Twilight Children (37 page)

There still hadn’t been sufficient time to explore these matters in-depth. I wanted to lay the groundwork first of recognizing and recounting the abduction so that it would not hold such frightening power. However, I did try to acknowledge these other parts of Cassandra, to continue drawing them into our conversations. It was now clear to me that in our earlier sessions together Cassandra had “switched” on several occasions, and I did not know if these were conscious or unconscious alterations. However, as we talked about “the others”—predominantly Minister Snake, Cowboy Snake, and Fairy Snake, but also Bicky and Becky, a couple other Snake family members and a more amorphous personality simply referred to as the “Naughty One,” whom Cassandra maintained was not her at all—I was aware she could access these personalities at will.

This was all quite confusing to me on the outside, because it was hard to discern when she could control things and when she couldn’t; and it wasn’t helped any by the fact that the literature on multiple personality disorder was scant and my own experience almost nonexistent. I found, however, if I asked Cassandra directly about one of the alters, she could usually access the information, although she would relay it to me as if it came from someone else, rather than “switching” to that personality herself.

Because our eventual goal would be to reintegrate these different personalities back into one, I felt it was important to encourage Cassandra to access these alters for additional information about the abduction. This was both a way to keep the alters part of her conscious mind and to express my acceptance not only of these variously diverse parts of her but also of the secret information these alters held. Once again, the overriding message had to be that nothing was really going to be too overwhelming, too frightening, or too sordid that I couldn’t cope with it.

As a consequence, as we lay there on the pillows discussing—or, rather,
not
discussing her toy rabbit—I said, “Who else might know about your bunny?”

Cassandra looked over.

“Does Cowboy Snake know anything about Bunny?” I asked.

“Ow-ow-ow-owww,” she howled softly in a haunting tone that I’d come to recognize as Cowboy Snake’s signature tune. It was, indeed, a proper yodel, this sound, which I found a surprising noise to come from a young girl’s throat, so it always startled me slightly when she did it.

“Ow-ow-ow-owww,” she went again, mournful as a coyote. “Ow-ow-ow-owww.” Then she shook her head.

“Who, then?” I asked. “Who knows about your toy rabbit?”

“Fairy Snake,” she said.

“Can Fairy Snake tell us, then?”

“Little Bunny’s soft.” Her voice was soft and high, like a small child’s. “My daddy gave him to me. He bought him at Toys ‘R’ Us, ’cause there’s a Toys ‘R’ Us near where my daddy works. My daddy bought it. For me. And Bunny’s soft. And I take him to bed.” She smiled at me.

“That sounds nice.”

She nodded. “It’s ’cause I’m a good girl. Daddy bought him for me because I’m a good girl. And Daddy says he and me can go to Toys ‘R’ Us one day and he’ll take a shopping cart and we’ll
fill
it with toys!”

“Hey, lucky you.”

Cassandra grinned. “And once,
once
, guess what?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My daddy bought these clothes. Doll clothes. For a Cabbage Patch doll. But I don’t got one of those. But he said he bought them for Bunny and I put them on and Bunny had a dress on!” Her voice went up in the squeally, high-pitched manner of an excited child.

“Your daddy did some nice things, didn’t he?”

She nodded vigorously.

“Your daddy showed how much he loved you, didn’t he?”

She nodded again.

A small pause then.

Cassandra was still watching me. “My daddy loved me a lot,” she said, her voice much softer. Another pause. “My daddy loved me.” It was almost a whisper.

Silence intruded then. I looked away. Listened to the music. Tried to identify it. Massenet’s “Méditation” from
Thaïs
.

“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” I said, “when we have many different feelings about the same thing. When we feel hate and love and fear and happiness and excitement all at once.”

Cassandra nodded. Tears had formed in her eyes. She was no longer looking at me.

“But you know what?”

She shook her head.

“It’s okay to feel like that. Everyone feels like that. Everyone has times when they hate someone and love them at the same time. When they’re scared of them but they want them there, too. When they have lots of different and even opposite feelings about the same things. It’s all right to be that way, because that’s how we’re made.”

The tears rolled over her cheeks. She raised her left hand and caught the tears one by one with her index finger, wiping them on her shirt. “What I want to know,” she said very softly, “is why. Why, if my dad loved me, did he let those things happen to me?”

Because the recounting of her experiences was so emotionally draining, I tried to break the sessions into parts to allow us some other activities besides the tale itself, not only because I wanted to give Cassandra a chance to recover before returning to the unit but also because I wanted to model ways she could master herself for regaining equilibrium after dealing with overwhelming feelings and events.

So, this discussion of Bunny, which I saw as an exploration of her father’s relationship with her, of trying to understand him as a man who loved her as well as abused her, segued nicely into doing the poker chip exercise.

We got out the feelings papers, and I asked Cassandra to put chips into the columns listing the various feelings. First I suggested she show all the different feelings that thinking about Bunny made her feel.

“It makes me feel good to think about Bunny,” she said and looked across the sheets. “And you know what? We don’t have that one. Don’t have just simply ‘feeling good.’”

“Would ‘happy’ be the right one?” I asked.

“No, that’s too big a feeling. Just ‘good.’”

“Warm?” I suggested.

“Yeah, ‘warm.’ That’d do. A warm feeling. A nice feeling. We don’t have anything of those.” Cassandra jumped up and got the box of markers out. She drew a new line down the last paper to section off the column and then wrote “Good” at the top. “There. Now we have that one.”

She paused. She looked along the table at the other sheets of paper, laying side by side. “Look at all those. Remember when I was drawing pictures and putting these names on the feelings? Like here is ‘dog puke feeling.’ And ‘baby feeling.’”

I smiled and nodded.

“I don’t know why I wanted to do that,” she said. “but I really did. It seems sort of silly now. And my drawings are crap. Look at them.” She giggled.

I smiled again. “Things are changing, aren’t they?”

Cassandra nodded.

There was a small pause.

“I’m getting better, aren’t I?” she said softly.

“Yes, I think so.”

Again there was a pause. Cassandra reached across the table for the poker chips and poured a small amount out. She carefully stacked one, two, three blue chips on the column under “Good.” She added two more.

“Know what Dr. Menotti said to me?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“If I can go ten days without being in lockdown once, I can go home.”

“Hey, that’s good, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “And guess what else?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I’ve already gone seven days.”

S
aturday morning I started the long drive to Melville Crossing. It was a windy, gray day, one of those where the sky is a dreary unbroken pane of color, dull as a gunship. It wasn’t raining and wasn’t predicted to rain, although I would have preferred rain, I think, just to give movement and, thus, perhaps a sense of life to the still winter-brown landscape.

When I arrived at the McDonald’s in Melville Crossing, it was empty except for staff, and so brightly lit in contrast to the overcast day that it was jarring to come inside. And noisy, too. Some teeth-gnashingly cheery music was being played too loudly through the speakers, and the staff were doing something enthusiastically back in the cooking area, which sounded like it involved throwing pans.

No Sloanes, however.

I bought a Dr Pepper and took a seat in a large booth near the play area. I waited.

I checked my watch. We had agreed to meet at lunchtime and because of the distance we were each covering, we’d agreed to meet at noon for lunch at 12:30
P
.
M
. I arrived at 11:50. Noon came and went. 12:30 came and went.

As families began to fill the place up over the lunch hour, I felt self-conscious sitting in one of the big booths all by myself. It was a good-sized establishment, aimed at attracting trade from the nearby highway, but not that large. A woman with a rowdy group of five children glared at me. I was especially self-conscious because I had nothing more than a drink in front of me. I would have gotten up to get a hamburger but knew if I moved, I’d lose the booth. So I sat tight and glared back.

12:45. How long should I wait? I reminded myself that there were any number of legitimate reasons for a delay, given the distance. In the back of my mind, however, was the fear that they weren’t coming at all. Lucia had chickened out yet again.

Where would we go from here? I wondered, as I watched the clock edge past one o’clock. Would Lucia phone again? Would we keep having to have these afternoon pep talks to the point we’d try this meeting again and hope it worked? How long, realistically, could I be expected to do this? Where did my responsibility in this situation leave off, allowing me to pass the baton to someone else who lived closer to Quentin? Who would it be? How? The only thing I could think, if Lucia refused to follow through, would be to involve Social Services, and this would mean filing some kind of formal child abuse report. If I did this, up came the specter of court action and the involvement of lawyers and social workers and so much more trauma than should be needed to get Drake the help he deserved.

Frustrated and unhappy, I sat until the lunchtime crowds thinned. It was 1:20 by that point. I got up, went to the counter, and ordered a Quarter Pounder and some fries.

And then there they were. Skip, Lucia, and Drake climbing out of a dark blue SUV in the parking lot as I was sitting down at the table again. It was 1:30.

I saw Lucia turn and scan the crowd inside the restaurant until our eyes met. She raised a hand in a half wave.

What had she been doing? I wondered. Taking all this time to work up the courage? Having trouble getting Skip on the road because she hadn’t actually told him why they were coming here? Or had she been hoping that by being so late, I wouldn’t be there, that she could legitimately say, “I came,” without having to confront the issues?

Drake spotted me as soon as they came through the door. His parents went to the counter to order lunch, but he and Friend came running across the room to me.

“Hi! And hi, Friend, too!” I said and I signed “Hello” as well.

He grinned from ear to ear and clambered up into the seat opposite me.

“Isn’t this exciting? Did you know you were coming to see me?” I asked.

Drake nodded enthusiastically.

“And I’m so glad to see you!” I said. “Did your parents tell you why you’ve come?”

He shook his head.

“Well, good news! You’re here because I understand now about how you can’t make words. We’re meeting so I can help your mom and dad learn about it. That way we’ll discover new ways to talk. Like with our hands.” I signed “I love you” to him.

Drake’s cheery expression faded as I spoke. He searched my eyes.

“We
do
understand now,” I said. “No more of this awful ‘Drake must speak,’ because now we know why you can’t do it. We know it isn’t you being naughty. It’s not your fault. From now on, I’m going to try and help your mom and dad—
and
your granddad, too—understand that it isn’t ‘Drake must talk like we do’ but instead ‘Drake has his own special ways of talking.’” I smiled at him.

Tentatively, he smiled back.

Lucia and Skip arrived at the table. One look at Lucia stayed my urge to inquire about their delay in arriving at Melville Crossing. She was pale and haggard.

“This is my husband, Walter,” she said, as he put the tray on the table.

“Just Skip, please,” he said and extended his hand. I shook it.

He wasn’t what I’d expected. Physically, Mason Sloane was a sturdily built man, and this had lent to his powerful presence in the room every time I’d met him. In contrast, Skip was tall and gangly thin, almost as if at thirty-five he were still trapped in adolescence. His hair was pale, his skin an unhealthy, almost grayish color. He was, nonetheless, strikingly good-looking because of bone structure so suave and chiseled it belonged in a James Bond movie. What let Skip down, however, were his eyes. He met mine only briefly then looked away, down, over to Drake, down again. Shifty eyes, as my grandmother would say.

Skip and Lucia sat down. There was a long, acutely uncomfortable silence as everyone unwrapped their food. Lucia leaned over to help Drake open his Happy Meal. The toy was a little Lego something and Drake held it up joyfully. Both his parents smiled at him. Then Lucia used the handle of a plastic fork to cut Drake’s hamburger in half. She handed one piece to him.