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The words
shut up
came to mind, for starters. The door opened and a couple of big kids came out, sucking on Popsicles.
    This was what she heard herself say: “You want a piggyback?”
    Nina stopped in mid stamp. “But you got the stroller.”
    “Yup. You want to try?”
    And Nina came onto her mom’s back, clinging with arms around her neck and feet around her waist. Her mom ran like that for a whole block, pushing the stroller, both kids laughing uproariously. Then all of a sudden, Sharon couldn’t do it. She couldn’t run another step. But Nina came down and walked willingly the rest of the way to the library. Later in the day, an obscene caller phoned the house, interrupting a rerun of
The Waltons
. She found herself swearing back. In more than one language. At the next session, after she mentioned these odd things, her therapist didn’t seem surprised.
    “You’ve talked about things like this before,” she said. Brigitte Felber was a plump, white-haired psychologist from the French part of Switzerland. She never said z
is
, but carefully articulated the
th
sound, tongue touching her front teeth. “For example, you told me you picked me out of the Yellow Pages because you hate driving and you can walk here. Yet your first holiday with Dan was a road trip and you did the night driving.”
    Sharon nodded, her chest tightening. Sometimes, lately, she didn’t hate driving. The radio would be on, the volume deafening, her hands beating time on the steering wheel.
    “You’ve also mentioned that occasionally you forget, for a moment, that Eleanor is your sister-in-law. Especially right after therapy. And sometimes in our sessions your voice sounds very young and I have to explain big words to you.Do you have any thoughts about what could cause all these kinds of things?”
    “Alzheimer’s?” Sharon asked, but there was a deeper worry. “Or maybe I’m crazy.” There—she’d said it.
    Brigitte shook her head. “You show no signs of dementia and you are assuredly not crazy. Your thinking is fine. You have no delusions.”
    “Then why is this happening? Swearing at people on the phone—it’s just not like me.”
    “I agree. It isn’t. But there is an explanation. Have you heard of DID? It used to be called multiple personalities. About one in a hundred people are multiple.”
    “You mean like Sybil?” Sharon asked.
    “No. Not like that. Let me ask you this.” Brigitte smiled as if thinking of some delightfully silly joke. “How long can you stand to be in a mall?”
    “An hour,” Sharon said in a small voice. Her first therapist, in the counselling centre at her university, had never asked questions like this. “How did you know?”
    “When you have many people in your head, all looking out, all being attracted to different things, a mall is over-stimulating. Like a loud party. But an hour of therapy isn’t long enough for them to talk. I’d like to book you for ninety-minute sessions.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” Sharon said. “I don’t like parties because I’m shy. That’s all.”
    Brigitte asked, “Are you always shy?”Sharon looked around her sister-in-law’s living room. A graphic designer, a vet, two or three psychologists, an author, a journalist, a photographer, two scientists, a teacher, a linguist and one stay-at-home mom who homeschooled her four kids and made hand-crafted Christmas ornaments to raise funds for the homeless were waiting for Eleanor to open the wine. She collected people, interesting, talented people, even the odd famous one, proving to herself, if not her mother, that dropping out of school had had no ill effect. None of these people would wear a shrunken, past its best-before-date sweater. If the earth had opened up to swallow her, Sharon would have thanked it on bended knee before diving in. One of the psychologists was sitting on the couch, engrossed in conversation with the homeschooling mom. The psychologist wore pointy boots.
    “Hi Sharon.”