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them.”
    Stella walks the packet over to Dr. Bridge and then returns to her spot on the divan. She glances everywhere but at him.
    “I’m speechless,” he says after he has studied the three drawings. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, how good these are? They amaze me. You must— you must —have been an artist in your previous life.”
    Stella flushes with pleasure at his response, but then shakes her head to indicate that she is as perplexed as he.
    “May we discuss these?” he asks.
    “Yes.”
    “May I move closer to you?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    Dr. Bridge sits next to Stella and sets the drawings on his knees. She is aware of his scent: a mixture of laundry starch and his own not unpleasant body odor. His proximity makes her nervous.
    He studies the first drawing. It is of a room, a beautiful room, though not in the best condition. The plaster is chipped in places, and the sink is old. There are floral studies on the walls between the many windows. A plate of pears rests on a table.
    “What does this room mean to you?” he asks.
    “I feel it’s a room I’ve been in. I’m aware of the room as an oasis. For a time, I’m happy there.”
    “What do you do in this room?”
    “Do? I don’t really know. Read? Sew? Draw? Polish the windows?”
    “Simple pursuits.”
    “Yes.”
    “Is anyone in the room with you?”
    “No,” she answers. “The point is that I’m alone. I’m honest there. I can think. I feel replenished. The room is my secret and my haven.”
    “Outside the room,” Dr. Bridge says, “you have drawn a kind of forest, which, as you suggested, seems rather menacing, or sinister, as you put it. I have never seen such trees, though they do remind me of misshapen trunks at the edge of a cliff or on a moor—no line is straight.”
    “Whatever is outside the house is evil.”
    “You set out to draw this particular room? Were you remembering something?”
    “No, not a memory. It just came.”
    “What’s the menace, precisely?” he asks in a gentle tone. She notes that her hands are shaking, and she has the distinct sense that the doctor would cover them if he could.
    “I have no idea.”
    “You said you felt honest in that room, and you could think.”
    “Yes,” she says, drawing a breath.
    “Can you explain what you mean?”
    “It’s a sense that I can tell the truth in that room.”
    “To whom?”
    She presses her lips together, thinking. “To myself, I suppose. There’s no one else there.”
    “Do you think the room represents the interior of your mind?” he asks. “A place meant to be an oasis, a secret place where you once thought you could not be violated?”
    “Or might it represent the way the war has violated me and all of us?” she counters. “That would explain the menace outside the room.”
    “Yes, that’s possible.”
    But Stella can see that Dr. Bridge is not convinced.
    “This is of a house, too,” he says of the second drawing. “Is it the same as in the first? The woods behind it are similar.”
    “It’s not the same house.”
    “A man is lying on a blanket. There’s a picnic basket. Lovely food. Peaches and figs, it looks like.”
    Stella nods.
    “The man has a telescope near him.”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you in this scene as well?” Dr. Bridge asks.
    “I don’t know. But the drawing makes me happy. I feel safer there than I did in the first. Possibly because of the man.”
    “You don’t remember this man?”
    “No. He might simply be a figment of my imagination.”
    “I’m fascinated by the telescope,” the doctor says.
    “I can’t explain that.”
    “But still you have the menacing trees.”
    “I have a sense that he is not supposed to be there. Or maybe I’m not supposed to be there.”
    “And that’s it? Does the drawing suggest anything else?”
    Stella closes her eyes once again. She shakes her head.
    Dr. Bridge tucks that drawing behind the others. When Stella sees the next drawing, she reaches over and puts both