Torey Hayden
Twilight Children

Contents

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

Epilogue

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

This book is based on the author’s experiences. In order to protect privacy, names, some identifying characteristics, dialogue, and details have been changed or reconstructed. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters.

Chapter One

She was a small, fine-boned girl with a pointed pixie chin and unusually distinct cheekbones. Her hair was a soft black, straight and shoulder length, but it had been rather raffishly cut, as if perhaps done by another child. Her eyes, however, defined her face. Enormous, protruding slightly, and fluidly dark, like shadowed water, they overpowered her other features. She wasn’t what I would call a pretty girl, but she was striking in a faintly unreal way, so that when she lifted her hand to push hair back from her face, I half expected to see elfin ears.

“Hello,” I said and pulled out the chair at the table.

She hunched forward, hands down between her knees so that her chin was almost on the tabletop. Her eyes, however, remained on me. She smiled in a manner that was rather self-conscious, yet friendly enough.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Cassandra.”

Ah, a mythical name. It fit the fairy-tale looks.

“How old you are, Cassandra?”

“Nine.”

“My name’s Torey, and you and I are going to be working together each day.” I pulled out a chair adjacent to hers and sat down. “Can you tell me why you’ve come to the unit?”

Her dark eyes locked on mine, and for a moment or two she stared intently, as if she expected to find the answer there. Then she shook her head faintly. “No.”

“What about your mom? What did she tell you about why you were coming here?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” I said. I bent down and opened my box of materials. Taking out plain paper and a smaller cardboard box, I laid them on the table. “Most of the children I work with come to the unit because they have problems that make them feel bad. Sometimes, for example, they have problems in their family. Maybe someone in the family is really unhappy and it makes them do hurtful things. Maybe there’s been a divorce. Maybe there’s lots of fighting at home. For some of the children who come here, it’s other things. Maybe they’ve been in an accident or a really scary situation, or they’ve been very ill. Some have been treated or touched in a way that felt wrong, or people tried to make them keep secrets that hurt. And sometimes … sometimes kids don’t even know the reason they have troubles. They just feel angry or worried or scared all the time. So these are some of the reasons children come to the unit.”

Cassandra watched me with unusual intensity, as if she were really trying to take in what I was saying, trying to absorb it, almost. Nonetheless, there was an oddly blank quality to her stare, almost as if she were listening so carefully not for the content of what I was saying but rather because I was speaking to her in a foreign language she didn’t quite understand.

“Hearing about reasons for other children coming to the unit,” I said, “do you think any of those describe you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll share with you some of the things other people have told me about you. You can then say if you think they are true or not.

“Your mom, for instance, tells me that you had a scary thing happen to you when you were five. She says that she is divorced from your dad and that you and your sister were supposed to live with her and not see him. Then one day your dad came to school and had you get into his car, even though that was against the rules. He drove off with you and wouldn’t bring you back, and he wouldn’t phone your mom to tell her that you were safe, and he wouldn’t let you phone your mom. She says you were gone a long time – about two years – and during the time you were with your dad, some very scary things happened to you. Is that right?”

Cassandra nodded. Her demeanor was pleasant, cheerful even, as if I’d said no more than “Your mom says you are in third grade.”

“Your teacher tells me that you like school, that you can be very enthusiastic about what is happening in class. She says you are quite a smart girl and can do really well sometimes.”

Cassandra smiled.

“But she also tells me that at other times you have lots of problems. You can get very angry and have a hard time following the rules. Occasionally when you are at school, you get very upset and then you stop talking. Mrs. Baker says there are sometimes days and days when you don’t want to say anything to anyone, and this makes it difficult to do your work in class. But she tells me while these are bad problems, they aren’t the biggest problem. She says the biggest problem is that you very often don’t tell the truth. You make up stories about people that get them into trouble, and you often talk about things that aren’t really happening at all.”

I paused. “What do you think? Do you think these things have caused trouble for you?”

Cassandra shrugged. It came off as almost a comical gesture, the way she did it. She brought her shoulders way up and rolled her eyes in an exaggerated fashion that was tinged with tolerant good humor, as if to say, “Silly grown-ups, who make mountains out of molehills.”

“These are the reasons the grown-ups have given me, when I asked, ‘Why is Cassandra Ventura on the unit?’”

Cassandra rolled her eyes again, then looked up to the right, then up to the left, then back to the right.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Do these things seem like problems to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m interested in your thoughts. There isn’t a wrong or right answer to my questions. We’re just exploring.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember what? If you do those things? If people think those are problems? Or you don’t remember what I just said?”

Again she shrugged and rolled her eyes.

I pushed one of the plain pieces of paper in front of Cassandra, then I opened the small box. Inside was an assortment of marking pens, pencils, and crayons. “I want you to draw me a picture of your family.”

She hesitated. “I’m not a very good draw-er.”

“That’s okay. They can just be stick figures, if you want. You can make them any way that’s easy for you.”

“Like bubbles? Instead of sticks, can I draw them round, like bubbles?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Fish!” she said with sudden animation. “I draw really good fish. I figured out this way. Let me show you.” She picked up an orange crayon. “See? You make a circle. Then you draw a little triangle on one end with the point sticking against the circle and that’s the tail. See?” She made several more fish along the side of the paper. “Can I make them fish?”

“You decide,” I replied.

But she didn’t make fish. And she didn’t make stick figures. Instead, Cassandra dropped the crayon and took a pencil. She began to draw very small, very carefully proportioned people. First a man, then a girl, then a smaller girl, then a woman. A pause. Cassandra considered the picture. Then she added another figure next to the mother. This was a second man. Then she added a third man. Another pause.

Everything thus far had been done in pencil. Indeed, she’d chosen a very sharp, hard-lead pencil and so the drawings were quite faint. She then put the pencil down and reached over for the box, pulling it closer. Looking through, she picked out different crayons and set about placing her family in a pleasant scene of grass, blue sky, and bright sunshine. She worked carefully, coloring in the grass after drawing the lines and then the sky. She assiduously avoided coloring over the orange fish so that it looked almost as if they were balloons in the air. She pressed hard when making the sun, turning it waxy yellow, many of the rays extending out over the crayoned blue of the sky.

While Cassandra had been careful not to color over her fish at the edge of the paper, she had had no such compunctions about coloring over the family. They were hardly visible through the blue she’d used for the sky.

“There,” she said, then paused to regard the picture. “No, wait.” She reached out and took up a black magic marker. Carefully she penned in a smiling face on the sun. “That’s better. That’s a happy picture now, isn’t it?” Then she continued with the black marker and drew a strange little blobby shape in the sky not far from the sun. It had three protrusions, making it look rather like a clover leaf without the stem.

“You’ve worked hard on that. Can you tell me about it? Who are these people in the family?”

“Welllll,” she said in a slow, drawn-out voice, “that’s my dad.” She pointed to the first faint figure. “That’s my sister Magdalena. And that’s my sister Mona. And that’s my mom. And that’s Daddy David. And that’s Uncle Beck.”

“And where are you in this picture?” I asked.

“I’m not in this picture. Am I supposed to be in this picture? I thought you said you wanted a picture of my family.”

I nodded.

“You wanted me in the family?” she asked.

“Well, if you wanted to draw everyone in your family, it might include you, mightn’t it? … but then again … however you see it, that’s good. There isn’t a right or wrong way of doing it.”

“Everyone? You wanted everyone? I didn’t know you said everyone. I didn’t know you meant everyone.”

Cassandra reached over and picked out an assortment of crayons – red, yellow, blue, green. Down in the right-hand corner of the picture she began to draw several small snakes, all with smiley faces. She made about ten of them of different sizes.

“This is becoming quite an intricate picture,” I said. “Can you tell me about these?”

“This is Mother Snake and this is Father Snake and these are the kid snakes. And this is Minister Snake. And this is Cowboy Snake. And this is Fairy Snake. They’re my brothers and sisters, these ones. He’s my brother and he’s my brother and this one’s my sister.”

“Ah,” I said. “Your mom only told me about your sisters Mona and Magdalena.”

“These are my other brothers. In my other family. From when I was abducted. I lived in a whole other family then, and these are my brothers and sisters from there. I called them ‘Minister’ and ‘Cowboy’ and ‘Fairy’ because that’s how they liked to dress up. Well, not him. He really was a minister. He was a grown-up. Like seventeen, I think. But Cowboy and Fairy were my age. Well, Fairy was younger. She was three. I took care of her.”

“I see. Your mother didn’t mention your other family.”

Cassandra grinned then. It was an openly saucy expression. “Maybe she doesn’t know.”

Or maybe I don’t know, I was thinking. There was something too playful about her behavior, making it feel manipulative to me. I was getting a sense of smoke and mirrors about Cassandra, that she was astute at giving what she surmised I wanted so that I never noticed what wasn’t being offered.

“And that’s me, there,” she said and pointed to the clover-shaped blob in the sky.

“Ah,” I said, “so you are in the picture now?”

“Yup.” She looked up at me and smiled. “But I’m up there ’cause I’m an alien.”

Chapter Two

I’d been working on the unit almost two years. Feeling frustration with the attitude of the administration in Washington toward special education and foreseeing the inevitable cutbacks and job losses that would result from administration policy changes, I had decided to take a break from teaching. Some years earlier, I’d completed my psychology credentials, so this seemed the right time to move in that direction. My intention had been to join a small clinic where a friend of mine worked. It was located in a city I had lived in previously, a city I knew and loved well and where I already had a good social network. What had attracted me most, however, was a chance to work with the clinic’s director. He not only had a formidable reputation in child psychiatry, which was reason enough to want to learn from him, but he was also a skilled administrator, known for his creative thinking. Breaking free from the often restrictive attitudes of psychiatry, he had sought to set up the clinic with a more holistic approach, drawing together professionals from several allied fields – child psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, social work – to work together in a broad, cross-disciplinary manner. This ability to “think outside the box” appealed to me greatly.

How I’d left the small town where I had been teaching with the intention of taking up a position in that wealthy, well-funded, broad-minded private clinic and ended up instead working in the claustrophobic world of a closed psychiatric crisis and assessment unit for children in a metropolitan general hospital was somewhat of a mystery even to me. It had involved one of those encounters one can only write off later as “fate,” when a colleague of a colleague contacted me late one Sunday afternoon, saying something about being familiar with my former project in elective mutism and would I be willing to give an in-service to staff at the hospital. While on the unit to do the in-service, I found out they were desperately looking for a specialist in psychologically based language problems. I was not such a specialist, but I was free for a few months, since times had not quite coordinated between the end of the school year and the opening of the position at the clinic. I said if they were interested, I’d be willing to give it my best shot. They were and I did. And months zoomed by. The position at the clinic came and went and I remained at the hospital.

It was a good choice. No doubt the clinic would also have suited me well, and I still had occasional idle dreams of switching over at some later date, but I loved the gritty, front-line feel of working in a hospital. We were a shortterm facility, designed primarily for diagnosis and assessment, as well as acute crisis intervention, and as a county-funded institution, many of the cases referred to us came from the poor under-belly of society. The continual struggles for enough time, enough money, enough choices never went away, lending a certain frisson to the work and provoking among the staff an attitude akin to that of comrades-in-arms in a MASH unit. Like a good political debate, this kind of edgy atmosphere stimulated me. I enjoyed, too, the flexibility of my position, which allowed me to continue liaising with many of my patients long after they had left the hospital unit and returned to their homes and schools, and I enjoyed being a “language specialist,” of seeing the many variations of one presenting problem.

Which is how Cassandra came my way.

In the beginning Cassandra Ventura’s life had looked promising. Her father was a security guard. Her mother had been a secretary but gave up work when Cassandra’s elder sister, Magdalena, came along. During those years, the family exuded the American dream. They worked hard, were committed members of their church, helped out in community activities. Dad was a regular on the company bowling team. Mom baked cakes that won prizes and sewed enviably well, providing the two girls with elaborate costumes at Halloween, new dresses at Easter, matching outfits for the school pictures.

Behind closed doors, however, it was a very different scene, one of drug problems and domestic violence. Mr. Ventura claimed never to have abused the children until that final incident. Before that point, it had been only his wife who had suffered the cruel put-downs, the beatings, the dishes smashed over her head. But then on that night, six-year-old Magdalena had tried to intervene, getting physically between her arguing parents. Mr. Ventura swung out at her, meaning only to push her aside. She fell and was knocked unconscious. That proved the breaking point for Mrs. Ventura. She could no longer keep up the pretense of being a happy family. Taking the girls, she fled to a women’s refuge. The next day she went to the police.

It unraveled swiftly from there. As well as the domestic abuse, Mrs. Ventura also revealed her husband had long-term drug problems and had been using his position as a security guard to procure a regular supply of cocaine. The criminal trial that followed was ugly and rancorous and made worse because it required testimony not only from his wife but also Magdalena. Mr. Ventura was jailed for eighteen months.

Mrs. Ventura rebuilt her life with rather disconcerting speed. All within the space of time her husband was in jail, she managed to file for divorce; meet and move in with another man, whose name was David Navarro; relocate to a new community about an hour’s drive from the city; and give birth to a third daughter, Mona.

Cassandra had been three at the time of her father’s imprisonment. Two years later, when she was in kindergarten, she came out of school to find a car waiting for her. When the man in the driver’s seat said he was Daddy, she hesitated. She didn’t actually remember her natural father well, so she didn’t know if this was him or not. When he tried to call her over, she replied that she needed to wait until Magdalena came out. He said, “I have some of your old toys here. I thought you might want them.” So she went to see.

When Magdalena came out from her third-grade class, there was no sign of her younger sister. Her mother was called. The police were called. Nothing. No trace. Cassandra had disappeared.

The Navarros’ efforts to find Cassandra were unrelenting. Police bulletins, news reports, searches over several states, posters in the local grocery store, on the side of milk cartons, efforts through Mr. Ventura’s parole officer – everything anyone could think of was tried in an effort to find out what happened that afternoon – but nothing turned up. It was as if Cassandra and her father had, as the old cliché goes, simply vanished into thin air.

Twenty-six months passed without any word of Cassandra’s whereabouts. Then three states away, a young man working in a 7-Eleven convenience store discovered a small girl in the alley behind the store going through their garbage. Suspicious that she was there to steal something, he gave chase when she tried to run away, and caught her. When she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer his questions about her name or where she lived, he called the manager. The manager realized immediately that the girl was too young to be alone in such a place at that time of day, and he was concerned about her unkempt appearance; so he called the police. It was Cassandra.

No one ever knew precisely what had happened to her during those twenty-six months. Cassandra was totally mute for the first weeks after her return. Her father, when found, was in a drug-addled stupor, and he seemed incapable of giving much information beyond indicating the motive behind the abduction had been revenge against his ex-wife. “I wanted to make her suffer for what she’d done” was his only real explanation.

Cassandra had been not quite six when she was abducted and was now approaching eight. She was very dirty and suffering from malnutrition, giving the impression she had spent at least part of the time living rough or in very poor conditions. No one knew whether this was in the company of her father or others, because her father gave a muddled, inconsistent picture and Cassandra said nothing. Even when she did begin to speak again, she usually refused to talk about the abduction. The few things she did say turned out to be mostly lies.

The longed-for homecoming proved to be nothing like Cassandra’s mother had dreamt about for so long. In place of the cheerful, loving daughter who had been abducted that autumn afternoon, she welcomed home a wary, mute stranger.

Cassandra found it impossible to settle back into her former life, which, in fact, was not her “old life” at all, but rather a completely different one from what she’d been living before the abduction. She hated her stepfather and wouldn’t tolerate him in the room. She refused to talk to him or even look at him. She fought constantly with Magdalena and did many small, nasty vengeful things to her. With her new sister, Mona, she was so spiteful and short-tempered that her mother didn’t dare leave the two of them alone together.

Cassandra startled easily, was prone to unexpected tantrums, suffered horrific nightmares, and alternated between shouting at everyone and not speaking at all. She lied constantly, stole from everyone in the family, and had chaotic eating problems, tending to hoard and hide food, or else taking too much, consuming it too fast, and vomiting it back up, occasionally while still at the table. She also had digestive problems and was plagued by many other minor illnesses associated with a compromised immune system.

In addition, it appeared Cassandra had not attended school at all during the time she was gone. Indications when she was in kindergarten were that Cassandra, like her elder sister, would be an able student. Old enough to be in second grade when she returned, she was now behind in everything and could neither read nor do basic adding and subtracting.

Cassandra’s mother and stepfather attempted to deal with the situation as appropriately as they could. Her parents decided to restart Cassandra’s education from the beginning, so she was placed in first grade, a year below where she should have been for her age. This still left plenty of catching up, as the academic year was well under way when she returned, so she was also given extensive resource help. To deal with the psychological trauma of the abduction, Cassandra had individual therapy with a child psychologist for twelve weeks, which was the length of time covered by the Navarros’ insurance.

And Cassandra did start to recover. She began to speak reliably again. First it was at home and then, more slowly, at school, although she could still be oddly unpredictable and sometimes went silent for hours and occasionally even days. She was making reasonable academic progress and generally keeping up with her class. At home she was still difficult and prone to tantrums, but the family felt this was improving, too.

Yet …

It was Cassandra’s third-grade teacher, Earlene Baker, who kept pressure on the Navarro family to seek further help for their daughter. Mrs. Baker found Cassandra’s behavior disconcerting and difficult to cope with in the classroom. She was most concerned about the amount of very manipulative behavior Cassandra engaged in, which mostly took the form of lying and “storytelling.” A number of the lies, she said, seemed completely pointless, such as coming to school in a pair of running shoes she wore almost every day and insisting they were new. Many others were malicious, such as on one occasion when Cassandra had purposely hidden her schoolwork and then told the school staff that another child had stolen it from her. The only thing that had saved the other child from serious trouble was a playground aide who had happened to notice Cassandra placing something carefully into a trash bin outside the school and had later gone to investigate. Most of the lies, however, were about hideous but outlandish things, like her little sister falling in the canal and being swept under the culvert but then being rescued by an unidentified boy who just happened to be passing.

Mrs. Baker said she was aware that in all likelihood Cassandra had suffered terribly during her abduction and she tried to take this into account, but even so, why would a nine-year-old spend recess cheerfully helping the school janitor sweep leaves and then come in and say he had tried to push her down the stairs?

Mrs. Baker also wondered if Cassandra could be suffering petit mal seizures. It was a bit of joke with everyone at school, even Cassandra, that she “should have been born blond” because she could be very “ditzy” – not paying attention to what was going on around her, not remembering obvious details about ordinary things. Mrs. Baker didn’t always find the behavior funny. She felt the forgetfulness, which could be very abrupt and out of the blue, was often manipulative in nature and just a further extension of the lying. Occasionally, however, she said Cassandra did genuinely seem not to remember things that had just happened, and this occurred often enough for it to interfere with learning and social interactions. This led Mrs. Baker to wonder if there could be a neurological underpinning for such behavior.

Cassandra’s erratic speech also bothered her. Most of the time, Mrs. Baker said, Cassandra was chatty to a point of being verbose; however, every once in a while she’d suddenly refuse to speak to anyone, and this could last anywhere up to a few days. Mrs. Baker saw no particular pattern to these silences, but they did occur at home as well. Cassandra’s mother was resigned to them, feeling they were another outshoot of the traumatic abduction and the best response was to give Cassandra peace and support and not call attention to them. Mrs. Baker couldn’t be this lackadaisical because not talking interfered with the learning process. Given the randomness of the behavior, Mrs. Baker’s mind again went back to the question of a neurological basis. When she spoke to me, she mentioned Cassandra’s father’s drug problems and wondered if Cassandra had been the victim of any drug-taking while she was with her father, or if there had been some kind of horrible abuse that might have caused brain damage, which was now throwing up these odd neurological signs.

The final concern was what Mrs. Baker called Cassandra’s “creepy” behaviors – actions that, while there was nothing inherently wrong with Cassandra’s doing them, made Mrs. Baker uneasy. Among these was a tendency for Cassandra to turn otherwise ordinary conversations into nonsense. She would be chatting normally and then unexpectedly get what Mrs. Baker described as her “Bad Seed” look. Suddenly her replies would become off-topic, occasionally provocative, and often make little sense. This was a very disconcerting behavior, Mrs. Baker said, because it “felt crazy.” And very off-putting. Other children quickly became disconcerted or irritated and avoided her.

Another creepy behavior was Cassandra’s tendency to pretend she was some kind of animal, like a vulture or a bear, and then only relate to people using shrieks or growls. Often she picked a violent animal and then used the animal’s normal aggression as an excuse for hitting, biting, spitting, or doing other hurtful things. Mrs. Baker said Cassandra often did this playfully, as if she were in control of the behavior and it was only a game; however, she could persist with the animal-like behavior for several hours, despite repeated requests to stop or even punishment.

Neurological investigations turned up no evidence of seizures. The doctors concluded Cassandra’s problems were psychological, most likely part of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the abduction, a diagnosis she already carried. She was given a prescription for antidepressant medication and sent home.

Mrs. Baker didn’t see a significant change in Cassandra on the antidepressant, so she persisted in her efforts to pressure the parents into getting more treatment for Cassandra. She claimed the various difficult behaviors were soon going to make it impossible to keep Cassandra in regular education. She kept insisting the parents continue searching for help. Consequently, Cassandra was eventually referred to one of the senior child psychiatrists affiliated with our unit at the hospital. He spent time in Cassandra’s school, observing her, then met with both Cassandra and her parents. In the end he decided it would be beneficial to bring Cassandra to the unit as an inpatient for observation and assessment.

The child psychiatrist, Dave Menotti, was to oversee the case, but I was given the individual daily therapy sessions with Cassandra. Dave’s thinking was that my experience with psychogenic language problems might prove useful here, even though her occasional mutism was not the presenting problem. He described her to me as a child “where something doesn’t add up,” which I knew meant we were still very much in the diagnostic stage. While we assumed we had the source of her problems – the twenty-six-month abduction – we had no understanding of how that pieced together with her difficulties now.

Chapter Three

Cassandra and I sat together at the table, examining the drawing she had done of her family.

“That’s really quite an elaborate picture. Can you tell me more about it?”

“There I am. Up in the sky,” she said. “I look down on everyone. I can see everyone. I can see everything from the sky.”

“That sounds interesting, being able to see everything.”

She nodded. “I like being an alien.”

“If I were an alien, I think I would feel lonely,” I said, “because I’d feel I was different from everyone else. I’d feel like an outsider.”

“No, not me. I like it,” she replied. “Because I can travel in a rocket ship.”

Cassandra was a rather wriggly little girl, squirming around in her seat, bending her head down and around in a way that allowed her to look up at me while I regarded the picture. There was something coy about her behavior. This made me wonder if she had chosen to draw herself as an alien because she genuinely felt like an alien or if she had chosen to do it as a way of engaging me, as a sort of savvy assessment of what she’d thought a therapist would be interested in.

“And here we have your family,” I said. “Yes? Your mother, your stepfather, your two sisters – ”

“And the fish. The fish, too,” she interrupted and pointed to them.

“Ah, I thought they were leftover from when you were experimenting with shapes …”

“No, they’re living in the sky like it was an aquarium. Goldfish. Really, they’re a family, too. That big one’s the dad. And that’s the mom goldfish. And those are the babies. They belong to my other family.”

“I see.”

“Those are my other family there. Remember, because I told you already. They’re outside the aquarium, looking in. That’s why they’re small.” She pointed to the snakes. “Really they’re not snakes. They got snake costumes on.”

“They’re not snakes?”

Cassandra laughed at this. “Silly! They’re people!” She laughed again. “That’s Daddy Snake and Mama Snake and the kid Snakes. And there’s the Minister Snake. And that’s Cowboy Snake. And that’s Fairy Snake.”

“I thought you just said they were people,” I replied, a little confused.

“They are,” she said cheerfully. “‘Snake’ is their last name. That’s because they dress up in snake costumes all the time, so that’s why people started calling them that. And really I’m Cassandra Snake when I live with them.”

“Why do they dress up in snake costumes?”

“Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!” she replied in an unexpectedly loud, singsong voice.

I sat back.

She laughed shrilly.

I sat quietly without speaking.

“Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!”

She laughed again, writhed in her seat, and fluttered her hands. Then taking up a black marking pen, she drew strong black lines across the picture in a random, rather frenzied manner. The lines didn’t color over anything or appear to be there to cover up anything. The way she did them, they appeared to be just marks, slashes across the page, as if her inner environment had become too much to control and these marks simply exploded forth like lightning strikes.

Saying nothing, I just sat, waiting.

This outburst lasted about three minutes. Then slowly Cassandra came back into herself and grew quieter. She was still laughing in a rather peculiar way. It was almost what I’d describe as a lascivious, sleazy kind of laugh. Certainly it implied sexuality to me, which, I suppose, given the “snakes” and the outburst regarding “ding-dong,” “willy,” and “Peter,” was perfectly possible.

Still I said absolutely nothing. I kept my expression as bland as possible so that she would not interpret my silence as disapproving, but I continued to sit motionless.

At last Cassandra fell completely quiet. The interesting thing about this episode, to my mind, was that not once did she take her eyes off me during the whole course of it. Her eye contact was quite extraordinary, but it also implied to me that my reaction was very important to this whole little drama. I sensed she was doing it for me, that she was expecting me to behave in a certain manner as well and she had to keep a close watch in order to see what I was going to do or, possibly, to adjust her own behavior as necessary.

When she was finally reduced to sitting quietly again in the chair beside me, her great dark eyes still fixed on my face, I said, “You know, I think you did that as a way of getting away from what we were talking about. Sometimes magicians do that trick. They say, ‘Look over here,’ because they want your attention over here so that you aren’t paying attention to over there and they can hide something away without your noticing.”

There was a long, long silence. She pressed her hands together prayer fashion and pushed them down between her legs on the chair. Straightening her elbows, this pushed her shoulders up, like a frozen shrug. Her eyes were still locked on mine.

There was a flicker. She looked away for just a very brief moment, then back at me. “Can I go now?” she asked. “I’m tired. I’m done with this. I want to go back to the dayroom.”

The children’s psychiatric unit was on the seventh floor of the hospital. When one first came off the elevator and turned left, there was a long corridor that contained administrative offices, many of which were not affiliated with our unit. At the far end were the two sets of double locked doors through which one entered the unit itself. Immediately beyond the doors to the left was the nurses’ station, and to the right, the dayroom where the children gathered to relax and play when they weren’t in the unit classroom, attending therapy sessions, or participating in activities. The sleeping rooms were down two short corridors that branched off the opposite side of the dayroom from the nurses’ station. Most accommodated two children each, although there were four single rooms. All locked. In all, the unit could accommodate twenty-eight children between the ages of three and eleven.

Beyond the dayroom, to the left of the nurses’ station, was a third short corridor, and it was here where the two therapy rooms were, plus a miscellany of utilitarian rooms – an examination room, a med room, a walk-in linen room, and an odd little room that was about twenty feet long but only about six feet wide. Various kinds of technical equipment, like video cameras, recorders, and monitors, were stored just inside the door, whereas at the far end, there was a teeny, tiny kitchen, narrow as a boat’s galley.

It was down among these rooms that I had my office, which I shared with Helen, a clinical social worker, whose main task was liaising with children after they had left. Consequently, she spent only a small amount of time each week actually on the unit, and I normally had the office to myself.

The room was a curious mixture of the industrial and the macabre. A set of cast-iron pipes went through the room. This would have been ordinary enough, had they been in the corner of the room or ordinary-sized pipes, associated with something like the central heating. These, however, sprung up about three feet in from the near-side wall and varied in size between three and six inches in diameter, so it was like having a stand of trees in the office. Iron trees. Or rather, just their trunks, passing through the room.

Moreover, in the old days, the room had been used for electric shock therapy. This had long since been discontinued, but the evidence was still there in the form of odd knobs and disconnected wires and the indentations of long-since-removed equipment on the walls. These things had since been painted over, indeed, many times, giving them a blobby, indistinct form.

Midst this, Helen and I had managed to squeeze in our two desks, a large table, and two sizable bookshelves. As always, Helen’s side of the room was a triumph of order and organization. My side looked, as Helen succinctly put it, as if the condemned-building notice was overdue.

I had just returned to my desk from the session with Cassandra when there was a quick rap at the door, and it opened. Nancy Anderson stuck her head in. She was the charge nurse on the unit during the weekdays. In her fifties, a tall, strongly built woman of African American origins, Nancy had made a career of psychiatric nursing. She loved the job; she loved the kids, and decades of experience had given her a clear understanding of life’s absurdities, which meant her reaction to most things was a good laugh.

“This one’s for you,” she said, waving a piece of paper.

“What is it?” I asked and reached over for it.

“He’s asked specially for you. Read your research on elective mutism. Saw that article in the paper. Wants you.”

“Oh, good,” I muttered sarcastically.

I hated these – cases where the parents wanted a specific therapist or therapy – because they often came with wildly unrealistic expectations. Many were looking for miracle workers, nothing less, and it seldom worked out that miracles were in the cards.

“Harry’s looked it over,” Nancy said. “He says why don’t you arrange an opportunity to see the child sometime this week. There’s a space in his schedule to interview the parents next Friday, if that works for you. If they want to go ahead with something, if it looks right, there’s a space coming open on the unit a week next Wednesday.”

I took the paper from Nancy. “Geez. This is out in Quentin. Did Harry notice that?”

Nancy lifted her eyebrows in a “no idea” expression.

“That’s almost two hundred miles. It’s going to take over three hours of driving just one way. It’ll use up my entire day just to observe the kid for forty-five minutes.”

“I think that’s why they’re thinking of inpatient.”

“Surely they’ve got services in Quentin.”

“Well, they want you.”

I started reading. It was a personal letter from a man named Mason Sloane. He was the grandfather of the boy in question and the letter was written on the letterhead of a well-known regional bank.

Oddly, to my mind, the first thing Mr. Sloane established was his family business pedigree. They were majority shareholders in the bank, which had been founded in the late 1800s by his grandfather. Ownership and operation of the bank had passed from father to son through the generations and was now managed by Mr. Sloane’s son, who was a prominent businessman in Quentin, a small city of about thirty thousand.

What drew Mr. Sloane to me was an article he had read in the city’s Sunday newspaper about my research into elective mutism. He had a four-year-old grandson named Drake, his only child’s only child. The boy did not speak outside the home. Mr. Sloane said he was an exceptionally intelligent and lively boy; however, he had always refused to speak to almost everyone. The family had taken him to various specialists locally with no success. When Mr. Sloane read about my work, he knew here was Drake’s problem. And I was the solution. Drake had elective mutism and if he came to see me, he would be cured.

The rest of the letter outlined how money was no object nor was distance or effort. They’d do anything to see Drake had the help he needed and I was it. All I had to do was name my price and make the arrangements.

Sitting back in my desk chair, I sighed. The article he was referring to in the newspaper had been one of those things that had seemed like a good idea at the time I did it. This was before I’d gained any insight into how important it was to journalists to write dramatic stories, even if there wasn’t actually any drama in your work to write about, and how, if you did get suckered into talking about your favorite bit of research, a reporter desperate to prove to his boss he can write something more exciting than this week’s round of society weddings was not the best guy to open up to. What I had hoped would be an article providing general information on this surprisingly common childhood problem metamorphosed into pop psychology sound bites that not only had never come out of my mouth but also diminished my treatment methods, making them sound effortlessly, almost arrogantly effective, as if there were no margins for error at all.

There was more to worry about in Mr. Sloane’s letter, however. It was clear from the tone that he had already made several sweeping assumptions: that Drake was a perfectly ordinary boy just waiting to be cured, that “cure” was just a matter of finding someone with the magic to do it, and that enough money could fix anything.

The way the hierarchy was set up at the hospital meant each child who entered the unit was assigned his or her own team of specialists, which would include nursing and care staff, psychologists, occupational or physical therapists and educators from the unit, plus liaison people, who would continue to work with the child when he or she returned to the community. Each such team was always headed by a child psychiatrist. Even if one of us in an allied position had been responsible for referring a child to the unit with the intention of working more intensively on a problem ourselves, nonetheless, the case leader was still one of the psychiatrists. This was because the unit was, first and foremost, a medical facility. The child psychiatrists, by virtue of also being medical doctors, were thus always at the top of the pecking order. Moreover, it was they alone who were able to prescribe drug treatment in addition to the other forms of therapy.

I wasn’t known for being a natural team player, certainly not back in my teaching days, when I’d rather relished the “outsider” status provided by being in special education, and I had always been inclined to rebellion. However, I found this hierarchical approach worked well in the tightly structured hospital setting. I was grateful not to be in a position to make the ultimate decisions, which were often very gray and, thus, very difficult, and frequently had grave consequences. Even more, however, I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation provided by regular interaction with professionals whose background and training were very different from my own.

We had five child psychiatrists, four men and a woman, and they were, all of them, sharp, erudite individuals. My favorite among them was Dave Menotti, who was affable and witty and most likely to come down from “Heaven” – our term for the corridor on the floor above where the psychiatrists’ offices were – to fraternize with us. Harry Patel, however, was the psychiatrist I most looked forward to leading my team. He was a quiet man who seldom socialized, so it was hard to get to know him personally. A native of New Delhi – indeed, a fairly recent immigrant – he often gave the impression of not quite having a command of English, and this contributed to his slightly aloof nature. But this wasn’t true. Harry just didn’t waste words if none were needed. And Harry was stunningly good at what he did. I would have expected the difference of cultures to work against him, but this hadn’t happened. Indeed, perhaps it was this that gave him such astute powers of observation, because I found he could see depth even in the most ordinary of situations. Faint nuances of behavior, fleeting expressions, sighs, silences. He took them all in. He worked with incredible delicacy, never pushing the children, never leading, only following. I loved watching him in action, and I loved even more the chance at his guidance.

So, even though I had qualms about Mr. Sloane’s letter regarding his grandson, if Harry suggested we observe the child, I was happy to do so. Thus, I cleared my schedule, packed up my “box of tricks,” and set out for the long journey to Quentin.

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