my “road to recovery.” Reliving the trauma, Laurel supplies helpfully. This is when you supposedly split and became me. Shrinks love this sort of thing.
So I give him what he wants. I trace my steps through that bloody water to the tub and look down—
Into a woman’s face floating below red water. A baby is crying—
“I picked up the baby,” I say.
“From where?” Dr. Hancock asks. “Was she in the tub?”
I try to think. I see the red water and then I’m holding the baby wrapped in a blanket that’s sopping wet. “I-I’m not sure,” I admit.
“What did you do next?” Dr. Hancock asks.
“I walked downstairs. There was a suitcase by the door . . .”
A suitcase? Laurel asks.
I see myself walking out the door with a baby in my arms and a suitcase. “I had brought it over to Daphne’s . . .”
Why? Laurel asks inside my head. Why would I have brought my suitcase to your house?
Don’t you know? I want to shout at Laurel, but instead I say, “I was leaving. I’d come to say goodbye to Daphne, but when I found her . . .”
Something snapped.
“Something snapped. I took Daphne’s baby and I started to think I was Daphne. Daphne pretending to be Laurel.”
Dr. Hancock sighs with satisfaction. “You experienced a dissociative break with reality brought on by the trauma of finding your friend dead by her own hand—her baby almost dead. The shock was particularly bad because of how much you identified with Daphne. You had to keep the baby safe so you had to become Daphne in your own head.”
“I guess. It seems . . .”
Preposterous? Laurel suggests.
“Sensible,” I say.
Dr. Hancock grins. “Exactly. You just did what you had to do.”
“Yes,” I agree, another moment of honesty that makes me feel dangerously exposed. “Now what do I have to do to . . .”—I stop myself from saying get out of here and say instead—“get better?”
“We keep talking,” he says. “We figure out how you got here and then we find a path back.”
“You mean we talk about Lau—my history?”
“Exactly.”
Oh honey, Laurel says, good luck with that.
THE ONLY TIME I leave my room is to shuffle down a long hall to the bare, windowless room where I meet with Dr. Hancock once a day. I’m not allowed out into the “general population” yet. When I ask why not, Dr. Hancock tells me I’m still in a very impressionable state. “I want to limit your outside influences until you’ve established firm boundaries again.”
It makes me sound like an orphaned duckling that will imprint on whatever it sees first. Or a blob of clay waiting for the potter’s wheel. I feel like a blob. The medication they’ve got me on makes my mouth gummy, my hands and feet clumsy, my head full of cotton. I need to think clearly. There has to be some reason that Peter and Stan want people to believe I’m Laurel. But why? If they killed her for her inheritance why bring her back to life?
Good question, Laurel says.
“The money was tied up in a trust,” I say, forgetting not to answer out loud, “so Stan won’t have access to it whether you’re dead or not.”
He would have access to it as Chloë’s guardian. But in that case, why do they need me to be alive? Why do they need you?
I’m about to answer when Dr. Hancock enters my room. “Laurel?” he asks. “Who are you talking to?”
They must have hidden cameras in the rooms. I’ll have to remember that from now on.
“Myself,” I answer.
THE NURSE BRINGS me three pills instead of the usual two with my dinner tray that night. That’s what I get for talking to myself. I remember Ben Marcus saying that some of the patients “tongued” their medication, but I’m not sure how to do that. The nurse always makes me stick out my tongue after I swallow. But tonight, after I empty the paper cup of pills into my mouth, I kick the dinner tray off its stand. When she looks toward it, I spit the pills out into my lap and cover them in a fold of my pajamas. Then I quickly lift the water cup to my mouth and pretend to swallow the pills. The nurse is too angry at having to clean up the mess to bother checking my mouth. “Baby Killer,” she mutters under her breath.
I’m shocked. It’s not true! I want to scream. It was Laurel who tried to drown her baby.
You don’t know that for sure.
The blanket was wet, I answer in my head while peeling the damp, grainy pills off my pajamas. I hide them under my mattress.
Why are we hiding them? Laurel asks. But I don’t answer her.
WITHOUT THE PILLS I stay up half the night. The hospital is different at night, full of sounds that are masked during the day by the voices of orderlies and nurses, the wheels of carts squeaking up and down the hall, the screams and shrieks of patients. At night I can hear a rhythmic thumping, like a giant heart powering the life of the building. I can hear, too, the wind moving through the pine forest. I remember the expanse of woods I saw from the tower. If I could get out of here I could hide in those woods.
I sit and watch out the window until it happens. What I’ve been waiting for. The light comes on in the tower. It flashes once. I flick my own light in answer. I don’t know whom I’m signaling. In the stillness and quiet of the night hospital it feels as if I have slipped out of time and I am signaling myself weeks ago, sending a warning to myself.
Laurel’s Journal, July 8, 20—
Project Doormat has been progressing quite well. I think I missed my calling. Organizing books and papers is not half
