Chapter Text
He's standing in the kitchen and smiling, talking to her mom while she chops an onion. It’s their final moment before the world changes, before she loses them both forever. Her mom says something her dad laughs at, and the phone rings. And Abigail answers it, not knowing that it’s the beginning of the end.
She hands her dad the phone, and like a whirlwind, her mom is bleeding and crying as he shoves her out of the house. Abigail runs back to the kitchen for the phone, but he catches her. He’s fast; he always catches her.
The knife slashes through her neck, and Will Graham shoots him until he collapses beside her on the floor. When she turns to look there’s no one there. Dr. Lecter is standing over her with the same bloodied knife she used to kill Nick Boyle. Will Graham places his hand on his shoulder. He says, “You told me you wouldn’t do that in the house.”
When she looks down there’s no blood. Her scar is still there on her neck, but she’s unharmed. In Dr. Lecter’s free hand is a heart. It’s Will’s.
Will looks at it in with something unbelievable in his eyes like adoration, even as the gaping hole in his chest bleeds down his shirt and onto the carpet. Abigail scrambles away from the red mess at her feet.
“What did you do to him?” They look away from each other to look at her.
“He gave it to me.” Dr. Lecter smiles, and Will kisses him. “It’s ours to share.” He offers the beating heart to Abigail, and she takes it. It’s warm; it exudes life. Abigail bites into it, and Will falls to his knees beside Dr. Lecter. He brushes Will’s hair back from his face and nods for Abigail to continue. She takes another bite, and Will screams, but he doesn’t sound like he’s in pain. He just sounds excruciatingly alive.
Dr. Lecter stops her just when his blood begins to taste sweet on her tongue. He takes the heart from her, and she spits pumpkin seeds into her hand the way Will taught her to. When she looks up the room has changed around them. They’re back in the garden outside the psychiatric facility, and Hannibal is holding Will close to him on the red blanket. Will’s chest is still hollowed out, and his skin is pale and sweating.
“Will he be okay?” She kneels in front of Will, taking his face in her hands like he is something fragile, something precious. She stains his cheeks with red. Hannibal touches her hair.
“We will need to hide him, until he is.”
“Why not just tell the truth?”
“What will people think? His blood is all over your face, and your hands.” Abigail looks down, and it’s true; her hands are dripping with it, with Will’s blood. They are in her room now, and Hannibal is sitting on the floor with Will. He stays there until the blood stops running, and Will’s body convulses once with a final choked breath.
She jolts upright in bed and throws back the covers so she can lurch over the side of the bed and vomit into the trash can on the floor. She stays draped over the edge dry heaving and crying until there’s nothing left inside of her. She falls back onto the tiny mattress, exhausted and confused, terrified by what she saw. She sobs once and turns her face into the pillow to scream.
Her body is in the same curled up position when she wakes in the morning. The corners of her eyes feel raw and puffy. She sits up and finds that the trash bag has been replaced.
The sun is just rising outside the window when Abigail goes to shower in the bathroom attached to her room. Some of the vomit dried in clumps in her hair as she slept, so she washes that first. She’s always been quick with her showers, which means she can get away with just standing under the water for a few minutes and letting it rush down overhead.
She has a session with Dr. Bloom today. The woman will ask how group went the day before, if she’s had any bad dreams, what she thinks about her dad now that she’s written some more about him in her journal. Abigail will give the appropriate responses; she will not mention the dream about Will Graham and Dr. Lecter.
Since he helped her hide Nick’s body, Abigail dreams about Dr. Lecter often. Her dreams take strange turns that she never anticipates. Sometimes they just sit together and drink hot chocolate, and he tells her stories she doesn’t remember when she wakes up. Sometimes Dr. Lecter leaves the room, and she hears gunshots; her mom screams through it, and far off, a telephone rings. Sometimes Will Graham is there. Usually he’s with Dr. Lecter, but a few times he’s been by himself. In her dreams, Will is the one teaching her to shoot a rifle while Hannibal proudly looks on. When she makes a kill, Will hugs her tightly and spins her around, and she forgets that he’s the one who had to kill her father.
She can’t tell Dr. Bloom about her dreams because then she won’t let them come to see her anymore. They’re the only ones left in the world who care about her, who don’t think she’s been tainted irreparably by her father. They’re the only ones who can save her from the things she’s done. They’re the only ones who know who she is.
At first she didn’t know why they would take an interest in her. She thought it was a fluke, thought they felt responsible for her because her parents were dead, and the rest of the world wanted to see her burn. She thinks it could be that still, but things have changed considerably since she woke up from her coma. Dr. Lecter takes care of her, and she’s not his patient; Will comes to visit her every few weeks, or more than that occasionally, even though she heard one of the nurses say he lives somewhere in Virginia.
Dr. Lecter wants to take her in as one of his own, and so does Will. They’re like fathers or maybe something far more complex than even that. She never expected their protection, but now it’s the one thing left in her life that signals the possibility for a happier, brighter life in her future. She thinks anything would be better than rotting away in a hospital. No one here knows, or can ever know, the full truth of what she’s been through.
Abigail goes downstairs for breakfast, and the food isn’t half as bad as it could be. The eggs benedict are better than her dad ever made them, but the rest of it is lacking. She eats it anyway. Dr. Bloom will already be hearing from one of the night nurses that she threw up sometime last night. She doesn’t need them pouring it in her ear that she might have an eating disorder on top of the bad dreams that she already isn’t being fully honest about. When she asks what it was that she dreamed about, Abigail will tell her she dreamed about her father killing girls that looked just like her. It’s usually the answer she gives; it’s usually the truth.
Other times she dreams about the girls themselves. They’re alive or they’re dead, but either way they speak to her, and they tell her that she’s evil. They call her a murderer, a cannibal, and a monster. They could have been her friends. She could have gone to school with them, studied for exams with them, or gossiped about boys with them, but they were dead. It was all they would ever be now, and it was her fault. She’s all the things they accuse her of being and more.
She eats the cold hash browns on her tray, and the few patients who have wandered downstairs to have breakfast don’t look at her. It figures that even as a celebrity, she’s still ignored in a room full of people.
At around nine, more patients begin filing into the large cafeteria, and Abigail quietly makes her way out into the garden. She casts her eyes to the wall a few times and thinks about jumping it, but Dr. Bloom would hear about it and think she wasn’t making progress. She would have to give up some of the things that made her feel normal for a while. They brought on too much attention, and any kind of attention in this place is negative attention. It would set her back, and she doesn’t want to be here any longer than she needs to. It was already starting to feel like a permanent sentencing.
It’s warm out in the garden. The sun is high in the sky, and only a few clouds line the distant horizon. She walks down the winding trail she walked with Dr. Lecter and counts the apples dotting a few of the branches as she goes by. They’re blood red like Will Graham’s heart in her hands.
Abigail makes her way to the end of the trail where Dr. Lecter picked an apple for her. He’d given it to her and said: “An apple for knowledge.”
“Of good or of evil?” Abigail had asked when she took it from him.
“That is for you to decide.” Dr. Lecter smiled at her, ever mysterious. She wondered where he was from that he spoke the way he did. He looked vaguely Scandinavian, but his accent was more Slavic its sound. She wants to ask, but she never does. It seems like something that will reveal itself with time, and she feels like she can wait. The question was on her tongue that day, but she had only laughed and tossed the apple into the air.
It makes her think about Dr. Lecter, about how her dreams of him could become so dark. He’s a good thing in her life, and he’s always done good things for her. He protected her from Jack Crawford and persuaded Will to do the same, though she doubts that was a difficult feat to accomplish.
She saw that things with them were different. They had been by a few more times since their picnic with Dr. Bloom. Dr. Lecter had cooked dinner for them and Freddie Lounds when they were still trying to talk her out of co-writing a book about the things that happened to her, and while Lounds didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, Abigail could tell. She’d seen enough just that day when they’d gone up to meet her in her room before Dr. Bloom got there; Will stood closer to Dr. Lecter, touched him more often—subtly, but more than he ever did before. She did ask Dr. Lecter about that; it seemed more polite somehow than asking about his past.
“He seems happy.”
“I believe he is.”
“Is it because you’re in a relationship?”
Dr. Lecter’s expression was not one of surprise, though he did appear taken with her blunt choice of words. It might have been crass or rude coming from someone else, but she knew she could get away with it, more because of who they were to each other than because she was young and didn’t know any better. She wasn’t that young anymore, and she did know a little better than to ask questions where they weren’t welcome. Dr. Lecter isn't an unwelcome person, not when it comes to her. He can’t be after what they’ve been through.
“Do you sense a change in us?” He had asked while they were walking beneath the trees on their way back to Will and Dr. Bloom.
“You seem about the same, but there’s a change in him.” He had smiled small at that, either proud of his ability for discretion or amused at Will’s inability for it. She suspected the latter.
Abigail stays out in the garden all morning, and no one troubles her. Closer to lunchtime, she goes up to the greenhouse where a few nurses are stealthily monitoring everyone’s behavior. Only a dozen patients are allowed inside at one time because crowds can evoke mania in the more violent, unstable ones. Abigail’s had to deal with a few of them since she’s been here, though they mostly leave her alone now that she has people who come to see her from the outside world. It’s that, or they’re afraid she’ll kill them and eat their still-warm corpses. Being the daughter of a serial killing cannibal does have a few perks, apparently.
There are seven patients up in the greenhouse when she gets there. She recognizes three of the women from group and another woman, Cora, who sits with her sometimes in the cafeteria. There are two other men and a woman she doesn’t know, older than her but not by much.
She takes one of the three empty chairs at the head of the table Cora’s sitting at. She leaves a chair in between them. Cora looks up from her blue workbook and smiles at her, lips carefully pressed together. She hums in greeting.
Talking to Cora is one of the things Abigail does that the nurses tell Dr. Bloom about. It really is ironic how she’s urged to speak of death and nightmares in group when a simple conversation with another patient is frowned down upon. Nurse Trudy is watching Abigail with her pen pressed to the clipboard propped in between her stomach and forearm. Abigail watches her right back and decides it might be worth it to give Dr. Bloom something else to talk about for once. She hasn’t asked about why Abigail talks to Cora yet, but the nurses keep telling her every time it happens.
It’s one of the only things left that makes her feel like someday she’ll be able to be somebody different and not just her father’s daughter. Will Graham and Dr. Lecter are two of the other things.
“Did you eat breakfast today, Cora?” Nurse Trudy scribbles furiously on her clipboard. Had she been a simple machine with a single lever, Abigail could not have timed it more perfectly. She hides her smile at the predictability of the staff here and watches Cora roll her lips together and nod once.
“Eggs benedict?” Cora blinks and shakes her head. “Oh, the croissants.” Cora nods.
“Do those have egg in them?” She asks easy questions that require only a yes or no answer. This is the custom with Cora. She nods yes. “I thought they tasted pretty good today, for cafeteria food.” Cora nods, her smile spreading just a little bit wider across her face. “I bet you could make them better.” Cora bites her lip through her laugh and shakes her head. The movement tosses her pretty blonde hair across her shoulders like a horse shaking out its long golden mane. Cora is older than Abigail by a few years, but she looks much younger when she relaxes like this. The laughter dancing in her eyes affects her posture, the way she holds her head. Her laugh gives away just a whisper of what her voice sounds like.
“Excuse me, Miss Hobbs.” Abigail looks up into Nurse Trudy’s aged face, though she doesn’t want to. “Miss Armistead was in the middle of her studies when you interrupted her.” She sounds sweet and polite, but Abigail’s heard it all before. She scares away anyone who gets close enough to talk to Cora, no matter what it’s about and no matter what Cora’s occupied (or not occupied) with. Abigail doesn’t need to look down to confirm that she’s studying trigonometric constants. She clocked the marked up unit circle when she first sat down.
“I’m good at math. My mom was a teacher.” It was part of what made her so agriculturally useful. She used to tell Abigail that math could be applied to anything. “You might have to squint sometimes, but that’s pretty much the way it goes with anything in life.”
“Are we going to have a problem, Miss Hobbs?” Abigail turns in her seat to find Nurse Diane standing over her. She holds her ground. Dr. Bloom will definitely ask about this in therapy.
“I just thought I’d check in with Cora and see if she’s okay.” She says innocently, dropping her eyes back to Cora. She’s shrunken back inside of her protective shell, all timidity and anxious fear. Abigail doesn’t know the way to help her back out while Trudy and Diane hover over them like this.
“That’s between Cora and her doctor, honey.” Abigail wants to tell Diane not to patronize her, but they’d only haul her out of the greenhouse like livestock, and she doesn’t want Cora to feel responsible for whatever action they try to take against her. “It’ll be lunch soon. Why don’t you go down and eat something? Such a skinny thing.” Abigail grits her teeth and reluctantly stands to her feet.
“Nguh.” Cora stands, too. “Hon’t go.” She snaps her mouth shut once she realizes she’s spoken.
Abigail can’t look anywhere else but at Cora, even as Diane is walking toward her and grabbing her arm. Cora has never tried to speak to Abigail before. Her eyes are big and shiny with tears. She falls into her chair and sobs into her hands when Diane takes her away, and Abigail can’t even act on the rage she feels toward Trudy and Diane for hurting Cora when she was finally beginning to open up. Diane is speaking to her in a harsh tone, but Abigail isn’t listening. She doesn’t care what she has to say about what just happened.
Her grip tightens a little bit around Abigail’s wrist, but she lets go when Abigail jerks away from her. She walks off into the cafeteria without waiting to be told. Diane says something behind her like, “Little witch.”
She wonders briefly what Dr. Lecter would say and assesses her lunch options. The specialty of the day is a beef and vegetable stir-fry that looks like a stew made from road kill and weeds. She avoids it and takes a plastic bowl of salad. She eats it plain and crumbles the crackers into the bowl after she’s done. It isn’t until much later that Cora comes down for lunch. Diane and Trudy aren’t with her, but the nurses stationed along the walls have been forewarned to watch her. Abigail can tell by the way they look from her to Cora and then to each other.
Abigail waits until Cora sits on the other side of the cafeteria alone with the road kill stew before she leaves. Her session with Dr. Bloom is in forty five minutes.
To pass the time Abigail returns to her room to write in her journal. She’s filled about half of the tiny pages with dreams she’s had of her dad. A few times she wrote about her mom and the memories they made together. She wrote down her account of the picnic with Dr. Bloom, Dr. Lecter, and Will Graham. It’s one of the happier things in her journal. She drew a smiley face next to the line, Dr. Hannibal Graham or Mr. William Lecter? I wonder if they’ve discussed this yet.
She’s also thought about what her name would sound like paired with theirs: Abigail Lecter, Abigail Graham. Although she doesn’t know how likely it is that they’ll make a family with her after all now that they have each other, she likes the sound of both. The name Hobbs is stained by the things her father did. She carries it with her like a curse, like a birthright. She doesn’t write these thoughts down in her journal. Dr. Bloom told her no one would read it, but there was really no way for her to know that for sure.
Instead, she writes tamer versions of her dreams, overly dramatic renditions of the fear she felt for her father, and calculated observations about the adults in her life, whether their interest in her is professional or personal and whether her interest in them genuine or fleeting. The feelings and the images are real; the histrionics are a strategically-employed façade. She will know if someone has read from her journal; she will be safeguarded against emotional blackmail if it comes to that, and she will be able to take it up with Dr. Bloom if it does because she knows a very different truth than the one Abigail’s committed to paper.
It might reveal her as paranoid, but it could also cost a nosy nurse his or her job; if it did that, it would prove that she, in fact, isn’t paranoid so much as she is one step ahead of the rest of them. She hopes it will be Trudy or Diane that takes the bait.
Until then, she has half an hour to kill before she needs to head downstairs and meet with Dr. Bloom. She takes up her pen and writes a haiku to fill the small rectangle of space left on the end of the page. She writes:
Come nightfall there’s rain
The animals take shelter
Mourning brings sunlight
It must be frustrating to know this journal exists but be sworn against reading it, like having the forbidden answer key to an impossible test. She believes Dr. Bloom will not break her promise not to read it. It’s other people she doesn’t trust explicitly. She has no reason to; it shouldn’t be a mark against her.
She makes her way downstairs and walks with a nurse to Dr. Bloom’s office. She sits outside for five minutes staring at the blue sky through a small window above the bookcase at the end of the hall. A sniffling man steps out of the office and doesn’t look at Abigail as he goes. A few minutes later, Dr. Bloom emerges from the room and smiles. She holds the door for Abigail to enter.
The office is bright with three big windows. Two are on the wall across from the entrance and one is around the left corner of the office near her desk. The drapes are thick and honey-colored to match the pale goldenrod walls. Abigail checked over the course of a few weeks when the doctor’s back was turned, and none of them open. It’s not that she wants to escape, especially; it’s just nice to know that she could if the need arose. Her dad did teach her a few things apart from just shooting a rifle.
“Keep the trees at your back, Abs. No one’ll be able to sneak up on you that way. Don’t put yourself in a corner if you can help it.”
Some days it had been more obvious than others that he was training her to hunt something bigger than deer, though she had never had to be anything more than deceptive with the girls he sent her after. He never left them alive long enough for them to go after her.
“How are you today, Abigail?”
“I’m okay.” She looks around the office, counts the three well-stocked bookshelves. She never knows how to handle herself in the warmly lit room. She paces over to the window in between one of the enormous shelves and the Whistler mounted on the adjacent wall. She spares it a glance before standing at the window and pulling back the drapes to look out. Dr. Bloom’s office faces a corner of the garden. It’s not a bad view. “Did the nurses tell you about Cora?”
“You know they always tell me about Cora.” Dr. Bloom answers evenly, sitting down on one of the armchairs facing the window.
“You never ask me about her.”
“Do you want to talk about her?”
Abigail shrugs vaguely. The answer is yes, though she doesn’t say it. She watches two men shoving each other in the garden. A male nurse breaks up their disagreement, and Abigail has the very clear thought that they should be allowed to settle their differences the way they want to, without interference from anyone else. Dr. Bloom stands to look out the window with her and catches the tail-end of the scuffle. She looks at Abigail and then back out the window.
“Cora Armistead has been here for a long time.” Dr. Bloom says after a moment. “What do you know about her?”
“She bit off part of her tongue and can’t talk well. Other than that, just that she scares easily.” Abigail shakes her head. “Oh, she’s studying math.”
“Your mother taught geometry.”
“Yeah.” Abigail turns away from the window and makes for the chaise lounge seated directly in front of the equally huge window on the other side of the bookshelf. She sits on the edge of it, not wanting to look like one of those stereotypical patients so commonly associated with this particular piece of furniture. Dr. Bloom passes behind the chaise lounge to situate herself in the corresponding armchair to the left of the window. Abigail wonders if they came in a set or if Dr. Bloom had them re-upholstered to match the room and each other. They’re pretty classy; dark beige in color with polished mahogany legs. This window faces over the wall at the edge of the garden. Abigail likes to sit here because she can watch the cars drive passed on the street.
“What do you and Cora talk about?” It’s a strange question for some reason, maybe because Cora never actually says anything—or hadn’t said anything in the past.
“I just ask her how she is, what she had for breakfast; that kind of thing.” Abigail says it like it’s no big deal because really, it shouldn’t be. “I feel like a freak when people ignore me.” She explains, rubbing the knuckles of her left hand with the thumb from her right. She sees Dr. Bloom nod a few times, slowly as if considering what the statement means on a deeper psychological level. Abigail just thinks it means that having a friend is a relief from the ostracism that has become a part of her daily life, but it’s only because she’s choosing not to look into it more deeply.
“Have you considered that your interaction with her might be doing more harm than good?”
“I figured you would tell me to stop if it were.” She looks up at Dr. Bloom and thinks she may have made a mistake being so forward, but Dr. Bloom only looks thoughtful. She can’t tell what else, if anything, she thinks of the admission. “The nurses don’t care about whether something’s good for her.”
“So you ignore their authority because you disagree with it?” This was a bad idea.
“They’ve never told me to stop talking to Cora altogether.” Abigail looks back out the window, watches a plane fly by. “It’s just whenever I approach her they find excuses to make me leave. They’re bullies.”
“Do you think taking it into your own hands is what’ll help her if they are bullying her?”
Abigail takes a deep breath and sighs, setting her hands in her lap and examining the blue of her veins beneath the skin. Dr. Bloom is watching her. She bites her lip.
“I thought I could help her feel less alone, more…”
“More normal?” Abigail looks at Dr. Bloom and then looks away. She stands to her feet and walks to the painting in the corner of the room; it’s The Monk at the Sea. The composition is predominantly gradient shades of blue. It pairs nicely with the yellow and beige color scheme of the room. She read about it once for an art class she took early on in high school; she thinks someone named Frederic painted it, but she can’t remember. “It’s okay to try and make connections with people, Abigail, but maybe Cora isn’t the one you should go to.” She says it gently like she expects it to hurt Abigail’s feelings more than it does.
“If not her, then who?” She’s only partially concerned with Dr. Bloom’s answer. Her thoughts are focused on Cora, on who she’ll reach out to if Abigail leaves her be.
“There are a dozen girls you meet with every week for group. They know more about you, and vice versa. It might be nice to talk with people who understand you better.”
“What if Cora does understand me better?” Abigail walks around the front of Dr. Bloom’s desk guarding the mosaic of diplomas framed on the wall behind it. She walks passed the knee-high statue of a Pegasus with flexed wings. It looks as if the animal is just taking off in flight as a half-naked woman desperately clutches at the horse’s sides; a stupid thing to do to a creature so wild in movement. Its powerful legs could easily trample her body and permanently cripple or paralyze her. Abigail keeps her thoughts to herself and keeps walking. Dr. Bloom keeps pace with her a few steps back.
“You would never know exactly how she felt about you.” Dr. Bloom notes, running her hands along the spines of the books as she passes another deep red shelf. “Do you find that comforting?”
“I would know how she felt about me,” Abigail ignores Dr. Bloom’s question as it doesn’t apply to her. “What she can’t say in words, she tells me in other ways.” She passes the door and halts to examine the fruit tumbling out of the basket in the painting. She knows this one is Cézanne. The apples are lumpy and multi-colored, and there’s an unfortunate-looking heap of bread on the table behind them that could be baguettes or éclairs. She thinks they’re baguettes, though now she really wants doughnuts. There are never doughnuts in the cafeteria; too unhealthy, too loaded with sugar.
“How does she tell you?” Dr. Bloom stops at Abigail’s shoulder and analyzes the painting. She tilts her head to one side as she looks on.
“She smiles or she laughs; sometimes I can tell that she’s letting me in.”
“And that makes you happy.”
“It does.” Abigail moves on from the painting and scans the third and final bookshelf along the neighboring wall. She reads some of the titles and the smaller author names: Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, The Provincial Letters by Pascal, Rules of Reasoning by Descartes, and The Confessions by Rousseau. “I thought it was okay to make other people feel better.”
“It is, within an appropriate context.”
“You’d call this inappropriate?”
“For right now, I would.” Abigail turns to make eye contact with Dr. Bloom before continuing onto the Whistler painting. She stares at it for a long time, unable to remember how she came to know the artist’s name. She thinks the title of the painting might have something to do with whistling, and that’s why it stayed with her. “I’ll speak to the administrator about the way the nurses have been treating Cora Armistead. Until then, I think it would be best if you kept your distance from her.”
“But why?” Abigail faces her. She really does want to know. Dr. Bloom sighs.
“I can’t tell you the specifics.” She hedges. “You should just know that the staff has her best interests at heart.” Abigail thinks about Nurse Diane squeezing her wrist too tightly and then calling her a witch as she walked off. That kind of behavior would fly with cattle or with a dog, maybe, but Abigail, and Cora, are neither of those things. She doesn’t mention it to Dr. Bloom. She doesn’t see an immediate need to do so.
Abigail thinks to ask what to do if Cora approaches her, but it doesn’t seem like she will have a problem with that. Dr. Bloom doesn’t mention it either, so she migrates wordlessly to the armchairs across from the Whistler painting and sits in the one closer to the large window. The sun at half past noon illuminates the warm yellow walls and creates a soothing glow to bask in. Dr. Bloom sits across from her and crosses her legs.
“The nurses told me you were sick this morning. You look better now.”
“I had a bad dream.” Abigail says, purposely trying for ambiguity. Her doctor picks up on it.
“Your father?” Abigail thinks before answering. She thinks of Will’s heart throbbing grotesquely in Dr. Lecter’s hand, gushing blood out over his thick carpenter’s fingers. She remembers the scene as vividly as if it had happened in the real world, as if she had tasted Will’s coppery blood and the viscous meat of his heart as it pumped unrealistically against her lips. She scrubs the knuckles of one hand across her mouth where it feels bloody with the memory. “Abigail?” She starts.
“Um, yeah.” She nods, averting her eyes. “My dad—he…” She puzzles over her words. “We killed someone that we loved.”
“Who was it?”
“My mom, maybe. I don’t really remember. It must have been her.” It must have been her screaming in her dream and not Will. It must have been her dad holding the knife ready to kill her, not Dr. Lecter waiting to feed Will Graham’s heart to her as if it were a truffle or an apple—a bright red apple: “An apple for knowledge.”
“Why do you think it was her?” Dr. Bloom leans forward.
“Because…it wasn’t like how he felt about the girls he killed, and I didn’t—I wasn’t invested in them the way he was. It went deeper than that.” Her breath catches in her throat.
“Deeper how?”
“It wasn’t about just loving her. It was about…” She furrows her eye brows together in concentration. The answer is there. It’s right there, glaringly bright and sparking on the underside of her tongue, but she can’t get to it. “It was about…invading her, almost.” Consuming him would have been an insult to Will’s pedigree. That had to have been it. Dr. Lecter wouldn’t be with someone if just consuming them was enough, if dominating them was enough.
Will Graham is suggestible enough to be transformed. He can become something that doesn’t need a heart to sustain him if his counterpart survives with him. That was it; that was the change she’d seen in Will, and since then, it had only solidified into something far more intricate and impossible to comprehend from just one side or just one frame of mind.
“Of good or of evil?”
Dr. Bloom nods in her chair. She says, “Do you think he killed those girls because he wanted to do that to you?”
“I still don’t know why he killed those girls.” Abigail murmurs, opting for the truth because she doesn’t know the right answer yet. “I know that he can’t hurt me or anyone else now that he’s dead, but thinking about what he did and why he did it…it scares me.” She shivers. “I can’t understand what he saw in me that made him the way he was, and that scares me.”
“Nothing you did explains or justifies your father’s actions.”
“That is for you to decide.”
“Jack Crawford doesn’t think so.”
Dr. Bloom looks intrigued by the turn in the conversation. She leans back in her chair and studies Abigail’s expression until Abigail drops her gaze and turns her head to the right so she can stare at the Cézanne instead of meeting Dr. Bloom’s eyes.
“It’s still an open investigation. Jack needs to follow all the leads.”
Abigail doesn’t have to look to register the slight disapproval in Dr. Bloom’s reply. She knows her face will be a well-contained, clinical mask if she looks, so she doesn’t. She keeps her eyes on the lumpy apples.
The apple Hannibal picked for her was perfect, deep red, and sweet on her tongue. She hadn’t even washed it; just sank her teeth into it straight from the tree, straight from its life source. It’s warm; it exudes life. Abigail bites into it, and Will falls to his knees.
Abigail swallows around the crisp taste of apples in her mouth and the false memory of blood and screams; it’s only false based on a technicality. Some of the blood and most of the screams are real, painfully real. Only Will’s scream had been imagined. She wonders how she created it in her mind, tries to guess at what parts of his speech and what chords she’d heard in his voice inspired the sound that tore out of his broken body like an exorcised spirit. She hadn’t thought herself capable of such inventiveness in the grim realm of the macabre. It shouldn’t surprise her, so it doesn’t.
“Do you know about Cézanne?” Dr. Bloom asks, following Abigail’s eyes to the painting on the wall. Abigail shakes her head no. “He changed the way a lot of people thought about perception; how we understand space and distance in paintings. Traditionally, overlapping and foreshortening help us differentiate between the subject of the painting and its lesser components through a careful construction of space on the canvas.” She explains what the term foreshortening refers to. “It’s when the artist makes a line shorter so the image appears reduced when we look at it.”
“So how did he change the way people thought about perception?”
“He would give a stronger presence to secondary objects so they were more pronounced than what we would expect to be the primary object. Markers that we find natural and fixed, he would switch their roles; a dormant ocean takes on the form of a giant tidal wave about to crash over a city, for example.”
“And the fruit?”
“Perspective.” Dr. Bloom answers readily. She’s enjoying this. “See how everything on the table looks ready to topple over?”
“The apples are lumpy.” Abigail nods.
“It’s because he painted them from a multi-point perspective. The shape of the fruit changes from every direction it faces and from every new angle it takes on.”
“I feel like you’re going somewhere really profound with this.”
“Well, now it would be too obvious.” Dr. Bloom smiles, and Abigail returns it.
“My mom used to do that.” She says quietly, looking away. Her eyes find the window this time. “But with math.”
“It has endless real-world applications.” She sees Dr. Bloom nod in the corner of her eye. “More than certain other things.”
“Like pumpkin seeds.” Abigail laughs, though she’s still thinking about human hearts and how they’re red just like the darkest red of an ambrosia apple. She grimaces around the definition of the word: delectable, immortality-granting, the food of the gods. Dr. Lecter stops her just when his blood begins to taste sweet on her tongue.
“He tried.” That does make Abigail smile more genuinely. Will did try, valiantly. Abigail felt guilty for snapping at him, for mocking his wish to be a paternal figure in her life. Even after her cruelty, he still put his career on the line to protect her from Jack Crawford—to protect her and Dr. Lecter both from Jack Crawford.
It was more than her dad had ever done for her. Even the best thing he could have offered her would have been eclipsed by all the wrong he did in her name. Will had every right to take his place if he wanted to. He had proven to her in making his decision and standing by it, however uncomfortable it must have made him, that he would be there for her whether she would have him or not. And that was what a parent did for a child, wasn’t it; provided shelter when it wasn’t sought for, offered love when it was undeserved. Will has every right. She understands her dream now; a simple literal manifestation of things she already knew to be true. Will had given Dr. Lecter his heart and wanted to give it to Abigail, too.
Like father, like daughter, she had eaten it. She had honored him the way her father by blood taught her to, and she had honored him the way Dr. Lecter had encouraged her to; the way Will had seemed strangely accustomed to, although he had died in her dream.
She is an orphan with two fathers, with blood connecting her to each of them and with secrets solidifying their bonds. Dr. Bloom says something, and Abigail perks up again, realizing she was staring off. “Will called earlier and said he wanted to come by today. I won’t object if you want a visitor, seeing as I just pronounced Cora Armistead as being off-limits.” Abigail nods.
“I want to see him.” She nods again to herself, touching her scarf compulsively where the scar lies beneath. She doesn’t ask if Dr. Lecter will be tagging along. She thinks it might be better, though she’d prefer to get Will alone.
There are a few things they need to discuss. The drive from Will’s home in Virginia is an hour long, so Abigail begins planning her words as soon as she leaves Dr. Bloom’s office. She sees a girl from group waiting in the hall and smiles cautiously. The girl, Jordan, she thinks, smiles and ducks her head. Abigail walks back up to her room unaccompanied by hospital personnel and writes in her journal. The marker has been moved. She flips to a random page toward the back and writes:
Sometimes I think about waiting in the garden for Nurse Trudy when she takes out the trash in the morning and stabbing her with one of her pens. See if she writes that down on her clipboard.
She leaves the long red ribbon there on the page. She doesn’t know much about fishing, but she knows what comes after the first bite; a little waiting, a little tugging. She’ll have to wait to reel in her catch, but when she does, it’ll be a beauty. It’ll be worth whatever trouble she gets herself into if even the smallest reward of retribution comes with it. She wants the nurse, hopefully Trudy or Diane, who poked into her business canned. Failing that, she’ll settle for getting egg on the offender’s face.
She thinks it could be the environment, or maybe it’s the company, making her more agitated and more starved for development, even if it’s not positive. Everything about being locked up in Port Haven feels wrong and backwards. She wants to jump the wall; she wants to talk to Cora and tell her she’s fine or that she will be if she isn’t now; she wants to hurt Trudy and Diane for hurting Cora, for sabotaging her campaign to befriend the poor lonely girl.
At the risk of sounding too apologetic or too mindlessly grateful for her behavior toward him and for his actions, she wants to tell Will Graham that he can be her father if he wants to be, though she doesn’t understand why he would, knowing what kind of a person she is and where she’s been. She wants to tell him his predecessor set the bar so low that he could trip over it, but she thinks that might sound like an insult, and another low blow from her after what he’s done for her would break his heart. To break something he’s freely giving her would be senseless and wasteful. They need to talk about this, too.
She turns back to the earliest clean sheet in her journal where the lined pages have all been written in. She scribbles another haiku, sure that it’s called something else when it’s not about nature but not bothering to linger on it.
Ambrosial muscle
Bleeds red life and promises
We will honor him