The Half Life of Molly Pierce (15 page)

It was almost as if someone else had taken a turn at living my life.

Someone else.

And suddenly the answer hangs waiting in the air in front of me.

I could reach up and pluck it from the atmosphere.

Someone else living my life.

I don’t feel anyone else inside me.

But what else accounts for it?

What else accounts for any of it?

“Molly?”

“Wait,” I repeat, but quieter this time. This time barely a whisper escapes my throat.

I’m remembering something else. Something that happened to me. I had never given it a second thought.

I walked into Alex’s office one day and went to sit down in my usual chair but found a book in my way. I picked it up. The cover was a woman’s face cut into a dozen vertical pieces.
Sybil
.

“What’s this?” I asked, tossing it on his desk.

He looked up like he’d forgotten it was there. Reached for it, shook his head, and chuckled.

“My last patient borrowed it. Must have forgotten to tell me he was done. It’s a good book, you know. You might like it.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s about a woman living with sixteen separate personalities. All trapped inside her head. Fascinating case.”

“It was a movie or something, right?” I asked, feigning interest to make Alex happy. All those psychology books bored me to death. He’d tried to get me to read some in the past and they only succeeded in putting me to sleep.

“It’s been the basis for a couple movies. You should read it, Molly. You might find it interesting.”

I had woken up two hours later.

Why had I woken up two hours later?

Had Mabel come out to see what Alex knew about split personalities? Had he known, then, about her? He must have. That look on his face was too forced. Too offhanded. Too clever. He’d left the book there on purpose.

“Molly?” Sayer says again and this time I lower my hand and look at him.

“Who’s Mabel?” I say again. Even though I know. I know who Mabel is now and maybe I’ve known all along.

“I’m not supposed to—”

“I have to go. It’s fine, I have to go.”

I find my sweater, pull it on and go into the kitchen. The clock on the microwave says two a.m.

I can’t go home now. But I have to. I have to see something.

Sayer follows me. He tries to take my hand but I pull away from him, find my shoes and put them on, hopping, one by one.

I don’t know who you are.

And I’m certainly not the girl you know.

“Molly, please don’t leave this late. Please just stay until morning. We can talk, okay? Please don’t leave.”

I don’t want to talk. I just want to get out of this apartment, get into my car, and drive home.

There is something I have to do. Something I have to see.

“It’s fine, Sayer. I’m fine. Okay? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Text me when you get home at least, okay? Let me know you’re safe?”

“Sure. Sure, I will.”

Outside, the night is unforgiving. Cold and windy with quick bursts of rain. I get soaked on the way to my car, but then it stops and I drive with the windows open to keep myself awake. I’m shaking and my teeth are chattering drumbeats in my mouth when I finally get to my driveway.

My parents haven’t left any lights on.

I use my cell phone like a flashlight but still trip up the front steps and only just manage to catch myself on the railing.

I’ve shut my brain off. I’m moving through the house with no obvious brain functions other than those that are absolutely necessary. Take a step. Take another step. Open this door. Step through the door. Cross the room and open the cabinet underneath the TV.

This is where my parents keep the photo albums. I’ve turned on every light in the living room without really realizing it. I spread the albums across the floor in chronological order. One summer, in the middle of one of her frequent bouts of organizational inspiration, my mother sorted every single photograph in the house. She put them all into identical green albums. She wrote the corresponding years on the front in thick black magic marker. Hazel and I were supposed to help, but we mostly just looked through picture after picture, finding every naked photo of baby Clancy that we could and making one big collage on the carpet, ecstatic at our cleverness.

But there was one thing I kept noticing.

In the photographs of me.

It wasn’t every photo. It wasn’t even most of them. But every so often I’d find one, pull it out of the big shoe box where all the pictures sat messy and unorganized before my mom got to them. And I would look at this picture of myself. Me with my arm around Hazel. Me in midjump on my bed. Me hanging an ornament on the Christmas tree.

And it was like.

I don’t know.

It was like I was looking at someone else. It was like I was looking at someone who looked exactly like me. She had my hair and she was my height and she had the birthmark on my arm. She was me. Except she wasn’t.

And I couldn’t explain it. So I put them all away. And even though I told myself it was nothing, wasn’t there a small voice in the back of my head? Wasn’t there something nudging at the corners of my brain, something telling me to look deeper, investigate further? Wasn’t there something telling me they weren’t nothing. That they didn’t mean nothing. That they meant everything.

I want to find those photos now, to see if they contain any evidence, any clue. To see if they make sense. Do they confirm anything? Or is it just my overactive imagination finding things where they don’t actually exist? Creating panic where panic isn’t needed.

I flip through album after album. I pull open the covers and scour over every year from my birth to the present.

But I can’t find any of those photos.

Where did they all go?

Did I just imagine them?

I start over. I get to my sixth birthday party, the year Clancy put his entire face in the cake, when I hear a movement behind me. I jump a mile and turn around.

It’s my mom.

“I wasn’t at Erie’s,” I say. I guess I’m crying because my voice is all thick and wrong.

“I know,” she says, “you were with Sayer.”

“How did you—”

“He texted me when you left. I’ve been waiting up for you, Molly. I was worried.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” I say.

She nods. “What are you looking for?”

But she sounds like she knows what I’m looking for. And that’s when I notice the shoe box in her hands.

“You knew about her?” I say. I wipe my face with my sleeve and maybe I try to stand up but I feel rooted to this spot on the carpet, the mess of albums spread out in front of me like a halo.

“Not at first,” she says. She takes a couple steps into the room but she seems unsure where to go. She surveys the carpet and sighs. “There were hints, when you were younger. You’d ask me questions you should have known the answer to. Once you woke up one morning and asked who decorated the Christmas tree. When it was you, of course. I mean, we all did. But you were there.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone?”

“I never thought . . . It was always little things, you know. And even then, Molly, you were so good at pretending to be okay. And besides, it went away.”

“It did?”

“When you were about ten or eleven. You stopped asking weird questions. And whenever I looked at you, I knew it was really you. Before . . . well, sometimes I wasn’t sure.”

“And then?”

She takes a few more steps and sits on her knees in front of me. “And then things got a little rough. About a year ago. We made the decision to—well, we strongly suggested you start seeing someone.”

Strongly suggested
is a funny choice of words because what actually happened was my parents loaded me into the minivan and drove me to Alex’s office. There wasn’t a suggestion involved. They didn’t tell me where we were going until we were in the parking lot. I thought we were headed to the bookstore; they told me a big shipment had just come in. I’d spent five minutes arguing in the foyer about how much homework I had to do, and why couldn’t they take Hazel or Clancy instead of me? But, no, they said, it had to be me, and before I knew it I was being shepherded into Alex’s office and I was shaking his hand and my parents were saying,
Now, we’ll just be in the waiting room, Molly. We’ll just be out here, okay?

My mother sighs.

“In retrospect, we should have taken you there so much earlier. We should have been paying more attention, I guess; we should have noticed something.”

I told Clancy everyone would be better off without me and my parents had taken me to see a shrink and he had told me to call him Alex.
Just call me Alex
, he’d said.
I’ll call you Molly
.

“It didn’t take him very long to . . . to meet her,” my mother continues. She looks impossibly sad; she looks impossibly guilty. “And when he told us . . . well, that particular explanation had never crossed our minds.”

“These are the pictures?” I say, reaching for the shoe box. She relinquishes it at once.

“Of Mabel,” she says. “They used to be in the albums, of course. But a couple months ago, she asked me to take them out. I told her . . .” Her voice chokes. She puts a hand over her mouth. “I told her these were our family albums, and she was family. But she wanted to take them out. So we sat down together and we went through every one and she pulled out all the photos of her. Some of them, I couldn’t even tell. But she knew them all.”

“Why? Did she say why?”

“She said she wanted them to be in one place. So you could see them all, when you were ready. And then you could decide what you wanted to do.”

“She said I’d ask for them?”

“She knew you very well. I think she was getting ready to say good-bye,” my mom says. There’s a sadness in her voice but it’s a sadness that’s unsure of its place. She doesn’t know where to put it; she doesn’t know where it came from or how it works.

“Open it,” she says. “See what you think.”

What I think. I don’t know what I think. I don’t know about anything, but I open the shoe box and I pull out the first photograph.

Me, riding a bike in the driveway. Shooting a big, sloppy grin to the camera.

No. Not me.

Mabel.

I can see that now.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“A
re you serious with this shit, Alex?” I say, grabbing the book from his hands and holding it up as evidence.

My transition is fluid. If you are not paying very close attention, you miss it.

It takes Alex a moment to figure it out.

“Molly?” he asks tentatively.

He’ll never say my name first because if it isn’t me, Molly will be wondering why he’s calling her Mabel.

That was my idea.

“She’s not ready to find out,” I say, tossing the book back on his desk. “And she won’t find out like this.
Sybil
, Alex, really? Could you be more obvious?”

“Maybe if she read it—”

“I won’t let her find out like that.” I sit down in the chair, cross my arms over my chest. He makes me so mad sometimes I could scream. He doesn’t know what’s best for her. Only I know what’s best for her. “Besides,” I add, “they’re saying the shrink made the whole thing up.”

“Largely fabricated,” Alex corrects me. “Exaggerated. And you know I don’t like the term
shrink
.”

“Whatever. I just thought we had agreed that we don’t tell her until I say she’s ready.”

“Mabel.”

I’m about to get one of his lectures. I can tell by the way he says my name. I get up from the chair, having no desire to be trapped in it while he reprimands me. I go to the window. It’s spring. The air is almost warm enough.

“I know her better than you,” I say. My preemptive strike.

“I have no doubt about that, Mabel,” he says.

“Can you stop saying my name like it will validate me or something? I know my own name; I’ve had it my whole life,” I snap.

“You’re upset.”

“Of course I’m upset. We had a deal and now you’re trying to tell her behind my back!”

“I’m not telling her,” he says.

“What is that, then? What’s that book?” I say, pointing at it.

“I’m giving her the tools to figure it out for herself.”

“I told you I’ll tell her, Alex! But you have to give me time, okay? You have to trust me. She’s not ready yet.”

Alex sits on the edge of his desk and watches me. He’s always been a little wary of me. But I guess that’s fair.

To him, everything is my fault.

Molly’s illness.

They don’t call it a split personality or multiple personality disorder anymore. It’s dissociative identity disorder. And he thinks it’s all my fault.

Well, it’s not, Alex.

You’ve read that book; you should know.

It’s Molly’s fault. She made me.

She wasn’t whole enough on her own. She made me to fill herself out. She made me to stick into the corners of her body, to take up room, to be complete.

“When do you think she’ll be ready?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“Next month? Next fall? Next year?”

“I don’t know! I said I don’t know.”

“You’re hiding an awful lot from her. It’s always been my opinion that honesty is the most important aspect to successful therapy.”

“Honesty, sure.” I snort. “Look, Alex, you don’t know what she’s like. She doesn’t want to know, okay? She
refuses
to know. It’s not always me! Sometimes she makes me come out. Sometimes she pushes herself away. She worms down into the very bottom of our body and she stays there until I’ve made everything safe again.”

The word
safe
.

I know that’s what Alex is dwelling on because he looks away from me. He looks down at his own hands and he won’t meet my eyes until at least two full minutes have passed.

“Safe?” he repeats. He tries hard to keep the judgment out of his voice but, hey, even shrinks are human.

“All I’ve ever done is to keep Molly safe,” I say through my teeth.

“That’s not how I see things,” he says.