Hidden Pictures

“‘I see her every night,’ Teddy says. ‘She sleeps under my bed so I can hear her singing.’”

Teddy’s early descriptions of Anya are disturbing. However, his comment foreshadows Anya’s desire to be close to him, not frighten him. If she sings under his bed, it is more likely to be a lullaby than a frightening trick. This becomes a poignant image once the reader learns the truth about Teddy’s history with the Maxwells.

“There is no rest of the story. After Annie died—or went missing, who knows—her family turned the cottage into a garden shed. Wouldn’t let anyone stay out there. And it’s been that way ever since, seventy-some years. Until this month.”

Mitzi introduces one of the story’s major mysteries. The cottage where Mallory sleeps has a dark history, but it has been uneventful for the past seven decades. Now that the cottage is occupied at night once again, it foreshadows the growing influence Margit will exert on Mallory in the coming weeks. In a popular horror trope, Mitzi delivers the story with the relish of someone telling a ghost story around a campfire. She claims that she doesn’t want to frighten Mallory while going out of her way to provide lurid, unverified details.

“Russell has a saying that I love—he says we don’t know how much our bodies can endure until we make cruel demands of them.”

Mallory explains part of her love of running. She runs long distances at high speeds and relishes the challenge to her stamina and willpower. Mallory has put her body through the ordeal of heavy drug addiction. Running is a cruel demand that she chooses for herself, rather than one she succumbs to. It is a time of pain that she can master, rather than being a slave to regret and sorrow.

“I turn my attention to his latest illustration. It’s a picture of a man walking backwards through a dense and tangled forest. He’s dragging a woman by the ankles, pulling her lifeless body across the ground.”

Teddy is happily drawing a disturbing picture at the breakfast table. It provides several of the clues that Mallory will untangle over the course of the story. The man is ultimately proven to be Ted, and the drawing shows his complicity in Caroline’s crime. There is a jarring wrongness to the idea of a cheerful child creating a morbid sketch, particularly once the reader understands that they are drawings of an actual murder.

“I cringe at the lie because I’ve already forgotten about it. If Adrian and I were alone, I’d come clean and fess up—but I can’t say anything now, not with both his parents staring at me.”

Mallory has already lied to Adrian about her past and her school situation. Like many habitual liars whose deceptions arise from addiction, Mallory has a hard time remembering what she has said or to whom she has said it. She will eventually tell Adrian the truth, but she is too uncomfortable to embarrass him and herself in front of his parents. She would rather let the summer end with them thinking highly of her than tell them the truth and risk ending the relationship early.

“Some women don’t want to be mothers, in my opinion. They want children, they want cute pictures to put on Facebook. But do they want the actual experience of mothering?”

Mitzi is judgmental about the Maxwells, and Caroline in particular. She thinks Caroline wants to have the appearance of being a mother but cannot appreciate the actual reality of her responsibility. This is a clever use of irony given that the reader will learn that Caroline cared so much about being a mother that she stole someone else’s child.

“Yes Ted, she’s being murdered and her body is being dragged through a forest and I wonder where our sweet gentle little boy got all these terrible ideas?”

After Mallory’s shows Ted and Caroline Teddy’s latest drawing, Caroline blames Ted, who reads Teddy the Grimm’s Fairy Tales each night. The deception that Ted and Caroline maintain, already knowing the source of the drawings and the source of Teddy’s grim imagination, must cause them a great deal of inner turmoil. Caroline is still more comfortable blaming Ted than herself, even when it is a lie.

“She says you’re not well, and scary pictures could make you sick again.”

This is Teddy’s response when Mallory urges him to keep drawing and sharing his pictures. She was unaware that Caroline had talked to Teddy about her mental and emotional state, and now she wonders how much Teddy might know about her past. If he hides the drawings from her as a protective gesture, then it will prevent Mallory from learning more. However, the reader will learn that Caroline is trying to prevent Mallory from seeing more pictures because Caroline knows where the drawings come from and that they could expose her to Mallory.

“When you eliminate the impossible, all that remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That’s Spock in Star Trek VI, but he’s paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes.”

Adrian has a nerdy side that is both endearing and useful to Mallory. His love of science fiction and fantasy makes him more open to the allure of her stories, whether he is being rational or not. Spock and Sherlock Holmes represent purely rational beings. It does not matter that they are fictional characters. They are still capable of conveying truths that are hard to argue against.

“We spend the morning immersed in a game of endless invention and improvisation. In the Enchanted Forest, nothing is off-limits.”

Mallory is impressed with Teddy’s imagination when they play in the Enchanted Forest. The endearing nature of Teddy’s joy and wonder foreshadow the disappointment Mallory will feel when Teddy eventually chooses Ted’s iPad over games of make believe. The comment that nothing is off-limits in the forest is also an ominous portent given that Mallory’s final showdown with Caroline will take place there.

“It’s all too much for Teddy because he explodes into tears and I pull him into my arms and his body is soft and loose again; he feels like a regular boy again. I realize I’m asking him to explain something he doesn’t understand. I’m asking him to explain the impossible.”

After Mallory’s experiment with the baby monitor, she sees what it looks like when Margit takes control of Teddy. Teddy is stranded between his parents’ aggressive skepticism, Mallory’s tenacity at solving the mystery, and being used as a communication device for Margit. Teddy does not have the tools to deal with what is happening, and Mallory is reminded that he is the most vulnerable person in the situation.

“He doesn’t realize I’m Mallory Quinn, ex-junkie and total screwup. He doesn’t know that my sister is dead and my mother won’t speak to me, that I’ve lost the two people in the world who meant the most to me. And there’s no way I can tell him. I can barely admit these things to myself.”

Mallory struggles to accept Adrian’s support because she feels guilty about deceiving him about her past. She reveals that, even though she is in recovery and is trying not to overburden herself with unnecessary shame, she still has a lot of work to do. Mallory has not yet taken full accountability for her actions if she continues to lie about her identity and history. This foreshadows the support Adrian will show to her when she does reveal the truth. He cares about her enough to help her because of who she is, not who she was.

“Listen Mallory: You’re safe here. You’re not in any danger. I will never let anything bad happen to you.”

After the Maxwells confront Mallory about the séance, she tells them about the baby monitor. They downplay her theory, but Ted uses Mallory’s uncertainty about her job as an excuse to touch her and cast himself in the role of her protector (and future partner, as it turns out). Ted points out that she is not in danger, even though Mallory has not been overly concerned for her safety, but Teddy’s.

“People in South Philly don’t spend a lot of time talking about French royalty. Still, I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I shovel on more lies.”

Mallory pretends to know more than she does when Adrian mentions Versailles. Her desire to appear cultured in front of Adrian aligns with her fantasy life, in which she was never an addict and she is still a runner at Penn State. Because she knows her time as Teddy’s nanny will end with the summer, she may not treat the lies as having potentially serious consequences.

“I pray that Adrian will see past all the horrible things I’ve done—that he’ll see me as the person I am now, not the disaster I used to be.”

Despite her guilt and shame, Mallory is strong enough to admit that she is better than she used to be. There are reasons for her to view her future with optimism. Mallory does not accept that her future must be the same as her disastrous past. She believes that she has changed, even if no one else is as certain. If she can pray, she has not given up because she would not ask God for help if she thought that help was impossible.

“He sounds giddy with delight, but something in his happiness makes me sad. Overnight, like flipping a switch, I feel as if something magical has been lost.”

Mallory listens to Teddy playing Angry Birds on the iPad. After he loses permission to draw, he no longer wants to play games that require his imagination. He would rather move his finger across a screen than play make believe in the Enchanted Forest, and it makes him happy to turn off his imagination. Mallory recognizes that he has already left a small part of his childhood behind.

“I’m grateful to the judge who sent me to rehab instead of prison.”

Like many addicts, Mallory is eventually grateful to those who initially forced her to account for the consequences of her actions. Rehab was not easy for her, but it was a safe place. Prison might have forced her to become sober, but it also could have led her deeper into drugs, and/or have risked her life. The judge may have sent her into the hell of withdrawals, but his decision gave her the best chance at healing.

“I can’t help feeling like this is a mistake. Teddy took a real joy in drawing and I think it’s wrong to deprive him of the privilege. Worse, I feel like it’s happening because of me, because I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut about Annie Barrett.”

Mallory blames herself when Ted and Caroline give Teddy an iPad to temporarily replace his artwork. Even if someone is using Teddy to make the drawings, he still enjoys drawing when he is doing it voluntarily. She thinks that she is now responsible for Teddy losing an artistic outlet that allows him to express himself, only to replace it with something the family has traditionally eschewed as creatively unstimulating.

“Teddy would miss me. I know he would. I can’t leave him without saying goodbye. I need to stick around long enough to explain things, to let him know that none of this was his fault.”

After being fired, Mallory has a chance to leave without placing herself in further danger. However, she selflessly thinks of Teddy. Because Mallory understands the corrosive nature of guilt, combined with the devastation of losing a loved one, she is unwilling to burden Teddy with having to wonder about his role in her departure. By staying, Mallory can free Teddy from Caroline’s control, restoring Teddy’s identity in the process, but only at greater personal cost.

“Over several months, the drug had completely rewired my brain, hijacking more and more of my pain receptors, and now I needed OxyContin simply to exist. I couldn’t sleep, or eat, or focus in class. And no one warned me this was going to happen. No one told me to expect a struggle.”

Mallory’s struggle with opioids is relevant to the modern discussion of addiction to painkillers. Once her pain was manageable, she needed Oxycontin to function. She could no longer conceive of a normal life outside of her reliance on the drug. She was caught off guard by her dependence on the drug, which drove her to do things that only an addiction could.

“I’ll be remembered as the crazy babysitter who drew all over the walls, the one who believed Teddy’s imaginary friend was real.”

Mallory hates that she has lost control over the narration that will be her future. She cannot choose how other people will interpret her actions or the stories they will tell about her. She has made great strides to take control over her life and sobriety but has no control over how people will represent her or how they will think about her.

“I should have been paying more attention. I shouldn’t have been so distracted. If I had just been a little more careful, everything would still be okay.”

Mallory’s internal monologues are a classic example of the futile, self-flagellating regret that her recovery program works against. She can’t bring Beth back with regret any more than she can reverse time and reverse her own addiction. It is impossible to move on while consumed with constant guilt.

“Protecting you, Mallory. I’ve always protected you. Don’t you remember your job interview? All those rude and nasty questions about your qualifications? I was trying to scare you away. I tried scaring all the candidates away. But you were persistent. You really wanted to be here. And Caroline thought you were the solution to all our problems.”

Ted reveals his distorted view of himself, as well as casting himself in a heroic role. At this point, the reader knows that Ted is controlled by Caroline, is guilty in his complicity in the abduction as well as Mitzi’s murder, and is inadequate in his job, yet he still struggles for a scenario in which he is good and capable.