Overheard in a Dream

Torey Hayden

Overheard in a Dream

A novel

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The boy was so pale you would have thought he was a ghost. A wraith. Something insubstantial that would vanish into nothing at all. He was small for nine, slender and fine-boned. His hair was pale as moonlight, very fine, very straight. His skin was milky-white with a dull translucence to it, like wax. Such fair colouring meant that at a distance, he appeared to have no eyebrows or eyelashes at all, and this incompleteness only emphasized his ephemeral appearance.

“Meow?” said the boy.

“Hello, Conor,” James replied. “Won’t you come in?”

“Meow?”

Around his waist he wore numerous coils of string with bits of aluminium foil wrapped around them. Four of these trailed down behind him and onto the floor. He gripped a small toy cat by its hind legs. Extending the cat out in front of him, as if it were a scanning device, he rotated it slowly, pointing it at every corner of the room. Then he began to make an oddly mechanical noise, a sort of ratcheting “ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh” that sounded like a sluggish machine gun. Then a new sound started, a soft whirring sound. “Whirrrr. Whirrrrr. Whirrrrrrrr.” He stepped into the room just far enough to allow Dulcie to push the trailing strings forward with her foot and close the door.

The child avoided looking at James. His eyes darted nervously here and there. A hand came up alongside his face and he flapped it frantically. “Whirrrrrrrr,” he went again.

James rose from his chair in order to encourage the boy into the room, but the child reacted with panic, pointing the stuffed cat at James like a gun. “The cat knows!” he said loudly.

James stopped. “You don’t like me coming towards you.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh. Whirrrrrrr. Whirrrrrrr.”

“You would like me to sit down again.”

“Whirrrr.”

“That’s all right,” James said quietly and returned to the small chair beside the playroom table to sit down. “In here you can decide how things will be.”

Conor remained rooted just inside the door. He looked James over carefully, or at least that’s how James interpreted his behaviour, because Conor’s eyes never met his. Instead, the boy flicked his eyes back and forth repetitively, as if he had nystagmus, but James sensed it was simply a method of gaining visual information without eye contact. Then he extended the toy cat again and took a step further into the room. Still gripping the cat tightly by its hind legs, he raised and lowered it as if scanning James’s body. “The cat knows,” he whispered.

The play therapy room was spacious and painted pale yellow, a colour James had chosen because it made him think of sunshine. Not that this was really necessary, as there was usually a surplus of the real stuff pouring through the large east-facing windows and in the heat of summer, the room had a downright Saharan feel. Nonetheless, the colour pleased him.

As did the room itself. All the toys and other items in the room James had chosen with care. He knew exactly what he intended to create in the playroom: a place where nothing would constrain a child, where nothing looked too fragile nor too fancy to be touched, where everything invited playing with. When he’d first described to Sandy how he wanted to create a playroom, she had remarked that he’d never grown up himself, that it was his own childhood he was equipping. No doubt there was some truth in this, as the boy does make the man, but what she’d failed to appreciate was that these were also the tools of his trade and he’d quite simply wanted the best.

Very cautiously Conor began to move around the perimeter of the room. Holding the toy cat out in front of him like a divining rod, he went in a clockwise direction, keeping very close to the walls. The cat’s nose was touched to the furniture, the shelving, the various playthings along the way. “Meow? Meow?” he murmured as he went. It was all he said.

Having circumnavigated the room once, Conor immediately started on a second round. There was a low bookcase on the right-hand side where James kept many of the smaller toys. On top of the bookcase were wire baskets full of construction paper, glue, string, stickers, stamps, yarn, sequins, and other odds and ends for making pictures.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Meow?”

“If you want, you may take any of the things out of the baskets,” James said. “Everything in this room is to play with. All things are for touching. In this room, you decide.”

“Meow?” the boy replied.

The direction Conor was moving meant that he approached James from behind. The first time he had skirted widely around James as he sat at the small table. This time Conor slowed down as he drew near.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat motionless so as not to frighten the boy.

“Whirrrr,” came the whisper behind him.

The child’s breathing was fast and shallow, giving a hollowness to the sound like a rheumy dog panting. Then came the very soft touch of the toy cat against the back of James’s neck. With staccato quickness it touched him and then was gone. The boy whirred. The nose of the cat came again, so lightly that it just tipped the hairs on James’s skin.

“Meow?”

James turned his head and there was the briefest moment of eye contact between them. James smiled.

“The cat knows,” the boy whispered.

Thinking that someone as well known as Laura Deighton wouldn’t want to sit out in the waiting room with Dr Sorenson’s clients, Dulcie had allowed her to go into James’s office to wait for him there. James hadn’t expected this. A flicker of alarm went through him when Dulcie told him, because, of course, Laura Deighton would notice that he had her books on the shelf and, quite understandably, she would then assume that he had read them.

James wasn’t a Laura Deighton fan. He knew her books only by what he’d read about them in The New York Times Book Review, that they were “complex,” “profound,” and worse, “literary,” which, James knew, were all euphemisms for pretentious and/or unreadable. However, Laura Deighton was native to this corner of South Dakota, and since James was a newcomer and hence an outsider, he was acutely aware of the need to show respect for local icons. Consequently, he had bought the books – in hardback, even – and had set them up prominently on the bookshelf in his office to show his local loyalty. He did intend to read them at some point. He’d just never quite got around to it.

When he entered the office, he found Laura Deighton’s attention was not on books, however. She was standing beside the window, her interest absorbed in something outside. She didn’t turn immediately.

“Dulcie will keep Conor busy for a moment so that we can talk,” James said. Going to his desk, he set down the folders and his notepad. He adjusted his suit jacket and straightened his tie. Only then did Laura Deighton finally drag her attention away from the window.

She was an unremarkable-looking woman. In early middle age with the mousy-coloured hair that is the aftermath of a blonde childhood and eyes that weren’t really any particular colour at all, neither brown nor green, she could have been mistaken for any ordinary woman down at the supermarket, any one of those of a certain age who go a little soft around the waist, a little saggy here and there, who don’t stand out for any reason.

Her clothes, James noticed, weren’t really appropriate to the situation. It wasn’t simply that they lacked style. They were too casual for a first meeting of this kind, even by South Dakota’s relaxed standards. Jeans … okay, maybe it was possible to pull off jeans if you were twenty-seven and leggy, or if they were a fashionable brand and dressed up, but Laura Deighton’s jeans were a cheap brand that the local ranchers favoured. The white shirt was nondescript and the tweed jacket fitted her carelessly. She wore no jewellery and little makeup. Depression? James wondered. Or maybe this was how creative genius dressed.

James felt vague disappointment on seeing her. He thought there’d be some aura of glamour around her, some presence that would make it impossible to mistake this literary giant, risen from the cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, there was nothing.

“Do sit down,” he said. He gestured broadly towards the sofa and chairs.

Laura ignored them. She came over, extended her hand to shake his and then sat down in the chair beside his desk. “I appreciate your seeing Conor at such short notice.”

Silence followed. James preferred to let the client set the tone of the interview, so he never started off by asking questions. This didn’t appear to unnerve her the way it did some parents, but she was obviously anticipating questions. She looked at him expectantly.

When he didn’t speak, she said once more, “Thank you for seeing Conor at such short notice. Conor’s paediatrician – Dr Wilson, over at the clinic – recommended we bring Conor in to you. He said you’d come here from Manhattan, that you’d been in a practice there.”

“Yes,” James said.

“He spoke very highly of you. Said it’s a renowned practice in New York, that to have been a partner there, you’d be a real high flyer.” She chuckled. “And I can tell you, that’s serious praise coming from Dr Wilson.”

“Thanks to him for that recommendation,” James replied, “but I’m sure there are also many good professionals out here too.”

Silence then. Again she looked expectantly at James. When he didn’t say anything further, she said, “Until now we’ve had Conor at the Avery School. In Denver. Have you heard of it?”.

“I don’t know it well,” James replied. “I’ve only been out here since February, but Dr Sorenson has mentioned it.”

“They work on a very structured behavioural program. Called ‘repatterning’. The school has an excellent reputation for success at socializing severely autistic children.”

A pause.

“Although,” she said with faint sarcasm, “maybe that’s simply because they do to the failures what they’ve just done to us. We received a letter right out of the blue saying they didn’t want Conor back this autumn. That they felt Avery wasn’t ‘helpful to his needs’. It was worded wonderfully. Like it was their fault things didn’t work out, when you knew they meant just the opposite. That they think we’ve got a funky kid. So here we are with absolutely no place to send him. Completely stuck.”

James looked at Laura closely. He was finding her difficult to read. On the face of it, she appeared straight-talking, but her words and body language gave off none of the usual subtle subtext. She sat absolutely still in a relatively neutral pose that was neither open nor closed. She made good, although not outstanding, eye contact. Her tone of voice was even but not very nuanced.

His inability to glean more intuitive information from her surprised James. He’d been prepared for other challenges in meeting Laura Deighton. Would her fame unnerve him, for instance? Or more likely, would he take an instant dislike to her? The literary people he’d known in Manhattan were, to a person, pompous and self-absorbed, and he hated these traits. When he’d discovered she was coming in, he caught himself feeling a certain gratification at the fact he’d never actually read any of her books. But her blankness was unexpected. There was just no discernible subtext. That was where James was accustomed to doing all his “reading,” where he got so much information about clients, there in that intuitive space beneath words and gestures. With Laura Deighton, it was as if this space did not exist.

“Has Conor always been in a residential program?” he asked finally. “Have you not found suitable programs locally?”

“It needs to be residential. Our ranch is out beyond Hill City. Realistically, we just couldn’t be driving him a long distance every day.”

“Was Dr Wilson clear with you about what kind of therapy I do?” James replied. “Because if I took Conor on, I would expect to see him three times a week.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, although perhaps not so much so that it could be interpreted as surprise.

“I’m a child psychiatrist,” James continued. “What I prefer to do with the children I see is traditional play therapy, which means having them in on a very regular basis.”

She was silent a long moment. “No. I hadn’t quite realized that’s what you did. So perhaps it’s not appropriate. Conor’s autistic. I know in the old days it was common to send autistic kids to psychiatrists, but, of course, we understand now it’s not a psychiatric condition. It’s neurological. Consequently we’ve always had Conor in behaviour-based treatment because that’s the proven way of teaching life skills to children like him.”

“Did Dr Wilson give you any reasons why he thought it might be helpful for Conor to come here?” James asked.

“No, he just suggested it.” She paused. Her silence was at first expectant, but grew longer and more indistinct.

Then without warning, the mask slipped. Her shoulders dropped in a gesture of despair. “Probably just because I’m so desperate. I know I’m driving Dr Wilson demented with my calls. It’s just that Conor’s so difficult. Home for a month and he’s destroying us.”

Sympathy washed over James. He leaned towards her, his folded arms on the desk, and smiled reassuringly. “Yes, I can understand. Children like Conor can be very demanding,” he said softly. “Don’t worry.”

The muscles along her jaw tightened. She wasn’t teary but James knew she was in that moment just before tears.

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how Conor is at home?” he said. “That’ll give us a better idea of whether or not coming here would be appropriate.”

Laura became teary.

He smiled gently and leaned forward to nudge the box of tissues towards the edge of the desk. “Don’t worry. This is a very hard moment. Most parents feel pretty upset.”

“It’s just … just such a nightmare. Like one of those nightmares where you keep doing the same thing over and over and it never works out, it never achieves anything.”

She took a tissue. The tears hadn’t really materialized, so she just clamped it tightly in her fist. James had a strong sense that she was feeling deeply conflicted in that moment, that self-control was a huge issue but that at the same time the burden of this boy was so overwhelming that she was desperate for help.

“Is Conor your only child?”

“No. We have a daughter too, who’s six.”

“When did Conor’s problems first start?” James asked.

Laura let out a slow, elongated sigh. “When he was about two. He seemed all right when he was a baby, although it’s hard to know with your first child. There were things I had always been concerned about. He was very jumpy, for instance. If you came up behind him or there was a loud noise, he’d always startle badly. Dr Wilson said it was just a temperament thing, that it simply indicated he was a sensitive boy, and not to worry about it. Otherwise, he was a good baby. He slept well. He didn’t have colic or anything.”

“Did he seem to develop normally to you?”

“Yes.” Her voice had a plaintive, almost querulous note of bewilderment to it and James wondered how often she’d had to give these details. Or was stopped from giving them. In this era of insurance and accountability, there often was little time spent on collecting psychosocial histories beyond what was needed to prescribe the appropriate drug. James had found listening carefully to the parents’ initial version of events was one of the most valuable thing to do, not only for the concrete information it provided in building up a picture of a child’s problems, but also as a way of cementing that crucial relationship with the parents, because they often felt so desperate and unheard.

“Conor was always timid,” Laura said. “He cried easily. He worried about things. Even as a little, little boy. But he was very bright and interested in things. He talked early. Even by a year old, he could use several words.”

“So you say the difficulties starting showing up after he turned two?”

Twisting the tissue between her fingers, Laura nodded. “It started with his becoming very clingy. He’d always been inclined to be clingy but suddenly it got much worse. He never wanted me out of his sight. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him. He began having these terrible temper tantrums. Dr Wilson was still telling us not to worry. Kids have tantrums at that age, he kept saying, but I don’t think he realized how bad they were. Conor would just go frantic and do things like literally rip the wallpaper off the wall with his fingernails. To complicate things, that’s when I got pregnant with Morgana and it was a challenging pregnancy. I had some serious medical problems. And we were having some financial difficulties, which meant the pregnancy wasn’t very well timed – it hadn’t been planned – so a whole lot was going on.”

“Can you describe Conor’s behaviour in a little more detail?” James asked.

“He got really hyper, really agitated. He wouldn’t sleep. He could go days without sleeping. Which, with a new baby …” She let out a defeated sigh. “And the screaming started. He’d be sitting, playing normally with his toys and then suddenly he’d get all panicky, and start screaming and screaming. He had been in a nursery program two days a week, but we had to take him out because his behaviour upset the other children so much. The school wouldn’t keep him.” She put a hand over her eyes for a moment in a gesture of desperation and then rubbed her face. “It just got so distressing to live with. Finally Dr Wilson arranged for him to go into the children’s unit at the university hospital in Sioux Falls to be assessed. That’s when autism was diagnosed.”

James nodded thoughtfully.

“And now …” Laura said. She sighed again. “It’s getting just like that all over again. ‘Difficult’ doesn’t half describe living with Conor. For example, everything has got to be just so. His room, his toys, his food. Everything must be in a special place and in a special order. I can’t do anything for him if it isn’t exactly the same way I did it before. Like at breakfast, I can’t put the eggs on the table if the juice hasn’t been poured first. All these little rituals have to be followed precisely. Like those wires. Did you see those? Those bits of string around his waist? There must four of them. Exactly six feet long. Each with twelve bits of foil. Then there’s that frigging cat. That cat rules everything in the house. It goes everywhere he goes, does everything he does, investigates every molecule that comes in contact with Conor.

“This all makes even the smallest, most ordinary task a trial. Try giving a bath to a kid who must have string, foil and a stuffed cat on his person at all times. Or putting him to bed. It’s like putting Frankenstein’s monster to bed. All those wires have to be attached to the bedpost and crisscrossed over the bed just so. If they’re not just so, he’ll sit there ‘adjusting’. He can be up for hours ‘adjusting’, scanning the cat over them, ‘adjusting’ some more and all the while he is making noises – buzzing and whirring, or worse, meowing. This then wakes Morgana. She goes in to see what’s going on. She means no harm. She’s just being your typical, nosey six-year-old. But if she tries to help him or she touches his cat, he freaks. So then I yell at her for upsetting him and she cries. Then he cries. Like as not, I end up crying too.”

James smiled sympathetically. “That must be very difficult. What about your husband, Alan? Does he help much with Conor?”

Laura leaned back in the chair and expelled a long, heavy breath. “Well, there’s another issue …

“It’s not so good between Al and me at the moment,” she said softly, and James could hear emotion tightening her words. “That’s a whole other story. A long one and I don’t want to go into it right now. But the short answer is: yes, he helps when he can. It’s just I don’t know how long that’s going to last, because we’re splitting up.” She looked over tearfully. “So, see, this is why I can’t cope with Conor at home. Even I have to admit I need help.”

Chapter Two

“Laura Deighton, huh?” Lars said, leaning over the appointment book that was lying open on Dulcie’s desk. “So is the boy coming in then?”

James nodded. “I couldn’t get her to agree to three times a week, but we’re going to do Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“What’s she like?”

“Seems okay,” James replied.

“Not all …?” Lars wiggled his hand in a gesture that James took to mean “above herself”.

“No, not really. Just trying to cope with some big challenges, like all parents of autistic children.”

Lars rolled his eyes teasingly. “But then you’ll be used to celebrities, won’t you? The high-falutin’ crowd. City Boy.” He grinned.

City Boy, indeed. Culture shock was too mild a word for what James had experienced in moving from Manhattan to Rapid City. South Dakota might as well have been the dark side of the moon. James did manage to do what he’d dreamed of – set up his own private practice in family therapy – but it hadn’t turned out to be exactly like his fantasies. Even at South Dakota prices, James had discovered he couldn’t afford to go it alone. Consequently, he’d ended up in partnership with a local psychiatrist, Lars Sorenson. If James had wanted freedom from the strict Freudian theory that had ruled his life in New York, he couldn’t have done better than Lars, whose ideas of psychiatry had more to do with football scores or gilt hog prices than Freud. James’s former colleagues would have frozen stiff at Lars and his homely country doctor approach. Indeed, James himself had taken so much thawing out when he first came that he’d probably left puddles behind him, but if Lars had noticed, he’d never let it bother him. In the end, James was grateful for the partnership. Lars was never in such a hurry that he wouldn’t stop and listen or answer one more stupid question about “real life,” as he liked to call living and working in Rapid City. And while there was a lot of good-natured teasing, he had never once laughed outright at James’s city-bred ideas.