“But is the rest of it true?” he asks. “You lived in a halfway house? You used heroin?”
I’m too ashamed to answer, but he can read the truth on my face. Adrian turns and leaves the den and I go to follow him but Caroline blocks my way. “Let him go, Mallory. Don’t make this any harder for him.”
I turn toward the window and watch Adrian cross the flagstone walkway and his face is all twisted up with hurt. Halfway down the driveway he breaks into a kind of trot, like he can’t wait to get the hell away from me. He gets inside a black pickup truck and peels away from the curb.
And when I look back at Caroline, she’s holding a plastic cup. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
She walks me to the powder room. I go inside and reach to close the door, but she stops me, shaking her head. As if she’s worried I’m going to somehow manipulate my sample, like I carry around vials of clean urine just in case. Caroline does me the courtesy of turning her head while I drop my shorts and squat over the toilet. Having been tested many hundreds of times, I am well practiced in collecting clean samples. I can fill a four-ounce cup without spilling a drop. I set the cup on the edge of the sink, then pull up my shorts and wash my hands. The water runs black, filling the basin with grainy residue. I use a bar of soap to scrape at my fingers and palms, but the graphite clings to my skin like ink, like stains that will never come out.
“I’ll wait for you in the den,” Caroline says. “We won’t start until you get there.”
All my handwashing leaves a filthy gray ring on the immaculate white pedestal sink. Yet another thing to feel guilty about. I try to clean it up with some toilet paper, then I dry my hands on my shorts.
When I reach the den, Caroline and Ted are seated on the sofa and they’ve got my sample on the coffee table, resting atop a paper towel. Caroline shows me a dip card that’s still wrapped in cellophane, to prove it hasn’t been tampered with. Then she unwraps the card, exposes the five test strips, and lowers them into the cup.
“Look, I understand why you’re doing this, but it’s not going to come up positive. I swear to you. I’ve been sober for twenty months.”
“And we want to believe you,” Caroline says, and then she glances at the drawings all over the walls. “But we need to understand what happened here today.”
“I already told you what happened. Anya took possession of my body. She used me like a puppet. I didn’t draw any of these pictures! She did!”
“If we’re going to talk about this,” Caroline says, “we need to stay calm. We can’t shout at each other.”
I take a breath. “All right. Okay.”
“Now before you came to work here, we had a long talk with Russell about your history. He told us about your struggles—the false memories, the lapses—”
“This is different. I don’t have those problems anymore.”
“You know just a couple days ago, Teddy lost his box of drawing pencils. He came to me crying. He was upset because he couldn’t find them anywhere. And soon after that, all these pictures start magically appearing in your cottage. Doesn’t that seem like an extraordinary coincidence?”
I look down at the cup. It’s only been a minute. It’s still way too early for results.
“Caroline, I can barely draw a straight line. I took one art class in high school. I got a C plus. There’s no way I drew these pictures, I’m not that good.”
“My patients always say the same thing: ‘I can’t draw to save my life!’ But then they try art therapy and the results are extraordinary. They draw the most amazing images to work through their trauma. To process truths they’re not ready to face.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Look at the woman in your pictures. She’s young, she’s tall. She has an athletic build. She’s actually running, Mallory. Does she remind you of anyone?”
I see where she’s going but she’s wrong. “That’s not a self-portrait.”
“It’s a symbolic representation. A visual metaphor. You’ve lost your younger sister. You’re upset, you’re panicking, you’re desperate to bring her back—but it’s too late. She’s fallen into a valley of death.” She moves around the den, directing my attention from one picture to the next. “And then an angel comes to help her—nothing too subtle about that metaphor, right? The angel is leading Beth toward the light and you can’t stop them. Beth has crossed over, she’s never coming back. You know this, Mallory. It’s all here on the wall. This isn’t Anya’s story. It’s your story. It’s Beth’s story.”