Sissy was occupied by the girls at the sink, so Jacob went over to see if she was all right. “It doesn’t have to end up in the Met,” he said.
“It’s all out of proportion,” she replied. “These stupid plastic mirrors are so warped.”
Indeed, the cheap hand mirrors were rippled like puddles frozen in midbreeze.
“They won’t give us glass ones,” Ella muttered. “Somebody might, you know—”
Jacob nodded knowingly. “Try to find out who’s the fairest of them all?”
Ella laughed so loudly she seemed to even surprise herself. She lifted her head up and clamped one hand over her mouth, but Sissy wasn’t even looking.
Jacob leaned forward to examine the portrait more closely. The warping wasn’t the problem so much as the hollow grin — teeth gritted and lips pursed, as if the girl in the picture had just sucked a Warhead.
“Here’s your problem. This is not what a smile looks like. This is what it looks like when someone is being operated on without anesthesia.”
Ella’s smile grew so large that it overpowered her face, launching her cheeks up so high that they all but hid her dark brown eyes.
“See, there you go. Draw that.”
Ella froze, picked up her mirror quickly and looked into it. “I look like a… like a…”
“What?”
“Like a mental patient.”
Jacob laughed so fast that he had to cover his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that at work, or even alone with Oliver.
But Ella didn’t seem to see the humor in it. She dropped her head back onto the table. “No wonder my love life’s such a drag.”
“Well, you really can’t judge a smile in captivity like that,” Jacob said. “They’re much nicer in the wild. See, there. Like that.”
Ella stared into the mirror again. “It’s a vicious cycle. I look in the mirror, hate what I see, then paint what I see, hate what I paint, look back in the mirror at myself hating what I painted. It’s actually a perfect analogue for the major depressive experience.”
“The major depressive experience? You make it sound like a semester in Spain.”
“This basically is my study abroad.”
Jacob looked over at Sissy, who was now showing someone the proper way to Saran Wrap a paint palette to keep it fresh for the next day.
“I had a friend who was an artist,” he said, immediately annoyed at himself for using the past tense, “and she told me self-portraits aren’t really about faces but what’s going on behind the faces.”
Ella considered this. “If I painted that, they’d seriously freak.”
“So?”
“So then they’ll think I’m still depressed, and I won’t be able to start school again in the summer session so I can catch up on all the bullshit that I’m missing every stupid awful second that I’m stuck in here trying to get myself to be fucking normal.”
And with that Ella grabbed the jar of painty water and dumped its bilious contents directly over her self-portrait. The murky black water tidal-waved in all directions, mostly back onto her own lap, and she jumped up, as startled as if it hadn’t been she who’d poured it out. Shadows leaked into the paper, thick drops running down the length of the self-portrait and off the edge. Already it was pooling heavily under her stool on the floor.
“What happened?” Sissy shouted, rushing over.
Ella gently lifted the soggy edges of the portrait. Its agonized smile now peered out from behind a thick gray fog, but the smile on Ella’s own face was nothing short of spectacular — cheeks rising so high that they fully engulfed her eyes.
“Darling, what happened?” Sissy asked again.
“Clumsy me,” Jacob said quickly. “My fault.”
Which, he supposed, in a way, it was.
APRIL
After that, Jacob began noticing Ella almost everywhere. She seemed to have only one friend — Maura, a mousy girl with greasy hair who wedged herself across from Ella during mealtimes. Ella seemed to politely tolerate her presence, though something told Jacob that she’d be far happier sitting alone with her book than discussing the weather, the ABC primetime lineup, and what nail polish they’d wear again when they finally got home. But steadily Jacob noticed that Ella (and often Maura) was looking at him, then quickly away.
During group sessions with Dr. Feingold, Ella began to sit in the chair closest to the chessboard where Jacob stationed himself. When he led the patients down the hall after sessions, she invariably walked at the front of the line. In the common room, he would rotate positions periodically, to try to keep an eye on the rowdiest groups of patients. Slowly he became aware that whenever he moved locations, she followed, orbiting him like a moon. During meals Jacob would sit with the other orderlies at a long table near the side of the room, and wherever he sat, whichever direction he faced, Ella would sit one table over, no more than a few feet away.
“Someone’s got a little crush on you,” remarked Paul.
“What?” Jacob asked. “A what?”
Paul smirked and made rapping motions with his hands. “A little infatuation with your situation. A yen for your zen, man. Some uncomplicated admiration. Some pokey little puppy love. A hankering for your—”
Jacob didn’t want to know how he’d finish that rhyme.
“Die in a fire, Paul.” He stood to leave despite Paul’s assurances he’d only been kidding.
It was pouring outside, and Jacob didn’t feel much like a walk anyway, so he spent the rest of the break in his bathroom stall, quiet except for the echoes of his sandwich being eaten.
Not that she didn’t seem, well, better since he’d spoken to her in the art lab that day. Her “Portrait of Ella in Gray” was now hanging up in the common room to everyone’s frank admiration. And he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d never laid a finger on her, even when she’d jumped up from spilling the jar — and this was more than he could say for some of the actual doctors. Little Dr. Rutherford, with his gross mustache, had allegedly had a three-year affair with a former patient, a gifted trombonist with a drinking problem, yet he was still working down on Ward II as if nothing had ever happened. Dr. Parker, a behaviorist with a husband and kids at home, had last year started sleeping with a janitor in the little-used fourth-floor library. And Dr. Harrison, who still ran Ward I, had actually married a former patient of his from another hospital where he’d worked in the early 1970s. Everybody knew about it. They had an annual Christmas party at their house in Greenwich; Oliver had gone many times.
It always seemed to Jacob that Oliver lived vicariously through these stories at the same time that he lived in constant terror of them — a good lawsuit being all that stood between Anchorage House and total collapse. In honest moments, Jacob even wondered if Oliver didn’t enjoy sleeping with him so much as doing so beneath a Sword of Damocles.
For the hundredth time, Jacob thought about walking out on the job, on Oliver, on this life. Of decking Paul in the mouth before he did. Of calling Sara, only he had no idea where to begin. She was still after him about his address for the Save the Date card. She wanted to know if she could mail it to Oliver’s place, or to Anchorage House — did he have a mailbox there? Jacob just said he was looking into it.
As he passed by the art room, he checked to see that Sissy wasn’t inside, then walked slowly around the room, pausing in the far corner by the bowls, pencil cups, and coffee mugs that the patients had made last month. They couldn’t keep them in their rooms, now that they’d been fired, because they might shatter them and harm themselves with the jagged bits, so these eminently functional artworks sat here, functionless, until their makers headed home. Jacob casually inspected Ella’s mug. He smiled proudly. What a perfectly sane mug! A golden pattern was carved around the top edge — no, not a pattern but some kind of incoherent lettering. At first he thought maybe she was insane after all, but upon closer inspection, he realized that it wasn’t merely Greek to him. It was Greek, Όλυσσεύ, repeated all the way around.