They’ve tried to dissect her mind, make sense of her. They’re so ignorant. And they don’t know that I have the box. I’ll be keeping her safe with it. I know what they want. They want to rest their fears. Jamie really did scare them, just as she said. All those people inside her fascinated all the doctors and psychiatrists and reporters, but scared them, too, because they couldn’t break her down, couldn’t make her send away any of the people she loved so much. They could make the others inside her show up, but they couldn’t destroy them.
“I don’t see any of them, Mama. I don’t talk to any of them, exactly. It’s different. I feel their sound. They each give me their sound, and it’s different from all the others. That’s how I know that they’re there,” Jamie said, trying to help me understand more. “See? So I keep them in the box!”
That was the first time she explained the small cardboard box she kept in her room. She asked me not to open it unless she was there. The first time, when she lifted the cover, I didn’t know what I would see. But there was nothing inside. Just the pretty lining that was pale blue with tiny silver roses.
“They’re all resting now. But sometimes when I hold the box I can hear them inside, all talking at once,” Jamie said, laughing.
The hospital made videos when the others appeared. I never watched those. I didn’t need them. I had Jamie.
She spoke about the sounds often after that. She had her own symphony inside that box, was what it seemed like, and the instruments, the voices, that played, played for her. She listened with her heart and knew each one of them that way.
“We need to know their names, Jamie, right now,” one of the doctors said to her the last time I visited her in Andersonville. He was new, and impatient.
“Will you name them for us, Jamie?” he asked.
“All of them?” she’d said, so sweetly.
And when they said yes, she sang a song that brought tears to my eyes. The tones she sang spun out and wove together like a fabric and I felt the colors of the notes. I knew it was a gift that Jamie was giving me, an opening into all of the others, after all. I know now she didn’t expect to see me again.