Overheard in a Dream (11 page)

“I did try. I went to college and got the necessary business degree. I found my trophy wife in Fran. We got married in June the year I graduated and she was pregnant with our first daughter by July. I was in the bank by August. I did everything I should. But I hated my life. The world of banking just seemed so hideously dull and dusty to me. I was crap at it because I just didn’t care.

“It was through the bank, though, that I got into dealing cattle. Started out by giving loans. That’s part of why I was so bad at it, because I kept lending money to these dirt poor ranchers who wanted to do something stupid like go buy some fancy continental bull like a Charolais that was completely inappropriate for Wyoming conditions. Pretty soon I was going out to see the cattle. Just checking out our investment in the beginning, but I liked going. I liked getting out of the bank. Before I knew it, I’d bought a few myself. And then I bought a small ranch to keep them on. That’s what did it. Up until that point I could keep up the pretence that I was really a banker. But I was
good
at cattle. I could do with cattle what my dad could do with numbers, and I loved it. That was a new feeling for me – doing something I loved – and I loved everything about it. The sounds, the smells, being outdoors. Being successful.

“When my father found out about the ranch, he went cold as the North Pole towards me. To him it was all about the legacy, about who was going to take over the bank after him, who was going to keep the McLachlan name on the office door and I was letting him down. I wasn’t living up to my obligations. I hadn’t even managed to produce a son, just three daughters.

“To Fran, the ranch was an insult. It was blue-collar work in her eyes. She kept saying ‘But I married a
banker
,’ as if by buying the ranch, I had reneged on some deal we had. She absolutely refused to move out to the country, which was, of course, all I wanted to do. And what I needed to do, if I was going to make a decent business of it.

“I stood my ground. I was almost thirty by then. Old enough to understand you can only go so far in fulfilling other people’s dreams, no matter how much you want to make them happy. But I lost a lot while learning that lesson. My relationship with my dad never did recover. And Fran and I only lasted about a year more. Then she met someone else and that was that. Which gutted me, because I had three gorgeous little girls and I hardly got to see them after that.

“So it was a lot different this time around. I went into this marriage with my eyes open and have really tried to avoid making the mistakes I made the first time out.”

“How did you meet Laura?” James asked.

Unexpectedly, Alan laughed. “I ran over her foot at the gas station!” And he laughed again, a deep, full-throated guffaw. “Really. I did. I’d stopped at this place out on the Pine Ridge reservation for gas. She was already there, but she’d driven up on the wrong side of the pump. So she was trying to pull the hose around to her gas tank. I was thinking, ‘Stupid woman driver’, because she’d blocked the way to the other pump. I tried to squeeze my truck by and I ran over her damned foot.”

James’s eyes widened.

“Broke it too,” he said cheerfully. “So it only seemed gentlemanly to ask her out to dinner.”

“It’s surprising she went after you did that!”

He laughed again. “Yeah, I thought so too. But she did. Whatever else you might say about her, she’s a good sport, is Laura.”

A small, wistful silence drifted in. “I can still remember our first date, that night I took her out to dinner. We went to this place called the Mill. She had the cast on her foot, so we couldn’t dance or anything. We just had a meal and talked, but it was really noisy in there, so I said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ I was thinking of the Bear Butte Lounge over on the highway, because that’s a nice quiet spot, but when we got in the car, Laura says, ‘Let’s go out to the Badlands.’ That sounded a pretty strange idea to me, but I thought, ‘What the hell? Why not?’ It was a nice spring night. All starry. So, we went out past Wall and we parked at one of the overlooks and just sat in the car and talked.

“We talked and talked.” His smile grew inward. “And you want to know what happened? We actually talked all night long. About the Black Hills mostly. I remember telling her about the ranch and my cattle, and she started telling me all these stories about how the land where the ranch was had been sacred ground to the Sioux. She was working out on the reservation at the time, so she was really well-informed on all this Indian stuff. And Laura can be such a fantastic storyteller, if you get her going.”

He laughed. “I was bowled over. All I could think of was that here was somebody who thought about the land just like I did, who
loved
this country, you know, right into her soul. So we talked and talked and never did anything else. Never even kissed that night. Not once, which makes us sound like a couple of real squares, but it was so good to talk like that with someone.

“Anyway, next thing I knew, it was five thirty in the morning and we were still sitting at the overlook in Badlands, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what the hell am I going to say to Patsy?’ Patsy’s my middle daughter, and she was home from college for the Easter break and staying at the ranch with me. I just knew she was going to go back and tell my ex-wife I was staying out all night with women! I didn’t get home until after eight, because the Badlands are a good ninety minutes away from the ranch, and there’s Patsy in the kitchen when I came in. ‘Good date?’ she asks. And I said, ‘It’s all right, Pats, it’s not what it looks like.’ And she laughs. I could tell she didn’t believe a word I said. She says, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I understand.’ But I knew she didn’t.

“I felt protective of Laura. I didn’t want Patsy to think Laura was the kind of woman you’d just take out and get it off with on the first date. So, I said, ‘Pats, if you’re going to tell your mother about all this, you might as well know I’m going to marry her. You can tell your mother that too.’” Alan laughed heartily. “So, that’s the point when I decided I was going to make Laura my wife, although it was almost two more years before I informed Laura of it!”

“It sounds as if your attraction was pretty instantaneous,” James said.

“It was. I just knew it was the right thing. Straight off.” Alan looked over at James. “So now I keep asking myself: how did it all go so wrong?”

C
onor’s strange relationship with speech made James think of Laura, as he watched the boy moving around the room.
Wind Dreamer’s
eerie world still haunted James, hanging like cobwebs in the quiet corners of his mind to catch his thoughts at unexpected moments, pulling them back into the ghostly realm of the Badlands and the young man’s quest experiences. Interesting, James thought, how she could create something so powerful with words alone. Interesting, likewise, that Conor seemed to find words so dangerous that he confined himself to naming things, describing their obvious physical characteristics or repeating things that others had already said.

While doing his usual circumnavigation of the playroom, Conor had stopped at a large basket of Lego on the floor. He paused and pushed the cat’s nose into it. Reaching in, he then picked up a little Lego person. He studied it carefully. “Here is a man. With black hair and yellow shirt.” Putting the man into the same hand as the stuffed cat, he bent down and looked into the box again.

“Garden things!” he cried with unexpectedly delighted surprise. He lifted up some Lego flowers.

“You sound happy that you have found some flowers,” James said.

Conor bent back over the box. “
And
trees. Flowers and trees. Things for a garden.” He rooted energetically through the basket.

Astonished by Conor’s sudden animation, James leaned forward to watch.

“Many trees. See?” Conor said. He didn’t make eye contact but he was definitely interacting with James. As he took them from the basket, he set them up on the edge of the bookshelf.

“Yes, there are lots of trees in there and you are finding them.”

“There are trees on the moon,” Conor replied.

This was said with equanimity, slipped in quickly as if it were nothing more than another descriptor. “Three trees on the moon.”

As the toy trees ran out, Conor’s cheerfulness waned. He pawed through the Lego, just in case one had been missed but said nothing more.

Finally he straightened up and began arranging the ones he’d found in a very straight line along the bookshelf. He counted them, not aloud, but with his finger.

“What’s this?” he asked. It was the plastic road sheet, folded up on the shelf where he was lining up his trees.

“That’s the plastic sheet with roads drawn on it,” James said. “Remember? We’ve looked at it before. When it’s laying out on the floor, children often like to drive toy cars along the roads or make houses from Lego and create neighbourhoods.”

Clutching the cat to himself with one hand, Conor used the other to gingerly pull the sheet off the shelf and let it fall to the floor. It was heavy-gauge plastic, so it fell open easily, but it fell upside down. This seemed to mesmerize him. He bent and straightened the upside-down sheet out.

“The roads are on the other side,” James commented.

Conor rocked back on his heels and looked at it. “I think it’s the moon.”

James recalled Conor’s previous encounter with the plastic sheet and his odd echolalic comments regarding the moon landing. It had seemed a bizarre response. James could see no connection between the white sheet or, indeed, the plastic Lego trees and the moon.

Taking the Lego man from his other hand, Conor attempted to stand him up on the sheet. The plastic wasn’t quite flat, so the toy fell over. He tried again. Again it fell over. Frustrated, he shoved the little man under the sheet until it disappeared completely from view.

This pleased him. Conor pulled it out and then put it under again in a way that reminded James of his earlier fascination in covering up toy animals with tissues. However, as with so many other things Conor had done in the playroom, an intensity then began to overtake his actions and he repeated the behaviour several times obsessively.

Obsessive and compulsive behaviour is normally associated with anxiety and James noticed the way the boy’s muscles were beginning to stiffen with anxiety as he moved the figures. Conor brought a hand up and flapped his fingers frantically.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh,” he cried.

“I hear your worried noise. You feel frightened when you think of the moon,” James ventured.

The boy began to rock back and forth. Bringing his hand up, he waggled his fingers in front of his face.

“Conor?”

“The cat knows,” the boy murmured.

James watched him.
Knows what
?
What does that damned cat know
?

When clarifying his therapeutic philosophy, James had come up with his mantra “in here you decide”. In his experience, people only made substantial and lasting changes in their lives when they themselves actively decided to do it, but even more importantly, if they felt they were in control of doing it. So many of the difficult issues people had with life were about control.

This was the cornerstone of his approach with children, who were by default powerless, but he found it equally important to apply this principle to his adult clients. Consequently, he tried to say nothing to Laura or Alan that might make them feel he was pushing them in one direction or another.

When Laura came in for her next session, James decided not to mention that he had read
The Wind Dreamer
in case it made her feel on show as a writer.

“I’m curious about this imagination of yours,” he said instead. “From what you said the other day, it’s clear you spent a lot of time with Torgon and her world. How did this work out in relation to other children? Kids at school, for example. Did you have many friends when you were that age?”

“All this stuff going on in my head probably makes me sound like I must have been a lonely, friendless kid but it
wasn’t really that way,” Laura said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I didn’t want that. I loved my own company. With my kind of imagination, I always had something fun and exciting to do.

“I did have one really good friend and I think this was because she loved pretending as much I did. Her name was Dena. I met her in first grade and we were absolute best friends from that moment.

“We were an odd couple in some ways. While I didn’t live in a conventional family setup, the Meckses were solidly middle class and everyone had solidly middle-class expectations of me. For instance, both my brothers were honours students all the way through school, so my dad expected to see straight A’s on my report card too. It was all so different for Dena. She was the middle child of seven and came from this brawling, beer-drinking cowboy family who were all packed into a dinky house on the alley behind Arnott Street. Every Friday night all her aunties and uncles and cousins would come in from the country and they’d spill out into the yard, playing cowboy music on their guitars and getting drunk. Dena was a dead loss at school. She could never understand math and was always in the lowest reading group, and yet she was perfectly happy. No one in her family ever cared what she got on her report card. Often as not she forged her mother’s name on it and they never even saw it. And they didn’t seem to notice.