Lie Down with the Devil Read Online Free PDF

arm.
    Tomorrow I’d meet her new doctor, the long-term therapist. I’d find out how badly those weeks in Colombia had damaged my little girl.
    I wanted to know. I didn’t want to know.

THREE
    Friday morning, much too early. Dry mouth. Headache. The clock ticked loudly in the small room. On the corner table, a plant arced upward, searching for light. The corner was dark, but the plant was lush and glossy. Maybe it was a plastic replica, but I doubted it. Everything in the office was as perfect as the plant: dustless, orderly bookshelves, shining mahogany desktop, cool blue walls, flickering fireplace. The reclining couch in the corner gave a hint that this was more than a waiting room. But I was waiting. The clock kept ticking and I kept waiting.
    The doctor’s shoes whispered on the carpet as he entered and settled himself behind the desk. He was perfect, too, aside from being eighteen minutes late for our appointment. A central-casting shrink, not old, simply mature, with graying temples and crow’s feet at the corners of eyes that matched the walls. His name was Eisner, Aaron Eisner, and he spoke slowly, weighing each word as it left his mouth.
    “I’m recommending residential placement, given the brief contact I’ve had with the patient. Considering what I know about the immediate cause of her distress, a time of continuous evaluation and monitoring seems indicated.”
    “You think she might—?”
    “Harm herself?”
    “She did harm herself,” I said.
    Harm.
That was a good word. Better than the word that wouldn’t cross my lips. Better than
kill. Do you think my little sister is planning to kill herself?
    His voice was calm and reassuring. “We know a great deal more about these self-inflicted injuries than we used to, a good thing and a bad thing. If it weren’t endemic, we wouldn’t know so much.”
    “Like what?” I said. “Like why would she do it?”
    “I could try to explain her behavior—the cutting— as an attempt to alter her mood state. To improve it.”
    “You’re saying she tried to change the way she felt by slicing her arm with a kitchen knife? How would that make her feel better?”
    “It’s counterintuitive, you mean?”
    “I don’t want to play word games. How?”
    “Among those who self-injure, the act of self-harm tends to bring their levels of psychological and physiological tension down to a tolerable level. The relief is almost immediate.”
    “How? Why?”
    He clasped his hands, interweaving long, tapered fingers. “Let’s say that your sister feels a strong uncomfortable emotion—”
    How would you feel if you’d watched your father die?
I thought.
    “And she doesn’t know how to handle it; she may not even know how to name it. But she has discovered that hurting herself reduces the emotional discomfort quickly. She may still feel terrible, but she doesn’t feel panicky or jittery or trapped, the way she did before.”
    I pressed my lips into a thin line. Paolina had been tied up for hours at a time by the kidnappers. Maybeshe’d bitten the inside of her lip or dug her nails deep into her palms, learned about self-inflicted pain then.
    “But not all people react that way,” I said.
    “No. One factor common to people who self-injure is abuse.”
    As far as I knew, the last time my little sister was physically abused—prior to the kidnapping—was as a child of seven, when her mother brought her to the Area D station, her face cut and bruised. Marta had turned in her own boyfriend, insisted he be jailed.
    In some ways she’d been a decent mother. I had to keep reminding myself of that.
    “Another factor,” Eisner said, “is a sort of invalidation. Many of these people were taught at an early age that their interpretations of—and feelings about—the things around them were wrong or bad. They may have learned that certain feelings weren’t allowed.”
    Marta had been a child herself when Paolina was born. Who knows what she taught her daughter?
    “And