The Other Mrs.(91)

I’ve never heard anything as ridiculous in my whole life.

She tells me that the child doesn’t say much but that she likes to draw. She says that the two of them, this woman and the child, drew pictures together today, which she shows me, plucking a sheet of paper from her briefcase and handing it to me.

And there it is, sketched with pencil on a sheet of notebook paper this time: the dismembered body, the woman, the knife, the blood. Otto’s artwork, the same picture I’ve been finding around the house.

I tell her, “I didn’t draw that. My son drew that.”

But she says, “No.”

She has a different theory about who drew this picture. She claims that the child alter inside of me drew it. I laugh out loud at the absurdity of that, because if some child alter living inside of me drew it, then what she’s saying is that I drew this picture. That I drew the pictures in the attic, in the hallway, and left them around the house for myself to find.

I did not draw this picture. I did not draw any of the pictures.

I’d remember if I did.

I tell her, “I didn’t draw this picture.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she said, and for a split second I think she believes me. Until she says, “Not you specifically. Not Sadie Foust. What happens with DID is that your personality gets fragmented. It gets split. Those fragments form distinct identities, with their very own name, appearance, gender, age, handwriting, speech patterns, more.”

“What’s her name, then?” I challenge. “If you spoke to her. If you drew pictures with her. Then what’s her name?”

“I don’t know. She’s shy, Sadie. These things take time,” she says.

“How old is she?” I ask.

“She’s six years old.”

She tells me that this child likes to color and draw. She likes to play with dolls. She has a game she likes to play, which this woman played with her in an effort to get her to open up. Play therapy, this woman tells me. In this very room, they held hands and spun in circles. When they were both as dizzy as could be, they stopped. They froze in place like statues.

“The statue game, she called it,” this woman tells me, because they held still like statues until one of them finally toppled over.

I try to imagine what she’s telling me. I picture this child spinning in circles with this woman, except the child alter—if I’m to believe her—is not a child. It’s me.

It makes me blush to think of it. Me, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, holding hands and spinning around this room with another grown woman, freezing in place like statues.

The idea is absurd. I can’t stand to entertain it.

Not until Tate’s words come rushing back to me: Statue game, statue game! and it strikes a nerve.

Mommy is a liar! You do know what it is, you liar.

“On average, those with DID have around ten alters living within them,” she tells me. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes as many as one hundred.”

“How many do I supposedly have?” I ask. Because I don’t believe her. Because this is just some elaborate scam to besmirch my name, my character, making it easier for me to take the fall for Morgan’s murder.

“So far I’ve met two,” she says.

“So far?”

“There may be more.” She goes on to say, “Dissociative identity disorder often begins with a history of abuse at a young age. The alternate personalities form as a coping mechanism. They serve different purposes, like protecting the host. Standing up, speaking up for the host. Harboring the painful memories.”

As she says it, I think of myself, harboring parasites. I think of the oxpecker bird, who eats bugs off the backs of hippos. A symbiotic relationship, once thought, until scientists realized the oxpeckers were actually vampire birds, digging holes to drink the blood of the hippopotamuses.

Not so symbiotic after all.

She says, “Tell me about your childhood, Dr. Foust.”

I tell her I can’t remember much of my childhood, nearly nothing, in fact, until I was around eleven years old.

She just looks at me, saying nothing, waiting for me to put it together.

Are you prone to periods of blackouts, Dr. Foust?

But blackouts are temporary losses of time, caused by things like alcohol consumption, epileptic seizures, low blood sugar.

I didn’t black out for the extent of my young childhood. I just don’t remember.

“That’s typical in cases of DID,” she tells me after a while. “The dissociation is a way to disconnect from a traumatic experience. A coping mechanism,” she says again, as if she didn’t just say that moments ago.

“Tell me about this woman,” I say. I’m trying to catch her in a lie. Certainly sooner or later she’ll contradict herself. “This Camille woman.”

She tells me there are different types of alters. Persecutor alters, protector alters, more. She has yet to ascertain which this young woman is. Because sometimes she stands up for me, but more often her portrayals of me are hate-filled. She’s huffy, ticked off. Angry and aggressive. It’s a love-hate relationship. She hates me. She also wants to be me.

The little girl doesn’t know I exist.

“Officer Berg took the liberty of doing some research,” she says. “Your mother died in childbirth, no?” she asks, and I say that yes, she did. Preeclampsia. My father never spoke of it, but by the way his eyes got glossy whenever her name came up, I knew it had been horrific for him. Losing her, raising me alone.