Twilight Children

by Torey Hayden

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be. How long have you been a psychologist? You sure don’t know anything about it.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see or you’d do it. You don’t see anything. You’re stupid. You don’t know anything about doing your job.”

  A moment’s silent standoff. She glared at me, fixing me very firmly with her gaze.

  “I don’t like you,” she said sulkily. “You’re a big pain. I don’t like being in here. I’m not going to come anymore.” Frustrated, she sat down in the chair opposite me at the table.

  Yet more silence.

  She sighed heavily and flopped forward on the table. “You want Cooperative Girl,” she muttered.

  A pause.

  “You said I could come in here.” Her voice was low and still petulant. “But you don’t want me. You want Cooperative Girl.”

  “I hear you saying you can’t be yourself because you aren’t able to tell me what to do.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m thinking that you feel worried about coming here unless you can control everything that might happen.”

  She clamped her hands over her ears and lowered her forehead down until it was against the tabletop.

  Several moments passed.

  Then gradually she lifted her head and lowered her hands. She remained hunched well forward over the tabletop and she sat very still, staring down at the wood pattern of the Formica. There was almost a meditative quality to it, a quieting, and it lasted two or three minutes, which is a sizable amount of time, if one is simply sitting without speaking. I watched her carefully.

  “I can tell you something,” she said very softly, her head still down.

  “All right.”

  “It’s a secret, so you’ve got to not tell anyone. But I can explain why I got so many problems and got to be in here.”

  Cassandra tilted her head to the side slightly, enough to look at me sidelong. For a moment or two she held my gaze. “You know my teacher?”

  “Mrs. Baker? Yes.”

  “Well, one day … this was last term. Before Christmas. I was at my desk doing my workbook and she leaned over me … and she put her hand between my legs and felt me.”

  I watched her.

  “She said if I could come in after school, she’d show me something. I didn’t want to and I was sort of shaking my head. Like this. Real slow, like, because I didn’t want the other kids to see. I didn’t want them to know what she was doing to me. I didn’t want to come in after school, but she said if I didn’t, she’d tell my parents that I had stole some money, even though I hadn’t done it. But she said she’d say that to them and they’d believe her.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “So I went in after school. She was there with her girlfriend. She’s a lesbian and they were making love with each other. She asked if I wanted to do it, too. I didn’t want to. I know that’s wrong and I wanted to run away, but she said she’d tell my mom and get me in big trouble if I didn’t do what she wanted. She said nobody was going to believe me over a teacher. So I had to let her and her girlfriend tongue me.”

  “So you’re telling me that you think the reason you have problems and are here is because Mrs. Baker did sexual things with you?”

  Solemnly, Cassandra nodded.

  I hesitated.

  She quickly read my uncertainty. “It’s true!” she said with sudden vehemence. “It is the truth and no one will believe me. It’s just like she said. Everyone will believe her and not me. And I got to pay for it.”

  “I think the reason people have a hard time believing you, Cassandra, is because in the past you have sometimes had trouble telling the truth. This makes it hard for people to know if what you are saying has really happened or not.”

  “It has. And it’s your fault. No one believes me. No one takes my side. Nobody understands anything.” And with this Cassandra broke into inconsolable sobs.

  Chapter

  8

  State law required all allegations of child abuse be reported, so I had no choice but to go immediately to Dave Menotti with Cassandra’s accusations regarding Mrs. Baker. I was quite certain she was not telling the truth. Not only did her allegations sound outlandish in terms of their content, the logistics just didn’t fit. Mrs. Baker not only had a husband, but he usually stopped by the school at the end of the day to give her a ride home, as they had only one car. A friendly bear of a man, he was in the room, helping his wife rearrange classroom furniture the day I had visited. So the odds did not seem high that she also had a secret lesbian lover who joined her after school in molesting the children. Nonetheless, these were serious allegations. Without evidence that they were untrue, it would be negligent—and unforgivable—to simply ignore them.

  In the early afternoon Dave and I sat together watching the videotape of the session. What came through in a way that hadn’t been so obvious to me during the sessions was what a strange girl Cassandra was. There was no other way to put it. You watched her and you just got this eerie, uncomfortable sense of how odd she was.

  The other thing I noticed was the lack of any discernible pattern to her behavior. Other than a desire to control the session, which had been present in all our meetings, Cassandra’s behavior was diffuse and erratic. Watching the session, I was struck by how much of my floundering was simply because I still had no idea what I was dealing with. She switched from being aggressive to being coquettish to being domineering to being babyish and dependent without giving any indication of how these related to one another. Moreover, she made these switches so quickly I saw myself struggling to keep up. As soon as I tried to address one problem, she was off doing something else.

  Dave said this indicated a “poorly organized personality” and added that this was, in his experience, the precursor to borderline personality disorder. In adults, this emotional disturbance shows itself as a pattern of behaviors that includes poor interpersonal relationships; intense and inappropriate emotions; unstable, often unpredictable moods; and impulsive and manipulative behaviors. So he speculated aloud that this might be what was forming.

  We both agreed that Cassandra showed many indicators of having been sexually abused, including her comments about her father’s penis and the graphic description of what she alleged her teacher had done to her. However, there was no way at this point to discern when or where or how the abuse had taken place or what it had involved. Like me, Dave felt there was not much credibility in her allegations against Mrs. Baker, but he was intrigued that Cassandra should pick Mrs. Baker to accuse. Why? he asked. Did Cassandra perceive Mrs. Baker as a threat and was thus attempting to get rid of her? Or was it just the opposite? Did she actually like Mrs. Baker and was using these allegations to make herself appear special to Mrs. Baker in our eyes? Or was she doing it to ensure some kind of connection to Mrs. Baker, feeling that even the negative uproar lies would cause was preferable to having no attention at all? I replied, what about the possibility that she’d simply lost contact with reality? Perhaps in her imagination these things had happened and she wasn’t able to discern that they were thoughts and not actions.

  Dave’s and my conversation digressed then, wandering back to the issue of how hard it was to know how to treat someone when the individual’s observable behaviors could be interpreted so many ways. I remarked that the tape reflected well the lack of focus in the sessions and my feeling that I was spending all my time reacting rather than acting. There wasn’t really much more direction in what I was doing than in what she was doing.

  Dave replied that we weren’t lacking focus. Her abduction was the source of Cassandra’s difficulties and the focus of our work was understanding how that trauma had affected her and finding a way of helping her deal with that experience.

  I hadn’t really needed reminding of this. Indeed, I said, that was half my problem. I’d spent a lot of time investigating the current research into treatment of traumatized children and had made detailed plans for d
ealing with the issues surrounding the abduction. The problem was that so far I hadn’t managed to squeeze in even one of my planned exercises. Focusing on the trauma of the abduction was what I wanted to do, but that was just never where we ended up going.

  Dave smiled gently. “Au contraire, mam’selle,” he said. “I think that’s just where you’re going.” And he rose from his seat, clapping me on the shoulder as he did so. “The trick,” he added, “is fitting what you know to the events, not fitting the events to what you know.”

  The day after I’d returned from Quentin, I reported back to Harry Patel regarding my visit to see Drake Sloane. I told Harry that, yes, indeed, Drake was electively mute and the preschool had tried interventions, which had thus far been unsuccessful. I mentioned the possibility of bilingualism as a contributing factor and did say there were a few peculiarities to the case, such as the restrictive nature of Drake’s mutism. My overall impression, however, was of a reasonably well-adjusted child who, given an environment sensitive and appropriate to his needs, would most likely outgrow the difficulty without further treatment.

  Which sadly couldn’t be said about Drake’s grandfather, I added. I told Harry how I’d found the old man to be difficult, demanding, and meddlesome and how I suspected that if there were any serious problems, they lay in the family dynamics and not in the boy. Then I mentioned how I’d unintentionally antagonized the old man and he’d stomped out on me. So, regardless of my findings, that was the end of the story.

  Or so I’d thought.

  Sitting in my office with Dave Menotti, going over the videotape of Cassandra’s session, I heard a quick rap at the door.

  It opened and Harry popped his head in. “Oops, sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I’m just leaving to go over to the medical center, and I wanted to say before I missed you, Torey, that Drake Sloane is coming into the unit on Sunday.”

  My eyes widened with surprise.

  “Had a call from Mason Sloane, who said they’d had a family meeting and Drake’s parents decided they wanted this problem sorted out.”

  Mason Sloane decided, more likely.

  As I didn’t work weekends, I wasn’t on the unit when Drake was admitted, but, of course, I was slated for his individual therapy sessions. When I arrived on Monday, I found Drake curled up on the couch in the dayroom watching cartoons, his huge stuffed tiger, Friend, sitting beside him.

  “Hi, Drake!” I called as I walked through the day-room to the nurses’ station. “Remember me?”

  He nodded enthusiastically, smiled broadly, and waved, then started to get down to come over.

  “You wait there just a second while I talk to Nurse Nancy and then I’ll come get you. Then we’ll go do something fun. Okay?”

  Grabbing Friend around the neck in such an vigorous hug that they both toppled over, he laughed and nodded.

  Before starting the session, I wanted to find out how Drake had adjusted to his first day on the ward and what Nancy’s general impressions were, so I stepped into the small room behind the nurses’ station and closed the door.

  “What a sweetie!” Nancy said. “He’s been just good as gold since he’s come. There were some tears last night. I mean, poor little tadpole. And his mama must have had a very wet pillow last night, too. She lingered so long yesterday. You could just see it in her face.”

  This I could imagine. My impression during my visit to Quentin was not only that Lucia loved her son very dearly, but that Drake may have served as a buffer between her and the rest of the world. Indeed, my general sense was that both Mason Sloane and Lucia had more problems than Drake.

  Truth was, I was not happy with the Sloanes’ decision to bring Drake for inpatient treatment. Without evidence of devastating levels of dysfunction, the boy was, in my opinion, way too young to be separated from his mother and left for days in an institutional setting. Elective mutism on its own is not indicative of serious pathology. To hospitalize a four-year-old for not speaking at school falls into the category of “burning the house down to roast the pig,” in my opinion. This left me far more concerned about the psychological damage we could do by separating a preschooler from his family and familiar surroundings for days, if not weeks, than what would occur from leaving the elective mutism untreated. Unfortunately, he was not my child and it was not my choice. If parents made this kind of decision and had the insurance or finances to see it through, our hospital unit was designed for diagnostic purposes. So my best course of action was to swallow my own opinions and simply to get on with the job as quickly and straightforwardly as possible, so that he could go home.

  I didn’t foresee any problems in this. My treatment essentially involved very little more than arriving as an outsider with whom the child had not already established a silent relationship, setting up the expectations he/she could and would talk with me, and then presenting the child with opportunities to do so. Among children for whom there was no other significant pathology, this “method” had worked very well and my success rate was almost a 100 percent within the first session. So I set myself the personal goal of having Drake ready to go home by the next weekend.

  The therapy room wasn’t large, and it suffered from being painted a really nasty institutional gray, but otherwise it was an acceptable room. Long and narrow in shape, it had a sunny south-facing window on the far end that overlooked the trees in the hospital courtyard below. On the right-hand side of the room was the one-way mirror with an observation room on the other side. Usually there weren’t any observers, but located in there was also a video camera that recorded all sessions. On the left-hand side of the room was a low set of shelves running the entire length of the wall. These contained a small selection of playroom items commonly used in therapy—puppets, toy cars, plastic people and animals, paper, crayons, pens, plus a Playmobil dollhouse, a Fisher-Price garage, and part of a Playmobil hospital set. A Dick Bruna alphabet frieze had been put up on the wall above the shelves along with four large posters of Dick Bruna’s popular rabbit character, Miffy, displayed at rakish angles. Their bright primary colors and imaginative arrangement against the gray walls in the long, narrow room gave me the feel of being amid the cheap and cheerful decor of a student dormitory.

  I always carried my own box of materials with me, the same box I’d taken out to Quentin, and I set it on the tabletop. Drake immediately settled into the chair opposite, putting Friend on the chair beside him. Friend was so enormous that he actually sat taller in the chair than Drake.

  Drake proved an enthusiastic companion. If he was lonely or frightened at being separated from his family, he didn’t show it. His expression was bright-eyed and animated; his whole body wriggled with anticipation.

  “So what do you think about all this?” I said. “Do you like being here?”

  He nodded eagerly.

  “What’s been your favorite part?”

  He gestured with his hands. I had no idea what he was trying to communicate but he did so fervently, then looked up at me with expectancy.

  “You know what I think, Drake? I think it would be so much easier if you used words. I really do want to understand what you are saying. I want to know all about what you like to do and the things that happen when we aren’t together. I’m really, really interested. But we need words for that, don’t you think?”

  Drake nodded.

  “Your mom has told me you use words with her. I’m thinking it would be helpful if you used words to talk to me, too. So that’s what you and I are going to do in here together. I’m going to help you to start using words. You see, my special job is working with boys and girls who find it hard to talk. Just like you. Just exactly like you. So I’m very good at helping people start to talk again.”

  This seemed to please Drake enormously. He nodded enthusiastically, as if I were suggesting just the best idea in the world.

  I was struck yet again by his physical presence. He was such a gorgeous kid. His features were so symmetrical and well formed, his eyes so vibr
ant. I was even growing accustomed to his unusual hairstyle. It was part of him, part of what made him seem so ethereal, like a lost angel.

  “Because I’ve worked with lots of other boys and girls who’ve had trouble talking, just like you, I know how hard it is to get started. I know it can be scary when you’ve been used to not talking. But usually it’s just the first time that’s hard. We’ll work together. I’ll be right here, helping you. And I know you can do it.”

  Again, the wholehearted nod.

  I reached into my box and pulled out a set of cards I’d made. They were about five by seven inches in size and made from magazine pictures I’d cut out and pasted. Each showed a clear, appealing picture of common items: a car, a cat, a dog, a man, a child, and so on. I chose one that was very popular. It was a close-up of a little red-haired boy and a black cat. The boy was holding an ice cream cone and as he licked it on one side, the cat, long pink tongue extended, was reaching out to lick it on the opposite side of the cone. Children never failed to respond both to the inherent humor in the picture and to the almost universal desire to share experiences with animals.

  Drake laughed noiselessly and pointed to the boy and the cat and then looked up to assure himself that I too was seeing how funny it was.

  “Yes, that’s a good picture, isn’t it? What’s happening? What’s this?” I asked, pointing to the cat.

  He gestured, tapping his finger against the picture.

  “Yes, what is that? What’s it a picture of? What animal is this?”

  He was exhaling, pushing air out quite audibly but it was nowhere near a word. Just breath.

  “What is this? What animal is this?” I continued pointing to the cat. My experience in getting elective mutes over this first hump of speech was that I had to provide an opportunity to speak early on in the session and then pleasantly but persistently keep at the request, ignoring the silence that was thrown up; indeed, never allowing the silence to develop any kind of potency. So I continued to ask, rephrasing the question repeatedly, tapping the picture, pointing to it, staying forever on task.