The Left Hand

Elspeth

He calls me Ms. Reeve.

It is the first thing I notice, and it goes through me like cold water through a seam. Nine in the morning, the sixteenth of December, and Dr. Ambrose Kestrel stands at the window of his study with his back to me and the seven clocks ticking at his shoulder, and he does not say Dahlia. He does not say Good morning. He says, "Ms. Reeve. Please sit."

Not the chaise. The chair.

I sit.

His suit is the charcoal one. His waistcoat is buttoned to the throat. A pair of silver cufflinks glints at each wrist, the Eye of Horus on both sides, turned precisely fifteen degrees. His hair is combed. His chin is shaved close enough to shine.

It is a restoration. The man who stood in the doorway of the green room with a paraffin lantern, shaking, has been put back in his case. Everything that was cracked has been cleaned and varnished and set on a shelf. It is a very good job. If I had not had my mouth on his, I would not have known there'd been a crack.

I fold my hands in my lap and look at the floor.

I let him have the silence. It is what he needs. A man who has spent a night looking at the ceiling does not want to be asked how he feels.

"I owe you an apology," says Kestrel, to the window.

"Doctor?"

"Last night's... excursion... was a clinical error. I put you in a situation of undue distress. I allowed my own judgment to be compromised. What passed between us afterward." He stops. I hear him swallow. "It was inappropriate. It was my responsibility. It will not occur again."

It was my responsibility.

I note the structure of the sentence. He has taken the blame entirely, in a tone of formal penance, and in doing so he has told me what he most wants me to know. That it happened. That it was real. That he will not pretend, even to protect himself, that I was the one who forced it.

I let my lip tremble.

"Did I do something wrong?"

"No." The word is fast. "No. You did nothing wrong, Dahlia."

Dahlia. It slipped out. He hears it. His shoulders stiffen.

"I'd like to begin a new phase of treatment," he says, quickly, and turns, and for the first time his eyes meet mine. They are very clear and very tired. There's a muscle ticking beside the left one. "A phase I've delayed too long. I think you're ready. We've done a great deal of work on the content of what happened at Lake Verrin. I now want to begin the reconstruction."

I wait.

"Until now, I've been guiding you. Giving you the narrative, in effect, in order to establish a stable frame. That was necessary. But a frame is not a life. It is not what you remember. A true recovery is one in which the patient herself retrieves the event, in her own words, and finds that she can survive it." His fingers lace behind his back. "I propose, today, to ask you to tell me what you see."

My heart does one slow, hard beat.

"In the Orchard?"

"In the Orchard. Without prompts."

Without prompts.

I look at the man across the desk from me, who has not slept, whose pulse is, I'd guess, ninety, and I understand what this is. It is not a therapy. It is an audit.

He wants to see what I have.

…

I go down the ten steps with my left hand on the cold wall.

I prepare as I would for a deposition. Not by rehearsal, but by clearing. I have thirty minutes before he comes, and I spend them with my back against the glass, in the smell of dahlia and night jasmine, running the ballast.

Five. Zero. Three. One. Seven. Four. Four. Zero. Nine. Two. Six. One.

Finch's twelve digits. I recite them like a rosary, in the voice that I use for numbers. They are heavy, they are cold, they are real. As long as I can say them in order, with the pause where the zero goes, the floor is the floor.

Four hundred and twelve million. The fourteenth of September.

Dennis Oakhurst. Sixty-one. Cardigan. One pack a week.

Elspeth Calder Marrow. Thirty-four. Left-handed.

When he enters I am lying on the chaise, rigid as a board, with my eyes closed and my fists at my sides. He sits on the stool. He takes out the watch. The pendulum clock beside the chaise begins its slow tick.

Tick... tock...

"Look at the watch, Dahlia."

I look.

…

I'll tell you what hypnosis is like, since no one has told me.

It is not sleep. It is not falling. It's more like being in a house where somebody has gone around, very quietly, taking the furniture out of the rooms. You are still there. The walls are still there. But the things that told you where you were, the clocks and the doorways and the particular angle of the light, have been removed, one by one, until you are standing in a very large, very pleasant, very bright space with nothing in it to hold on to.

I fight it with numbers.

Five. Zero. Three.

Tap. Tap. On the back of my hand.

One. Seven. Four.

"You are in the Glass Orchard," says the voice, from a long way off. "Nothing can hurt you here."

Four. Zero.

"Go to the kitchen, Dahlia."

I go.

"Tell me where you are."

My lips move. They are working by themselves, in a patient, practiced rhythm, and I let them. I have prepared the words. I know the script. It is Warren's script, as Kestrel built it: a kitchen in a log house, a night of pine and spirits, a kitchen knife in a right hand. I say the lines I have rehearsed in my mind for five weeks, in a thick, slow, drugged voice.

"The kitchen. At Lake Verrin. It's late."

"What do you smell?"

"Pine. And whisky. There's... a smell of whisky."

There was no whisky. Dennis drank bourbon on a Friday. It was Wednesday, and he'd been on the wagon since August.

"Where is Conrad?"

"Across the table."

"What is he doing?"

I hear the question as a bell, and I hear my own voice reply as if it were someone else's.

"He's shouting."

Tap. Tap. On the back of my hand. The voice is gentle.

"Good. What is he shouting?"

And here is the first of the traps.

Because I don't know. Because the man in the script shouts, and the script has no words. Warren, I think, in a conference room in Manhattan with a lawyer's imagination, wrote shouts and curses and threatens to take everything away, and did not trouble to say what the threats were. He didn't need to. A man who shouts is a man who shouts. A jury will supply the rest.

"I can't hear," I say.

"Listen."

"There's... it's too loud. Everything's loud. He's saying... I don't..."

"Listen, Dahlia. What are the words?"

And that is when I feel it begin.

…

The floor opens.

It does not drop. It softens. I am standing in the cedar kitchen with the lamp on and a mug in my hand, and the room has rearranged itself. The script has gone thin. It's a transparency laid over a photograph, and the photograph is showing through.

The frost on the glass. The binder on the table. A gray-haired man in a cardigan with leather patches, saying It foots.

It's not whisky, I think. It's tea.

And Conrad isn't across the table.

Conrad is by the door.

He is standing in the dark by the back door, with the light behind him, very still, with his hands at his sides. I can't see his face. He is only a shape. A tall shape, with a limp cast of the shoulder.

And his left hand, against his thigh, is tapping.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I know this.

I know this the way I know the sound of my own door. I know it in the base of my spine, in the soles of my feet. I have heard it across a thousand dinner tables, in bed in the dark, in the back seat of a car. I know the pause after the third beat, when it is going to stop, and the pause after the third beat when it is not.

"Dahlia."

The voice is a long way off, and urgent.

"What does Conrad say?"

I hear myself answer.

It is a small, sleepy, thoughtful voice, with no fear in it at all. It sounds like a woman describing the weather. It sounds like someone I used to know.

"He doesn't say anything," I say.

A silence.

"He never shouts. He doesn't. He goes quiet. He stands there, and he taps, three times, on his leg, and he doesn't say anything at all, and then you know."

I hear it as one hears a stranger's voice in an adjoining room.

I try to stop it. I reach for the ballast. Five. Zero. Three. One. But it is slipping away from me like a rope paid out through wet hands, and the voice goes on, in the same dreamy, sorrowful tone, saying the thing I have not said aloud in seven years.

"That's how I know. It's always the quiet. When he's quiet, that's when I'm in danger."

"Dahlia..."

"He's so quiet. He's never been loud. Not once."

There's a small sharp sound on my left.

I don't know what it is. A breath, perhaps. A stool shifting. A fountain pen that has been put down on a glass table, very softly, so as not to make a noise.

And beneath my left hand, on the cream nappa leather, I feel something moving.

My fingers. The ring finger, the middle, the forefinger. They are lifting and falling, lifting and falling. A small steady pulse against the leather.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I'm doing it.

I am doing the thing that he does.

It's my own hand, the left, the clever one, and it is tapping three beats on the chaise as if the nerves had been rewired. Seven years. Seven years of sitting beside a man whose hand did that, and my own hand, which I thought I owned, has learned it.

I come up out of the dark like a swimmer coming up out of a drowning.

I'm gasping. My eyes are open. The glass ceiling is glittering white over my face, and Kestrel is bent over me with one hand on my shoulder, and it is not the voice of a doctor that is saying, over and over, in a low and urgent tone:

"Dahlia. Dahlia. Dahlia. Wake up. Come up. It's all right. I'm here."

The watch lies on the glass floor where he dropped it.

I have never seen him drop anything.

…

He takes his time with me.

He gets me up. He sits me on the chaise with a blanket around my shoulders, and fetches a glass of water from the table, and holds it to my mouth when my hand will not close around it. He kneels in front of me on the glass floor in his charcoal suit, and takes my wrist between two fingers, and counts.

"A hundred and four," he says. "That's high. Breathe, Dahlia. Slow. In through the nose."

I breathe. I make my face into the face of a woman who has been through a terrible thing and does not know what it was. It is not difficult. I'm shaking so hard the water slops over the rim.

"What happened?" I whisper. "I said something. Didn't I? I said something wrong."

"You said nothing wrong."

"I heard myself."

"You were in a deep state. People say all kinds of things. It's the very nature of the technique." His thumb moves, once, on the pulse inside my wrist. "I want you to know that nothing you said in here has any force. It's only... imagery. The mind assembling. It doesn't have to mean anything."

He is lying.

I know he's lying because his cufflinks do not move. His hands are perfectly still. He has trained himself, in one night, not to touch them. And that is the proof: a man who works that hard to hold his hands still has a great deal to hide.

He heard.

I look into his face. I'm looking for the thing in it that I can't hold on to: the chill, the wariness, the instant of scientific alarm. I find instead something far worse.

I find tenderness.

It is a wide-open, unguarded tenderness, and underneath it, like the shape of a rock under water, a kind of terror.

"Rest," says Kestrel. His voice is rough. "Take the day. I'll tell Nurse Sorrell you're not to be disturbed."

"Doctor..."

"Ambrose," he says. "In here."

I look at him.

"Ambrose," I whisper. "I'm frightened."

"I know."

"Tell me it isn't true. What I said."

He holds my eyes, for a long moment, and I see that he is going to give me the answer I've asked for. I see him decide to. It costs him something.

"I don't know what's true," says Kestrel. "That's the honest answer. I'm no longer sure what's true in this room."

And I understand that this is the most dangerous thing he's ever said to me.

…

I spend the rest of that day in the Lantern Wing, behind a locked door, with my knees pulled up on the window seat and a blanket around my feet, looking at the snow.

I go through it as I would go through the books of a company that has just gone into receivership. Item by item. In order.

One. The script is Warren's.

I should have seen it on the first day. The shouting, the curses, the threats of violence. It's the language of a particular kind of man, and Conrad isn't that man. Conrad is quiet. But there is a man in the Marrow family who shouts, and I have heard him through the wall of a dining room at Marrow Hall, thundering about a bill or a vote. A man with a mane of white hair and a voice like a pulpit.

Augustin.

When Warren sat in his office on Park Avenue with a pad of yellow paper and wrote the scene of a husband provoking his wife to murder, he did not write Conrad. He wrote the man he had grown up with. He wrote the only furious husband that he knew. His father.

It is almost funny. It is the clearest evidence of the whole case, in the form of a single wrong verb. He's shouting. Four thousand pages of Larkspur trails, and the proof is in a childhood.

Two. The falsification is not mine alone.

Kestrel must know. He's watched Conrad in the Orchard thirty-one times. He's listened to him weep. He knows exactly how Conrad behaves when he's angry or afraid, and it is not by shouting. He must have known, when he took Warren's script, that it was wrong.

And he used it anyway.

Three. My hand.

I hold the left one up in front of my face and look at it.

It lies there, thin, pale, with the white strip on the finger and the raw red scratches I've made with my own nail. It looks perfectly ordinary. A hand.

It is not mine.

I put the right over it, hard, and press until the tendons stand out. I make it still. It stays still. And then, after a minute, as I watch, it begins again, under my palm: a small stubborn flutter, like a trapped bird. Three beats.

I take my hand away and sit on it.

It would be funny, I think, if it weren't the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me. I came into this place with one fear, which was that the Marrows would take my memory. I had not imagined that I'd carry, in my body, in the sinews of my own wrist, a record of the man who put me here. That seven years of being quiet beside him had made me, in some small and permanent way, quiet like him.

Four. The reconciling item.

Forty seconds on the ninth day. Four minutes today. A mouth that said true things when it was supposed to say false ones. I am not in control of the instrument.

Dennis used to say that an auditor's first duty was to audit herself. The books you keep are the books you can't trust.

I look at the window.

It's late afternoon. The light is going blue. In the white slope below the glass, a crow stands in the snow, black and perfect, with its head on one side. It watches the house.

There is a knock at the door.

Not Kestrel's. He knocks three times, evenly spaced. This is two soft knocks and a pause. A woman's hand.

"Dahlia?" Bridget's voice, low, through the wood. "I've brought your tray."

I unlock the door.

She comes in with the tray balanced on one arm. Soup. A roll. A paper cup with two pills in it. She sets it on the desk, and then, without looking at me, she lifts the cup with the pills and tilts it into her own palm, and drops them in her pocket.

"He's had me clear your schedule for three days," she says.

"I know."

"He's been in the study since noon. Door locked. Lamp on. He asked me to bring him the pharmacy list and a pot of coffee, and he's been playing something on the Gramophone. I couldn't hear what. Something slow." She glances at me. Her eyes are very dark. "You've done something to him."

"Yes."

"I hope you know what."

"Not yet."

She is quiet for a moment, rubbing her thumb along the rim of the tray.

"There's something else," says Bridget. "Tomorrow. The tour."

"The donors."

"Cordelia's sending Mr. Pryce." She watches me. "Anders Pryce. The new Director of Philanthropy. I've seen the schedule. Ten-thirty, the day room. Eleven, the Lantern Wing." A beat. "He's asked to see you."

A cold drop runs down the length of my spine, slow and exact, like a bead of water on a windowpane.

"By name?"

"By number," says Bridget. "He asked for C-104."

I sit very still.

Out in the snow, the crow lifts one foot, and puts it down, and does not move.