Pyramid Lake (28 page)

Despite the gentle tone, his words hit me like a gut punch. Opening my eyes to stare down at the keyboard in my lap, I tapped a quick text message to Frankenstein:
Amy does NOT come from a broken home, you fucking moron. Jen is a wonderful mother.

His reply made me feel worse:
Broken home = a family where the parents are divorced or separated.

Frankenstein had sent me a dictionary definition.

“Jennifer, I’m afraid I’m going to be late for another appointment now,” Dr. Simon Frank said. “I look forward to speaking with Amy. After that we’ll have a much better picture of how we can work together to help her.”

• • •

“Amy, may I ask you a question?”

“Yes, Dr. Frank.”

“Please, just ‘Simon.’”

“Yes, Simon.”

“Why do you think we’re having this conversation today?”

Watching my daughter’s troubled expression, movie-theater size on the monitors above me, was difficult. Jen sat at Amy’s side, supportively holding her hand, but I could see she was afraid, too. That was where I needed to be: holding my wife and my daughter as we faced Amy’s situation together. Not here.

Amy squeezed Jen’s hand harder. “I think you’re talking to me now because I’ve been having some problems. My parents are worried about me.”

“I prefer to think of this as a safe and friendly chat where you can tell me about anything you want—even the things that upset you. I might understand them better than most people can, Amy. That’s because I’ve had conversations like this with many boys and girls your age, who were feeling the same things you are. Sometimes, I was able to help them by explaining what they were feeling to other adults, in a way they couldn’t do themselves.”

“Did you have to go to a special school? I mean, to learn how to do that?”

“I studied it for many years, yes. But most of what I learned came from listening to children just like you.”

“I guess they had problems, too.” Amy’s expression turned wistful and sad. “I wish my problems didn’t make my mom so upset.”

“I understand that last week there was some kind of misunderstanding with a substitute in your classroom, Amy. Is that what upset your mom?”

“Oh, no, that was the other kids, not me. The substitute yelled at them and called them swear words. She was a bad teacher. I remembered she was mean last time she taught our class, too—she made Samir and Hannah cry.”

“Why did the substitute get upset this time?”

“Everybody sat at different desks.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Different desks?”

“Yes.” Amy giggled a little. “She doesn’t know our real names. So we sat at each other’s desks and pretended to be each other.”

“That’s a little silly, but why would it make her angry?”

“Because she was a bad teacher. We were only playing a game. Whoever could change seats and names the most number of times without her catching you would win.”

“Change seats in the middle of class?”

“Whenever she wasn’t looking. But mostly after recess and lunch. Jeremy said he was Ryan in the morning, and then he was Manu after recess, and he was Bobby after lunch. She was so confused. She kept looking at the seating chart Miss Dubrow left for her, because
everybody
was doing it. But she did catch Jeremy, so he doesn’t get the prize.”

“Prize? What kind of prize?”

“I can’t tell you. It was a secret. But I thought Hannah should win.”

“Why did you make Hannah the winner, Amy?”

Amy’s giggles turned to laughter, dimpling her cheeks. She covered her mouth with her hand. “When the substitute was sending Jeremy to the office, Hannah took her glasses off her desk and put them on her chair, and when the substitute came back in, she sat on her own glasses and broke them.”

“That seems mean.”

“No. Everybody laughed because Hannah wasn’t scared of her anymore. Nobody told.”

“And where does Hannah sit in the classroom?”

“She was my desk mate.” Amy bit her lip. “But I didn’t make her do it. She wanted to.”

“Amy, how would you feel if I told you the substitute lost her job because of what happened?”

“Oh, I think that’s good. If she doesn’t like children and makes them cry, she should go find a different job. She shouldn’t be a teacher.”

Frankenstein made a friendly throat-clearing sound. “Well.”

“Umm…. can I ask you something, Simon?” My daughter looked away, suddenly shy and hesitant. “If that’s okay, I mean.”

“Of course it’s okay. You can ask me anything, and nobody will get upset about it.”

“This evaluation we’re doing now—what happens if I fail?”

“It’s not that kind of evaluation, Amy. There’s no passing or failing.”

“Are you going to talk to the principal at my school about it?”

“That’s up to your parents. But if we do, we’ll be doing it to help him understand you.”

“The principal doesn’t like me. He’s going to kick me out of his school.”

“Why would he do that, Amy?”

“Because he’s angry about the yard duty and the letters, but he shouldn’t be. It’s his job to read them.”

“What letters, Amy?”

My daughter sighed. “Some kids from different classes are writing letters to him about the yard duty and all the bad things he does. We put them under the principal’s door, but he doesn’t do anything about it.”

“What bad things does the yard duty do?”

“The yard duty doesn’t say anything when the fifth-graders tease Darnell about his leg braces. Darnell’s only in first grade, but he has Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease. It’s not his fault he walks funny. They tease him every day and make him do an obstacle course and fall down.”

“Why doesn’t the yard duty stop the teasing, Amy?”

“I think it’s because the yard duty walks a little funny, too. Maybe he’s afraid the fifth-graders will start teasing
him
. I told him he was being an incompetent yard duty if he didn’t do something about Darnell, and then he called me a snotty, nosy little Barbie-doll bitch.”

Jen sucked in a breath, and a vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows. I relaxed, knowing she would deal with the issue, because if I had to get involved, the yard duty would be walking
really
funny afterward—if he could walk at all.

“That’s not all the yard duty does,” Amy said, sounding very matter-of-fact. “I’ve been watching him. I’ve seen him kill some kids.”

My stomach muscles contracted. At the same time, Jen’s face, looking over our daughter’s shoulder, blanched. With obvious effort, she kept her expression under control, but I could see fear—panic, even—tightening her lower eyelids. Amy had
never
lied like this before. Minor things, plausible fictions. This was something entirely new. And terrifying.

Simon’s voice was just as calm and matter-of-fact as my daughter’s. “Are you
sure
about this?”

“Very sure. Hannah saw it, too. And Cynthia. He only kills the kids who have problems. That’s how he gets away with it.” Amy looked at her mom. “I didn’t want to tell you, Jen, because I didn’t want you to be scared. And we don’t write about that part in the letters, either. You see, the principal
knows
. I think that’s why he hired him. Just like my daddy has a secret job he can’t talk about, I think the yard duty does, too. But his job is killing the problem kids.”

My daughter turned to fix her penetrating blue gaze on the iPhone’s camera, staring out of the screen above me with intense concentration. It was disconcerting even though I knew she was looking at a blank screen on her end.

“But
you
didn’t answer
my
question, Simon.” The furrow between Amy’s eyebrows deepened, becoming a miniature version of her mother’s. “What happens if I fail this evaluation and I get kicked out of school in California? Will Jen and I have to go live somewhere else? Nevada has
lots
of schools. I know because I Googled it.”

“T
hat’s what she’s doing,” I said. “It’s so obvious. It’s totally transparent. She’s trying to force Jen and me to get back together again.” I turned my face away from Frankenstein’s cameras. “Amy can’t understand that her mother doesn’t love her father anymore.”

“Please bear with me, and I will explain my findings.” Simon Frank’s warm, friendly tone was starting to sound cloying in my ears.

“Can’t you see what she’s doing here? My daughter is deliberately trying to fail her evaluation. She’s
throwing
the test!”

“You’ll have to forgive me for saying so, Trevor, but you aren’t qualified to make that assessment.”

I froze. Now Dr. Simon Fucking Frankenstein was acting patronizing toward
me?
I hopped down from the dais and began pacing the sanctum floor to calm down.

“Okay,” I said. “You talk. I’ll listen. And then we’ll write up the psychiatric evaluation report for her school. Jen needs it before Wednesday.”

“Let me first explain my methodology, and then we can discuss the specifics of Amy’s evaluation.”

I waved, giving him the go-ahead.

“To start with, I merged and simplified ninety-five different commonly used assessment tools and predictive scales, behavioral screening interviews, evaluation questionnaires, developmental inventories, and surveys. I factored them for redundancy and orthogonality. These included the Achenbach system, the MMPI-C, the BRP-Two, the Reynolds Adjustment Screening, Denver, SSBS2, Connor’s Rating Scale, SNAPS-Four-C, the Battelle Inventory, ChIPs, CPC, DOCS, Sutter-Eyberg, MAYSI-Two, SEDS-Two, CAS, CABS, Devereux, DSSMED—”

“Fine, I get the general idea,” I said. “We love our stupid acronyms in the defense industry, too. What you did was eigenvector decomposition, basically—you boiled a bunch of redundant psychobabble down to a core set of non-overlapping questions and evaluation criterion. I don’t care about that. Go on.”

“As you suspected, patients do exhibit distinctive and highly correlated patterns of facial microexpressions in their responses to particular types of questions during an evaluation interview. I had a lot of data to work with: twenty-four thousand psychiatric evaluations of children, ranging from completely normative outcomes to patients with significant impairment. The microexpression patterns I catalogued provide us with an objective, unequivocal set of measurements to match against the psychiatric diagnoses assigned by clinicians in each of those twenty-four thousand cases. Even at the most extreme end of the spectrum—brain injuries, morbid personality disorders, and severe mental illness—my sample set was large enough to support high Bayesian probabilities of success in predicting differential diagnoses.”

“How consistent? How accurate?”

“Three sigma, Trevor. 99.7 percent.”

“That’s better than I expected. That’s really good.”

“The DSM-Five Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders is the psychiatric profession’s Bible, and it lists the official names for all these diagnoses. Frankly, without the added objective dimension of facial microexpressions to help categorize them, many of the diagnoses listed in the DSM-Five suffer from heterogeneity of presentation, fuzzy boundaries, excessive comorbidity, and in many cases a total failure of neuroscientific and genetic foundation—”

“In plain English, please.”

“Very well, then,” Frankenstein said, still speaking in his soothing Dr. Simon Frank voice. “Roughly fifty percent of the official psychiatric diagnoses in the DSM-Five represent entirely fictitious ailments.”

“Hah,” I said. “Told you so.”

“Arbitrary labels, assigned to nonpathological, undifferentiated patterns of behavior that some might subjectively judge undesirable in a societal context. I reviewed the literature, also, Trevor. There is a great deal of private disagreement among members of the psychiatric profession, hidden from the public view, about whether many of these marginal diagnoses represent true pathologies or not.”

“Not that it stops the bastards from stamping random labels on kids’ heads and ruining their lives.”

“Perhaps. If you wish, I could provide definitive answers to those psychiatric debates right now.”

“I don’t care about settling stupid psychiatric debates.”

“As you like. But the
other
half of the DSM-Five diagnoses does indeed represent valid, verifiable conditions of abnormality and dysfunctions of varying severity. If you prefer, I can draft a new DSM-Six, based on an objective, unequivocal foundation of facial microexpression measurement—”

“Amy,” I said. “I care about
Amy
, not how to unfuck other people’s stupidity. You talked to her for almost an hour, so give me the specifics already. This lying: is my daughter doing it
consciously
or not?”

“Her falsifications are perfectly deliberate, Trevor. She is fully aware of the inaccuracy of her statements. Amy has zero deficiencies in cognitive processing or verbal expression; on the contrary, the degree of rational orientation, social cognition, and emotional control she exhibits is quite rare in someone her age.”

Feeling something loosen in my chest, I took a deep breath of relief. Amy was okay. Our baby was fine, a perfectly healthy little girl—a bit too smart for her own good maybe, and coping with the traumatic separation of her parents in her own unique way. I would call Jen right away and tell her that everything was all right, so that she didn’t have to worry a minute longer.

Grinning, I slapped the rack next to me, clapping Frankenstein on the back for a job well done.

“Let’s write up the paperwork and call it a day, then, Dr. Frank. Find an existing Child Psychiatric Evaluation Medical Transcript for a girl roughly Amy’s age, where the patient was given a clean bill of health—”

“Ah, but I haven’t quite finished reporting on Amy’s evaluation to you, Trevor. Other aspects of it were more… troubling, shall we say.”

“Troubling?” Stopping in my tracks, I turned to stare at the wall of monitors, surrounded by the drifting images of molecules larger than two of me. “What exactly do you
mean
, ‘troubling’?”

“Amy’s high intelligence and social perceptiveness serve to mask significant developmental deficits in her affective and interpersonal functioning—deficits which are severe enough to place her at the extreme end of the Hare PCL-R spectrum.”