“Oh, we had him stay for the weekend from time to time. Some of our live-in patients were comforted by having a priest around. I’m sure he prayed over your mom, sprayed her with his emergency holy water.” She sipped her tea and said, “I can’t imagine him doing anything bad. Not because I can’t imagine him doing anything bad ever, but because there was always someone around, my family, the nurses.” She laughed, delighted by slandering her brother-in-law. “I mean, I don’t think Greg’s a bad guy. I trusted him around my children their whole lives. To be frank,” Alice said, “I do not believe in demonic possession. And your mother? She had Multiple Personality Disorder.”

So, Gal was right.

“You could see how MPD would get confused with possession, couldn’t you?” she said, sighing, like an annoyed academic. “The disassociation is present in both cases, the confusion between the two was unavoidable.”

“What do you think was my mom’s involvement in the Dawn Young case?”

“She did it,” she said, plainly. “She killed that girl.”

“But she took back her confession,” I argued. “Said she’d been drugged.”

Alice thought about it. With hardly any emotion, she said, “Well, once she left the safety of this place, and police had her signed confession in hand, she was facing the reality of getting charged. I would have walked it back too, said anything to take it back. Wouldn’t you?”

“Would your husband say the same thing?”

“If you were to ask my husband, he would tell you Multiple Personality Disorder usually manifests after someone undergoes abuse during their childhood. That abuse, if it’s traumatic enough, can make them violent and unpredictable.”

My mom had a younger brother who died young, bone cancer, but she had great memories of him. He kept pet doves, he played the accordion, he always left chocolates in her shoes. Her mom, my grandma, died when I was a toddler, but my siblings cooed over her, said she was sweet, baked us angel cakes topped with whipped cream, and loved baseball. She was a hoot, shouting at the TV, belting “Take Me Out” during the seventh inning stretch. Grandpa died when I was in utero. He had been racist and grouchy, kept his car tidy, and cobbled wooden animals for his son and daughter. Mom grew up in an apartment in Chicago, they moved to a bungalow on the outskirts of the city when she was a teenager. Every tidbit I’d heard about her family, abuse and violence didn’t fit.

Alice chewed the side of her lip and twisted one of her rings. It seemed like she was weighing whether she wanted to tell me something more.