“I know,” she mumbles, without conviction.

“It’s worse if you never get out.”

“I know.”

“For the most part, they’re perfectly fine, you know.”

“I know,” she says, feeling sorry for the images of her public self that percolate in her mind: stilted, gloomily shadowed; or glib and foolish, and excruciated after.

“What sort of costume do you need? A red cloak?”

“That and a basket, I guess,” she answers.

“Let’s walk down to Charles Street, then. Though we might have to hurry—the shops must be shutting soon.”

Having to hurry, having to put forth any supplementary effort, renews her sense of resistance. “We don’t have the money to buy costumes,” she mutters.

Ted rubs his fingertip over the smooth seal fur. “You could wear your red shoes. You could wear your red shoes and nothing else.”

She cuts her eyes at him, ready to laugh.

“They would never forget you,” he adds, smiling slyly.

“That’s just what Mother thinks,” she says. “She keeps dreaming I’m a chorus girl or a hooker or some tart, and my father drives off a bridge in shame.”

“So she brings him back to life only to kill him,” Ted observes.

“No, I kill him,” she corrects.

“But that’s her invention, not yours,” Ted says. “You’ve been working at something else.”

“You mean with Beuscher,” she says.

“With Beuscher, but also in your writing.”

“Oh, ‘Full Fathom Five.’” She rolls her eyes, the narcissistic pool of self-pity too attractive to allow herself to agree.

“Yes,” Ted answers emphatically, thumping the mask in his lap, his hair falling over his brow.

“But I haven’t written anything really good since we’ve been here. My stories are just as glazed and static as they were in Northampton,” she argues.

Ted stretches his arm across the pillows behind him to reach the table on his side of the bed; he sets his mask down, avoiding the additional books and clock and water glasses there. He rests his other hand, radiating warmth, on her quilt-covered thigh. “You’ve made the courageous leap, which was the first and most necessary step. Now you need to get past the intrusions.”

“Dr. Beuscher says I’m trying to accomplish two mutually canceling things this year. One is that I want to write. The other is that I want to free myself of Mother. But now I can’t write because I’m afraid she’ll take possession of everything I do, as she always has.” She slides the smooth soles of her wool-socked feet down the bed sheet to reach past her knees for the copy of “Mourning and Melancholia” atop the quilt. “It’s all in here,” she says. “Almost word for word my experience when I was twenty, eerily exact. In Freud’s terms, Mother is a vampire draining my ego.”

“Then don’t let her,” Ted says. “While we’re still here, simply do what you can to practice craft. Develop your daily discipline. But don’t worry about producing anything, for yourself or for your mother. Just write. You have a wealth of words; they’re there. They’re your bank account. You needn’t squander them frivolously or inauthentically.”