Hush (11 page)

there's anything you can tell us that might help Davy, we'd like to hear about

that too. I understand you'll be talking to our director, Dr. Tony Weston. You

should feel free to bring up anything with him. With all of us working together,

we might see some very quick developments."
"I'll do everything I can," Chet vowed. "It's been a tough time for us, ever

since the boy's mom died."
She heard his voice crack when he said this.
"I'm so sorry. When was that?"
Chet blinked a tear loose and felt its warm trail run all the way down his

cheek. Whenever he pulled this act he really did feel sad, and it was easy to

sound all torn up inside. Fun, too.
"Last year. That's when Davy stopped talking." He laid a protective hand on the

boy's shoulder.
Celia fought the lump forming in her throat. They really were a sad pair, a

widower and a motherless boy. One so traumatized he couldn't talk at all, and

the other barely able to speak of his grief. She must have been a remarkable

woman. I wonder how she died. But Celia knew it would be bad form to ask.
"Thank you for telling me that, Mr. Boyce. That's exactly the kind of helpful

information we need." She already knew about the deceased mother from the file,

but wanted to encourage Mr. Boyce's openness as much as possible. "Is there

anything else we should know about, or that we should talk about by ourselves?"
By ourselves. He liked the sound of that. Some of them want it long before they

know it. They speak in codes and give you clues. Her too. He wiped away a tear

and shook his head mournfully, still feeling the sadness, still having great

fun.
"Then I guess we should get started. If you want to come back at noon Davy will

be ready for you then. Our school normally goes from ten to two-thirty, but we

keep their first day short."
"How about if I just stay? I'd love to see how you do this art therapy."
"I'm afraid you won't be able to, Mr. Boyce, but you're more than welcome to

wait in the reception room." As she spoke, Celia rose and walked out from behind

her desk. She gently took Mr. Boyce's arm and guided him out the door. "You see,

Davy and I need to work together in privacy. After the evaluation is complete

I'll be glad to review all of this with you if you'd like. It's wonderful when

parents take the kind of interest in their children that you do, Mr. Boyce, but

Davy and I will need this time to ourselves."
Chet wasn't even sure how she did it but she'd left him in the hallway before he

knew what had happened. And then she shut the door. But he was certain of one

thing, had absolutely no doubt about it: she touched him first.
15
Davy looked up nervously. Now that they were alone his eyes darted around

Celia's office, and she figured her biggest challenge would be to focus his

fidgety energy.
"Davy, I'm really happy you're here today." She paused to smile, but all he did

was glance at her warily. "What I'd like to do is have you draw some pictures."
He turned away, and his eyes continued to jump around.
"We'll start by having you come over here." She'd have to prod his every move,

she could see that already. And she'd have to watch him carefully. She did not

want to be bitten. "Come on."
He didn't budge. She thought he looked extremely tense. She put her hand on his

shoulder to coax him along and detected a trembling under his shirt. The boy was

scared. Of her? The Center? Probably both, she decided.
Davy stood up under her gentle guidance, much as his stepfather had before him,

and moved over to the table.
She laid a single sheet of white paper in front of him, picked up a black

felt-tip pen and placed it in his hand. He held it for barely a second before

dropping it and leaving a dark smudge on the blank sheet.
Hmmm. Celia studied him but he no longer returned her gaze, not even for a

jittery second or two, for now his eyes moved past her to the shelves full of

supplies. She turned and saw the sharp tip of the lead pencil, the one she had

decided against giving him because it was a potential weapon. She looked back

and, yes, that's what he was staring at.
"Do you want the pencil?"
He didn't answer, not exactly. He just kept his eyes pinned to the pencil point,

which stuck out about an inch from the edge of the shelf.
Okay, she conceded uneasily, if that's what you want. But even as she considered

the pencil's menacing possibilities she knew it was even more important to

appear fearless. Once a child learned he could intimidate you, he was likely to

turn therapy into a war of nerves. She could not let that happen under any

circumstances, so she handed him the pencil.
Davy received it with both hands and examined the yellow barrel, turning it

round and round before testing the tip with his index finger.
"Now, Davy, I want you to draw a picture of a person."
She watched her words register in his eyes, which no longer remained on the

pencil point but rose to meet hers. She knew he was not supposed to have any

difficulty understanding speech.
"You may start now, Davy."
But he didn't start. He looked at her, and though Celia was tempted to encourage

him, she held back. She knew that children also conveyed a great deal when they

refused to draw: their defiance, insecurity, or fear of their innermost

feelings. But she'd found that most of the kids who wouldn't cooperate were

older than Davy. She'd encountered a number of reluctant adolescents when she

worked at the Illinois Psychiatric Clinic in Chicago. They had been

sophisticated enough to understand that art therapy could reveal their secrets,

and fearful enough of the past to want to keep it hidden. When a child Davy's

age refused to draw, the reason could be simpler, and a lot sadder: art was

play, but some kids didn't know how to play because their childhoods had been

stolen from them.
Davy tapped the pencil point against the paper but kept looking at Celia, as if

seeing her for the first time. Then he propped open his mouth with the eraser

the way children sometimes do. His top teeth stuck out at an unpleasant angle,

and she felt bad for him. He definitely needed orthodontic work, but would

probably never receive it. The Boyces did not appear to have those kinds of

resources. Davy's top two front teeth were also crossed at the bottom and

brought to mind swordsmen touching their weapons before a match. The words en

garde rang hollowly from the memory of a college boyfriend who had taken up

fencing, and who had once scared her almost senseless by jumping out of a closet

wearing only his wire-mesh mask.
Davy's canines also protruded and looked very much like the fangs for which they

had been named. His teeth gave his face a threatening appearance it did not

deserve. His lips, for instance, were perfectly formed and sweet, and did his

face the favor of covering up its principal flaw. As a young girl Celia also had

had terribly formed teeth, but braces had been out of the question until she'd

left home and could pay for them herself. Throughout her childhood she'd tried

to keep her mouth closed, concealing her teeth much as she'd learned to hide her

thoughts and fears from her mother. Celia figured Davy might be doing this

already. By not talking he was clearly hiding his feelings, and the tortured

arrangement of his teeth might be the perfect metaphor for the jumble of

thoughts he kept hidden inside.
She saw that he could turn out to be a handsome man, if his teeth were fixed and

he grew into his nose. It looked a bit large for his face, though hardly so

pronounced as to command more than fleeting attention. And that crew cut, that

has got to go. She knew crew cuts were back in style, but she had never cared

for them and thought Davy's did little for his appearance.
He looked down, as though to begin, and when he actually put the pencil to the

paper and started to draw, Celia wanted to applaud. She was genuinely happy to

see this and not at all discouraged by the undersized nature of his effort. A

lot of adults were also self-conscious when they worked on their first picture,

and many of them likewise drew small figures, as though to minimize the mistakes

they imagined they were making.
His lines were hard and dark, and he drew slowly and with concentration.

Remarkably, he drew well, not with the blessed instincts of an artist— not yet,

anyway— but with a steady focus and a basic appreciation of form. The line

quality was sure and he lacked the certain crudeness of many seven-year-olds,

and not a few adults. He even used shading, which would make Celia's job easier:

it almost always revealed what a client worked hardest to cover up. Shading was

one of the paradoxes of art therapy that fascinated her.
She couldn't be sure just yet but it appeared that Davy was drawing a woman. If

that turned out to be the case, she'd have to give a lot of thought to this

highly unusual decision. But she tried mightily not to interpret his work right

now because she believed that at some instinctive or intuitive level he would

feel judged and therefore inhibited. Much of art therapy was predicated on the

power of the unconscious mind. The behavior therapists dominated psychotherapy

in the United States, and cared little for this notion. Tony, their new

director, clearly belonged to this straitlaced school, which typically

disparaged art therapists as a largely useless lot of women who had succeeded

neither as artists nor as therapists.
Women did dominate the field, and Celia was convinced this was the real reason

for the strong bias against art therapy. She wasn't without her own passions and

prejudices, and had little patience for behavior therapy and all its hard-nosed

devotees produced in droves in North American universities. She attributed their

preeminence to the society's emphasis on product as opposed to process. These

were the same fools— and that's precisely how she thought of them— who had

taught parents to tell their children, "I love you but I don't like what you're

doing," as though the behavior and the child could be separated from each other

in such a tidy fashion. Celia found this approach consistent with a system that

preferred to deal only in surface qualities, that devalued women when their

looks faded, and older people when their productivity faltered.
At times like these Celia wished she could be relieved of every last vestige of

vanity so she would never again stand before a mirror in judgment of herself,

for it played right into the hands of all the men and women who promoted surface

qualities at the expense of the larger, wilder world that existed under things.

That's what counts, she thought, all the messages hidden in the lines that Davy

draws, the story behind the story.
Her faith in art therapy had grown slowly, for she'd possessed an ample store of

skepticism when she was introduced to it. Like most of her colleagues, she did

have a strong background in art. She had majored in it at the University of

Illinois and minored in psych. Art therapy was a natural for Celia, but her

exposure to behavior therapy during her undergrad days had been so successful

that it took some time for the magical means of the unconscious to wave its

marvelous wand.
Intellectual curiosity had driven her to take a weekend seminar offered by one

of the field's pioneers, an elderly gentleman from Seattle who sat by a slide

projector and narrated one case history after another. He pointed out what would

later become obvious to the fledgling Celia: that people revealed themselves

through their art; whether they intended to was completely irrelevant. They did

it with what they chose to draw, how they chose to draw it, their line quality,

shading, color, and the way they handled facial features and rendered bodies. In

short, the entire universe of inclusions and exclusions.
Celia began to study her own paintings and saw that this was true. The inner

world of her fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreams came to life in her brush

strokes, once she'd learned to look beyond the seductive surface of simple

forms.
She grew increasingly enamored of the field, and while she would have preferred

simply to paint for a living, no one had shown a great inclination actually to

buy her artwork, mostly flowers and trees that filled her canvases with

voluptuous folds. She was well aware of the O'Keeffe influence, but didn't care.

She was driven to paint these swirling sensuous objects, so that's what she did.
Her only other career option had been commercial art, but that had seemed a sure

way to deaden whatever talent she possessed. Art therapy, with its appeal to her

intellect, her sense of aesthetics, and her altruistic inclinations, came along

at the right time. She enrolled; she excelled; and she even landed a job in

Bentman, which seemed the greatest feat of all.
She checked on Davy, saw him working away, then moved over to the window and

spotted Jimmy and Ira on the swings in the play area. The van must have just

arrived. She checked her watch and saw that it was almost ten o'clock, which

marked the beginning of the "children's day," the term the staff used for the

hours from ten to two-thirty when their clients were present. During this time

the children attended school in the small building behind the Center, received