(AL): Altered personality states, amnesia surrounding the trauma. Sometimes accompanied by a paranoid alter ego, a scared alter, a sexually deviant alter, a dominant or aggressive alter—
(FH): How many of these alters did Carly have?
(AL): That’s what made her case so interesting. She had only one other alter, and that one was fairly normal, as far as alters go. She was fully developed, but not exaggerated, like alters can be. Another unique feature is that the alter, who called herself Kaitlyn, came out regularly, at timed intervals.
(FH): Is that unusual?
(AL): It’s unheard of. Another unusual thing about the Kaitlyn alter is that she heard a voice—a voice speaking to her when there was nothing there. She called it Aka Manah.
(FH): A voice. She was delusional?
(AL): She heard a voice. We all hear voices, but we know that they are our thoughts. Kaitlyn wasn’t sensitive to that. She heard the voice in her head and outside of herself. Most often outside of herself. She thought it was real.
(FH): I see. [Pause] When did the Kaitlyn persona come out?
(AL): At night. Kaitlyn called herself a child of darkness.
(FH): And that wasn’t extreme?
(AL): In the scheme of things, no. It simply amounts to a normal teenager’s angst about her existence. I believe it was Kaitlyn’s “job,” as it were, to protect Carly from the dark hours, owing to what happened to her parents. In trauma, darkness is often given personification—like an evil force.
[Pause]
(FH): Tell me about what happened at the end of September 2004.
(AL): I only found out about all of this later, but it was around the end of November when Carly seemed to integrate, but she did so in a peculiar manner.
[End of tape]
12
136 days until the incident
Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson
Sunday, 19 September 2004, 6:30 pm
Dorm
I should throw tantrums more often.
Jaime knocked on the door before she came in, which I should have known meant something was wrong. She’s grown so much that when I saw her, I thought I might actually cry. Her arms are leaner, her stomach flatter; the pudginess of her toddler years is gone. She’s five years old already.
When she saw me, she paused, eyes searching mine, she was afraid of me but when I opened my arms, she laughed and ran into them. I picked her up—she’s so heavy now!—and spun her around like I used to.
My heart was breaking.
“It’s been too long, Spud,” I told her. “Were those fake parents of yours trying to keep you away?”
Jaime bit her lip as I put her down, and I felt bad, but only for a minute.
“Hey,” I said, bending low so that I could look her in the face. “Don’t listen when they talk crap about me, okay? The Baileys are a different kind of people from our family. They don’t understand.”
Jaime’s eyes began to well, and she nibbled on her lip. Some things don’t change after all.
“What is it, Spuddy?” I took her waist and wiggled her until she laughed. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“Even a bad thing?”
“Of course, even a bad thing. And you know, when you tell someone else a bad thing, it breaks in half, so that you’re only carrying a small bit of it. So come on.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Bailey don’t like you.”
What else is new? I’m well aware that they look down their straight, pointed little noses at me, judging with their self-righteous little eyes. That Johnson girl… she has problems. Mental problems… Gasp! Shudder!
“I know. It’s okay. They don’t have to like me. But you have to like me because I’m your sister and I love you. That’s all that counts.”
“They want to keep you away. I heard them talking.”
It took all my self-control not to press her for information right away. Instead, I said, “Oh?”
She nodded. “They say that you’re a bad affluence—”
“Influence.”
“—a bad iff-iffluence, and you should go back to prison.”
Prison. What a nice euphemism for the loony bin.
“Jaime, we weren’t in jail. You know that, right? We were in a kind of hospital getting better after the accident.”
“Mrs. Bailey says that you have to be locked up because your personality is wrong.”
Word for word, Dee. My. Personality.
Is.
Wrong.
I took Jaime’s hands. “My personality isn’t wrong. And I don’t think Carly’s personality is wrong. Do you?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Bailey thinks our personality is wrong because she thinks one of us shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh.”
“I want you to do something for me, okay?”
She nodded, her eyes fixed on my face. I was her big sister. I would make everything right again. I would take a world that had become bent and confusing overnight and smooth out all of the wrinkles. Her hope is a noose around my neck.
“Whenever the”—insert: Dickball—“Baileys talk about me, I want you to close your ears. Close them like you close your eyes, and don’t listen. They don’t understand. They think they do, but they don’t.”
“But I can’t close my ears. I don’t have earlids.”
“Oh, you do,” I said earnestly. “They’re inside your head. If you imagine them closing, they will.”
Jaime considered this for a moment. “Okay.”
“Now, come on, enough about the Baileys,” I said, rolling my eyes. She giggled. “Tell me about you, about friends—everything!”
She wrapped her little arms around my neck, and I helped her onto my lap.
“I started school, and I like it a lot. I have a friend called Mandy, and she likes me and lets me play with her dolls.”
I frowned. School? Already?
“Oh, yeah?” I prompted.
“She has a Bratz doll that has hair that can grow, and a Barbie doll with a tail like a mermaid, and…”
She told me the minutiae of her life, and I felt as though I had never heard anything more interesting or vital in my whole existence. I soaked up every little detail—about her new crayons (green was her favorite), the dresses she got to wear (disgusting, frilly concoctions to make her look like a doll), the shopping trips she and Dickball Mrs. Bailey took into London, and the dollies that Mandy let her play with.
“Do you have a picture of Mummy and Daddy in your room?” I asked her abruptly, because it suddenly occurred to me what the Baileys were doing. They weren’t merely giving an orphan a place to live; they were adopting her, absorbing her as their own, sucking out her Johnson and injecting their Bailey! It explained the dresses, the “keep away from Carly” mission, the “Carly’s personality is wrong” mantra—it explained why she had started schooling so young. Indoctrination.
“I don’t have any pictures from before.” The words slipped out like a bubble, too fragile to resist the destruction of dry air.