When She Was Bad

by Jonathan Nasaw

  And though in the forefront of his mind he was repeating the same phrase over and over, like a mantra, as he scrubbed—it’s not my fault, it wasn’t me; it’s not my fault, it wasn’t me—in the back of his mind Lyssy was pretty sure he could hear dry laughter emanating from the dark place where he was never to go.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Lily awoke to the sound of an over-hearty female voice bidding her good morning through a speaker in the wall near the head of the bed. For a few seconds that seemed to last an eternity, she felt lost and frightened, totally disoriented. Then it all came flooding back: the airplane, her grandparents, and—oh God—the Institute!

  A moment later the room’s only door slid open, then closed behind a massively built young woman in white duck trousers and a tight-sleeved white polo shirt with the RCI logo over the left breast. Her light brown hair was cut in a mullet: shaved sidewalls, buzzed on top, hanging straight down to her powerful shoulders in back. PATRICIA BENOIT, PSYCH. TECH., read the plastic name badge pinned to her shirt.

  “Hi, I’m Patty. Dr. Corder wants me to stick with you this morning, kinda show you the ropes, get you orientated, how’s that sound?”

  “I have to pee.”

  “You might want to try out the shower, too.” Patty wrinkled her nose. “Getting a little gamy, if you catch my drift. I’ll be at the nurses’ station—buzz me when you’re ready.” At the doorway, Patty angled her body to block Lily’s view of the keypad before punching in the code.

  Although she was wearing a modest cotton-flannel nightgown from the suitcase full of clothes and personal effects Dr. Cogan had packed and brought along for her (the nurse who’d helped her unpack last night had confiscated her tweezers and nail file), Lily waited until the door had closed again before pulling the covers back and climbing out of bed. In the bathroom, she wiped off the toilet seat with a neatly folded square of toilet tissue before sitting down, and patted herself dry afterward with another neatly folded square, keeping her nightgown rucked up onto her lap the whole time. Lily hated exposing herself—even at home, she preferred to lock the bedroom door before disrobing, and the bathroom door as well, whether for a quick pee or a long bath.

  Here, though, there was no bathroom door to lock, or shower-stall door, or even a shower curtain—the recessed shower head set high and flush in the curved wall angled away from the open stall doorway, and a six-inch-high tiled ledge in the bottom of the doorway kept the water from flooding the bathroom.

  After brushing her teeth, Lily reluctantly pulled her nightgown over her head and looked around the bathroom for a place to hang it. There being no hooks or towel racks, she folded the nightie and placed it on top of the towels and washcloths stacked on a high rounded shelf. Naked, she peered tentatively into the shower stall. There were no temperature controls, no faucets, no taps, but the moment she stepped inside, warm water cascaded from the single jet eighteen inches above her head. Electric eye, she guessed; a little experimenting proved her right.

  Boy, they thought of everything, Lily told herself as she soaped up and lathered her luxurious dark mane—shampoo, body wash, conditioner in tiny motel-size plastic bottles were arrayed on a recessed shelf under the jet. You couldn’t drown yourself, scald yourself, hang yourself, cut yourself, or even tweeze yourself. Not enough in the little bottles to poison yourself, either. Maybe you could choke or something if you tried to swallow one, but they probably even—

  Then suddenly Lily remembered what Lyssy had mentioned yesterday—there’s a reason they call it the observation suite—and all at once, she knew she was being watched. Panic seized her; she squatted on her heels with her legs together and her knees drawn up, crossing her arms over her breasts and hugging herself miserably. The shower turned itself off; she was below the electric eye. Cold and shivering, rocking on her heels, Lily uncrossed her arms and buried her face in her hands.

  2

  Lilah emerges from her blackout to find herself crouched naked in a shower stall, rubbing her right thumb against the pads of the first two fingers. Awakening abruptly in unfamiliar surroundings is nothing new for Lilah—her life has always been a disconnected series of sudden appearances.

  So she rises—and jumps back against the wall of the stall with a startled laugh as the water comes on. Electric eye—cool. Fragrant soap, water not as hot as she likes it, spray not as needle-fine, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to control it. She lathers and rinses luxuriously, sensuously, with special attention to the erogenous zones, idly masturbating for the sheer sensation of it, no intention of going for an orgasm.

  The water shuts off when she steps out of the oddly doorless stall. Wherever she is, she tells herself—if it’s a hotel, it’s one of those modern ones—at least the towels are clean, thick, and plentiful. She wraps a bath towel around her torso, makes a turban of a second, and is drying herself with a third when she hears a knock. “Be right out!”

  But as Lilah tightens the towel under her armpits and steps out of the bathroom—another oddity, there’s no bathroom door—the room door slides open to admit a powerful-looking woman in a white polo shirt, white duck trousers, and a mullet haircut. Lilah, who is nearsighted but too vain to wear eyeglasses, squints at the plastic tag on the woman’s breast. She can just make out the name—Patricia Benoit—but the letters below it are a blur.

  Probably a maid, thinks Lilah. And if it’s true what they say—the butcher they are, the sweeter the tongue—she probably gives some heavenly head. “Is that Ben-oyt or Ben-wa?” She lets a giggle escape.

  “Ben-oyt—but you can call me Patty. What’s so funny?”

  “I was thinking about ben-wa balls. You ever heard of them? They’re these like, sex toys, you stick ’em inside your—”

  “Oh, right, right.” Patty colors. “I’ve heard of them, I just didn’t know that’s what they were called.”

  “Ever use ’em?” asks Lilah, slyly, as she brushes past the much larger woman; her damp feet leave tidy little Robinson Crusoe footprints on the carpet as she crosses the room to examine the clothes folded and stacked in the waist-high blond dresser, which has recessed shelves instead of drawers.

  Patty lets the question drop. She’s worked with DID patients before, and some of them—not Lyssy, of course—she’s suspected of feigning the disorder either knowingly or unknowingly. It was fun for them to impersonate different characters, they received lots of attention, and it was also a nifty way to deflect responsibility for their actions. Or at least, it was nifty until Dr. Corder got hold of them.

  But this Lily DeVries is for real—after watching the alter switch in the shower on the security monitor at the nurses’ station, Patty has no doubt of that. Not even Jody Foster, whom Patty idolizes, is that good an actress. Lily hasn’t just changed her affect or adopted a set of mannerisms, like the fakers do—the very way she inhabits her body is strikingly different.

  This alter, the towel-clad, gutter-mouthed tramp swearing quietly over the selection of clothes available to her, seems entirely comfortable with her physicality. She carries her shoulders low; her walk is liquid and balanced, her hips loose and swaying, and when she unwraps her long brown-black hair and hunkers down on her heels to examine the clothes on the bottom shelf, she reminds Patty of one of Gauguin’s tantalizingly unself-conscious Polynesian girls.

  Having been fully briefed by Dr. Corder this morning, and having reviewed the so-called “map” of alters drawn up by Lily’s former psychiatrist, Patty now has a reasonably good idea who this one is. Name: Lilah; alter class: promiscuous; age: actual; self-image: actual; affect: sexually provocative.

  “Are you here to make up the room?” asks Lilah, still hunkered down on her heels.

  “No, I was here to escort you down to the dining hall,” says Patty, with an emphasis on the past tense.

  Escort, Lilah thinks. This must be one hell of a ritzy place. “Want to help me work up an appetite?” She rises, letting the towel fall. Stark naked, she holds her
hands out at her side, as if to say, here I am, and I’m all yours if you want me.

  “That is so not happening, young lady.” Patty looks down at the carpet; she’d have turned down the offer even if she hadn’t known about the hidden security cameras. Taking sexual advantage of one of her charges, even one as extraordinarily desirable and apparently willing as Lilah, is simply unthinkable for Patty.

  Nevertheless, she has the feeling that this latest acquisition, the searing image of the naked girl offering herself, has just acceded to the permanent collection in her private museum of erotic images; she also has the feeling that this was precisely Lilah’s intention. “I’ll be right back,” she tells her charge.

  Alone again, Lilah selects a sweatshirt and a pair of panties and jeans at random—while the place may be ritzy, judging from the selection of clothes it’s also informal—but just as she finishes changing into them, the door slides open again and Patty announces a change in plans.

  “Time to begin your therapy,” she says, tossing Lilah a green hospital gown as the door slides closed behind her. “Take those off, put this on.”

  Therapy? thinks Lilah. Then she reads the fine print—PSYCH. TECH.—on Patty’s name tag and suddenly fear floods her system. A desperate plan begins to take shape. “Could I have a little privacy to get dressed, please?”

  “Now it’s privacy you want?” Patty turns away and punches her security code into the keypad. As the door begins to slide open, Lilah dashes across the room, jukes right, then left, and ducks under Patty’s flailing arm. She races down a long green corridor toward a door with a breaker bar and a sign reading Emergency Exit Only, unable to shake the eerie sensation that she’s done this before—and not so long ago, either.

  Heads turn as Lilah passes the nurses’ station; the faces are white and blank as night-blooming flowers. She hits the breaker bar, crashes through the door, and bolts barefoot down a flight of stairs.

  But the door on the next landing is locked. And here’s Patty lumbering down the stairs after her, red-faced and puffing, her arms mottled and meaty-looking as two legs of lamb, spread wide to block Lilah’s retreat. “Come on now, oh come on,” she’s saying, in a voice less of anger than of schoolmarmish annoyance.

  Joining Patty on the stairs is another massive, white-clad figure who fills his polo shirt like the Mighty Hulk. If this is a dream, I’d really like to wake up now, thinks Lilah. It sure feels like a dream, the way she’s rooted to the landing, frozen in place as the two close in on her, looking nightmarishly similar in their white uniforms, like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in a madhouse production of Alice in Wonderland.

  They flank her, each taking an arm, and walk her back up the stairs and down the corridor; this time the nurses all turn away busily as they pass the desk. Patty accompanies Lilah into the peach-colored room while her male counterpart—his name tag reads simply, Wally—waits outside. “Let’s try this again,” says Patty, picking up the discarded hospital gown and shoving it firmly into Lilah’s hands.

  3

  Hotel dining room. White tablecloths, tinkle of glass and clatter of tableware, muted breakfast conversations. Striking vistas of Portland through tinted plate-glass windows. From the entrance alcove, Pender scanned the premises and spotted Irene Cogan, wearing a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, sitting alone reading the Oregonian and picking desultorily at a grapefruit.

  He crossed the room, his head pounding with every footfall, despite the double padding of his rubber-soled Hush Puppies on a thick gray carpet patterned with the hotel chain’s interlocking initials in burgundy. “Mind if I join you?”

  “I like your outfit,” she said, gesturing graciously toward the empty chair across from her. He was wearing a white-on-white guayabera shirttails-out over not-yet-rumpled brown slacks. “Have we been invited to a Mexican wedding?”

  “Har de har har,” said Pender, whose interview at the TPP offices down by the warehouse district was to begin in less than an hour and was expected to take all day. He turned to the hovering, white-jacketed waiter. “Screwdriver. Light on the oj, heavy on the Stoli. If it takes, I may consider solid food.”

  “Hungover?” asked Irene, after the waiter left.

  “Aaaargh! As Charlie Brown used to say.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “For what?”

  “For all the booze you drank last night, what else?”

  “Oh, that,” replied Pender, then: “Look, about last night…“

  She held up both hands; two silver bracelets jingled as they slid down her long slender wrist. “Please, let’s not talk about it, okay?”

  From that high point, the conversation flagged. Irene dissected her grapefruit and skimmed the newspaper; Pender sipped at his orange-tinted Stoli and gazed out the window at the cityscape below. “I’m sure glad this didn’t turn out awkward,” he said after a few minutes.

  “Me too,” said Irene over the top of the newspaper. Then she folded it and slipped it into her gigantic Coach bag. “I keep thinking I ought to give Lily a call just to see how she’s doing. I know it’s inappropriate, but—”

  “Why inappropriate? I mean, think of that poor kid, waking up in a strange place, not knowing anybody. And it’s probably just starting to sink in about her grandparents—of course you should call her, why shouldn’t you?”

  Because she’s no longer my patient, thought Irene. Then she reminded herself that as far as her relationship with Lily was concerned, she’d crossed that line a long time ago. “You know, I think I will,” she told Pender.

  “Tell her Uncle Pen says hi.”

  4

  “Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

  No answer. Dressed in an open-backed green gown with strings in back that tie in front and paper slippers that keep threatening to slide off, Lilah shuffles down the long green corridor, flanked by a white-clad psych tech on either side. When they reach the elevator, Mullet Woman punches in the security code and steps inside first, while Hulk follows Lilah. Exiting one floor below, they reverse the process, then flank Lilah again and march her down another long green corridor, this one two-toned with a waist-high, olive-colored wainscoting, to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  The door opens, revealing a large tiled room dominated by an enormous padded table in the shape of a cross; it looks more like a medieval torture device than a piece of furniture. Beside it, seated behind a gray metal desk, is a plumpish, bespectacled man in a white lab coat, his reddish-brown hair combed back in waves from a high round forehead. He gestures toward the empty wooden chair across the desk, politely asks her to take a seat. She shakes off the hands of her escorts, puts a little extra hip swivel into her walk as she crosses the room.

  “Do you know who I am?” is his first question.

  She draws the hospital gown tightly around her, shrugs noncommittally.

  “Ever seen me before?”

  “Not that I know of.” A seductive smile. “You are kinda cute, though.”

  He’s not biting. “What’s your name?”

  “Lilah.”

  “Last name?”

  She frowns prettily. “Sorry—sometimes I have trouble remembering things.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Some kind of mental hospital?”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  She shrugs, causing the hospital gown to fall open. His eyes flicker downward—only for a moment, but a quickening of his breath gives her a sense of power. She leans forward provocatively. “Look, whoever you are, could we talk in private for a couple minutes?”

  “No, we can’t.” He breaks eye contact, types something onto a laptop computer on the desk, then looks up again. “Just a few more questions. You were right about this being a mental hospital—do you have any idea why you’re here?”

  Both the room and the man are too chilly for her to go around with her boobs hanging out. Lilah pulls the lapels of her hospital gown closed again. “Because your goon
s over there wouldn’t let me leave.”

  “I mean why you were brought here in the first place.”

  “I don’t know. Amnesia, maybe?” She waits for him to finish typing another note into the laptop. “Well, am I right?”

  “You’re experiencing some loss of memory, then?”

  “Yeah, I got CRS—can’t remember shit.”

  “Tell me the last memories you do have—before coming here, that is.”

  “Well there was this biker, he picked me up in Seaside, I was pretending to be a hooker—I do that sometimes, just for the fun of it…. “

  She tells him the rest readily enough—Lilah feels no sense of shame where sexual matters are concerned. When she finishes, he closes the notebook, then does something that takes her completely by surprise: he leans earnestly across the table and stares hard into her eyes, saying, “Lily? Lily, if you’re there…if you can hear me…if you’re in any way conscious…if you have any conscious control over any of this…if any of this alter switching is in any way voluntary to any extent, now’s the time to speak up. Believe me, nobody here is going to think less of you.”

  Lilah draws back, tearing her eyes from his searching gaze. “He’s the crazy one, not me,” she tells Mullet Woman over her shoulder.

  But Mullet Woman’s not looking at Lilah, she’s looking over Lilah’s head at the crazy doctor, who sighs, blows the air out like a man who’s just made a tough decision, then nods toward the cross-shaped table.

  “No way,” says Lilah. “No fucking way.”

  Yes fucking way. Hulk and Mullet Woman each take an arm and lift her onto the table as easily as if she were a scarecrow, then force her arms away from her sides and fasten her wrists to the crosspieces with fleece-lined clamps. “Help me,” she screams, kicking futilely as strong arms yank her legs out straight and clamp her ankles to the table. “Please somebody, help—”