Twilight Children (14 page)

Again very quietly, “B.” She had a vague German accent.

“Here. Would you read the next one?” I pushed the magazine over into a better position for her to see it.

She looked at it. No response.

“Here. Right here. We’re looking at the third one.”

Still she did not read it. Or even try.

“Please?” I said.

Silence.

I was formulating my next move in face of this opposition when Gerda said very softly. “I need my glasses.”

Ah. Oh.

I looked up, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think about that. Are your glasses in the bedside stand?”

There was a moment’s silence where the noises of the rehabilitation center swirled in fluidly around us like surf around rocks. At last she shook her head.

“No?” I said. “Where are your glasses?”

She shook her head.

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head.

And I was thinking, here she was, almost six weeks after the stroke, and in all this time no one among the staff had wondered if she wore glasses and, if so, where they might be.

“All right,” I said. I closed the magazine and put it in my lap.

A pause while I considered what to do next. I was floundering. Probably it showed.

I regarded the magazine.

Silence.

“You know what?” I said at last. “I’m going to read to you. Sit back. Here.” I got up and shifted the table with the breakfast tray on it down past the foot of the bed so that the staff couldn’t miss it. “Get comfortable. Do you want this pillow?” Then I sat down again and opened the
Reader’s Digest
. “What shall we go for?” I asked. “A story about orchids, someone who grows orchids? Or this one, called ‘The Lake That Went Down the Plughole’? Or ‘Sing a Song of Blackbirds,’ which looks like it is about bird-watching and backyard birds?”

Gerda looked at me with the most uncomprehending look. Her forehead was creased, her brows drawn down in a questioning expression, as if I were speaking in a totally foreign language.

I waited for her to respond in some manner, spoken or not, but she didn’t. Finally, I said, “Well, today I’ll choose. Let’s find out about the lake that went down the plughole, because that sounds pretty unusual.” And I settled back into the orange plastic chair and began to read.

T
he tape of Drake’s voice hadn’t arrived before my next session with him, so I thought I would try yet another tactic.

“We’re going to play a game today,” I said to him, once we were in the therapy room. “Look. I’ve got candy.” I opened a bag of M&M’s. “Do you like candy?”

He nodded enthusiastically.

“I thought you might. You’d be a very strange little boy if you didn’t like candy, wouldn’t you?”

Drake immediately saw the humor in this and laughed noiselessly.

“I’m going to put the candy here on the table. And I’m going to set this doll here.” I poured a small pile of M&M’s out in one area, then took one of the Sasha baby dolls out and set it upright on the tabletop. “And let’s set Friend here, all right? I’m not going to take him away. Just set him in this other chair on this side of the table. Because guess what? Friend is going to help us today, too!”

This tickled Drake. He clapped his hands gleefully.

“Okay, here we go,” I said. I pointed to the candy. “What’s this?”

Drake smiled beguilingly.

“Some people use words to tell what things are, don’t they? If someone asked me what that is, I’d tell them ‘candy.’ But you know what? There’s another way of saying it. Do you know what it is?”

He shook his head.

“Like this.” And I made the American Sign Language sign for “candy.” “These movements are a special language. You do all the talking with your hands and not words at all. And in this language, this motion here is used to say ‘candy.’”

An odd expression crossed Drake’s face, which seemed to be a kind of hesitance, almost a physical falling back from me. Then abruptly he smiled.

“For a moment, you seemed a little worried there,” I said.

The tentative expression had vanished. He grinned cheerfully.

“This kind of language is called ‘sign language’ and this—” and I demonstrated, “—we call a sign. It’s the sign for ‘candy.’ Can you make this sign with your hands?”

He didn’t even try. He just sat. When I continued sitting patiently, he looked away, looked at Friend, then down at the floor.

“Come on. Have a try,” I said encouragingly. “Here.” I reached over and lifted his right hand. “And when you make the sign for ‘candy’ to me, I’ll know you want some and I’ll give you a piece. How’s that?”

Instead of doing it, he let his hands drop back to the table when I let them go.

I stood up and walked around the table to Friend. Leaning over the toy tiger, I lifted his front paws and endeavored best I could to make him sign “candy.”

“Look,” I said. “Friend wants some candy. So he is making the sign.” I reached over and put an M&M in front of Friend, and then I made Friend sign again.

The absurdity of a giant stuffed tiger signing anything—and he
really
wasn’t very good at it—suddenly struck me. I got a fit of the giggles and started to laugh. Indeed, I couldn’t stop.

This delighted Drake. He started to laugh, too.

“Yes, this is very funny, isn’t it? Friend really can’t sign very well, can he, because he doesn’t have any fingers!” I said amid my chuckles.

Grinning, Drake shook his head.

“Here, you try. Come here and see if you can make Friend do a better job than I have.”

Drake got up from his chair and came around. He made even more of a hash of it than I had, but it was uproariously funny to both of us.

“No, no, like this,” I said and made the sign myself.

And Drake imitated it back.

“That’s right. Like that.” And I gave an M&M to him.

It was only at that moment he realized what he had done, that he had made the sign himself. The laughter fell away immediately. There was a heartbeat’s hesitation and then came a curious, almost expectant expression.

“Can you do it again?” I asked.

A long pause. Then he did it very quickly, almost as if not to be caught doing it.

“Good! Good job. Here.” I gave him a second M&M.

I returned to my chair and sat down. As I did so, Drake reached out and tapped my arm. I looked at him and immediately he signed “candy” again. I laughed and gave another piece.

“Now, here is a new sign. What do you think this is?” I drew my index and middle fingers of each hand back from my eyes.

For a moment Drake wrinkled his brow in concentration, then shook his head.

“It’s an animal. What animal has stripes like this going back from his eyes?”

Still Drake couldn’t guess.

“It’s an animal right in this room. Right now!” I said.

Drake exploded with joy. Leaping from his chair, he shot around the table and grabbed Friend tightly around the neck.

“That’s right! This is the sign for ‘tiger.’ And we have a tiger right here, don’t we? Can you make this ‘tiger’ sign, too?”

Drake promptly complied.

“But we don’t just want to call him ‘Tiger,’ do we? That would be like my calling you ‘Boy.’ We want to call him by his name. ‘Friend.’ Here is the sign for ‘Friend.’ See. Fingers coming together like this, because friends like to be together.”

Drake imitated my gesture.

“That’s right! How good you are at this! You can learn these signs very quickly, can’t you? And isn’t it nice to be able to say his name? Now if I ask ‘What is your tiger’s name?’ you can tell me, can’t you? All by yourself!”

Clearly delighted, Drake leaped up and down, turning in a circle as he did so such that his long hair lifted up off his shoulders in a jerky twirl. He signed Tiger-“Friend” as he did so.

It was an immensely pleasurable session. I taught him the sign for “doll” but he learned so fast that I also taught him “up,” “down,” and “under.” We made up games with these signs and spent the rest of the session communicating eagerly with each other.

When the time came to leave, Drake grabbed Friend tightly around the neck and tore out the door, dragging the tiger behind him. Then he stopped halfway down the corridor. He turned and ran back to me, embracing my legs.

I knelt down to his height. Drake lifted his fingers to his lips and signed “kiss.”

As I stood in the corridor outside the therapy room and watched Drake and Friend heading back to the day-room, I was both encouraged and bewildered. The ease with which he had acquired and used the signs was fascinating, because if he were withholding communication for psychological reasons, I would have expected considerable hesitance in signing also. While Drake had held back initially, once he overcame that, he had signed enthusiastically. This indicated either he wasn’t withholding speech for psychological reasons or that the reasons he withheld were very specifically to do with speech itself and not with communication. There was a much bigger surprise in all this, however, and that was Drake’s signing “kiss.” I had not taught him that sign.

So? What was going on? Logic told me someone else must have already been teaching Drake to sign. If so, who? And why had no one mentioned it? And if he knew them, why had Drake never used any to try and communicate with us? It did occur to me that I might be reading more into all of this than was there. American Sign Language is very intuitive, relying on movements that are easily connected to the meaning of the word. The sign for “kiss” involves touching the tips of the fingers to the lips, which could be a gesture he and his mother might have developed spontaneously between them. The second part of the sign involves then touching the cheek, which I wouldn’t have expected him to come up with on his own; however, it was conceivable I’d overinterpreted the gesture. Perhaps it was just accidental movement.

I met with Harry Patel later in the afternoon that day to bring him up to date on my sessions with Drake. I took along two of the videotapes, having marked out particular parts for him to watch and give me his assessment. We spent about forty-five minutes going over the case together.

I asked Harry if he thought Drake’s lack of speech could be a purely physical problem. I was thinking primarily of aphasia, which is a type of brain damage that disrupts speech at the neurological level before it ever reaches the parts of the body involved in speech production. I hadn’t seen any particular indicators of neurological problems in Drake, except perhaps the slight jerkiness in some of his movements. On the other hand, I had had several children previously who were presented to me as electively mute but turned out to be aphasic. I did acknowledge that in all the instances it had been fairly easy to identify indicators of brain damage, either via the child’s history or via observable behaviors. On the other hand, during my time teaching I had come across some much more subtle examples of aphasia. None of these had been mistaken for elective mutism, but some had gone undetected for many years and they had caused a quirky dysfluency in expression. In an extreme form, perhaps it could mimic elective mutism.

Harry said, “We have other problems. Mason Sloane phoned this morning. He was anxious to know how things are coming. I told him we had made arrangements for Drake to be seen by the audiology department. Well!
That
didn’t please him.” Harry widened his eyes in a telling expression. “He got very angry and accused us of just being in it for the money. He said, did we think they were stupid? Did we think his own family would not notice if Drake was deaf? Of course they have had all that investigated long ago. He said, in fact, two years ago, Drake was seen at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He had a very thorough investigation to ascertain why he was not speaking normally and there was absolutely no evidence of physical involvement whatsoever.”

“Gosh,” I said in surprise. Stuff kept turning up on this kid that none of us had had any idea existed. I didn’t need to mention how incredibly helpful it would have been for the family to share everything with us at the onset, because contrary to popular opinion, we weren’t in it for the money. We were genuinely trying to help this boy and if we didn’t know something existed, then it was hardly our fault if we duplicated it.

“Well, anyway, I’ve asked him if we can see this report,” Harry said. Then he gave an impish grin. “Know what the son-of-a-canine said back when I said why had they not sent this at first? He said, ‘You don’t need that. What you need is to deliver the goods.’ That’s exactly what he said. Like it was a product he had ordered. He said, ‘Your therapist needs to get on and do what she said she could in that newspaper article’!”

I rolled my eyes.

The next day, the audiocassette from Lucia arrived. I was very curious to listen to it. Not only did I want to hear Drake’s voice, but I also wanted to hear the quality of his speech: how fluently he spoke, how well he formed the words themselves, how he used vocabulary and grammar, how he pitched his speech. This would tell me a great deal about where we actually were with this problem, including whether it was likely to be a physical disability, a neurological problem, or a psychological one.