The whole family has suffered, Penny, and we’re not any closer to understanding you or what you did not for lack of trying, though. Since I’m something of a film buff, I’ve watched all the movies I could about multiple personality disorder. The Three Faces of Eve, which put Joanne Woodward on the starlet map. Funny enough, your Eve alter came out even though you’ve never seen the film. Sybil, a story we all know, but maybe more have seen the movie than read the book. You were even dubbed “The Sybil of Swampscott.” Cruel, I thought, but people don’t understand DID, and sadly Hollywood doesn’t do a great job explaining it.
More recently I watched that movie Split, from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan. James McAvoy gave a good sense of what having a chaotic and disorganized mind might feel like, but that’s not the mind of a cold and calculating psychopath.
That’s what Palumbo thinks you are. Remorseless. Ruthless. Totally lacking empathy. Faking your alters to do as you please. And maybe he’s right. Maybe you’re more like a heartless killer than you are Kevin from Split with his twenty-three personalities.
One thing I know for sure—Edgewater is the sort of place where you can’t get better, but you sure can get a whole lot worse.
CHAPTER 6
FROM THE OUTSIDE, EDGEWATER State Hospital—approached via a series of wide, tree-lined streets—looked exactly like a prison. A tall chain-link fence topped with rows of razor wire enclosed a series of three-story square brick structures Houses, they were called, with thick iron rods fronting dingy rectangular windows. Inside one of those second-floor windows was the room where Grace’s now-seventeen-year-old daughter slept.
Good as it would be to set eyes on Penny, it would be Eve whom she’d visit today. It was always Eve in here.
Since her daughter’s arrest, Grace’s harried days were filled with running the restaurant as well as meeting with Navarro whenever developments required her attention, or her pocketbook. Soon, maybe today, she’d have a sit-down with Dr. Mitchell McHugh, Penny’s new doctor here, to discuss strategy—not only for her daughter’s treatment, but for the upcoming trial as well.
She was glad Dr. Palumbo had finally resigned. Good riddance to him. Her primary hope was that Dr. McHugh would not only believe DID warranted its own classification in the DSM, but that her daughter had the condition. While Palumbo was out of her life for good, Grace would see the ghost of him soon enough. The assistant district attorney, Jessica Johnson, had an expert witness prepared to testify that DID wasn’t a valid diagnosis, and that Penny suffered from a severe antisocial personality disorder.
Would McHugh be an ally or an adversary? She’d find out soon enough.
Trudging across a parking lot turned scorching hot under an unrelenting July sun, Grace made her way along a curved walkway leading to the secured entrance of Abbot House. Weeds sprouted up through the many cracks in the paving stones. In her mind, everything about this godforsaken place, from its decrepit exterior with its chipped brick and nonexistent landscaping to its bile-yellow interior walls, was cracked. Jack would say if you weren’t crazy when you came in, that’s what you’d be when you got out.
My daughter is here … my girl … my heart.
Off in the distance, Grace spied the tops of two other units poking up from behind Abbot House. When taken together, these three buildings and the series of tunnels that connected them comprised the entirety of the Edgewater complex. One building housed the men, another the women, and a third, the oldest building of the bunch, provided residency for the most violent, volatile, and difficult-to-manage patients. The names of these structures—Crane, Hartwell, Abbot—seemed fitting for a college campus, but these weren’t dorms. The rooms were cells.
At the visitors’ entrance, Grace pressed a round door buzzer so that someone peering through a camera mounted above her head could grant her entry. There were five people in the spare and uninviting waiting room, none of whom she recognized. Good. Nobody, including the paid employees, wanted to be here, so eye contact and small talk were avoided at all costs.
Accustomed to the routine, Grace handed her ID to a stone-faced woman working the screening desk in a cubby-sized space secured behind Plexiglas. After completing the check-in procedure, Grace stored her purse in an empty locker, closing it with a lock she’d brought from home. An armed guard emerged from behind a heavy steel door secured with a biometric apparatus and keypad. Grace found it ironic that the “hospital”—and she used that term lightly—had elected to upgrade their security systems before they addressed the insufferable “patient” accommodations—“patient” being another word she used lightly.