by Liz Coley
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.”
Dr. Grant took you into a dark, quiet room and sat you down. By that point, you were trembling. She talked in a soft, soothing voice about nothing at all until the fear drained away. Then she brought out a gleaming disc on a chain and asked you to follow it with your eyes until you surrendered yourself and allowed us to peek through the windows of your eyes. Doctor said, “Girl Scout. We need to talk. We need to take away Angie’s pain.”
It wasn’t Girl Scout who came up spitting, though. I sent another through the gate—the Little Wife. It was time for her to lighten her burden, time for Dr. Grant to meet her. And time for you to know.
Angie, you thought you were making the right choice. Our mom and dad were completely won over by the doctor’s sales pitch. In a way, they only wanted their Pretty Girl-Thirteen back again. They wanted their three years back, just like you did. They wanted to forget too. They didn’t want to know the full damage, to understand all our scars. But you had to.
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.
“I always knew there had to be someone in this role,” she told Angie after the first two hours in the clanking machine. “The alter who personally took on the physical abuse. I believe this one who calls herself ‘Little Wife’ is at the heart of it.” She frowned and twisted her pink lips in concentration. “Although I still find it remarkable and somewhat baffling that a single event at your age could have initiated this degree of dissociation. That’s just so atypical.”
Dr. Grant was right, of course, but Angie wasn’t about to unload that secret. As she prepared to go under for the third time, she remained silent about Tattletale, the first little splinter. Dad was so fragile; Mom was so pregnant; Grandma was so completely dependent on Yuncle. And Angie wasn’t ready to deal with the firestorm of accusing her “favorite uncle” of incest. Dad would probably kill his little brother with his bare hands.
She would just never, ever let herself be alone with him again, she promised. And at some point, when she was whole and strong, she’d deal with the bastard. That thought brought a smile—the sudden image of an avenging angel with a sword. As Angie slipped under the spell of hypnosis, a satisfying fantasy of slicing Yuncle to ribbons filled her imagination. The sound of wings was the last thing she heard.
At the end of the session, Dr. Grant was cheerful and triumphant. “We got another one,” she announced. “A young man—very serious, very protective. He’s also quite compact, neurologically speaking. Probably the newest and least developed. We got his entire range mapped out in a single session. Good work, Angie.”
Like she had anything to do with it. A young man inside. Great. Did that mean she was bi? The doctor quickly assured her that the gender of her alters had nothing to do with her own sexual identity. Thank God. She could not deal with any more complications.
In spite of lying still for an hour and dozing in the car on the way back, Angie was exhausted and begged to stay home from school for the rest of the day. Mom gave her a sympathetic hug. “I have to go into work for at least a couple of hours,” she said. “I’m way behind on shelving.”
“I don’t expect you to stay home with me,” Angie said, a little more sharply than she meant to. “Not if piles of books are calling your name. I just need to lie down for a while.”
She dragged up the stairs and collapsed into a tight bundle under the covers. Everything softened and blurred. Just as she thought she was drifting off for good, her hand crept under the pillow, the way it did when she was truly asleep, and her fingers hit something unexpected. She jerked awake. Her journal had been stuffed there, open and a bit crumpled. The top sheet was blank, but thick, jerky writing showed through.
Angie heaved up on her elbows and flipped the empty page. Her cheeks heated as she read the four words, carefully centered like a title page: “Little Wife’s First Journal.” Little Wife? Her left hand rose before her face, the fog bank lifted from her memory. She remembered the inscription engraved inside the wide silver band. How could she have forgotten something so simple? She slipped it from her finger and read it again. DEAREST ANGELA. MY LITTLE WIFE. Something trembled inside her, and she threaded the ring back over her finger, where it was supposed to be. The words made her feel loved and scared at the same time. But she was only sixteen. She couldn’t be someone’s wife. So what did it mean?
More words showed through the paper, small and dense.
With a flutter of anticipation, she turned the journal page again. Chills raised the thin covering of blond hair on her arms. Once she started reading, she couldn’t stop.
Hey Ange.
I know you’ve met Girl Scout, or at least she’s had her chance to talk to you. Goody Girl Scout left a hell of a lot out, like the part where she freaked out and I came to the rescue. I mean, to listen to her, you’d think, “Oh yeah, so she could make a four-course gourmet dinner with two ingredients and one hand tied behind her back.” Ooh. Sure, that saved our life. As if. Feeding the man’s stomach, sure, that helped. But get real, bitch. That’s not all he wanted from his little wife. Girl Scout could only handle the front room. Left it to me to conquer the back room, the bedroom. Want to know how it happened? Sure you do. You can’t help yourself, wanting to know. Every girl dreams of her wedding night, right?
I’ll warn you now, honey. It’s no PG-13 story. Get it, Pretty Girl? We stowed you away safe, so you’d miss all the excitement. And now you’re poking around? You really want to know? Are you sure? Here goes, then.
So Goody Girl Scout and the man finished their first dinner together. He made a point of telling her how dark it was outside the cabin, that there were cliffs and crevasses. The coyotes were howling like crazy, and he said, “Hear that? Hear them hunting? Just remember you’ll never hear the cougar before she gets you by the throat.” That’s all he needed to say. She knew she couldn’t run off in the dark.
Then he unlocked her bloody ankles and carried her through the door to the second room, the one she spent the whole day not looking at, not thinking about. The room was small and black. He put her down on that hard bed that was going to be my birthing place. I mean, that’s where I was born that night. You know? No, of course you don’t. Not yet. I’ll set the stage for you, so you can really appreciate it, appreciate what I do for you, for all of you.
Girl Scout couldn’t see a thing, just hear him moving in the room. She held her breath.
He lit the oil lamp on a shelf, and his face turned dark orange in the flickering light. Without speaking a word, he washed our feet with a wet cloth, rubbed the sores
with some sweet-smelling liniment. He kissed our pretty legs. He treated her like a queen, and all she did was lie there like a stiff board. After he wrapped our feet, he leaned over her breathless, terrified face and kissed her on the lips. “There you go, little wife,” he said. “All better. Now, tell me how much you love me.”
She just lay there, the idiot. He smacked our cheek, gently. “Tell me, Angela.”
She forced out the words. “I love you.” She didn’t even know his name.
“Show me,” he whispered. “Show me how much you love me.”
She looked helplessly into his dark eyes. “I—I don’t—I—”
“Don’t love me?” His voice was cold, and his hand smacked our other cheek, hard enough to sting.
She cried out. The sound excited him, and he slapped her again. His eyes turned darker and closer together in the flickering yellow light. She rolled away from him, and he grabbed our hair and forced her to look him in the face.
“Angela, darling,” he said, but his teeth were tight. “I wanted this to be a special night for you, but you are not cooperating, my little wife.”
She wigged out, freaked. She screamed. He slapped. She begged. He ripped at her clothes. She curled into a tight ball to hide her shivering bare body. He was reaching for this coil of rope he had ready on the bedpost, when she checked out. Yeah, Girl Scout just up and left the head.
So Ange, there you were for just a second, terrified, like, how did I get here? Then it was little Tattletale, but she opened her eyes and saw it was the wrong person, and it wasn’t the horsey game, oh no. She scampered off screaming, and into the space she left behind I was born, tied down on that hard, hard bed with the man pushing and grunting and weighing me down. Well, that was done and over pretty fast, the first time. He shuddered and fell on me with all his sweaty body, and he said, “You love me, little wife?”
And I didn’t want to be hit, so I said, “Of course I love you.”
And he rolled off, and smiled oh-so-sweetly and said, “See, I knew it all along. You were just scared a little, weren’t you, my shy thing?”
And I asked oh-so-sweetly, “Could you please untie my hands?”
And he said oh-so-sweetly, “Well, not tonight. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.”
And then, since I was in the middle of the bed, he lay down on top of me and fell asleep snoring, and I lay there awake till morning, trying to breathe and thinking about how I was going to get my hands untied.
And when the daylight came, he got up and went outside to pee. I asked, “What about me? Can I please, please go to the outhouse?” And he untied me and showed me the chamber pot in the corner of the room.
Then he put me back on the bed and did it all over again, taking his time to pause and make me beg for him. He told me how lucky I was to have a husband who wanted me so much. I didn’t want to be hit, so I said, “Oh yes, I know how lucky I am. I love you so much.”
And he said, “You are unimaginably sweet.” And he untied me and took me into the kitchen to start breakfast—her job. I left her to it with those heavy rings around her legs.
I knew if I said the right things at night, I could make things better for us. I knew if I did the right things in bed, I could make things better for us. And that prissy Girl Scout—I heard her saying, “Stop pretending you don’t like it. You’re just a slut.”
Yeah. That’s what she called me from the day of my birth. She called me Slut.
Ungrateful bitch.
Angie’s ears rang with the blood rushing through them. She touched her wrist scars with gentle wonder. She had absolutely no memory of them—no memory of pain, of terror, of rape. She was innocent. Untouched. A miracle.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
COMPETITION
THE LAST TWO ONE-HOUR MAPPING SESSIONS WERE A FRUSTRATING waste. Tattletale was clever at hiding, which was good. She’d had longer to practice than anyone. And Girl Scout was stubborn. She refused all Dr. Grant’s invitations to step out, as if she knew the next step after mapping. And maybe she did. Angie had no idea how much of her life the alters watched, like movie critics in the dark of the theater, passing judgment on her choices.
Dr. Hirsch suggested moving ahead immediately with the next part of the procedure, at least with the alters they’d scanned. While Mom and Dad watched in awe and Angie in rapt curiosity, he pulled up a beautiful brain scan, a 3-D simulation spinning on his computer screen.
“That’s me?” Angie asked.
Under a transparent shell that was recognizably the surface of a brain, bright-colored clumps marked the personality regions in the hippocampus. “The red one is you, Angie, the dominant, by far the most extensive. The purple cluster is the ‘Slut’—excuse me, ‘Little Wife’—persona, and the yellow splash there is the male figure called, er, Angel. So now we introduce the modified light-sensitive genes into the neurons only being used by alternative personalities.”
Angie was fascinated. Did her sense of who she was all come down to a few cubic centimeters of cells in the middle of her head?
“What if you aim wrong?” Mom asked. “Is there any risk of deleting Angie? I mean, that would be totally unacceptable, wouldn’t it, Mitch?”
Dad didn’t hesitate. “Unacceptable.”
Angie let a small breath escape. Dad still cared, even if he couldn’t make eye contact with her. He pressed the doctor. “How safe is this procedure?”
Dr. Hirsch harrumphed a bit impatiently. They’d been through this before they signed consent forms. “Optogenetic technique has been used extensively to treat the neurons involved in Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, spinal injury, and even certain forms of blindness. Using it for memory control is experimental—the new frontier. As I explained, the carrier virus will be injected only near the brain cells we want the new genes to enter. We can target with exquisite precision.”
Dad nodded. Mom asked, “The virus itself? It’s harmless?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Hirsch assured her. “Really the only function it retains is the ability to inject genes into a cell. And we’ve chosen those genes, haven’t we? The only risk we run is that we will not succeed in silencing the alters, not that we will damage the core personality or Angie’s brain. The neurons themselves won’t even be harmed. We just eliminate their ability to send a signal by altering the membrane calcium channels and ion pumps.”
Mom looked baffled. Dad ran his hands through his hair. “Now I’m completely out of my depth.”
Angie got it, sort of, thanks to seventh-grade Life Science. “And how exactly do you get the virus into me? How do you put in the kill-switch genes?” she asked.
Mom frowned. “Please don’t use the word ‘kill,’ hon.”
Dr. Hirsch stroked his goatee. “You know, I rather like the term. I may use it. ‘The K-switch genes.’ We’ll only require three small bore holes for access.”
“Holes!” Dad jumped to his feet. His chair tipped over backward with a soft thud on the office carpeting. “In her head? I don’t remember anything about drilling through her head! You said injected. I thought we were talking about a shot!”
Mom looked just as alarmed. “Will you shave off all her hair? I’m not prepared for that.” She smoothed her sleeves. And her face. “We’ll have to find just the right wig so no one knows. There’s so much to prepare.”
Angie pulled back and let them handle all the anxiety. It wasn’t worth obsessing about. Whatever they needed to do, they’d eventually do. As it turned out, though, she kept most of her hair, and it covered the tiny holes they drilled in her skull to lay in a channel to her hippocampus. The gene-seeding process was long and tedious, but much quieter than her hours in the scanner. Now they had to wait at least a couple of weeks for the genes to move in and take control of these calcium channels or whatever before they could be turned off.
Should be a quiet couple of weeks, Angie thought. But she was wrong.
It was getting harder to get up in the morning. What was th
e point, anyway? It wasn’t like she could concentrate on school with the constant clamor in her head. Before the stupid mapping procedure, she’d been fine. She’d been getting good grades and even thinking she might be able to move up in a few classes after Christmas. Now there was chaos. The alters were all stirred up.
She would dress and head into school, only to discover that Slut had slipped into the bathroom to put on thick eyeliner and dark red lipstick. Clearly Girl Scout had called that one right. Without warning, Angie would find her shirts pulled off the shoulder with her straps showing. Then Girl Scout would copy over homework in her own neat handwriting while Angie was asleep and reorganize her homework folders so she couldn’t find anything. Tattletale would ride imaginary horses all night long, which left Angie’s head pounding in the morning, as if hooves had kicked her repeatedly in the head.
Kate was an island of sanity for her. Lunch every day led to chatting every night. And if Angie ever said, “I need chocolate ice cream or I’ll die,” within half an hour Kate was there in her parents’ ancient third car, ready to roll.
“You’ve got a lot of stress,” Kate said after the third ice-cream night in a row. “Maybe you should take up jogging or something. I’m gaining weight here. Look—look what I’m reduced to eating.” She pointed to her wilty cafeteria salad and bent a shred of purple cabbage like rubber.
“Sorry. I’m eating for five,” Angie said, testing the waters.
Kate laughed. “I know you haven’t been implanted with quadruplets. That excuse won’t fly.”
Angie whispered, “I’ve started remembering, in a way.”
Kate’s smile instantly straightened. “Oh, Ange. Oh wow.” She reached across the lunch table. “Was having amnesia better?”
“Well, yes, in a way,” Angie said. “See, we figured out that while my mind was checked out for three years, my body was hosting a bunch of multiple personalities.”
Kate gasped, her eyes wide. “A bunch? Are you kidding?” She searched Angie’s face for clues. “Nope. You’re not kidding. How disturbing and … and cool.”