by D. J. Palmer
“Is this you?”
She nodded.
“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the smoke pouring from the small box on the countertop.
“That’s a toaster,” she answered glumly, clearly disappointed that he didn’t recognize it straightaway.
“I knew that,” Mitch said, trying for corrective action. “I meant why is it smoking?”
“The toast is burning.”
“Who are you?” Mitch asked again, his voice a bit pleading.
The girl eyed him crossly, like he should have known.
Too fast. Too much. Mitch pointed to a bathroom she’d drawn in the upstairs part of the house with a tub full of blue water. Strokes of blue crayon spilled from a faucet, an indication the water was still running.
“Is the girl in the kitchen going to take a bath?” Mitch asked.
She shook her head. “Not yet. She has to finish her dinner first.”
There was a bedroom next to the bathroom, and inside she’d drawn a second little girl who also had pigtails. This girl was given a yellow dress, done in the same triangle fashion as the outfit of the other girl. She had on a silver necklace with an anchor pendant attached. The pendant was supersized, but that was probably due to the challenge of drawing to scale. In one hand, she held a blue rectangle, a book, Mitch presumed.
“Who’s this?” Mitch asked.
“That’s me,” she said, as if the answer should have been obvious.
“I thought you were downstairs having breakfast,” said Mitch.
“It’s just a dumb drawing,” she answered testily. “I should rip it up and start again. It’s terrible.”
“No, no,” Mitch said. “I like it very much. You’re a very clever girl. Now, will you tell me your name?”
She hesitated, but eventually said, “I’m Chloe. See, I signed my initials.”
She moved her index finger to a patch of side yard, below the tree with many crooked branches, and touched the anchor symbol she’d drawn. Then, using blue crayon, she went over the lines until they darkened, making clear the letters C and F in her stylized signature:
“C. F.,” she said proudly, in case Mitch hadn’t seen them for himself. “See? Chloe Francone.”
“Chloe. That’s a nice name.”
While this wasn’t definitive proof in Mitch’s mind of Penny having DID (she could have known what he was after, which alter he thought he might reach) it was certainly a compelling demonstration. Either way, make-believe or not, Mitch wasn’t fazed at meeting Chloe, nor was he shocked that she’d regressed in age. It could be the stimulation of the crayons opened the gateway in Penny’s subconscious for a switch to take place, and the alter that appeared was of an age where those crayons would have been appreciated and enjoyed. She was acting ten years old, or thereabouts, the same age that Grace said the anchor symbol began to make an appearance on her drawings.
“Chloe, do you know your mother’s name?”
“My mama’s name is Grace. My daddy’s name is Arthur. He makes pizza for a living.”
Is Arthur … makes pizza … all present tense, because in her reality, at her age of ten or so, Arthur’s still alive in her mind.
If this is make-believe it is certainly very consistent.
“What’s that under your hand?” Mitch asked, pointing to the lower portion of the house. He could see she’d drawn a basement in black and gray crayon, but she was hiding what was in it.
A slip of a smile came to Chloe’s face.
She lifted her hand slowly, eyes never leaving his. Mitch’s focus went to a figure Chloe had drawn down in the basement: a woman on her side, two black Xs for eyes. Dead. Although this woman wore the same triangle-shaped blue dress as the woman in the kitchen above, only one of them had Grace’s trademark ears.
Mitch thought: Rachel.
Next to the body, Chloe had drawn a crooked jug filled with a liquid depicted in yellow crayon.
Ammonia.
“How old are you, Chloe?” Mitch asked.
“I’m nine,” Chloe said sweetly. She got up from her seat. “Who are you, anyway? Where am I?” she asked, looking anxiously around the stark room as her calm veneer faded like a mirage.
Oh, no, thought Mitch.
CHAPTER 28
GRACE, WHO’D BEEN WATCHING through the one-way mirror, bolted from her chair and entered the interview room as quickly as her legs could carry her. She knew her presence was supposed to remain a secret, but the moment she heard her daughter’s confusion, motherly instinct took over. With a beaming smile on her face, arms open wide, Grace approached her daughter, who stood still, timid as a mouse. It had been a long time since they were last together, but she had no doubt Chloe would remember her mother.
“Chloe,” Grace said, embracing her daughter in a tight hug (which Eve would never have allowed). “Let me have a look at you.”
She pulled back to appraise Chloe at arm’s length.
“Mama?” Chloe’s sweet voice tumbled out, shaky and uncertain.
Grace had no idea why her daughter had regressed in years, but for sure Mitch would have some explanation. Her immediate concern was for her child’s well-being. Grace imagined it would be like waking up from a coma surrounded by bright lights and strange faces. “What’s going on?” she asked nervously. “Where am I?”
She spoke in the clipped, pressured tones that Dr. Cross had first observed some years ago. It was her default way of talking when agitated about schoolwork, but this was a pressure of a different sort.
“Chloe, please sit down,” Grace said, placing her hands lovingly on her daughter’s shoulders. Accessing that inner place that allowed parents to keep calm in a crisis, Grace coaxed Chloe gently onto a chair. She knelt down beside her. “Don’t be scared, sweetie,” she said, taking Chloe’s hand. “Everything is fine. It’s hard to explain, but you’re going to have to be brave and a little patient, okay?”
Chloe gave a nod. “Okay,” she said, anxiousness showing in her voice and on her face.
“I’m going to ask you a question. There’s no wrong answer … I just want your honest one. Can you do that?” Grace knew to offer reassurances that whatever answer she gave, it couldn’t be incorrect.
Chloe returned another nod.
“Can you share with me a memory that you have before I came into this room, before you made your drawing, even?”
Grace gestured to the picture. Chloe sent her mother a pleading look, then turned her attention to Mitch, who stood nearby. “Who’s he?” she asked.
“I’m Dr. Mitch McHugh,” said Mitch, stepping forward.
“A doctor … what for? Am I hurt?”
With a glance, Grace made it quite clear to Mitch that she wished to be the one in charge. “You were in an accident,” she said calmly. She hated lying to her child, but felt the end would ultimately justify the means. “You weren’t hurt, but you did suffer a head injury.”
Chloe touched her head gingerly as if expecting to feel pain.
“The injury—sweetheart, it’s actually inside your head. In your brain,” Grace explained.
“So my brain … is … it’s broken?”
Grace heard: So I’m not perfect?
“No, love,” she said. “You’re not broken. And you’re safe here.” Grace dragged over a chair to sit beside her—less painful on the knees. She retook Chloe’s hand.
“What was the accident?” Chloe asked.
“Well,” said Grace, pausing to think how to respond. “Honestly, we’re hoping you could tell us.”
“Tell you what? I … I don’t remember any accident.” Chloe focused her attention on Mitch, an understandable choice given how doctors were supposed to have all the answers.
“This is a tricky question,” Mitch said, coming around the table with his phone out, recording the events as he’d done before. “Think of it like a test and you want to do well on it. Close your eyes, and give it some real hard concentration. Do you remember a house with a tire swing?
Having breakfast? Burning toast? What do you remember last?”
Chloe’s nature was to perform perfectly, whatever was asked of her. Through counseling, Grace had learned that failure, in Chloe’s mind, was an affront to her identity—though really it was Penny’s fears manifested, augmented, and presented in the form of this girl alter.
“Is closing my eyes a part of the test?” asked Chloe.
“Yes,” said Grace. “Now close them and try to remember.”
With that, Chloe shut her eyes tight.
“What were you doing before you were here?” Grace asked.
Chloe’s whole face was a picture of concentration. Grace observed the muscles around her jaw and eyes slowly began to ease. Is she remembering something?
Then Chloe made an audible gasp. “I was looking at a book,” she said, astonished that a memory had actually come to her. Grace got Mitch’s attention as she tapped her finger on the drawing of a blue rectangle clutched in the hand of the little girl upstairs.
“The title of the book,” Grace said hurriedly. “Can you see it in your mind?”
Chloe shook her head.
“No,” she said. “The cover is blue … and there are boats … boats in the water.”
She spoke in a dreamy, faraway voice, almost a whisper. Grace turned to Mitch, who stared back as if disbelieving his own eyes and ears.
“You’re doing so well,” Grace said brightly. “What else can you tell us about that book? What else do you remember?”
At that Chloe’s eyes flew open, her gaze fixed on the picture she’d drawn. She put her finger on the toaster, tracing the black and gray crayon lines of smoke spreading out in all directions.
“Burned it all up,” she said in a trancelike voice, similar to the one Penny had used in the room flooded with ammonia.
Grace was puzzled. “Burned what up, Chloe?”
“It all burned … burned it all up … but she didn’t go away.”
“Who?” Grace asked. “Who didn’t go away? Who burned it up? What burned?”
Instead of answering, Chloe tapped the table rhythmically with one hand … tap … tap … tap … and with each tap she said the name of a place:
“Michigan … Florida … Key West…”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I’m bad,” she said.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“I’m a very bad girl.”
“Chloe?” whispered Grace.
“Alabama … Alaska … Charlotte … Chicago … bad girl … very bad girl.”
“Chloe, can you hear me? Answer me, darling!”
Grace’s voice cut through some fog, reached some place in her daughter’s mind. Chloe blinked once, blinked twice, before her face went slack. She lowered her head, avoiding Grace’s probing stare. When her daughter peered up at her, Grace knew without a doubt that Chloe was gone. She sat in her chair with her shoulders pulled back, chest out, head cocked to one side, looking rather annoyed.
“Hello, Eve,” Grace said, feeling a pit in her stomach.
“Mother,” Eve said, making her greeting extra saccharine for effect. “Are we to have lunch here?” Eve, blinking rapidly with her tongue sticking out, indicated her displeasure, before her gaze shifted to the drawing on the table.
“What’s this?” she said, knocking her knuckles on the picture.
“You tell me,” said Mitch, coming forward—still recording, Grace could see. “You just made it.”
Eve’s whole face screwed up.
“Don’t mess with me,” she said darkly. “I think I’d remember drawing this.” She sent him a look of disdain as she put her finger on the dead woman in the basement. “Are you going to play head games with me just like Palumbo did?”
“No,” said Mitch. “I’m not. I promise.”
Grace sent Mitch a look as if to say: How could this be made up?
“Then who drew this?” answered Eve defiantly. She was behaving more frightened than upset, but that was understandable to Grace. To disassociate from the self meant to lose that time. To slip out of one’s conscious personality and return to it later was naturally disorienting. For Eve, it was as if she’d blinked and the drawing had suddenly appeared.
“Do you know a girl named Chloe?” Mitch asked.
“Are you saying an alter of mine drew this?” Eve answered, skeptical.
“I’m not entirely sure who made it,” said Mitch while rolling up the paper to keep it safe—and Grace thought that was the truth, at least in part.
Eve turned her attention back to her mother.
“I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she said.
Grace was feeling the same. She kept thinking about the smoke billowing out from the toaster in the drawing and what Chloe had said.
Fire. Burned it all up. Didn’t go away.
She didn’t know the meaning of the places Chloe had recited, still didn’t know what the rhythmic tapping was about either, or that damn book she couldn’t find at home, but she did understand a thing or two about fire. And only one person Grace knew of had a pyromania problem.
Maria.
CHAPTER 29
THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED, the start of your journey and ours into DID, was a sunny Saturday in September when you were thirteen years old. The scene is one that will definitely feature prominently in my film. Picture the shot:
EXT. Wide pleasant street. Bright blue sky. Typical suburbia.
CUT TO: Cute boy on a BMX bike.
He showed up at the house having arrived on that bicycle—I remember that detail vividly. I was in the living room watching TV, and emerged only when it started getting loud and weird. He was a good-looking kid, about my age, so I put him at fifteen. He stood on our front doorstep, and I heard him ask very specifically for Chloe.
Naturally, Mom told him he had the wrong address, and he replied that he was from Marblehead, had recently moved to town, and had met a girl named Chloe at our restaurant. She’d invited him over to hang out and do math together, something like that, and she’d given him this address. My guess is, knowing boys of that age, that he didn’t have just numbers on his mind when you, Chloe, told him where to meet.
How do I know it was Chloe in the restaurant talking to that boy, inviting him to our house? I can’t be sure of it, but I was at Big Frank’s that day, and I distinctly remember you sitting at a table, math books splayed out in front of you, being very diligent about your work. So I guess when the cute boy—pretty sure his name was Troy—came over to talk to you, you gave him the name of your most studious alter.
Now that Troy was standing on our doorstep, Mom was as confused as I was. She called you to the front door, asked if you’d ever seen this boy before, and you said no, never. And then, well, then he started laughing. He pointed at you and he just kept on laughing, but not in a mean way. It was an awkward thing, more like he was the butt of some joke.
Troy said to Mom—and to me, because I’d come out from the living room by this point—that this (here he pointed at you) is Chloe. This is the girl he met at Big Frank’s. He stood there like he was waiting for this ridiculous joke of ours to end. It got quite uncomfortable, as you can imagine, I remember that clearly. And you, Penny, well, you just kept shaking your head, saying, “I don’t know who this boy is, tell him to go away, Mom.”
I’ve learned a few things about your alters over the years. As Penny, you say Mom, but as Chloe you’d say Mama; Ruby was Mum; and Eve says Mother.
Looking back on it, that’s how I can be sure it was you, Penny, upset as could be, screaming at that boy to go away and leave you alone.
“I don’t know him! I don’t know him!” you shouted, clutching your head as if your brain was on fire.
Mom panicked, which made perfect sense because you were out of your mind, truly frightened. She slammed the door in that poor boy’s face. He must have been beyond confused, and so was Mom, but me? I’m not sure. I was thinking of other people you’ve pretended to be, about Eve, and Ruby. And now Chloe? R
emember, we didn’t know about DID at this point.
I figured either you were embarrassed about inviting a boy over without permission, or you were an amazing actor, or you really didn’t remember ever meeting Troy. To this day I’m still not sure. I wish I’d captured that look on your face, though. Such profound shock and horror—it reminded me of the way Mom looked that day we thought we’d lost you and you were hiding in the bed.
After the boy left, Mom made a dozen phone calls. With that you got yourself a new psychiatrist. Dr. Caroline Cross.
I think without Dr. Cross, you’d still be getting treated for OCD and depression, but the signs were there all along. Different types of memory loss … different personality states … anxiety … depression … and those were the symptoms we could see.
Your other doctors weren’t incompetent; it’s just that the whole Chloe incident made it easier for Dr. Cross to diagnose you. She was very methodical, patient, or so Mom would say when singing her praises. Dr. Cross observed things about you that we didn’t, like how you’d sometimes talk faster, in a tighter, more nervous voice when you discussed schoolwork and grades, especially when under pressure to perform.
One day, not long after your diagnosis, Dr. Cross met with us as a family. She wanted us to understand DID so we weren’t frightened of it. It was more common than people realized, she said. First and foremost, you weren’t different people. You were one person with multiple personality states, each identity expressing a part of a whole. If we could integrate those different states, she said, you would be Penny—who sometimes got angry like Eve, who obsessed like Chloe, and who could be as fun-loving and carefree as Ruby.
“It’s not something to be scared of,” Dr. Cross assured us, mainly addressing Ryan and myself, because this meeting was our primer into the condition.
“What Penny has is a very elaborate defense mechanism,” she explained. “It’s quite possible that before your sister came to live with you, she experienced some sort of extreme trauma—something very difficult for a young mind, still in its formative stages, to process. Think about it like compartmentalization. Do you know what that means, boys?”