Before I Break (6 page)

Dissociative Identity Disorder. Wh
at the hell does that even mean?  It might as well be freaking “living inside of you disease.” I take a deep breath and head back in the house. There’s still yelling coming from behind the door but I ignore it. I head up the stairs and into my room. I flip open my laptop, pull up the search engine, and then stare at it. I sit down and stuff my head in my hands. They’re shaking. Once I do this, there’s no going back. But really there’s no going back now.

I type in Dissociative Identity Disorder in and hit enter. 1,080,000 results. Wow. I scroll down and click on what seems like the most official link.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a dissociative disorder involving a disturbance of identity in which two or more separate and distinct personality states (or identities) control an individual's behavior at different times. When under the control of one identity, a person is usually unable to remember the events that occurred while other personalities were in control. The different identities, referred to as alters, may exhibit differences in speech, mannerisms, attitudes, thoughts, and gender orientation. The alters may even present physical differences, such as allergies, right-or-left handedness, or the need for eyeglass prescriptions. These differences between alters are often quite striking.

I stare at the screen taking
in all of the information. You’d think this would be empowering, finally knowing what’s wrong with me. But it’s terrifying because it makes this real. After reading about this for the past half hour, I haven’t seen that there is a cure. Treatment, therapy, something about integration which makes no freakin’ sense. Apparently I’m lucky though, there’s only one ...‘alter.’ That’s what Cal is, an ‘alter’. I suppose it could be worse, Cal could be a woman, and my
husband
could have showed up today…I think of his message and how he joked about it, knowing I had no clue what he was talking about. This guy is a prick. Hopefully he’s the only one, but who knows? I try not to think about what all this means.  It’s kind of landed on my doorstep this morning, literally.

My head weighs a thousand pounds. I want to wake up, run from this
, for it to only be a nightmare. My life has gone from finally getting on track to straight to hell in a matter of minutes. I wonder who else knows and watched me blindly go through life without knowing the truth. Dexter obviously knew, but the real act of betrayal is my parent’s lies. I never trusted him, but them…how could they do something like this?

I
hear a car screech outside and see the white Audi pulling off. She’s gone. Maybe for good. She had no clue what was going on. This Cal guy has screwed us both over. If I were her I’d walk away and leave this mess behind. If he’s anything like I think he is, she’s lucky. Nothing tying her to this mess, but if that’s the case Jenna should leave too.

She’
s not tied to me. We’re only engaged.

Are we engaged? Can you even get engaged while married to someone else?
Married. Im married? No
Cal’s
married. That sounds even more ridiculous than me being married. I’m...Cal or Cal is me? It’s a bad math equation. How is it possible for him to have a whole relationship and manage to get engaged and married while this was happening? I should have some recollection of her. Well I did, kind of, but nothing concrete, no memories, just familiarity...

The emotion that poured off that girl when she saw me. She looked at me as if I was her world.
She was devastated when I didn’t know who she was. He couldn’t have had time to have a relationship like that. How could he forge a connection with someone that intense when he could disappear at any moment? They couldn’t have been in love.

Fix this or there will be hell to pay.

And who is he to threaten me? How am I supposed to fix this? I didn’t even know about any of this until today. He’s the one who ruined my life! The part that sucks about this the most is there’s nothing I can do. I’m powerless. How can I marry Jenna and not know when this guy will show up? I don’t know anything about him. How can I take his threat seriously? What if I marry Jenna one day and wake up as this guy the next? She doesn’t deserve that.

I look under my bed and pull out calendars I used to keep before my
blackouts stopped two years ago, when I started tracking the time I lost. I have four books worth. 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. I used to keep track of how many days I didn’t remember. I look over them all, counting. 12 days one month, 16 the next. 7, 10, 18, 22. I total them all together and out of four years, I was aware of what I was doing for 750 days. A little more than half of the time frame. That’s a hell of a lot of time for this Cal guy to do a lot of damage to my life…and build his own.

A burning
starts in my throat and spreads to my chest. I grab the calendars and start ripping them up and throw them across the room. I see pictures of me with my parents, with Jenna, and with friends throughout the years. I grab them and throw them too. This isn’t my life. How can it be my life when I don’t own it? When someone can take it over at any second without me having any say?

“Christopher,”
my mom says, her expression is horrified as she stands in the doorway, looking at me in the middle of my mess of a room. I’m about to be 28 years-old, and I still have a room in my parents’ house. I look at her, her face partially covered with her hands. My dad joins her soon after and takes a deep breath.

“
Son, what’s wrong?” he asks cautiously as if he’s afraid to hear the answer. I let out an angry laugh.

“Dissociative-Identity-Disorder,”
I say pointedly and watch their expression change from shocked to guilty.

“
We can explain. Come, come downstairs so we can talk about this,” my dad says.

“
What’s there to talk about? How fucked up my life is? That I’m sharing it with some asshole and you hid it from me?”

“Don’
t use that language with us!” my dad says, seemingly offended.

“
Why not, Dad? Is that too Cal-like?” I shout at them. He had no problem dropping f-bombs in the message he left me.

“Son
, we know you’re upset,” my mom interjects.

“
Upset, doesn’t explain this. My life has been a lie—I don’t have a life!”

“
You have a life. You, you’re the real person. He’s…”

“
Is that right? Because he has the wife? I’m pretty sure he has friends, and a house. He at least knew what was going on, and according to him, I’m ruining
his
life. He knows a hell of a lot more about everything than I do!” I shout, and there’s silence.

“
How could you not tell me this was happening?” I say, my anger turning to exasperation.

“We thought w
e were protecting you. We didn’t want to burden you.”

“
Huh, how do you think I’m feeling now?” I laugh with disdain.

“We’re so
sorry, Christopher,” my mom says, tears falling from her eyes. She can save them now.

“W
e thought it would make things worse,” my dad says incidentally. Like hiding the fact that I have another person inside of me was trivial. Some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“How?!
How could you think that was best? How could you think that me not knowing there’s this jerk-off running around, screwing people, and getting married was best for me?!” I ask, letting out a disbelieving laugh. They looked dumbfounded.

“You
let me think that I was having blackouts and amnesia, a normal side effect of some made-up neurological disorder. How could you do this to me?” I say louder because it’s as if they aren’t hearing me.

“We
were going to tell you,” My dad finally answers.

“When
? Because this has obviously been going on for years. Why now? Oh, because I could possibly get arrested for being a polygamist?” I shout.

“That’s
enough!” my father says, authority dripping from his voice. My chest is heaving, but I try to calm down; seeing the tears covering my mom’s face and hearing her soft whimpers from her covered mouth breaks my heart.

“Don’t
you dare think for a minute this has been easy for us. You don’t think we wanted to tell you? You don’t think we wanted this guy to disappear? Trust me he’s not any fun to deal with! The day we met him was one of the worst days of our lives,” my dad says, his voice stern but yielding.

“Not telling you was one of the most difficult decisions we have ever made. We thought we were doing what was best for you. Clearly we see that we were wrong now,” he continues.

“You have to know we didn’t do this to hurt or deliberately deceive you. You have to know that, Chris. We thought that it would be easier for you not to know, until we knew you were in a good place to deal with this. We didn't know what would happen if we told you...” my mom explains timidly.

“
We couldn't see what good would come from telling you,” my dad interjects.

“The
doctors pretty much told us that there was no cure for this. Intensive therapy could make you
one
with this guy. Trust me he isn’t anyone you need to be ‘one’ with. Why tell you this if there was nothing we could do about it? It was just going to make you worried and stressed out of your mind,” my dad says defensively.

“When
you came back after my diagnosis, we were going to tell you. By that time, we knew about Lauren and saw that Cal was doing things that would eventually affect you,” my mom sighs.

“But
you were being so strong for me while I was sick. It seemed like too much. As time went on, things got better for both of us, we thought. We hoped that maybe there wasn’t a
problem
anymore,” my mom says, her voice returning to normal.

“Ev
erything has been going so well. We were selfish to revel in the normalcy of life.” my dad says.

“When
you told us yesterday that you were marrying Jenna, we knew we had to say something. We were just trying to figure out the best way,” my mom adds.

I let out a deep breath and hold my head. I know that they d
idn’t have evil intentions. I know all of this time they’ve had to be going through hell too. I sit down on my bed and rest my head in my hands.

“What
do I do? Where do I go from here?” I ask the people who helped me make every major decision in my life. My mom lets out a deep sigh.

“T
h—there’s something else we have to tell you son,” my mom says reluctantly.

***

“You need another one of these.” Lisa pours another shot of vodka in my glass, and I down it before finishing the rest of story. The room hasn’t started spinning yet, but my head is.

“Right.
When I thought things couldn't get any worse, they tell me not only did this jerk-off marry someone, but he got her pregnant too, which makes
me
the father.” I laugh, staring at the empty glass. I don’t usually drink much, but before telling her this story, I told her to pull out the bottle first. Her eyes are wider than they’ve been since I started the story of my life over the past twenty-four hours.

“Whoa,
I was going to say this was your last shot, but I think whiskey is in order.” She disappears behind the bar. She replaces my empty glass with the brown liquid from her bottle; it’s the kind my dad pulls out on special occasions... I lift my glass feeling a wide goofy smile on my face.

“To
me being a father!” I say sarcastically, and she bursts into laughter.

“You
are the father!” she says with fake enthusiasm. We laugh, clinking our glasses together. The good thing about alcohol is everything that sucks in your life seems hilarious. The sting of the whiskey burns five times worse than the vodka. I usually only have a beer or two, but with each drink, it’s as if each problem I picked up today disappears.

“I
wish...I could have been there to see the look on Jenna’s face when your wife showed up,” she says with a giggle. I shake my head. I wish they got along better since she’s my best friend and all, but that’s the least of my problems now.

“She’s
not my wife...I think?” I defend myself.

“Te
chnically you and this Cal guy are the same person,” she whispers as if she’s telling me a secret.

“So that makes her your wife.
” She slaps me on the shoulder. I frown at her.

“The
good thing, though, is tomorrow you’re going to be way too hung over to care about any of this.” She cackles, and it’s suddenly as if my body weighs a thousand pounds. I was sitting upright on the couch but now I’m either lying down or the room has turned sideways.

“What about after tomorrow.
” I hear myself starting to slur.

“Ask sober Lisa. Druunk Lisa is going to bed.” She giggles as she shifts off the couch. She makes her way to turn off the light before she stumbles to her room. I turn myself on my back and watch the ceiling fan turn. It’s spinning so fast, and I could have sworn it was brown but now it’s black. I look around, and I’m not on Lisa’s couch anymore but in this huge bed with black sheets.  It’s daylight, and sun is shining in on my face. I stretch my arms outward and feel warm skin. I look down and see it’s on a thigh that’s barely covered with the sheet.  My eyes trail up the body, and I freeze when I see the girl’s face from earlier. Her eyes are still closed but her pink, plump lips curve into a seductive smile.