Dr. Hester nods. “I do that too. While I still can. It helps.”
“With what?”
“With everything.”
Greg asks, “Are you ever going to let me leave?”
“Where would you go?” Dr. Hester asks, just like the first time they did this little dance.
“I could be someone. I have… experience.”
“You have a body that is just remembering to function on its own,” Dr. Hester says, “and a mind that still has cracks in it that you fall into. You’re not ready. I don’t know if you ever will be. Mr. Hughes, in the eyes of anyone that matters outside of these walls, you murdered your wife.”
“I didn’t.”
“You remember?”
“Yes. No. Not all of it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’m not like that.”
“We don’t know what we’re like, Mr. Hughes, until we’re called upon to show our true colors. For all you know, you could be remembering things a certain way because you want to remember them that way.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Greg says. He knows this. He knows this. “Not like you think.”
Dr. Hester doesn’t respond.
“WHAT DO you know about schizophrenia?” he asks Sean as they watch the clouds pass by overhead. They’re lying side by side, arms brushing together, fingers intertwined.
“Not much,” Sean says, and he sounds amused. “I’m just a waiter, after all.”
“You’re more than that,” he says, squeezing his hand. “You always have been. To me.”
“Yeah?” Sean asks.
“Yeah,” he says, just to make Sean laugh.
He does. It’s predictable, but he doesn’t care. It sounds so good to hear it.
“I think,” Sean says, tilting his head so their foreheads are almost touching, “that it’d be like having a storm of birds in your mind. But a controlled storm. Like with a purpose. It’s there, and it’s chaos, but there’s order to it. It won’t make sense to anyone else, but it does to the person that has it.”
“A murmuration?” he asks.
“Exactly,” Sean says, and he’s leaning in, like they’re going to kiss, like they’re going to—
“CAN YOU do it?” Greg asks, voice low. “Can you get me in again?”
The gardener frowns. “To the Garden? Why would you—”
“I need to see it.”
“I took you there once, Mr. Frazier. I showed you where you’d come from once. I don’t think I can do it again.”
“I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m….”
Out of control.