“I wouldn’t say it was awful,” she began, and then she looked more closely at the painting. The shape of the headboard ...
It was her bed, Rolanda realized. Cosette had painted her, sleeping in her bed upstairs. She hadn’t been dreaming. The girl really had been in her bedroom watching her.
“But you wouldn’t say it was good either, would you?”
Rolanda had a difficult moment trying to bring herself back to the conversation. The idea that Cosette had crept into her bedroom, had actually been sitting there, watching her, was unsettling. How had the girl gotten in? The front door was locked. And so was the door to her own apartment.
“Well, would you?” Cosette asked.
Rolanda cleared her throat. “How long have you been painting?” she asked.
“Oh, for years and years. But I can never get anything to look the way it really is. Not the way that Isabelle used to. If I was her, I’d never have given that up.
She spoke with such earnest weariness that Rolanda couldn’t help but smile.
“Have you ever taken any courses?” she asked. “Because it’s a long process, you know. Most artists take fine arts at a university or at least study under another artist. I can’t think of any who were already completely accomplished at your age.”
“I’m older than I look.”
Rolanda nodded. “You said that before.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“I believe you.”
“I just look like this because this is the way Isabelle brought me over. I’m not really a child.”
“Who is Isabelle?”
Cosette pointed to the painting of The Wild Girl that hung on the wall across the room. “That’s one of her paintings. It’s the one she did of me.”
“But that painting’s been here for years ....”
“I know. Didn’t I tell you I was older than I looked? It’s been fifteen years since she first brought me over.”
Rolanda felt as though she were in one of those old black-and-white comedies where conversations always went at cross-purposes. She regarded Cosette. It was true the girl looked like the subject of Isabelle Copley’s painting, but she couldn’t have sat for it. She simply wasn’t old enough. Rolanda wanted to confront Cosette with the impossibility of what she was saying, but the first thing you learned when you came to work for the Foundation was not to be confrontational with the clients—especially not at the beginning. They might be lying, you might know they were lying, but you didn’t call them on it.
By the time a child came to the Foundation, their life was already such a mess that the first priority was to make sure they were healthy and safe. Everything else was dealt with later.
“What do you mean about Ms. Copley bringing you over?” she asked instead. “Where did she bring you over from?”
Cosette shrugged. “From before.”
“Before what?”
“I don’t know. There are stories there, but they don’t belong to us anymore. We have to start a new story here. But it’s hard because we’re not like you. We can’t dream. The red crow doesn’t beat inside our chests.”
Rolanda found herself wishing she had the luxury of enough time to call someone: one of the other counselors. Alan Grant, whom Cosette had mentioned earlier. Or even this artist, Isabelle Copley. She knew she was missing something, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She might have put Cosette’s odd conversation down to drugs, except that Cosette showed none of the usual signs of a user.
She was so matter-of-fact, so normal. Except for what she was talking about.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” she told the girl, “but I’m not sure I understand what you mean about ...
well, any of this. Red crows and coming across from before and the like. But I want to understand.”
“Maybe I should just show you,” Cosette said.
She threw the blanket back and got up from the sofa. Walking over to Rolanda’s desk, she rummaged around in the papers on top until she turned around with the sharp Xacto blade that Rolanda used for opening parcels. She brought it back to the sofa.
“Look,” she said.
Rolanda cried out and grabbed at Cosette’s hand as the girl drew the blade across her palm, but she was too late.
“Oh, my god!”
“Don’t worry,” Cosette said calmly. She dropped the blade onto the floor and held her cut palm up to Rolanda’s face. “Just look.”
All the blood, Rolanda thought. She couldn’t stand to see all the blood .... Except there was none.
There was just a white line on Cosette’s palm, which was already beginning to fade.
“Wh-what ... ?”
“We don’t have any blood,” Cosette said. She held her hand upside down and shook it, then held it out again, palm up. “And that’s why we can’t dream. We don’t have a red crow beating its wings inside our chest. We ... we’re like hollow people.”
Rolanda couldn’t take her gaze away from Cosette’s hand. When she finally did, it was to look at the Copley painting of The Wild Girl.
It’s the one she did of me.
Slowly she looked back at Cosette and the bloodless cut on her palm. The painting was at least ten or fifteen years old. But Cosette herself couldn’t be much older than fifteen ....
It’s been fifteen years since she first brought me over.
She didn’t bleed. She was unchanged after fifteen years. Rolanda couldn’t suppress a shudder. The Foundation’s rules and regulations fell by the wayside. “What ... what are you?” Rolanda asked. “What do you want from me?” Cosette dropped her hand to her lap and she seemed to shrink into herself.
She lowered her face but not before Rolanda saw the tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t know what I am.”
Her voice was small, pitched so low that the short distance between them almost stole away its audibility. And then she began to weep.
For a long moment all Rolanda could do was stare at her. Then slowly she reached out, shivering when her hands touched the girl’s shoulders. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but there was nothing alien under her hands. All she felt was the warmth of Cosette’s body under the sweater, the tremor in her shoulders as she wept. No matter what she was, no matter how strange, she was still a child. Still hurting. Rolanda could no more turn away from her than she could from any child that came in through the Foundation’s doors.
She went down on one knee and drew Cosette into a comforting embrace. She held her until the tears finally subsided; then she took her upstairs and put her into her own bed. Long after she could hear the other counselors arrive downstairs and the day’s work begin, she sat there beside the bed, holding Cosette’s hand. She looked into the girl’s face and saw no rapid eye movement under Cosette’s eyelids. She touched the pale white palm, now unblemished.
We can’t dream. The red crow doesn’t beat inside our chests.
She was way out of her depth here, but she didn’t know to whom she could turn. The first thing anyone would do would be to take Cosette to a doctor and then specialists would be brought in and then
...
Rolanda sighed. The first priority at the Foundation was always the child, and she knew she couldn’t allow Cosette to be put through any of that. She’d seen E. T. and Firestarter. They were both fictions but, she thought, not so far from the truth of how events would go if the situations in them were true.
Which left them on their own.
“What am I going to do with you?” she whispered.
Cosette’s fingers tightened on her own, but otherwise she didn’t stir.