“I didn’t start working with Anna,” she says, “until the second hospitalization in 2007. That was a few months after the incident in Pennsylvania. The couple was still considering adoption, you see. It was just that one time—and once the sister said her good-bye, Anna was perfectly normal. But then, a double whammy. The couple finally conceived, after seven years of trying. Even still, they were planning to go ahead with the adoption, but then Anna was on the subway with the foster mother and she picked up another . . . echo, ghost, whatever. Not a very friendly one this time.”
Myron. I would remember Myron even if I’d never spent a single minute in hypnotherapy. He was very strong when he was angry, and Myron was almost always angry. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget Myron and keep his voice and his face out of my dreams. Trying to forget the nightmares that followed after Myron was finally gone. Trying to seal his file shut and wall it off in the most remote corner of my mind.
All of the others I’ve hosted fit the label of ibbur. They’ve been needy, but not malevolent. They asked for my help. And in cases where I couldn’t help, they eventually went away. Myron, on the other hand, was a dybbuk. He didn’t ask. He simply took.
I don’t want her to talk about Myron.
And she doesn’t.
“Let’s just say her foster parents decided that it was better not to risk the welfare of an infant with a child who was so volatile. Who might be dangerous. So Anna lands back in the hospital. I started working with her when she left the hospital and was assigned to a group home. I accepted the diagnosis of the previous doctors. Officially, I still accept that diagnosis.”
“But unofficially?” Porter asks.
“Anna changed my mind about a year and a half after I started working with her. One of my clients died that winter. Bruno was an elderly man, homeless much of the time. He had issues with kleptomania and substance abuse. I guess the chair you’re sitting in was the last place he felt safe.”
Porter glances down at the chair and his eyes widen. I stifle a laugh.
“Anna knew things about my client that I simply couldn’t explain away. Including where he’d hidden the very nice ballpoint pen my daughter had given me the previous Christmas. I was pretty sure he’d taken the pen from my desk, and I’d been working with him, trying to get him to trust me enough to admit it. Then they found his body in Layhill Park, not too far from the homeless shelter that took him in from time to time. Later that week, I’m talking to Bruno again—through Anna—and he tells me that he stashed his treasures, as he called them, in a plastic bag that he hid in the bushes near the bleachers at the baseball field in the park. And that’s where I found my pen, along with a bunch of other stuff he’d collected, including an earring I’d lost two years earlier. Guess he found it in the carpet and decided to keep it.”
“He could have told her that in your waiting room, Dr. Kelsey. Maybe she read your file. Or maybe she followed him.”
“Anna was six at the time, Mr. Porter. Their appointments were on different days, and she was accompanied to and from her appointments by a social worker back then. Believe me, I tried to think of a rational explanation. But there wasn’t one, so I finally had to accept that Anna wasn’t just telling me what she believed to be true, as I’d thought. She was telling the actual truth. And while many of my colleagues would still disavow any claims of psychic abilities, I consider myself a realist. We have mapped the human genome, but we still understand very little about the human brain. There are some sections for which no scientist, no psychologist, can pinpoint an exact purpose. The fact that I cannot tell you why Anna has this ability and others do not, the fact that I cannot quantify it, doesn’t make it any less real.”
Porter is quiet for several moments. “So you don’t think she really has this dissociative identity thing. But you go on treating her a few times a week anyway? Is that ethical?”
Kelsey leans forward and her eyes narrow, a faint red flush creeping up her cheeks as she stands up. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s angry. I’ve seen her annoyed in the past, pissed off about some bit of bureaucratic insanity, but never angry.
“If you think I’m in this for money,” Kelsey says between clenched teeth, “take a good look around you, Mr. Porter. Yes, I kept Anna as a patient despite the fact there’s no category for her actual condition in the diagnostic manual. How would you like to walk around each day with one or more visitors in your head? Dead people you don’t know, didn’t invite, and have to struggle to evict? Dead people who leave behind their memories, whose deaths you dream about in vivid detail for weeks after they finally leave? Anna needs at least as much help dealing with the effects of her condition as anyone I have dealt with in thirty-six years of practice, so I have absolutely no qualms about the ethics of keeping her as a patient.”
Your grandpa might want to watch his mouth, Molly. Kelsey may be little, but she’s fierce. I think she could take him.
Molly sniffs derisively, no comment.