CHAPTER 37

“So what seems to be the trouble, Mr. Corvelli?”

Dr. Damien Opono is a native Hawaiian with a casual demeanor I immediately admire. He’s fairly young as far as psychiatrists go, but I don’t necessarily need advice from a sage these days; I need someone to talk to. And, yes, I need drugs. Something to pull me out of this funk. I feel as though I’m on the brink. It’s the way I felt after Brandon Glenn was murdered at Rikers Island. How I felt nearly every day until I graduated law school and my time became my own.

“It’s a woman,” I say.

It wasn’t what I meant to say. But the good psychiatrists, they seem to draw it out of you just by looking at you. I’ve got to be careful around this guy.

“A girlfriend?” he says.

“I suppose you can say that.” If Dr. Opono reads the local papers, he already knows who I am, and despite the doctor-patient privilege, I have no intention of letting Opono or anyone else—not even Jake, not even Flan—know that I’m currently sleeping with a client accused of mass murder.

“And what about her is troubling you?” he says.

“She’s addictive,” I tell him. “She’s bad for me and I know she’s bad for me, and yet I can’t seem to stay away.”

“That’s not terribly uncommon.”

“No, particularly not for me.”

“Oh? Why do you say that?”

“Let’s just say I’m beginning to see a pattern.”

“A pattern in the type of woman you become involved with?”

Nikki. Erin. “Yeah, you can say that.”

Dr. Opono crosses his legs, a gesture that tells me he’s not going to simply write me a prescription and send me on my merry way. “Tell me about the woman you’re currently involved with.”

“Intense. Unstable. Incredibly manipulative.”

“Impulsive?”

“Hard to tell,” I say. “Since I’ve met her she’s stayed home a lot.”

“A temper?”

“Like Tony Soprano suffering from ’roid rage.”

Dr. Opono arches his eyebrows. “Wow. I’m assuming, though, she doesn’t look like James Gandolfini?”

I smile. “Maybe a slight resemblance.” Leaning forward on the couch, I say, “Thing is, the temper’s not always raging. Sometimes she seems as delicate as a rose petal and all I want to do is save her.”

“So, you’re suggesting that her mood swings?”

“Like a pendulum.”

“Hmm.”

“And she cuts.”

“Sorry?”

“Self-mutilates. She cuts herself. Sometimes even burns her own flesh.”

“I see,” he says, steepling his fingers. “Sounds like she could be a borderline.”

“A borderline what?”

“She may suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s marked by many of the symptoms you’ve just described.”

“It’s a mental illness,” I say.

“Very much so. Borderlines typically possess a shaky sense of identity. They’re prone to severe mood shifts and frequent displays of anger, often inappropriate, sometimes violent. Self-destructive tendencies such as self-mutilation are very common. Many of their relationships are just as you described—very intense yet very unstable. They may suffer chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom, and they may make frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, real or imagined.”

“Interesting. So, when she goes from kissing me to trying to bite my ear off…”

“She’s likely employing a defense mechanism called ‘splitting.’ Like a child, she sees the world as split into heroes and villains. There are no gray areas. No gray people, so to speak. At any particular moment, an individual is either ‘good’ or ‘evil.’”

“In other words,” I say, leaning back on the couch, “she can’t reconcile that one person can possess both good and bad traits.”

“That’s right. Borderlines essentially cannot tolerate human inconsistencies.”

“So, if someone she saw as all good—such as a lover—suddenly betrayed her…”

“She would experience that betrayal far more intensely and react far more dramatically than, say, you or I.”

“It would seem to her as though someone she trusted were sticking a knife in her gut,” I say.

Dr. Opono frowns, shrugs his left shoulder. “Something like that.”