Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

Their eyes locked-one of those she knew that he knew that she knew moments-then he gently prized the fork from her clenched hand and used it to stir a packet of sugar into the brown sludge in his cup, as if that, and not disarming Lilith, had been his purpose in taking it all along. “Never could get the hang of those dinky little doll spoons,” he added apologetically-but he never did return the fork.

Dr. Cogan, meanwhile, had taken an envelope full of photographs from a brown leather Coach bag the size of a Pony Express saddlebag. She slid one of the pictures across the tabletop. In the snapshot, Lilith was standing at the top of wide, terraced steps, shading her eyes against the sun. The two-story, Mission-style villa in the background was a mansion by almost any standard.

“That’s your house behind you,” said Dr. Cogan, enunciating every syllable with a fussy precision and taking extra care with the sibilants, as though at some point in her life she’d conquered a speech impediment. “And this one was taken behind your family’s vacation home near Puerto Vallarta last winter.” Another snapshot of Lilith and Dr. Cogan in bathing suits; in the background, a sprawling adobe.

“And here’s your grandmother and grandfather.” Old couple standing next to a gleaming black SUV, the man erect and lantern-jawed, the woman plump and apple-cheeked, her shoulders hunched a little, as if she were afraid the SUV was going to explode any second now.

“Why don’t I remember any of this?” asked Lilith. “Did I get hit on the head or something?”

“I wish it were that simple,” said Dr. Cogan. “Are you familiar with a psychiatric condition known as dissociative identity disorder?”

“I…I think so. It’s like multiple personalities, right?”

“That’s the old term for it, yes-we call it DID now.” The doctor turned to the man. “Pen, could you give us a few minutes?”

“You bet.” He slid out of the booth, taking Mama Rose’s espresso and Lilith’s fork with him, picked up a newspaper from a neighboring booth, and shambled over to a table for one, halfway between the women and the front door.

“Who’s he?” Lilith asked Dr. Cogan.

“An old friend. He helped coordinate the search.”

“What search?”

“The search for you.” Dr. Cogan fished around in her bag again, emerged from the depths with a pearl-gray tape recorder the size of a pack of playing cards. “Here, I have something I’d like you to listen to.” She pressed Play.

“My name is Lily DeVries,” said a childlike female voice. “And whoever you are who’s hearing this, so is yours. What Dr. Irene has to tell you may sound a little weird at first, but you really need to hear her out, okay? For both our sakes.”

Looking up to meet Dr. Cogan’s eyes, Lilith experienced a sense of deja vu so intense it was almost dizzying. It dawned on her that all the questions she’d failed to ask over the last ten days were about to be answered. She wished she still had Mama Rose’s Beretta; for that matter, she wished she still had the damn fork. “Go ahead,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Ulysses, this is Dr. Trotman,” said Dr. Al.

“Pleased to meet you.” Lyssy limped across the conference room with his right hand outstretched, palm down to hide the burn scars. Wally waited by the door.

Dr. Trotman brushed his hand with her fingertips. “How do you do, Mr. Maxwell.”

That meant how are you? But not really-it was all part of what Dr. Al called phatic communication, which was one more thing Lyssy had had to learn from scratch, though without complete success: his mind still tended toward the literal.

“Okay, I guess. Except sometimes I get phantom pains in my leg.” A shy Lyssy grin. “You know, the one that isn’t there?”

“Do you remember how you lost that leg?” asked Trotman.

Puzzled, Lyssy turned to Corder. “Is that a joke?”

“What? Oh-no, it’s an idiomatic expression. She doesn’t mean did you lose it, she means do you remember how your leg came to be amputated?”

“No, ma’am-that happened before.”

“Before what?”

“Before I can remember.”

“What about your hands?”

He looked down at the small, dreadfully scarred appendages hanging at his sides as though he’d never seen them before. The flesh had melted away from the inner surfaces of the fingers, leaving the hourglass shape of the bones distinguishable beneath the shiny scar tissue; livid white patches of unlined, grafted skin stretched tautly across both palms. Ultimately, though, the plastic surgeons had done their job well: those deformed hands not only functioned, but were as inexorable as claws or talons once they’d grabbed hold of something-it was letting go that they found difficult. “Also before.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why not?”

“Because I know what happened.”

“But you just said you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Are you playing games with me, Mr. Maxwell?”

Lyssy gave Dr. Al a helpless glance, as if to say, I’m doing my best here. Dr. Al nodded encouragingly. Lyssy turned back to Trotman. “You asked me if I remembered, ” he explained earnestly. “I don’t remember much of anything that happened before I came here. But Dr. Al told me some of it. When I was sixteen, I guess I tried to put a fire out with my bare hands. Not the smartest move, hunh?”

Trotman turned to Corder and gave him a raised-eyebrow What are you still doing here? glance. He nodded. “We’ll be next door if you need us.” Wally followed him into the adjoining conference room.

“Have a seat, Mr. Maxwell,” said the psychiatrist. Two molded plastic chairs, identical to the ones stacked in the smaller room, faced each other at a forty-five-degree angle at the end of the conference table, the top of which was made of some black, unreflective space-age polymer, like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lyssy took the end chair; Dr. Trotman tucked the back of her skirt under her as she lowered herself into the other one. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Let’s begin with your name.”

“Begin what?” Dr. Al would have smiled patiently at that; Dr. Trotman glanced up sharply from the notebook in her lap. “Sorry,” said Lyssy, mock-chastened. “My name is Lyssy.”

“Full name?”

“Ulysses Christopher Maxwell.”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Monday.”

“Date, month, year?”

He got that right, too, adding shyly, “My birthday’s on Wednesday-I’ll be thirty-two.”

“Happy birthday in advance. Can you tell me where we are right now?”

“1-South-the conference room.” She waited. “Oh, you mean the hospital? It’s the Reed-Chase Institute.”

OX3, the psychiatrist noted on the pad-oriented times three. “Do you know why you’re here?”

Dial down the grin, ratchet up the earnest factor-it was very important to Lyssy that she understand. “When I was little, my parents abused me real bad-I mean, badly. And there are some people, I’m one of them, who when they’re little and bad things happen to them, their mind tries to protect itself by splitting up into all these different identities. And the different identities, they all think they’re separate people, and the real person doesn’t have any control over them. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what they’re doing.”

“I see.”

“And in my case, some of those alters were really psychologically disturbed because of what had happened, the abuse and all, and so they went on to abuse other people. Dr. Al says that happens a lot, that abuse gets passed along. And, and, and they-Well, they’re gone, now, the others-there’s just me. But lots of people, they don’t believe in such a thing as multiple personalities-they think I’m a bad person, and that if I get out, I’d do bad things. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t-I don’t even like to think about bad things.”