Twilight Children (26 page)

Lucia still hadn’t responded. I could hear rustling and bumping on the other end of the phone, as if she were moving around, but she didn’t actually say anything.

“Lucia?” I asked.

That’s when I realized she was crying.

I hesitated, because I didn’t want to embarrass her by calling attention to it, but finally I said, “Is something wrong?”

She wasn’t simply wobbly-voiced at this point. She was sobbing and seemed unable to speak.

“Can I help you in some way?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to choke out.

“No, no, don’t be sorry. It’s okay. I’m sure this is all very distressing.”

“Yes,” she wept.

“It’s okay. I’m not in any hurry. Take your time.”

This seemed to make things worse, rather than better.

“Is there something I can do to help?”

“Noooo.” More sobbing.

“Are you sure?”

Nothing but weeping on the other end of the phone.

“Would it help if we got together? Perhaps just you and me? We could go over things. Would that help?”

“It’s too far,” she sobbed.

“It’s a long ways, but it’s not too far. I’m happy to come out, if you want. Just you and me. How would that be?”

She made little whimpering noises that I took to be an affirmative.

I pulled over my diary. “I could come out tomorrow. Wednesday afternoon. Would that work?”

“No,” in a tiny voice. “It can’t be then. It can’t be here. He’ll be here then.” And then more crying. A minute or two passed with her being unable to speak.

“So what date could you make?” I asked.

“Thursday. Thursday afternoon. At Starbucks. On the corner by the mall,” she managed to say.

I paused to look at my calendar, my thoughts going frantically to what I could rearrange.

“I have to talk to you,” she whimpered, then started to cry again.

“Yes, sure. Of course. That’s okay. Thursday will work. Say, 2:30?”

Before I got any kind of confirmation, the phone went dead.

I
returned to the dayroom late in the afternoon to see Cassandra. Given we hadn’t had our session that day because I’d left her in the seclusion room, I wanted to thrash a few things out before our next session.

Sprawled over one of the chairs, she was watching TV.

“Hi,” I said. “May I talk to you, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” she replied cheerfully and leaped up. She was dressed in what looked almost like a dancer’s outfit—black leggings, a long-sleeved pink T-shirt with a short-sleeved black T-shirt over it—and it emphasized her lithe, spidery build. For a flashing moment, I thought of a young Audrey Hepburn, what with the graceful movements, those huge dark eyes, and the gamine haircut.

I took us to the far end of the dayroom, which was well away from the TV and the other children. Cassandra scrambled over the back of an orange Naugahyde chair and slid into the seat. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

I sat down in the chair next to hers. “I want us to get a few things straight before the next session.”

“Like what?” she asked. There was this breezy, bright tone to her voice, as if I were bringing her some totally new information she was keen to hear.

As always happened when I was with Cassandra, my mind raced forward, trying to interpret what was going on, trying to figure her out. Was this casual optimism the dissociation showing itself? Was she acting like a different person now because she literally
was
a different person? Or was this part of her manipulative defense? If she acted as if nothing had happened—“pretended to forget”—did she hope I would, too?

“We’re going to start running things a little differently from now on,” I said, “because at the moment, the way we’re doing it is not getting us very far in our time together.”

“You stress a lot over things, don’t you?” she said earnestly.

“It’d be helpful, Cassandra, if you just listened to me right now.”

“I am listening,” she replied, her voice pleasant.

“Here’s how it’s going to go. If you are in lockdown when it is time for our sessions, you’re going to stay in lockdown.”

“That won’t help me very much. I thought you wanted to make me better,” she said.

“This has been our big mistake. It’s not about
me
wanting to
make
you better. It’s about
you
wanting to
get
better. I can’t make you better by myself. More important, that’s not my responsibility. It’s yours. So if you are in lockdown when I come, I will say to myself, ‘Cassandra does not want to work on getting better today,’ and I’ll go away and do other things.”

She regarded me, her demeanor thoughtful but still rather detached. There was about her a palpable self-confidence. She didn’t speak.

“And if we get to the therapy room and I say, ‘Today we’re going to do this,’ and you say, ‘I won’t do that,’ or ‘I’m going to do something else instead,’ or ‘I want to do it my way,’ or otherwise keep us from doing what we’re in there to do, again I will say to myself, ‘Cassandra doesn’t want to work at getting better today,’ and we’ll stop work and I’ll bring you back to the ward.”

“You’re saying that wrong,” she pointed out. “You should be saying to yourself, ‘Cassandra doesn’t want to work with
me
at getting better today.’ Because maybe I want to work at getting better. I just don’t want to do it with you.”

“Yes, you’re right. That would be another way of saying it. Both of which have the same result. That we aren’t working together because you do not want to do the work that day.”

“That’s okay with me,” she said casually. “I’d rather be on the ward than with you. I hate being with you.” Her voice remained pleasant.

“Which is your decision. What I’m saying is that rather than my getting all concerned and trying to get you to cooperate when you don’t want to, I am going to go with your decision. If you decide to work with me, you can come with me to the therapy room and we will work. If you decide you don’t want to work with me, you can sit here in the dayroom for the time you usually spend with me. Or if you are in the seclusion room, you can stay in the seclusion room.”

Silence.

We again entered into the territory of aggressive eye contact. In fact, Cassandra leaned forward so as to stare me down even better. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“Because these are the new rules.”

She sat back in her seat and flopped her arms out over the metal arms of the chair. She still had her eyes on me. “You hate me, don’t you?” she said. She didn’t ask it as a question. There was no emotion in her voice. She might have been saying, “You have blue eyes, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t hate you,” I replied. “In fact, I like you. It’s just that my job here is to help you and unless you want to work with me, I can’t do that.”

“Everybody hates me.” The same equanimous voice.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said.

“It’s unfair.”

“Life does seem unfair to you, doesn’t it?” I said.

She nodded vigorously.

“What are you going to do about it?”

She shrugged in an exaggerated way.

“The truth is, Cassandra, the way things are right now, they’re a real mess for you, aren’t they?”

She rolled her eyes comically.

“Getting into trouble on the ward, going into lockdown all the time, getting your privileges docked, having problems with me every day, not being able to go home, having to cope with creepy thoughts, trying to get away from them. Things are a mess.”

She shrugged.

“You’re trying to pretend that’s okay,” I said. “Right now. You’re trying to act as if none of this is serious. And I can understand that. I’m sure it must feel really, really scary having to deal with your life all the time. These problems are everywhere. They affect everything. They involve everyone. You can’t get away from them, even for a minute. So I imagine pretending things aren’t serious makes you feel—at least for a moment or two—like they don’t hurt so much. I can understand that. I can understand why you keep doing these things.”

I seemed to catch Cassandra off guard. For the first time in several minutes, she broke eye contact. She glanced away, glanced up, looked back at me, looked away again. Her brow furrowed. I’d expected her to deny responsibility, to say these things were my fault or the staff’s fault for not helping her better, but instead she simply sat, her focus shifting to an unseen place in front of her.

“The real problem you and I are having, however,” I said, “is not about things being so scary. I
know
they’re scary. I know that makes them serious, and I know deep down you take them seriously. I also know they’re so, so hard to deal with. So that’s not the problem. The real problem is that you haven’t decided whose side you’re on.

“The plain truth is, Cassandra, I can’t make you better. Your mom can’t make you better. Dr. Brown can’t make you better. Even taking you away from the bad places, like where you were with your dad, and bringing you back to nice safe places won’t make you better. Do you know why that is?” I asked.

Her head was lowered. She didn’t respond.

“That’s because what’s wrong isn’t out here where your mom and Dr. Brown and I are. It’s in there.” I reached over and tapped her chest. “It’s there inside you. So wherever you go, your trouble goes with you.

“The problem we’re having is this: that troubled place inside you hurts a lot. I
know
that, Cassandra. Some really, really awful things have happened to you. Things children shouldn’t have to experience. But you did experience them and they hurt you very much. I do understand this. I also understand that it’s natural for us to try and protect something that’s gotten badly hurt. I understand that’s what you’re doing, that you don’t really want to be horrible and difficult with everyone. You are just trying to protect that troubled place inside you, because it hurts so much, and you don’t want it to get hurt again.

“Unfortunately, there’s a really big problem in doing this. And the problem is: you’ve protected your troubled place so well that you’ve ended up taking its side. You’ve ended up saying, ‘I’ll take care of you, Troubled Place, no matter what. I won’t ever let anyone hurt you.’ But the difficulty now is that Troubled Place is, in fact, hurting
you
, because it’s making you have to do all these bad things to keep it safe.

“We need to change this. In order for us to make things better for you, Cassandra, you need to get on
our
side. On the side that is trying to fix that Troubled Place, so it will heal up and go away and leave you alone.

“We
can
do that. We can beat this. But we can only do it if all of us together are on the same side, because it’s too big for one person alone to beat, whether that one person is you or your mom or me or Dr. Brown. We have to learn to fight together like a team, because that’s the only way we’ll be strong enough to make what happened to you stop hurting you.”

Head still down, Cassandra’s mouth crumpled. Tears trickled out of the corners of her eyes.

I reached a hand over and laid it on her shoulder.

She leaned forward, way forward, until her forehead rested on her knees. She sobbed.

It was the first time I’d really seen her cry and once she began, Cassandra continued to weep heavily.

It was late afternoon, about four-thirty or quarter of five. Thick cloud cover made it even darker outside than it usually was at this time of year. Everywhere else in the hospital was lit by bright fluorescent lighting, but the dayroom had quirky lighting, mostly small ordinary tungsten bulbs on tracks overhead, in order that the area over by the television could be dimmed without throwing everyone else in the big room into darkness. And it
was
a large room, more like a hall than a living space. Consequently, the kids watching TV were distant from Cassandra and me, as was the nurses’ station. The lateness in the day, the weather outside, and the TV brought a nighttime feel to most of the room. The lights were on over the nurses’ station and were glaringly bright where we sat, but everything else was in shadows.

For some reason this made a strong impression on me, as did the furniture where we were sitting, a group of chairs with steel armrests and hard-wearing, washable, waterproof Naugahyde seats and backs—institutional furniture—which, perhaps in some misguided effort to make them seem less institutional, were in colors no one could really live with—either bright orange or, alternately, an equally strong turquoise. As Cassandra cried, I sat quietly, not thinking, not doing anything really other than just being, and the lighting and the furniture imprinted itself on me.

I got up at one point and found a box of tissues at the nurses’ station, which I brought over, but otherwise I just sat. I kept my hand on Cassandra’s back, rubbing her shoulders occasionally, but mostly just resting it there. We were discouraged from touching the children beyond a hand on the shoulder, both for our own safety in this litigious day and age, and also because most of the children had issues of one sort or another with touch. In the case of a child like Cassandra, it was an absolute necessity to observe these strict boundaries because of her lies. Nonetheless, I still felt it was crucial to touch her now, to cross that gulf of physical space that isolates each of us from the other, and respond with sympathetic, caring, and appropriate touch.