The Girls He Adored

72

I Rene, though she was still flirting, letting Christopher rattle on about how lovely she was, how her hair set off the earrings, could feel herself starting to lose her nerve. How tempting it seemed, how easy it would be, to sit here and let him talk himself out. Then a nice lunch, maybe a swim, and another travesty of a session. A nice dinner. Maybe a video-there was quite a collection in the parlor. Her room was comfortable enough. And if he insisted on sex, as long as he remained Christopher, it wouldn't be so bad. He was gentle-he even smelled good. It wouldn't be giving up, she told herself-she'd just be staying alive, waiting to be rescued.

But for how long? This was a highly unstable multiple, living in an unstable relationship with… Irene made a differential diagnosis of Miss Miller on the fly: a pedophiliac with either narcissistic, avoidant, or dependent personality disorders, or all of the above, exacerbated by post-traumatic stress disorder to the level of psychosis.

So why are you still futzing around? she asked herself. Futzingthat was one of Barbara's expressions. And it was the thought of Barbara-please Jesus let her be alive-that gave Irene the strength to push on.

“What do you say we get back to work here, Christopher? I think the best way I can express my appreciation for these lovely earrings is by moving ahead with your therapy.”

“Okay by me.”

“Yesterday you said something I found interesting. You said that when you were in love with Mary, you were able to resist Max's control.”

“Right.”

“But on Sunday you told me that what was good for Max was good for the system. Is that something you really believe?”

“No, but he does.” Suddenly Maxwell sat up, swung his legs over the side of the chaise, took the pen from Irene, and set it down on the arm of her chair, then pressed her hand between his two hands. “Tell me that you love me, Irene-tell me quick if you want to keep talking to me.”

Was it a trick? Was it even Christopher? Irene felt an immense weariness coming over her, like someone lost in a snowstorm, who only wants to sleep, yet knows that sleep is death. The thought of saying those three little words to this man was equally repellent to her both as a therapist and as a woman. But if this was Christopher, she had to do everything in her power to help him maintain dominance over the system, over Max.

“I love you.” Her voice rang strangely in her ears.

“Kiss me like you mean it.”

In for a penny, in for a pound. She allowed him to press his lips lightly to hers.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now I'm going to tell you a story. But I need you to hold my hand the whole time, and look into my eyes.”

“All right.”

“When I was fourteen I started keeping a diary. Every day that I was in control of the body, I'd make an entry. When Miss Miller and I were going good, it'd have three, four daily entries in a row. When we were fighting, there might be one a week. Then one night I discovered I had run out of pages-filled the diary up. I was looking around my room for something else to write in, and in the back of the closet I found an old composition book-you know, the kind with the black-and-white marbled cardboard covers?

“But when I opened it up, I saw that someone else had already started a diary in it. A boy by the name of Martin. A boy who'd lived in that very room. Went to my middle school. Had the same teachers I did. Slept with Miss Miller. I was so jealous I could have spit.”

“So you weren't the first?” Irene said softly.

“That's what I thought, too. Then I checked the dates. February nineteen eighty-two through June of eighty-three.”

“He was an alter?”

“One of us. One of us. But I'd never heard of him. So I started reading his diary. He'd been there almost from the beginning-he was one of the first split-offs. And he hated Max, he despised him. Called him an outsider. He wrote down that he was writing the diary for the rest of us to find. He wrote that Max was the devil incarnate, and was trying to destroy him. That eventually Max would destroy us all. But if only we'd work together we could fight Max, take away his power over the system.

“Ten pages in, the last entry ended in the middle of a sentence. Below it, in a different handwriting, Max's handwriting, were the words Sic Semper Traditor.”

“Thus always…?” That was as far as Irene's medical Latin would take her.

“Thus always to traitors. If it's possible for an alter to die, Martin was dead. Worse than dead-at least dead people leave memories behind. There was nothing left of Martin but that notebook.”

He fell silent, but his eyes, only inches from Irene's, were eloquent: they spoke of fear, they begged for help.

“I understand what you're trying to tell me,” she said. “You're afraid that what happened to Martin will happen to you if you try to resist Max-even though you know that that would be the best thing you could do for the system. But I need you to know that there's one big difference between yourself and Martin.”

What? His lips moved soundlessly.

“You have me.” But in her heart of hearts she was every bit as terrified as Christopher appeared to be.