Twilight Children (6 page)

“He speaks just to me.”

“Just to you?” I said, surprised. “You mean he doesn’t speak to his father either?”

She shook her head.

“What age was Drake when this happened? When did he stop?”

“He’s never spoken to his father.”

“
Never?
” This degree of selectivity caught me by surprise. It wasn’t unique in my experience, but it was very, very unusual and tended to point to a markedly more severe problem than Drake appeared to have.

“My husband does the work, so he is not in the house much,” she said. “He is in his father’s bank. And on the weekends he does the golf. And he does the boat on the lake with his father in the summer. These are all important for his work. So he does not spend much time in the house when Drake is awake.”

Our conversation continued. I asked a few more questions, explored a few more avenues; then finally I said, “If you want me to work with Drake, I’d be happy to. Unfortunately, we have to consider the distance. Normally I see children with elective mutism in their school setting, since that’s usually where the mutism occurs, and I work with them two or three times a week until we get the problem sorted out. But there really isn’t any way I could do that here, so far from the city. I’m afraid the only way I could work with Drake would be if he came into the unit at the hospital as an inpatient. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Sloane would be very agreeable to that. And to be truthful, Mrs. Sloane, I’m not so sure I’d be agreeable either. That’s a very drastic measure. Drake is young. Elective mutism with preschoolers seldom needs such a major intervention as hospitalization, so I wouldn’t be very comfortable taking him away from home unless it were really, really necessary. You might prefer to find someone here locally to work with Drake and, if you wish, my unit could offer to liaise with them and support whoever took it on.”

She nodded. “It was good of you to come so far and I am sorry it was for nothing, but I think you are right. We will leave it. I think Drake will be just fine.”

I felt disgruntled after the meeting. It hadn’t been a satisfactory visit for a variety of reasons. Mason Sloane’s actions, while they did not particularly upset me, had certainly impeded my opportunity to accomplish anything useful. His expectations were unrealistic and his attitude untenable. At the end of the day, the fact remained that there was a child who did need support.

I felt Drake’s mutism was worth further investigation simply because it did seem unusually extensive; nonetheless, experience told me that in all likelihood the problem was minor. I suspected Lucia was not admitting the degree to which she spoke Italian to Drake and that his mutism was influenced by his not being wholly comfortable in English. My hunch was that everything would come right quite easily with a bit of very gentle intervention in a supportive environment, but that was the key: “supportive environment.” Sympathetic adults, a relaxed atmosphere, and time for Drake to master two languages were crucial, if there were to be no long-lasting problems. Unfortunately, I went away from the meeting dissatisfied that Drake would receive that. Instead, I was left with the concern that Lucia and the grandfather were locked in some kind of battle of wills or in a series of accusations and denials over the use of Italian in the home and this was causing a poisonous environment, which Drake was reflecting with his mutism.

Anyway, that’s what I considered. However, having lots of time to think as I made the long drive back to the city, a couple of spare not-fitting-in thoughts refused to fall silent. One was Drake himself. He was an extroverted, charismatic little boy who gave such a clear impression of wanting to communicate. This was not at all the typical profile of an elective mute. Nor was it typical of children who had bilingual problems. In my experience with young bilingual children, the extroverted, confident ones would happily bull ahead with whatever mixture of the two languages they had available and not worry whether they were right or not. I had encountered more than a few who were electively mute due to bilingualism, but in all the cases these were very shy, private children by nature who feared humiliation when making mistakes. Moreover, of what I could remember, they had all come from homes where no English was spoken at all, so their problems came from having no chance to practice English outside the public arena of the classroom.

The other odd thing was Lucia’s comment that Drake had never spoken to his father. This did not fit at all with bilingualism, and I had never encountered a bilingual child who did not speak to everyone at home. Moreover, not speaking to immediate family members in the privacy of the home is an unusual pattern, even when elective mutism stems purely from emotional issues. In my own research it had been closely associated with serious child abuse and severe family dysfunction. Again, Drake’s open, gregarious manner did not give the impression of such a traumatized child. However, I knew not to presume.

I
nto my next session with Cassandra I took with me one of my favorite therapeutic props, a box of dolls. These were called Sasha dolls. They were about sixteen inches high with beige nonethnic-colored skin; smooth, stylized limbs; and wistful, enigmatic expressions that were neither clearly happy nor sad. That alone set them apart in an era when virtually all other dolls had vacantly delirious grins that would better suit a stoned hippie.

I now had eight of these dolls, three of which were baby dolls, and the other five—two boys and three girls—had the proportions of a child in middle childhood. Through the years I had made or acquired a large wardrobe of clothes, plus many other small accoutrements, so I now used an apple box to accommodate it all. Wanting to give the apple box a little more longevity, to say nothing of a little more style, I had covered it in bright green wrapping paper with tiny cartoon rabbits all over it that I’d found in a store one Easter.

Cassandra noticed the box straightaway when she came into the therapy room. She looked at it, looked back at me with an interested, curious expression on her face, and then approached the box.

“It looks like a present, doesn’t it, with all that wrapping paper,” I said. “It’s not really, though. So it doesn’t need to be unwrapped. If you put your hands on the bottom, you can lift the top off because the paper is wrapped separately around the top of the box and the bottom.”

Carefully, Cassandra eased the lid off the apple box. “Look!” she cried. “Look at all these dollies! And look at all the clothes!”

“Yes. And we’re going to use those things in our work together.” I sat down at the table.

“This is the kind of work I like!” she replied and reached in to take out a red-haired doll wearing a long blue patterned dress.

“There are a couple of things, however, I want to talk about first,” I said, “before we get down to work. When you were in here yesterday, I asked you if you knew why you had come to the unit and you didn’t seem quite sure. So I want to make certain that’s clear to you.”

Cassandra appeared to be paying little attention to me. She was enthusiastically rooting through the box, looking at various clothes, trying them up against the red-haired doll.

“Sometimes when kids come to the unit, they think they must have done something wrong and leaving their families to come to the hospital is a punishment for that. It’s important to understand that isn’t true. You didn’t come here because you’ve done anything wrong—”

“Yes, I have,” she interjected in a casual, almost cheeky voice. She didn’t look up at me.

“You think you’ve come here because you
have
done something wrong?”

“I put a frog in the blender! Whirr!” She reached out with one finger to press an imaginary switch. “Just like I’m going to do with this dolly right now. Here’s a blender,” she said, pointing to a bare space on the table. She held the doll upside down by its feet and lowered it into the imaginary blender. “Whirr! It’s chopping it all up. Look at the blood. It’s gone all bloody. Whirr!”

She looked up cheerfully. “And now I’m going to take the lid off. The blender’s running and I take the lid off. WHIRRRRR! The blood spatters all over you! You’re all bloody now. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

O-kaaaay
. I sat back. I was definitely getting a better sense of what Earlene Baker had meant by Cassandra’s “creepy” behaviors.

“I’m taking the lid off again. It’s still running. Whirr! Blood and guts going all over. All over you. Splash! Splash!” Cassandra threw the doll into the air and made wild gestures with her hands to indicate splashing.

I remained silent. I didn’t want to get drawn into questioning Cassandra on her imaginary blender. I suspected it was simply a replay of the old joke: “What is red and green and goes two hundred miles per hour? A frog in a blender.” As with our conversation the day before, there was a vaguely manipulative feel to what she was saying, a sense that she was trying to shock me or engage me in a way she could control. Even if it were a true event and she had really put a frog in a blender, I wanted time to suss why she had chosen to insert this topic into the conversation here. So, instead of responding to her comments, I reached into the box and took out a doll, too. It was a blond boy doll dressed in hiking shorts and a T-shirt. I walked him along the side of the table.

“I haven’t got a doll,” Cassandra announced, even though she was still holding on to the red-haired doll. “Mine’s all chopped up. Here, put yours in the blender.”

“You know what this boy’s wondering?” I asked and walked the doll closer to her.

“Unh-uh. And I don’t care.”

“He’s wondering, why does that girl want to play that game?”

“What game?”

“This boy says, ‘Why do you want to pretend something that’s not true?’”

“Because I want to.”

“He says, ‘Why do you do that?’”

“Because it’s fun,” she said rather defiantly.

“This boy says, ‘Sometimes when I do that, it is because I don’t want to talk about something else. When I play a silly game, people get distracted and stop asking me.’”

“Not me. I do it because it’s fun,” she replied. “Funnest thing in the whole world and so that’s what I do. Squish up frogs. And other stuff. I step on anything I see and watch its guts squirt out.”

I held my doll in a standing position on the table. “This boy says, ‘I have yucky feelings sometimes. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know how to explain them. Sometimes they make me do things I don’t mean to and I get into trouble. But if I play a silly game, people won’t ask me about these feelings.’”

“You’re stupid,” Cassandra replied. “That never happens to me. It happens to you because you’re stupid. You should go in the blender.” She reached over to pull the doll out of my hand.

“I’m not stupid. I’m just scared,” I said for the doll. “Being scared doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It just means it’s hard for me to think because I’m too frightened sometimes. And when I’m that frightened, I don’t want someone to get angry at me and put me in the blender.”

“You belong in the blender. You’re very bad. Very, very, very, very bad. Come here. Get ground up.” She reached for the doll again.

Holding on to it with some effort, I kept the boy doll standing upright on the table. “I’m not bad,” I said for the doll. “Being scared doesn’t mean I’m bad.”

“Yes, it does. You’re bad and stupid. Everybody’s bad and stupid. The whole world is bad and stupid. Everything should be ground up in the blender!”

This outburst seemed to explode out of her physically, and she leaped up, throwing her doll high into the air. It fell to the floor and she picked it up. Holding it by the legs, she pounded its head against the linoleum in a frantic way.

“Cassandra?” I said.

She paid no attention to me.

“Cassandra, I can’t allow you to do that. The doll will break if you treat it that way.”

She continued to hammer the doll’s head against the floor with vicious, uncontrolled swings.

Rising from the chair, I came around behind her, leaned over her, and stopped the movement of her arms. “It’s all right to have angry feelings, but I can’t let you turn your anger into actions if it will hurt things. It’s time to stop now.”

As I spoke, it was as if a wizard cast a spell over the room. Cassandra froze the moment I touched her. When I removed the doll from her hands, her fingers retained their positioning, even though they were no longer holding anything.

Setting the doll back on the table, I returned to my seat. “You had some very strong feelings just then, didn’t you?”

Cassandra lowered her hand. Still sitting on the floor, she stared straight ahead.

“That’s all right. In here it’s okay to have such feelings. And if they get too strong, I’ll always be able to stop them.”

Still looking into the space in front of her, she remained motionless.

“However, it’s easier to cope with strong feelings when we have words for them. So one of the things you and I will do together is try and find ways to express your feelings with words. Then they won’t be so scary.”

Cassandra still didn’t move.

The strength of her emotions seemed to have literally paralyzed her, so I thought rather than pursue them at this point, it would be better to help Cassandra reestablish equilibrium. I reached into the box and took out a girl doll with long dark hair.