The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,64

away. “I don’t know what to do.” It brought tears to her eyes just looking at him as they held hands across the table and he fought to regain his composure.

“I’ve been worried for a long time.” She spoke softly. “I think there’s a part of Zoe broken so deep down inside that you can’t see it. On the surface she looks like the perfect mother, or wants to be. She runs the non-profit brilliantly. She’s a loving wife, a bright girl, a charming woman, but I think part of her is badly damaged. I feel it, more than see it. I think Jaime’s injuries are proof of it.”

“Do you think she hurts Jaime intentionally?” He was willing to consider any possibility.

“It’s more complicated than that, I think.” She said it as their lunch arrived and neither of them touched their food. “I wanted to talk to you about it a year or so ago, but you weren’t ready to hear it then. There’s a form of mental illness or a personality disorder that’s hotly debated in the psychiatric community. It’s called Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”

“I’ve heard of it, but I never knew what it was.” Somehow he’d had a feeling that his mother would know what was going on, better than he did, and he hoped that was true.

“People who suffer from it often make their children sick in a very serious way. They poison them, and do some frightening things to cause illness—not feign it, cause it. That’s the most severe form. Or they create or allow dangerous situations, where a child will get injured. They don’t injure them themselves, but they set it up, and let it happen. Or when a child is legitimately sick, they exaggerate the symptoms and insist they’re sicker than they are to make the illness seem more important. Some of them even set up surgeries that aren’t necessary.” He thought immediately of the ear tubes Zoe had engineered, and the appendectomy she wanted Jaime to have for her stomachache, and if he hadn’t objected, she might have had it.

“I think Zoe fits in that spectrum somewhere,” Connie said. “She puts Jaime in dangerous situations and the inevitable happens. And then there’s the apnea, the febrile seizure no one ever saw, the appendicitis that wasn’t. It’s a plea for attention for the mother. A desperate need to be noticed, appreciated, and comforted. Once the child is genuinely sick or injured, or appears to be, they rush forward and are the perfect mother and astound everyone with how attentive they are, and become the child’s savior and hero. They appear to be fabulous mothers, and it’s mostly women who suffer from this disorder—and no one sees that they have caused the child’s injury or illness in the first place. Some of them have had medical training in some form, so they know what they’re doing,” she continued. “The debate among psychiatrists is whether it’s a mental illness, a personality disorder, or a form of child abuse. Maybe it’s the degree of it that makes the difference. I’ve done a lot of reading about it for the last three years, since Jaime was born. I think Zoe fits the pattern. You’d know better than I. But it occurred to me three years ago—the difficult nursing, Jaime rolling off the changing table and bumping her head, falling down the stairs, the broken arm and wrist, the story you just told me. I’ve suspected it for a while.

“These women usually cover their tracks carefully and are very clever. There is always another explanation. They’re practiced liars. And I hate to tell you, but some of them kill their children. Or the children die in an accident they allowed to happen. I don’t think Zoe is at the extreme range of the disorder, but I’m not sure of that, and maybe you aren’t either. I understand why you’re scared, I am too.” Constance was quiet and calm and sane about it, which made everything she said worse and more real. She wasn’t hysterical or accusatory, she was, as always, intelligent, well informed, and made perfect sense. And what she described sounded all too familiar.

“Do they know they’re doing it?” he asked in a strangled voice.

“That’s debatable. Even the psychiatrists don’t agree on that. It’s a form of compulsive behavior.”

“Her mother donated her own marrow for a transplant when her little sister was dying of leukemia, and everyone thought she was heroic during her entire illness.