Twilight Children (12 page)

This sudden sharp voice startled Cassandra. She halted, her arms still extended.

“No,” I said more quietly. “It’s all right to play pterodactyls, but it isn’t all right to hurt people. If you come rushing at me, you may hurt me.”

I seemed to lose her again. After that momentary pause, she started to scream and threw herself wildly off the padded walls.

“No!” I said. She thumped into me.

I didn’t want to get into a really physical confrontation with Cassandra in that small space, but I’d be forced into it if she rushed at me; so I pulled out the necklace I always wore. It was a St. Christopher medal, a gift from a boyfriend, and normally wasn’t visible because it was on a long chain, and I wore it inside my shirt. “Do you see this?”

She wasn’t looking.

“Cassandra? See this? This medal? It’s a St. Christopher medal. I wear it to protect me.”

She shrieked defiantly.

“This is my pterodactyl protection medal,” I said. “Everywhere else in the room pterodactyls can fly, but when I pull my medal out, it protects me. This area is safe here. This area right around me.”

Of course, the first thing Cassandra did was fly directly at me.

I rose to my feet and caught hold of her arms, forcing them down. “No, where I am is a pterodactyl-free zone. I have my medal out.” Then I let her go and gently pushed her toward the rest of the room. “It’s all right for pterodactyls to be in the room. But they fly out there. Not here. This space is safe.”

Cassandra circled the room and came back to attack me again. Again I grabbed hold of her arms, forced them down, held them a moment, and then turned her free again, pushing her away from me.

Whatever was happening in this process—Cassandra’s flying at me, my catching her arms, pushing them down, telling her it was all right to be in the rest of the room but not here—seemed to mesmerize Cassandra. She was not really fighting with me. Her arms were easy to push down and hold and she did not struggle; however, she did it over and over again, and there was a hypnotic, almost mechanical sense to her actions. I couldn’t manage to get a peek at my watch, but this “game” went on for what felt like forever. Again and again and again she repeated it, showing no sign of wearing down. Or out.

Finally, on the next round when I caught her, I didn’t let her go after I’d lowered her arms. Instead, I said, “Aren’t you getting tired? Why don’t you sit down here very close to me? If you do that, the medal will protect you, too. We’ll both be safe from pterodactyls.”

She was having none of it. She struggled free and circled the room again.

And again the pterodactyl attacked me. And again I suggested she come inside the protective range of my St. Christopher medal. And again she broke free.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And several more agains after that. And every time I would say the same thing and she would have the same response.

This must have lasted at least ten more minutes. Finally, when she was panting and hoarse from screaming, she stopped and didn’t struggle to free herself from my grasp.

“Here, sit down,” I said.

Cassandra hesitated.

“Sit here beside me. It’s safe here.” Letting go of her, I sat down on the floor and patted the area beside me.

She sat. And once she was beside me, she reached out her hand. “I want to see that medal,” she said. These were the first words she’d used since I’d arrived.

Cautiously, I lifted the medal away from my neck and showed it to her, keeping a hand on the chain so that she couldn’t jerk it. She fingered the slightly raised features of the image.

“I don’t think this really works,” she said.

“Yes, it does,” I replied. “It was blessed by the pope.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise and she looked at me. “Are you Catholic?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“It won’t work for you, then.”

“Yes, it will. Blessings will work for anybody who tries to do good because of them.”

Still fingering the medal, she fell silent a long moment.

“See, it’s already working,” I said. “All the pterodactyls are gone from here now, aren’t they?”

Very faintly, she nodded.

There was silence then, a quiet, tired silence.

“I want to sit in your lap,” she said at last.

“Okay.”

She clambered onto my crossed legs. Gripping my wrists, she wrapped my arms around her. “I want you to hold me.”

So I did.

“I’m your baby. Hold me like I’m your baby.”

“You want to feel safe and close like a baby,” I said.

She nodded.

“This feels safe, doesn’t it?” I said.

Cassandra nodded again. “You’re my mom. You keep me safe.”

“You want your mom to keep you safe.”

“Moms should keep their babies safe, shouldn’t they?” she replied. “So nothing bad can happen to them.”

There was a long moment’s silence then.

“Sometimes it makes us very angry when unfair things happen to us,” I said. “Things that shouldn’t have happened. Things we should have been safe from.”

She didn’t respond.

“Sometimes we feel so angry, it’s like we have pterodactyls inside us. We’re that mad about things being unfair. And yet often what we still really, really mean by all that anger is that we just want to feel safe, to have people keep us safe when we can’t manage it for ourselves.”

“I’m your baby. I came out of your wee-wee place.”

“And sometimes if conversations get too scary, we need to think of something else quick, so that we won’t think about things we don’t want to.”

“I want to sucky on your breasts.”

“You want to be a very small baby, don’t you?” I said. “A little tiny baby whose mother will take very good care of her.”

Cassandra nodded and tucked her head in under my chin.

A very long spell of silence followed then, lasting perhaps as much as six or seven minutes. I just held her. She remained absolutely motionless. Slowly, slowly her muscles relaxed.

“Well,” I said finally, “I think our time is almost up.”

Cassandra nodded faintly.

“Shall we go back out on the ward?”

“Okay.”

P
terodactyls suddenly became our theme. The moment we came into the therapy room, Cassandra would say, “I want to play the pterodactyl game again.”

On the first occasion, I said, “How do you mean?”

“I’m going to be a pterodactyl. I’m going to get up here on this ledge and be looking for prey.” She leaped up onto the table. “And you come by. You don’t see me and I’m going to swoop down and attack you.”

“I see. Can you tell me more how this game goes?” I asked.

She had jumped down but she leaped back up onto the table again and stretched her arms wide with excitement. “Yeah! I’m big. Huge! I got a wingspan of a hundred feet! I’m the biggest pterodactyl in the whole valley. On the whole continent, even, and I fight with everyone and I win. And you’re walking by. You don’t see me. But you’re really scared, because, like, you’re a rabbit. And I dive down and kill you!”

As unappealing as the idea of being savaged by a pterodactyl was, this was the first time Cassandra appeared to engage with me in any meaningful manner, and it seemed as good a place as any to start in allowing her to express what were clearly intensely angry feelings; so I said, “Okay, I’ll be the rabbit.” I went back to the door of the therapy room.

Eagerly Cassandra flapped her arms up and down, then folded them in against her body like wings. She made a loud screeching noise.

I minced across the floor, looking one way and another. “I wonder where I can find some nice grass to eat. I’m feeling very hungry.”

Cassandra launched herself off the table with a force I hadn’t really anticipated, and my falling to the ground under the talons of the pterodactyl was not so pretend.

“I’m going to kill you! I’m tearing you to shreds. I’m ripping out your eyes now.” She dived at my head, plucking at my eyes with her hands. Her fingertips brushed my skin but kept just within the standards of pretend play. “I’m tearing you to shreds. Everything’s bloody now! Blood and guts everywhere! Look at all this blood! I’ve killed you. You’re dead now.”

She pulled back. I lay “dead” and didn’t move. Clambering back on the table, Cassandra spread her imaginary wings again and shrieked wildly. Then she dived again. Despite having already killed and dismembered me and my still lying there dead, she once again tore out my eyes and shredded my body and got blood everywhere. Blood seemed to feature big in this scenario.

And then again. And again. Repeatedly she dived down from the table to “kill you some more” and make “the biggest mess with blood and guts.” At last Cassandra said, “Okay, get up now.”

I sat up.

“Now, do it again. Come from the door.”

“What am I this time?” I asked.

“You’re a rabbit. You don’t know anything. Rabbits are really stupid. So you think it’s okay to go out and eat grass. You don’t even stop to think there might be something really dangerous out there waiting to get you. Hop, to show you’re a rabbit.”

So I enacted the drama again and we had an almost identical scenario. The pterodactyl flew down from its perch on the cliffside, attacked the rabbit, pulled its eyes out, tore it to shreds so that it bled everywhere, and then flew away, leaving it for dead. As before, the pterodactyl continued to kill the rabbit several more times after it had already died.

“Okay,” Cassandra said, “let’s do it again.”

“What am I this time?” I asked.

“You’re still a rabbit.”

“Why am I a rabbit?” I asked.

“Because, like I said, rabbits are really stupid,” Cassandra replied.

“What makes you think they’re stupid?” I asked.

“Because they’re really weak.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because they let anyone do anything to them and they don’t fight back. They don’t even make a noise,” she said. And we reenacted the scenario yet again in almost exactly the same way.

After killing and shredding me several more times, Cassandra said yet again, “Okay, get up now and go back to the door.”

“No,” I said, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to remain a person. I’m going to sit down here.”

“I can still kill you. Pterodactyls can kill people. They can kill anyone. Anyone, anything living today, a pterodactyl can kill. They’ve got a twenty-foot wingspan.”

She flew at me.

“But I’ve got my medal. See?” I pulled out the St. Christopher medal from my shirt. “This means this is now a pterodactyl-free zone, this here, around me. It means I’m safe and can’t be attacked.”

“No sir. Pterodactyls can kill anyone.” Arms outstretched, she rammed into me full force. It wasn’t a pretend hit.

I grabbed hold of her, wrapping my arms tightly around her in a way that pinned her own arms to her sides. “The rules are, I won’t allow you to hurt anyone. I won’t allow you to hurt me. I won’t allow you to hurt yourself. Do you understand?”

Cassandra immediately burst into tears.

I continued to restrain her for a moment or two longer, as much to communicate my strength as to prevent any further movement on her part. Then slowly I loosened my grip. Cassandra turned and put her arms around my waist, burying her face in my clothes. I held her close for several minutes until she stopped crying.

“That was scary, wasn’t it? It was a good game, but I think it was a very scary game, too,” I said. “It’s all right to play scary games in here, because I’ll always set limits on them. For example, with this game, when I take the St. Christopher medal out, it’s over. This room becomes a pterodactyl-free zone. If the pterodactyl is still attacking, I will stop it.”

Cassandra needed a few more moments to compose herself. I then went over to the table. Things were generally in disarray there—the chairs had all been knocked over, some papers had been scattered—so I bent and righted a chair and told her to sit down. Then I set the other chairs upright, shuffled the papers together and set them up on the table, and afterward went to my box. Opening it, I took out a small cloth bag. I returned to the table and sat down opposite Cassandra.

“We’re going to do something different now.” I opened the bag and poured the contents out onto the table. “Do you know what these are?”

Cassandra nodded faintly. “Poker chips.”

“That’s right. Do you know what poker is?”

“It’s a card game. People gamble with it.”

“That’s right. Chips represent money. That’s why there are four colors here. White ones, red ones, green ones, and blue ones. Each color is worth a different amount of money.”

Cassandra nodded.

“We’re going to play a game of our own. Not poker, but we’re going to use poker chips.”

I watched Cassandra closely as I spoke. Gone was the hyperactive mania that had marked the pterodactyl game; gone, too, was the wriggling, taunting manipulator. She sat quietly and attentively.