Pretty Girl Thirteen (31 page)

Mom sat across the table, forking small pieces of French toast at me. She was sweet but unbelievably awkward.

“You’re out of practice, Mom,” I teased her. “Better figure it out before Junior arrives.”

“More like June,” she quipped back. “Apparently you’re having a sister.”

Mom had no way of knowing that the sudden look of horror on my face had nothing to do with her announcement. Behind her head, the entire TV screen had filled with a photo of the man.

“Oh my God,” I gasped.

“Hey, what’s the matter with a sister?” Mom demanded.

Dad’s fork dropped with a
clang
. His face went pale. “Damned TV news. That didn’t take long.” His eyes darted to the rolled-up Sunday paper, still in its plastic sleeve.

Mom whirled and caught her breath at the face on the screen.

A face I now knew better than my own, the only face that parts of me had seen for three years. So ordinary, except for the narrow dark eyes that looked just a little off, a bit skewed from normal. Sandy-brown hair lightly flecked with gray. A weak chin. Very small ears.

The voice-over did not identify him by name, just asked for any information about his movements and whereabouts in the past five years. He was described only as a person found deceased in the Angeles National Forest—no mention of me or his record.

I was frozen in place, fascinated and appalled at the same time.

Mom slammed off the TV with a bang.

“Oh, my poor Angel,” Dad said, voice cracking. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

What a stupid comment. What the heck was he thinking? “Dad. I lived that.”

His face turned bright red, like he’d given up breathing.

“You couldn’t have stopped them anyway,” I said. “It’s news. A body in the park.”

His fists balled up fiercely. He raised them toward the darkened TV screen, like he could reach through it to the man, to the news studio. “I would have tried my damnedest. I swear I would. I would have done anything to prevent it.” He drew a shuddery breath. “Damned TV news.”

I knew he meant much more than that. He meant the man, and the fruitless search. He meant Bill, and all those years we could never get back. He meant my long-lost innocent childhood.

“Dad. You didn’t know. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”

He didn’t say anything, but a tear fell off the tip of his nose and splashed into the puddle of syrup on his plate.

I thumped his shoulders with my bandaged arms. “Look at me, Dad.” His tear-streaked face was a misery. “It’s done. He’s dead. We’re alive.”

Dad tore his eyes away from mine.

“Look at me,” I insisted. “Am I crying? Am I feeling sorry for myself?”

He only made a choking sound.

I shook him lightly. “You do not have the right to feel worse than I do. So get over yourself and start being here for me and Mom.”

His eyes widened.

A step sounded behind me, and I felt Mom’s hands on my shoulders. Her taut belly brushed the back of my head. “And the baby,” I added. “She does not need a morose, depressed, self-absorbed father. She needs a daddy. Get it?”

Mom squeezed her appreciation into me with silent fingers.

Dad pulled a handkerchief out of his robe pocket and blew his nose. He nodded.

“So you have the day off. Now go do something fun,” I said. “Mom, take him Christmas shopping. I couldn’t help noticing that no one’s put anything under the tree except me. Ahem.”

Mom smiled. “You come along too, hon.”

“Not till I get my gauze mittens off,” I said. “I don’t want to spend the whole day explaining.”

I felt like the parent for a moment. Dad stood up and gave me a long, squeezy hug. He whispered, “Angel. I’m sorry. So sorry.”

“I know that, Daddy,” I said in his ear while he squoze. “By the way, if you need any ideas, I’m getting my ears pierced, and I wouldn’t mind pearls.”

They had been gone for only an hour when the doorbell rang.

I jumped up and realized I’d have a heck of a time opening the door. Through the spy hole, I saw Brogan standing awkwardly on the front mat. His face wore an odd, nervous expression.

“Come in,” I yelled.

The door cracked, and he poked his head in with hesitation. “Angie?” He looked back and forth from my hand-pods to the smoking rubble across the cul-de-sac, actually at a loss for words.

“It wasn’t arson,” I said. “I’m innocent.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. Yes. Yeah, I know. I’ve just spoken to the Harrises. At their hotel. Are your parents around?”

“Nope. They’re shopping.” Spoke to the Harrises? Why? Suspicion dawned.

“Maybe I should come back later.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“I think you’d better come in,” I said. “I think this is a talk we need to have privately.”

He studied my face and apparently came to a decision. “Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

He sat down on the edge of the sofa, his elbows on his knees. I took a chair and leaned back on purpose.

“As I said, I’ve, uh, just come from the Harrises,” he said. “They recognized Brett Samuelson on the television. Apparently from the adoption signing.”

Oh, no. “Do they know it had anything to do with me?” I asked. “Did they figure it out?”

Brogan shook his head. “No. I told them it was a homicide follow-up. They felt quite sorry for him.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Let them stay that way,” I said. “Close the files.”

“Yeah?” He cleared his throat. “Sam’s sure a cute kid.”

“Good genes on one side of the family, at least,” I said lightly.

Brogan gulped, searching for a response.

I rested my bandaged arms on his knees. “He belongs with them. Close the case files. Please.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. His chest fell with a quiet huff of air. “I see why you’re the survivor, kiddo,” he murmured. “Tough as nails, softhearted as—”

“Besides,” I interrupted. “As long as we’re all living here, which I anticipate will be a long time, I’ll get to see him grow up. I’ll help them decorate his new room. I’ll teach him to read. I can help him with his homework when he goes to school. So it’ll be okay. He’ll be fine. Better, even.”

My voice caught, but I swallowed it down. “I saw him take his first steps, you know.”

Brogan did the totally unexpected. Stood up and hugged me, for a long time. When he let go, I saw the tears in his eyes. I suppose there were some in mine, too.

“Okay, kid. I’ll respect your wishes. But I’m putting a note with the Harrises’ story and a copy of the adoption papers inside the file before I seal it, in case you change your mind later.”

“Okay. Fair enough,” I said. “And you were never here, right?”

“I was never here. It’s been an honor meeting you, Angie,” he said. He dropped a kiss on the top of my hair. “I wish you all the best.”

Brogan drove away slowly. Pines swayed madly in the wind that promised a warm December afternoon.

I watched from the front window, at peace with my decision and my final secret. Too much was at stake. Too many lives would topple if all the truth were known.

Some secrets are meant to be kept close to the heart. Forever.

A
NGIE’S STORY MAY RAISE QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS FOR
some readers. If you would like to learn more about trauma and dissociation on behalf of yourself, a friend, or a family member, here is an excellent place to start:

The Sidran Institute

Traumatic Stress Education and Advocacy

www.sidran.org

The Sidran Institute provides general information as well as referrals to people who can help.

W
HAT IS DISSOCIATION
? I
N THE SIMPLEST TERMS, IT IS WHEN
part of our mind “detaches” and does its own thing—drives for fifty miles without realizing it, daydreams and misses an entire class, tunes out all sounds in the room when we’re concentrating on something else. This mild dissociation is quite normal. At the other end of the dissociation spectrum is psychosis—completely losing touch with reality through hallucinations and delusions.

My heroine, Angie, falls into a very special category of mental health patients. When one part of her mind detaches to save her from experiencing traumatic events, a complete, alternate personality takes over. The main theory of dissociative identity disorder (DID) is that it is a defense mechanism; young children, still in the process of understanding and developing their identity, can separate this way under extreme conditions of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. The fear and pain belong to an alternate personality, sparing the primary person but leaving gaps of hours or days or more in his or her memory. Even when the abuser is gone, the separate personalities remain on call to handle life’s threatening or challenging moments. There’s no accurate estimate of the rate at which this occurs, because reporting is very different across countries and cultures. Certainly, DID has been around for centuries, thought of as possession or hysteria in times past.

The most famous case of DID was Sybil, a real woman whose biography was popularized in book and TV form in the late 1970s. At that time, the phenomenon was called multiple personality disorder and it was considered quite rare, with only one hundred or so cases officially documented. Since 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized the disorder, thousands of cases have been found in the United States, for a combination of reasons: more awareness on the part of therapists, recognition of cases that would have been diagnosed as other disorders in the past, and changing public attitudes toward seeking mental health services. Some professionals think it is overdiagnosed, while others think it is under-diagnosed.

When preparing to write this story, I interviewed a friend, “J,” who is a “reintegrated multiple”—someone who has integrated several alternate personalities into one well-functioning person. Everything in J’s story—from the childhood causes of dissociation to what it was like to live as several people to the long process of emotionally dealing with the traumas and recovering as an adult—matched the published accounts of DID that I had read.

Several biographies and autobiographies of people who have experienced DID and reintegrated their personalities or learned to live more comfortably with alters are available. Many tell stories very sad, graphic, and distressing, and having read a few, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them.

Angie’s fictional experience is told more gently but still accurately represents many of the features of DID. For instance, alters can be different ages, different sexes, different sexualities, and differently handed (right/left). As is true of different people, they will have different tastes, outlooks, memories, voices, facial expressions, and body posture. Angie’s imaginary mental cabin is based on a common experience of multiples who visualize the way alters live together in their minds as people sharing a many-roomed house, a castle, or a space with many compartments.

Angie’s treatment is a mixture of fact and fiction. In real life, psychotherapy takes many years, not a few months. Traditional therapies include talk and hypnosis. People with DID are often very bright, and at the same time, easily hypnotized. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often a part of DID. Dr. Grant’s light bar, an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) device, is actually now in use for helping PTSD sufferers revisualize bad experiences and reduce their terribly negative emotional reactions. A combination of therapeutic techniques can be very effective in helping a patient with DID break down barriers between the alter personalities, absorb the memories that were too destructive to handle, and work out a plan for bringing the alters into a cooperative relationship.

Angie’s experimental procedure—“optogenetic treatment”—to erase the identities of two alters is currently fiction but theoretically possible in the future. While science hasn’t yet reached the state of pinpointing particular memories to exact locations in the brain, it may be getting closer. In real life, scientists have been able to study which parts of the brain are most active when switching between alters. Optogenetic treatment—that is, putting the genes for light-sensitive proteins into nerve cells—exists today and is being performed in laboratory mice to treat a variety of problems, including paralysis, blindness, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. Neuroscientists are excited about beginning to test optogenetics on humans in the near future. We are on the verge of a new era in treatments for physical and emotional disorders of the brain.