Don't Slay the Dragon (The Chronicles of Elizabeth Marshall Book 1) (7 page)

Lisbeth tugged my arm in a familiar gesture then headed out the front door, knowing I would be close behind.  

Chapter T
hirteen

We sat on a concrete barrier under the overpass, feet dangling above the river, surrounded by graffiti.  I didn’t know what to say.  Honestly, I was still shaking from that scene back in the kitchen of her trailer.  She hadn’t said anything but she seemed relaxed, her shoulders loose, her feet kicking back and forth like a little girl. 

“The stars are so bright tonight.”  She looked up at the sparkling sky in wonder, sounding so young, so innocent.  “Look, there’s the North Star and the Big Dipper.”

I followed her hand up to where she pointed.  It reminded me of those summer nights when we were younger, snuggled up in sleeping bags on lawn chairs, sleeping under the open starry sky.  We would stay up most the night and she would point out all the constellations and tell me the fascinating stories about them.  When we finally slept my dreams would be filled with mystical beings such as Orion and Cassiopeia, beasts such as mighty bulls and deadly scorpions.  We’d end up sleeping in half the next day but the images stayed with me much longer.

I stayed silent, still trying to gage her mood.
 

“The moon’s almost full,” she whispered and we glanced at the glowing orb rising over the mountains to the east. 

She let out a deep breath and brought her knees up to her chest, balancing carefully on the thin concrete barrier.  As her arms stretched around her legs I looked over and noticed numerous slanting wounds on her arms.  Some looked fresh, others scabbing, still others were now scars. 

“Lisbeth, what are these?”  I reached out and carefully traced one of the scars.

“Nothing,” her eyes flashed as she pulled back and yanked down on her sleeves, trying to cover her arms. 

“It’s not ‘
nothing’,” I persisted.  “Those are cuts.  Did Barbara do that to you?”  I asked, horrified.

“No.”  Her words held a finality that told me not to push the issue any further.  After what had happened earlier, I decided to heed the warning. 
Her next words sounded as though they came from a much older person, tired, world-weary.

“I have to get that scholarship, Caitlyn,” she spoke to the night
, her voice bleak and desperate.  “I have to get out of here.”

She nudged me with her shoulder and I nudged her back
.  We grinned at each other as the tension started to dissolve. 

“You’ll get that scholarship, Lisbeth.  I know you will.”  I had always been her champion.  I knew her mother often tore her down and she needed someone to believe in her.  “With your grades and test scores there’s no way they could say no to you.”

She nodded, accepting the compliment with gratitude in her eyes.

“Are you ok going back home?”  I had to ask.

She gave me a puzzled look, as though the incident in the kitchen had never happened.

“You and Barbara aren’t going to fight anymore, are you?”  I clarified. 

She shrugged her shoulders but didn’t look too worried.

“I’ll stay out of her hair and try to avoid her.” She shrugged.  “With any luck I’ll be packing for
Annapolis soon.”

The next week I thought it odd that I never ran into Lisbeth in the hallway at school.  By the end of the week I decided to check with Mrs. Matthews, her homeroom teacher for AP History.  She said that Lisbeth hadn’t been to class for several days.  I wondered if she was sick. 
That wasn’t like her.  She normally wouldn’t let anything interfere with school. 

I was planning to call and check on her, but finals were coming up and I’d recently met this college guy. 
He was calling me every night and we were making plans for a date.

By the next week when I still hadn’t seen her
I decided to call her home and see how she was doing.  Barbara answered.

“Hi, this is Caitlyn.  Can I speak with Lisbeth?”

“She’s not here.”  Silence.  Nothing more.  It wasn’t like Barbara to be so tight-lipped. 

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Caitlyn, Elizabeth is at Mountain West Regional Hospital.  She’s in the psychiatric unit.”  Her voice was hollow, dead.  I didn’t know what to say. 

Barbara went on to tell me that Lisbeth had had a n
ervous breakdown, a psychic break.  She had lost her temper over “nothing” and Barbara hadn’t been able to calm her down.  She’d called the paramedics who had transported Lisbeth to the local hospital.  It had taken six hospital staff to strap her down and medicate her.  She couldn’t have any visitors.  She was still undergoing a full psychiatric evaluation.  She would let me know when I could visit her.

I hung up the phone
and sank down into a kitchen chair in a state of shock and with a sense of guilt.  Had I failed my friend?  Was there something I could have done to prevent this?  I beat myself up with the questions for a long time after that. 

It wasn’t until months later that I found out that her scholarship offer letter had arrived the day after she’d been admitted to the hospital.
She had been accepted to the Naval Academy with a full scholarship, but she would never get the chance to go.

I didn’t hear from Barbara again until she called me a few weeks later to tell me that Lisbeth had been transported down to the state mental hospital.  She was finally allowed visitors and Barbara wanted to know if I would go with her for the first visit.  
It was a frightening thought, going down to the state hospital. 

I agreed to go, as much to see my friend as to reassure myself she was ok.  Giving Barbara support was also important too.  I didn’t always agree with how she treated Lisbeth, but I could sympathize with her struggles with being a single mother trying to raise a daughter as changeable and unpredictable as her. 

Driving down the interstate in Barbara’s small compact, I sat in silence and listened to her explain to me what to expect from the visit.  There would be security checks, our purses would be searched to make sure we weren’t bringing anything unsafe into the hospital. Our visits would be in an open common room, so our interaction could be monitored. We could only visit with her if her doctor thought she was doing well enough that day to be able to handle visitors.

It was a cold, hard dose of
reality.  Very few people question their sanity until someone close to them loses theirs.

Lisbeth had been diagnosed as
being bi-polar as well as with multiple personality disorder.  At that time, still being a junior in high school, the words meant little to me.  At first, the only thing I understood was that my best friend was very ill, and that our friendship may have changed in ways it might take years to understand.  It wasn’t until Barbara started going into more detail that I realized the full impact of just how much my friendship with her daughter may have altered.

Barbara went on to explain that the doctors at the state hospital had found as many as nineteen different personalities in Lisbeth, and they suspected there were more. 
It was a rare disorder, one they were still just trying to categorize. A team of doctors were working to try to understand and properly document the different personalities within her. As Barbara went on to list them, their names and individual characteristics, I numbly realized that I had met or was familiar with every one of them. 

Chapter Fourteen

Lisbeth, I would learn, was the “core personality”, the base.  She kind of kept everyone together, sometimes the go-between. The speaker for the group. She was the person I knew best.  She was the artist, the writer, the creative one.  She was my best friend.

Beth Ann was the student, the scholar.  She was the one that drove the grades.  She did the studying, took the tests.
  She was very intelligent, genius level.  She had been the driving force for the Naval Academy and college. She was very focused and goal-oriented. She was a type-A personality, organized to a fault with borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Bethany was a shy, vulnerable twelve-year-old girl.  She was awkward and nervous, especially around the opposite sex. 
Bethany had been created out of a need to stay pre-pubescent.  When Lisbeth didn’t want to deal with the pressures of being a teenager and young adult, she escaped into Bethany.  Bethany was safe and often protected by the others.

I’d met Lizzy
a time or two when I’d thought Lisbeth was just being scared and insecure.  She was a seven-year-old child with a history of abuse.  The doctors at the state hospital had discovered that Lisbeth had been molested by a neighbor when she was seven years old.  She’d been a latch-key child while her mother had been at work.  Sadly, a prime victim.  Doctors thought Lizzy may have been her first “split”.  She was terrified of adult men, especially ones with facial hair.  Doctors felt her molester had probably had facial hair.  Lizzy was an eternal child, never aging, never maturing.  She was kept sheltered by the others too, since she’d been the most injured.

Jade was an adult woman, cold and cynical.  She was in her mid-thirties, hard and stubborn.  Many times when Lisbeth was digging her heels in about something, i
t was Jade doing the goading.  Jade had a perpetual attitude and a chip on her shoulder the size of Mt. Everest.

There was a teenage boy named Mick.  He was the cutter and had a fascination with knives
and weapons.  He’d left the scars on her arms.  He was another one created to help her deal with the pressures of her life.  Cutting was something she could control when the rest of her life seemed to be spinning out of control.  Mick was sneaky and clever, a thief and a shop-lifter, sullen and rebellious if confronted directly.

Vesper, of course, had been the martial arts champion.  He was of an unknown age, adult male, and undoubtedly lethal
.  He had the temper, the lightning-quick reflexes, and no conscience.  Schizophrenic and paranoid, he was the one you didn’t want to tangle with alone.  He was deadly and threatening with everyone he came into contact with. Except me. I was his safe zone, the one person he wasn’t threatened by.  Somehow, through the long-time, positive connection I had with Lisbeth, I seemed to be the only person he wasn’t threatened by.

Skye was one of her more fanciful, whimsical personalities.  She was more fairy than human and lived in a colorful kingdom of her own making.  Skye was
one of Lisbeth’s escapes into fantasy.  It was where she went to completely get away from her life.  Skye had royal blue hair and deep blue eyes, sparkling skin and floated rather than walked.  She was mischievous in a playful way, light-hearted and fun to be around. She was partial to a bow and arrows.

When she played her complex, fantasy board games, her character’s name was Sashan.  Sashan, I would later learn, was tall and regal, a beautiful blond elf with magical abilities.  Lisbeth had gone into such detail to create this character that Sashan was very much real to her.
  She was a strategist, and a planner. She was of royal lineage and had a long list of talents and was skillful with various weapons. 

There was Liz, a middle-age snob, wealthy and judgmental.  There were times that Lisbeth would make snide, rude remarks about other students at school, their clothing or make-up.  I thought she was just being funny with her upper-middle
-class voice and her fashion rules.  I never realized that Liz was an entirely different person.

Those were the ones I knew
the best.  Others I had just brief glimpses of.  There were still others that the doctors discovered during her stay in the state hospital and that I met during my visits there. 

Every weekend and sometimes during the week I would travel with Barbara the seventy miles down to the state hospital to see her.  Many of the visits she wouldn’t see Barbara.  The doctor’s had been doing some deep therapy and were spending a lot of time delving into her past.  Her anger at her mother would get dredged up and she wouldn’t be able to see her. 

Somehow, I was the “safe” one.  The only person all her personalities felt safe being with. 

The doctor
s were trying a combination of different anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and mood-altering medications to try to “integrate” the different personalities back into one, back into the core Elizabeth or Lisbeth.  Some she reacted well to, others she didn’t.  Sometimes during my visits she was barely there, just an over-medicated patient, one who hardly recognized me.  Other times, she was a manic chain smoker, a habit she’d picked up to fit in with the other patients.  Still other times, she was a stranger to me, a new personality that I didn’t know, but who had “heard” about me.

This was when I met Maxine, the brash and hard truck driver.  She was tattooed and pierced from head to toe.  She could tell you such detailed stories about some of her tattoos that you could swear you could see them appearing on her arms.  Maxine loved her Camel cigarettes and had an attitude about everything.

Chad was one of her personalities that frankly made me uncomfortable.  He was in his late thirties, loud, abusive and controlling to women.  He was a bully and mean-tempered.  He was the embodiment of the men Lisbeth despised or feared.  Possibly the echo of her dead-beat father.   I would keep my visit short if Chad was there.

On they went until the doctors had identified twenty-seven different personalities. 
They carefully diagnosed their individual characteristics and traits.  It was well documented that when one of her more calm personalities were present, such as Beth Ann or Bethany, she would be right handed, her features were softer, her entire appearance warmer.  When Chad or Mick was there, and especially Vesper, she used her left hand, her voice lowered, and her features sharpened.  There was even an incident where Maxine was talking to one of the doctors and he could actually see piercings appear in multiple places in her ears and face.  When she changed to Bethany, the piercings disappeared.

Throughout the rest of that school year and into that summer, when Lisbeth should have been graduating from high school, packing and moving to
Maryland, she was instead at the state mental hospital, a guinea pig to medication and therapy.  Sometimes our visits were regular, but at other times she wouldn’t respond well to therapy and the visit would be cancelled.

I would get letters from
her, sometimes several times a week.  It was always fascinating seeing the different changes in handwriting, sentence structure and subject matter based on who was writing to me at the time.  Sometimes the person writing to me would change from one paragraph to the next.  I became familiar with Lizzy’s child-like scrawl. Beth Ann’s determined print and Liz’s fancy cursive. 

As I started my senior year of school, the doctors increased her medication in a desperate attempt to integrate her personalities.  She wouldn’t recognize me most visits and many times she would act as though she didn’t even know I was there. 

School became more challenging to me, classes required more studying and homework, and I was sending off scholarship applications to every school in a hundred mile radius.  I wrote to Lisbeth as often as I could, but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get many replies. 

Her diagnosis wasn’t the best.  Doctors
worried that they may not be successful and she may not be able to be released and to lead a “normal”, productive life. 

I sometimes wondered if I had a friendship left, if there was anything of the Lisbeth I knew in that frail little body in the state hospital.