When she had graduated, she terminated the counseling sessions, and married and divorced Justin. Now she lived in her ivory tower. As far as she could tell the attempt at counseling had been a complete failure.
The painting she was trying to work on was a failure as well. She lifted it from the easel and set it against one wall to dry. Then she took up her sketchpad and pencils, hoping that the change in medium might help her convey some of the delicacy that she could see so clearly with her mind’s eye.
As she worked, an old memory shook itself out of a dark recess in her mind. She paused to let it unfurl. She had always drawn as a child. As soon as her fingers were big enough to clutch a crayon she would draw, over and over again, people in cages. It had become an elaborate secret project over the years. The people acquired names and personalities. They had rooms in their prisons. She would draw crude beds, chairs, bookcases, kitchens, all behind bars. They were her people, and she would never let them go.
Over time, she had stopped with that obsession but she had never spoken of it to anyone, and she’d always destroyed the pictures with a hot sense of shame. What kind of monster was she to daydream about caged people?
Seven. Her breathing hitched. She had always drawn seven people. How could she have forgotten that?
She sketched, her movements slow as she struggled past the adult’s acquired finesse to approximate something of the child’s crudity as she worked to recapture the details from years ago. A simple triangle of an ankle-length dress, the long sleeves, the curl of hair . . . She hesitated at the hem of the dress and her forehead wrinkled. If she remembered right, she had never drawn hands or feet.
Her college counselor would have had a field day with that imagery. She shut the sketchbook with a sharp slap.