Quarter to three in the morning. She’s pulling in Spotify on her cell phone, playing all the Lorde they have. She is at her drawing board. Before she took over the lease, this workshop belonged to a cabinetmaker. He left behind a huge, work-worn table he probably made here, with no thought to ever getting it out through the door. The thick legs are inset deep into the top, further stuck with adhesive and bolts. She added a tilting top for drawing.

Waiting for the heat to kick on, she shrugs into a stray sweater, a shape-shifted maroon cardigan once worn by the evil Cathy Ames in a teen-outreach production of East of Eden. Its current shape is that of a large rag. A tide of designs and models—her own and those of students, also props she hangs on to because the next play won’t have them and she doesn’t want to have to go looking again, the stray piece of some costume—all wash up in this workshop and have to continuously be beaten back, like sand from a desert hut.

She is trying to use work to confine her mind. But her mind is not interested in confinement, not at all. Rather, it wants to leap around madly, go forward, then circle back again to the scene of the crime, to see what more it can pull loose. She pushes aside the small set she is working on, pulls over a notebook with an articulated drawing of Neale’s kitchen, showing where the players were. Laying a grid on chaos.

She is caught between two immovable and large pieces of her life: what happened in Neale’s kitchen and what’s happening in New York. Her worst event and her biggest break. In a reasonable life, these wouldn’t be juxtapositioned. She should be able to have a minute to take a deep breath. In her recent past there have been months-long stretches of underemployment when she could have easily fit in killing someone, then curling into some PTSD fetal position for a while afterward. After the Vita play, she has two shows on her schedule—one in April for Handlebars in Milwaukee, one in Chicago in July when school is out. A reasonable schedule.

(The heat has come on. Wet meets dry, and the memory of carpentry releases a sigh of wood and glue.)