“And what if I’m not helping her enough? The doctors at the care facility—”
“Are assholes.” She leaned forward, made eye contact. “Remember when you came home for Dad’s funeral? You were in the middle of your surgical rotation. I asked you how you could stand it … knowing that if you screwed up, people could die.”
“Yeah.”
“You said, and I quote: ‘That’s part of being a doctor.’ You said that sometimes you just kept going because you had to.”
Julia closed her eyes and sighed. “I remember.”
“Well, now is the time to keep going. That little girl upstairs needs you to believe in yourself.”
Julia glanced up the stairs. It was a long moment before she said, “If I were going to do something radical, I’d need your help.”
“What can I do?”
Julia’s frown was there and gone so quickly Ellie thought she’d imagined it. Then Julia stood. “Find a place in the shadows, park your butt, and sit quietly.”
“And?”
“And wait.”
Julia felt a surprising buoyancy in her step as she went up the stairs. Until the conversation downstairs, she hadn’t even realized that she’d been quietly giving up. Not on Alice; never that. On herself. More and more often, in the deepest, darkest hours of the night, she’d been questioning her abilities, wondering if she was helping Alice or hurting her, wondering about Amber and the other victims. The more she wondered about it all, the weaker she became, and the weaker she became, the more she wondered. It was a vicious cycle that could destroy her.
She squared her shoulders and tilted her chin up, adopting a winner’s stance. Combined with this fledging hope of Maybe I’m still okay, it gave her the strength to open her old bedroom door.
Alice lay in her bed, curled up like a little cinnamon roll. As always, she was on top of the covers. No matter how cold the room got, she never pulled the blankets over her.
Julia glanced at the clock. It was nearing six o’clock. Any minute, Alice would wake from her nap. The child was like a Japanese train in the adherence to her routine. She woke at five-thirty every morning, took a nap from four-thirty to six, and fell asleep at 10:45 each night. Julia could have set her watch by it; that schedule had allowed them to conduct the press conferences.
She shut the door behind her. It clicked hard. She took her notebooks out of their storage box on the uppermost shelf of the closet and went to the table, where she read through her morning’s notes.
Today Alice picked up our copy of The Secret Garden. With remarkable dexterity, she flipped through the pages. Whenever she found a drawing, she made a noise and hit the page with her palm, then looked up to find me. She seems to want me watching her all the time.
She is still following me like a shadow, everywhere I go. She often tucks her hand into my belt or the waistband of my pants and presses against me, moving with a surprising ability to gauge where I’m going.
She still shows no real interest in other people. When anyone comes into the room, she races to the “jungle” of hers and hides. I believe she thinks we can’t see her.
She is increasingly possessive of me, especially when we are not alone. This shows me that she has the ability to make attachments and bond. Unable—or unwilling—to vocalize this possessiveness when others are speaking to me, she uses whatever is available to make noise—hitting the wall, snorting, shuffling her feet, howling. I’m hopeful that someday soon her frustration at the limitations of these forms of communication will force her to try verbalizing her feelings.
Julia picked up her pen and added:
In the past week, she’s become quite comfortable in her new environment. She spends long spans of time at the window, but only if I will stand with her. I have noticed increasing curiosity about her world. She looks under and around things, pulls out drawers, opens closets. She still won’t touch anything metal—and screams when an accidental contact is made—but she’s edging toward the door. Twice today she dragged me to the door and then forced me to lie down beside her. She spent almost an hour in total silence, staring at the bar of light from the hallway. The dogs were on the other side, whining and scratching to be let in. Alice is beginning to wonder what’s beyond this room. That’s a good sign—she’s gone from fear to curiosity. Thus, I think it’s time to expand her world a bit. But we’ll have to be very careful; I believe the forest will exert a powerful pull on her. Somewhere out there, in all that darkness, is the place that was her home.