Twilight Children (13 page)

“But before we start playing, we’re going to do something else we need for the game,” I said. Pulling over one of the pieces of paper on the end of the table, I turned it horizontally, uncapped a pen, and drew five equally spaced lines down the paper, dividing it into six columns. “I’m going to put the names of different kinds of feelings here. Top of this column: happy. Top of this column: sad. Top of this column: angry. Top of this column …” I paused and looked up. “Can you think of another feeling I can write here?”

“Disgusted?” Cassandra ventured.

“Good, yeah. I hadn’t thought of that one.” I wrote “disgusted.”

“Being afraid,” Cassandra volunteered.

“Good. Let’s think of all the feelings we can.”

“There’s no more space,” Cassandra pointed out.

“That’s all right. I’ll make another page. We can make as many pages as we can think up feelings to write.” I divided another sheet into columns.

“Lonely.”

“Good. More?”

“Excited.”

“Okay. More?”

“Unhappy.”

“Well, I have ‘sad.’ Do you think that’s the same or different as ‘unhappy’?”

Cassandra considered a moment. “Different. ’Cause you might be sad if your cat got run over or something, and then you’d be unhappy, too, because you didn’t have no more cat. But sometimes when you’re sad there isn’t a reason. You just feel sad. But if you’re unhappy, you’re not happy anymore.”

While I didn’t fully understand this reasoning, I could tell she thought of them as two separate emotions, so I included them separately.

“Can you think of others?” I asked, after I’d written down “unhappy.”

“Ummmm.” She pressed her fingers to her lips and thought. “I know! Confusion.”

“Good.”

“Joy. Because that’s different from ‘happy.’ ‘Happy’ is a quiet feeling but ‘joy’ is a big feeling.”

I smiled. “That’s a very clever distinction. Any more?”

“Bored. And tired.”

“You think ‘tired’ is a feeling?” I asked.

She nodded.

I wrote it down.

“And what about when someone feels really, really, really angry?” I suggested. “So angry they can’t stand it. Sort of like they have a pterodactyl in them? Is that different from just plain angry?”

“Probably it’s ‘hate.’” She paused. “No. I can hate, like, school, but I’m not really super angry about it. They’re different. Put ‘super angry.’” She paused again and then her face lit up. “No, I know! Put ‘pterodactyl’ there. In that column. Call that ‘pterodactyl feeling.’ And put a flower in the ‘joy’ one. We’ll call that ‘flower feeling.’” A brief thinking pause followed. “Love’s a feeling. We haven’t put that there. Put ‘love.’ And then draw a baby under it. Call that ‘baby feeling.’”

She was suddenly into this. Leaning across the table she grabbed the paper to pull it over. “I want to draw the pictures, okay? And we’re going to call each one by the kind of feeling they are. ‘Baby feeling,’ ‘flower feeling,’ ‘pterodactyl feeling.’” She opened the small box containing the colored markers and took out a fine-tipped black one. “And for ‘lonely,’ we’re going to draw an alien and write ‘alien feeling.’” She wrote that below and drew a clubby little shape like she’d drawn on her first day with me. “And for ‘bored,’ it’s going to be a squiggly line, like this. ‘Squiggly line feeling.’ And ‘tired’ is going to be ‘in bed feeling.’” Cassandra drew a little stick figure in a bed under it. “And ‘hate’ is going to be ‘snake feeling.’”

This hadn’t actually been part of the plan, this giving identities to the various feelings, but I didn’t interfere. Wearing as this session had been, it was the first one where I felt Cassandra and I had been working together and not against each other. So I sat back. The rest of the time she spent hard at work, naming and illustrating her feelings.

I
n the afternoon I sat down to view again the videotape of my session with Drake. Playing parts of it over and over, I scrutinized his responses to the bubble blowing.

What struck me most—and not for the first time—was that he made virtually no noise at all. Even his grunts and puffs of air were largely silent. And as before when I had noted this, he did not appear to be purposefully controlling this. I observed nothing that indicated he was actively holding himself in, keeping control of himself enough not to speak. Indeed, he did not appear to be monitoring himself any more than any other four-year-old would. He behaved in as open and carefree a manner as any little boy at play. The only difference was silence. As carefully as I looked at the videotape, I was unable to see anything I hadn’t seen before.

Perhaps most notable in what I did see was Drake’s gentle but persistent refusal to blow on the bubble wand or bubble pipe himself. He had happily joined in the bubble-making when it involved only lifting the wand from the solution; however, he would not even try to blow. Why?

My gut instinct was that there was something physically wrong. Drake wasn’t refusing to make bubbles, and indeed, he wasn’t refusing to make speech. For whatever reason, he simply wasn’t able to do it. That sense came through strongly at that moment.

Of course, this was exactly what Helen had said when she had first seen him on tape, too. And the truth was, this had actually been my original instinct clear back during that first observation in Quentin, even though I had come into the classroom knowing ahead of time that he was speaking at home. Too many of us were coming to the same conclusion for there not to be some substance in it.

But … then what about his speaking at home? What was the quality of that? Was it possible there was some physical impediment that made it hard for him to speak and this, in turn, made him reluctant to speak outside the family? Had he possibly been laughed at or harassed for speaking slowly or poorly and now refused to do it at all? But if so, why had the family or the school not mentioned an impediment?

Hmmmmm.

I rewound the videotape. Taking it back to the place where Drake was playing with Friend, I watched again as he engaged the stuffed tiger. At that point he appeared very uninhibited and generally unaware of me. All his focus was on the bubbles and Friend. And not a noise. Not a single noise.

I studied the faint jerkiness in his movements that I’d noted during the session. It wasn’t much, wasn’t anything I’d consider out of the norm for a four-year-old just mastering large muscle control. Were there any syndromes involving muscles that might inhibit speech? Could it be cerebral palsy? Aphasia of some kind? Or
could
it be something so straightforward as a hearing loss? Had a minor loss, such as could be caused by infant ear infections, made him self-conscious of speaking outside the home because he couldn’t hear his own voice well?

Here was one advantage of his family’s insistence on having Drake as an inpatient, I thought. All the resources to pursue these questions were right here and I didn’t need further consents to make use of them. So I picked up the phone and rang the hospital audiology department to make an appointment for a full workup on Drake’s hearing.

When I was finished, I phoned Drake’s home number. Lucia answered. We chatted a few moments. I told her Drake had settled in well and was working very hard, and what a pleasant little boy I found him to be. And then I asked about his speech.

Both Harry Patel and I had asked Lucia previously about Drake’s speech, and so had the staff during the intake interview when Drake had arrived on the unit. Now, however, I wanted specific details. I didn’t say anything about my increasing suspicions that Drake had physical problems. I simply wanted to hear her version of it, and I was hoping she might be more relaxed over the phone, because she did not have to make eye contact with me or worry about her father-in-law’s presence.

Indeed, Lucia did seem friendlier and more forthcoming than she had in person. She talked willingly about her conversations with Drake. When I asked if he spoke freely to her whenever they were alone—for instance, did he speak to her when they were alone at the park or alone in the car, as well as alone at home—she admitted no. Even then he was silent because “he doesn’t want to be overheard.” In fact, she said he could be quite shy talking with her, too. Mostly it was at bedtime or if they had a little “cuddle time” together during the day that he would speak.

I asked what sorts of things they talked about. Lucia said it was just ordinary stuff. He would tell her about what he had done at preschool or about something fun they were planning. Just the usual conversations like you have with young children, she said. Sometimes they sang songs together, she added. Or other times when she read him a story, he would talk about the pictures with her.

I asked if she had ever overheard him talking to Friend. She said no. She said again how little he actually spoke. Even with her. So I asked why she thought that was. Is he able to form words all right? I queried. Is it hard for him to speak?

He’s normal, she replied immediately, but there wasn’t any defensiveness in her words. Just hesitant, she said. Just shy about talking.

But is his speech good? I persisted. Can he speak clearly? Can he make the usual speech sounds all right?

Yes
, she said more emphatically. He’s normal. His speech is normal. He just doesn’t do it much. And then she added, “I can let you hear him, if you want.”

“
What?
” I said, surprised.

“I can send you a tape recording of him speaking. The school wanted us to make it. They thought they could play it for Drake at school and say, ‘Here you are. Here is Drake’s voice.’ And this was their hope that he would start to speak then and wouldn’t be afraid to do it in front of the other children.”

I was pleased at this unexpected news, because both audiology and I could make fair assessments of what was going on if we could hear him speaking. “That’s great,” I said. “I’d be very interested if you could send a copy of this tape to me, please.”

The next morning on the way to work, I stopped again at the rehabilitation center to see Gerda. As with the first morning, Gerda was sitting up in her bed, her long white hair loose around her shoulders. Over her nightgown she was wearing a pink bed jacket, a very old-fashioned article of clothing that I’d only ever seen in pictures of women in maternity hospitals in the 1940s.

“Hello. Me again,” I said. “How are you doing this morning?”

She had very blue eyes. They were that deep, pure color that is often described as “China blue,” referenced, I think, from Blue Willow dishes. For a brief moment she turned them on me. There was something I couldn’t quite catch in her expression, but it felt like an odd mixture of curiosity and gloom, as if she were inquisitive as to why I was there but simultaneously feeling “What’s the use?” It made me think perhaps the specialist was right and depression was her main enemy.

When I made eye contact, she looked away. Indeed, she looked right at the wall and didn’t turn back.

I pulled the plastic chair over and sat down. Setting my box of tricks down on the floor, I opened it and took out an old
Reader’s Digest
magazine. I always carried a few of these because most of the stories had a low reading level and teenagers with reading problems usually didn’t feel so self-conscious when asked to read aloud from an adult magazine. Moreover, there were jokes and funny stories, and these often proved valuable when trying to charm a recalcitrant older child or adolescent into being cooperative.

Moving aside the breakfast tray, which still hadn’t been collected, I laid the magazine in front of Gerda and positioned myself so I could see it, too.

“I’m going to have you do this for me,” I said. I opened to the “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power” section. “Have you ever read this magazine before?”

Contrary as any child I’d worked with, Gerda simply refused to look at the magazine. She continued to keep her head averted, staring at the wall beside the bed.

“I always enjoy this section. See? Here’s the word. And then you choose which of the definitions fit.”

No luck.

“Gerda, here.” I reached over and touched her chin with my fingers, gently trying to reposition her face.

Clearly she hadn’t expected me to do this, and she startled. I was able to move her head quite easily. For the briefest moment, our eyes locked.

“I’m hard to get rid of,” I said and smiled. “You might as well know that now. Once I start coming, you’re stuck with me.”

She didn’t jerk away, but she shifted her eyes.

I tapped the magazine. “Let’s do this, okay? Humor me. I know you respond to the other staff when they ask you things; so please respond to me. I’ll go away sooner if we get through this.”

She looked down at the magazine.

“The first word is
chortle
,” I said. “Now, does
chortle
mean ‘A: to shout,’ ‘B: moan softly,’ ‘C: laugh throatily,’ or ‘D: grunt’?”

In a very quiet voice, Gerda said, “C.”

“Yup. Good. That’s right. In fact,” I said, “did you know that word was invented by Lewis Carroll? The guy who wrote
Alice in Wonderland
? He made it up from the words
chuckle
and
snort
.”

She was watching me as I spoke.

“Next one: ‘Radar, a system for locating objects using: A: radioactivity, B: sound waves, C: gravity, D: radio waves.’”