‘It seems to me that this picture is quite different from most of the images you’ve produced here in these sessions, Elisabeth,’ says Arne.

‘Different how?’

‘Does anyone else want to contribute? Does anyone have an idea why I believe this picture is a clear departure from Elisabeth’s general style?’

‘It’s certainly more explicit,’ says Gina, an older woman with scraggly black hair and teeth stained an impressive shade of yellow.

‘Continue,’ says Arne.

‘Well. In most of Elisabeth’s pictures, the themes seem to be pretty abstract. You might see bloodstains, I might see the inside of a jam jar, Joel might see something else entirely. But this… This is, like, obvious.’

‘What do you see, Gina?’

‘Well. A river. Of blood. A dark, busy forest. Uh. Lots of life somehow. Bugs, bats, those faces among the trees.’

‘Faces?’ Elisabeth blurts it out, her eyes returning to the painting, and only then does she see them: faces indeed, distinctly human, and ghoulishly twisted into terrifying grimaces that bleed into the dense foliage of the forest.

‘Elisabeth?’ says Arne. ‘You sound surprised.’

‘No. No, just I didn’t realize that they were so obvious, that’s all.’

‘Can you tell me about this?’ Arne points his finger to the top right-hand side of the picture, where a little brown bird, painted meticulously and in more sophisticated detail than the rest of the scene, flies in between deliberately childishly drawn, yellow five-point stars.

‘Um… No.’ She has rarely felt this tongue-tied in a group therapy session; usually Arne’s art sessions are her favorites, but today she feels strangely discombobulated and dissociated, entirely unable to decipher any meaning in her own imagery. The task they were given was to ‘paint yourself in nature’.

‘Would I be correct in assuming the bird represents you?’

‘Yes. Yes, maybe.’

‘It looks like a happy bird.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And yet, the scene it flies over is very disturbing.’

‘Yeah. Yes, I guess it is.’

‘A blood-red river, threatening faces among dense trees, a real sense of danger.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘But the bird is free.’

‘Yeah,’ says Elisabeth, blinking at sudden tears in her eyes.

51

Kristina

I shiver lightly at her words. My mother. I can’t believe Leah has really gone that far, seeking out people in my life and striking up contact with them, but she clearly has. The problem is, Leah is certainly mistaken if she thinks that she could uncover some deep, dark secrets about me by speaking to my mother. There are no deep, dark secrets to uncover. It’s all right there, on the internet, like Leah herself says.

Could she really have gotten to Elisabeth, too? I can’t imagine it would be possible; Elisabeth spent the last eighteen months of her life in a rehabilitation facility with limited visitor access. I think she would have mentioned it to me if someone had come around asking about me, no doubt about that. But what if she didn’t?