4. Fragments
Fragments
Bliss
The medication cup is blue today.
That feels important for a second, though I don’t know why. The cup is paper, the blue pale and washed out, and Nurse Larkin holds it between two fingers while she checks my name against the tablet in her hand.
“Bliss Fontaine.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Meridian Memory Institute.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
I shouldn’t have to search for it. The answer waits somewhere behind the fog, shaped like fire and broken glass and something I’m not meant to touch.
“For treatment,” I say.
Nurse Larkin smiles. “That’s right.”
Two tablets. One capsule. Water that tastes faintly metallic. I swallow because refusing makes the morning longer, and mornings are already made of too many questions.
Dr. Strauss waits in the therapy room with his notebook open and his chair angled toward mine. Everything in here is soft. Soft light, soft rug, soft voice. Even the corners of the furniture have been rounded, as if sharp edges are the problem.
“How are your dreams?” he asks.
“I don’t remember.”
“And your childhood?”
The word opens into nothing. Not empty. More like a room after someone has removed the furniture and left outlines in the dust.
“I grew up in Montreal.”
“Yes. With your mother.”
“Colette.”
“And your father?”
I know facts about him. Piano. Scarves. Smoke in bars. A laugh that should have a sound attached to it. I search for the sound and find only static.
“He died.”
Strauss writes something down. “How does that feel?”
I look at the blank wall behind him, where no art hangs. “I don’t know.”
His pen moves again.
After therapy, they allow me back into creative integration.
For now.
The room smells of paint and cleaner, and the locked cabinet stays closed while I work from the tray they give me. White. Black. Grey. Enough to make weather, not enough to make anything dangerous.
My brush moves because my hand remembers what the rest of me can’t explain. A slope. A shadow. A door that becomes smoke if I look too closely. The paint spreads across the canvas, obedient and dull.
Nurse Larkin watches from the corner. “That’s calmer.”
I keep painting.
By eleven, I’m in group session with six other patients arranged in a circle beneath the silver clock with no numbers. Some are older. Some stare at their hands. One man cries when Dr. Strauss asks him about his daughter and keeps apologizing because he can’t remember her birthday.
Across from me, a woman named Elise sits too still. She has paint under her nails too, green hidden beneath the grey, and when Strauss asks about her family, she says, “They told me I needed distance.”
Her eyes flick to mine before she looks down.
I know that look.
I think I know that look.
Dr. Strauss asks us to share one thing we’re ready to release. The answers move around the circle in quiet, careful voices.
Guilt.
Fear.
Attachment.
When my turn comes, I look at my hands. Grey has settled into the lines of my skin.
“I’m ready to release confusion,” I say, because that’s what he wants.
Strauss smiles. “Excellent, Bliss.”
The word should please me.
Instead, somewhere beneath the medication, something bright and furious claws at the fog.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1115 hours
The music arrives during reflective recall.
It doesn’t come from the room. There’s no speaker, no radio, no phone hidden beneath the soft chair or behind the white shelves.
Meridian doesn’t allow unscheduled sound because sound can agitate pathways before the mind is ready, which is one of Dr. Strauss’s phrases.
He has a great many of them. They line up neatly in my head even when everything else refuses to.
He asks me about safety today.
Not the word itself. He circles it first, careful and calm, asking where I felt protected as a child, who comforted me when I was afraid, whether my mother’s love ever felt demanding. His pen moves with every answer, even the small ones.
“I don’t remember being afraid,” I say.
“That’s all right. Memory can be selective.”
He says it like permission.
It feels like theft.
“What about music?” he asks. “Your intake notes mention your father was a musician.”
Facts arrange themselves. Piano. Bars. Scarves. Cigarettes he promised my mother he’d stop smoking. A laugh with no sound attached.
“He played piano.”
“And did he sing?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer leaves my mouth, and something inside me rejects it so sharply my fingers curl against the fabric of the chair.
I hear it then.
A man’s voice. Low and warm, threaded with smoke and tenderness, singing in French like the words were made to be carried slowly.
La mer.
The sea.
The sound opens behind my eyes, blue and silver and moving, not a picture but a room I used to live in.
There’s rain against a window. My bare feet on a wooden floor.
Paint drying somewhere nearby. Someone cooking onions in butter.
My father’s voice rising and falling while he plays the same few bars again because I’ve asked him to, because I always ask him to, because that song makes the whole apartment feel like it’s floating.
My face is wet before I understand I’m crying.
Dr. Strauss leans forward. “Bliss?”
The music falters.
I try to hold it, but the harder I reach, the more it breaks apart. French words scatter. The room returns. White walls. Soft rug. Silver clock. Strauss watching me as if the tears belong to him because he was present when they appeared.
“What are you experiencing?” he asks.
“I heard something.”
“What did you hear?”
I press my fingers into my palms, searching for the sound, the shape of it, the person attached to it. “A song.”
“Which song?”
The title is there and gone. Sea. Blue. My father’s mouth close to the microphone, my mother laughing from the kitchen, me painting at the table with too much yellow because I was seven and subtlety was boring.
“I don’t know.”
Strauss writes that down.
His voice softens into satisfaction. “This is very positive. An emotional breakthrough.”
No.
The word forms so clearly it almost reaches my tongue.
It isn’t a breakthrough.
A breakthrough is something he gets to name, record, measure, and fold back into his treatment plan. This isn’t his. This came from underneath. From somewhere he covered but didn’t destroy.
A crack. That’s what it is.
A crack in whatever they’ve built over me.
I lower my eyes before he can see too much.
“Yes,” I say, because it’s the answer they expect.
Dr. Strauss smiles and keeps writing.
He keeps writing while, somewhere beneath everything they’ve given me, the sea keeps singing.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1315 hours
Creative integration begins again after lunch.
The room looks exactly as it did this morning. White walls. White shelves. White table. The silver clock without numbers. Nurse Larkin arranges brushes beside my canvas with the same serene precision she uses every day.
Grey waits in the tray.
I stare at it for a long time.
My hand doesn’t reach for the brush immediately. It lingers above the paints while something beneath the medication shifts, slow and uncertain, like an animal deciding whether it’s safe to leave its hiding place.
La mer.
The melody brushes against my thoughts before fading again.
Not gone. Waiting.
I dip the brush into grey because that’s what I’m expected to do. The first few strokes settle across the canvas in familiar layers, soft and empty. Mist. Shadow. Nothing that asks questions.
Then my hand keeps moving.
I don’t tell it to.
A shape begins to emerge beneath the grey. Someone seated on a stool, head lowered slightly, shoulders relaxed. An instrument rests across their lap. A guitar.
Not a piano.
I frown.
My father played piano.
Didn’t he?
The uncertainty catches me long enough that I almost paint over the figure. Instead, I add another line. Then another. The outline softens into memory rather than detail, blurred at the edges, impractical to identify, yet undeniably someone.
My brush hesitates above the tray.
Grey.
Black.
White.
Nothing else.
A flicker catches my eye.
Near the edge of the mixing palette, almost hidden beneath a folded cloth, a smear of dried paint has escaped someone’s cleaning. Tiny. Forgotten.
Blue.
Not much. Barely more than a fingerprint.
I stare at it.
The color stares back.
My pulse quickens.
Before I can think better of it, I touch the tip of my brush to the dried pigment and add the faintest stroke across the guitar.
Blue.
Actual blue.
The mark is so small no one should notice it.
It changes everything.
The room seems brighter. The figure feels closer. The melody brushes past again, stronger this time, carrying warmth, laughter, and a voice just beyond recognition.
My breath catches.
I add another whisper of blue where a sleeve might be. Then a third across the background, thin enough to disappear unless someone looks carefully.
The painting wakes beneath my hand.
Footsteps sound in the corridor.
I freeze.
Nurse Larkin is checking canvases, patient by patient, offering simple praise for balanced compositions and reduced emotional stimulation.
My gaze drops to the blue.
Panic arrives all at once.
If Dr. Strauss sees this, he’ll ask why I chose blue. He’ll ask what I remembered. He’ll write it down. He’ll explain it until it belongs to him instead of me.
No.
This is mine.
Before Nurse Larkin reaches my table, I lift the canvas from the easel, slide a blank practice board into its place, and carry the painting against my body as though I’m taking it to dry.
She smiles without looking closely.
“Don’t forget to label it, Bliss.”
“I won’t.”
I walk calmly back to my room.
Only after the door closes behind me do I move quickly.
I leave the canvas propped behind the wardrobe where no one will see it, watching the thin strokes of blue dull as they dry.
Every few minutes I check the corridor.
When the paint no longer shines beneath the light, I lift the mattress with both hands and slide the canvas underneath, blue side up this time, protecting the fragile surface before lowering the mattress again.
For several seconds, I stand beside the bed, listening to my own breathing.
Hidden.
Safe.
They can have the grey paintings.
The blue belongs to me.
Meridian Memory Institute, Rural Oregon. 1600 hours
The rest of the afternoon stretches around the secret under my bed.
I sit through nutritional therapy with my hands folded in my lap while a clinician talks about routine, regulation, and the importance of accepting support. I nod when I’m supposed to nod. I answer when someone says my name. I drink the tea they give me even though it tastes like leaves and metal.
All the while, blue waits in my room.
A real color waits there, small and bright enough to change the shape of the whole day.
Blue.
The word keeps moving through me, carrying the strange little thrill of having done something they didn’t allow.
By the time Nurse Larkin walks me back to my room, my fingers feel too awake. They twitch against my thigh, remembering the drag of the brush, the tiny stolen mark across the guitar, the way the whole painting shifted because of it.
“Rest before dinner,” she says at the door.
I nod.
The lock clicks after she leaves.
I wait because waiting has rules. Count the footsteps. Count the pause at the next door. Count the second set of steps heading away from the corridor.
Only then do I cross the room and lift the mattress.
The canvas is still there.
The blue is dry now, duller than it was wet but no less incredible.
I pull the painting out carefully and set it on the floor beside the bed.
The figure is blurred. The instrument is wrong, or maybe the memory is wrong, or maybe everything I know about my father has been rearranged until guitar and piano and song all belong to the same place.
I touch the air above the blue without touching the paint.
My hands are shaking.
I stare at them like they belong to someone else. Paint-stained fingers. Grey in the creases. A tiny blue smudge along one thumbnail I missed when I washed.
Proof.
The room tilts a little, not from the medication this time. From knowing.
I painted blue.
I’m not supposed to have blue.
I’m not supposed to want it.
I’m not supposed to remember a song about the sea or a man’s voice singing in French or the way color can turn a flat surface into somewhere a person might survive.
Dr. Strauss would call it emotional material. He’d write it down, translate it into symptoms, and hand it back to me in words that make it smaller.
I won’t let him have this.
I slide the canvas beneath the mattress again, slower this time, protecting the edge before lowering the weight over it. The bed looks unchanged. The room looks unchanged. White walls. White shelves. Grey tray on the desk where they’ll expect tomorrow’s obedience.
But something has moved beneath it.
Blue.
I painted blue.
I don’t know why that matters, but my hands are shaking and my pulse is racing, and somewhere under all this grey, I think there’s a woman who paints in every color that exists.
Maybe she’s waiting for me to find her. Maybe she’s the part of me that knew how to begin before anyone gave her permission.