When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  Sharon’s voice droned on from a great distance. She asked the woman to reconsider and tell Stanley not to share the progress of her therapy with anyone he saw fit.

  “You’re not yourself,” Sharon was saying, “give it time. Client-therapist confidentiality exists for a good reason. Revelation may help a lot of people and hurt you more than you comprehend right now.”

  “Forget it,” Nails said. “The reason people get away with child abuse is that nobody talks about it. A librarian told us so.”

  “I care about you,” Sharon said. “You’re the one who’ll get hurt with this exposure.”

  To the woman, Sharon’s voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking through an empty oil drum. There was no way to convince Sharon of how important the training tapes were, or to how many people they might make a difference. Sharon had never been abused. The woman hung up the phone, feeling drained. She’d wanted coffee, had she drunk it? The kitchen, except for the dirty coffee cup and ashtray, gleamed pristine under the track lighting. Somehow the house managed to stay neat although she never cleaned it much that she knew of.

  Only when she felt one foot dragging ahead of the other, up the stairs to the bedroom, did the mechanical movements of her body become annoying and giant tasks undone flood her mind. Bills needed paying, the checkbook needed balancing, business letters should be written, lists made out for the week. And there it was again, the notion of being harassed, cornered. Why couldn’t she be good, do the right things? Had she asked Stanley how long this therapy process would take, so that her life might finally have meaning and order? By working at top speed she might be able to cut the time in half. She prayed, using the term loosely, for she never prayed and despised the idea of it, that he could whip her into shape in three months. That would mean survival for her business life.

  Exhausted, she crawled into a nightgown and then into bed. Her mind was so tired that sleep began moving in. Without warning, the mother’s words came to her, “We get what we deserve in this world.”

  Nails drove these words away with a thought of her own: in spite of what the law said, and people paid lip service to, the stepfather had been worthy of killing. The woman sensed the smile on her face as sleep finally took over, but in her mind as always, the guilt brought by yet another self overrode Nails’ message.

  The source of the thought transference was not revealed to the woman and she tossed all night, battling random thoughts. At seven the next morning she awoke, wrapped in a strong and ugly terror. There would be a real estate meeting in two more hours and she had not typed the contract. Laughter sounded in her head as she fled down the stairs from the loft bedroom and started jamming paper into the typewriter. Fear erupted as she found a contract on the desk, already typed. Had she even been near the typewriter last night?

  The Buffer, sensing an onslaught of more emotion than she herself could absorb, moved over completely and the woman was gone.

  Catherine picked up the carry-all purse from the desk and slithered out of the nightgown she’d never liked. The fabric was opaque, the neckline high, and the sleeves long. She trailed the garment after herself, moving up the staircase with unhurried steps. Catherine never hurried, even when things got out of hand. And they were out of hand.

  SIX

  THE second he walked into Protective Services that morning, he got a call from Martha Ryland, Jeannie Lawson’s counselor. She introduced herself over the phone, in a voice that sounded friendly but professionally direct.

  “Jeannie can’t have told you much,” Martha Ryland said. “Frankly, she still has an aversion to men. She’s given me permission to fill you in.”

  Stanley remembered the little Jeannie had told him. She’d had multiple personalities; three to be exact, each one distinctly separate from the other. The abuse which had caused the multiplicity had gone on from the time she was seven years old until she turned fourteen.

  “I can’t begin to tell you,” Martha said, “how rotten it was, or exactly how it screwed up Jeannie’s life. She’s now what her therapist calls integrated; in other words, all three persons have become one. Your class has done Jeannie a lot of good, she seems so much more open. Up until yesterday, she felt like a freak. There’s just one thing. The woman you’re treating now insists that you talk about her therapy publicly. Jeannie can’t afford the same openness. I predict that one day she’ll be an exceptional clinician, but exposing her background at this point . . . you and I both know what would happen. Her career would be over before it started.”

  Stanley did know. Adult child-abuse victims in the work force were often regarded as “risky” employees, prone to falling apart on the job. They probably weren’t any more risky than other employees but the stigma was there. If a prospective employer should get wind of the added stigma of multiple personality, Jeannie Lawson could face an even tougher battle.

  Which meant that he should call his own client and tell her that using the videos for training purposes was over. He felt almost sure she was multiple and if so, she would certainly not want it made common knowledge.

  “How,” Martha asked, breaking in on his thoughts, “do you feel about entertaining the idea of your client’s being multiple?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I’ve been wondering for a few weeks, but to me, the woman’s symptoms aren’t classic. Now Jeannie’s pointed out things I was overlooking. As she said, once it’s happened to you, it’s easy to spot it in someone else.”

  “It still doesn’t make you sure, though, does it?” Her tone had lost some of its professional crispness. “I don’t envy you. I know Jeannie’s therapist. At first she doubted everything too, the way a good clinician would. But when she weighed the evidence, as I suppose you’re beginning to do, denying it was useless. Jeannie’s therapist knew she wasn’t schizophrenic or any of the other labels that had been pinned on her at various times by a number of other doctors and psychiatrists.”

  “Neither is this woman,” Stanley said.

  “It was eerie, listening to Jeannie describe that woman’s tapes, as if she sensed a friend. She told me that during her therapy, none of her friends understood the multiplicity, and after a while she kept quiet. This is the first time that Jeannie has reached out to anyone. I view her willingness to go this far as a sign of recovery, and her psychosocial history, when she turns it in, will probably be something to behold.”

  Martha gave Stanley the therapist’s number. Jeannie had alerted her to expect Stanley’s call, and she was just as forthright as Martha. Stanley spent what would have been his breakfast hour going over what both counselor and therapist had said. Added to what he’d read of the little available information, certain concepts began to form; what few multiples there were, in general, operated in a world wherein emotions were “buffered” for them by their other selves. The selves, depending on how many there were and how damaging the cause of the multiplicity, handled what the first-born child could not. So that the degree of life which the first-born child might enjoy could range from a lot to a little.

  If his client were multiple, it might explain her current state of confusion and mounting panic. A great deal might be the result of awakening emotions. If she’d never experienced them before except from a great distance, through her other selves, she might shortly become torn, wanting isolation because she felt strange in her new world—yet needing human solace for the first time. Would that solace be readily available to her among her friends and acquaintances? Stanley didn’t know. One thing was certain. He had to get to her immediately, and cancel their agreement to use the tapes.

  It was now 8:30 in the morning. The woman answered the phone on the first ring. He explained to her that perhaps they’d been hasty and that she should rethink her decision. A lot, he said, might come out on the tapes that she wouldn’t want to be public knowledge.

  “Like what?” she demanded. “I’ve hidden my whole life, mostly because I was frightened of what oth
er people thought. What is it you’re afraid people will find out from the tapes? That I’m crazy? My best friends tell me that. I don’t care about my enemies.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said softly. “There are people who have no idea how the human mind reacts to abuse and they’re all too willing to ostracise; worse than that, they don’t mind taking bread out of your mouth in the bargain.”

  “Stanley, have you ever met a purchaser or a seller? You have to be crazy to be one. That’s why I’m successful, so far. Those people relate to me.”

  “You aren’t crazy,” he said, and knew that if he went further, he’d have to say “multiple,” and he wasn’t ready to do that.

  “Are you afraid that the mental health world will come down on you for exploiting me? If that’s the case, I’ll sign a statement saying the videotaping was my idea, which is the truth, and that I give you full permission to use everything as you see fit. I’ll have it notarised. Whatever you think may come out on those tapes, it cannot possibly be worse than—jesus, there aren’t words to say it. The fear just sits right here and eats at me. I don’t know why it’s here, when I wake up, when I sleep. I want it to go away. Maybe the tapes will make it go away for other people, too. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? Stanley, I’m weighing forty years of fear against your argument, and you come out on the short end.

  “Stanley,” she said very quietly when he did not answer, “regardless of anything else, I’m going to keep talking, and the next therapist may not have your expertise—or ethics.”

  “We’ll go on, then,” he said, “but I want you to know I’m willing to stop anytime you are.”

  “We’ve got to hang up now, Stanley, or we’ll be late for a business meeting. You mustn’t worry so much. We’ll be fine.”

  In spite of the May humidity that had seeped into Protective Services that morning, he drank his tea at break time, hot and steaming with two slices of lemon. The journal pages the woman had given him in yesterday’s session warranted something warming.

  Fragmentary pieces of time are coming back along with that old “catch yourself before you fall” feeling. That’s as far as my mind will take me, only into, never beyond those little flicks of acknowledgement. I feel sometimes as if my head is going somewhere without me. The shadows tonight, the odd sounds in this house, are frightening.

  My daughter, Page, loves shopping, with the enthusiasm of her fourteen years. It’s an effort to block the fear long enough to pick her up from her father’s house. I make excuses not to and feel guilty, but I’m scared to go outside this house.

  Perhaps I should tell you. It probably doesn’t mean anything but lately I’ve been hearing more than one thought in my head at a time. Perhaps I’m only talking to myself, but that name “Miss Wonderful” keeps popping up. Now there are other names.

  Probably it’s only my imagination. Or maybe before the gods drive you mad, they give you mind games to play. I hate games. The stepfather used to summon me and before I learned better, I used to obey. “Come and play,” he’d say, “see the new game, little one?” He played games, the stepfather, long before I saw him starting out over the fields during the hunting season with the rifle in the crook of his arm, to shoot down the wild animals and skin and hang them in the barn. The animals he didn’t shoot, he trapped and tortured. The acts aren’t clear, only his expression as he did it. Before that, I didn’t know how dangerous a man he was, or what an intense interest he took in the games. On looking back, he seemed an average adult when I was two, very tall, dark, crew-cut, burly; a man whose eyes held tiny yellow lights when I got angry and refused him something. I don’t recall his anger when I was small, just his ability to arouse curiosity in me.

  Movement. I hate movement. Slow, from side to side, stop. Then start again. That thing. Curiosity. Touch it. I can recall the feel of it, the wiry hair around it, more than the thing itself. The picture fades then, grows bright for a moment, dims. The action is never clear.

  Adding up the few memories of childhood that are here, the extreme panic doesn’t make sense. Marriage was the same, Stanley. You want details. All I’ve got are vagaries, dim notions that I just couldn’t be good all the time, either as a child or an adult afterward.

  I seem to have done everything I ever put my mind to, even diametrically opposing things like art and math, at which I still believe myself to be inept. But I never should have gotten married. Norman’s marriage to me was like a single piece of music that flits from a waltz to a disco beat, from that to a square dance, then roars into Ringo Starr on the drums and lo and behold, a Concerto in E-flat Major; a constant shock to all concerned. In trying to sort out emotions during that relationship, I discovered there weren’t any. And for every statement I make to you, pointing out that or any viewpoint, I can give you twenty more, all in conflict with each other. They all belong to me and none of them belongs to me.

  For that last statement alone, Stanley, the mother would have had me committed to hell. She always said that a person should take responsibility for her own actions.

  Anyway, there I was, married, trying to be nice all the time because having watched the mother and the stepfather all those years, it seemed wiser to be the opposite of what they had been, what they believed me to be. Regardless, after years of single life, I hated being locked up with Norman. My niceness faded with the approaching birth of our child. Pregnancy made me feel dirty, as if I’d committed a sin. At the first sign, I hid myself inside the apartment in a voluminous white robe. It had been part of the trousseau, purchased to convince myself that I was passably attractive, and I wore it night and day to cover the biggest flaw of all.

  Fear grew the moment that wedding ring went on. Hiding began to consume me. In stores, on the street, I stared straight ahead, looking neither left nor right, quaking when someone called my name. What did they want from me, what had I done wrong? For the first two years I shook all the time. I finally got angry and figured out what was wrong. I was bad, plain and simple. After all, Norman was a wonderful man, we had a beautiful child, everything in the world that others wanted, we had. I wasn’t happy because I was bad.

  Our daughter, Page, was born incredibly perfect and something incomprehensible tried to nestle inside me when I admired her. I wanted no part of whatever it was; she cooed, my mind shut off.

  I was so preoccupied with my badness for those two years, that I’d forgotten I was ugly. I remembered and the tantrums began; I couldn’t go near Norman. I smashed things and said things so mean and hurtful to him, about my concept of marriage, family life, about myself and the way I hated everyone. There were little flicks of time when everything was black—no vision, lost time, disorientation—but it didn’t seem real and neither did I, nor did the doctors who couldn’t find the problem. I slept a lot, Norman stopped talking to me. There was no way of telling what stray word might set me off. I raged when awake, needing to be more than an imperfect wife. One minute I was convinced that given the chance I could conquer the world, the next minute I was cowering in the apartment, doors locked.

  Page and I went on picnics and stole flowers from a nearby park. The flowers reminded me of my mother; I hated them but for some reason felt it very important that Page see and touch beauty. All the while, some perversity, some ancient hope, ground at me. I cherished her individuality, that spark of independence no child should lose to life’s restrictions and parameters. I went against Norman’s wishes. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, train her to bow to discipline and respect us as parents, simply because we were.

  Norman wanted her neat. Neat? I hoped she’d be herself—beautiful, free, sure of her own worth. And I kicked away stirrings inside myself. I liked her, so what? Other mothers spoke as if they’d invented the feelings I could not in all honesty say were mine. All I knew was that my ears ached whenever I looked at her.

  The blackouts got worse. Right after the last one when they gave me the Dilantin, Norman
and I really got into it. He was, as I have said, a quiet, kind man, and thoughtful, but he also had limits and I reached them one night, over something. He got up from the kitchen table, came at me, backed me up against the wall. In that instant when he lunged, glared at me with his face almost touching mine, I cannot tell you exactly what happened in my head. It was as if someone had taken it from me, bent it out of shape. It wasn’t me anymore, it was as if I had been invaded.

  I howled like some demented animal, waiting for the blow; childhood sat in front of me. A sound started in my throat. The sound grew, not so much in volume as in intensity, and reminded me of an animal, a small one, trapped and in pain. I was unable to stop that sound, couldn’t really be making it, but it went on and on. Norman talked to me with a stunned expression and told me I was frothing at the mouth. Without touching me, he sat back down at the table and didn’t say a word. The calmness of his reaction brought me out of whatever it had been, as though it had never happened.

  So much for the marriage, Stanley. Not even that analyst helped. I left Norman. I left Page with him. I wasn’t sure, you see, that I would be wise enough to choose a man after Norman who wouldn’t try with Page what the stepfather had with me. That one idea was paramount in my mind but of course there were others—my anger and inability to do things right, to be a proper mother. For a number of years before the marriage broke up, I couldn’t even undress in front of Norman, the idea of sexual interaction between us made me ill. More than that, I felt repulsed, angry, scared. It was no atmosphere in which to bring up a child, to taint that child with my own . . . Stanley, I don’t even have a word for it.

  Nothing has changed, nothing makes any sense. I look at Page and can’t believe she’s real, and don’t know what I mean by that. I look at the paintings hanging on the walls here in this house and people tell me I painted them. I can’t believe they ever came into existence. I look at me when I can bear it—I’ll never be real, Stanley.