by D. J. Palmer
Convincing as the switch had been, Mitch reminded himself that these alters might be nothing more than an elaborate invention. Until he made his own diagnosis, his sympathies must not occlude caution and careful observation.
“So, Eve, tell me, do you know why you’re here?” Gut instinct told Mitch to embrace Eve rather than push for Penny’s return.
“I do.”
“Can you tell me?”
“Pretty sure you have a thing called a file on me. Have you read it, Doctor?” She smiled wickedly.
“I have. I just wanted to hear it in your words, get your take on what happened.”
She appeared skeptical, a clear signal to Mitch that he had best move on to another topic.
“Penny was here, not long ago. Did you know that?”
Again nothing.
“She said she remembered something from that night that brought you here, but she didn’t say what it was. Do you know what she remembered?” Mitch allowed a bit of desperation to leak into his voice, playing, he hoped, to Eve’s ego.
“Maaaaaaybbeee.”
The way Eve studied Mitch, a coquettish glimmer in her eyes, made him shudder. It was an alluring stare, one brimming with a poise that was startling to see in a seventeen-year-old girl just coming into her own.
“Can you tell me?”
“I think you’d best ask Penny.”
Seeing the circular nature of this conversation, Mitch switched tactics.
“Do you remember the night you were arrested?”
“Hard to forget.”
“So you know what happened, why you’re here?”
“The file,” she said, as if he was the one who needed a reminder.
“Was someone in the apartment with you that night?”
There was nothing in the police report to indicate someone else was involved with the murder. The police had found Penny alone with Rachel in the lower-level apartment of a multifamily home in Lynn. Mitch speculated that one of Penny’s alters had leaked into her subconscious, giving her the impression that another person was present. But that theory needed to be verified.
“I can’t remember much from that night,” Eve said flatly. “A bunch of cops piled on top of me and they took me to jail.”
“You don’t remember killing Rachel Boyd?”
“I do not. And I told the police that, but they didn’t seem to believe me.”
Mitch wasn’t sure what to make of Eve’s conviction.
“Do you know who Rachel Boyd is?”
“I’m told she’s my birth mother.”
“But you’ve never spoken with Rachel before?”
“No.”
“You exchanged messages with her online via Facebook. Do you remember that?”
From her case file, Mitch knew that Rachel made the initial contact, but didn’t know how she’d learned Penny’s identity. He made another mental note to get that detail from Grace.
“Wasn’t me,” Eve said assuredly, and Mitch thought it could have been Penny, or one of her alters who had those correspondences, but he’d have to reach them to confirm.
“Was Penny in the house the night Rachel died?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“Well, can I talk to her?”
Eve sat more upright in bed. “And what will you do for me? Will you get me out of here?”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then I guess pretty Penny has to stay away.”
Her tone was ice cold. Grace had returned to the treatment bay, taken one look at her daughter, and pulled back as if stopped by an invisible wall.
“Hello, Mother,” Eve said languidly with false cheer. “I’m famished. What are we having for lunch?”
CHAPTER 12
GRACE SAT ACROSS FROM Mitch in the Edgewater staff cafeteria, drinking a cup of coffee that was going to compound her jangled nerves. The cafeteria’s bright lighting vanquished all shadows, making the prepared food displayed in the under-counter refrigeration unit look as sickly as the patients. The coffee, however, was surprisingly good.
The news Mitch shared was less so.
“Explain it to me again,” Grace said. “Penny only thought she wasn’t alone at the time of the murder?”
“Think of it like signals in the brain getting crossed,” Mitch explained. “The stimuli she was experiencing produced such an overload of information that it led to the bleeding of one persona into another.”
“Like it broke down the walls in her mind?”
“Exactly,” Mitch said. “The shock, the trauma, of Rachel’s murder basically blasted a hole through the metaphorical bricks separating Penny’s alters. I don’t know which alter came through that night, but I suspect that was the other presence in the room.”
Grace found Mitch’s explanation heartbreakingly all too plausible.
“I thought you didn’t believe she has DID?”
“I said I haven’t drawn any conclusions, but I’m operating on the assumption that her diagnosis is accurate. To that end, I’d like to know more about Penny’s alters … about how you met them.”
“It began eight years after we found Penny in the park,” Grace said, after taking a moment to collect her thoughts.
“So Penny was…” Mitch added in his head. “Twelve at the time?”
“That’s right. She was twelve. And that’s when we met Ruby.”
* * *
Arthur had been at the stove, cooking up his weekend special. Ryan and Jack, Penny too, had all outgrown the days of Mickey Mouse–shaped pancakes, but Arthur made them anyway because some traditions were too hard to let go.
Arthur was thin, due to twelve-hour days spent on his feet coupled with the willpower to avoid sampling his wares. He had the sharpest blue eyes Grace had ever seen, keen as an eagle’s, somehow capable of seeing everything happening at the restaurant, including things that took place behind his back.
Without any prodding, Arthur knew when the sausage sizzling in the pan needed to be flipped. He set the table, poured glasses of juice, cut the fruit, flipped the pancakes, the sausages, doing it all effortlessly because he took to the kitchen like a fish does to water.
After her bath, Penny came downstairs damp, still wearing her bathrobe, nose in a Harry Potter book. She was entering adolescence and all that came with it—new places for hair, menstruation, buds for breasts. She was reading book four in the series, The Goblet of Fire, a thick and meaty tome that she carried with her everywhere she went. Penny loved her books, could get lost in them for hours, so it was no surprise to Grace that she fell hard and fast for the magical world of Harry Potter and the utter brilliance of his creator, J. K. Rowling.
The trouble all started with a single word.
“I’m quite peckish this morning,” Penny said as she took a seat at the table, speaking in a mock English accent.
“Peckish?” Ryan looked at Penny askance. “You mean ‘pukish’?”
“No, silly,” said Penny, keeping that accent going. “Peckish. Hungry.” She elongated the word and her eyes went wide at the sight of the pancakes and sausage steaming on warm plates.
“Are you going to talk like that all day?” Jack asked.
“Like what?” Penny studied them, confused.
Jack and Ryan stared at each other, equally bemused.
“Like with your dumb English accent,” Ryan said.
“What are you talking about?” Penny said, an edge invading her voice. “This is how I talk.”
Jack rolled his eyes at his brother.
“Oh yeah,” Jack said, and the brothers shared a laugh.
“Mom,” Penny said to Grace. “There’s a football game I want to watch on the telly later. Can we go to the shopping center this morning instead?”
Grace was about to say sure, as the day was remarkably under-scheduled, but Ryan had keyed in on several curiosities.
“First off, it’s May,” he said. “And football season is over. Second, ‘telly’? And third,
‘shopping center’? Do you mean ‘the mall’?”
Penny rolled her eyes at her brother. Insolent being, her look said.
“It’s real football, not dumb American football, dummy. Liverpool is playing Man City and I want to watch. Second, it is a telly, and okay, the mall, whatever. You say ‘potaaato,’ I say ‘potahhhto,’ but you understand me perfectly well, don’t you, because you’re not a complete idiot?”
Grace dropped the mail she’d been sorting onto the counter. Normally, she’d issue some sort of rebuke to keep the sibling peace, but she was too stunned at Penny’s speech—how quickly the words spilled out of her mouth, the perfection of her accent.
Arthur didn’t miss a beat as he moved a mouse cake from the pan onto Penny’s plate. “’Ere ya go, luv,” he said with a jovial accent, more Chim-Chimminy than Beatles. “And make sure you put your wand away next time. I sat on the couch and that thing turned my butt into cottage cheese.” He gave his butt cheeks a squeeze with a free hand and bounded off with a smile and laugh. But Grace wasn’t laughing, and neither were Jack or Ryan.
“You’re so silly, Dad,” Penny said.
With that, Arthur’s smile faded. She always called him Daddy. Maybe this new accent was her way of moving into a different phase of their relationship; maybe some kind of maturing and distancing had just taken place. Quickly regaining his composure, Arthur slipped right back into character and asked Penny if she was going to buy new trainers at the shopping center. Penny answered that she didn’t need them, like he hadn’t made a joke at all.
* * *
“She talked like that all day,” Grace said to Dr. McHugh. “Didn’t break character once. And she watched that soccer game—sorry, football match—from start to end, riveted as could be, cheering for Liverpool like her life depended on it. When I went to her room before bed, I kissed her forehead like I always did and said, ‘Goodnight, Penny.’ She just looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘Mum, it’s me. It’s Ruby.’”
“In the accent?” McHugh asked.
“Yes, in the accent. It continued the next day, too. She had all these new words I didn’t know she knew. Knackered. Cheeky. Mate. Bloody. Phrased things just like a British person might say them.”
“What did Arthur say about it?”
“He wasn’t concerned at all. He thought it was just imaginative play, probably inspired by the Harry Potter books. He told me not to worry.”
“So at this point you hadn’t met Eve?”
“No, both Eve and Chloe came later.”
Mitch took out a small black notebook and jotted something down.
“I need you to believe in this, Dr. McHugh.”
“Please, call me Mitch.”
“Okay then, Mitch. I need you to believe in us, in the diagnosis. Eve, or some other alter, is responsible for what happened to Rachel. Not Penny. My daughter doesn’t belong in prison, potentially for the rest of her life.”
“You know if she’s found not guilty by reason of insanity that the plea won’t prescribe a limit to her stay here. It could be five years, ten, or decades. The mandate would be that she’d stay hospitalized until she’s deemed safe to be released out into the public. I could be gone, and Penny could stay locked up here long after my departure, longer even than a possible prison sentence.”
A chill raced up Grace’s spine.
“As I understand the law, Penny can’t just be punished for having a mental illness. If she gets proper treatment, she could be released.”
“You’re talking integration,” said Mitch, referring to the therapeutic practice of bringing all dissociative parts of Penny’s personality into one sense of self—in essence, killing Eve, Chloe, and Ruby. “For that we’re going to really need to understand her past. Tell me, how did Penny and her mother reconnect?”
Color flushed his cheeks, and Grace realized that her pained expression might have caused him some embarrassment. “Birth mother,” he corrected. “Rachel. How did they reconnect?”
As an adolescent psychiatrist, Dr. McHugh should have been well versed in the tricky vernacular that came with adoption. The common names—birth mother, first mom, tummy mommy, natural mother—all have a qualifier distinguishing the biological parent from the adoptive one, the one who carried the physical, emotional, and psychological weight required to love and raise a child. For her part, Grace was deeply honored by the role Rachel had played in the formation of her family, and always said a special prayer for her on Mother’s Day.
“That’s all right,” Grace said, letting his slip bounce right off her. Lord knows, she was used to it by now. “Penny was arrested when she was fourteen—she’d just entered high school. She and her friend, Maria Descenza, who regrettably is still a friend of hers, were arrested together. I don’t know if any of that’s in her file.”
“It is,” said Mitch.
“Good, so I don’t have to go into the details. It was a difficult time for us all, as you can imagine. Anyway, after her arrest, Penny put her personal story on the Internet for all to see, a Facebook post that went viral. Everyone has some fascination with DID, I suppose. By the time I read it, the post had already caught fire. There were at least a thousand shares in the first hour alone.”
“She revealed her condition to the world?” Mitch asked.
“That she did,” said Grace, her tone a little defeated. “She wrote it all out: how she was the Jane Doe from the park, her diagnosis, about Eve, her arrest, all of it. It was her coming-out party in a way, done on her own terms.”
Dr. McHugh didn’t bother concealing his grimace.
“I tried to put a bow on it,” Grace went on. “Young girl, complicated history, expressing herself, needing an outlet to process her feelings, all that. I do think Penny felt terribly guilty for her arrest, deeply ashamed, and needed to put those feelings somewhere, get some support—which, by the way, she did. A lot of kids at her school commented on that post, and for the most part, they were very supportive and encouraging.”
“So, prior to the Facebook post, her peers didn’t know she had been diagnosed with DID?”
“No. We kept them, and most everyone except a few administrators, in the dark. Students thought Penny was obsessed with her grades and that she was high-strung as a result, which is why she got in so many fights. They didn’t realize it was her alters—Chloe, the perfectionist, and Eve, whom you met—until she posted her story. Unfortunately, the Internet is a damn digital time capsule—which is how Rachel found Penny. She’d been back in Lynn for a few years, reconnected with old friends, and one of them forwarded her that post. She had no idea her daughter lived so close by.”
“And you’re sure it was Rachel?”
“Absolutely,” said Grace. “Attorney Navarro got the discovery materials from the DA’s office, and according to the forensic experts, those correspondences came from Rachel’s computer, so it wasn’t a setup, if that’s what you’re thinking. Penny never told us that Rachel had contacted her, and Rachel made it clear in her messages to Penny to keep it a secret—for a little while at least, in her words.”
“How did she know it was her daughter?” Mitch sounded a bit incredulous.
Grace offered him something of a smile in return. “Doctor,” she said, sounding as if he should know better. “There are only so many girls who can say they were abandoned in a park.”
“Had you ever tried to track Rachel down before she and Penny reunited?”
“Yes, after the diagnosis we were curious about past history, but Rachel was living on the margins. She didn’t want to be found.”
“No arrests?”
“None recent. Rachel had been arrested before Penny was born. We knew that. It was a major possession charge, enough to slap her with intent to distribute. She pled guilty, but to a lesser charge, and didn’t see any prison time.”
“Where was this?” Mitch asked. “Do you know?”
“Lynn,” Grace said. “She’s from there, or somewhere on the North Shore, I k
now that for certain—ironically, the same district where Penny’s trial will take place. I believe she was quick to cut a deal and give up her parental rights in exchange for having the abandonment charges dropped because, with her criminal record, she was looking at serious time.”
“Makes sense,” said Mitch.
The topic of Rachel led Grace to another question she often wondered about.
“Something happened to Penny before she came to us, didn’t it, Dr. McHugh? Something Rachel did to her that caused Penny to develop DID. That’s usually the case with the condition, isn’t it? Maybe there was something in Penny’s memory, in her subconscious, and when she saw Rachel—” Grace didn’t bother finishing the thought.
“Yes, that’s right,” Dr. McHugh said. “Childhood trauma is a leading theory on the causes of dissociative identity disorder. The condition is thought to be an elaborate coping mechanism. Do you think Rachel hurt Penny?”
“The doctors who examined Penny at the hospital after she was found noted two long, narrow burn scars on her forearms that could have come from a curling iron,” Grace said. “But Penny never talked about any abuse.”
Grace often had to bury thoughts of Penny’s childhood trauma, because it was far easier to believe that her daughter’s formative first few years were filled with love, not pain, and that Rachel’s actions were a personal sacrifice born of desperation rather than the continuation of a long pattern of abuse.
“Dr. Cross, who gave us the DID diagnosis, said that we all start out with multiple personalities when we’re young. Is that something you believe?”
“I do,” said McHugh, nodding. “It’s like learning about life through committee. Those disparate voices in our young minds help us figure out the world and how different environments and stimuli affect us. Do we like things sweet or sour; what’s funny to us; what scares us? By age nine, our experiences tend to mold us into the person we become, and all those likes and dislikes, our moods and disposition, solidify into a single identity—this concept of self.”