Julie Is Three

by Craig DeLancey

There’s more than one way...

* * * *

“Will you let her go?”

That was the question I had to answer before the next morning. Kristine Louvrier asked it of me, standing with her hands on her hips, her mouth compressed into an angry line. I was glad that my desk stood between us.

“She’s my niece,” she added. “I’m next of kin. You have to give her to me.”

“I have to do what’s best for the child,” I said.

“You know what’s best for the child. It’s to let her come home with me.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “It’s not... not so obvious.”

Ms. Louvrier’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’ve told you too much. And you wondered why we keep it a secret. You’re actually considering locking a seven-year-old girl in a mental ward—imagine the trauma!—because I told you the truth.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“You exploited me and you’re going to destroy her. Or worse: Does this mean you’re going to tell other people about us?” She was a head shorter than me, but I was sitting and she seemed to tower over me. She gazed at me so fearlessly, with such anger, that I was starting to wither. Or maybe, just maybe, I suspected she was right to be angry.

“Please. Sit.”

She didn’t. “I’m getting a lawyer. I’ll be back. I’m going to sue you, your hospital. You send her to a mental ward, and I’m going to make it my mission to destroy you in court. I’m gonna sue your dog.” She turned and yanked on the door to my dim little hospital office, and the heavy steel swung open so hard it slammed into my bookcase, bounced off, and slowly swung closed in her wake.

I stared at the calendar page on the back of my door. It was seven months behind.

Would I let the girl go? Would I tell others? Those were the important questions, I knew. But the question that haunted me, the question that was going to follow me later as I crawled along in traffic on my commute home, was a different question she had asked me: Aren’t you lonely? “We have a girl,” Thomas, the head nurse, told me just three days before. He waved me down as I tried to hurry past the front desk in the morning. I was in a rush because I had to oversee the transfer of a criminally insane schizophrenic who landed in our emergency room. There was just enough time to squeeze in my rounds before seeing to the transfer.

And, truth be told, I just wanted to get everything done as quickly as possible, so I could sit in my office and drink some tea and zone out for a while. Maybe surf the web.

“I, uh...” I pointed at the open corridor behind him, to indicate I had to get moving. Thomas was a big man, and just by politely standing before me he pretty much blocked the whole hallway.

He continued in his long drawl, “Parents got killed in a car crash. She was center of the back seat—broke her arm but otherwise no damage. But Dr. Wells thinks you should see her.”

“How old?” Thomas called pretty much any female human a “girl.” The age range could be large.

“‘Bout seven, I guess.”

“Traumatized?” I’m a psychiatrist, so Wells’s referral meant the girl potentially had a psychiatric problem.

“Sure. Who wouldn’t be? Saw her mommy and daddy get killed. She seems all shook up. But, more than that, it’s... well,” and Thomas leaned forward, exaggerating the confidentiality of the detail, “she talks funny. Like she’s going in and out of it.”

I nodded. “That would be expected of a kid in shock.”

I decided I’d better see her first. I found her room, on the pediatric hall. It had water-stained walls that looked squalid under the too-bright ceiling lights. A small girl, beautiful in the way any seven-year-old must be, lay asleep on the bed, twisted in her white covers, barely bigger than her pillow. A snowy white new cast covered her right forearm, from the elbow down over the palm.

I lifted her chart off the bed hook. No physical trauma, other than the arm. No signs of abuse: no scars, no lesions, no burns, no previous breaks or fractures, no evidence of sexual activity. A healthy girl, very likely with a good family. The kind of profile you’d expect given parents who made their seven-year-old sit in the center of the back seat.

She stirred on the bed and opened her eyes. They were dark and deep set, staring out at me as if from a long distance. She pulled her long, dark hair out of her face.

“Où est ma mère?” she asked.

Round here that meant Cajun. From down near the delta, most likely. My French is nearly nonexistent, but I used the bit I have. “Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas français. Parlezvous anglais?” She shook her head no, but then she said, “I do.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “Julie, I’m Dr. Douglas Everly. You can call me Dr. Doug. How are you feeling?”

“I’m not Julie.”

“Oh?”

“I’m Juliana.”

I looked at her chart again. The name there was definitely Julie. “Oh. So, Juliana, how are you feeling?”

She shook her head, as if it were too hard a question. I didn’t try to discover whether she fully understood that her parents were dead. Instead I said, “You speak French. You’re from Louisiana?”

“I don’t speak French,” she answered.

“What?”

“Julie speaks French.”

“Excuse me?”

“Julie speaks French. I can’t.”

“But you spoke French just now.”

“No I didn’t. That was Julie.”

I nodded and locked eyes with her. “I see. And you’re Juliana. You don’t speak French.”

“Nope.”

“Are you from Louisiana?”

“Yes.”

“Could I, if I wanted to, speak to Julie?”

She shrugged. “Sure, but she doesn’t hardly know any English. And Juny is kind of slow. You’d better talk with me.”

“Juny?”

“Juny speaks a bit of French, too, but she’s not smart. She can draw, though. And play piano.”

“Juny, Juliana, Julie,” I said softly. “So Juliana...”

“Yeah?”

“Have you always had... Juny and Julie with you?”

“Course.”

There was a tap at the door. Richard Stev-ens, the head doctor for our hospital, stood there.

“Excuse me, Juliana,” I said. I went out into the hall, pulling the door closed behind me.

Stevens played tennis for keeps most weekends, and weekdays he watched the hospital balance sheet with angry determination to keep it as thin as he was.

“What about this one?” he asked, pointing through the window on the door to Julie’s room. His med training was in neurology, so he fancied himself competent in psychiatry also.

“I’m not sure,” I told him. “Strange signs of trauma.”

Stevens nodded. “This isn’t a mental hospital. Get her out of here quick. Today, if you can.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Stevens cut me off. “They need your help with that schizophrenic patient. He’s gonna need meds.”

I nodded, stole a last glance over my shoulder at Julie, and then headed for the psych hall.

“God, Karen, what a day,” I told my wife that night.

“Not as bad as mine,” she said.

I put the boxes of Chinese take-out on our kitchen island. Honestly, the two of us should be watching our weight instead of eating fried egg rolls and sweet-and-sour pork, but neither of us can face cooking after the hour commute home. Karen was already in collapse mode: She had changed into a track suit and pinned her blond hair above her head. I took off my tie and threw it over a stool.

She got out two forks and handed one to me.

“Plates,” I said. I hate eating out of the boxes. She shrugged and I set the table. When we sat down and put napkins on our laps, she grabbed the remote—always lying somewhere on the kitchen table—and turned on the television that glared out at us from the kitchen counter.

The sound seemed to boom through the kitchen. We have a nice kitchen: cherry cabinets, white walls, and granite counters shining under recessed lighting. But I don’t much like it. Every clink of a fork on a plate seems to echo tightly in the long room.

“Hon, can we not have that on?”

“Okay.” She frowned and turned the TV off. “You upset?”

“It’s work. You know.”

“Something happen?”

“A schizophrenic patient threatened a nurse, hurt a doctor, ran around screaming. A total mess.”

“That’s terrible. But are you okay now?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She bit an egg roll.

“But really that’s not what’s bugging me. We got a young girl in today, and I’d not had a minute to evaluate her before Stevens started trying to push her out of the door.”

She paused, holding her egg roll half way to her mouth. “You worry about kids, I know. But that... that thing that happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

I shrugged. “I just want to be sure it doesn’t happen again. And this girl... she’s special. A weird case. A mystery. She talks in different voices.”

“What’d’you mean?”

“As if... as if she had multiple personalities. What we call dissociative identity disorder, in the trade.”

“Weird. But that happens, right?”

“It’s rare. So rare I was never really convinced it exists. But I guess I’m willing to believe that some people, really abused and messed-up people, will hide themselves in the delusion that they’re different people. As an escape.”

“Is she abused and messed up?”

“That’s the funny thing. She doesn’t seem like it. Not at all.”

Karen shook her head. I forked some more lo mein onto my plate and she turned the TV back on.

“I’ll keep it down low,” she said. “I just want to see the news.”

I went to see the girl first thing the next morning. She sat up in her bed, awake but silent. There were damp streaks of tears down her cheeks, and her eyes were swollen. So, she’d finally come to understand that her parents were dead.

“Hi, Juliana,” I said.

“Juny,” she muttered.

“Okay. Hi, Juny.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

She shrugged.

“I understand. A little.” I pointed at her head. “Your hair is in a braid today.”

She nodded. “The nurse did it for me.”

For an absurd moment I pictured big Thomas braiding the girl’s hair, then realized of course it had been the night nurse.

“It looks nice,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Listen, honey, I just learned that your aunt is coming. She should be here today or tomorrow. How’s that?”

“Aunt Kristine? That’s good.” She sniffed back tears and smiled weakly.

“You like your aunt?”

“Yeah, all of her.”

I frowned. “What does she do?”

“Part of her studies fish at college. More college.”

I thought about that a moment, but then hit on an idea. “You mean graduate school?”

“That’s right. She went to college before and one of her studied old languages and one of her studied the oceans. And one of her cooks great. I like them all. Can I go home? Can the Aunt Kristines take me home?”

“I hope so,” I said.

Kristine Louvrier, Julie’s aunt, proved to be a young woman, broad shouldered and not very tall, with short dark hair and a very direct manner. I was paged to the front desk when she arrived.

“Please come to my office,” I told her.

“Can I see Julie?”

“Of course, but first can we talk a moment?”

She frowned at that, opened her mouth with what looked like the intent of protesting, and then just nodded. I led the way.

“How is she?” she asked me when we sat down.

“Julie is physically fine.”

“Physically.” She fixed me with steel gray eyes.

“I have other concerns.”

“Is she... traumatized?”

“Of course,” I said. “She’s lost her parents. But... there’s something else.”

Her eyes narrowed. She did not, as I expected, ask me about the something else. Instead, she asked, “Can I take her home?”

I looked down at my paperwork. “You’ll be taking custody of her, I see.”

“I’m a Ph.D. student, nearly done with my thesis. Writing up the results. I can stay in Julie’s home and finish my Ph.D. while Julie finishes her school year. Then we’ll just have to see where I get a job. But whatever happens, we’ll stay together. And we’ll keep her house. We have all our family near there.”

“That sounds ideal,” I told her.

“Can I take her home, then?”

“That’s what we need to determine.” I sighed and looked around my office. It had become disheveled in the last few months. In the last few years, really. Piles of papers and books covered nearly every surface. The folded corners of unread hospital memos poked at odd angles out of the bookcases. There were coffee cups resting like forgotten friends here and there around the room. Most still had an inch of black liquid festering in the bottom. Suddenly, I was ashamed at how I’d allowed the room to grow so disordered. It told the truth about me: that I’d burnt out.

I shook my head and tried to gather my thoughts. “Julie has some very unusual signs of psychological trauma.”

Again, I waited, but Kristine Louvrier did not ask me what signs. Often, whole extended families are complicit in abuse, aware that it is happening. This woman’s silence suggested that instead of being curious and concerned, she was eager to hold onto a secret.

After a pause, I added, “I think she suffers from a serious delusion. The delusion that she is several people.”

Louvrier did not move. She said, “She’s always had two imaginary friends. It must just be that.”

“What are their names?”

“Excuse me?”

“The imaginary friends.”

“Juliana and Juny.”

I nodded. I didn’t know whether I felt worse or better about the aunt accurately knowing these two other names. I leaned forward. “I would like to see Julie’s home. Where you’ll be living.”

“You want to do a home inspection, like a social worker?”

“Not exactly,” I said. I had no legal power to ask for a home inspection. “Something informal. Not official. I’m having trouble understanding why Julie has this delusion. And it’s my job to make sure she’s fit to leave, and that the environment she enters won’t make her worse.”

She squinted at me but then nodded. “Okay. When can you come out?”

“Tomorrow.” I stood and gestured to the door. “Now, let me take you to Julie.”

I went into the hospital the next morning to do quick rounds before heading out on my drive to Julie’s home. I was packing my briefcase to leave when Stevens banged on my office door.

“Everly, what are you doing with the girl in pediatrics? The Cajun kid?”

I sighed. “She has signs of unusual emotional trauma, but I can’t confirm what kind.”

“I heard. Multiple personalities.”

“I’m not sure I believe that. I need just a little more time to determine where’s her best destination.”

“You’ve had two days. She goes tonight. Send her to Cresthaven. They’re better equipped to decide where she goes next.” He moved on without a good-bye.

Cresthaven was a hellhole where the poorest were dumped, loaded up with lithium, and allowed to shuffle around dirty tiled halls all day. The Cresthaven staff watched TV and counted out pills, and weren’t competent to do anything else.

I could stall the head doctor another day. No one got transferred out as quickly as he asked. The paperwork alone took more time than he allowed for the whole process. But I had only a day.

The drive to Julie’s hometown consumed the remainder of the morning, most of the way on winding two-lane roads through farm fields broken by long stretches of tall trees draped with kudzu. A gas station, a few homes clustered close together, and a diner constituted the tiny town’s center.

I stopped at the diner. A long bar stretched away from the door. Behind it the cook worked ambidextrously, a spatula in one hand and a knife in the other. Rows of booths lined the other walls. Old men and women, and a few my age, filled the booths and talked in relaxed joviality. Framed and fading photographs of people hung over them—a long history of customers, I presumed.

I sat at the bar and ordered the fried chicken, some pie, and a coffee from a smiling waitress with a name tag that read BRIANNA.

When I got to eating the pie, I asked the waitress for directions to Sycamore Street.

“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You just head on down here half a mile and turn left. You can’t miss it. There’s a little graveyard right on the corner.”

“Thanks.”

“Who you going to see?”

“The Louvriers’ home,” I said.

A man two seats down on the bar shook his head. “You know what happened to them, don’t you?” He wore the full outfit of a fireman, with his fireman’s helmet on the stool seat beside him.

“Yes, sir, I do,” I told him. “I’m going to see Kristine Louvrier.” It couldn’t hurt, I decided on the spot, to see what people here would reveal about the town or the Louvriers.

“Well, now, I heard she were back or at least around. Gonna raise the little Julies.”

I was sure he used the plural. I leaned toward him, about to say, “Excuse me?” but the waitress gave him a pointed look, and he straightened up and closed his mouth. She quickly said, “Harry here is our deputy sheriff.”

“And fireman?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he told me. “This is a small town. Most everyone is related, a cousin of one kind or another, first or second. And we’re kind of isolated out here. So, we all do everything. Stephen back there cooking lunch—” he pointed over the counter at the cook dropping more birds into the fryer with one hand while shaking oil out of a frying basket with the other. “—is our town librarian. Brianna here is also town clerk and Sunday school teacher. Always been that way here.”

“The Louvriers were fine people,” the waitress said. “Everyone here loved them. You a friend of theirs? You miss the funeral?”

I introduced myself. It caused a moment of silence. Then Harry the fireman and deputy said, “Well, that’s right. You got to make sure things are going to be best for the... Julie and... And you’re gonna find they are. Things are best for hers here.”

I thanked them and paid the bill.

As I pushed through the front door, I thought I heard the deputy ask the waitress, “Julie is three, isn’t she?”

The house was modest but pleasant, white with a broad porch, on a sycamore-lined street so quiet the loudest sound was the wind in the trees. The gutters were clean, the roof black enough to be new, and the grass high but even, so that you could tell it had been cut regularly but neglected since the car accident.

Kristine Louvrier met me at the door, wearing jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt, with a highlighter in one hand and a textbook in the other. I glanced at the title: Coelenterate Biology.

“I’ll give you the full tour,” she said.

She methodically showed me every room of the house, with brief explanations punctuated by long resentful silences.

Julie’s room was messy but not dirty. In one corner was a bed. In another stood a drawing desk with pictures pinned over it. Another corner held a chair and small table and bookshelves, all littered with small plastic animals with big eyes. Some kind of Japanese things, they looked like. And in the final corner there were pictures of some teen musician taped on the walls, above a heap of skates. It suddenly struck me as like a room shared by three different but normal little girls.

The rest of the house was clean but lived in. Last on the tour, Kristine Louvrier showed me the basement and garage. The garage, like my own, was crowded with the things we accumulate over the years. I stared at the three bicycles—small, medium, and large—lined up by the garage door, aimed at the driveway. Helmets hung expectantly from the handlebars. A terrible sadness swept over me, to see these waiting skeletons of a perished family life.

“I’ll make tea,” Kristine said, interrupting my reverie. I followed her inside.

“What’s your judgment?” she asked, as she served Darjeeling in the living room.

“The house is wonderful,” I said. I sat down on the couch and put my hands between my knees. “But you’re not telling me everything.”

She squinted with suspicion. “What do you mean?”

“Julie doesn’t just have imaginary friends. She believes that she is three people. No seven-year-old could maintain such a façade, so well, so consistently, for so long, just on a playful whim.”

She sat down across from me in a high-back chair. “You like having this power over people? To break their families?”

My voice broke as I whispered, “No. No. I hate it. But three years ago I sent a little boy home to parents I thought were fine. A lawyer and his smiling trophy wife. And they beat that boy to death.” And beat something in me to death also. I limped through every long day of my job after that. “I’m never going to make that mistake again. Julie is a wonderful girl. Smart. Attentive. Nice to talk to. I like her. I owe it to her to be right about this. Now, Julie isn’t normal. And that usually means something—something really bad—has happened.”

Kristine Louvrier stared at me a long time. I may be burned out, but I’ve still learned through the years to recognize when someone is about to explode with the possibility of speaking the truth. I waited. I waited, expecting her to confess that something terrible had once happened to Julie.

Instead, what she finally said completely flummoxed me.

“It’s a mutation, I think. Carried in this one family.”

“Wha... ?” I furrowed my brow, trying to decode that. It made no sense. I asked about a little girl’s family life, and this biology Ph.D. candidate starts talking about mutations. For a moment I thought she might be mentally ill also, making random paranoid associations. “What are you talking about? What’s a mutation?”

“We all have people inside us. All of us in this family.” She stood, went to the window, and looked out at the silent, shaded street.

I finally understood. “You’re saying that... you too?”

She nodded, still looking out at the street. “It goes back many generations. We have several persons inside. Usually three, but not always. It must be some kind of beneficial mutation.”

“Beneficial?”

“We’re no crazier than other people.”

“But you...” I faltered. I told myself that I mustn’t get caught up in this absurd idea. The simplest explanation was that she was lying or delusional.

She turned away from the window. “Don’t you ever get... full? Not tired, just full. Like, you’re trying to learn something, and you’ve worked at it a while, and you just need a break? You might have all the time in the world. But you just can’t fit any more into your head.”

“Sure. I went to med school.” I could study maybe four hours a day, and then I was done. And after, the other things I loved—poetry, composing—proved impossible. They became almost painful, like noise.

“When that happens to me—to one of us—we just switch to a different self.”

I only nodded. If I were to grant her claim, I could see then how that might be useful.

“And all of humanity’s best accomplishments come from dialogue, right?” she continued. “From people interacting and challenging each other. Well, each of us can interact and challenge herself.”

“But—”

“You know,” she interrupted, “one of me studies cnidarians. What most people call jellyfish and corals.”

“Julie said fish.”

“No. You mean Juny said fish. Julie and Juliana wouldn’t confuse it.”

I tried not to show my surprise. She was right.

“I study cnidarians. And long ago I had a revelation. What is your blood?”

Her tone made it clear that her question was academic. So I shrugged. “Oxygen delivery system.”

“That’s what it does, but what is it? It’s the ocean inside. All progress in evolution is to take what’s useful that’s outside, and bring it inside and bring it under control. Bring the sea inside, control its contents and temperature, so you can bathe your cells even while you walk on land. That’s circulation. Bring the sights and smells of the world inside, where you can manipulate them and plan. That’s representation, imagination—the mind. Well, the greatest leap in human progress was to become social beings. And my family, we’re just bringing that inside us. You sit in society like a sponge in the sea. We carry a society within us, like blood.”

This had gone far enough. I put my hands together, as if pleading with her. “From where I’m sitting, this is not a very plausible explanation. I expected abuse. That’s still more likely than this... story.”

“I’ve told you the truth. Why can’t you even consider it possible?”

“Okay. Suppose what you say is true. We can prove it. Test the personalities the way we test synesthesia: exhaustive high-speed question and response. I could show that you can’t be faking it. Then I can let Julie go with certainty that her... behavior is not a kind of trauma.”

She shook her head. “Not yet. We’re too few. We don’t want people to... overwhelm us. Make us a freakshow. Maybe even accuse us of being the mutant threat.”

“You’d be a curiosity for a few weeks and then forgotten.”

“Maybe. But we shouldn’t have to beg for privacy. Should we?” She sighed. “Now you know our secret.”

“But, even if I believed this story, what you’ve told me doesn’t confirm that Julie will be safe.”

“We’ve raised generations of our kind here. Not one of us has been mentally ill. Not even a bit.”

I frowned. Suddenly I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped by the confusing complexity of this. Some part of me found her story weirdly plausible. The skeptic in me was resolved that I was being duped. I stood.

“I have to get back to the hospital. I have a long drive.” I went to the door.

“When will you... ?”

“Decide? It has to be soon.”

“I’ll come to your office tomorrow,” she said.

I nodded. “I have appointments till four. Can we meet at four-thirty?”

“Sure.”

She followed me to my car. I got inside and put the window down. “Suppose what you say is true,” I said. “Don’t you get... lost? Confused? By all those voices?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. No more than single people get lost or confused.” She looked at me hard and said softly—and, I realized in surprise, with genuine curiosity— “Now you tell me. Don’t you get lonely? All by yourself all the time?”

I frowned but didn’t answer. I started the engine. “See you tomorrow.”

I had to battle the next day with the county jail, which wanted to return the criminally insane schizophrenic to us. I learned that they’d already shipped him to another hospital in the city two weeks before—it was no doubt that hospital that had dropped the guy in our ER.

Nerves frayed and hands shaking from adrenaline after shouting into my phone, I went straight into the meeting with Kristine Louvrier at four-thirty. It was almost inevitable that we would end up in a fight, given my condition. When she threatened to sue and stormed out, I sat at my desk catching my breath, hoping to calm down. I wasn’t given the chance: big Thomas stuck his head in.

“Dr. Stevens has been looking for you. He’s mad that little girl is still in pediatrics. And he wonders where the hell you’ve been all yesterday.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“You look tired, Doc.”

“I am.”

Thomas knew better than to tell me to go get some rest. He gave me a sympathetically wistful smile and left.

I walked dejectedly down to pediatrics.

Julie sat propped up in her bed. The television flickered silently in the corner. A checkerboard sat on the bed beside her, the pieces arrayed in the middle of a game. She drew on a pad of paper on her lap.

“Hi,” I said. I checked her chart but nothing had changed. I’d given her a battery of cog tests in the morning, and then a social worker had talked to her using a therapy doll. She showed no cognitive deficits and had reported no inappropriate touching. I leaned against the end of the bed now and looked at her drawing: a cat with huge eyes. It appeared clever, rather professional to my eye, kind of like one of those Japanese cartoons. Or one of the figurines in her room.

“Who’s winning?” I asked, pointing at the checkers game. I assumed she was playing the nurse, who inevitably had been called away to rounds.

She shrugged. “I’m not playin’.” She switched pencils, and started darkening one iris of the cat’s eyes.

“Who is?” I asked.

“Juliana and Julie.”

“Ah. And you’re Juny.”

“Course.”

I noticed then that she was drawing with her left hand, with quick facility. I frowned. During our session in the morning, she had struggled to fill out some written tests, trying to grip the pencil around the cast that covered her right wrist and palm.

“You’re left-handed?” I asked.

She only nodded.

“But you write with your right hand?”

“Naw,” she said, focusing on her quick strokes. “Julie and Juliana do. I don’t.”

She looked up at me then and set the pencil down. She spoke faster, with sharper intonation, as she asked, “Can I go home tomorrow, Dr. Doug?”

I hesitated. The change in tone was eerie, and the muscles around her eyes had switched from a slack ease to attentive concentration.

“Juliana?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I sighed. “Perhaps. We’ll figure it out tomorrow, anyway.”

“I miss school,” she said. “Julie misses school.”

“And Juny?”

“Juny never pays attention in school. Except in music class.”

“Oh.” I straightened. “Well, don’t stay up too late. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay.”

As I was opening the door, I heard the clack of a checkers piece. I looked back. She was reaching across herself and awkwardly using her right hand to arrange a black piece. There was a pause, and then with the right hand she moved a red piece. She sat back, sighed, and then her expression took on a relaxed, even vacant expression, almost transforming into a different face. She picked up the pencil with her left hand and continued to draw.

I went out into the hall. The head doctor stood there, looking at Julie through the window on her door.

He nodded a minimal greeting. “Strange case. Fascinating. I understand why you’ve been stalling. There’s a paper in it, for sure. But, you know, I think she can be treated with standard pharmaceuticals. Thorazine will kill those other voices. Get her out of here first thing in the morning.”

After my miserable commute home, I found my wife watching television in the kitchen. She’d ordered pizza out, and about a third of it remained, sitting in its soggy cardboard box on the counter.

We exchanged salutations and I went to the cupboard. I, at least, was going to eat from a plate.

“I had a bad day at work,” I said.

She nodded. “I’m sorry, hon. That’s getting regular for you lately.” But she looked right back at the television.

“We don’t talk much anymore, do we?”

She frowned. “We talk.”

“No we don’t. You watch TV during dinner every night. We always eat take-out.”

“You expect me to cook?” She frowned, suspecting these were the opening moves of me picking a fight.

“No. No. But, I mean, we’ve got time then.”

“Time?”

“We didn’t cook. So we’ve got some time. To talk.”

She turned off the TV. “Okay. Talk.”

We finished the pizza in silence.

The next morning, as I came in, Kristine Louvrier had already staked out the waiting room. She paced before a seated heavy man in a suit who clutched a briefcase. When she saw me, she made a straight line to intersect my path.

“I’ve brought my lawyer. You better get yours.”

“No need,” I said.

They followed me to my office. “I would like to speak to Ms. Louvrier alone a moment,” I said.

“Absolutely not,” the lawyer drawled. He put a hand on his vast stomach—as large as my own, I noted with a wince—and shook his head angrily.

I looked at Kristine Louvrier. Her eyes moved quickly around the room while she thought. Finally her steel eyes met my gaze.

“One minute,” she said.

“I advise against it,” her lawyer protested.

“One minute.”

The lawyer sighed and went into the hall. She closed the door, turned, and glared. “So?”

I sat. “I want you to give me your word, your word, that if anything starts to go badly for Julie, you’ll call me.”

She frowned. Slowly, she sat down too. “What changed your mind?”

Lying awake in bed the night before, Stevens’s words, “Thorazine will kill those other voices,” had echoed in my mind, horrifying me. It sounded so much like he spoke of killing two... persons. I realized then that I already believed.

But I would be ashamed to repeat what our head doctor had said. So I just shrugged. “Do you promise?”

“Why do you want me to?”

“Because nothing is nature is so simple. Mutations that are purely beneficial are rare. Your petty fear of a week of notoriety cannot be allowed to endanger a girl’s welfare.”

After a long pause she nodded. “I promise.”

“That’s not good enough,” I told her.

She scowled angrily. “What do you... ?” And then, after a moment of reflection, she smiled. “We promise,” she said. “All three of us.”

I handed her the release paperwork, already filled out. And then I handed her one of my business cards. “Please. Call me, if I can ever help.”

She nodded, then rose and opened the door.

I stood in the waiting room and watched them leave. Juliana—I think it was Juliana—waved to me as she stepped through the automatic doors. Then I did my morning rounds, but at eleven I went back to my office and called my wife.

“What is it?” she asked, still wary after the evening before.

“Hon,” I whispered. “Can you sneak out of work for an hour and come have lunch with me?”

Her voice softened. “Is everything okay? Work okay? Is it that girl?”

“I guess so.”

“Is she okay?”

“I think she will be,” I said. “I think she’ll be as well as any girl can be who just lost her parents.”

“Good.”

“But she made me think, hon. I just feel... I feel lonely. I need to hear your voice now. Sometimes I can’t think without having you hear me and talk back to me. And sometimes I...” My voice almost broke. I felt the pressure of tears, but I resisted them. I took a deep breath and started again. “Sometimes I... I don’t like myself much. When I’m alone. But I like myself more when I’m with you.” There was a long silence. Then she said, softly, “I’ll be right there.”

Copyright © 2010 Craig DeLancey