Free A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson Page B

“me.” Maanik had no “me” during her episodes, at least not the “me” she’d been for sixteen years. But a diagnosis of dissociative identity ­disorder—a split personality—wasn’t accurate either because multiple personalities rarely had delusions. They lived in the real world. Maanik was obviously reacting to something that wasn’t there. A form of petit mal or grand mal was a possibility, yet sufferers would not respond to hypnosis the way Maanik had.
    One size did not fit all here. What was Caitlin missing?
    She wanted to see the girl when she wasn’t experiencing the cycle of behaviors. Even watching her quietly eat dinner would help Caitlin establish a baseline and get a firsthand sense of who she was.
    Give it a rest , Caitlin told herself. She had never healed anybody on day one, and besides, lingering over one case was a poor way to greet another. Her eleven thirty appointment would be arriving in about ten minutes and she felt the relief of . . . not normality, there was no such thing, but of having an established therapeutic history and many more months to devote to the work. Neither of these essentials was available with Maanik.
    Why was she so different from any kid Caitlin had ever seen?
    She had a sudden inspiration to search for her online, to see if there were any videos of her before the assassination. She kicked herself for not thinking of it before. She expected the Pawars to keep something of a lock on her public persona; the daughter of a diplomat had to have a strong concept of privacy. But there were several videos on her school website of Maanik engaging in debates as part of their Model UN. Caitlin clicked on one and noticed immediately how sure the girl was of herself. She certainly was not faking extroversion, which made these repeated inward collapses even stranger. In another video, Maanik was starring as the fiancée of an eccentric British aristocrat in a school play; at one point she gestured excessively and intoned, “I’m not diseased. I’m mismanaged.” Maanik rolled her eyes and the line got a huge laugh from the audience.
    She seemed utterly normal, entirely comfortable in her own skin, impressively so. There were none of the tics or hints of darkness that shrouded most of the kids Caitlin saw. Could the assassination attempt have done so much damage? If her father had died or been wounded, yes. If her mother had suffered some kind of collapse, perhaps. But those severe triggers did not exist here. The reaction simply was not proportionate. Caitlin needed to think this through further but her eleven thirty was knocking on the door.
    Hours later, after five more appointments and two conference calls, it was time to pick up Jacob. She could tell as she approached the front door of her building that the temperature outside had dropped considerably. She snuggled into her coat collar and caught herself humming “Let It Snow.” As she stepped outside her humming stopped and she suddenly felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. It ran up her backbone and tickled out along her shoulder blades like a small animal. Instinctively, she moved closer to the wall, stood still, and looked around.
    What the hell?
    Her heart was thumping harder; her breaths grew shorter. There seemed to be a cold wind against her arms but there was no motion in her sleeves. She had goose bumps.
    Get a grip , she told herself.
    She saw people picking up their cars from the garage across the street, a smoker by a tree in the tiny park on top of the garage, a group of college students hurrying by her, but nothing to explain the chill that remained. She felt exposed, pinned there as though these other people existed on another plane and she was alone. Or nearly so.
    There was also an unsettling sense of being watched. It was not a flash of exposure, like walking in front of a tourist taking videos.
    Barbara was right , she