When She Was Bad: A Thriller by Jonathan Nasaw Page A

Lyssy couldn’t think of anywhere to escape to, even if he had been able to convince Lily to come with him—nor could he think of any reason she’d want to. Outside of Lyssy’s fantasies, they scarcely knew each other. Perhaps, though, that could be changed—when Wally brought him down to the director’s office for his weekly therapy session that afternoon, with his heart beating like a rabbit’s from the strain of trying to sound offhand and casual, he asked Dr. Al how the new girl—what was her name, Lily?—how Lily was doing.
    “Settling in,” the doctor replied, not at all fooled. “I noticed you two seem to have hit it off quite nicely yesterday.”
    “Yes sir, we did. Matter of fact, I was hoping I could invite Lily to my birthday party tomorrow.”
    “Well I can’t make you any promises yet,” said Dr. Al. “There are quite a few variables that would have to be—Lyssy? What is it, son?”
    For Lyssy’s gold-flecked brown eyes were swimming with tears. Turning away, he shook his head in anguish. “I love her, Dr. Al. I know it sounds stupid, but I really really love her.” And it all came pouring out—or almost all: Lyssy knew better than to mention that he’d even considered the possibility of escape.
    “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of,” said Corder, when Lyssy had finished. “She’s a lovely young lady, and the two of you have so much in common, it would be almost unhealthy if you weren’t attracted to her.”
    “But of all the times for this to happen,” Lyssy moaned. “It’s all so…so hopeless.”
    You can say that again, thought Corder. His heart went out to poor Lyssy—he decided to inform the staff that if Lily seemed amenable, they were to give the two patients a little more room and a little more privacy. Let them have their walks, get to know each other in the short time Lyssy had left.
    As for the birthday party, he told himself, that would depend on how quickly Lily recovered from the morning’s ECT therapy. If there were no complications and no further alter switches, he decided, he’d ask Patty to escort Lily to the party tomorrow after work. It would mean paying two, three hours at time-and-a-half to Patty as well as Wally, but that was a small enough price to make Lyssy’s last birthday here as happy as possible. (It was also fully billable.)
    And in the meantime, there was one other thing he could do to help relieve Lyssy’s anxiety. “Grab some couch, young man,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. “I think we’re long overdue for a hypnotherapy session.”
     

    The book of things that all DID patients have in common would be a short one indeed: 1) they all suffered egregious abuse in childhood, really over the top stuff; 2) they all have at least one alter identity; and 3) they are all tremendously suggestible when it comes to hypnosis—which may in fact be the very quality that engenders the disorder in the first place.
    For a psychiatrist, having a patient who can be slipped into a trance state so easily is the equivalent of an internist having a patient with a glass abdomen—it makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on. For that reason, and to save time, early in their association Al Corder had implanted a code phrase in Lyssy’s subconscious mind, one that would trigger a hypnotic trance state whenever he heard it.
    From then on, all Corder had to do to put Lyssy under was whisper that trigger phrase in his ear. It even worked on the alters, which indicated to Corder something that may have been intuitively obvious, but had never been proved clinically: that the alters all share the same subconscious from which they had sprung.
    After dabbing away his tears and blowing his nose with a tissue from the box on the desk, Lyssy limped over to the green leather couch across the room from the fireplace and lay on his back, his head resting on a hard leather cushion encased in a disposable paper pillow cover—a cootie protector,