by Alan Russell
TWENTY-EIGHT
“That’s a good dog. That’s a good boy.”
The praise of dogs by strangers is often commensurate to the threat they offer. Cerberus’s barks and growls had Cheever going heavy on the platitudes. Neither dog nor human believed what he was saying, but Cheever was still trying to convince the animal of his good intentions.
For the dog being such a splendid fellow, Cheever was amazingly slow to open the door. He continued to talk with Cerberus, letting him get used to the sound of his voice. The growling subsided, but didn’t completely go away. Cheever decided to use a tactic other than sweet talking. That had never been his strong suit anyway.
“Sit, Cerberus, sit.”
The dog cocked his head slightly. Cheever repeated the command, his voice even sterner. Cerberus circled around the door, and then much to Cheever’s surprise he sat down.
Cheever inched the door open. He was glad Helen had taught the dog at least one command and hoped that “attack” wasn’t another one. “Good dog,” he said.
The nub of a tail twitched. Cheever took that as a positive sign. The dog excused himself from sitting and cautiously took to sniffing at Cheever. The detective tried to act as unconcerned as possible, not an easy thing with an animal whose hackles were still up.
“You hungry?” Cheever asked, his voice a few octaves higher than usual.
The stub worked a little harder. Cheever walked slowly across the room, the dog with him every step, where he found a bag of meal and jug of water. He poured a healthy portion of the kibble into an empty bowl and refilled his water. Cerberus sniffed at the results, but it was apparent he was more interested in Cheever than the food.
“Ready to go for a walk?”
At the sound of those words Cerberus forgot his misgivings. He bounded toward the door, then back to Cheever. The detective picked up a leash, attached it to the dog’s collar, then was dragged to the door. Cheever tried his luck on a second command and yelled, “Heel!” If anything, the word inspired the rottweiler to pull him down the stairs all the faster.
Cheever let Cerberus pick their route. The dog started out traveling south along Seventh Avenue. There were no other two-or four-legged animals out strolling. An occasional car passed, the nightly migration to escape the city. Over the years Cheever had considered moving downtown just for the convenience of being close to work, but had never gotten around to doing it. Very few cops lived in the downtown area. Most had families, and the downtown wasn’t very child-friendly. Redevelopment had brought plenty of upscale developments and urban attractions to San Diego, but little in the way of greenways or parks. Part of the ReinCarnation Foundation’s stated goals was to see to the building of playgrounds and so-called friendly space, magnets for families. Build it, Bonnie Gill had said, and the children would come. It didn’t look like her theory was going to be tested out any time soon.
Cheever pulled at Cerberus’s leash, a signal to turn around. The dog didn’t think it was time to go back, and they had a short battle of wills. The leash won, but barely. When they returned to the loft, Cerberus went directly to his food, leaving Cheever free to wander about. There were three shrouded paintings, one more than had been on display his previous visit. Cheever remembered how Helen had said works in progress had a life of their own and hadn’t wanted him to look at them as if it might jinx the final product. They were naturally the first things he decided to inspect.
He removed the coverings. None of the paintings were finished. The first painting was the least polished of the three, hadn’t progressed much beyond the sketch stage. A man was descending into a pit of darkness. Slung over his shoulder was a lyre. The musical instrument was the giveaway, that, and the way to Hades. Cheever knew he was looking at Orpheus. Around the forbidding pit were other holes that gave the appearance that someone had been digging. A cow skull had been dug up, as well as the carcass of a bird and some bones. It wasn’t until Cheever looked at Orpheus a second time that he noticed his own likeness.
I don’t play the lyre, he thought, trying to distance himself from the figure in the painting. Cheever knew his response was silly, but he wasn’t comfortable seeing his own face identified with a hero’s. He wondered who was supposed to be his Eurydice and decided it had to be someone already dead. (But was that physically or literally?) He also wondered if Helen’s drawing was an editorial of sorts announcing that his quest was already doomed to fail.
He turned his attention to the second painting. It reminded Cheever of one of those “paint by number” sets, but with at least half the numbers missing. Part of a woman’s face was painted. There was a nose, a chin, ears, and the outline of eyes, but even with all those facial elements there was still very little there. Lines needed to be connected, and colors added, and shadows drawn in, but most of all, a character needed to be included. The woman was still very incomplete.
The last painting showed a man leaving a building. The background was dark, and the streets surrounding the structure had an ominous feeling, but the uneasy images were softened by all the carnations popping up everywhere. The escaping figure looked to be in a hurry. He was wearing an overcoat over a business suit, and his hands were gloved. Behind his back he was holding a huge red carnation. The man didn’t appear to be aware that his carnation was shedding. There was a trail of red petals that led back inside the building. Cheever followed the petals. They took him to a tiny figure looking out of the darkened window; the gloom all but hid the little girl. The only thing that distinguished her from the shadows was the outline of her red hair.
Cheever reached for the painting and brought it close to the floor lamp, wanting to get a better look at the faces of the figures, especially the man. “Damn it,” he said aloud. The closer inspection didn’t help. But at least some things were clear. He was able to make out the exterior of Sandy Ego Expressions and recognized the surrounding neighborhood. Cheever also assumed he was seeing the murderer and the witness, even if their faces were obscured.
He searched through the loft, spent most of his time examining Helen’s sketch books. Cheever took pains to study all of the sketched faces, but he couldn’t find a match to the man leaving the gallery. Helen had done some preliminary sketches for the painting, but in none of them could the man’s face be clearly seen.
Cheever wished he could say the same thing about his own face. In his short modeling session with Helen she had managed to capture half a dozen distinct expressions. He looked like six different people, and that was disconcerting to him. Cheever wondered whether he was as many things as Helen seemed to think he was. But this was a woman, he consoled himself, who saw him as Orpheus.
Excluding Helen’s art, there were very few personal items in her loft—no letters or diaries, no mementos or keepsakes. He rifled through two chests that held the bulk of Helen’s eclectic wardrobe. Not even the sizes were consistent. Her collection of wigs was found in a large box, eight of them, including two shades of red. Most of her wigs rested on Styrofoam heads, although one was draped over a model of a Cro-Magnon man’s head and another cloaked a small basketball. She used coffee cans and cigar boxes to store glasses, makeup, costume jewelry, and various personal knickknacks. There appeared to be enough accoutrements for all of her statues and personalities.
Cheever rummaged through a reinforced plastic dairy container and found a collection of masks. There didn’t appear to be any consistency to them. The masks were made of wood and plastic and porcelain and cloth. Some were the kind of masks worn to costume parties, others were decorative, and still others were art, ready to be hung on a wall.
He picked up one of the masks. It was hand carved and showed an African woman’s face. Cheever brought it over to a chair with him and took his time examining it. His fingers traced the elaborate carving. There were bevels and beading and finely wrought design work. It wasn’t quite like holding Cinderella’s slipper, he decided; it was more like being left with one of Helen’s heads. And unlike Cinderella’s sli
pper, Cheever had the feeling that for Helen there was no perfect fit, just a mask for every occasion. And no fairy godmother either.
Cheever called in the order for Chinese food. As he hung up the phone, another head dropped into his lap. Cerberus was looking for affection. The detective scratched behind the dog’s ears and told him what a good dog he was, this time offering the words softly and with a little meaning.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
She opened the door, and Cheever, who was holding a large bag, said, “Beware of geeks who bear gifts.”
Rachel inhaled deeply. “Right now I’d welcome anyone carrying such an aromatic calling card. I’m famished.”
“That’s two of us.”
“Then let’s eat.” She hesitated a moment. “There’s a table in the kitchen, or we could eat in the dining room...”
Cheever had seen the dining room. It was large and formal, the kind of setting appropriate for state dinners. “Kitchen’s fine,” he said.
She set the table with dishes that had painted floral designs on them, no two apparently alike. Cheever was happy to see his plate came with a lily instead of a carnation. The wine glasses were also handcrafted. Cheever held his glass up to the light, interested in its imperfections. A trail of small bubbles ran through the heavy, blue-hued glass; it looked as if a miniature scuba diver had been swimming around inside.
Rachel appeared with a bottle of wine. “The house white?” she asked.
He put down his glass. “Thank you.”
While she poured, Cheever started pulling out the cartons of food from the bag. “I ordered for Helen,” he said. “That was probably wildly optimistic, but...”
“It was the right thing to do,” Rachel said, “but I don’t think she’ll be sitting down with us. About an hour ago I fed her some chicken soup.
“Canned,” she added regretfully. “She’s sleeping now.”
“Did she say anything?”
“No. But there are signs that she is...” Rachel searched for words: “...beginning to awaken.”
“Where’s Prince Charming when you need him?”
“Is that the story where they all lived happily ever after?”
“Unless they’ve changed the ending.”
Rachel took notice of all the cartons he had pulled from the bag. “You brought enough for an army.”
“I got your vegetarian chow mein and Buddha’s platter and shrimp moo goo gai pan.”
“I only meant one dish...”
“I know. I thought we’d share. And then there’s Helen’s order.”
“What did you get her?”
“The combination plate. What else?”
Rachel knew she shouldn’t smile, but did anyway. Cheever handed her some wooden chopsticks, and they both started scooping out the food onto their plates, and then, a few moments later, into their mouths. Between bites, they kept talking.
“Has Helen ever withdrawn before?”
“Not like this,” she said.
“What do you think brought it on?”
“It’s likely she perceived some threat. I’ve heard of others with DID similarly withdrawing.”
“Because of a threat?”
“Often because their worlds were changing. I’m wondering if Helen’s response has something to do with her moving closer to integration.”
“Is that event imminent?”
“I don’t know. Every integration is different, even if in popular literature it seems more like spontaneous combustion than anything else. Integration often occurs in degrees. There usually has to be consensus among the alters before a successful integration can take place, that, or one personality becomes dominant over time.”
“And subjugates the others?”
“And assumes the others, becomes them.”
“How is an integration performed?”
“The treatment is predicated upon the patient. There is no one method. Integration occurs when the patient is ready and not before. That can be over time, or overnight, or never. It is usually the preparation which is the work and not the integration itself.”
“And how do you prepare a patient for such an event?”
“You discuss how life will go on after integration, how it will be a different life, but ultimately a better one. To get Helen ready, I have been posing a Zen koan to her: Show me the face you had before your parents were born.”
Cheever thought about that. How flexible was the human mold? Maybe there was something literal in the expression “losing face.” Maybe that’s what happened to everyone over time. He also considered the unfinished painting in Helen’s loft. Was she working on the painting of what she looked like before her parents were born?
“And when she discovers her face, will she be ready for integration?”
“That’s the hope. We’re also discussing the aftermath of integration.”
“Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse?”
“In some ways. But Helen needs to understand not only what is happening, but what is going to happen. She needs to come to terms with being one person. When people with multiple personalities get fused they often experience a great loneliness.”
It must feel, Cheever thought, like the disintegration of a family. Like losing loved ones.
“Today at lunch,” he said, “her personalities reminded me of children. None of them wanted to be overlooked. They all had to put an order in.”
“Sometimes it’s that way in therapy,” Rachel said. “There is jealousy if one personality gets too much attention.”
“By the end of the lunch it was a free-for-all. The personalities were out of control.”
“Maybe they didn’t like the questions you were asking. Their collective behavior might have been an escapist strategy. By becoming unglued, the Greek chorus avoided having to deal with you.”
“Not completely,” Cheever said. “They kept doing their changing, and I kept doing my asking.”
Cheever refilled her wine glass, and then his, killing the bottle. “There’s another bottle chilling,” she said, then quickly added, “that is if you want any more.”
He could sense her nervousness. Probably part of her “escapist strategy,” Cheever thought. He should know. “Let’s let it chill a little longer,” he said, his words calm and unhurried, even if that wasn’t how he felt inside.
They kept eating, but more slowly now, the soft clicking of chopsticks staving off silence. For a time they studied the food too closely and avoided looking at each other too obviously.
“Tonight I studied three of Helen’s paintings in progress,” Cheever said. “One of them shows the gallery where Bonnie Gill died. It also shows a man hurriedly leaving from there. You can’t see his face in the painting, but you can make out a red-haired little girl staring at him from the window. When the painting’s finished I’m willing to bet we’re going to have another picture of a traumatized little girl.”
Rachel nodded, not sure of where Cheever was going with his thoughts.
Cheever reached out with his hands, as if balancing two loads, as if weighing something. “Do you think Helen’s most recent fugue state has some tie-in with her two-year childhood blackout?”
She offered a careful answer. “There was certainly a trauma or traumas in Helen’s youth with which she has yet to come to terms, but whether her latest fugue state has any connection with the trauma from her past I don’t yet know.”
“Then and now,” Cheever said, still weighing the scales with his hands, still trying to reconcile the gap of twenty years, wondering if there was some connection. “Could she be confusing the present with the past?”
“Yes. It’s possible that whatever triggered her most recent fugue state made her recall her initial trauma.”
“Brought it back to her? Blurred the lines?”
“Again, that’s possible.”
“Yesterday,” he said, “Caitlin asked me about death.”
“In what context?”
>
“She wanted to know what happened to people when they died.”
“I can’t say the question is significant in itself. Five is a normal age to ask those kinds of questions.”
“You qualify everything.” He sounded frustrated.
“Yes.”
“At last, an unequivocal answer.” Cheever offered a small smile with his tease.
“You don’t like riddles?”
“Only if I can solve them. Today Helen was at the Maritime Museum when she noticed the name of one of the ships: Medea. You know the myth?”
“Yes.”
“She screamed out a message for me there, said I should ignore the body parts. What do you make of that?”
Rachel considered whether Helen was talking in the past or the present. She tried to ignore the throbbing from her breast. She hadn’t taken the pain medication, had figured the wine would be better than a pill.
“It sounds as if Helen was afraid someone was trying to divert you.”
“With a body?” Cheever’s question was to himself. It didn’t make sense. Or did it? With the death of Willie Lamont everyone thought some slasher was loose. Could he have been a sacrifice to slow up the investigation?
Cheever awoke from his musing to see Rachel shifting around uncomfortably. She was pale and appeared to be in pain. Too late, he remembered her own wound and fears. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Rachel wondered if she was that transparent. “Fine.”
“Any pain?”
She shook her head, but then realized she was giving a passive-aggressive response. Her body language said she was hurting. Between head and heart and breast she was giving conflicting messages. In the face of such mixed signals, he stood up. Rachel knew she had driven him away, knew he was going to say, “You’ve had a rough day,” and then say he should be leaving. And then her script would be to reluctantly agree. She felt a mixture of regret and relief at his leaving. More mixed signals.
Cheever opened his mouth, but he didn’t offer parting words. He didn’t want to leave, not yet, so he offered a reason for his standing: “How about some more wine?”