At night, and asleep, I called for Evie. I woke with people above me, consoling me, and her name still in my mouth. She was in a different hospital, they said, and I couldn’t see her just yet.
A week after I first woke up, I opened my eyes and found a stranger in the room. She was sitting on the chair beside my bed, reading from a ring-bound file. In the moments before she knew that I was awake, I examined her. She wasn’t wearing hospital uniform. Instead, she wore a sharp, pale dress and a blue jacket, and the highest shoes that I had ever seen. Her hair was short. Her eyes flicked through the words before her, and as she read, a line between them creased and softened, according to the sentence.
‘Hello,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’m Dr K.’
Many months later, I understood that it was spelt as a word – Kay – but by that time we knew each other well, and she liked my interpretation: ‘It’s far more concise,’ she said.
She set down her folder and held out her hand to me, and I took it. ‘I’m Alexandra,’ I said. ‘You probably already know that.’
‘I do,’ she said, ‘yes. But it’s better to hear it from you. Alexandra, I’m one of the psychologists who works with the hospital and with the police. Do you know what that entails?’
‘The mind,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. So while all of the doctors and the nurses will be looking after your body, we can talk about your mind. How you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. Both what has happened, and what you would like to happen now. Sometimes the police might join us, and sometimes it will just be me and you. And when it’s like that – when it’s just the two of us – whatever you say to me is confidential. It’s a secret.’
She stood up from the chair and knelt at the side of my bed. ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘A promise. I can understand minds, and I can work with them. I like to believe that I can make them better. But I can’t read them. So we’ll need to be honest. Even about the difficult things. Does that sound OK?’
Her voice was starting to distort. ‘OK,’ I said.
She said something more, but she was in motion, tipping away from me, and when I next woke it was night-time, and she was gone.
After that, she visited each day. She was sometimes accompanied by two detectives; they were there when she explained that Father had killed himself shortly after I left the house. The first team of respondents found him in the kitchen. Despite multiple attempts, it was not possible to resuscitate him.
Did they try? I wondered. Then: And how hard?
Instead, I asked how he had done it. The detectives looked at Dr K, who looked at me. ‘He consumed a toxic substance,’ said Dr K. ‘A poison. There were many, many indications that this had been planned, and planned for some time.’
‘There was a large supply in the household,’ one of the detectives said. ‘We speculate that this might have been the endgame.’
They looked at one another again. There was a relief to them, as if they had got something out of the way which had gone better than they expected.
‘How do you feel about that?’ Dr K said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. An hour later, when I was alone, I came up with my answer, which was: unsurprised.
Mother, they said, was in custody. She, too, had been in possession of a toxic substance, but had declined to take it; they had found her sitting on the kitchen floor with Father’s head in her lap. She guarded the body like those dogs you read about, which refuse to leave their master’s corpse.
‘And the others?’ I said.
‘Rest, now,’ Dr K said. ‘Let’s talk more tomorrow.’
I understand, now, that there were things that they were working to resolve. We had a whole team, a vast new family: the police; our psychologists; the doctors. They’d stand looking at old photographs of our faces on a whiteboard, headed with the names by which the world now knew us: Boys A to D; Girls A to C. There were lines drawn between us, and words written along those lines: ‘Close proximity’, and ‘Potential violence’, and ‘Relationship to be determined’. New details would be noted, offered or ascertained from hospital beds. The map of our lives began to appear, like constellations at dusk.
Often, Dr K and I would sit in silence. ‘Would you like to talk today?’ she would ask, and I would be too tired, or in pain from one of the operations, or hating everything: hating her beautiful clothes and composure, and mortified, in contrast, by the way my body looked in the bed, the angles of it avian and strange, none of it working as it was meant to. At other times, when the detectives were with her, she would ask me about everything that I could remember: not just the Binding Days or the Chaining, but before that, when we were children. My audience recorded everything that I said, even the things that seemed irrelevant, and so I talked more: about the books that Evie and I liked, for example, or the holiday in Blackpool.
‘How long has it been since you went to school?’ Dr K asked. I was embarrassed: I couldn’t remember.
‘Did you start at senior school?’ she asked.
‘Yes. That was my last year. I don’t remember the exact time I stopped, but I know where we were up to in all of the subjects – in almost everything.’
‘How would you feel about going back?’ she said, smiling.
After that, a hospital tutor came to visit me each afternoon. Dr K never mentioned it, but I recognized her quiet magic. She had procured a Bible for me to read, because I liked the familiar passages before bedtime. She sensed when I was becoming tired of the detectives’ questions, and shut her notebook, closing the conversation. To say thank you, I tried to talk to her more, even when I did hate her.
Sometimes, too, we talked about the future. ‘Have you ever thought,’ she said, ‘about what you would like to do?’
‘Like a job?’
‘Maybe a job, but other things, too. Where you would like to live, or places you’d like to visit, or activities you’d like to try.’
‘I liked history,’ I said, ‘at school. And maths. I liked most of the subjects.’
‘Well,’ she looked up at me, over her glasses, ‘that’s helpful.’
‘I had a book of Greek myths,’ I said. ‘So I’d like to go to Greece, maybe. Evie and I agreed that we would go together. We told each other the stories.’
‘Which was your favourite?’
‘The minotaur, obviously. But Evie got scared. She liked Orpheus and Eurydice better.’
Dr K set down her notebook and put her hand next to mine on the bed, as close as it could be without touching. ‘You will go to Greece, Lex,’ she said. ‘You will study history and maths, and lots of other subjects. I’m quite sure of it.’
The team concluded that our best chance of living normal lives would be through adoption. Following careful consideration, each of us would be adopted by a different family. We had diverse, specific needs and problematic sibling dynamics; besides, there were so many of us. I have no basis for it, but I see Dr K lobbying for this approach, standing in front of the whiteboard and fighting for it. Above all things, she believed – with work, and with time – that it was possible to discard parts of the past, like an old season’s coat that you never should have bought.