P. Parrish - South Of Hell

Amy was hugging herself and singing. She was singing the same nonsensical song that she had sung last night before falling asleep.

Amy sang the song over and over, until her voice finally tapered off into soft, even breathing.

Dr. Sher sat riveted, a stunned look on her face. She switched off the small tape recorder she had set on the table by Amy’s head. Finally, she leaned forward and took Amy’s hand.

“Amy, I want you to wake up now,” she said evenly. “We’re going to count back from ten together, and when we get to one, you’ll wake up, okay?”

“Yes.”

At one, Amy opened her eyes. She looked first at Dr. Sher and then at Joe. She smiled shyly.

“Did I do okay?” she asked.

Dr. Sher smiled back. “Yes, dear.”

“I sang the song,” Amy said.

“Yes, you did.”

“But this time, I sang the whole thing. I never did that before. I can remember it now.”

Her smile widened. She swung her legs to floor and sat up, suddenly very alert. She focused on Joe.

“I’m hungry. Can we get a pizza?”

That morning, back at the hotel, Joe finally had persuaded Amy to try a slice of the leftover pizza, telling her that while it may not have been on Aunt Geneva’s list of edible foods, it was on Joe’s. Amy had readily agreed to try it, willing to move on. Seeing how well Amy looked now, Joe wondered if she might be ready to move on in other ways as well. Maybe Dr. Sher was right. Maybe there was no way through this for Amy except by facing the ugliness head-on.

“Yes, we’ll stop and get a pizza,” Joe said.

Amy’s face lit up with a smile.

Joe turned to Dr. Sher. “I’m sorry I tried to stop you. I should have trusted you. It’s just that I don’t know what I am seeing here.”

Dr. Sher was watching Amy put on her jacket. “I really think I need to see her again. You can’t expect much from just one visit.”

Joe nodded.

“That song she was singing,” Dr. Sher began.

“She’s done it before. It seems to calm her.”

“But you don’t know what it means to her?”

Joe shook her head. “I’ve asked her. She doesn’t remember it when she’s awake.”

“Apparently, she was able to retrieve it during the hypnosis. The song must be a good memory, something she goes to when the bad memories get to be too much.”

“The song’s nonsense, though,” Joe said.

Dr. Sher was watching Amy and looked back at Joe. “What?”

“The words. They don’t make any sense.”

Dr. Sher’s eyes locked on Joe’s. “They make perfect sense. She’s singing in French.”

There was an advantage to working as a cop in a college town for almost fifteen years, Louis decided. Shockey not only knew the best doctors, but he knew lawyers and judges, too. One in particular, an arthritic old judge named Herman Fells. Fells, whose own daughter had been murdered twenty years ago, agreed to fit them in on his family court calendar between two other pending cases. Shockey had been forced to allow an agent from Family Services to attend the hearing, but because of his contacts, he had managed again to get someone sympathetic to keeping Amy out of the system.

Louis glanced at his watch. They had been inside the courtroom for more than an hour now — Joe, Shockey, and Amy. At first, he had been miffed that Joe had asked him to stay out in the hallway. Amy would be more relaxed — and lucid — if Louis was not in the small courtroom, Joe had told him. Louis hadn’t asked Joe why she thought Amy didn’t seem to mind Shockey being close.

It bothered him — but not enough to get in the way of things.

He looked at the doors. Shit, what was taking so long?

Maybe they didn’t have enough information. Dr. Sher had suggested that Amy get a routine exam to rule out any physical problems, and Amy had passed. And Dr. Sher’s own written assessment declared Amy competent to tell the judge how she felt about her father, Owen Brandt, and why she didn’t want to be with him. That had to be enough to get her into a custody hearing.

The other things — her memories or dreams, the strange blackouts — those were like defense mechanisms, Dr. Sher had said, the brain’s way of blocking out pain until it was ready to handle it.

He could understand that. He might not understand Amy, but he sure could understand the shield the brain brought down over some things. It had been only recently, on his last trip up to Michigan, that some of his own memories — the bad ones — had shoved forward. Like the time he had locked himself in a closet to avoid a belt whipping from one of his foster fathers.

But at least he knew that memory was real. Some of this stuff with Amy, like the smelly hole, the ropes, the dead kitten, he wasn’t so sure about. He supposed they could be based in reality, maybe filtered though an overactive imagination.

But Amy being able to sing in French — something she couldn’t do when she was awake — was one thing he didn’t understand.

He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out the paper Joe had given him last night. Dr. Sher, who had lived in Paris and spoke fluent French, had written out some of the words she had heard Amy singing. The English words he and Joe had heard had been only their own ears hearing the phonetic version. But Dr. Sher, listening to the tape over and over, had come up with a transcription of what she believed Amy was singing:

Caches dans cet asile ou Dieu nous a conduits

unis par le malheur durant les longues nuits

nous reposons tous deux endormis sous leurs voiles

nous prions aux regards des tremblantes etoiles

His own college French wasn’t good enough to read it, so he called Dr. Sher that morning for a translation and had written it beneath the French:

Hidden in this sanctuary where God has led us,

united by suffering through the long nights

we rest together, rocked to sleep beneath their

cover we pray beneath the gazes of the trembling stars.

He stared at the words, shaking his head. There was a logical explanation behind it. There had to be.

Joe had been the one to bring up the idea that Amy might have a split personality. But Dr. Sher had discounted it as too rare. And even if it were true, it still meant Amy had to have learned French somewhere.

That morning, Louis had made a phone call to the Hudson police and asked one of the cops to take a more thorough look inside Geneva’s home. The cop had called back a while later and told Louis he had no found no foreign-language books, no keepsakes from places afar, and no brochures, photos, or magazines that suggested that Amy had ever ventured far from home. The cop also said there wasn’t even a television in the home. And school records confirmed that Amy had stopped attending in the third grade.

As for the neighbor, Mr. Bustin, the one Amy remembered for his Go Blue room, the cop found out that Amy had visited him only a few times, that he did not speak French or any other foreign language, and that he had nothing in his home that Amy could have picked up.

A soft tapping drew his attention down the hall. A family was huddled at the end, a black woman and five children. One of the kids, a girl who looked about six, was banging on the wall with a broken Barbie doll.

Louis folded the paper and put it back into his pocket.

He had almost bought Amy a doll that morning. Joe had sent him to Kmart to pick up things Amy would need for her court appearance. He had walked around the store for a long time before he actually started putting things in the cart.

His only experience shopping for kids was with Ben Outlaw. That was easy. Boys were quick, picking out T-shirts usually based on the cartoon graphic on the front. If things didn’t fit perfectly, Ben never cared. He’d just roll up the sleeves or cut off the cuffs.