Twilight Children (35 page)

She paused.

“I remember that … I remember that … it was right before I left to go home. That’s when painting time was. I remember the teacher putting them on the radiator to dry. And then I went out. I had on this brown coat. I remember that coat. And my dad was there. He was driving this little red car. I didn’t remember him having a red car. I hadn’t seen my dad in a long time, so I didn’t know it was him. But he said my name. He said, ‘Do you still like Barbie dolls, Cass?” I said yes. He said, ‘I got some of your old ones. Would you like to have them again, because they’re really nice?’

“I couldn’t remember having Barbie dolls I didn’t know about, but he was my dad. So I went and looked but he didn’t have any Barbie dolls in his car. He said, ‘They’re at home. There’s too many to put in the car. Get in and I’ll take you over.’”

Cassandra fell silent. The music tape had ended. I didn’t want to get up and restart it for fear of breaking the spell, so I just lay quietly.

“I got in the car,” she said, and there was in her voice all the regret of that decision.

Again the silence.

“I was going to wait for Magdalena, because she was just about to come out. That was what I was supposed to do. I was in kindergarten and we got out before the third grade did, and so I was supposed to wait for Maggie and then we would walk home. But I got in the car, because he was my dad and I thought he knew about my Barbies.

“And then he shut the door. He let me sit in the front and my mama never let me, so I was feeling sort of excited. And he fastened my seat belt and started to drive. I didn’t know where his house was, but it was far away, because he kept driving. And I said, ‘How much longer till we get there?’ and he said, ‘Not long,’ and then I said it again, and he said ‘Not long’ again. And then I said I had to go to the bathroom and he said that was okay because we were going to stop and have a hamburger because it was dinnertime. So we did, and he bought me one of those soft ice cream cones, too, even though I didn’t eat all my hamburger, and then we got back in the car again and I was sort of getting worried because it was getting kind of dark out. I said, ‘I think I better go home,’ because I thought my mom was going to get mad at me. He said, ‘Don’t worry. She knows you’re with me. It’s all right.’

“And we started driving again. And it was a really long ways, because I fell asleep and when I woke up, we were still driving. And I said, ‘How much longer?’ and he said, ‘Not long,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think I want to go to your house,’ and he said, ‘Well, we’re almost there.’ But I was getting sick of it by then. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to go to his house. So I sort of started crying …”

She fell silent again. The thumb came up. She sucked softly for perhaps a minute or two.

“I was crying. I don’t remember what I was saying but I remember asking to go home, because that’s what I wanted, and my dad said to me … my dad said to me … ‘I hate to tell you this, Cassandra, but your mom doesn’t want you anymore.’ He said, ‘She phoned me up and told me to come get you and that’s why I was at the school.’ I started crying really hard then. I couldn’t believe that was true. I thought my mom would have kind of let me know about something like that and she never had. But he said it was true. He said, ‘Now your mom has a new baby. She doesn’t want you anymore. She said three children were too many. She wanted to keep Magdalena, so she told me to come get you because she was going to give you to me. She said I could give you a better life.”

Cassandra started to cry.

“What a horrible thing to hear.”

She nodded.

“And it
wasn’t
true,” I said. “You know that, don’t you? Your mom would never have given you away. She loves you so much and she was so worried when you disappeared. She searched and searched for you. Your dad was just saying that to get you to come with him.”

“Stop,” Cassandra said.

I looked over at her.

“Stop. I said, ‘Stop.’” She had her hand over her eyes. “You said if it got too hard, all I had to say was ‘Stop’ …”

“Yes, that’s right. We’ll stop.”

She started to cry in earnest then, rolling away from me.

I sat up. “Cassandra, come here.” I reached out to her.

Rising up on all fours, she crawled over to me and I wrapped my arms around her.

She sobbed heavily.

“Thank you,” I said. “I know it’s very hard when you first start to crack open the door on your Troubled Place, but I really appreciate that you did. I understand much better now. You’ve worked very hard today.”

She was still crying. Several moments passed.

When at last she could gasp for air, she said, “And what was awful, what was
really
awful, was that when I got to his house finally,
finally
, after all that time, there weren’t
any
Barbies. Not even one. He’d lied to me. He didn’t really have any toys at all.”

T
he duplicate—and correct—copy of Drake’s assessment arrived from the Mayo Clinic on Tuesday morning. When I had finished my morning sessions, I sat down and read carefully through it.

Drake had a complex set of congenital medical problems that included atrophied vocal cords and mild ataxia, which refers to a lack of coordination in certain muscles. This apparently accounted for the faint jerkiness I’d noticed in his movements. I hadn’t really been aware he was uncoordinated for his age. Most of my experience was not with preschool children and there is, at four, such a huge variation in motor skills that I hadn’t been looking for it. As I read the report, however, I thought back on his refusal to blow bubbles and, indeed, on his insistence on having a cup for his ice cream instead of a cone and realized then that these things probably resulted from lack of coordination in the muscles of his mouth.

The report highlighted that this particular group of problems occasionally appeared as part of a rare degenerative syndrome but that Drake was missing a usual marker for the syndrome in his blood. However, it was still possible he had it and, thus, it would be important for him to have regular retesting to rule this prospect out.

The recommendations at the end of the report emphasized the importance of teaching Drake alternate ways of expressing himself so as not to impair his communication skills. Given that he had no hearing problems and a high IQ, Drake stood a good chance of living an entirely normal life in spite of his disability. It was crucial, however, to give him the tools to do this as soon as possible, in order that he not miss, as the report writer put it, “the window of opportunity” to acquire language that is present in all young children but that tends to decrease as the child becomes school-aged. It was also suggested that Drake might be a good candidate for a voice synthesizer as he grew older.

Reading the report, I was again overcome with a sense of revulsion toward the Sloanes—toward Mason Sloane for being such an imperious, dominating old fart that he could control those around him so successfully, toward Skip Sloane for his weakness in not being able to stand up to his father and separate from him, if necessary, and for his self-absorption in not seeing something
had
to be going on with his son and not doing anything about it. Most of all, however, I felt it toward Lucia.
She
was the perpetrator. The others had let natural personality traits overrun them, showing little awareness or control, but
she
had actively sought to deceive. She had chosen to fake data, to set up an elaborate hoax to absolve her husband and herself, and had done so willingly at the expense of an innocent child. This report stated straightforwardly not only how to help her son, but also how important it was that her son be helped immediately, and it was already eighteen months old. The most valuable time for Drake to acquire language skills was in the preschool years, and with her deception, she has wasted at least a quarter of it.
Knowingly
. It went against everything I felt a mother should be to her child, and it just disgusted me to think anyone would do that.

When I realized I was thinking like that, I was again brought up short by the strength of my own feelings over the matter. It wasn’t so much a matter of why I felt so strongly. “Why” would be a factor of my own personality and my own experiences and would be for me to understand as an exercise in self-awareness. The real question was much more basic than that. It was: how was I logistically going to keep such strong personal feelings from interfering?

And it was important that they didn’t interfere. Although Harry Patel and I now had insight into what was going on with Drake, we had not yet managed to secure him the help he needed. Moreover, the only way we could help Drake, since he was no longer our client, was by helping his parents. So, to make effective changes, I had to convince Lucia and Skip to help Drake. And that wouldn’t happen if I in any way conveyed they repulsed me.

So I thought deeply that morning about why people do what they do, and also about our responsibility as those who intervene in situations like this. It would be a simpler world if life were black and white, if it were only a matter of rewarding the good guys and punishing the bad, if it were only about giving help to those who deserved it. But not so. It’s all grays. We’re all evil in parts and good in others, undeserving and deserving. And our struggles mainly come down to how aware we are of that.

In the process of trying to understand others’ difficult behavior, I’ve found it is very helpful to realize that no one chooses to be unhappy. If someone is unhappy, they will be so because they genuinely cannot see how to do otherwise. This I’ve found to be true even in those situations where, from a more objective perspective, it is very obvious what their mistakes are.

So, in the end, I was able to get myself around to the place where I recognized that Lucia must have made the decisions she did because she simply couldn’t see alternatives to them; and as a consequence, I was better off not wasting emotion on wanting her to be what she wasn’t able to be. Better instead just to get on with the task of helping her find those alternatives.

It was good I had this think in the morning, because in the afternoon, I had to put theory into practice. Lucia phoned again. Indeed, this became a pattern. She phoned three afternoons in a row. Each time she was in tears. Each time she was ready to back out. She simply could not face the prospect of telling her husband the truth about Drake and what she had done.

I took it to be a good sign Lucia was phoning me. If she were genuinely unwilling to make these changes, no contact would have been a more logical response. Thus, I took the fact that she continued to reach out, even though we weren’t making any noticeable progress, as an indication she was still considering it.

Nonetheless, the calls were tedious. Over and over and over we covered the same territory. I talked about how important it was to make these changes; how Lucia’s and Skip’s first responsibility was to Drake, not to Mason Sloane; how Mason Sloane did not have authority to ruin their lives. Repeatedly, I listened to her story, reassured her I was okay with her tears, sympathized with how hard it was to face up to such difficult matters, rallied her on, told her I just knew she and Skip did have the strength to make these necessary changes. At the same time, however, I also tried to be unambiguously open about the fact these changes
had
to take place and, if they didn’t, that I would eventually involve Social Services or some other outside body. I explained as gently as possible that while her behavior toward Drake did not constitute child abuse in the traditional sense of the word, it
was
abusive, because it was seriously harmful to Drake. Thus, it couldn’t continue. I said I was particularly concerned to learn that Drake required continuing medical intervention to make certain his problems weren’t of a degenerative nature. And I continued to express my worry that we were compromising Drake’s chances of functioning normally in the future by every day we missed of not providing special language support now.

It was a tightwire act. Even as I got past my own difficult feelings toward Lucia’s actions and was able to relate to her without thoughts of revulsion at what she’d done, I still found it hard not to want to scream down the phone at her:
Get on with it!
I could appreciate she needed someone to listen to her, that she had undoubtedly been stifled and silent at least as long as Drake. I could appreciate, too, that Lucia was no doubt in as much need of sympathy and compassion as her son. And, of course, I was very grateful that she’d found the strength to come forward at all, because otherwise Drake would have vanished from our radar, and that would have been that. We would never have known what became of him. Nonetheless, I could not continue compromising Drake’s welfare to support Lucia. For his sake, we
had
to stop this charade.

During each phone call, we went over different ways of telling Skip and Mason Sloane the truth. Lucia seemed to forget these various ideas between calls. It was as if they just dropped out of her head when she hung up the phone, because each day when I mentioned them, she reacted as if they were all new to her.

So I tried a different tactic. Instead of suggesting ideas, I asked her to come up with them. What did she think would be a good way to go about it? What would work from her perspective? By this point she had heard my suggestions three or four times, so I hoped if I gave good enough prompts, she would be able to produce her own versions. Not so. Talking with Lucia was maddeningly similar to conversations with Cassandra. “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” were her two favorite phrases.