When She Was Bad

Besides, the psychiatrist didn’t really believe what she’d said about not doing Lily a favor by bringing her back to consciousness. Irene had seen this unnamed autistic alter only once before, when Lily was first brought to her for a consult by a pediatric psychiatrist who was sharp enough to recognize that autism didn’t just pop up full-blown at the age of four, however textbook the symptoms.

It hadn’t taken Irene long to diagnose dissociative identity disorder, especially as Lily’s parents had recently been convicted of child abuse in its ugliest form-the standard marker for this particular dissociative disorder. And happily, the symptoms of autism had disappeared, along with the unnamed alter, as soon as Irene put the girl under hypnosis.

But now Lily was once again in her own little world. True, it was a world without fear or pain, but also without joy or understanding or volition, and Irene could no more have left her there than she could have lobotomized her.

Still, hypnotizing an autie was a tricky proposition. Irene turned to Lyssy. “Help me bring her downstairs to my office.”

Gone like magic was the pasted-on scowl. “Great, great, thanks. C’mon there, honey, let’s take another little walk.” He wrested the coin sorter from the girl’s grasp and lured her out of the bedroom as though she were a donkey, and the toy a carrot.

Irene preceded them into the office and quickly cleared her desktop, on which she placed a small wooden metronome from her drawer. “Pull that chair over to the desk,” she told Lyssy. “Now sit her down…good, good.”

“I just want to tell you, I’m sorry about, you know, threatening you before, I just-”

Irene cut him off. “Never mind that now-let’s focus on the job at hand, shall we? I want you to take the coin sorter away from her now…. It’s okay, dear, it’s okay, look here, look what Dr. Irene has for you.” She turned on the metronome, set it to the highest speed-tick tick tick tick. The girl ceased her squirming and mewling and leaned forward, focusing her attention, her very being, on this new and fascinating object. She wasn’t just watching it, she was becoming it. Breathing rapidly, eyeballs following the rapid motion, pulse racing, tick tick tick tick.

Irene waited a full minute, then slowly began lowering the metronome’s speed, one setting at a time, and with it the girl’s breathing. And as her breath rate slowed, her heart rate slowed…and slowed…and slowed….

“Lily?” whispered Irene. “It’s all right, dear, everything’s okay, you’re safe now, it’s safe to open your-There you go, that’s my girl. Hello, Lily.”

5

“Anybody home?” a female voice called from the living room. “Carson, Mama Rose?”

Lying on their backs, their hands cuffed through the headboard railing, Mama Rose and Pender exchanged complex, profoundly meaningful glances. We made it! was the primary message in both sets of eyes, but a sincere acknowledgement of the ordeal they’d gone through together was also in there someplace, along with a mutual recognition that their lives were about to get seriously complicated again. “Back here, Dennie!”

Footsteps; then a mahogany-skinned, pie-faced, burstingly pregnant woman, shirtless under faded overalls, appeared in the doorway, staring in horror from the denim-and-tie-dyed-clad body on the floor to the mummified couple on the bed. “Mama Rose? Mama Rose, what happened?”

She doesn’t know, thought the older woman. Doesn’t know L’il T.’s dead. Doesn’t know she’s a widow, doesn’t know that kid inside her is never gonna see his father. “Cut us loose, then I’ll tell you all about it,” she croaked through dry, cracked lips.

It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. Big-bellied and awkward, Dennie had to kneel and go through the corpse’s pockets until she found the universal cuff-key in the watch pocket of his jeans, then climb onto the bed and lean across Pender to reach their handcuffs, her swollen, blue-veined breasts swinging free inside the overalls. Ever a gentleman, and unable to avert his glance, he closed his eyes until she had finished.

It took several minutes for sensation, in the form of a thousand agonizing pinpricks, to return to their unused limbs. In the meantime, it was Dennie who cut through their linen mummy wrappings with a pair of shears, and Dennie who held a glass of water to Mama Rose’s parched lips, tenderly cradling the back of Rose’s head on what remained of her lap while the older woman sipped noisily, greedily, water dribbling down her chin.

Then Dennie eased Mama Rose to a sitting position, propped her up with the bed pillows, rolled up Mama Rose’s pant legs, and began massaging her calves with both hands to restore the circulation. “Now will somebody please tell me what’s going on around here?” she asked. “Teddy never came home last night and he’s not answering his cell phone.”

Rose glanced imploringly at Pender, who was busily chafing his crossed wrists with his tingling hands. He refused to acknowledge her unspoken plea: You tell her. She turned back to Dennie. “Worse than that,” she said.

“Is he…is he hurt?”

Tough-talking Mama Rose, who had always scorned euphemisms, found herself unable to get the d-word out. “Teddy’s…he’s gone, Dennie. Carson, too-they’re both gone.”

Dennie kept working, head down, rubbing the life back into Rose’s legs. Mama Rose thought for a minute the pregnant girl hadn’t heard her, or had misunderstood; then the tears began plopping down onto her bare shins, and she remembered something Dennie had told her once: that Eskimo babies were taught to cry silently.

She longed to take the younger woman into her arms, but they weren’t working yet; she longed to cry for Carson-and for herself-but somehow the long night of horror had robbed her of tears. Which was just as well, because with a cry of surprise Dennie suddenly left off massaging Rose’s legs, and pressed her hands to her own great belly.

“What? What is it, honey?”

“I think I felt a contraction,” said the newly widowed mother-to-be.

“Well that fucking figures,” said Mama Rose. “That goddamn fucking well figures.”

6

Daylight crept reluctantly through the cracks in the blinds. Outside the darkened office, the small town stirred to life. A newspaper thudded onto a front porch; a neighbor’s dog barked to be let out; a crow on the back fence angrily greeted the new day.

Inside, despair. “It’s not fair,” Lily moaned, rocking back and forth on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin and her hands clasped around her shins. “I never did anything wrong, I never hurt anybody.”

Lyssy sat next to her, his hand resting lightly on the nape of her neck. “We know, believe you me, we know,” he murmured soothingly. His posture and manner, his facial expressions, even that believe you me, were so eerily reminiscent of Al Corder that if Irene hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn there was a family resemblance.

The rocking slowed; Lily turned her tear-streaked face toward Irene, who was sitting in a side chair drawn up in front of the sofa. “What happens next, Dr. Irene? Where do we go from here?”

“You don’t need to go anywhere, dear. If what Lyssy just told us is true-and if Lilith was telling him the truth-then you haven’t committed any crime. Quite the opposite, in fact: Alison says you saved her life. So whatever Lyssy decides to do-keep running, turn himself in-there’s no reason you couldn’t stay on here with me.”

“And you won’t send me back to the Institute?”

Irene smiled ruefully. “I promise you, dear, that’s one mistake your uncle Rollie and I won’t be making again.” She turned to Lyssy. “As for you, Lyssy, I strongly recommend you give yourself up before anybody else gets hurt-