she not only designed an enhanced curriculum for me, she gave me individual tutoring after school.”
“Is that ‘me’ primarily Max, or one of the other alters?”
“Christopher, mostly.”
“May I speak with Christopher?”
“Sure-why not?… Good morning, Irene.”
It had taken but an instant.
“Good morning, Christopher. Nice to meet you.”
“Oh, we've met. In the jail.”
“Yes, I remember. I believe you kissed my hand.”
A shy, winning grin over his shoulder. “A liberty-but irresistible.”
“Quite all right. So how do you feel about what's going on?”
“The therapy? What's good for General Motors is good for the USA.”
“I don't follow.”
“What's good for Max is good for the rest of us.”
“I see.” One of her professors used to call I see the therapist's hiccup. “Tell me about Miss Miller.”
He sighed-a lover's sigh. “She was in her late twenties when we first met. Delicate bones. Pale, freckled skin. Funny upturned nose. Radiant- radiant! — reddish blond hair she wore piled and pinned on top of her head like they used to wear it a hundred years ago. Sweet little figure. Very shy, very empathetic. You could see everything she was feeling in those big green eyes-when I showed her the bruises from the beating after Max broke Wandmaker's nose, they filled with tears. She took me down to the school nurse herself.
“After that everything happened pretty quickly. The police were called, my parents were arrested at work, and I went home with Miss Miller that afternoon-the alternative would have been a temporary group or foster home situation, or protective custody in Juvie, which they believed I would have seen as punishment.”
“Understandably.”
“Understandably. Anyway, Miss Miller lived in an old Victorian house within walking distance of the school. She fixed up the spare room for me. She said I didn't have to talk about anything if I didn't want to. I said I sure didn't. I remember we had Twinkies for an after-school snack-she bought them especially for me-and we watched old movies on television-she loved old movies-and I did impressions of the actors for her. Eventually I picked up all the classics-Bogart, Cagney, Stewart.
“Her bedroom was upstairs, with a spare room across the hall. She made that up for me, but of course I couldn't get to sleep that first night. So she let me sleep with her. We watched TV in her big bed, and drank cocoa. I remember watching her take her hair down. She was sitting at her vanity, wearing a long white nightgown. Her back was to me, but she knew I was watching as she unpinned it and it came tumbling down. She told me over her shoulder that she had to brush it a hundred and fifty strokes every night, and asked me to help count the strokes.
“The moonlight was coming through the window and shining off that beautiful strawberry blond hair, and when she let me do the last few strokes, I thought I was going to die from happiness…”
Long silence. Too long. “What happened next, Christopher?”
Now the words came tumbling out rapidly. “It wasn't her fault, it wasn't Miss Miller's fault. She didn't get any pleasure out of what happened next, after she came to bed. I was the one who insisted on hugging her. I threw my arms around her and clung to her like a little monkey, and when she tried to push me away, I cried and clung even harder.”
He stopped. Irene waited a few beats, then prompted him:“Were you aroused?”
“Yes.”
“Did you experience orgasm?”
“A dry one-I was only nine.”
“From frott-from rubbing against her?”
“I know what frotteurism is. And the answer is yes.”
“Did she know?”
“Of course not!”
Irene couldn't miss the defensive tone, but decided not to call him on it yet. He was describing things as he'd experienced them as a nine-year-old. That was good-she didn't want to interfere with that. In the normal course of therapy there would come a time when she would need him to bring his adult perceptions to bear on the situation, in order for him to understand that as a child, he was blameless-that a woman who would allow a boy his age to have sexual relations with her, especially at such a vulnerable time, was as much a monster as Maxwell's parents. Once he understood that, she could help him deal with the anger and denial, hopefully without evoking the homicidal alter.
But this was not the normal course of therapy-not even close. With any luck, she thought, she would escape or be rescued before then. In the meantime, she had to feel her way along slowly and nonconfrontationally.
“How did your parents feel about what was going on?”
“Well, little lady, Ah guess ya could say my pop was kind of embarrassed. Soon as they got out on bail he took his doublebarrel and blew mah mom's brains all over the wall with one round a double ought six, then blew his own head off with another.”
A John Wayne impression. Irene sensed that he was close to cracking-still, she had to ask the question. “And how did you feel about that-your whole life changing, losing your parents? It must have been terribly difficult.”
He turned around to face her. “Guilty, I guess,” he said in his own voice. “And glad. And guilty at feeling glad. I killed them as surely as if I'd pulled the trigger. But there would be no more beatings, no more rapes, no more being locked in the closet or terrorized in the basement. Plus I had Miss Miller. Can we take that swimming break now? This is tougher than I thought.”
“Of course. But it just occurred to me, I haven't brought a bathing suit.”
“No problem,” replied Maxwell. “I'm sure we can dig one up some place.”
56
The ridge was first settled by pot growers back in the sixties, Christopher explained to Irene as they returned to the house. The hippies had lived in psychedelic-painted school buses at first, he told her, and with the money from their first few sinsemilla harvests they'd dug wells and paid the electric company to run power lines up from Charbonneau Road. With power for the water pumps, they were able to irrigate the next crop with drip lines and double their yield.
Rolling in dough by now, the tree-hugging hippies reluctantly cut down a few Douglas firs and built the house on the very ground where the trees had stood. They also bought an old barn in the valley, took it apart, and reassembled it board by board on Scorned Ridge to use as a drying shed. Unfortunately, summer was too short and autumn too damp in Umpqua County to allow sufficient curing time-they eventually dug a pit six feet deep in the meadow, lined it with concrete, and roofed it over with thick Plexiglas.
Mystery solved, thought Irene. It was the drying shed she'd spotted in the meadow this morning. “What happened to them- the growers?”
It was a big operation, Christopher explained-too big, even for Oregon's liberal drug-enforcement policies. In the late seventies, helicopters descended upon the plantation in the meadow. The hippies managed to escape, but the crop was burned and the property seized, to be sold at auction several years later-Miss Miller's representative just barely managed to outbid the lumber companies.
The house at the edge of the forest was high and narrow like a Swiss chalet, with a sharply peaked shake- shingled roof and overhanging eaves. As they approached, Irene noticed that many of the dark-stained deal boards were warped, bowed, and even split.
Maxwell followed her eyes, read her thoughts. “They nailed it up green,” he explained. “Someday I'm going to have to rebuild the whole damn thing.”
The rear, kitchen door faced the forest; Christopher led Irene around the side of the house to the screened-in front porch that faced west, across the meadow.
