Phantom Limb: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Lucinda Berry

  It was the same way with the special friends. Emily cried silently throughout their games, but I refused. I would watch what they did to me without making a sound or moving a facial muscle, and when it was over I put my clothes back on, took Emily’s hand, and walked out of the room. Sometimes the pain was too great and I had to cry to release it, but I only did it in front of Emily or by myself. There’d been times where I’d been close to crying in front of someone else, but I’d always been able to pull my emotions back inside. Until today. Today was different. Something had shifted.

  My intimacy with Rose compelled her to tell me more of her story. She spent the rest of the day sharing details about herself she’d never told anyone before, not even any of her previous therapists. She told me she never had anything to do with her dad. He’d left when she was only six months old to be with an eighteen-year-old girl who he’d been having an affair with during her mother’s pregnancy.

  “My mom said she was some itsy-bitsy little thing who was as dumb as a box of rocks and only interested in him for his money. But she was young and beautiful, which I guess is the only thing he cared about.”

  She’d never seen or talked to him since.

  “Did your mom ever talk about him?” I asked.

  “Nope. It was like he never existed. She called him my sperm donor whenever she talked to other people about him, and I think people believed she’d conceived me by in vitro fertilization all on her own.”

  She’d never gotten a Christmas gift or a birthday card from her dad. At least she knew who her dad was. I had no idea who my real dad was. Mother never talked about him. She didn’t refer to him by any name, negative or otherwise.

  Before we lived with the Rooths, Emily and I didn’t know what a dad was. We weren’t aware you could have more than one parent. The Rooths had obtained our birth certificates during the adoption process. The line reserved for the father to sign acknowledging paternity was filled in as “unknown.” When the Rooths’ lawyers questioned Mother about our father, they were met with evasiveness every time. She told them she didn’t know who our father was and didn’t care to find out.

  “Did she have boyfriends?” I asked, remembering the steady stream of men in Mother’s life.

  “Nope. I mean, I’m sure she had men she was sleeping with, but she never brought anyone home and she was definitely not in a serious relationship with anyone. Ever. She cared too much about herself and her job.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She was a lawyer.” Rose rolled her eyes. “The worst kind of a lawyer. She defended criminals. It didn’t matter to her what crimes they’d committed as long as they kept her bank account full. I don’t get why she cared so much about the money because she never used it to do anything fun. Her whole life was work, work, work. I never saw her.”

  “Weren’t you lonely?”

  “You have no idea. It was awful living alone in a huge, empty house. Not to mention that it was so clean it was like living in a museum.”

  She described how her mom loved to collect antiques and artwork that she kept displayed around the house and Rose wasn’t allowed to touch any of it. Even her bedroom was filled with collectible dolls that she couldn’t do anything with except stare at them as they lined the shelves in her bedroom.

  “My mom was so mad when I didn’t go to college,” she said to me after we got out of group in the afternoon. Unlike yesterday, when group ended early, today’s group ran late because Mark spent the first half of it trying to get someone to confess to stealing one of the nurse’s cell phones. Nobody ever confessed.

  “Where’d you apply?” I asked.

  “I didn’t apply anywhere. It was the worst thing I could’ve done to her. She took it so personally.” She added as an afterthought, “Maybe it was personal.”

  Even though her mom wasn’t around, she had people to take care of her. She’d had nannies that she referred to as glorified babysitters since she was two weeks old. Once she’d turned thirteen, she was on her own and able to do whatever she wanted and the only thing she wanted to do was get skinny.

  She’d been starving herself since she was nine years old. It took her mother a year to notice, even though the nanny had repeatedly expressed concern. She tried to kill herself for the first time when she was eleven by hanging herself in the closet. The belt broke and she fell to the ground. Instead of dying, she got her first cast. It wasn’t long until her mother started sending her away to psychiatric facilities.

  “How old were you when you got locked up for the first time?”

  “Twelve. It was a lot different than here. It was all other girls with eating disorders. A bunch of rich snobs. And they all hated me.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Six months. And my mom didn’t visit me once.” Her face looked older than I’d ever seen it.

  “It’s okay to cry.” I gave her the same permission she’d given me earlier in the day.

  “I’m done crying over my mom.” She said it with an air of finality, signaling that she was done with the conversation as well. “Did you know you can play Spades with two people? Wanna play until dinnertime?”

  I tried to focus on the card game, but my mind couldn’t keep track of anything. I was exhausted. I didn’t think it was possible to be more tired than I’d been yesterday, but I was. I couldn’t keep track of Rose’s conversations any longer. All of her words started to blur together.

  As soon as dinner was over, I told Felicia I didn’t want to have any visitors and asked if I could go to bed early. I was surprised when she said yes. As I lay in my bed, having surpassed my seventy-two-hour limit, I felt the threat of impending doom hovering around me like it had since the morning. Not being able to go home had changed everything. It had brought with it the realization that this wasn’t temporary and I wasn’t going to be able to get out anytime soon. It meant I was going to have to stay alive, and in a way that I’d never had to live before. The prospect of living a new way of life was more terrifying than any anticipation of my death.

  14

  “I noticed you refused to see your visitors again last night,” Dr. Larson began the following morning.

  I nodded. The morning nurse told me Bob, Dalila, and Thomas had shown up together during visiting hours the night before. I was already asleep by the time they got there.

  “Can I ask why?”

  It was too much of an effort to sit in my room and try to think of things to say to them. I didn’t want to see the pain and rejection in Dalila’s eyes. The pain and rejection had been there for as long as we’d lived in their home. Now it was coupled with the immense grief of losing Emily, which made being around her unbearable, and I was still angry that they’d had Emily’s funeral without me.

  “It’s just too hard right now,” I said.

  “Bob and Dalila seem to really care about you. Dalila calls twice a day to talk about how you’re doing. She checks on your progress every morning and then again at night. She seems willing to do whatever it takes to help you.”

  It was one of the things that made her such an amazing mother. She’d devoted her life to us. She showered us with love and affection, kissing and hugging us whenever we were within her reach. She taught us how to function in the world and cared for our health with the skill of the most experienced nurse. Our list of medical problems was endless, and since we were so uncomfortable being poked and prodded, she learned how to handle them. She refused to allow the doctors to hold us down and restrain to give us our shots, so she learned how to give them to us herself under the guidance of our pediatrician. We were so sick during our first months with them, since we had the immune systems of infants, and she spent night after sleepless night holding cool washcloths to our foreheads, rubbing our aching bones, massaging Vicks VapoRub on our chests, and singing nursery rhymes.

  She didn’t waste any time enrolling us in all kinds of activities because she didn’t want us to miss out on any more opportunities than we alrea
dy had, and she made sure we got to try everything at least once. Neither of us learned to swim despite all the classes we took, but we got good in karate and liked anything having to do with art. She hired private tutors to work with us each afternoon, and it wasn’t long before we were reciting our ABCs and counting to twenty like we’d always been doing it. Taking care of us was the equivalent of two full-time jobs, but she never complained. Dalila’s love overflowed and seeped out of her pores, which only made our rejection more painful.

  We didn’t try to reject her on purpose. We were kind to her and never spoke a mean word to her. We were grateful for everything she did for us. For the first year, we said thank you every time she gave us food to eat until she finally convinced us we didn’t have to. We were polite and respectful. We grew into well-mannered girls, and much to everyone’s surprise, we began to thrive in our environment, despite our horrible beginnings. But we were unable to reciprocate her love and affection in a real, genuine way. We could do everything that was expected of us, but we couldn’t give her the only thing she wanted—for us to return the love that a child has for their mother. We never could do it no matter how hard we tried.

  “You made Dalila cry after supper again,” Emily whispered one night as we brushed our teeth before bed.

  “I know,” I said.

  We still weren’t sure whether we’d be able to stay with the Rooths. It seemed too good to be true. We lived in constant fear of doing something wrong and being sent back to Mother.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  I’d spilled my milk at the dinner table that night and automatically flinched when Dalila jumped up to grab a towel from the sink.

  “Oh, honey,” she’d cooed as she wiped up the milk spilled down the front of me. “It was an accident. You don’t have to be scared if you make a mistake.”

  She hugged me. I stiffened my body, preparing for the blows that used to come so quickly. I saw the look of hurt in her eyes before she pulled away. It was a look that was becoming more and more familiar with each passing day.

  I felt Emily’s eyes on me and turned to look at her. We didn’t need to speak. Her eyes told me to get up and hug Dalila. Lately, we’d been talking about how important it was to Dalila for us to hug her. The last few weeks we’d worked hard to try to remember to do it. We reminded each other about it constantly. Emily was much better at remembering than I was and she gave better hugs.

  I jumped up from my chair. I went up to Dalila at the sink and put my arms around her from behind, awkwardly hugging the back of her. I was uncomfortable, but I made myself keep the position because whenever she hugged us, she held on for a really long time. I counted to twenty before I let go and returned to my seat. When I turned around, I saw her wiping tears away from her eyes. Emily must’ve seen it too.

  I didn’t know how to describe my feelings about Dalila to Dr. Larson. He probably assumed there was something Dalila had done wrong that I hadn’t told him, but that wasn’t the case. She’d done everything right—always had. It was simply that neither of us felt a need to connect with a mother on an intimate level. The desire might have been there if we’d gotten taken away from Mother earlier, but we’d had to squelch our desires and impulses for maternal love for so long they no longer existed.

  Both of us had wanted a mother, and we’d reached out to Mother time and time again for any morsel of love and attention she might throw our way. We were happy with any scraps she might have, but the closest she ever came to affection was patting us on the head like you might do to appease a puppy you didn’t want to be bothered with. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d reached my arms out to her to be picked up or hugged and she’d swatted me away like a fly that had accidentally gotten into the house when the door was left open.

  Sometimes when she got home after being gone for a long time, she would come in to check on us. We would sob and try to cling to her when she leaned over the crib. She’d smack us and yell at us to lie down, so we learned to stop reaching for her. If we asked for anything or tried to crawl into her arms, she would grab us by our arms and fling us back into the crib as if we weighed nothing. Eventually, we were quiet and kept our hands to ourselves when she’d appear at the door, no matter how eager or desperate we might be. I didn’t know when it happened or how old we were when we gave up trying to connect with Mother. I stopped first. It took Emily a lot longer to give up.

  “I know you’re right about Dalila. She’s a great person. I’m pretty sure there’s never been a better mother, but I can’t connect with her like she wants me to.” I didn’t want Dr. Larson to think badly of her.

  “Has it always been that way?”

  I nodded.

  “I understand.”

  He did?

  “When children are young, there are critical periods of development where important tasks take place. One of the biggest tasks is the attachment to a primary caregiver. As psychologists, we know this is one of the most important things to happen during the first five years of life. Sometimes when it doesn’t occur, children grow up unable to form attachments with other people, or they form what we call disorganized attachment. I think in your case, because you experienced such horrific abuse, it damaged your ability to form a reciprocal attachment to a maternal figure. It’s also one of the reasons your attachment to Emily was so strong. Whereas most children form their most secure attachments with one or both of their parents early on, your instinctual need for attachment was developed with Emily.” He cleared his throat. “What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s not your fault. Your behavior and attitude towards Dalila makes perfect sense given your childhood.”

  It was the first time in all of our discussions that he’d given me helpful information and didn’t just confuse me. Maybe there were other things he could help me with, like explaining what the doctors thought was wrong with me.

  Yesterday, Rose had told me everybody had to have a diagnosis in order to be hospitalized. She told me the list of labels everyone gave in group after they said their name was their official diagnosis. I’d always thought Rick and Darin were the most messed up because they heard voices and talked to people who weren’t there, but I was beginning to think Shelly and Tobi were equally screwed up. I was starting to wonder if they might be worse than Rick and Darin because they each had three or four diagnoses behind their names and I was more scared of Shelly than anyone else on the unit. She’d get the same look in her eyes I’d seen Mother get right before she was about to beat Emily with the coat hanger or the time she made me drink bleach when I asked for water. Rick and Darin were persecuted by demons who were real to them, even if we couldn’t see them, but Shelly wasn’t reacting to any voice in her head. She was reacting to the evil inside her like Mother.

  Rose told me there was no way I didn’t have a diagnosis of my own. She even had the medical book that the doctors used to diagnose and study our disorders. All we needed to do was to find out what my diagnosis was and we could look it up.

  “Does my diagnosis have something to do with attachment?” I asked.

  “Your diagnosis is very complicated,” Dr. Larson said.

  “What is it?”

  “Is your diagnosis something that’s important to you?”

  It was a silly question. Of course it was. Who wouldn’t want to know what was wrong with them?

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “Why do you think it’s important?”

  “If you and a team of doctors have decided there’s something wrong with me—that I have some kind of mental condition, or whatever you guys call it—I’d like to know what it is.”

  Was it a secret? Would any doctor not tell their patient that they had cancer?

  “We can go over your diagnosis.” He looked secretive about it, like he didn’t want to tell me. Whatever door had opened during our conversation about Dalila was closing. “We’ve diagnosed you with a dissociative disorder. Dissociative disorders are on a spectrum much like most mental ill
nesses. They range from mildly impairing to severely impairing. Your disorder is what we would classify as being severely impairing because it’s negatively impacting your life on multiple levels. It’s severe. You represent a unique case and something we haven’t seen. Your core feature is dissociation, but you don’t meet the criteria for some of the more common dissociative disorders that we see. The particular name for your disorder is a Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “What’s a dissociative disorder?”

  “It varies. And it all depends on which particular disorder you have. But you can have one and function in your environment. Lots of people do. You can be a fully functioning person but have no memory of doing certain things. The person becomes fragmented from themselves in some way. They disconnect or disassociate from themselves and the environment around them.”

  He still wasn’t making any sense. He didn’t seem very sure of himself. I wasn’t sure he knew what he was talking about or trying to explain.

  “Maybe this will help. Have you ever lost periods of time? Has there ever been an occasion where you were awake and did something you weren’t able to remember you’d done or where you were?”

  I nodded my head. Maybe there was a piece of truth in his jumbled mess of words, because I did lose pieces of time and didn’t know why. It started when I lived with Mother. There were times when the special friends would take me into the bedroom and I wouldn’t remember anything that happened while we were there. I would be aware of going into the bedroom, but the next thing I knew I was back in the living room watching TV as if nothing had happened. But my disappearing wasn’t only with the special friends. Even when we lived with the Rooths, there were times when I did things I didn’t remember doing. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to tell Emily about it. I didn’t talk to her about it until we were in high school.