“The state never located her parents, I take it?”
Kelsey shakes her head. “Only a first name on the note—someone assigned her a middle and last name later on. Either she was born outside the state of Maryland under a different first name or she was born on a different day, because there’s no record of anyone giving birth to a baby named Anna on December 3, 2001. Once the search came up empty, they put her into the foster program. She was a prime candidate for adoption—an adorable toddler, blonde hair, blue eyes, sharp as a whip. But a few weeks later, they get strange reports from the first foster parents. Talking in her sleep. Not toddler talk, either. Fully formed adult sentences, and the tone of voice was different from her usual speech. And then it starts happening when she’s awake. So Anna was placed in a children’s psychiatric ward where they observed similar behavior. She gets an official diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Porter says. “Usually called multiple personality, isn’t it?”
She nods. “At any rate, Anna was hospitalized for a few months. And then it disappeared completely. No symptoms, no unusual behavior. A new set of foster parents was rounded up and things were going really well. They knew about her previous problems, but everything seemed fine, so they chalked it up to the trauma of desertion. They even started the initial paperwork for adoption.”
This part I do remember. The memories are even clearer because of the hypnotherapy I’ve done with Dr. Kelsey over the years. It was the best house I’ve lived in. A small fenced yard, a sandbox in the back. A yellow pail and orange shovel with a handle in the shape of a crab. Sesame Street every morning. I can’t remember the foster parents’ names, but they had a little black Yorkie named Dorothy, who licked my hands when she sat in my lap and shared my Goldfish crackers when I left the bowl on the floor.
“I’m guessing Anna had another relapse?” Porter asks.
Kelsey shrugs noncommittally. “If you want to call it that. They took her up to Pennsylvania to meet her prospective grandparents. She was sitting on their porch swing when, according to their report, she started speaking in a different tone and calling the foster father’s dad by his first name, asking him about people he went to high school with. Asking about them by name.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The house had been in the family for several generations. The older guy’s sister died when she was in her teens, back in the late sixties, while he was serving in Vietnam. She never got to tell her brother good-bye. Anna . . . picked her up . . . when she touched the swing.”
“Picked who up?” Porter asks.
“The sister’s ghost. Her psychic echo, I don’t know. In Jewish mysticism, they call it an ibbur—when a spirit takes over a host to finish some task, something incomplete that keeps them from moving on. There are similar concepts in other faiths as well. Anna thinks that, in most cases, the spirit . . . the consciousness of someone who can’t move on to whatever comes next, eventually returns to the last place or the last thing that made them feel happy. Or safe. For the sister, it must have been that porch swing. And she couldn’t let go until she told her brother good-bye.”
The brother is vivid in my memory. A chin that needed shaving, the strong smell of cigarettes and motor oil on his shirt. His sister’s name was Lydia and the old guy was Paul. Lydia wasn’t pushy. She just said, I never got to say good-bye. Please, would you let me say good-bye? I could feel how important it was to her, that it was everything in the entire world to her, so I let her take control. I was too young to think about consequences, about whether I could fight her if she decided she didn’t want to leave. I was still hugging him when she went away. Everyone was crying and a bit freaked out. But Paul smiled behind the tears. And Lydia was happy. She went away happy.
Porter just snorts. “And you believed this story?”
“I didn’t,” Kelsey admits, with a quick apologetic glance toward the mirror. She thinks I don’t know this, but I do. Even five-year-olds can tell when someone doesn’t believe them. When they think you’re making it up or crazy or whatever. She was always nice about it, though, and most people weren’t, so I didn’t really mind.