For now she is too much like a child for their retreat beneath the covers to end in anything other than her clinging, naked, to his nakedness, crying until she feels empty. But in the morning she feels moved to kiss him, and he responds with tenderness.

‌April

Dr Logan sits with April for an hour. He says nothing. He arrived, he turned the chair at the window to face into the room, he smiled at her, and he closed his eyes. Now he is just sitting there. She can see he is breathing, but he is very still. His palms are open, upturned, on his knees, as though he expects to receive a present. Two months ago he was here getting upset with her, a week after they discussed whether death was the end, and now he is sitting in her room as though she doesn’t exist. Maybe he is here to do nothing. Tick a box on a form. She likes the peace. He is emptying the room. Or is he filling it? For a while, she breathes with his breathing. They are breathing together, like lovers. Then something arises in her mind. The pool’s blue surface, on a late summer evening. Still, still, not a sound, not a screech of laughter, not a thump of bass. An evening without a party. The only living presence a bat, sweeping the air for midges. Dr Logan takes in a deeper, fuller breath, surprisingly loud in the silence, and lets it out slowly.

Dr Logan, she says. Have you ever had something happen to you? Something terrible?

Logan opens his eyes. April looks infantilized in her regulation gown. A child of the madhouse. But her eyes are steady and sane. He re-engages that part of his brain that processes language and lets her question echo in his head. Did something terrible happen to you?

My daughter died, he says.

The words fall out of him so easily that they surprise him. How painless it is to say words unattached to resistance. My daughter died. Now he knows: for the first time, this is accepted fact. My daughter died. He has never said them this way. Painlessly. He watches them land with April, who receives them with the grace of an experienced fielder.

How did it happen? she asks.

He is going to see if he can do it again.

A plane jump, for charity. Her parachute failed.

Again, the words simply appear. They appear and vanish, and he is the same. They are no longer full of knives and treachery. There is no sense of them dragging him bodily into some dreadful abyss.

That’s rough, says April. He can see she means it. And that there is something more. He knows that she asked him to make this ladder towards her so that she can cross it to him. She keeps her eyes on him and says, Something terrible happened to me, too.