Wildalone (18 page)

“All right. Let's start with your home.”

“What about it?”

“How many windows does it have?”

I did a mental run through our house in Sofia. “Seven.”

“Are you sure?”

I pretended to do another count. On the wall behind her, a framed print in the neurotic color blotches of Cézanne showed a still life with five pieces of fruit: three apples, a lemon, and a quince. “Yes, I'm sure. Seven windows.”

“And when you counted them just now, were you inside or outside the house?”

“Inside . . . Why?”

“Good, that's all I needed to know. Now let's see if I'll be way off on the backstory.” She unclasped her hands and leaned forward, as if to reassure not so much me as herself. “You grew up as an only child, yes? Your parents never told you about Elza. Kept her belongings locked away in the house, perhaps in a room to which you gained access by accident—you were what, five or six years old?—and that's where you found her piano. It wasn't until much later, probably around the time you decided to come to America, that the family secret finally surfaced. And she began to haunt you. Strange episodes. Creepy, even. At times you could almost feel her physical presence like a ghost. Which made Princeton the natural choice for you. The
only
choice, really, if you were to ever be free of her. By the way, how am I doing so far?”

I was stunned. For a moment, even the apples of Cézanne seemed to shudder in shock, about to roll out of the frame and topple to the floor.

“I take your silence as a sign that I was right, at least about some of it?”

“Yes. About all of it, actually, but . . . how did you figure these things out?”

“That's my job, Thea. The technical term is ‘replacement child syndrome.' It gives a very accurate prediction of how a child's behavior patterns will change following an older sibling's death. Even Sigmund Freud himself—although not strictly a replacement child, since he was the firstborn—suffered from similar symptoms after the death of his younger brother Julius.”

“Suffered from what exactly?”

“From the burden of being viewed as a replacement child: the one who would fill the unfillable void, erase the loss, act as panacea. It's obviously an impossible task, because children aren't fungible and the agony of losing a child can never be healed simply by having another. Instead, parents should acknowledge the loss, allow the dead child a place in the family, and let the mourning process run its course. Failure to do so would project their trauma onto the surviving children, triggering the syndrome.”

“What makes you think my parents failed?”

“Most people assume that the best way to heal is by suppressing the pain or blocking it out altogether—even if this means permanently erasing the dead child from the family history, locking up the physical reminders out of reach, and so on. This is especially true of parents who never had a chance to grieve properly. For example . . .” She looked away, as if no longer sure that giving an example was a good idea. “Historically, women whose babies had died at birth weren't allowed to hold or even see them—it was considered harmful to the mother. Clinical studies have now shown that such denial only leaves the grief unresolved. And the wound, so to speak, forever open.”

I finally realized where she was going with this. The disappearance of Elza's body had left my parents' grief as unresolved as grief could be.

“In such cases, people either withdraw and neglect their other children, or become overprotective, doting on the children too much. You counted the windows from the inside, which meant you must have been a happy
child raised in an inclusive, loving home. I know many who aren't as lucky.”

“They count the windows from the outside?”

“Almost invariably. Alienated children are outsiders. Some report feeling literally invisible in the family.”

“Yet counting from the inside doesn't necessarily mean a loving home. It could be just the opposite: a home perceived as a prison.”

“You're absolutely right.” She smiled again, but so confidently that it probably meant I wasn't. “Except a prisoner would know the windows right off the bat, no? There would hardly be a need to count them for me. And certainly not a second time, as you did.”

This bothered me more than anything else she had said so far—because I hadn't counted them a second time. Then . . . could it be true? Over the years, piano practice had often made me feel trapped. And my parents were overprotective, sure. But I had never thought of my home as a prison. Or had I? After all, here I was. In a foreign world. By myself.

“Are you thinking jails and shackles?”

The choice of words startled me—a joke, clearly, but by now I knew better. If the human mind were a musical instrument, this woman would be no less of a virtuoso than Rhys had been the night before.

“I'm just . . . I still don't see how you guessed all those other things about my life.”

“To be honest, it was a bit of a conundrum. Here you are, at Princeton. And a celebrated pianist, no less. In short: doing everything exactly like your sister. But why would your parents allow it?”

“Maybe so I could become the ultimate replacement child?”

“No, it doesn't work that way. The overprotective pattern is to keep the replacement child—and I hope you don't mind the term, I use it only descriptively—as close as possible. Not send her to another continent. And definitely not to the same school where the first child died. In other words, all those decisions must have been yours. The piano, for example. To achieve such a level of success, you'd need to start at a very early age. But a six-year-old doesn't just wake up one day craving to play classical music, right? The parents must push for it. Yours, of course, would never do such a thing, as it
was the piano that won Elza the accolades required for admission to Princeton. So there had to be some other trigger. Some event that, to a child, must have felt mysterious, and captivating, and enticed you to play despite Mom and Dad's objections. Such as, let's say, discovering a world that had been locked away. And in it—a piano waiting. Except your parents made a big mistake right there.”

“By allowing me to play?”

“No, by not telling you about your sister. Think about it—much of your childhood was still at their disposal. Plenty of time to ease you into the truth, shape your reaction, and ensure what they probably wanted most of all: to steer you away from the American bug that so many young people in Eastern Europe seem to catch just from breathing the post-Communist air. But instead they waited. And once you had a mind of your own, it was too late.”

“Not entirely. When I found out what they had gone through, I offered to stay in Bulgaria.”

“Their happiness in exchange for yours. What parent would accept such a bargain?”

“I wasn't bargaining. I really meant it.”

“Of course you did. Empathy. Self-sacrifice. Early understanding of grief and loss. These are all typical, because a replacement child doesn't expect to be the center of the universe. Huge difference there, between you and Elza.”

The difference wasn't quite as huge, given how I had chosen Princeton knowing it would devastate my parents. Yet there was something else, in that last statement of hers. It sounded personal. Not so much a deduction—a specific observation.

“Dr. Pratt, how long have you been at Princeton?”

She rose from the couch, walked over to a desk in the far corner of the room, and took a bottle of water from a stack next to it. “Would you like one?”

“No, thanks.” A diploma in Latin above the desk had her name, that of Johns Hopkins University, and the year 1990. “You were here in '92, weren't you?”

She unscrewed the cap and stared inside, as if the clear liquid held molecules of the past itself.

“Did my sister come in for therapy too?”

“Not voluntarily.”

“You mean she needed . . . psychiatric help?” I almost choked on the words, wishing I had taken that water bottle.

“I didn't think so, at the time. But the school disagreed. Have you heard of the Nude Olympics?”

It sounded like a Dionysian version of the Olympic Games. “Does that have anything to do with ancient Greece?”

“Unfortunately, no.” The suggestion amused her. “It's a Princeton tradition. Used to be, until 1999, when the Board of Trustees banned it. Every winter, on the night of the first snowfall, sophomores would run naked in the Holder Courtyard over at Rocky College, and from there—out on the town, bolting into local stores and restaurants. Depending on the level of inebriation, there could be sex and vandalism too, leading to arrests, criminal charges, and even hospitalization.”

“But my sister was never a sophomore.”

“Right, she wasn't. Which was part of the problem. That year, the first snow fell on December thirteenth—”

“The same weekend her body disappeared from the funeral home?”

“Yes, although I don't think there's a connection. The point is, in the winter of 1992—and, to my knowledge, for the first and only time in the school's history—the Nude Olympics seemed to have happened twice. On December thirteenth, the night of the first snowfall. But also a month earlier, on November tenth, with a group of students starting at Holder and ending up in the woods south of campus. There was only one nonsophomore involved: your sister. Incidentally, she was also the only woman.”

I felt my cheeks flush. Apparently, Elza had been much wilder than I had suspected. “Did anyone get arrested?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Borough Police officers were dispatched after reports of the initial ruckus. The students, I believe there were six of them, faced disciplinary charges. It came down to just mandatory counseling, but at first there had been talks about suspension for the entire spring semester.”

“Suspension? For running around naked?”

“Well . . . there had been much more to it than running. I'm sure you can imagine.”

I couldn't quite. My sister. Naked. With five men in the forest. In the middle of the night. “I still don't understand, though. Why would they do this a month early, instead of waiting for the first snow with the others?”

“
Because we don't do what the others do.
These were her exact words, when I asked her the same question.
And besides
, she said,
it was first frost—doesn't that sound more like freedom?”

It didn't sound like freedom, not to me. But I wished I had known that girl. Wished I could be like her: defiant, brave, a rebel.

“Dr. Pratt, do you think that this is how she . . . that this incident is linked to the way she died?”

“It doesn't matter what I think, Thea. We will never find out. And even if we did, you can't reverse what's already happened. The only thing you can do is keep your life free of ghosts.”

The word gave me a shudder, before I realized she didn't mean it literally. “I'm not sure I can. Elza is a part of me—a part I'm only now beginning to know.”

She shook her head. “What's part of you is the anxiety and grief you've been picking up from your parents, subconsciously, over the years. When a secret festers for so long, learning the truth can bring nightmares. Some people internalize the trauma so much they start to see their dead sibling's ghost. An apparition by the window at night, that sort of thing.”

“And it's just . . . hallucination?” For the first time since Tsarevo, I felt relief about the white figure I had seen there.

“You can call it that. Scientifically speaking, it's a cognitive distortion: your brain's effort to make her seem real, in order to minimize the loss. But don't fall into the trap of identifying with her.”

“Why not? I often wonder if the two of us are alike.”

“You aren't. And trust me when I say this, as I met the girl. She harbored a certain aggravation with the world, a latent anger at nobody and nothing in particular. You don't seem to have any of that in you.” Then a pause, to weigh the next words: “Which is a good thing.”

THE ALLEY HAD ENDED
; I would have known even with eyes closed. My steps, only a moment ago muted by a myriad of sounds on a busy campus, now clicked distinctly on the pavement, lifted in ripples through the vaulted stone like the voice of a worshipper entering a church.

It was always Princeton's arches that took the breath away. A world of fuss left behind. Ahead—distant lattice windows, a tree, perhaps a patch of sky. But in between, you felt on the cusp of miracles. The low ceiling would close overhead, ready to keep your secrets. Feeble light would stretch your shadow across the walls. Amplified, your steps would turn into music. And for a few seconds, as you made your way down the eerie passageway, there would be only you and the stone. Nothing else.

On the other side of this particular arch was the Holder quadrangle of Rockefeller College (or “Rocky,” as it was affectionately known). I should have figured it out long ago, way before I heard mention of Rocky in a psychiatrist's office: This was Elza's dorm. Had to be. Years back, I had witnessed an incident. An odd lapse of poise that, like all seemingly insignificant memories when one is trying to piece together the past, took on a new meaning in hindsight:

“Hell, I don't know. Do you think these Americans are onto something? Because in the old days, we used to call it child exploitation.”

The man was my father's boss: head of a forensic lab, and one of several guests my parents had invited over for dinner. Apparently, he was also adamant that nobody under the age of eighteen should work—a topic spurred by a program on TV while everyone at the table waited to find out whether or not the Bulgarian soccer team had qualified for the World Cup.

“Pavko, come on.” His wife frowned, a few seats over. “How can you say this, when the Communists used to make us spend most of the summer vacation doing mandatory labor? I still remember the student brigades: sweating to death from the heat, either out in the field or at the canned food factory. And all this in the name of ‘communal well-being'? At least in America those kids are getting paid!”