Mary, Mary

the Mary I already knew. Two archive boxes would be enough for a start.
    Her cursive was tidy and precise. Every page was neatly arranged, with even, empty margins. Not a doodle in sight.
    Words were her medium, and she had no shortage of them. They slanted to the right on the page as if they were in a hurry to get where they were going.
    The voice, too, was eerily familiar.
    The writing had Mary Smith’s short, choppy sentences, and that same palpable sense of isolation. It was evident everywhere I looked in the notebook.
    Sometimes it just seeped through; other times, it was right on the surface.
    I’m like a ghost here. I don’t know if anyone would care whether I stayed or left. Or if they even know I’m here at all.
    Except for Lucy. Lucy is so kind to me. I don’t know that I could ever be as good a friend to her as she is to me. I hope she doesn’t go anywhere. It wouldn’t be the same without her.
    Sometimes I think she’s the only one who really cares about me. Or knows me. Or can see me.
    Am I invisible to everyone else? I truly wonder—am I invisible?
    Reading through and picking out entries at random, I also got a picture of someone who stayed busy while she was kept in the mental hospital. There was always one project or another going on for Mary. She’d never given up hope, had she? She seemed to be the resident homemaker, as much as a person could be in this environment.
    We’re making paper chains for the dayroom. A little babyish, but they’re pretty. It will be nice for Christmas.
    I showed all the girls how to make them. Almost everyone participated. I love to teach them things. Most of them, anyway.
    That Roseanne girl from Burlington, she tries my patience sometimes. She truly does. She looked right at me today and asked me what my name is. As if I haven’t already told her a thousand times. I don’t know what kind of somebody she thinks she is. She’s just as much a nobody as the rest of us.
    I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just didn’t answer. Let her make her own decorations. Serves her right. I’d like to smack Roseanne. But I won’t, will I?
    Somebodies
and
nobodies
. Those words, and that idea, had shown up more than once in the e-mails out in California. The inclusion of it here jumped out at me like an identification tag. Mary Smith had been obsessed with
somebodies
—high-profile, perfect mothers who stood out so clearly against the negative space of her own nobody-ness. Something told me that if I kept looking, I’d find it as a long-running theme for Mary Constantine as well.
    What
was
missing was any mention of her children. In context, the journals read like a chronicle of denial. The Mary who lived here at the hospital seemed to have recorded no memory or awareness of them at all.
    And the woman who lived as Mary Wagner—the woman Mary Constantine had become—could think of nothing but those children.
    The common thread as she had evolved was a lack of consciousness around Brendan’s, Ashley’s, and Adam’s murder.
    The
A
’s and
B
’s.
    I could only hypothesize at this point, but it seemed to me that Mary was on a crash course toward a fuller realization, and wreaking havoc along the way. Now that she was in custody again, the only person she could harm was herself.
    Still, if she was in fact moving toward the truth, I hated to think what might happen to her when she got there.

Chapter 113
    IT WAS HARD TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY from Mary’s journals—her words, her ideas, and her anger.
    For the first time, it seemed possible to me, even probable, that she had actually committed the series of murders in L.A.
    When I looked at my watch, I was already half an hour late for a meeting with her lead therapist, Debra Shapiro.
Shit. I need to hustle over there
.
    Dr. Shapiro was actually on her way out when I got to her office; I was full of apology. Shapiro stayed to speak with me but was perched on the edge of a couch with her briefcase on her lap.
    “Mary was my patient for eight years,” she told me before I even asked.
    “How would you characterize her?”
    “Not as a killer—interestingly. I view the incident with her children as an aberration to the larger arena, if you will, of her mental illness. She’s a very sick woman, but any violent impulses were subjugated a long time ago. That’s part of what kept her here; she never moved through anything.”
    “How can you be sure?” I asked Dr. Shapiro. “Especially given what’s happened.”