The doctor smiled at her to assure her Cordo’s crying was nothing to be alarmed at. He told her to stay here while he and Cordo went out into the hall and into a corner. They spoke confidentially.
“What antidepressant are you on?”
Cordo told him. The doctor then wrote him a prescription for trazodone, it can be dangerous with fluoxetine but it’s the best for treating depression as well as sedating you.
“Sedating me?”
“Yes. These night terrors your daughter has are obviously not troubling her. If they were there are psychological treatments. But as of now, the only adverse side effect they’re having is on you. So you take the trazodone right before bed, Amelia’s night terrors won’t disturb you.”
Cordo was obviously suspicious but took the prescription.
“When will she stop?”
“Most kids grow out of them. If they’re not gone by the time she’s four, we’ll reconsider the pharmaceutical route for her.”
Cordo got the prescription filled and took it that night. An hour later he was asleep and if Amelia had night terrors at all, he didn’t hear them.
Then everything went smoothly for a while. Amelia did not remember if she ever had the terrors and Cordo was never wakened by them and as she showed no sign of disturbance or lack of sleep, the issue faded into the background.
Amelia picked up on reading and writing in French and English quickly, likely because Cordo pushed them on her, reading aloud Hemingway and Flaubert at night before bed and singing Jim Croce and Georges Brassens. But she also picked up on math with ease, due in no part to Cordo whatsoever. She blazed through the numerical problems in her learner books, her reading ability enabling her to go at her own pace.
One night Cordo ordered pizza for dinner. Before the doorbell rang, he did the math on his phone, then, perhaps seeing a rare opportunity to contribute to Amelia’s mathematical education, he asked her if she knew how to do percentages as she sat at the kitchen table coloring in a drawing book of plants—no doubt bought by Lourdes with the express purpose of recruiting her early as a botanist—with their common names under them (and had Cordo known, he would have seen how she colored each plant correctly—no red stems or purple leaves but green, orange poppies, red roses, white jasmine, purple lavender, pink rhododendrons, though how she knew what colors these should have been was a puzzle).
“Do you know what 15 percent of $20.95 is?” Cordo asked her.
Amelia thought for a moment and Cordo perhaps was just getting ready to give her instructions as to how to solve it when she answered:
“Three decimal one four two five.”
Cordo looked down and saw that exact figure on his phone’s calculator. He stared at the back of her head.
“How did you do that?”
Amelia shrugged, not turning around.
“It’s easy.”
Shortly before she turned four, Cordo turned on his voice recorder, which he used to record interviews, and left it in the top drawer of Amelia’s dresser before she went to bed. Then he took his trazodone and slept the night through and in the morning, he listened to the recording, an hour into which he heard Amelia’s familiar nocturnal sobbing and screaming.
He continued to record every night leading up to her fourth birthday and every night she screamed. He played one such recording for her doctor.
Amelia was outside in the lobby reading The Hobbit while other kids were playing with building blocks.
The doctor tapped a pen on his palm as he sat casually reclining behind his desk.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked Cordo.
Cordo sat forward in his chair, shoulders taut.
“She doesn’t remember anything. Doesn’t have bad dreams, she says.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Cordo thought.
“I don’t know. If she doesn’t have a problem and I don’t have a problem anymore, does a problem really exist?”
“You’re getting into philosophy now—not my specialty.”
Cordo did not respond with a smile, as was the intended reaction.
“Or am I just taking the easy way out?”
The doctor shrugged.
Difficultly, Cordo requested they start Amelia again on some medication. As no go-to medication for night terrors exists, the doctor said, the next best thing would be to try to decrease her brain activity during sleep. There are a number of medications we can use, it’ll be a timely process, as most aren’t effective until five to six weeks after use. We’ll start her out with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are used to treat ADHD and various nervous disorders. If the SSRIs don’t work after, say, three months, we’ll move onto another class of drug.
The doctor took out his prescription pad.
“You sure about this? She may still grow out of them.”
Cordo glanced at the family picture on the doctor’s desk.
“Would you just let your kids panic all night and not do anything about it?”
The doctor didn’t respond, only nodded a little. He prescribed Amelia sertraline.
“It may be best if you don’t take the trazodone for a while, until you know how she’ll respond to it.”
Cordo took a deep breath.
“Better get ready to enter back into the shit storm, huh?”
Two weeks after Cordo started Amelia on the sertraline, given her with a cup of water right before bed, explaining these will help you sleep better, I sleep fine Daddy, I know but take them anyway—two weeks of not taking the trazodone and being wakened by Amelia’s piercing cries a half-dozen times each night, only for her not to remember anything the next morning, and Cordo regained that haggard drug-addict appearance that had drawn such concern from his social circle, he did not sleep, did not even try now without the sedative—two weeks later he saw the first sign of the medication’s effects on his daughter.
They were eating dinner one night, not talking, as they usually did not. Amelia ate with a knife and fork, cutting her own food.
“What happened to my mother, Daddy?”
Cordo chewed slowly as he looked over at her. She went on eating and cutting, glancing at him.
“Your mother?”
Amelia nodded.
Cordo sat back, perhaps wondering how he would tell her about Lourdes. It was the first time she’d asked about her.
“She’s not around anymore.”
“Is that a picture of her as a baby above my bed?”
Cordo hesitated.
“Yes. With her mother.”
“She looks a lot like me.”
Cordo nodded. Yes, there was a striking resemblance between Amelia and young Lourdes. The black hair, the dimples, the narrow nose.
He set his fork down.
“Do you wanna see other pictures of your mom?”
Amelia wiped some spaghetti sauce from her mouth.
“Yes.”
He took her hand and led her into his bedroom, into his closet. He unfolded the stepladder leaning up against the shelves of shoes and folded pants and underwear and socks, set it up underneath the crawlspace door, got upon it, and pushed open the door. He took down tote bags and suitcases and trash bags, set them in the carpet, then took them onto his bed, where he and Amelia sat and opened the bags and found the loose pictures, the photo albums, the frames.
They were all of Cordo and Lourdes’ time together—she’d had none from when she was younger, since she was a baby.
Cordo and Amelia looked through all of the pictures for more than an hour.
“She’s beautiful,” Amelia remarked.
“Yes, she was.”
“Why don’t you put some of these up around the house?”
Cordo’s hands paused. He thought about this, nodded. Then he started telling Amelia where each of the pictures was from: We spent a weekend on Bainbridge Island together, this is from lunch on my first day working full-time for The Times, Kubota Gardens on a rainy day—yeah, it’s real
ly pretty, sure we can go some time—a Mariners game with Tom (which, he didn’t tell her, they’d snuck shooters of Fireball and Jäger into and gotten drunk and had to take trains back to Cordo and Lourdes’ apartment, where they had gotten even drunker and watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show multiple times before passing out).
“You look in love,” Amelia said.
Cordo smiled.
“We were.”
“Why did she kill herself?”
Cordo was silent. Then angrily:
“How…Did you find something on the internet, did Ms. Margaret say something to you?”
“No.”
“How do you know about…?”
“I had a dream.”
Cordo took a moment to let his anger evaporate.
“A dream.”
“Yes.”
Cordo swallowed.
“What about?”
“A woman killed herself.”
She pointed to Lourdes. Cordo clenched his fists.
“How?”
“She cut open her stomach and took me out and then got in a boat and went out into the ocean and set herself on fire and sank the boat.”
Cordo looked pale, sick, but Amelia was unmoved, peaceful. His lower lip quivered and Cordo stood and went into his bathroom and closed the door and was in there for a while and Amelia heard him blow his nose a few times as she kept flipping through the pictures. She looked in other bags and found various items that could only have been Lourdes’—hairbrushes, makeup, perfume, hair curler, straightener, clothes, shoes.
Cordo came back out and sat beside her again. Amelia saw his eyes were red.
“Why did she do it?” she asked softly.
Cordo sniveled mucously, shook his head.
“Nobody knows.”
Amelia looked back down at the pictures.
“She had cancer.”
There were no photos of her time after being diagnosed—she’d refused to be photographed then. Cordo shook his head in mystification.
“How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
“…How?”
“I hear her voice in my head.”
Amelia looked innocent and yet shrewd.
“Do you know about death?” he asked.
Amelia nodded.
“How?”
“Books.”
Cordo half-smiled.
“What is death?”
“When the mind stops thinking, the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, and cells stop dividing.”
Cordo nodded.
“I guess that’s true.”
“Why do people believe in God?”
Cordo took a deep breath.
“I don’t know. They’re afraid of death?”
“Mom didn’t believe in God.”
“…No.”
“Do you?”
“…I don’t know. Who do you think God is?”
“An imaginary friend.”
Cordo chuckled airily.
“You want me to put pictures of Mom around the house?”
Amelia nodded.
So he did.
After these two weeks, Amelia had occasional nights that she would sleep straight through but she also continued to have night terrors, though considerably fewer. She also reported continued dreams, which her pediatrician told Cordo was good, was improvement. He could, however, not provide any clarification as to the nature of the dreams, which mostly consisted of Lourdes “sitting in a big room with other people listening to an old man on a stage talk about plants” or “looking at glass tubes with small leaves and water in them” or “crying and holding me in her stomach.”
“It may be her mind is making up narratives to go along with the image of her mother as a scientist,” the pediatrician told Cordo alone in his office. “The dreams she describes are rather general and vague.”
“What about the voice she’s says told her about Lourdes’ cancer?”
“Maybe she heard you talk about it in passing at some point. Maybe that little voice is an imaginary friend.”
“What about how she describes Lourdes dying? Nobody ever said she set a boat on fire.”
The doctor thought.
“Could mean a subconscious projection of Lourdes going to Hell. Don’t Catholics believe suicide is an unforgivable sin?”
“I don’t know. And that’s another thing—how can she know so much at her age? God and death and all?”
“She sounds like a particularly perceptive little girl. You may want to have her tested before she starts school.”
Cordo looked into the wall.
“She frightens me sometimes.”
The doctor nodded.
“I’d imagine.”
Amelia started sleeping through the night more often and then in the second week of the third month she was on sertraline, she went a full week without night terrors, only dreams, which she related to a fully rested Cordo the next morning, always vaguely about Lourdes.
One day Cordo got home and Margaret met him in a frenzy and told him how she’d taken Amelia with her to the supermarket earlier in the day and as they’d been walking around, Amelia had bent over like she had a tummy ache and Margaret stopped and rubbed her back and asked her what was wrong and Amelia then held her head between her hands and squeezed and then she screamed the most horrible scream you ever heard and started crying and people all around were looking around I was just mortified and I picked her up and ran outside with her and put her in the car and tried to find out what was wrong but she just kept crying for more than an hour and she couldn’t say anything for a while. Then when she could, she said she didn’t know, she just heard screaming and whispering all around, screaming like dying, she described.
He told Margaret to go on home, then went into Amelia’s room and talked to her about the afternoon.
“What was the whispering saying?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear it very well.”
Cordo nodded.
“Maybe you should go to sleep.”
Amelia nodded. Cordo gave her a sertraline and left. She slept peacefully.
Two more days, two more episodes, Margaret reported, worse and worse.
“Could it be a brain tumor?” Cordo asked her pediatrician. “It sounds like she’s hallucinating.”
“Doubtful. She recognizes the thoughts are in her mind rather than in the real world. It sounds more like intrusive thoughts. If I remember right, the sleep doctor predicted she would have OCD?”
“Yeah.”
“Amelia’s panic seems to have shifted into her waking hours, so the cause of her panic has also shifted into her conscious brain. She’ll have better memories of everything now. I think it’s a good time to start therapy, get to the root of her anxiety.”
He wrote a name and number down for Cordo and gave him the slip of paper. He looked at it a moment.
“Can we cat-scan her? Just to be sure.”
The doctor agreed. Amelia’s body had no tumors.
So Cordo took her to therapy once a week. He sat outside in the waiting area while Amelia and the psychologist talked in her office for an hour.
At first it was only once a week. Then, as Amelia started having day terrors more frequently—incoherent screaming and whispering—the psychologist upped her visits to two, then three times a week and then Cordo had to enlist Margaret to help take her.
After the sessions Cordo gave Amelia his keys to go wait out in the car while he and the psychologist talked or she talked to Margaret, who then conveyed the session notes to Cordo. Amelia’s thoughts, the psychologist said, revolved almost solely on her mother and if not on her, then around plants.
“She described to me a recent compulsion to look through a book of plants, trying to memorize their names. She said she felt like if she didn’t, something awful would happen.”
Amelia remained on sertraline for two more months, until she reached a plateau, where she had day terrors
several times a week, though she slept peacefully at night. Cordo kept her in therapy and her pediatrician put her on paroxetine instead, which kept her asleep at night but which did nothing to ease her day terrors, even after three months. Nor did fluvoxamine or escitalopram.
Cordo declined to enroll her in kindergarten, on recommendation from her pediatrician, for reasons of her advanced mental capacity, as well as for her psychological trouble.
As the therapy and drugs continued to prove ineffective at treating all of Amelia’s issues, the pediatrician eventually prescribed fluoxetine, which Cordo was back on now since quitting the trazodone. He made sure Amelia took her pill in the mornings with breakfast while he took his at night before bed.
He and Margaret soon observed fewer day terrors and after four more months, her panics lessened to once every few weeks.
The pediatrician recommended she enroll in school then, though she ought take a series of standardized tests to determine which grade she should be enrolled in.
Amelia agreed and Cordo brought her into the doctor’s office and left. She took an hour to complete the tests, which were administered by a child psychologist, and the results of the tests came in the next day: Her calculated IQ was 191.
The pediatrician and psychologist consulted with Cordo in the doctor’s office, just the three of them. The two professionals speculated Amelia would succeed academically in college courses.
“The issue there though is how she’ll respond to that environment,” the psychologist said. “She’s hardly interacted with children her own age.”
That’s when the pediatrician recommended a service dog.
Both Cordo and the psychologist were intrigued by this notion and the psychologist ran down the list of services a service dog could render.
“She has always wanted a dog,” Cordo said.
The psychologist was sure Amelia would qualify for one.
“Is college something Amelia would be interested in right now?” the pediatrician asked.
Cordo couldn’t say off the top of his head, so Amelia was brought in from the waiting room. She sat beside Cordo, who held her hand and squeezed a little too tightly, perhaps giving Amelia the impression something bad was about to happen.
Most Unnatural Page 5
