F Wilson - Sibs

"I imagine so," Dr. Gates said, still cool and clinical. "Ingrid was, ah, rather promiscuous."

"And the clothes!" Kara said, still on a roll. "That's why they were hidden! Kelly wasn't hiding them from anyone! It was Ingrid hiding them from Kelly! Now I understand!"

Kara turned away and fought the tears that sprang into her eyes. It was so good to understand. And poor Kelly. What she must have been going through.

She sat down again.

"God, it's so bizarre! What could cause something like that to happen?"

"It is almost always severe trauma." His eyes bored into hers. "Childhood trauma."

"Kelly had no childhood trauma. Neither of us did. We were 'the Wade twins.' Everyone loved us. If anything, our childhood was uneventful—blissful and uneventful."

"Ingrid has a different story."

A chill tiptoed down Kara's spine.

"What… what did Ingrid say?"

Dr. Gates leaned forward and stared at her.

"Do you truly have no idea what I'm talking about?"

Kara met his gaze and tried to override the growing fear that he was going to say something awful, that here was the part she couldn't accept.

"No. Not the faintest."

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes, then leaned forward again. He took a deep breath.

"Very well. I'll say it flat out: According to Ingrid, she was sexually abused on a regular basis between the ages of five and nine."

"No! That's crazy! By whom?"

"Your father."

Kara felt her body go numb. The room swung around and the lights seemed to dim for a few seconds. She fought for focus and managed a single word:

"What?"

"That is what Ingrid told me, and she was quite detailed."

"My father! Never!"

"It fits, Miss Wade. It's that type of abuse, that degree of trauma that incites the formation of a second personality."

Kara was on her feet again, shaking with revulsion.

"Listen to me, Dr. Gates! Nothing like that ever happened! So get this straight, and get it straight now: My father never committed incest! It never even crossed his mind! If it had, I'd have known about it!"

Gates leaned back again, twirling that damn key ring.

"I told you that you would resist the facts. Your sister went through a period of denial too."

Kara's revulsion was now turning to anger.

"I will not have my father defamed! He was a good man who's been dead a dozen years and can't defend himself! Besides, Kelly would have told me!"

"Kelly didn't know."

That brought Kara up short. She stared at Dr. Gates without speaking.

"Listen," he said, "and perhaps you will understand why I asked you here. The regularly repeated trauma of such magnitude can cause a child's mind to create a second personality as a defense mechanism. The second personality takes over during the times of recurrent trauma. There is no communication between the personalities. The secondary personality shields the primary personality, forming a barrier between it and an intolerable reality, thus allowing the child to go about her everyday life as if nothing happened. And in a sense, nothing does happen to the primary personality—the second personality absorbs all the trauma."

"it never happened!" Kara said.

"When the trauma stops, the second personality is no longer needed. But it doesn't dissolve, it doesn't go away, it merely becomes dormant, ready to leap to the surface should the first personality be traumatized again. I believe that the traumatic break-up of Kelly's last relationship—the lies she had believed, the betrayal she felt—awakened Ingrid. Kelly managed to handle the emotional trauma in a mature manner, but Ingrid was awake. And Ingrid wanted out. It was that tug of war going on in her subconscious, and the unexplained lapses in memory when Ingrid managed to take over, that eventually brought Kelly to me."

Kara sank back into the chair and closed her eyes.

Kelly… Ingrid… it had to be true. It explained so much. But the rest of it… sickening…

"All right," she said slowly. "I'll grant the existence of this Ingrid personality. But she's a liar. You said she was sexually promiscuous—"

"Many sexually abused children grow up to be promiscuous, a reflection of how they were taught to relate to a male during their formative years. Just as physically abused children grow to be violent adults."

"Kelly was not abused, dammit! I was there! I grew up with her! The Ingrid part of her is lying!"

"Perhaps. I have no way of knowing. Ingrid often spoke of how her twin sib was also regularly abused by their father."

Kara was out of her seat again. She wanted to hurl herself at Gates and throttle that bland, matter-of-fact expression off his face.

"Are you deaf? It. Never. Happened!"

It couldn't have happened! Not Dad. Never. She saw his weathered face, his easy smile, his gentle blue eyes. He never even raised his voice. Dad was a… a prude! She remembered how embarrassed he'd be whenever she and Kelly as teenagers would pass him in the upstairs hall in their underwear. He'd shout at them to get their robes on. He couldn't have—

"She said her twin sister was named 'Janine,' " Dr. Gates said softly.

"There! What did I tell you! This Ingrid is all screwed up! If she can't even get my name right, how can she have any credibility about the rest of her story?"

Kara turned and headed for the door. She had tolerated as much as she could of this nonsense.

"Thank you for your time, Dr. Gates. I've heard all I want to hear."

He did not raise his voice but, as her hand reached the door knob, Kara heard him with numbing clarity.

"What if the Janine she speaks of belongs to you, Miss Wade?"

Kara froze. Her anger vanished as if it had never been, replaced by a cold, sick fear crawling through her chest. She turned and leaned against the door, facing him.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"I am not doing anything to you. I am giving you the information you demanded yesterday, information that might be of vital importance to you."

She hung there, weak-kneed, trying to comprehend the unthinkable, but the thoughts would not take form. Her mind fought them off, drove them away.

"Please sit down," Dr. Gates said. For the first time there seemed to be real concern in his voice.

Kara shook her head. "No. Just finish this and let me go."

"All right. I'll put it all in a nutshell. Your twin sister developed a separate personality to shield her from a massive childhood trauma. I dealt with that personality. I know it existed. Therefore, since you and your twin grew up so closely together, and since you have no memory of your sister's trauma, I thought it fair and prudent to warn you that it is entirely possible that you, too, may have developed a second personality to shield you from that same trauma."

"Okay," she said slowly. "You've warned me. Maybe there was a trauma. Maybe we've both repressed it. But that doesn't mean it absolutely had to have been… incest."

"Judging from Ingrid's promiscuity, I'd say there's a high probability that—"

"But you can't be absolutely sure can you?"

Grant me that! Please grant me that!

"No," he said after a pause. "It's hard to be absolutely sure of anything in this case. Especially with Kelly gone."

Thank you.

Now. There was one more thing she had to know before she fled this place, this man, this city.

"How could I tell if I had another personality?"

"If you have black-outs, memory lapses, new items around the house that you don't remember purchasing, you might suspect, but short of a chance encounter with a friend or relative when the other personality was in charge, you couldn't actually know. Except perhaps…" His voice trailed off.

"What? Tell me!"

"Hypnotism can sometimes bring the other personalities to the surface, but it's not foolproof. And it can be risky."