Twilight Children (18 page)

She glared at me, and her teeth were literally gritted. “I’m
not
scared,” she hissed in a very low voice. “And I
hate
you.” She didn’t, however, knock the book off again.

“It’s okay to hate me. It’s okay to feel strong feelings, because I will never let them get too strong. Even so, you still need to do this.” I opened the book to a picture of a rag doll. Then I took out a red crayon from the box. “Today’s work is to color this picture. Start by making the doll’s skirt red.”

“I’m not going to do this.” She snapped the crayon in two.

“Well, I’m putting no limits on how long it’s going to take us to do this, but we are going to do it, because this is where we are going to start,” I replied. “So if you don’t want to use a crayon that is so long, here is this part that is now shorter.” I handed a broken section of the red crayon back to her.

“I’m
not
going to do this.” She refused to pick up the crayon. “And you can’t make me.”

I suppose if I were a good psychologist, I would have been following someone’s well-researched, deeply thought-out theory at that point that said something about good therapy not involving forcing a child to do things. Certainly none of my training had included demanding a child do exactly as I say, but the teacher in me took over at that moment. If I had learned anything as a teacher, it was the importance of setting limits and establishing control before going forward with change, because this defined the safety of the environment. Safety is the most basic task of all. Without a sense of safety, no growth can take place. Without safety, all energy goes to defense.

In a traditional therapeutic setting, there is often no problem with taking whatever time is necessary to win trust. In such a setting, Cassandra might have needed weeks, if not months, to develop the level of trust necessary to allow me to implement change, and this would have been great. I would have loved to have been able to give her that kind of gentle interaction. Unfortunately, here in the hospital, where the cost—both human and financial—of institutionalizing a child over a period of time was high, we needed to march to a faster drummer.

I sat back in my chair.

“I’m not going to do this,” she stated.

I said nothing.

“I’m not going to do this.”

I sat.

“I’m
not
going to do this! Listen to me, you old hag. I’m NOT going to do this.” Cassandra grabbed up the small piece of crayon and threw it at me. Then she shoved the coloring book angrily off the table again.

Picking up the piece of crayon, I put it back on the table. Then I retrieved the coloring book and placed that back in front of her. I opened it to the picture of the rag doll again.

“I’M NOT GOING TO DO THIS!” Cassandra shouted. She pushed the book away again and got up from her chair to leave.

I got up faster. Grabbing her shoulders, I stopped her from going through the door. She struggled fiercely at that point, lashing out angrily. I held on.

At last I maneuvered her back to the table and into her chair. With that, Cassandra started to cry. Indeed, she cried very piteously.

I returned to my seat on the opposite side and sat down.

“
Why
are you doing this to me?” she wailed.

“Because this is where we start.”

“But why? Why do I have to do
this
?”

“Because I am here to help you, but I can’t do the work all by myself. You have to work, too. And this is the beginning of your work.”

“But I don’t
want
to,” she howled, her voice trailing off into a high-pitched whine. “I want to go home. I want my mom.”

I was very aware at just that moment how terrifying this situation must have been for Cassandra, because how was she to know I was any different than her abusers? Or that the enforced hospital stay was any different than her abduction? There was such a thin line here between gaining very crucial control in order to make progress and simply reinforcing trauma. To be honest, at that precise moment, I was feeling pretty terrified, too.

“Cassandra, I want you to color this picture. Here.” I put the piece of red crayon in front of her.

“I don’t want to,” she protested one more time.

“Here.”

And finally she picked up the crayon. She scribbled angrily over the picture.

“Okay.” I picked out a green crayon from the box. “Now, color the doll’s top green.”

She snapped the crayon in two.

“I can see you don’t like long crayons.”

“I don’t like YOU!”

“Color the doll’s top green, please.”

Harshly, she scratched the green crayon across the page.

“Okay.” I took out a black crayon. “Color the doll’s hair black.”

Furiously, she started to scribble with the black crayon. Indeed, this seemed to give her some pleasure, as she continued scribbling, covering the picture all over in black lines, the crayon held viciously, like a knife.

Oh well, at least she didn’t break the black crayon.

I picked a yellow crayon from the box. “Here. Color the doll’s shoes yellow.” This was a somewhat ludicrous request, as Cassandra had covered the page with so many black lines that the outline of the rag doll had all but vanished.

She took the yellow crayon and scribbled across the bottom of the page in the general vicinity of where the shoes should be.

“Okay,” I said. “I think we’ve colored that page.”

“I hate you,” she said.

“Now, you may choose what we do next.”

“I want to go.”

“It isn’t time to go. See the clock? Ten more minutes.”

“I don’t care. I want to go now,” she replied.

“All right,” I said and sat back. “If that’s what you choose, you may go. First we did my activity, now it’s your choice. So you can go.”

She stared at me. It was an unreadable expression. I couldn’t discern whether I’d caught her off guard by acquiescing and she was looking at me in confused surprise, or whether she was sizing me up for the next challenge. Whatever, she didn’t rise from the chair.

After a moment, Cassandra’s shoulders sagged very slightly and she looked down at the coloring book, still open on the table in front of her. She seemed tired, which was understandable. Certainly I was.

The aura of frisson faded. Cassandra continued to stare at the coloring book. She made no attempt to leave. The silence lingered.

Finally she said, “That’s not very good coloring.” Her voice was soft and matter-of-fact.

I didn’t reply.

“You’d think a little kid had done it. Like maybe a five-year-old. Like maybe that little boy who’s here,” she said. “People are going to see it and they won’t know it’s me.”

“Inside us we often have parts of us that still feel like little kids,” I said. “Even though our bodies are much older.”

“I can color much better than that,” she replied.

A heartbeat’s length of silence.

“When I want to,” she added.

“I think maybe that was the five-year-old inside you, coloring that picture. Which is maybe why, when I look at it, it looks like it was colored by someone who felt very scared and angry.”

“Or maybe just five,” Cassandra said. “Maybe that’s just how things look to you when you’re five.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She rose from her chair. “I’m going to go now.”

“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

I
n the afternoon I had a couple of errands to run that involved leaving the hospital for a short while, so I decided to get clearance to take Drake with me. I still worried about the effects of hospitalization on such a young child, and it was now apparent that he wasn’t going to go home after a week. I was also concerned about the occasionally stressful atmosphere of our sessions. The chance to take him out, to interact with him in a less pressured way, to do something friendly and fun seemed like a good idea to me.

Drake was delighted. Friend had to come, too, of course, and by this point Friend had his own fan club on the ward. While I helped Drake into his jacket, one of the young aides came and tied a scarf around Friend’s neck “to keep the chill off.”

Not that there was much chill. It was very late winter, yet nonetheless bright and sunny outside, full of the promise of warmer months to come. In fact, inside the car, it was actually hot.

I strapped Drake into a car booster I’d borrowed from the ward. He loved everything we were doing, waving and gesturing, his head swiveling this and that way in the parking lot. My knowledge of signs for outdoor things was quite limited but I knew “car” and signed that.

Drake observed my sign and then looked up at me. It was an odd little moment, because I was very aware of this “observing” quality. Here was a sign he didn’t know. But then he looked at me, made eye contact and, in an equally observing manner, took in my mood.

“You worry about making signs, don’t you?”

He regarded me, his expression solemn.

“Has somebody told you it’s wrong to sign?” Because suddenly I was thinking of Mason Sloane. Perhaps the staff at the preschool or somewhere else had tried to teach Drake sign language to help him communicate and Drake’s family hadn’t approved. Had he possibly been punished for signing?

Drake didn’t indicate one way or the other, but his sudden seriousness made me fairly certain the answer was yes. Everything then fell into place. This was how he knew signs, but also why he became upset when I had called attention to his using them, even though my comments were not meant to be negative. To him, I was catching him doing something bad.

It then occurred to me how confusing my own behavior must have seemed to the poor little boy. On one hand, I was teaching him signs and, thus, actively indicating that this was okay to do, but then I was also calling attention to the fact that he already knew signs, which he had gotten into trouble for knowing. What a bewildering world he was living in, trying to please all the adults, even when they sent such contradictory messages.

I dropped off some notes at a nearby clinic and picked up some photocopying. Then I went over to another medical facility, where one of our former patients had been transferred, in order to hand in some folders. As a treat, I then stopped at an ice cream shop. Of course, there was no leaving Friend in the car during this visit, so there was much unbuckling and lifting in and out before the three of us finally managed to go into the store.

It was a Baskin-Robbins franchise with all thirty-one flavors, but it was just a small one, the premises long and narrow and not much bigger than the therapy room. Because it was midafternoon on a weekday, no one was in there except us and the girl who was serving.

Enthusiastically, Drake went up and down the counter, looking at the various tubs of ice cream. He kept lifting Friend up to see, too, and pointing at different ones. The girl behind the counter was charmed by his excitement and kept handing over little taster spoons full of the different flavors Drake pointed to.

“Okay, we can’t stay forever,” I said, “so it’s time to choose. Which flavor do you want in your cone?”

Another few minutes were spent going up and down the display. Finally he pointed to a very bright ice cream of green, white, and orange.

“All right. A cone of that,” I said to the girl. “Just one scoop, please.”

She took down a cone from the display. Suddenly Drake became agitated. He grabbed my arm and tried to gesture something about what the girl was doing. He ran along the counter to where she was, back to me, and gestured again.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He gestured again.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” I said.

He gestured again, frantically this time.

“This is where words would be helpful,” I added, “because I do want to understand you, but I’m afraid I don’t, Drake. I’m sorry.”

The girl leaned forward to hand him his ice cream cone. “Here you go,” she said.

He wouldn’t take it. He shook his head.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Isn’t that the flavor you wanted?”

Drake was going to cry. Mouth turning down, he pointed along the counter.

I came down on my knees. “Honey, I’m sorry. I really don’t know what’s the matter. Is it the wrong flavor? If so, that’s okay. I’ll take that ice cream cone and you can get the flavor you want. Show me which one you want.”

He pointed. It didn’t actually seem to be at a different flavor of ice cream. He just pointed in the general direction of where the girl was.

Frustrated, I tried to comfort him. The girl leaned farther over the counter and tried to help, too. She said reassuringly that neither of us had to take the flavor if it was the wrong one, that she could just put it aside.

Steadfastly refusing to take the ice cream cone, Drake screwed up his face. Tears spilled.

I rose up. Not knowing what else to do, I opened my purse, paid the girl for the ice cream cone, and took it myself. But this was hardly satisfactory. Here I was with an ice cream cone I didn’t really want and Drake had nothing. The treat had been for him, not me.