I hadn’t had any time for painting since the Shady Terrace bombshell, so I was eager to jump in. I was deeply absorbed when my cell phone rang. Without thinking, I answered without checking the caller ID, which I later noticed said “unavailable.”
“Am I speaking to Cleo Sims?” the female voice asked.
I already regretted answering. It was probably someone trying to sell me something, but—since I use my cell for both business and personal calls—it could be a new client. “Who’s calling please?” I asked in my business voice.
“This is Judith Demar,” she said brusquely. “I’m a friend of Derrick Townes. You met me at the West End Gallery last Friday. Faye introduced us.”
Oh yes, Angelica’s horrible Judith with the dark-red aura. Now I definitely regretted answering. So I cut to the chase. “What can I do for you, Judith?”
“I’m calling on behalf of Derrick. We have to meet with you right away.” Her voice sounded like a no-nonsense drill sergeant. “Tomorrow. We’re both tied up in the morning so it will have to be afternoon. Can we say two o’clock?”
Whoa! This woman is a steamroller. And why was she calling on behalf of Derrick? My first inclination was to tell her I had no openings for the next month, if ever. But I decided to stay more civil. If I was going to work with the Townes children, I didn’t want her standing in the way. “My schedule is very busy tomorrow, Judith. I don’t have my appointment book with me right now, but I could call you in the morning and set up a time for next week.”
“Didn’t you hear me say I’m tied up in the morning?” She sounded like she was lecturing a small child. I could see why Angelica disliked her.
I stayed cool. “No problem. I’ll call in the morning and leave a message with a few available times. You can pick one and call me back.”
“Actually you’re wrong. There is a problem. And it’s your problem. Derrick’s daughter Lacey brought her sister Angelica to your office today without his permission. I’m sure you know that treating a minor requires parental permission.”
“Of course. But I wasn’t treating her. She and Lacey and Shane and I were just having a conversation.”
“Well now you and Derrick and I need to have a conversation about that conversation. And we need to have it tomorrow.”
Uh-oh. Elisa’s prediction of trouble was already coming true. I realized that I shouldn’t have let Lacey bring Angelica to my office. We should have met somewhere else to talk where it wouldn’t have looked like a therapy session. I could see how Derrick and Judith could make trouble for me, since it could be hard to prove I wasn’t treating a minor without permission.
So I agreed to a meeting. “Okay. I left my 4:00 time open tomorrow to catch up on my clients’ insurance forms. You can come then,” I said grudgingly. “That’s the only time I can offer you right now.”
Judith and Derrick breezed into my office like they owned the place at 4:00 on Thursday. They were both dressed in tennis clothes. Judith wore a tiny short black tennis dress that had white side inserts and a sporty racer back. Derrick matched her with sleek black shorts and a black tee that had a white stripe running down the right side and underarm mesh venting panels. Their shoes looked like the expensive kind that you see in pro tournaments or at Wimbleton.
“Excuse the tennis clothes,” Derrick said with a smile as I showed them in to my counseling room. “Since you couldn’t meet us at two, we took advantage of our free time to get in some extra practice. We’re playing in a tournament this weekend and we don’t like to lose.”
“Not that we lose very often,” Judith said. “But we never pass up a chance to play.”
They sat together on the couch and I took the chair across from them. Might as well start things off on a pleasant note, I thought. So I followed up on the tennis thing. “It sounds like you’re both serious tennis players,” I said. “Is your tournament here in Boulder?”
“It’s here at the university tennis complex,” Derrick said. “I used to play professionally and if I had my wish, I still would. In fact I’d love to spend most of my time playing tennis. But I have to balance my tennis life and my business life.” I nodded. With his black curly hair, blue eyes, fit body and tanned skin, I could easily picture him as a tennis coach hanging out at the courts helping cute young girls improve their backhand.
“Derrick could still be a pro,” Judith said imperiously. “In fact we both could. But with all my books and academic articles, plus my grants and national committees, not to mention teaching two graduate seminars, I don’t have that kind of time.”
Whew! This woman sounded like the president of her own fan club. I didn’t want to hear any more of her resume, so I said, “Thinking of time, I know you’re both busy—and this meeting is an extra for my schedule too—so let’s talk about why you wanted to see me today.
“We don’t want you seeing Angelica again,” Judith said. “Just to be perfectly clear, neither Lacey nor Shane has legal authority to make decisions regarding Angelica, so they can’t bring her here without Derrick’s permission. We’re willing to overlook your seeing her without our permission yesterday if you promise to stay strictly away from her from now on.”
Derrick didn’t look quite as sure as Judith did and he, not Judith, was Angelica’s parent, so I waited to see what he would say. He stayed silent, so I turned to him and said, “How do you feel about this Derrick?”
He leaned forward in my direction. “Actually Angelica is a very disturbed child. I don’t know if she told you that she thinks she’s some kind of special child—Indigo—who doesn’t have to do things the way other children do. Unfortunately Mirabel supported her in that. In fact she’s the one who came up with it. I tried to get her to see reason, but I never got anywhere. Now Angelica refuses to do half her schoolwork because she says it’s irrelevant. I know she needs therapy and I’m sure you’re a good therapist, but Judith has found another therapist for her.”
“Yes, she’ll be starting therapy tomorrow and her pediatrician will be starting her on Ritalin,” Judith said. “Angelica needs to learn to focus and do her schoolwork. She may be gifted in some areas but she’s out of control and she needs stability.”
I hadn’t seen any evidence of Angelica being out of control, but I had seen that she was grieving the loss of her mother and her sister. I doubted that Ritalin was a good choice for her. I wasn’t her therapist and they weren’t asking my advice, but I still felt a need to remind Derrick that he had some responsibility as a father.
“I can see you’re concerned about Angelica,” I said, addressing Derrick. “She’s been through a lot losing her sister and her mother. She’s going to need a lot of your attention while she’s dealing with all that.”
Derrick’s face sagged. “I know that,” he said softly, “but I’ve never had that kind of relationship with her. I’ve tried everything, but she won’t talk to me about how she’s feeling.”
“Does she talk to anyone about how she’s feeling?” I asked.
Derrick sighed. “Just Lacey,” he said. “And now she and Lacey have come up with this notion that Mirabel was murdered. I don’t blame Angelica. She’s young, and as you say, she’s been through a lot.” He frowned and his voice took on an angry tone as he went on. “But Lacey should know better than to encourage Angelica’s crazy ideas.”
Judith put her arm around his shoulders and looked him directly in the face. “Derrick, you know Lacey likes to stir the pot. She thrives on conflict. You need to keep her away from Angelica as much as you can.”
Judith did have a point about Lacey loving drama, but the idea of keeping her away from Angelica was cruel. Fortunately Derrick stood up for Lacey and Angelica. He shook his head and nixed Judith’s demand. “No, I can’t do that, Judith. Angelica needs someone to talk to and Lacey is the only one she feels close to right now.”
“That’s why we’re starting Angelica in therapy,” Judith said. “But we can discuss this later. There’s no reason for Dr. Sims to be involv
ed.” She turned toward me, “So I assume we’re clear here. We’d prefer you to stay out of our family business. Unfortunately, we can’t stop Lacey or Shane from coming to you. But they do not have our permission to bring Angelica and you do not have our permission to treat her.”
I had certainly gotten the message by then and I was more than ready to see the last of Judith. “You’ve made you point,” I said. “Now I have phone calls to return and paperwork to catch up on.” I stood up and headed toward the door to the waiting room. They followed.
Derrick made a half-hearted attempt to make nice. “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,” he said. He smiled, shook my hand, and added, “I’ll probably be seeing you over at Shady Terrace dealing with that mess. I still haven’t figured out where my dad will live now that the place is closing.”
As I closed the door behind them, I wondered what Derrick saw in Judith. Was her tennis game so strong that he was willing to overlook her nasty disposition? Or did she have some other hold over him?
I sat in my office for a while contemplating the issues Judith and Derrick had raised. Was Angelica making up or imagining her Indigo-child status as a way to get out of doing stuff she didn’t want to do? I certainly wasn’t any expert on Indigo children. Had Angelica’s sense of what had happened to Mirabel come from an over-active imagination rather than a spiritual connection?
I felt a need for more information so I typed “indigo child” into my Google search engine. Over a million hits. I started with Wikipedia. Their entry described Indigo children as a controversial New Age concept with no scientific evidence to back it up. Believers describe Indigo children as bright, empathetic, highly intuitive kids who are here on earth to remake the world into a place of peace, but who function poorly in conventional schools due to their rejection of authority, being smarter than their teachers and a lack of response to guilt-, fear- or manipulation-based discipline. Okay, that sounded like Angelica.
Skeptics say that the traits attributed to Indigos are so vague they could describe anyone and that applying the Indigo label to a disruptive child may delay proper diagnosis and treatment the child needs. A good summary of Judith’s point of view.
Wikpedia continued with a paragraph about how some children whose parents believe they are Indigos are diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by the school system because they are impatient and easily bored at school. When school psychologists suggest a drug like Ritalin to treat the ADHD, these parents refuse. They insist that Indigos are a new stage of evolution who require special treatment, not medications.
Angelica didn’t strike me as a hyperactive child, but that diagnosis was outside my areas of expertise. Also, I had only seen Angelica in a few limited settings. I didn’t feel competent to judge whether Judith was right about Angelica.
Next I went to the Indigo Childern website, where I read a long warning about how the Wikipedia entry is a page filled with misinformation and bias. The writer admitted there is no scientific evidence of the Indigo phenomena but insisted that these children are the beginning of a change in human nature described by many around the world as a new consciousness.
Another site had a list of questions to help a person know whether they are an Indigo. Do you sometimes feel wise beyond your years? Does your family misunderstand you? Do you have strong intuition about certain things that most others do not? Do you have trouble conforming to the ways of society? Do you often feel misunderstood when you try to talk to people about what’s real? If you answer yes to such questions, you are most likely an Indigo who has come to earth to build a new society.
Or, I thought, maybe you’re a child who feels lost after the deaths of both her sister and her mother, and who feels misunderstood by her father and his bossy live-in mistress.
I turned off my computer. More information wouldn’t help. I needed to clarify my thoughts. Was Angelica Indigo? For that matter are Indigos real or are they merely wishful thinking on the part of their parents? Had Mirabel encouraged Angelica’s oddness and given her this special label as a way for them both to overcome their grief over Kari’s death? Was Angelica’s strong intuition that Mirabel had been murdered an important insight by a child with special abilities? Or was it a cry for help from a grief-stricken child who felt misunderstood? If I encouraged her to pursue her intuition would I be making it harder for her to accept the loss of her mother and move on? Should I reconsider my involvement?
The sun slipped behind the mountains, leaving me in the dusk as I tried to resolve these stubborn questions. Suddenly a familiar voice came from a far corner of the room.
“Yo, Cleo. You can’t bail in two feet of water. You’re heading for a nose-dive.”
Tyler! I couldn’t see him in the dim light, but there was no mistaking that voice or that surfer slang. This time I was going to get some answers. “Tyler, can you come closer so I can see you? I really need to talk to you.”
Usually he ignores my requests, but to my surprise he did what I asked. Suddenly I could see him perched cross-legged on the windowsill, wearing his usual “Never Stop Surfing” tee shirt and rubber sandals. I was encouraged that he had responded to my request. Maybe he was in an unusually helpful mood.
“Tyler, I feel like I’m already in a nose-dive. I want to help Angelica and Lacey, but this is a messy situation. I don’t know who to believe.”
“Believe in yourself. Don’t sit in the channel and watch. Get into the lineup. Don’t back down. You’ll blow it if you miss the good wave.”
I groaned in frustration. “Argggh! Tyler, if you know so much you must know that what you’re saying doesn’t mean anything to me!”
I should have known better. Tyler never hangs around when I get confrontational with him. He bounced off the windowsill and floated off toward the corner, where he melted into the wall and vanished. But his words trailed behind him like a gusty tailwind. “Forget about meaning, Cleo. It’s time to hit the surf. Angelica’s in the impact zone.”
Chapter 14
After Tyler left, I went through the rest of my phone messages. Surprisingly one of them was from Shane Townes. He’d left a cryptic voice mail. “Hey, Cleo. Could I buy you a drink after work? There’s some stuff I’d like to run by you.”
Buy me a drink? The image of Shane yesterday in his torn jeans and Lord of the Rings tee-shirt talking about online games brought to mind a high-school age geek—someone who’d be more at home in a coffee house than a bar. But then I remembered the Shane from the wedding dressed in the pricey pinstriped suit. He definitely had his sophisticated side. And he was twenty-four and he’d gone to USC, so he was probably no stranger to trendy bars.
Anyway, I didn’t have any plans for the evening, and a drink could be just what I needed to defuse the lingering tension I felt from tangling with Judith. Also, my curiosity got the better of me, like it always does.
He was old enough for me to talk to without permission. So why not give him a call and see if he was free. I did. He was. We agreed to meet at The Med at 5:30 for their happy-hour drinks and tapas.
The Med is on Walnut not far from my office, so I walked over. I didn’t feel like waiting so I was happy to see Shane walking up when I arrived and even happier when we managed to get a table in the bar right away. In keeping with its name, the Med’s décor is Mediterranean—terra-cotta floors, white stucco walls accented with colorful tiles, plants and fresh flowers everywhere. We ordered the red Sangria and a selection of small plates—tapas—which are their specialty and a great deal at happy hour. We chose skewers of Moroccan spiced shrimp, fried garlic calamari with Spanish sauce, hummus with black beans and cilantro, and roasted mushrooms in garlic herb butter sauce.
I wanted to get to know Shane a little before we started in on the family issues, so I indulged my curiosity and asked him about his work. “You said you have a job working on an online game. What’s it like? I’ve heard about games like Second Life but I’ve never played one.”
Shane spea
red a roasted mushroom, swirled it around in its garlic butter sauce and popped it in his mouth without dripping even a tiny bit of the sauce. Then he leaned forward and spoke with an intensity that reminded me of one of my students trying to convince the class of a favorite theory. “Gyaki-Birquit is a virtual world on another planet in the future. Like on Second Life, everyone who plays is represented by an avatar—a computer-generated character that can walk around, interact with other characters, teleport to other parts of the planet, and that’s just a start. You can customize your avatar’s looks, clothes, skills, personality and more. But because it’s all in the future everyone has super abilities like being able to teleport or send out shock waves that stun people near them. When you’re in Gyaki-Birquit your avatar is you, and you can make yourself anyone you want to be. You could be a person a lot like who you are now or someone totally different.”
I was beginning to see the attraction. Who wouldn’t want to try on some totally different identities? “So I could be a big muscle-bound guy or a cute sex kitten?”
He laughed. “If that’s who you want to be. You might want to add some brainpower too, though. In Gyaki-Birquit getting ahead is based on winning challenges that require thinking.”
I tore off a piece of pita bread and spread some hummus on it. “So I’d have to work there, try to get ahead?” I paused to enjoy the hummus and then added, “I thought this game was supposed to be recreation. Sounds kind of stressful.”
“No, it’s all your choice. You can make friends, join groups, start a business, compete in games, learn new skills, run for political office—just about anything you can do here. But because the characters all have super powers, everything moves way faster there. For example, my mom spent years trying to find more land the city and county could buy for open space—and working out details to get the land. But in Gyaki-Birquit a powerful advanced character can create additional land in an instant, choose what it will look like and what it will be used for. It’s the world like you ideally want it to be.” Shane stopped his explanation to motion our server over and order more Sangria
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