Twilight Children (36 page)

I suggested that perhaps giving Skip the correct version of the Mayo report and letting him read it for himself might be one good way of introducing the subject, if she couldn’t talk about it directly. I also suggested perhaps she write a letter to Skip, because sometimes it was easier to say things in writing than in person. Indeed, I even suggested e-mail. Could they have an e-mail dialogue, if a face-to-face one was too hard? Or what about a nice romantic dinner with a good bottle of wine to relax them?

Yes, maybe. That was Lucia’s answer to everything. “Yes, maybe. I maybe could do that.” But then when she next phoned, she hadn’t done it. She had forgotten. It sounded all new to her when I suggested it again.

I then asked if it would help if
I
told Skip. Lucia’s immediate response was no. She was accustomed to protecting Skip from a great number of life’s woes and leaving him to my mercy was further than she was willing to go. After these suggestions in various permutations failed for a fourth and fifth time, I finally said, what if the three of us got together? I was trying to avoid another day lost to the rest of my clients by going out to Quentin again, especially as Drake was not officially still on our books, so I suggested Saturday. Then Skip would be available, too.

No. A flat, out-and-out no from Lucia. When I asked why not, she first said it was because Drake would be there. I replied that was okay. Indeed, I felt it was time for Drake to be included, for him too to learn the truth. So then Lucia said no, Saturdays were dangerous. Why was that? I asked. Mason Sloane was likely to be around, she said. He would stop by unexpectedly. He would expect Skip to do things with him. He would want to spend time with Drake. And he’d very definitely want to know why I was there.

I suggested meeting away from the house, perhaps in Starbucks again, but that suggestion was also met with a no. Mason Sloane would find Skip wherever he went. Lucia talked with such certainty it was almost spooky, this sense there were eyes and ears everywhere, that there was no way of escaping Mason Sloane.

So I suggested meeting well outside Quentin. This wasn’t a new suggestion. None of my suggestions were new by this point. Previously she had objected, citing being unable to get away. What if it were a Saturday? I asked. Couldn’t it just be a shopping trip? Was Sloane that suspicious of them? Couldn’t they leave early enough before Mason Sloane came around? I reminded her that sooner or later Mason Sloane was going to have to be confronted over this anyway, so wouldn’t this be a good start? Just to simply leave without telling him where they were going? To have a family day out that did not include making plans with her father-in-law?

Lucia hesitated.

It was a long enough hesitation that I could discern she was actually considering what I was saying, so I pounced on it. What about Melville Crossing? I suggested. This was a small town about halfway between the city and Quentin, so it would be a good couple hours’ drive for both of us. There was a McDonald’s there, quite a large one with an indoor play area. I knew, because we’d stopped there before when taking kids on outings from the unit. So Drake could amuse himself in the play area while we got through the heavy talking.

There was a long pause. Then Lucia said, “If Drake comes, you will tell him … you will tell him … the truth?”

“Yes.”

She started to cry. “You will tell him I didn’t mean it?”

I
wasn’t able to continue working with Gerda after she was moved from the rehabilitation center. The nursing home she went to was almost ten miles away from the hospital, and, indeed, it seemed this would be only a temporary placement. In the end, Edward decided that once her property had been sold and other affairs put in order, he would move his mother to Detroit and place her in a nursing home there.

As well as logistical reasons for not continuing, there were no longer professional reasons either. Gerda’s language problems were, indeed, a facet of the stroke, and, as I had no training or experience in this area, there was little expertise for me to offer. Originally having seen Gerda as a favor for Joy, I wasn’t being paid for what I was doing beyond my travel expenses. Consequently, once she left the rehabilitation center, I was no longer going to be working with her.

Nonetheless, I did want to see Gerda one last time to say good-bye personally, rather than just disappear, because I genuinely had come to enjoy the old woman’s company. I had intended to go see her one last time before she moved out to the nursing home, but I didn’t manage it. Between Lucia and Cassandra absorbing all my extra time, plus my usual caseload, I was simply too busy in the week following the conference over Gerda’s future to get over there. And the rehabilitation center, always short on beds, wasted no time in moving Gerda out, once the decision had been made. So when I rang Joy on Thursday afternoon, she told me Gerda had already been transferred.

I still wanted to stop by and see her. This wasn’t going to be easy, simply because the nursing home was so distant from the hospital; however, when I made the plans to go meet Lucia and Skip on Saturday at Melville Crossing, I decided that if I left early enough, I could stop to see Gerda en route. The nursing home wasn’t exactly on the way, but it wouldn’t be a big detour to stop then. I penciled the address into my diary.

That was Thursday. That evening, Joy rang me at home. Gerda had had a massive stroke and was now in the intensive care unit of the hospital. Friday morning when I arrived for work, I stopped on the ICU floor to see how she was. Gerda had died in the night.

The nurse asked me if I wanted to view the body. This struck me as an extraordinary question before I realized that she had mistaken me for a relative and assumed I was there about mortuary arrangements. I said no, explained who I was, and told her about Edward, whom I assumed they had details for. And yes, she said, Edward had been contacted and was en route from Detroit. She knew there was also a daughter. Somehow she had assumed this was who I was. No, I said and suddenly found myself explaining the intimate, disconnected workings of this family I hardly knew. Then I excused myself and went on up to the unit.

Gerda’s death affected me deeply. In part, it was simply the shock one always feels over an unexpected death and being confronted by death’s irrevocable ability to terminate even the brightest spark of life. There had been such a vitality to Gerda when we had talked. When she spoke of her past as a strange, symbolic representation of her present, it had transformed historic memory into current events. The young girl, the boxcar horse, and the immigrant homestead had become as alive to me as the room in the rehabilitation center. Now suddenly it had all gone silent again. In a matter of hours, these things had reverted back to history, to things that would fade and pass away and eventually be forgotten, and, indeed, now Gerda with them.

It affected me also in terms of connection and disconnection. How had so many people in Gerda’s life missed seeing who she was? Missed understanding her? In many ways, this was one of those “probably for the best” kinds of death. Probably better this than life in a nursing home in Detroit, because everything about Gerda had so pointed to that being a life she wouldn’t want to live. Indeed, perhaps it was the distress of that change that had precipitated the second stroke.

I could see all this and appreciate it rationally, but in my mind was still the question “Why?” Why had there been all these missed connections? Why did Edward know so little about his mother? Where was Anna in all of this? How was it that Gerda had failed to communicate with her children? Why does this happen to people? And how sad that now the opportunity to change these things was over.

The sessions with Cassandra were harrowing as she began recounting her experiences during the abduction. She didn’t remember much, so there wasn’t really a continuous story. Rather, what she recalled was episodic—a huge amount of detail around a single incident and then blanks—but this, if anything, made the sessions even more grueling because those small moments then became breathtakingly real with their detail-by-detail clarity.

Once involved in the task, however, Cassandra showed a hungry desperation to continue. She
wanted
to tell me these things and often spent much of her time between the sessions thinking of what next she wanted to recount. Frequently, she would start the story the moment we met in the dayroom, well before we’d made it to the therapy room.

Indeed, the need to relate her experiences started spilling over into her relationships on the unit. She was now telling Nancy and the other staff about what happened. Even in the unit classroom, doing such simple things as a math workbook, her mind was on the past.

Many of these memories were just little snatches; if she was allowed to recount them, she would then return to the task at hand. For example, on the occasion of the math workbook, she seemed to be dithering over what to do, so the teacher had stopped by her seat to give her help. Cassandra said, “I was dreaming once. I used to have this one dream all the time. Back then. Back when I was with my dad. We were in this boat, going across a big lake. My dad was in the boat. But so was my mom and my sister. Then, when we were in the middle of the lake with no land around, the boat tipped over and we fell in the water. In the dream my mom saved my sister, because my sister couldn’t swim. And my dad swam to shore. But nobody saved me. I was going to drown. And then next, I was in this coffin and it was in the front room of our old house. But I was really alive. Nobody knew it. They thought I’d drowned and, because I was in a coffin, I was dead. And I kept trying to say, ‘No, I’m alive!’ But something kept me paralyzed. So no one believed me. No one thought I was alive and they put the lid down on the coffin and they were going bury me.”

“Wow,” her teacher said. “That was a scary dream.”

“Yeah,” Cassandra replied. Then she pulled over her math workbook and started working.

As these stories proliferated, Cassandra’s tendency to make up fantastic tales accusing people of outrageous or sexually perverted acts dropped off precipitously. My sense was that Cassandra’s lying had worked both as a preventative—keeping people distant so that they couldn’t do those things to her again—and also as a way of releasing internal tension, because the cost of keeping her experiences sufficiently suppressed to allow her to function in the everyday world was so hideously high. Those dreadful lies had simply been pus, discharged to ease the pressure of festering secrets.

Our time in therapy now inevitably belonged to Cassandra, who arrived each morning bursting with what she wanted to tell me. Often the desperation outstripped her ability to articulate these things. In other words, she arrived with very strong feelings but little real memory to attach them to. I tended to let her recount what was on her mind and go from there.

For instance, one morning she started by saying, “My daddy gave me a toy bunny.”

We were sitting comfortably on the pillows on the floor, as this had become our special place for talking.

That was all she said, but she looked over, her expression expectant.

“When was that?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

I nodded.

A pause.

“I think it was in the beginning. Because I didn’t have any toys.”

“And what was your bunny like?”

“It was brown and had a white tummy. And it was really squishy soft.”

“That sounds like a nice bunny.”

Cassandra nodded.

Since she had come into the therapy room wanting to talk about the toy rabbit, I assumed it had significance for her, that it played some part in the destruction of her childhood. My challenge then involved helping to open the doors on these memories without putting words in her mouth or pressure on her lack of memory.

I usually started by gently questioning, but also allowing plenty of time in between for her to explore her memory.

“What do you remember about your bunny? Did it have a name?”

“Bunny. I think it was just Bunny.” She fell very silent, her brow bunching up in an expression of concentration. A minute or two went by, which is a sizable amount of silence in an active conversation.

I listened to the music. Throughout this I had continued playing these tapes of slow, soft classical music. In part I did it to create a tranquil mood and aid relaxation, but I also did it to enhance association between the sound of the music and meaningful discussion, because I had discovered pairing certain activities with certain pieces of music tended to make it easier to elicit these same behaviors again. And beyond that, I found the music to be an invaluable place to put my own mind during these long silences. By listening to the music instead of hanging on to the end of the last sentence, I could keep that expectant impatience that often occurs during silences in conversations from developing.

“Foo-Foo,” she said at last. “Maybe the bunny’s name was Foo-Foo. You know, like in the song. ‘Little Bunny Foo-Foo, hopping through the forest.’ Maybe that was it.” A pause. “Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just the song coming into my head. I don’t know.”

During this period when Cassandra started talking about her experiences of the abduction, I had not lost track of the fact she had coped with much of the trauma by dissociation—that is, she had hidden experiences that felt too overpowering behind amnesic walls or had protected valuable parts of herself by disowning them.