Slater and Dr. Ryan watch through a two-way mirror as Draper interrogates Gypsy. Dr. Ryan, for his part, marvels at how far Gypsy’s physical transformation has progressed in such a short period of time. Her hair is crew-cut length now. Her cheeks have some color, and there’s already a bit more meat on her bones. Despite her predicament, she looks healthy—probably for the first time in her life.
There’s a laptop sitting open on the table between Gypsy and Draper.
“I want to play something for you,” Draper says, angling the screen in Gypsy’s direction.
“All right,” Gypsy says.
Draper presses Play. It’s a clip from Gypsy’s appearance on Mornings with Anne-Marie, the moment when she claims that she and her mother are “like the same person…two peas in a pod.” They finish each other’s thoughts, are stronger together than they could ever be apart. When the segment is done, Draper spins the laptop back around, hits Stop.
“That was just a short while ago,” Draper says. “Were you lying?”
“No.”
“When did it become a lie?”
“It didn’t.”
“Really?” Draper asks, unconvinced. “Let me show you something else.”
She calls up a screenshot from Gypsy’s Christian Couples account, begins reading aloud from a series of messages between Gypsy and Nicholas, reading only Gypsy’s part:
“It’s [The it here is your mother.] got $4,000 in a safe and I know the combination…Once it takes its sleep meds it don’t wake for nothing…Better make that an extra-long knife. LOL! Ha ha ha!…I’ll be sure the door ain’t locked.”
Draper snaps the laptop shut.
“There’s no doubt that you were the mastermind, Gypsy,” she says. “The point of my talking to you today isn’t to get a confession. We don’t need one. This is your chance to explain why. Get your story on record. How did you go from that interview with Anne-Marie to killing your mother just a few months later? What happened?”
Gypsy looks everywhere but at Draper.
“I learned some things,” she says.
“You mean about your illness?”
“I ain’t ill. That’s what I learned. It was her making me ill.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. Since before I can remember. ’Cause I can’t remember no time when I was normal. When I could eat what other people ate. When I didn’t have tubes sticking out of me. When I had hair. When I had all my teeth and none of them was cracked or crumbling. When I could see right. When I could walk. And then I find out that I could’ve been normal the whole time. I could’ve gone to school. I could’ve had friends.”
“But you can walk now,” Draper says. “Why didn’t you just walk away? Walk somewhere and tell someone?”
“It ain’t that easy.”
“Why not? Pretend I’m sitting on your jury. Make me understand.”
Gypsy bangs her open palms on the table. For the first time, she raises her voice, looks Draper straight in the eyes.
“Where were you people before? How come what I did is a crime and what she did ain’t?”
“Maybe it was a crime,” Draper says. “We didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well I didn’t know neither.”
“But how is that possible? How can you have two perfectly healthy legs and not know it?”
“Cause no one told me different. From when I was a baby. It was always just her telling me things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“That I had defects in my chromosomes. That my own blood was trying to kill me. That real food was like poison to someone sick as me. That it was just her saving my life day in and out and wouldn’t nobody else ever want the job. That my brain was weak on account of everything else wrong with me. That I’d never get hired to do nothing ’cause there wasn’t nothing I could do as good as other people. That my legs was born dead and we might as well cut ’em off for all the good they did me. That I’d better pray the end came for me before it came for her or I’d find out what this world was really about.”
Draper listens, struggles to maintain a neutral expression. Whether or not Gypsy is telling the truth, the scope of what can go wrong between two people—between a mother and daughter—has stretched beyond the bounds of her imagination. She’s beginning to understand why Slater is so jaded.
“And you believed all of that?” she asks.
“I told you—no one gave me nothing else to believe.”
“So what changed, Gypsy? Was it Katrina? Moving here?”
“I been thinking on that ever since Mama died. Moving here sped things up, but really it started with that trip we took last year.”
She tells Draper about her encounter with Robert, the fake bionic man.
“Maybe he was a deviant, like my mama said. But then maybe he wasn’t. I started thinking that maybe what happened down there could happen again. And again and again. As many times as I wanted. And if that was true, then a lot of what my mama said just couldn’t be. I think I half knew it already—I just didn’t know where to start looking for the truth. There were so many lies. Nothing but lies. Then we moved here and met Pastor Mike.”
“Was it Pastor Mike who helped you understand that you weren’t sick?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t mean to be helpful that way. He was like a new audience for my mama, and I could see him believing every word out of her mouth without asking no questions. She could’ve said anything and he would’ve believed her. She could’ve told him I was part giraffe and he wouldn’t have batted an eye. And then I could see he felt sorry for her. For her, not me. And he’s a grown man. That made me mad in a way I ain’t never been mad before. And that’s why I went on that site. ’Cause I wanted to prove to him and her and myself that Robert the bionic deviant wasn’t the only one in this wide world who could want me. There had to be other Roberts out there, and some of ’em had to be good people. That’s just math.”
“So when you opened your Christian Couples account you still didn’t know for sure that you could walk? That you could eat solid food? That you could grow your hair as long as you like?”
“No, ma’am. That all came later.”
“When?”
“When that doctor told me to stand up in his office and I did it and then I saw Mama’s face. Her face told it all. The whole story.”
On the other side of the two-way mirror, Slater turns to Dr. Ryan, raises an eyebrow.
“I guess that would be you,” he says.
“I guess it would.”