Pretty Girl Thirteen (14 page)

She dashed up to her room, slamming the door behind her. She leaned back against it and breathed as if she’d run a marathon, not a flight of stairs. It wasn’t supposed to be her job to make her dad happy. It was supposed to be the other way around.

Angie flung the plastic tape recorder onto the bed. She collapsed facedown on her pillow and considered crying, considered not breathing. Neither one worked. The pillowcase gave off the faint, fresh scent of laundry detergent. It was such a happy smell, she couldn’t follow through with tears or self-suffocation. So she got up and retuned her guitar, a process she could control, a discord she could fix. The flood of fury trickled away, leaving only a depressed puddle.

The honey-toned wood grew warm in her hands. She ran up and down a scale and began picking out an old tune—Grandma’s lullaby. “When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses …” She closed her eyes, playing the tune over and over till her fingers knew it without thinking. She disappeared into the music.

A hissing sound drew her back. Shoot. Had she turned on the tape recorder by accident? It was rewinding itself. She probably had fifteen minutes of pretty horses.

Angie held the toy tape recorder in her lap and pressed the big green
PLAY
button. The tape was old and had been recorded over and over again. Static ran for several long seconds, and Angie was just about to hit the red
STOP
button when she heard, “Hello? Hello? I think this is working.” The child’s voice was high and soft and breathless. Angie felt a jolt of recognition. Electricity ran all the way down to her toes.

“The big girl told me to say thank you very much for the tape recorder,” the child went on. “It’s really easy to use. I like it.”

Angie couldn’t help smiling at the formal politeness. She sounded very sweet.

“This is my story,” the girl said. “It’s scary to tell. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell. People who break promises go to Hell, he said, and they burn up forever. And I really don’t want to burn up forever,” she said. “He showed me how much a burn hurts with a match, and he said, That’s just one little match. Imagine a whole world of flames. And he said, Friends don’t tell on each other, see, like he didn’t tell about me breaking Dad’s best coffee mug. So I promised I wouldn’t. And he said, The magic word is hush.”

Another few moments of silence. The coffee mug. Angie had a vague memory of an oversized, brown-speckled mug teetering on the edge of the counter. The tape whirred another turn, and Angie imagined the little girl gathering courage to break her solemn promise of silence.

She resumed. “We played a few tea parties, and we did dress-ups, like pirate and princess, when he came over to play with me. And it was fun. He showed me how to play Uno and Crazy Eights, and Slap Jack, too. We had lots of fun games while Mom and Dad were getting ready to go out to dinner all the Fridays. Then they kissed me good night and told me to be a good girl and do everything Yuncle said. Everything… .” The little voice trailed off. “Everything,” she added sadly against the static hiss.

So literal, Angie thought. Little kids are always so literal. Yuncle? Why was her alter Tattletale talking about Yuncle Bill? That was so long ago. When her chest spasmed, gulping air, she realized she’d forgotten to breathe.

“So, this day Yuncle had an idea. He said, I’m tired of pirates. Princesses like horses better than pirates. Do you like horses, Princess Angela? Of course I do, I said. I love them. All the girls love horses. And he laughed so hard. He told me to hop on his back, and he crawled around on his knees while I yelled giddyup. And he said, all the best horse riders go bareback, so we had to take off our shirts so we had bare backs. And I rode around on his bare back, but it was hard to hold on without a shirt.”

Angie’s mouth went dry. A creeping feeling of dread touched the base of her neck. She wanted to turn off the tape now, but the innocence in the voice compelled her to hear the rest.

“He said, I’m afraid you might fall off this horse, my princess, and he laughed and rolled us both over. I giggled at him, lying with his hoofs in the air, so he said, hey, I know. Let’s make this a better game. Want me to show you how big girls ride? And I said okay, because I was getting kind of bored.

“Then he showed me. Then he showed me and he said, now you’re a big girl too.”

There was a long silence. Angie filled it with a thousand questions. Yuncle? How could he have done it? That bastard. A tear rolled down her cheek. Mourning for the poor little girl and her awful, agonizing secret.

The voice came on again, sober and subdued. “I didn’t like the new game so much. He said, stop crying, you baby. Princesses don’t cry. Next time won’t hurt. And then he burned me with a little piece of Hell and made me promise not to tattle about our game. And it was the same next time and next time and next time.”

The recording finished. It was static to the end of the tape.

Next time and next time.
Oh God. How many next times were there? Four years of Fridays? Right under her parents’ noses?

Angie rolled up her sleeve to study the sore that had appeared without explanation the day Yuncle and Grandma had visited. The livid spot surrounded a swollen, oozing blister, just about the size of a match head.

And Angie instantly knew without knowing—he’d done it again. That night. After dinner. That goddamn bastard had taken her for a sunset walk and done her. Or rather, done the trapped little girl inside he’d trained to be his sex toy. Poor, defenseless, silent Tattletale.

And where? In his car? In the shed? On the filthy ground in the cobwebs and dust? She couldn’t remember a moment of it, like her mind had been wiped clean of his guilty fingerprints.

A sick rage like she’d never felt before surged inside her. Damn him to his own burning hell. Her hands reached for an invisible weapon, a blade to defend the child. A sound like the brush of a hundred dove wings filled her ears, almost blocking the sound of Mom calling, “Time to go, Angie.”

If Angie’s parents noticed her tense silence in the car, they never commented. They were so oblivious, they probably thought she was just nervous about starting the brain mapping procedure that Dr. Grant had convinced them to try. She tried to cling to the hot, hard emotion, but the fury was draining away again, and a dull, gray calm spread through her. A smothering blanket of numbness pressed down on her head. Her eyes were achy dry.

Had her parents missed the signals of abuse? Or had she just absorbed everything deep inside herself and buried it in her mind—literally in a secret compartment? Either way, Yuncle had gotten away with it for years. Because she believed him, because she couldn’t tell. It was impossible to imagine how much pain was buried in her head, like … what was the opposite of secret treasure? The rotting corpses of her innocence? Yeah. Like a mass grave. God forbid they should ever dig it up and examine it. She shuddered and prayed that the mapping would work.

Would they find the boundaries of all the secret compartments in her mind, empty them, and nail them shut? That’s what Dr. Grant had promised. That was the goal, anyway. Step one of the experimental treatment—discovery before recovery.

The plan was that Dr. Grant would hypnotize her and hold the attention of one of the alters while the functional MRI machine mapped her brain. All the nerve pathways for that alter would light up with activity, and the computer would record their exact locations. Dr. Grant had arranged for a five-day stretch of recording slots at UCLA Medical Center, assuming that Angie could tolerate the one-hour sessions in the belly of the noisy, claustrophobic scanner. It was a huge time commitment, an hour’s drive each way in traffic, plus scanning time.

Dad hovered uneasily in the radiology reception area as they waited to get started—the downside of starting on a weekend so she wouldn’t miss too much school. “This shouldn’t hurt or anything,” he assured her. “It’s all done with magnets.” He wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already heard. He patted her back in a stiff-handed way, transferring his own anxiety into her instead of the opposite. Why was he here instead of ignoring her as usual?

Angie bit her lip, holding in the tears that ached in her throat for the entire drive over. The numbness froze her. After what Mom had spilled about Dad’s emotional meltdown, there was no way she could tell him the truth about his brother.

Hey, Dad. Guess what? Finally figured out why my brain knew how to break up into compartments. I had to build a wall between daily life and being molested by your brother. Over and over again. That’s how I learned to keep pain and fear locked away in another place.

Oh yeah. That conversation would end well.

She chewed her cheek till she tasted blood, forcing herself to feel the pain. It anchored her as she followed her parents along the corridor into the imaging room.

“Ready, Angie?” Dr. Grant’s smooth, cheerful face pulled her away from the echo of Tattletale’s little voice and back to now. “Let me introduce all of you to Dr. Hirsch, the guy in charge of the study.”

Now
he
looked like a typical “brain shrinker,” from his black goatee to his bushy black eyebrows. Startling black eyes like giant pupils had a piercing quality, like X-ray vision into your psyche.

While he obtained formal consent from her parents, Angie mind-wandered. Who would come out today? Girl Scout seemed most comfortable with the doctor. But Tattletale was close to the surface. Little Wife was a total blank, just a name right now. And someone had growled in her ear. So that should be the four that Girl Scout had told Dr. Grant about. Or was Little Wife the growler, and there was someone else entirely? What a patchwork quilt she was—bits and pieces sewn together by disaster.

Dr. Grant’s job was to bring out the alters one by one and hold them long enough to trace them. The bait she planned to use was inviting them to tell their stories as Girl Scout had already started to do, not to flood Angie with traumatic memories, but to give her an arm’s-length look at her lost time. Of course, Dr. Grant didn’t know yet about Tattletale’s trauma, about what Angie had only just found out.

She tuned back in just as Dr. Hirsch said, “Then ideally we will know the exact extent of the splintering, and can proceed with the therapy.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Angie asked.

“Erasure. In two steps. We’ll block, that is, deactivate, the neurons used only by the alters after tagging them with special genes we can manipulate. And when that is complete, you will have your unitary consciousness, one personality continuously in control. I have treated five prior patients with great success.”

That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Questions answered, gaps filled, and the alters could be retired. Girl Scout and Tattletale had already told her their worst, and she could handle it. Not
feel
it, exactly, but now she knew.

The machine room was intimidating, scary—the perfect place to send her primary personality fleeing in terror. A huge machine with a circular opening dominated the room. Her head was supposed to fit in the circle. She imagined invisible beams drilling into her skull and dissecting her, but then they’d promised her it was just a huge magnet.

In the dressing room, she shed her street clothes and put on the hospital gown. Her reflection looked back, pale and frightened. What secrets would she babble under hypnosis? She wasn’t so much worried about what Dr. Grant would hear, but Dr. Hirsch was monitoring. He didn’t know her. She didn’t know him. And what if Tattletale came out and told Dr. Grant about Yuncle? Would she have to tell Angie’s parents? There was some kind of law about teachers and health-care workers reporting abuse of minors if they found out or suspected. It was posted all over school. Did that law include psychologists?

Angie whispered to the mirror. “Tattletale, you absolutely have to stay quiet. It’s not time for you yet. Keep hiding from the scary doctor. Please.” Whether she imagined it or not, a feeling of agreement spread over her.

Dr. Grant was right outside the door when she came out. The doctor handed her a pair of wireless earbuds and lightly patted the back of her hand. “Nothing to worry about, Angie. I’ll be talking to you through these, since the machine is noisy. There’s a voice pickup, so I’ll be able to hear you. I’m sorry I have to be in another room. Now let’s go somewhere quiet where you can become more relaxed and see who wants to talk.”

It was Monday, the third day of recording, and Girl Scout had refused to come out, even under hypnosis. Another alter insisted on dominating the sessions. Dr. Grant gave a little “aha,” as if this was the one she’d been expecting all along, the one who was closest to the trauma that had splintered Angie’s sense of self in the first place.