Twilight Children (11 page)

Drake, however, didn’t seem to fit any of these profiles. This left only one other group in my experience: those children who are mute in reaction to trauma. This group includes children who have had a sudden appalling injury to the mouth, often coinciding with the age when the child is starting to speak. One such little boy I’d worked with had caught and badly ripped his mouth on a playground swing. The fright of the accident stopped him speaking altogether for several months. Then latterly he would speak only when in the safety of his house. This group also includes children who have witnessed deeply traumatizing events and are literally shocked speechless, as in the case of another young boy who had witnessed his sister’s murder. Mostly, however, it takes in children who have been severely abused and are affected either by the trauma of the abuse or by the threat “not to tell.”

Severe abuse was already in my mind in regard to Drake, because in my research, his kind of mutism, which was very complete and excluded even close family members, had been a marker of serious dysfunction in the family; and, of course, serious dysfunction often goes hand in hand with serious abuse. I found this so sad even to think about. He was such a joyous little boy—lively, intelligent, eager to please—the kind of little boy I’d imagine anyone would be absolutely delighted to have. It was heartbreaking to consider he might be experiencing a whole other world behind closed doors. It was daunting to consider how to go about uncovering it.

If Drake had any residual misgivings about his unhappy time with me the previous day, he didn’t show it. When I appeared in the dayroom where he and Friend were watching cartoons, he grinned broadly and jumped up.

“I’ve got something fun for us to do today,” I said, as we walked together down to the therapy room.

Drake smiled beguilingly. Honestly, the kid could have charmed ducks off water, as my grandmother always used to say.

Since he had become so upset the day before, I decided to choose a very different kind of activity. In the therapy room, I shoved the table back and seated us on the floor in front of the two-way mirror because I wanted to be able to scrutinize Drake’s behavior on the videotape afterward. Then I held up a bottle.

“Know what this is?” I asked, as I unscrewed the top. “Bubbles!” Lifting the little wand out, I blew through it, and a cascade of bubbles flowed between us.

Drake clapped his hands with delight.

I made bubbles several more times. Then I held the wand and bubble liquid out to him. “Here, you try,” I said.

He smiled joyfully at me.

“Here, like this.” I blew on the wand gently and a few bubbles came out. “You try.”

He smiled more.

I dipped the wand into the liquid and coaxed him again.

More grinning, but he wouldn’t try.

Getting up, I brought over a flat dish with a huge wand. I poured some of the solution into the dish. “What do you think is going to happen when I dip this big wand into the bubble liquid?” I lifted it up, pulling an enormous iridescent bubble from the water.

Amazed at the size of it, Drake jumped up and down with excitement. I whirled the wand and a basketball-sized bubble escaped and floated toward him, which he gleefully popped.

“It’s easy to do. Here, you try it,” I said and set the wand back in the dish.

Drake came over and took the wand from the liquid. His first bubble didn’t work, but on his second try, he managed to produce a series of bubbles each about the size of a baseball. One popped on Friend’s head, and this sent Drake into spasms of delight.

For several minutes, he was absorbed in making bubbles with the large wand. He played very uninhibitedly with them once they started to float, chasing after them, trying to loop them with the wand, kicking them, poking them. He repeatedly wafted bubbles over Friend and gleefully let them pop on the stuffed toy.

I watched him as he played. There was a rather jerky quality to his movements, which I hadn’t noticed in his usual activities. It caught my attention, but it was still very subtle. Not something I would actually identify as unusual.

It was intriguing to observe the attention he gave Friend. He was definitely more engaged in playing with Friend than with me. Throughout, he made absolutely no noise, which was eerie to observe. It felt almost as if real life had had the sound turned off, because the only noise in the room was the hushed slap of his sneakers against the floor. What gave it an almost surreal aura was that this was a scene of such gaiety. Capering after the bubbles, Drake gave the impression that he was laughing, giggling, whooping for joy as he played. However, he wasn’t even breathing audibly.

“Look here,” I said and reached in my bag of tricks. “I have a different kind of bubble maker. It’s a pipe. See? You dip it in the dish and then blow.” I demonstrated. Dozens and dozens of small bubbles tumbled around us.

Drake danced after them, batting at them with his hands.

“Here, you try.”

He grinned at me.

I loaded the pipe with bubble liquid. “Here.”

He continued to smile cheerfully, but he didn’t take it.

I gave a little puff of the pipe to create a small flow of bubbles, then held it out again. “You do it.”

Gleefully grinning, he slapped at the bubbles but still didn’t respond to my request to take the pipe.

At that point the penny did finally drop for me. If you behave very beguilingly, people don’t tend to force their will on you. Particularly if you are small and cute, to boot. Drake’s charismatic cheerfulness was an avoidance technique. Now, the question was, avoiding what?

W
hile I was blowing bubbles with Drake, I could hear a terrible commotion going on out on the ward. Yelling and crying was followed by the heavy sound of feet, which signaled extra staff arriving in an effort to control whatever was going on. My first thoughts were that the uproar would alarm Drake, because certainly it sounded frightening. He paused for only the very briefest moment in his exuberant enjoyment of the bubbles to listen; however, beyond that, he gave it no attention. My second thoughts, of course, were to wonder myself what was going on out there. It was pretty unignorable, so I was naturally curious.

No need to wonder long, however, because once the session with Drake was over and we came out into the dayroom, Nancy Anderson beckoned me over. “If you’re looking for your next one, she’s in lockdown.”

Cassandra.

“Lockdown” was the unit term for the isolation or seclusion room where children were placed when they completely lost control. It was a kind of ultralevel of time-out, used mainly when children became very violent and presented a serious danger to themselves or others. The seclusion room was a small cubicle—about six by six feet—with no furniture. The walls and floors were covered with a heavy-duty canvaslike material over a thin layer of foam rubber, so that a child could safely calm down and regain control without injuring her- or himself. In the old days, we called such rooms padded cells.

According to Nancy, Cassandra had been hyper all morning, bouncing around loudly and boisterously, constantly testing the patience of the staff and provoking the other children. Then she started “playing pterodactyl,” which involved standing on the arms of the dayroom chairs while shrieking loudly, her own arms outspread, and then leaping on anyone who walked past and pretending to tear at their clothes and skin.

Cassandra frequently pretended to be a vicious bird or animal. Needless to say, this was the kind of game that got old fast, because it was noisy and physical and often quite aggressive, but on most occasions she would stop when asked insistently enough. However, on this particular morning she “woke up really wound up,” as Nancy put it, and had been in trouble several different times already.

We’d noticed Cassandra had a tendency to zero in on children with weak or dependent personalities and would pester them ceaselessly, if not stopped. One girl named Heather had caught Cassandra’s attention in the morning. Heather was a dumpy, obese ten-year-old whose problems included much very infantile behavior. Cassandra had somehow discovered Heather was afraid of birds, and this may have influenced her choice in becoming a pterodactyl. Whatever the reason, she had been harassing Heather with her screeching and flapping since before breakfast.

Early on, Cassandra’s behavior had simply been annoying, and she was told to stop several times and, indeed, put into ordinary time-out. Although paying lip service to the staff in regard to understanding why she couldn’t keep playing and professing to be in better control of herself, Cassandra persistently returned to playing pterodactyl, and it became more aggressive as the morning wore on. Latterly, she had been dashing about, climbing up on the backs of the dayroom chairs and launching herself in quite a dangerous fashion at whoever passed. When she managed to knock Heather heavily to the ground doing this, the staff snapped. Cassandra was told to go into time-out to calm down. She ignored them. Staff came over to take hold of her and make her comply when she lost complete control and started raging furiously. She simply “went off the radar,” as Nancy described it. Small and wiry as Cassandra was, she required five adults to hold her and get her into the seclusion room.

I was disconcerted by this news. The truth was, in the time she had been on the unit, Cassandra’s behavior seemed to be deteriorating. She was becoming more difficult and bizarre, not less so. The other sad truth was that Cassandra was proving an extremely difficult child for any of us to like. She was an emotional mercenary, bonding only so long as it served her and then moving on to the next person. She seemed largely unconcerned by what others felt, thought, or wanted. We were coming to realize she was a startlingly bright, perceptive girl. Unfortunately, she applied these abilities to seeking out people’s weak spots. She was particularly good at recognizing innocent attachments to things or sensitive feelings about weight, appearance, intellect, or skill levels, and she would exploit these heartlessly, saying deliberately hurtful or offensive things in an effort to get what she wanted. In day-to-day life she was unpredictably moody, swinging quickly between being loud and excitable one moment to being silent and withdrawn, or going from being friendly and caring to being calloused and spiteful. Moreover, Cassandra seemed to have little sense of accountability for her actions. If you confronted her about doing any of these things, her response was always “I didn’t do that.” Or “It wasn’t my fault.” Or, if really pushed, “I don’t remember.” As much as I wanted to remain open-minded about Cassandra, I had to admit the words
antisocial personality
and
sociopath
had passed through my mind more than once.

I stowed my stuff behind the counter in the nurses’ station and went over to the seclusion room door. There was a small observation window made of glass with embedded chicken wire, or at least what looked like chicken wire to me. I gazed through. Cassandra was huddled on the floor in the far corner. She raised her head when I appeared at the window.

Unlocking the door, I went in and closed it behind me. I stayed against it until I had a chance to suss out Cassandra’s state because I didn’t want to be locked in myself unless necessary.

“You’re having a bad morning?” I asked quietly.

Cassandra didn’t answer. She simply shrieked. It was a loud, wordless cry of the sort you’d give if someone startled you from behind. Except, of course, she’d known all along I was there.

I sat down on the padded floor.

She shrieked again in the same piercing manner.

“Are you still a pterodactyl?” I ventured.

She nodded.

Dealing with pterodactyls not being part of my normal repertoire, I paused a long moment trying to decide the best tack to take. This hesitation seemed to annoy Cassandra. She screeched fiercely right at me.

“Pterodactyls seem like very angry creatures to me,” I said finally. “Powerful. Dangerous. They want to kill things. From what the staff told me, you sound like you’ve felt very angry this morning.”

Another pterodactyl scream. Indeed, this brought Cassandra to her feet, and she spread her arms like wings.

“What sorts of things would make a pterodactyl angry?” I asked rhetorically and didn’t look at her. “It would be helpful for me to know that.”

Again, more pterodactyl shrieks and flying motions. Up until this point Cassandra had not moved from where she’d been when I came in; however, now she started to circle the small seclusion room, screeching and flapping, her neck going in and out rather like an excited chicken’s.

Her circles were tight at first, avoiding the place where I was sitting against the door, but she became more and more expansive.

At first I thought this was okay, that she was working off some of the anger that had so overwhelmed her, that she needed this physical activity to release it before she would be able to regain enough control of herself to come out of lockdown. However, after a few moments of watching her, I changed my mind. Becoming more physical in enacting her pterodactyl fantasy seemed to agitate her, not calm her down. She ceased responding directly to my questions and just flew around the room, screaming and flapping.

The circles kept getting larger and coming closer to me. I realized I would shortly be in pterodactyl attack range, and this didn’t seem a healthy way to go, so abruptly, I said, “No!”