Twilight Children (38 page)

I sat quietly, waiting. Praying. Bracing myself.

I think it was at that moment, more than any other time, that I became aware of the extent of Drake’s disability. Not because of anything he did but just because of the eerie transposition of a completely silent child against the raucous noise of a fast-food restaurant, of the clatter in the food preparation area, of the music, the chatter, other children whooping and shouting in the play area.

Abruptly, Lucia rose. She was in the middle, between Drake and Skip, but she jumped up. Skip stood to let her out of the booth and then sat back down again.

I turned to see where she was going.

Skip said, “She needs to be sick.”

I looked back.

He shrugged without meeting my eyes. “She’s upset. It’s hard for her to keep her food down then.”

We ate in uneasy silence.

Skip reached over to his son. “You finished, buddy? Do you want to go play?”

Drake accepted this invitation readily. He slid down onto the floor and wriggled out under the table, then ran off, leaving Skip and me alone.

Silence.

“I know,” Skip said in a very soft voice.

More silence.

“Lucy told me night before last. She’d said something about coming out here today and I couldn’t understand why. Couldn’t figure out what she was getting at … So, she told me.”

I nodded.

“I probably knew,” he continued. “I probably knew all the time …” Which I pretty much imagined.

“Can you see that for Drake’s sake, we need to change things?” I asked.

Skip nodded.

“Have you seen the Mayo report?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I’ll send it to you, if you wish, because I’ve received the unadulterated version. It speaks in there of the need to reassess Drake in case there is more to this than they were able to ascertain. It’s very rare to have a child unable to make any speech at all, so it needs further investigation. There are degenerative conditions … other problems … and for Drake’s safety, he needs to be seen by a specialist again to address these possibilities.”

Skip had his head down. He drew in a long breath, and I realized he had become tearful. Raising a hand, he wiped the corner of his right eye. I glanced in Drake’s direction, hoping he would continue to play.

“I’m so sorry for this,” Skip said softly.

“No, it’s all right. I understand how upsetting this must be.”

“You have to understand about Lucy. She’s a good person. Really she is. And a good mother. She never meant Drake any harm.”

“No, I’m sure she didn’t. Sometimes things happen that we don’t mean. They get out of control before we realize it, and then they just run away with us. I’m sure that’s the case here. I’m sure no one meant in any way to hurt Drake. But now it’s time to put things straight, because Drake doesn’t deserve this.”

His head still down, Skip wiped his eyes again. Lucia remained sequestered in the McDonald’s toilets.

“Do you think you’re going to be able to do that?” I asked. “Take Drake back to the doctors? Get him reassessed?”

Very slowly, Skip nodded.

“As well as getting him reassessed, we also need to set up plans to help him communicate. He’s a lovely boy, Skip. A really lovely, intelligent little boy. One of the nicest kids I’ve ever worked with. He deserves to be able to share more of his thoughts with the rest of us. Whether this is by learning sign language or by investigating surgery and a voice synthesizer or whatever, he needs to start now or it’ll be a real handicap for him.”

Skip grimaced. Lifting his hand, he pressed it over his eyes.

I paused to give him a moment to compose himself. My earlier difficult emotions over Lucia and her role in all this had largely passed, and, indeed, there was a part of me that actually liked this couple. They did so clearly love each other and Drake, too, in spite of how he’d been treated. I was well aware they
wanted
to do right. Nonetheless, I had to acknowledge that they were one of the most difficult sets of parents I had ever dealt with, because both of them were so timid, weak, and emotionally unstable. I had no doubt that Mason Sloane was a nasty bully of a man, but as is so often the case between bullies and their victims, the victim’s behavior plays as big a part in perpetuating the torment as does the bully’s.

“We need to start tackling this matter right away,” I said again when the silence threatened to overpower us.

Skip nodded.

“Do you feel you can deal with this yourselves?” I asked. “Or would you like help in locating specialists? And in talking to the school? Because, while it’s a great distance and I’d need to turn all this over to someone local fairly soon, I’m more than happy to get you started with it.”

He shook his head.

“You’d rather do it yourselves?” I asked. There was something in that shake of the head I couldn’t read, which made me think perhaps it was a gesture of hopelessness and not a response to my comments. “Or you can’t manage it? Is that what you mean?”

He shook his head again.

A long pause then. I sighed, wishing I could shake him. I shifted in my seat. Sighed again.

“We need to move,” Skip said at last. Finally he lifted his head and for a brief moment met my eyes. “We can’t stay in Quentin. Our life is over there.”

“I understand how upset your father is going to be. I can imagine the scene. But this is his only grandson. While he’s been difficult to deal with, it’s also been clear that he loves Drake dearly. In spite of his rather … shall we say, ‘strong’ manner, he’s done it all for the boy. He’s going to be upset, but I’m sure he’ll come around. I’m sure he’ll accept Drake. Won’t he?”

“I—I—I just can’t stay there. I don’t want to go back. Not tonight. Not ever. We’re this far. I just want to keep driving.”

I looked at him.

Skip had his arms crossed in front of him on the table, and he was hunched forward over them, his shoulders up around his ears. He stared at the plastic tabletop. “So that’s what Lucy and I did this morning. Put what stuff we needed in the car. I stopped at the bank and withdrew as much as I thought I could call my own and we’re just going. Just going to keep going from here.”

Shocked, I stared at him. I had in no way anticipated this extreme reaction, and I now felt both alarm and guilt, because I’d pretty much brought it about. I didn’t know quite what to say.

It was at that point Lucia returned to the table. Skip slid over, and she sat down beside him. She looked at me with great, wary eyes.

“I’ve told her,” Skip said, his head down again.

Lucia nodded.

“I’ll confess, I’m a little … concerned,” I said. “Surprised. Because this seems a very big response. I’ve got to admit I’m a little worried when you tell me this.”

“We’ll take care of Drake,” Skip said. “I promise you that.”

“Yes, but … you’re just
leaving
? Don’t you have a house in Quentin? Belongings? A job? How can you just …
leave
?”

Skip shrugged and for the first time he sat up properly in the booth. “Some things you work out with people. Some things never work out. We talked about it these last couple of days, Lucy and me. Didn’t we?” He turned to her. “And we know we’re not going to work this one out. So I’ve made the preparations. I’ve transferred the accounts to my name only. I’ve shut off the utilities. We’ve notified the school. So, yes, we’re leaving. We’ll come back at some other point and sell the house, pick up the rest of it. At some other point.”

I still couldn’t believe this, and my incredulity must have shown because Skip then said, “You may think this is taking the weak way out, that we’re running away, like kids. But not so. Not really. If my dad’s taught me anything, it’s that when you see a bad deal, you cut your losses and get out of there.”

I nodded. Reaching out, I snagged an unused napkin lying beside the remains of Drake’s Happy Meal. “Here,” I said, and I wrote my name and address on the napkin. “When you get settled, send me a card, would you? Let me know how things have turned out.”

Taking the napkin, Skip folded it and put it in his shirt pocket. “Okay,” he said, and for the first time I saw him smile.

W
hen I arrived in the dayroom for Cassandra’s session, she wasn’t there. I looked around, bewildered, and then went to the nurses’ station to inquire. Nancy tipped her head toward the corridor. “She’s already down in the therapy room.”

This surprised me, as children were not allowed unaccompanied in certain parts of the unit, the therapy room being one.

Nancy grinned. “I know. A bit irregular. But it
is
her last day. And she has something special for you.”

I walked down the corridor to the therapy room. The door was closed. I knocked gently.

“Come in!” a voice called.

I opened it.

“Surprise!” Cassandra cried, jumping up and down.

“Wow!” I said.

The room was festooned with paper chains, the kind kids make at school by gluing construction paper strips into rings. These, however, appeared to have been made from every sort of paper—magazine pages, envelopes, newspaper, cards.

“Wow!” I said again. “When did you make all these?”

“I made most of them in my room. I was making them before in the schoolroom, ’cause Joe said that was a good thing to do to relax, and he always made us do chains if we got upset. There are different lengths you got to do, depending how bad you are. Which is kind of stupid really. But anyway, when Dr. Menotti said I could go home if I stayed out of lockdown, I asked Joe if I could have the ones I’d made. And then I started making more for in here. To make it look nice, like we’re having a party.”

“Well, that is really cool, Cassandra. Because there’s so
many
! You’ve worked really hard,” I said.

“And look. Come here and look, because I’ve made you a card.” She bounced over to the table and held it up. “And wait till you see what it does when you open it!”

It was a pretty amazing card. When I opened it, there was a pop-up part in the middle, which did stand right up out of the card. It was an abstract design and written across it was: “Good-bye. I Love You.”

“This is
really
good. How did you learn to do this?” I examined the card carefully.

Cassandra was hopping excitedly from one foot to the other beside me. “I can do lots of stuff you don’t know about,” she said in an amicable voice. “You really only know one thing about me, and that’s that my dad took me. But I got lots else to me, too.”

“True,” I said. “Very, very true. And a very, very good point.”

Because it was her last day on the unit, I’d told Cassandra we’d play games of her choice during her usual time with me, if she wanted. It was always a challenge to terminate a therapeutic relationship, because while hospitalization was over, there was almost always still much work to be done. I’d found, however, if we marked the end in a celebratory way, not only was it less likely we’d get into conversations over issues that couldn’t be followed through, but it also emphasized the child’s gains over the time he or she was on the unit. The other thing I liked about playing games was the way they provided a safe parallel structure in which to hide while saying those last few meaningful things to each other, including good-bye.

Cassandra had chosen checkers for her game, and she set about it lustily. I hadn’t played any games with Cassandra before, so I didn’t know how competitive she was. Cutthroat, as it turned out. And unexpectedly astute at checkers, which wasn’t a game I was terribly good at. She beat me fairly and squarely first game out.

We played two or three games and during them chatted affably about not much of anything. Cassandra gossiped about one of the boys on the unit, saying he liked one of the other girls and he’d been trying to kiss her when the staff weren’t looking. Then she talked about some music CDs that one of the staff members had brought in and how some of the children had danced to them in the dayroom the night before. Finally she fell silent and appeared to be concentrating on her next move.

After a period of quiet, she said, “I’m not going to see you anymore, when I’m gone.”

“Well, you
will
see me for a while,” I replied. “After you go back to school, I’ll be coming once a week to see how you’re getting on. We’ll spend some time together each time I come.”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to be my therapist anymore.”

“No, you’re right,” I said. “You’re going to be seeing Dr. Ruiz. She’s really nice. I’ve worked with her lots. And you’ll still see Dr. Menotti once a month.”

“How come you’re not going to do it?”

I smiled gently. “I’d like to, but I only do therapy here at the hospital. When kids go back home, my job is called ‘liaising.’ That’s because I used to be a teacher, so I understand how schools work. For that reason my job outside the hospital is to go around to kids’ schools and make sure they’re still doing okay and they can tell me if they’re not.”

“I wish we were still going to be working together,” Cassandra said.

“Yes, I do, too. I’ve liked working with you. But you’ll like Dr. Ruiz. She’s easy to talk to, and she knows how to handle tricky things. She knows a lot about kids having Troubled Places.”