“It doesn’t even look like her,” I muttered, stunned. I watched Angelina sit on a bed, fidgeting her fingers together rapidly as she talked with an older woman who had a notepad in her hand and glasses perched on her round nose.
The radiant Angelina with shiny, coal-black hair was pale with large, dark circles under her eyes. The straight ends of her hair were frayed like a tattered blanket. Her toned arms were skinny and looked like twigs hanging out from beneath a too-large hospital gown.
“That’s because it isn’t her,” her father ground out, his voice strained.
I cleared my throat, tearing my eyes away from Angelina. I moved over to the other side of the door in case Angelina happened to look up and see me.
Phil spoke again, still keeping his eyes on the small window. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know…but I am.” I crossed my arms over my chest, after taking the baseball cap off my head, and leaned against the cool wall. “And I think it’s time this is settled.”
Phil’s head slowly swiveled over to me, but I didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Do you think it’s fair what you’re doing to me?” I asked, my brow deepening. “I know you think it’s my fault. That her being here is my fault, but I think deep down you know it’s not. You just want someone to blame.”
Phil’s wrinkly face twitched, his clear eyes glossing over for a moment before he turned his gaze back to her. Silence passed between us. I briefly heard soft music start to play down the hall, paired with the hum of the air conditioner. Then, Phil’s wobbly voice started, and it was the only thing I could focus on. “You know, she always wanted to be someone she wasn’t.” He paused, crossing his shaky arms over his chest. “Even when she was younger. I can still remember the day she said that she was no longer going by the name of Angelina, but of Lori.” My head ticked to the side as the name Lori floated around. Phil let out a raspy, biting laugh. “At first, her mom and I thought it was cute, her always changing her mind about who she wanted to be, what she wanted to be when she grew up. But when she became a teen…things changed.”
I listened intently, allowing him to gather his wits. “She started going off and doing erratic things, like spending excessive amounts of money—money that she stole from us. She’d shoplift and get into cars with strangers, spouting off that her name was something different than Angelina. She’d go through stages of depression, have major mood swings.” He shook his head as he rubbed his hand feebly over his cheek. “It was torture, watching her go through something neither I nor her mother knew anything about. We finally began to seek help from our town pastor, who recommended seeing a counselor, and that was wh
en she was diagnosed.”
My world shifted. I had to hold onto the wall in front of me before I fell over. “Diagnosed?” Did I hear him right?
Phil wouldn’t look over at me. Instead, he looked down at the carpeted floor covered with yellow and purple swirls. “She has a slight form of dissociative identity disorder, amongst other things.”
I stuttered, my voice a slight rasp. “What?”
Now, Phil was looking at me. “She has more than one personality, jumping back and forth in between two presences of herself. You know Angelina, the one that we’ve been able to hang on to for quite some time—after therapy and medication, that is. We truly thought she was fighting it, getting better, but sometimes, it just takes a simple word or a person to shove her back into being someone else.” He sniffed, turning his attention away from my blank stare. “I wanted to blame you for a long time. I have been blaming you for a long time—Cathy and I both. I wanted to put all the blame on you. I figured you did something to her to make her regress into another self. That was why she ran off and disappeared for months.”
The words flew out before I could even understand what I was putting together. “Is that why she kept saying Lori?”
Phil raised a bushy eyebrow.
“She kept telling me that she was hanging out with someone named Lori. She blamed Lori for disappearing and said that Lori was the one who made her do it.” I shook my head, erasing the image. I kept wondering who Lori was, and now that I knew, it was shocking, mindboggling.
Phil nodded. “She was telling the truth. Lori did tell her to do it.” He turned to me. “Except, she is Lori.”
It felt like a thousand bricks were falling on my head while I was on a fast-spinning merry-go-round. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what Phil was telling me. I couldn’t understand.
“And the baby?” I finally asked, after more silence encased us. Phil smashed his lips together, and I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. I thought he was going to continue to withhold that information—the most important piece to this entire puzzle. My stomach knotted, and my fists clenched so tightly together that they physically ached.
“There was no baby, Reid.”
A held breath escaped my mouth, and I thought I was going to pass out. I stared up at the ceiling, evening my breath before I croaked out, “Why? Why couldn’t you just tell me that from the beginning? Do you know how long I’ve been blaming myself, worrying myself to death that I…that Angelina was somehow pregnant and that she’d truly done something to it? Do you know how guilty I’ve felt, thinking that this was because of me? Because I had broken up with her?”
Phil’s eyes glossed over again, and I could see the pity clear as day on his face.
I shook my head harshly. “Why did you do that to me? Do you know how fucking long I’ve been suffering?”
“We blamed you, Reid.” He rubbed his wrinkly face. “I knew that when you two started dating she’d never tell you about her diagnosis. We rarely talked about it in fear that it would somehow set her off, and I prayed every night that somehow things would work out—that she’d either tell you or that my dream would come true and she would somehow be over it.” Phil locked his gaze back onto the window, leaving me standing there with a gaping mouth. “We didn’t trust you not to run to the tabloids. We thought you’d find out the truth and ruin her and her career completely. We knew how angry you’d be when you learned that she lied to you, or kept you in the dark, or better yet, told you that you had a child together when you really didn’t.”
My nostrils flared as I paced back and forth in the hallway. I threw my cap back on my head and tried to even out my breathing. It was a lot to take in, so much so that I felt a bit suffocated. I half-wanted to ram my fist into the wall, and the other half wanted to run the fuck away.
“Turns out,” Phil said, causing me to stop mid-pace and stare at him. “Turns out, we didn’t need you to ruin her career—she’s done that all for herself. She’s…” He shook his head, looking down at his worn shoes. “She’s not pulling herself out of this one. She’s never done something so… drastic before.”
I could still feel the remains of anger flowing through my veins, but it was quickly being replaced by something else. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. It felt like the world was on my shoulders. “It’s because I broke up with her, isn’t it?”
He shook his head before very sternly saying, “No.”
“Then why? Why is she all of a sudden not snapping out of it? Why is she like that?” I angled my head to the small window that Phil kept peering into. I couldn’t even bring myself to do it. It made me sick.