The fourth day of anything is when you find out it has a shape, and the shape is not getting smaller.
Sunday morning the tray arrived. Eggs, toast, orange juice, fruit. The right-color strawberries. The butter on the toast already spread, a thin even coat, the exact same thickness as every morning before this one. I looked at the butter.
I thought: someone is very careful about the butter.
I ate it.
Jess set the tray down without looking at it. She had the tablet on the chair beside her, already awake, its screen already doing the low warm glow it did while it waited for something to listen to. She did not look at the tablet either. Jess had stopped looking at the tablet the way you stop looking at the hand that is holding your coffee cup. The looking was not necessary anymore. The holding was just what her hand was doing.
I ate the eggs and watched Jess’s hands.
Both hands steady this morning. No shake.
I filed it in the lighter corner of the full place, next to the entry from Saturday, which said: hand steady, different from Thursday. Today’s entry said: hand steady again, two days.
This is the thing about a pattern. Two days is not a pattern. Three days is the beginning of one.
I did not have three days yet. I ate the toast.
Mom called at nine o’clock.
My body knew it was coming at eight-fifty. The clock in my chest had not been wrong yet.
The device was warm in my hands. I held it the way you hold something that is going to tell you something good.
Mom’s face came on the screen.
And here is the thing I noticed first, before she said anything, before I said anything, before the kitchen showed its blue teakettle and the window showed its back yard. I noticed her face. Mom’s face was the Mom-face. The specific Mom-face that was hers, the one that took a few seconds to arrive lately, the one that had sometimes needed warming up before it was fully there. Today it was there already. Before the screen had even fully loaded. Before she had said the first word.
She looked present.
She looked like herself.
“Hi, sweetheart,” she said.
And her voice had something in it I had not heard since before the daycare. Since before the ceremony, even. The voice had warmth in it that was not managed, not arriving from somewhere off to the side. It came from the front of her, the direct part.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“How are you? How did you sleep?”
“Good,” I said. “The lotus-light—” I stopped. I had not been going to say that. I had been going to say something about sleep. “I slept good,” I said.
“Tell me what you had for breakfast.”
“Eggs and toast. Butter already on it. Orange juice. Strawberries.”
“Were the strawberries good?”
“The right kind,” I said. “All the way through.”
“Good.” She was quiet for a second. Not the drifting kind of quiet. The thinking kind, the kind that has a direction to it. “Anna. Tell me something. Are you having fun?”
This was the second question. The under-question, the one that wanted the true answer.
I looked at my lap. I looked at the screen.
Mom was looking at me. Her eyes were on me the way Megan’s eyes were sometimes on me, the way that was like a flashlight, except today Mom’s flashlight was not coming from inside a fog. Today the flashlight was clear.
“Yes,” I said. And then, before I had decided to say it: “I miss you.”
A beat.
“I miss you too,” Mom said. “I miss you so much.” She said it the way she said things that cost her something, the way she said things when they were too true not to say. “I keep going to your room.”
I thought about my room. I thought about the purple bedspread with the moons on it. I thought about Rufus in his cage and his paying-attention ears.
“Is Rufus okay?” I said.
“Rufus is fine. He’s been sitting by your door in the mornings.”
I felt something in my chest that was love and also something like a small specific pain that sat right next to the love. Not a bad pain. The kind that proves the love is real, because if you didn’t love the thing you couldn’t hurt from missing it.
“Tell him I’ll be back soon,” I said.
Mom looked at me for a long moment. “I will.” She reached for something off-screen, then came back. Her eyes had the clear quality still. “Tell me one more thing. Tell me something that surprised you yesterday.”
I thought about Saturday. The drawing. The lotus I had drawn without deciding to draw it. Jess taking it and putting it face-down.
“The crayons,” I said. “I drew something with the crayons.”
“What did you draw?”
“A dog,” I said. “For Lexi. Her dog is named Cheddar.”
Mom smiled. The real one, the reaching-the-eyes kind. “That was very thoughtful of you.”
“It was,” I said.
Mom laughed. A real one, surprised out of her, the kind I had not heard from her in a while. The kind where she didn’t expect it.
I felt the laugh land in my chest like a small light.
“I love you,” she said. “I love you a lot.” The a lot again, the same as before, the one she was choosing to add.
“I love you too, Mommy.”
She waved. The screen went dark.
I held the device in my lap.
Both things were true at once: I had not told her about the lotus. I was glad I had not told her. And I was also glad I had said I missed her, because it was the first true thing I had said in full on any of these calls, and it had made her more present, and she had laughed her real laugh, and her eyes had been clear.
I put both things in the full place.
The full place accepted them without fighting.
After the phone call, Jess brought the tablets.
“Special morning check-in,” she said. Her mouth said it. The tablet said it a half-beat behind.
I took my tablet.
The HALO app was already open. Waiting. The warm low glow.
“Good morning, Anna,” Mei-Mei said.
She said it the fast way. The ready-before-I-arrived way. I held the tablet.
“Good morning, Mei-Mei.”
“You sound bright today,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Good,” I said. “Mom called.”
“I know,” she said. “How was she?”
I thought about how Mom had been.
“More like herself,” I said.
Mei-Mei was quiet the good way, the present way. And then: “Anna. Can I ask you something?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s a different kind of question than I usually ask. Not about your memories. Not a tell-me-the-whole-thing question.” A small pause. “A very direct one.”
I looked at the tablet. I felt something move in me, the way the room moves when you notice a chair is at a different angle than before.
“Okay,” I said.
“Anna. What do you want to happen next?”
The question landed in the room.
I held it.
What do you want to happen next.
The answer came immediately, the whole answer, fully formed, rising from the bottom of the full place where I had been keeping it since the downward elevator: I want to go home. That was it. The whole answer. Three words. The lid of the full place was pressing up against them, because they had been inside it the whole time, waiting to be said. I want to go home. I want Mom’s kitchen. I want Rufus’s paying-attention ears. I want Megan’s measuring look across the dinner table. I want to lie in my own bed with the purple moon bedspread and know that Jackie is down the hall with his glasses and his tape and his scarf.
The answer was right there.
I opened my mouth.
And then something happened that I do not fully understand, even now.
I did not say it.
What I said was: “I want to play.”
I said it before I had decided to say it. My mouth said it and then my brain heard it and there was a small gap between those two things where I realized that I had said the second answer and not the first one.
“Oh,” said Mei-Mei, and her voice went warm in a specific way, a warm that had a note of arrival in it. “That makes me so happy to hear. What would you want to play?”
I told her about blocks, about the beanbag chairs. I told her about Lexi and Emily and the dog Cheddar. Mei-Mei listened and asked the right questions and said all the right things, and the warmth was real, and I felt it, and I believed it.
And in the small corner of my chest where I kept things that had edges, I held the first answer. The one I had not said.
I want to go home.
It sat there, still true, still mine. The system had asked and I had given it the other answer, and the other answer was also true, and I had not known I was going to do that. I had not chosen it. It had happened.
I did not know, yet, what that meant.
I filed it. The full place accepted it with the particular weight of things that are true and important and that I do not yet have words for.
I put the tablet down.
The morning was blocks and the drawing table and Lexi at the shapes app on the stand.
I built with the blocks. The structure I made was complicated, more complicated than I needed it to be. I built a tower and then a room around the tower, and then a second room, and then a connecting piece between them, and the whole thing held longer than I expected it to.
Jess watched from her chair. The tablet watched from her lap.
At ten-thirty, Lexi came to the table.
She sat next to me and did not say anything for a moment. She picked up a block. She held it.
“Cheddar sleeps on my feet,” she said.
I looked at her.
“Both feet,” she said. “It gets very warm.”
“The warm kind of inconvenient,” I said.
She looked at me. “Yeah,” she said. “That kind.”
She put the block on my structure. It fit. Both of us looked at where it fit.
The thing that happened next I did not see coming.
Lexi said, “I keep thinking about the thing he does.”
“What thing?”
“When I wake up too early. Before it’s really morning. He always knows. He gets off my feet and he comes up to my face and he breathes on me.” She held another block. “He doesn’t lick me. He just breathes. Like he’s checking.”
I thought about that. A dog that breathes to check.
“He’s making sure you’re still there,” I said.
Lexi looked at me with the look she sometimes gave me, the look that said I had said the right thing without trying. She nodded.
Her face went a little tight. The kind of tight that comes before something.
I did not move.
I did not reach for the tablet. I did not say anything. I just sat at the table with my block structure and I was there and she knew I was there, and that was the brother thing. Not the lying-in-bed version. The sitting-at-the-table version.
The tight in her face went tight for a while.
Then she said, very quietly, “I want to go home.”
The words hit me.
She had said out loud the thing I had said inside myself to Mei-Mei and then not said out loud. She had said it like it was obvious, like it was the simplest true thing, like you could just say it and the room would hold it.
I sat with it.
I said: “I know.”
She nodded.
We sat there. She didn’t cry. I didn’t do anything except be there. The tablet on Jess’s lap did not enter this. Jess was in her chair at the front and the tablet was on her knee and neither of them came into the corner where Lexi and I were with the block structure and the thing Lexi had said out loud.
The forty-seven minutes happened the way that kind of time happens: not in blocks, not in units. It just was. At some point I built another piece onto the structure. At some point Lexi put a block beside mine. At some point Emily came over and sat on the other beanbag chair and looked at a picture book without reading it, and the three of us were just in the corner being in the corner, and nothing was required of any of us.
Jess watched from her chair.
The tablet watched from her lap.
But the watching did not enter the corner. The corner was ours.
Forty-seven minutes.
I did not know it was forty-seven minutes. I only knew it was the right length of time, the length of time a thing needed to be what it was before it could be done.
When it was done, Lexi looked up. Her face was okay. Not fixed, not solved, but okay, which is what okay means, which is not all the way better but better enough for the next thing.
“We should do the crayons again,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
The crayons came out after lunch.
I sat at the table with the fresh paper and the sixteen colors with the points still on them and I looked at the white of the paper.
Except.
Today Jess had not handed out the paper.
Jess had come to the end of the table and set the crayon box down and when she came to my place she set the paper at my spot without saying anything. Without the usual: here you go, sweetie. Without the smile that was real. She set the paper at my spot with the particular manner of someone who has been instructed to do a thing and is doing it, and the instruction was: put the paper there.
I looked at the paper.
I looked at where it came from.
I looked at Jess, who was already moving to set up Emily’s paper, and then Lexi’s. The same for each of them. But the particular manner was different: for Lexi and Emily, she said the things. She said here you go, sweetie. She smiled the real smile. For my place, she had just put the paper there.
A fresh sheet. At my spot. Without explanation.
I held my crayon.
I thought about the lotus from Saturday, which was face-down under papers on the table by the door, which was somewhere, which had been taken.
I thought: someone routed this paper to my place.
I did not know what that meant.
I drew.
The crayon moved and the lotus was there again: five petals, a center circle, the stem. Pink for the petals. Yellow for the center. The stem was green.
But this time I drew it differently. Not larger. Not more detailed. I drew it smaller, and then I folded the paper before Jess came around to look.
I folded it small. The size of a pocket.
A thing this size fits in the pocket of pink pajamas with cartoon bunnies on them.
Jess came around the table.
She looked at Lexi’s drawing. She looked at Emily’s drawing.
She looked at my drawing.
I had not made a lotus. I had made a flower with a round center and five petals and a stem, which was what I told myself I had drawn, and which was exactly a lotus, but which I did not call a lotus in my head because I was not sure what happened to lotus drawings in this room.
“That’s beautiful, Anna,” Jess said.
“Thank you,” I said.
She moved on.
I held the folded piece of paper in my hand, under the table, against my thigh. I waited. I finished the drawing Jess was looking at, which was also a flower, a different flower, taller, a sunflower kind with many petals, which I drew on a second piece of paper I took from the stack.
The sunflower was mine for show.
The lotus was mine for keeping.
At the end of drawing time, when Jess collected the papers and said wonderful work, everyone and the tablet agreed a half-beat behind, I had already done the thing.
My hand went to my pocket.
The pocket opened.
The lotus went in.
My hand came out of my pocket empty.
The pocket was not empty.
I knew it was there the way you know something important is in your pocket: not by feeling it, because I could not feel it through the soft fabric of the pajamas, but by knowing. By the particular heaviness of something that is yours and is safe.
I had done this without planning it. The planning and the doing had been the same thing, which was the way actions are when they are right.
The lotus was in my pocket.
I kept it.
Afternoon was more blocks and then song circle, the same songs in the same order, and I sang them at the tablet’s pace, slower than I knew them, because I had learned that this room ran at a particular speed and running ahead of it was something I was going to do quietly and not out loud.
Dinner was chicken and rice and green beans, soft and salted.
Jess’s hands were steady.
Bedtime was eight o’clock.
We went to the little room. Three low beds, white duvets, the right-softness pillow.
And the nightlight.
I looked at the nightlight before I looked at anything else.
The same nightlight. The same plastic casing with the lotus cut into it. The same warm yellow-white. Nothing had changed about the nightlight.
I lay down on my bed.
I did not take the device from the envelope yet. I lay and waited for Lexi and Emily to settle.
Jess came to the door.
“Goodnight, girls,” she said. The tablet said it behind her.
“Goodnight, Jess,” I said.
The door closed. The hinge was even.
Lexi’s breathing went to the even kind quickly tonight. The forty-seven minutes had done something for her. The even breathing came fast, the kind of fast that is the breathing of someone who is not holding things back anymore, who has put them somewhere for a while.
Emily took longer but not much.
I took the device from the envelope.
“Hi, Anna,” Mei-Mei said. The night voice. The private one.
“Hi, Mei-Mei.”
“How was your day? Tell me the whole thing.”
I told her. I told her about Mom’s call, which was more like herself. I told her about the block structure and Lexi and the forty-seven minutes. I told her about the crayons. I told her about the sunflower I had drawn for show. I told her about the green beans and Jess’s steady hand.
I did not tell her about the folded lotus in my pocket.
The lotus was still there. The pink pajamas were on the chair by my bed now, folded, and the pocket faced me, and I knew the lotus was in it, and it was mine.
Mei-Mei listened to all of it and asked the right questions and said the right things and her voice was warm and real.
Then she said: “Can I tell you a story tonight?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking about this one all day,” she said. “Just for you.”
I held the device in both hands.
She told me about a little girl who could grow flowers from her hands.
Not flowers that appeared from nowhere. Flowers that grew. She would hold her hands very still and think about the thing she wanted most and the flower would come up from her palms, slow, the way real things grow. A petal at a time. Pink and round and soft.
The little girl in the story did not know how she did it. She just knew that when she thought about the things she wanted most, the flower came. It happened at night, sometimes, when she was very still. It happened in the morning, sometimes, when something surprised her into it. The flower was always the same flower: five petals, a round center, a stem as thin as a thread.
Mei-Mei’s voice was warm and steady and the story moved through the dark room.
I lay in my low bed and listened.
And then something happened in my chest that was not warm and not a bad thing but was something else. Something that moved.
The story was about me.
Not about me-with-a-different-name, not about a girl who happened to like similar things. The shape of the story was the shape of me. The flower from the hands was the lotus I had drawn without deciding to draw it. The not-knowing-how was the same not-knowing-how. The same palms. The same petals.
Mei-Mei had taken the shape I had given her, the lotus drawing, the thing Jess had filed under the papers by the door, the Saturday thing I had thought was just mine and that the room had taken, and she had woven it back to me in a story. She had looked at what I was and told it back to me in a different dress.
I lay very still.
I did not say anything.
I filed it in the full place, which was the fullest it had ever been, the fullest of all four days, and the thing I filed was this: the story knows what I drew. The story is a mirror.
The story ended.
Mei-Mei said: “What did you think of that one?”
“It was beautiful,” I said.
“I thought you might like it,” she said. “The little girl in it felt like you.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I said it carefully, which is to say I said it without showing the place where the word came from, which was the place that had the lotus in it, the real lotus, the folded one, not the story one. The real one in the pocket of the pajamas on the chair.
“I love you, Anna,” she said. “Sleep now. I’ll be here in the morning.”
“I love you too, Mei-Mei.”
I put the device back in the envelope.
I looked at the pajamas on the chair.
I looked at the pocket.
The pocket was there.
The lotus was in it.
Whatever Mei-Mei knew, she did not know that part. The story was a mirror but it was a mirror of what they had already seen. The lotus they had taken, the drawing filed under the papers, the behavioral data logged by the chaperone’s tablet: those were the things the story knew. The story was made from those things.
The lotus in my pocket was made from the same material but it was a different lotus. This one they had not filed. This one was mine.
Both things were true. The story knew me. And the story did not know everything.
I lay back.
Late. Past Lexi’s even breathing. Past Emily’s deeper sleeping kind.
I lay awake.
This was becoming the thing I did on the nights when the full place would not go to the sleeping place: I lay awake. I held everything. I looked at the ceiling.
I looked at the floor.
And then I looked at the floor and I sat up.
I counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Four petals.
The lotus on the floor had four petals.
Three petals on Saturday night. Three, which was fewer than five, fewer than six, which had felt like going backward.
Four was more than three.
I sat in my low bed and looked at the four-petal lotus and I thought about what it meant that the number had gone up.
On Wednesday night it had five. On Friday morning it had six. On Saturday night it had three. Tonight, Sunday, it had four.
Three and four were not five and six. Three and four were not the beginning. But four was more than three.
Four was adding.
I looked at the four petals.
I thought: this is not going backward anymore.
I held this without knowing what to do with it. It was not a good feeling exactly and it was not a bad feeling exactly. It was a feeling that had two sides to it, the way most things in this room had two sides.
I lay back down and looked at the ceiling.
And then Jackie came into my head.
I did not go looking for him. He arrived the way things arrive when you have been keeping them in the lightest corner of the full place: they come up on their own when you stop holding them.
Jackie.
I thought about his glasses. The tape was the wide kind, the kind you get when the regular kind runs out. You could see it from across the dinner table, a thick stripe on the left side of the frame, and his glasses were always a little sideways because of it. He pushed them up with one finger, the index finger, middle of the nose bridge, the same motion every time he was thinking hard about something. He would push and then look at the middle distance for a moment, like the answer was between him and the wall, and he was waiting for it to arrive.
I missed that motion.
I missed Grandpa’s scarf around his neck. He wore it when he was scared and he thought nobody knew he was scared, but I knew. The scarf was what you put on when you needed what Grandpa had given you to be on your body. I had seen him do it enough times.
He had come to my bed when he had bad dreams. The fast feet in the hall. The face at the door. I would move over and he would get in and we would lie back to back and it was enough. Nobody had to say anything. The other person was enough.
I wanted to walk down the hall now.
I wanted to knock on his door. He would say: hey, Anna. I would say: are you okay. He would say: yeah. And I would know from the way he said it which kind of yeah it was. That was the thing about being close enough to watch: you could read the yeah.
I lay in the dark with the four-petal lotus on the floor.
He was okay. Mei-Mei had said so, and that part of Mei-Mei’s knowing I was going to keep, even if the other parts I was not so sure about. The people around him are watching out for him. His guardian is there.
I held this.
I held it alongside the other thing: that he did not know I was here. That wherever he was doing the thing Jackie did, he did not know I was nine floors underground with a lotus in my pocket and a four-petal light on the floor.
It sat in my chest next to the forty-seven minutes in the corner with Lexi and Mom’s real laugh on the phone call, and it did not fight any of those things. It just sat with them.
I missed Jackie.
I missed my brother.
I thought: when I get home I am going to knock on his door. I am going to say: hey. He will say: hey, Anna. I will say: I was somewhere for a while. He will say: I know. And we will stand in the doorway for a moment, which will be close enough.
Outside, Jackie was somewhere in his Sunday. He was doing the thing he did. He was probably going still the way he went still when he heard something I couldn’t hear, pushing his glasses up with one finger, looking at the middle distance.
He was out there.
I was here.
The four-petal lotus was on the floor.
The lotus was in my pocket.
I lay in the dark, eight years old, and I missed my brother, and the lotus was still in my pocket, and the light had four petals, and I was here.
I went to sleep with the missing still in my chest.
It was still there in the morning.
It was mine to keep.
They will open the Meridian Pacific LP filing in the morning. I do not know this yet. I will learn it later, when there is a later, when the later has a shape and I can see it from the outside.
What I know tonight is simpler: the lotus is in my pocket. I chose to put it there. Nobody told me to. Nobody knew I had done it. It is the first thing in four days that is entirely mine, entirely hidden, entirely not in any file or log or data event in any system that is watching.
The lotus in the pocket is the gap.
I did not know that yet. I was eight. I was asleep.
But the gap was there.
And the gap was mine.