Twilight Children (30 page)

“Phone me, once you’ve told Skip.”

She nodded and rose from the table. “I will. Good-bye.”

I didn’t get back to the city from Quentin until almost 8:30
P
.
M
. Over the last hour of the journey I had amused myself planning what I’d do when I got home. After such a grueling afternoon, I wanted only peace and quiet and my own company. So I planned to open a bottle of wine, something I seldom did either on my own or during the week, which made it a real treat; moreover, there was a particularly good bottle of cabernet sauvignon in the wine rack that was calling out to me like a Siren. Then I’d make a creamy, calming plate of pasta with lots and lots of garlic. And before any of this, I’d stop at the video store and pick up something interesting, so once the pasta was made and the wine opened, I could kick back and veg out.

Planning this ideal scenario made the last part of the journey pass quickly, and truth said, it probably gave me as much pleasure as the actual experience would. This was fortunate, because planning it was all the relaxation I got that evening. When I came in the front door, I saw the light on my answer machine blinking. I hit the button.

It was the unit. The caller was one of the nurses, whose name was Carrie. Cassandra had “flipped out,” she said. Could I come in?

So the wine stayed in the wine rack, the pasta on the shelf, the garlic in its fine silver skin, hanging in a braid above the butcher block. Never bothering even to take my coat off, I reset the answering machine, switched off the light, locked the door, and headed for the hospital, stopping only long enough to pick up an order of chicken at KFC to eat in the car as I drove.

In an ideal world, not only would we be able to eat pasta and drink wine undisturbed after having put in a hard day’s work, but also difficult psychological breakthroughs would result in real, up-front results. In an ideal world, Cassandra, having recognized Uncle Beck for what he was—no longer a real person, but instead a demon inside her—would have had some wonderful, immediate payoff for that very difficult, hard-won insight.

Not so. Not in this world anyway.

In fact, things seemed to go an entirely different way for Cassandra. She had survived the hideous circumstances of her abduction and abuse by walling off things that were just too painful to deal with. In fact, she had walled off whole segments of her personality to the point they were developing separate identities of their own—Minister Snake, who passed judgment on the horrible child who acquiesced to these things; Cowboy Snake, who mourned what was happening, who tried to drown out painful experiences with a howling yodel; and innocent, pure Fairy Snake, kept away from the horrors of what was happening. But so, too, had Uncle Beck been walled up in the process.

It was easy to think that in helping Cassandra recognize her “Troubled Place” and what was going on in there, we would allow her to release those dreadful feelings, to let go of Uncle Beck and all he had done to her. I hoped that would eventually be true; at the moment, however, it wasn’t. Recognizing Uncle Beck was with her, was inside her still, was not at all freeing for Cassandra because in tearing down that wall, all the other walls in her mind became unstable. Cassandra, quite literally, fell apart.

Her behavior became very unpredictable in the two days following our talk in the dayroom. She had appeared calm and deep-thinking in the immediate aftermath of the discussion. After I had left, she’d had a meal and had talked openly with several of the other staff about Uncle Beck and about her Troubled Place. This particular terminology really seemed to strike a chord with Cassandra.
Troubled Place
became her byword.

By the next morning, however, her behavior had started to fluctuate. She became very anxious, worried that Uncle Beck might still be about, worried that something might happen to her mother, worried that if she left the hospital someone would abduct her again. Then she grew angry, shouting at the staff, calling them stupid, throwing her tray at breakfast. Then she was crying.

When it was our time together, she was impossible. Everything was a control issue, and we got nothing done. I was able to accept this. As the person who had revealed Uncle Beck and her Troubled Place, I was probably pretty scary to be around, because what else might I get into? So trying to control me was an understandable and possibly necessary reaction. Just very frustrating.

The rest of her day had been no more tranquil. She cycled repeatedly through anxiety, anger, manipulation, and sheer desolation, stressing the staff and distressing herself. Indeed, it continued well into the night, as every time Cassandra settled into bed, she was plagued by visions of Uncle Beck. In the end, she was given a sedative to help her sleep.

And then, of course, I couldn’t be there for our next session together, as I had to be in Quentin.

W
hen I arrived at the hospital, Carrie filled me in on what had happened.

At dinnertime one of the boys had come to the nurses’ station to say that Cassandra had managed to get into a utility closet off the dining room. In this closet was a small window perhaps only about twenty-four by eighteen inches wide. It had the same safety features as did all the windows in the hospital, which meant it could not open very wide and there was a screen on the outside, but it did not have a metal grid over it as did all the other windows in the psychiatric units. The boy said Cassandra was trying to break the window because she was going to jump out.

When staff went to investigate, they found Cassandra pounding on the window with a metal dish from the dining room. She was in a very distressed state and required three staff to get her out of the utility room and take the dish from her. She was put into the seclusion room until she calmed down. This was about 6:30 in the evening.

Carrie said they’d then let her out of lockdown because she did appear in control again and because Carrie knew one of Cassandra’s favorite television programs was coming on. Carrie hoped watching a show she enjoyed would help Cassandra to relax and calm herself.

When Carrie next looked, Cassandra was not among the children in the chairs in front of the TV. Going to investigate, Carrie found her in her bedroom, a chair pulled over into the middle of the room. Cassandra was standing on the seat of the chair, using her shoe to try and break the bulb in the light fitting in the ceiling with the intention of cutting her wrists with the broken glass. There was a metal grid over the fitting and the fitting itself was of sturdy safety glass, but Cassandra was nonetheless making a very concerted effort.

Two suicide attempts by a nine-year-old in as many hours; Carrie knew it was “time for the big guns,” as she put it. So she phoned both Dave Menotti and me. Dave phoned back with a prescription for greater sedation, which was administered. And by 9
P
.
M
., I was there.

Cassandra was in the seclusion room when I arrived. Dressed in her pajamas, she had a bathrobe over them, but as is the practice with suicidal patients, she wore no shoes and had no tie to keep the bathrobe closed. I opened the door and came in. There was a soft snick as a staff member locked it behind me.

“Hi,” I said.

Cassandra was standing on the far side of the small room. Her eyes were red in the way of someone who is very tired. They had a vague, rather haunted expression. She didn’t say anything back.

“Come here.” I held out an arm.

She crossed over to me. I put my arm around her and drew her close.

“I understand you’re having a very bad day,” I said.

She nodded.

“Can you tell me about it?”

At that moment she pressed in against me, pushing her face into my sweater. She didn’t speak.

“Here, let’s sit down.”

I made myself as comfortable as is possible in a padded cell, which is a soft but very sterile sort of place and is lit far too brightly. Cassandra sat with me, close against my side. I kept my arm around her.

“So, what’s happening?”

A long silence followed.

Cassandra picked at the edge of her robe, pulling little threads out of the terrycloth. “You weren’t here today,” she finally said in a tiny voice.

“No, I’m sorry for that. I had to be away today. I mentioned that yesterday. Do you remember? But I’m sorry. I can see you’ve had a hard day.”

She nodded.

Again silence. I listened into it. There wasn’t much to hear in the little room. The ventilation system, mostly. And Cassandra’s breathing, which was a bit noisy.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?” I asked again, very gently.

“I want to die.”

“Yes. I can tell that. Why?”

“My head’s too confusing.”

“How do you mean? Can you tell me more about that?”

She shook her head.

“Okay.”

Two or three moments of just sitting together.

“I’m too tired,” she said.

“Yes, the medicine will make you feel sleepy. When you get really sleepy, we’ll go in your room.”

“I don’t want to go in my room.”

“I see.”

“Everything in my head’s confusing. It’s like it’s arguing in my head.”

“Different voices?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

A small pause.

“Like voices. But not voices. Like everybody is talking at once. Arguing at once.” She snuffled. “I don’t want to be like this. It hurts too much.”

“Yeah. I can understand that,” I said.

“I just want it to go away. I want it to be like it was before.”

“Before when?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Just before. Before now. Before today. Or yesterday. Before I started thinking about all this.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see where thinking about all this must hurt.”

Cassandra nodded and pressed closer yet to me.

A silence came then, deep and a little sleepy. I was aware of a faint saline scent as I sat there. I think it was embedded in the padding of the cell and not coming from Cassandra herself. It was a profoundly human scent. Of tears, I think.

“I’m going to do something,” I said. I twisted around enough to fish in the right pocket of my jeans because I knew I’d stuffed a felt-tip pen in earlier when I was with Lucia. Taking it out, I uncapped it.

All the movement had meant I’d had to shift away from Cassandra, who had been leaning against my left side. She crooked her head to see what I was doing.

“These thoughts you’ve got in your head,” I said. “I want you to give them to me for tonight. So you can go to sleep.”

She looked at me, her expression quizzical.

“What are they? Let’s make a list of them.” I looked at her. “I want you to go inside your head. Listen to what all this arguing is about in there and tell me about it. What’s one thing you hear being said?”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” Cassandra replied.

“We’re going to make a list of those things you keep hearing so that I can take them home with me. I’ll take care of them for tonight. Then you won’t have to think about them anymore, because I’ll have them safe. That way you can sleep.”

“We don’t have any paper to make a list.”

“We don’t need paper. You just tell me what you hear inside your head. Everybody’s arguing. What are they arguing about? Tell one of the things.”

“They’re not arguing. It’s just mean voices. Scary voices. I dunno.”

“Okay, but what are they saying?” I asked. “Tell me one thing.”

“I don’t understand what we’re doing.”

I smiled gently. “Everything feels really confusing to you right now, doesn’t it?”

Cassandra nodded.

“You know the bulletin board out by the nurses’ station?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen it. It’s got, like, a million pieces of paper stuck up on it, doesn’t it? And everything stuck up there is stuff people want to remember. Like what the menu for the week ahead is. Or when events are or which people want to go on special outings. Or when someone has an appointment to go somewhere off the unit. Yes? Do you understand that?”

Cassandra nodded.

“Well, in your Troubled Place, you’ve got a bulletin board, too. Stuck up on that one are all sorts of different really yucky, nasty thoughts. And because nobody wants to keep seeing yucky, nasty things, it’s understandable you’ve tried never to go in there to look at that bulletin board. But what’s happened is that we’ve opened up the Troubled Place now by talking about Uncle Beck, and you can’t miss seeing all these scary thoughts are tacked up in there.”

“Yeah,” Cassandra said.

“So what I want you to do is take them down and give them to me for tonight, so that I can take care of them and you don’t have to keep looking at them. Someday, further down the line, we’re going to throw all those nasty, scary thoughts away, and how we do that is by getting all of them out and looking at them and talking about them until they get really boring and aren’t a big deal anymore. When something isn’t a big deal anymore, then it’s easy to throw it away. So that’s what’s
going
to happen in the future to all that yucky stuff, but we’re not quite there yet. Everything still feels like a big deal. It’s still scary. So, for now, I just want you to give these yucky thoughts that are bothering you to me. I’ll take them home with me, because they can’t hurt me. I’m a grown-up. I’m really strong. And if I have them, then they can’t hurt you.”