Here it goes, I thought, my psychoanalysis. I led her into the living room and purposefully took Daddy’s favorite chair. It helped me hold on to my sense of superiority. I sat back, with my arms on the arms of the chair, looking, I was sure, like some sort of princess holding court. This was, after all, my kingdom and not hers. She sat on the sofa across from me.
“I know that what you see happening to your mother is quite disturbing for you,” she began.
I pounced. “My mother never confused us. She never called me Kaylee or called her Haylee. Never! And she wouldn’t permit anyone else to get away with it, either, even my father.”
“I understand, but you have to realize, Haylee, that your mother is in a state of shock. At this point, it will only do more damage to force her to accept Kaylee’s disappearance when she blocks it out. It’s better if we go along with it as best we can when that occurs.”
“How can we do that? Kaylee’s not here! If you didn’t drug my mother again just now, she would have come down here to lecture the two of us and would have remembered that Kaylee is gone,” I snapped back. “Then what? We pretend Kaylee’s in another room or in the bathroom until you give Mother another pill?”
She closed and opened her eyes, projecting that tolerance I hated on the faces of my teachers and especially on Kaylee’s face. It had the effect of forcing your words to echo back at you and turning your anger into regret. “For now, we have to humor her, pretend that Kaylee is here when she forgets or blocks out that she isn’t. We can try to get her to change her train of thought, which was what I was doing. I’m afraid she’s going to move in and out of this state of mind, I hope for only a while. Sometimes she’ll remember Kaylee’s gone, and sometimes she won’t.”
“Hopefully for only a while?”
“Yes, hopefully for only a while.”
“What are you saying? You mean she might not? She might never believe Kaylee’s gone?”
“I’ve had patients like that, yes. The situation would need more drastic approaches. Look, the mind is incredibly stronger than we often imagine. It will do what it can to protect her from realizing something so painful. Eventually, facing Kaylee’s disappearance, if the disappearance continues, of course, will be quite devastating.”
“Eventually? It looks to me like it is devastating right now.”
“It can and might get a lot worse,” she said, as firmly as Mother had ever said anything.
“How can you tell all this so fast? You haven’t been here one full day?” I asked, more like demanded. Her superior self-confidence was annoying me. And I certainly didn’t want to hear that Mother might never believe that Kaylee was gone. Nothing would change if that was true.
Concerned, however, that Mrs. Lofter might read something more into my irritation, I tried to hide it, stuff it under a look of sadness. But it refused to be kept silent.
“That would be terrible, horrible. It would be like living with a ghost in the house.”
“Yes, it would. I’ve been involved in many similar situations, I’m afraid. Many of them involved an only child, which, as you can imagine, shatters parents, perhaps mothers more than fathers. Your family situation is complex, even without this event.”
I stared at her a moment. She seemed to know a lot more about us, about Mother. “Complex?”
“There’s a divorce. There are other issues,” she added softly.
“What other issues? How do you know about our issues?”
She was silent.
I leaned forward. “You and my father met before you came here, didn’t you?” I asked, my suspicion rising like mercury in a thermometer.
“Why do you say that?” she countered, but weakly.
I looked away. I could recognize guilt in someone’s face. As Kaylee used to tell me, “It takes one to know one.” Mrs. Lofter’s response was a yes, I was sure.
I turned back to her, no longer intimidated by her. “Why did my father pretend to be meeting you for the first time here? What’s going on? I won’t be treated like a child.”
“No one wants to treat you like a child.”
“Well, then, why be dishonest?”
She looked trapped.
She might have the education and the experience, but I had the instincts. I’d knock her down a peg or two.
“We didn’t want to frighten you more than you already would be,” she confessed. “No one was trying to fool you or do something behind your back, Haylee.”
“Which was what you did,” I said dryly. “I suppose the three of you met—you, Daddy, and the doctor—and discussed me as well as Mother?”