Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  I lifted her chart off the bed hook. No physical trauma, other than the arm. No signs of abuse: no scars, no lesions, no burns, no previous breaks or fractures, no evidence of sexual activity. A healthy girl, very likely with a good family. The kind of profile you’d expect given parents who made their seven-year-old sit in the center of the back seat.

  She stirred on the bed and opened her eyes. They were dark and deep set, staring out at me as if from a long distance. She pulled her long, dark hair out of her face.

  “Où est ma mère?” she asked.

  Round here that meant Cajun. From down near the delta, most likely. My French is nearly nonexistent, but I used the bit I have. “Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas français. Parlezvous anglais?” She shook her head no, but then she said, “I do.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “Julie, I’m Dr. Douglas Everly. You can call me Dr. Doug. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m not Julie.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m Juliana.”

  I looked at her chart again. The name there was definitely Julie. “Oh. So, Juliana, how are you feeling?”

  She shook her head, as if it were too hard a question. I didn’t try to discover whether she fully understood that her parents were dead. Instead I said, “You speak French. You’re from Louisiana?”

  “I don’t speak French,” she answered.

  “What?”

  “Julie speaks French.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Julie speaks French. I can’t.”

  “But you spoke French just now.”

  “No I didn’t. That was Julie.”

  I nodded and locked eyes with her. “I see. And you’re Juliana. You don’t speak French.”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you from Louisiana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I, if I wanted to, speak to Julie?”

  She shrugged. “Sure, but she doesn’t hardly know any English. And Juny is kind of slow. You’d better talk with me.”

  “Juny?”

  “Juny speaks a bit of French, too, but she’s not smart. She can draw, though. And play piano.”

  “Juny, Juliana, Julie,” I said softly. “So Juliana...”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you always had... Juny and Julie with you?”

  “Course.”

  There was a tap at the door. Richard Stev-ens, the head doctor for our hospital, stood there.

  “Excuse me, Juliana,” I said. I went out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind me.

  Stevens played tennis for keeps most weekends, and weekdays he watched the hospital balance sheet with angry determination to keep it as thin as he was.

  “What about this one?” he asked, pointing through the window on the door to Julie’s room. His med training was in neurology, so he fancied himself competent in psychiatry also.

  “I’m not sure,” I told him. “Strange signs of trauma.”

  Stevens nodded. “This isn’t a mental hospital. Get her out of here quick. Today, if you can.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Stevens cut me off. “They need your help with that schizophrenic patient. He’s gonna need meds.”

  I nodded, stole a last glance over my shoulder at Julie, and then headed for the psych hall.

  “God, Karen, what a day,” I told my wife that night.

  “Not as bad as mine,” she said.

  I put the boxes of Chinese take-out on our kitchen island. Honestly, the two of us should be watching our weight instead of eating fried egg rolls and sweet-and-sour pork, but neither of us can face cooking after the hour commute home. Karen was already in collapse mode: She had changed into a track suit and pinned her blond hair above her head. I took off my tie and threw it over a stool.

  She got out two forks and handed one to me.

  “Plates,” I said. I hate eating out of the boxes. She shrugged and I set the table. When we sat down and put napkins on our laps, she grabbed the remote—always lying somewhere on the kitchen table—and turned on the television that glared out at us from the kitchen counter.

  The sound seemed to boom through the kitchen. We have a nice kitchen: cherry cabinets, white walls, and granite counters shining under recessed lighting. But I don’t much like it. Every clink of a fork on a plate seems to echo tightly in the long room.

  “Hon, can we not have that on?”

  “Okay.” She frowned and turned the TV off. “You upset?”

  “It’s work. You know.”

  “Something happen?”

  “A schizophrenic patient threatened a nurse, hurt a doctor, ran around screaming. A total mess.”

  “That’s terrible. But are you okay now?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  She bit an egg roll.

  “But really that’s not what’s bugging me. We got a young girl in today, and I’d not had a minute to evaluate her before Stevens started trying to push her out of the door.”

  She paused, holding her egg roll half way to her mouth. “You worry about kids, I know. But that... that thing that happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

  I shrugged. “I just want to be sure it doesn’t happen again. And this girl... she’s special. A weird case. A mystery. She talks in different voices.”

  “What’d’you mean?”

  “As if... as if she had multiple personalities. What we call dissociative identity disorder, in the trade.”

  “Weird. But that happens, right?”

  “It’s rare. So rare I was never really convinced it exists. But I guess I’m willing to believe that some people, really abused and messed-up people, will hide themselves in the delusion that they’re different people. As an escape.”

  “Is she abused and messed up?”

  “That’s the funny thing. She doesn’t seem like it. Not at all.”

  Karen shook her head. I forked some more lo mein onto my plate and she turned the TV back on.

  “I’ll keep it down low,” she said. “I just want to see the news.”

  I went to see the girl first thing the next morning. She sat up in her bed, awake but silent. There were damp streaks of tears down her cheeks, and her eyes were swollen. So, she’d finally come to understand that her parents were dead.

  “Hi, Juliana,” I said.

  “Juny,” she muttered.

  “Okay. Hi, Juny.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  She shrugged.

  “I understand. A little.” I pointed at her head. “Your hair is in a braid today.”

  She nodded. “The nurse did it for me.”

  For an absurd moment I pictured big Thomas braiding the girl’s hair, then realized of course it had been the night nurse.

  “It looks nice,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Listen, honey, I just learned that your aunt is coming. She should be here today or tomorrow. How’s that?”

  “Aunt Kristine? That’s good.” She sniffed back tears and smiled weakly.

  “You like your aunt?”

  “Yeah, all of her.”

  I frowned. “What does she do?”

  “Part of her studies fish at college. More college.”

  I thought about that a moment, but then hit on an idea. “You mean graduate school?”

  “That’s right. She went to college before and one of her studied old languages and one of her studied the oceans. And one of her cooks great. I like them all. Can I go home? Can the Aunt Kristines take me home?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Kristine Louvrier, Julie’s aunt, proved to be a young woman, broad shouldered and not very tall, with short dark hair and a very direct manner. I was paged to the front desk when she arrived.

  “Please come to my office,” I told her.

  “Can I see Julie?”

  “Of course, but first can we talk a moment?”

  She frowned at that, opened her mouth with what looked like the intent of protesting, and then just nodded.
I led the way.

  “How is she?” she asked me when we sat down.

  “Julie is physically fine.”

  “Physically.” She fixed me with steel gray eyes.

  “I have other concerns.”

  “Is she... traumatized?”

  “Of course,” I said. “She’s lost her parents. But... there’s something else.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She did not, as I expected, ask me about the something else. Instead, she asked, “Can I take her home?”

  I looked down at my paperwork. “You’ll be taking custody of her, I see.”

  “I’m a Ph.D. student, nearly done with my thesis. Writing up the results. I can stay in Julie’s home and finish my Ph.D. while Julie finishes her school year. Then we’ll just have to see where I get a job. But whatever happens, we’ll stay together. And we’ll keep her house. We have all our family near there.”

  “That sounds ideal,” I told her.

  “Can I take her home, then?”

  “That’s what we need to determine.” I sighed and looked around my office. It had become disheveled in the last few months. In the last few years, really. Piles of papers and books covered nearly every surface. The folded corners of unread hospital memos poked at odd angles out of the bookcases. There were coffee cups resting like forgotten friends here and there around the room. Most still had an inch of black liquid festering in the bottom. Suddenly, I was ashamed at how I’d allowed the room to grow so disordered. It told the truth about me: that I’d burnt out.

  I shook my head and tried to gather my thoughts. “Julie has some very unusual signs of psychological trauma.”

  Again, I waited, but Kristine Louvrier did not ask me what signs. Often, whole extended families are complicit in abuse, aware that it is happening. This woman’s silence suggested that instead of being curious and concerned, she was eager to hold onto a secret.

  After a pause, I added, “I think she suffers from a serious delusion. The delusion that she is several people.”

  Louvrier did not move. She said, “She’s always had two imaginary friends. It must just be that.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The imaginary friends.”

  “Juliana and Juny.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know whether I felt worse or better about the aunt accurately knowing these two other names. I leaned forward. “I would like to see Julie’s home. Where you’ll be living.”

  “You want to do a home inspection, like a social worker?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I had no legal power to ask for a home inspection. “Something informal. Not official. I’m having trouble understanding why Julie has this delusion. And it’s my job to make sure she’s fit to leave, and that the environment she enters won’t make her worse.”

  She squinted at me but then nodded. “Okay. When can you come out?”

  “Tomorrow.” I stood and gestured to the door. “Now, let me take you to Julie.”

  I went into the hospital the next morning to do quick rounds before heading out on my drive to Julie’s home. I was packing my briefcase to leave when Stevens banged on my office door.

  “Everly, what are you doing with the girl in pediatrics? The Cajun kid?”

  I sighed. “She has signs of unusual emotional trauma, but I can’t confirm what kind.”

  “I heard. Multiple personalities.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that. I need just a little more time to determine where’s her best destination.”

  “You’ve had two days. She goes tonight. Send her to Cresthaven. They’re better equipped to decide where she goes next.” He moved on without a good-bye.

  Cresthaven was a hellhole where the poorest were dumped, loaded up with lithium, and allowed to shuffle around dirty tiled halls all day. The Cresthaven staff watched TV and counted out pills, and weren’t competent to do anything else.

  I could stall the head doctor another day. No one got transferred out as quickly as he asked. The paperwork alone took more time than he allowed for the whole process. But I had only a day.

  The drive to Julie’s hometown consumed the remainder of the morning, most of the way on winding two-lane roads through farm fields broken by long stretches of tall trees draped with kudzu. A gas station, a few homes clustered close together, and a diner constituted the tiny town’s center.

  I stopped at the diner. A long bar stretched away from the door. Behind it the cook worked ambidextrously, a spatula in one hand and a knife in the other. Rows of booths lined the other walls. Old men and women, and a few my age, filled the booths and talked in relaxed joviality. Framed and fading photographs of people hung over them—a long history of customers, I presumed.

  I sat at the bar and ordered the fried chicken, some pie, and a coffee from a smiling waitress with a name tag that read BRIANNA.

  When I got to eating the pie, I asked the waitress for directions to Sycamore Street.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You just head on down here half a mile and turn left. You can’t miss it. There’s a little graveyard right on the corner.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who you going to see?”

  “The Louvriers’ home,” I said.

  A man two seats down on the bar shook his head. “You know what happened to them, don’t you?” He wore the full outfit of a fireman, with his fireman’s helmet on the stool seat beside him.

  “Yes, sir, I do,” I told him. “I’m going to see Kristine Louvrier.” It couldn’t hurt, I decided on the spot, to see what people here would reveal about the town or the Louvriers.

  “Well, now, I heard she were back or at least around. Gonna raise the little Julies.”

  I was sure he used the plural. I leaned toward him, about to say, “Excuse me?” but the waitress gave him a pointed look, and he straightened up and closed his mouth. She quickly said, “Harry here is our deputy sheriff.”

  “And fireman?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he told me. “This is a small town. Most everyone is related, a cousin of one kind or another, first or second. And we’re kind of isolated out here. So, we all do everything. Stephen back there cooking lunch—” he pointed over the counter at the cook dropping more birds into the fryer with one hand while shaking oil out of a frying basket with the other. “—is our town librarian. Brianna here is also town clerk and Sunday school teacher. Always been that way here.”

  “The Louvriers were fine people,” the waitress said. “Everyone here loved them. You a friend of theirs? You miss the funeral?”

  I introduced myself. It caused a moment of silence. Then Harry the fireman and deputy said, “Well, that’s right. You got to make sure things are going to be best for the... Julie and... And you’re gonna find they are. Things are best for hers here.”

  I thanked them and paid the bill.

  As I pushed through the front door, I thought I heard the deputy ask the waitress, “Julie is three, isn’t she?”

  The house was modest but pleasant, white with a broad porch, on a sycamore-lined street so quiet the loudest sound was the wind in the trees. The gutters were clean, the roof black enough to be new, and the grass high but even, so that you could tell it had been cut regularly but neglected since the car accident.

  Kristine Louvrier met me at the door, wearing jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt, with a highlighter in one hand and a textbook in the other. I glanced at the title: Coelenterate Biology.

  “I’ll give you the full tour,” she said.

  She methodically showed me every room of the house, with brief explanations punctuated by long resentful silences.

  Julie’s room was messy but not dirty. In one corner was a bed. In another stood a drawing desk with pictures pinned over it. Another corner held a chair and small table and bookshelves, all littered with small plastic animals with big eyes. Some kind of Japanese things, they looked like. And in the final corner there were pictures of some teen musician taped on the walls, above a hea
p of skates. It suddenly struck me as like a room shared by three different but normal little girls.

  The rest of the house was clean but lived in. Last on the tour, Kristine Louvrier showed me the basement and garage. The garage, like my own, was crowded with the things we accumulate over the years. I stared at the three bicycles—small, medium, and large—lined up by the garage door, aimed at the driveway. Helmets hung expectantly from the handlebars. A terrible sadness swept over me, to see these waiting skeletons of a perished family life.

  “I’ll make tea,” Kristine said, interrupting my reverie. I followed her inside.

  “What’s your judgment?” she asked, as she served Darjeeling in the living room.

  “The house is wonderful,” I said. I sat down on the couch and put my hands between my knees. “But you’re not telling me everything.”

  She squinted with suspicion. “What do you mean?”

  “Julie doesn’t just have imaginary friends. She believes that she is three people. No seven-year-old could maintain such a façade, so well, so consistently, for so long, just on a playful whim.”

  She sat down across from me in a high-back chair. “You like having this power over people? To break their families?”

  My voice broke as I whispered, “No. No. I hate it. But three years ago I sent a little boy home to parents I thought were fine. A lawyer and his smiling trophy wife. And they beat that boy to death.” And beat something in me to death also. I limped through every long day of my job after that. “I’m never going to make that mistake again. Julie is a wonderful girl. Smart. Attentive. Nice to talk to. I like her. I owe it to her to be right about this. Now, Julie isn’t normal. And that usually means something—something really bad—has happened.”

  Kristine Louvrier stared at me a long time. I may be burned out, but I’ve still learned through the years to recognize when someone is about to explode with the possibility of speaking the truth. I waited. I waited, expecting her to confess that something terrible had once happened to Julie.

  Instead, what she finally said completely flummoxed me.