by M. R. Carey
“I don’t know her that well,” Zac hedged. Liz wondered if she was seeing a budding crush until he added, “Francine is really weird. Most people think she’s crazy.”
“And here’s your mom going to see a shrink,” Liz reminded him.
“Ha ha,” Zac mumbled. “Very funny.”
The girl got called in ahead of her, and Liz got a good look at her as she passed. She was a petite African American teen with a metallic blue streak down one side of her tightly curled hair. That was the only flamboyant touch in her appearance: she dressed right down toward camouflaged blandness in a white T-shirt with no logo, a pair of black jeans and unbranded sneakers. There was nothing strange about her that Liz could see, except that her slim build maybe shaded over a little too much toward actual gauntness. There was a solemnity about her that was unusual in a kid that age. Liz thought it might be the face you ended up wearing if everyone at your school thought you were crazy.
“She seems nice,” Liz said.
Zac only shrugged.
Liz’s name got called fifteen minutes later, when the girl was still fresh in her mind. She registered the fact that they had both been sent to the same consulting room—to Dr. Southern. This Francine must have genuine mental health problems over and above what the school’s whisper line said about her. Poor kid.
Liz’s first impression of Dr. Southern was that he was an affable idiot. He tried to make her relax by making a few bland observations about the weather and asking her about her taste in movies—which since she worked in a movie theater was pretty low-hanging fruit.
He was just trying to put her at her ease, Liz knew. But there wasn’t much hope of that considering what she was here for, and the doctor gave it up when he saw she wasn’t going for it. After that, things went a little better. He invited her to tell him about the two incidents and he unpacked the details with terse, focused questions.
He was particularly interested in the second incident. He asked Liz how she had been feeling when it all went down. Was she angry at the two women? Did she enjoy hitting out at them? Was it cathartic?
Liz tried to be honest. “Mostly I was scared. Really scared. Not of them, but of what I might do to them. I know it sounds like the classic payback fantasy, but it didn’t feel that way from the inside. I was trying to hold back, but I couldn’t, and that was … well, it was terrifying.”
Southern nodded like he understood. “Okay,” he said, “but still. I’m guessing there must have been some satisfaction to be had in retrospect, no? Thinking about how you sent them running?”
“No,” Liz said. “Really not. The loss of control was too frightening. And so was the thought of what might happen next. You know, if they called the cops or something.”
Southern switched tack. “You said your husband had hit you before? That he had a history?”
Liz licked her lips, which were feeling a little dry. She found she didn’t want to admit to it—to having stayed so long in a relationship that was so badly messed up. To having been a victim. “Sometimes,” she said, feeling as dirty and ashamed as if she was confessing to some sick sexual turn-on.
“Often?”
Liz gestured helplessly. “How do you measure that?”
“Once a year? Once a month?”
“Once every few months. And, I guess, you know, getting so it was more rather than less.”
“But you never hit back, on any of these other occasions? You didn’t retaliate?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
Liz found it hard to answer that question. She turned it over in her mind. What had she done when Marc cut loose? What had she thought about?
Surviving. Not doing anything to make his mood any worse. Keeping quiet so the kids wouldn’t come down and see what was happening. Not once had she ever thought about fighting back.
“I just shut down,” she said. Beyond that, it was too hard to explain. “I didn’t let myself want anything.”
Southern nodded again, as though that answer confirmed something he was already thinking.
“What?” Liz asked him. “Do you know what’s wrong with me?”
The doctor sat back in the plastic chair, making its legs splay out in a way that looked frankly dangerous. “Snap diagnoses are for fools and phonies, Ms. Kendall. We’ve only just met. But I can tell you what ballpark we seem to be in. Thing is, though, it’s going to sound worse than it is.”
“Tell me,” Liz said. “Please.”
“Very well. I’d say that this has all the classic hallmarks of a dissociative episode.”
The words didn’t mean anything to Liz. And then suddenly they did. She’d seen some far-fetched thriller by Shyamalan or someone—in disjointed pieces, out of sequence, as she saw most movies—and a few TV specials that did the same thing on a lower budget. “Wait,” she protested. “You mean like in dissociative identity disorder? The multiple personality thing?”
“Exactly.”
Liz threw up her hands. “No. No way.”
Dr. Southern didn’t seem perturbed by the emphatic response. “Okay, so you’ve heard of it.”
Yes, she had. In tawdry, implausible stories about people with a dozen or a hundred different identities to choose from, one of which was inevitably a serial killer. She was vaguely aware of a less dramatic reality underlying the movies and TV shows, but she still rebelled against the idea. That wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. “I don’t have a menagerie inside me, Dr. Southern,” she said, hearing the hostility in her own clipped tone.
“Of course not,” Southern said. “Dissociation comes in many, many forms, and most of them are far less extreme than the popular conception. It doesn’t have to mean that you have alternate personalities. At rock bottom, it just means being shut off from parts of yourself. From thoughts and feelings you don’t want to cope with. Be honest now. When your husband hit you all those times, and you didn’t fight back, wasn’t there some anger there? Some very strong resentment and even rage at being treated in that way by someone who was supposed to love you?”
It was the wrong question, so Liz didn’t answer it. “I already told you, I wasn’t angry when I hit out at Marc. I wasn’t anything but scared. Scared for my life.”
“And you acted to save yourself.” The chair creaked again as Southern leaned forward. His voice was annoyingly gentle and coaxing, as if she had to be nudged into seeing what was obvious. “But you didn’t want to be the one who did that. The one who picked up the bottle and used it. So maybe—I’m just saying maybe—you made someone else do it.”
Someone else, Liz thought, her mind running with the idea even though she tried to pull it back. Someone with more of an appetite for mayhem. She thought she knew who that might be—what name she might give to the parts of herself she had buried in order to go on with the thankless task of being Marc’s wife.
Punk rock Liz. Axewoman Liz. Sideways Smile Liz.
“No,” she protested.
“Why not? Tell me.”
She groped for an answer. Because I don’t want to admit I’m that sick. That out of control. Because if I’m breaking in pieces like that, I belong in a mental hospital, not out in the world. Because I might be a danger to my own kids. “Because if this was just me acting out what I wanted to do,” she said instead, “I would have enjoyed it while I was doing it. I didn’t. I keep telling you, I was scared out of my mind!”
And that was true. But the second time, with Eileen Garaldi and her nameless friend … She had hated those big, braying women. Their coarseness and their casual superiority. She had wished them ill. And maybe that wish had been a kind of summoning.
“Scared out of your mind,” Southern repeated. “So what was it that came into your mind when you went out of it, Liz? It wasn’t a ghost or an alien or a hypnotist. It was still you. But it was a part of you that was capable of doing what needed to be done.”
Liz opened her mouth to refute that argument too, but she was fighting a losing battl
e because it all made perfect sense. That was, objectively, what had happened—if you could be objective about something that had only happened inside your head. Marc was killing her. She wanted to live, wanted that very much, but she hadn’t been doing anything to make that happen.
So she stepped aside and let someone else come up to the plate. A designated hitter.
“But … the second time,” she protested. “There wasn’t any need for it.”
“Need?” Southern repeated with careful emphasis. “In the sense of …?”
“I wasn’t in any danger. It was nothing. Just an argument about a parking space.”
“And yet you gave yourself the same permission. This other part of you that you’d only just discovered, that you’d only just empowered, came out again. And why wouldn’t it? It had worked so well the first time. It had saved your life. Why wouldn’t you go there again when you were suddenly in a stressful situation and probably still not entirely recovered from that earlier trauma? It makes perfect sense to me that the threshold for your other self showing herself would get a lot lower in the wake of that first time. Because the first time was a slam dunk. It was mission accomplished.”
Liz sat in silence for a long time. The sense of it was slowly sinking into her. That she had called out for a savior and now the savior was sitting inside her mind like a cuckoo in a nest. Screwing up everything.
“I can’t live like this,” she said to Dr. Southern. “Seriously, I can’t.”
“And you don’t have to.” The doctor was tapping a pencil on the desk as he spoke, adding emphasis to each word. “I said this was classic dissociation, but actually it’s different in a couple of significant respects. Most people who present with the full dissociative syndrome—and we’re talking a tiny number in the first place—they’ve got a history of severe childhood trauma. You don’t. You’re a grown woman, and your personality is fully formed.”
“So?”
“So there’s every reason to believe that this was a one-off response to an extraordinary crisis—literally, a life or death situation. In which case it will almost certainly just go away by itself.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
“I’m not suggesting you should.”
The doctor reached for the bookshelf and took something down. A battered paperback with a lime-green cover. “I’ve got your prescription right here,” he assured Liz in the teeth of all the evidence.
“Mindfulness,” Liz said, reading the title upside down. “What’s that?”
“A treatment with no side effects,” Dr. Southern said. “And a good place to start.”
When Liz and Zac got home, it was to find Molly asleep on the sofa. There was Lego all around the living room like the aftermath of a gas main explosion, and Christine was shamefaced.
“I tried to keep her awake, honest to God,” she said as the three of them collected up the building bricks and stacked them in the drawers of the plastic worktable. “She was hyper for an hour and a half and then she flaked out all at once, like her batteries had just run out. I did manage to make her sit still long enough to eat her dinner, though.”
“You did great,” Liz said, handing over a twenty. “Thanks again for taking her at such short notice.”
The sound of the door closing behind the babysitter roused Molly from her deep doze. She was briefly disoriented, and then immediately launched into a plaintive story about how Christine had made her eat broccoli.
“Oh, you poor baby. How you must have suffered.”
“Yes. And it was green!”
“Green broccoli! The worst broccoli there is!”
“She let me have a hippo-yogurt-mousse, though. A strawberry one.”
“So you survived. That’s the main thing.”
Since Molly was back in the waking world, Liz got her to read aloud from Little Witch while Zac played the latest instalment of some military-themed console game in his room with his headset on. Every so often he’d say something to one of the other players, almost always a monosyllable.
“Right!”
“Go!”
“Now!”
“Hey!”
“Whoaaaa!”
“Do you want to watch a Thomas the Tank Engine?” Liz asked Molly when they were done with Little Witch. “Or should we play Lucky Ducks?”
“Can we do both?” Molly asked.
It turned out they could. After having a nap earlier in the evening, Moll was a live wire. She didn’t crash until after nine o’clock, by which time Liz was failing too. She looked in on Zac, who was still playing, and waved to him from the doorway. With both hands on the controller of the PlayStation and a live mike at his lips, all he could do was give her a grin and a nod in return. On another night she would have tasked him about homework assignments, but if his routine was broken it was down to her more than him. She decided to let sleeping dogs of war lie.
In her own room at last, she took out the book that Dr. Southern had loaned her. Mindfulness: Think Your Way to Health by Peter Bateman. It sounded like snake oil, but Southern had assured her it wasn’t. “It’s kind of an offshoot of cognitive therapy. The idea is that most bad attitudes and behaviors start off as bad thoughts. Bad habits that your mind gets into. Mindfulness puts you in the moment, makes you experience things more directly and intensely so you can see those bad thoughts coming and avoid them. If what you suffered was a sort of mental short circuit, this ought to help you mend your wiring.”
Liz read the first chapter, which promised no amazing revelations but did suggest (with a few provisos and cautions) that new ways of thinking could often bring unexpected benefits. It ended with the instruction to Play meditation one.
Liz had already unearthed her old CD player from the back of the closet and set it up on the bedside table with fresh batteries in it. There was a photo of the family that sat there, and in repositioning it she looked at it properly for the first time in years. It showed Liz seated, with Molly in her arms and Zac kneeling next to her. Marc stood behind them all, his hands on Liz’s shoulders in a way that had once seemed affectionate but now looked like a statement of ownership. Time for a new photo, she thought. Way past time, actually.
She plugged an old pair of gaming headphones—Zac’s, long ago outgrown as both tech and fashions had advanced—into the back of the player and inserted the CD that had come with the mindfulness book. With the headphones on, she pressed PLAY and lay back on the bed.
“Meditation one,” a rich male voice said in sonorous tones. “Finding the stillness inside yourself.” Liz didn’t know for sure if that was something she had ever been issued with.
The meditation made her concentrate on each part of her body in turn, tense it and then relax it, shift her awareness to it and then away from it. She felt slightly ridiculous lying on her bed fully clothed, trying to commune with her own physical extremities. But there was definitely an effect. At the end of the meditation, she felt both really relaxed and strangely self-aware. She held herself on the brink of sleep for a little while, floating on the surface of an interior ocean until, ever so slowly, she let herself sink.
In the last moment before she dozed off, she became aware of something else. There was an inflection to the silence inside her mind, as though something else was being silent along with her; holding itself absolutely still so it wouldn’t betray its presence there.
Her designated hitter. The thought came quickly, with absolute conviction. She just knew. That disowned but undissolved fragment was still with her, not advancing or retreating, communing with itself on the unmapped margins of Liz’s consciousness. Ready to step back in again the moment Liz dropped her guard.
Ready to take over.
Fran had gone to bed on Wednesday night with a head full of foreboding. She had dropped a risperidone a half hour before she turned out the light, but the memory of Zac Kendall’s mom at the clinic, changing without changing, two things at once, was very vivid. She was afraid of what the night might br
ing.
Feeling alone and vulnerable, she whistled softly for Jinx—and was hugely relieved when her friend came padding out of the darkness in the corner of the room. She had been afraid that the increased dosage would hold Jinx at bay, as it sometimes had in the past.
“Where do you go when you’re not with me?” she murmured as Jinx curled up on the duvet beside her.
You know where I go. My secret den.
“Where is that?”
It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you.
“Okay. But how do you get there?”
It’s magic. First you step, then you slide. Back to front and side to side.
“Don’t tell me then.”
I did tell you. Someday I’ll take you there.
They dozed off together, Jinx’s soft breathing lulling Fran quickly over the threshold of sleep.
In the event, the night didn’t bring much of anything at all. Fran didn’t have any nightmares, and when she woke her room looked one hundred percent normal. But the mood of queasy dread wouldn’t lift. She went into school on Thursday morning so tense and wired she felt like she was a human version of the ball of elastic bands her homeroom teacher, Miss Sutherland, kept on her desk.
She just about held it together through first period, but the pressure was building inside her. She had the risperidone in her school bag. During morning recess, she took it with her into the bathroom and sat on a toilet seat staring at it for the full ten minutes. When the bell rang, she popped a pill quickly, trying not to think about it too much but feeling obscurely ashamed just the same. Thanks a million, Dr. Southern, she thought glumly. Now I’ve got guilt as an extra side effect.
There’s nothing to be guilty about.
“I know that, Jinx,” Fran muttered. “Doesn’t help. Good that you’re still here though.”
