Stitch turned his face and took a deep breath. Lauren stared at his profile as he exhaled. “You know,” he said, “my grandmother died a couple of weeks ago, and—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry—”
“I don’t need all that—”
“—on top of everything else your family has been through—”
“No, I don’t need all that. But it reminded me. There’s this old rule about sitting shiva. You probably don’t know it. You’re Catholic, right? So you wouldn’t know about this. People don’t follow this rule all that often anymore. But the old rule was if you came to the house of the bereaved, you weren’t supposed to speak unless they spoke to you. You were supposed to bear witness to their pain in silence. If the suffering person wanted to talk, then they could make that decision themselves. It wasn’t up to you.” He looked up at her again. “Do you get it? It’s not up to you.”
“Lauren, Stitch—what the hell?” Christo, the accompanist, was beckoning them from the door to the backstage. “We’re all waiting for you.”
Stitch slipped past Christo in the doorway and into the wings. Because it appeared to Lauren to be the least impossible option—because it seemed just barely plausible that she could follow familiar instructions as an interchangeable component of a large coordinated group, as opposed to being left alone and unassimilated in the silence of an empty hallway, where she would be immediately swarmed by the full volume and velocity of her current predicament—Lauren followed Stitch and Christo through the wings and onto the stage, where she took her place in the back row, pulling in her shoulders in hopes of bringing down her height by an inch or two, keeping her eyes on Deepa directly in front of her, following as closely as she could, the two-step, the turn, the pat-a-cake clapping choreography. If she could move as Deepa’s shadow, maybe Mr. Smith wouldn’t call her out for falling just behind the pace. She moved her lips. Deepa had told her that, if you forgot the words, you could lip-synch “watermelon cantaloupe” on repeat and probably get away with it.
Halfway through the second rendition of “We Go Together,” Mr. Smith out in the seats called out for Christo to stop.
“Lauren,” he said. “Come up here.”
“Bus-ted,” whispered Brendan Dougherty beside her. He was only in the back because he was so tall.
Lauren walked to the front of the stage.
“Now sing it,” Mr. Smith said. “All on your own.”
Christo played a few prompting notes. “No,” Mr. Smith called to Christo. “A cappella.”
Lauren cleared her throat. “We go together, like rama-lama-lama, ka-ding-ety-dinga-dong.”
The laughter behind her like fingers flicking her ears.
“Keep going,” Mr. Smith said.
She pressed two fingers just below the waistband of her jeans, as if to check that her diaphragm was in flattened singing position, but actually to make sure her zipper was up. She was in the dream where you’re onstage in your underwear—everyone had the same stupid dreams. Now everyone standing behind her would have a new dream, that they were her.
“Um—uh—” Lauren started.
“Remembered forever . . .” sang Claire, just behind Lauren, trying to find a volume at which Lauren could hear but Mr. Smith could not.
“Claire, I did not ask you to sing, I asked Lauren to sing.”
His glasses caught the light, hiding his eyes in opaque whiteness.
“Remembered forever,” Lauren sang, “like doo-wop-sha-diddy-diddy-bing-ety-bingy-bong.”
The howling behind her, a dying moan, lions tearing open an antelope’s belly, the organs piling out, steaming, fogging Mr. Smith’s glasses.
Mr. Smith started applauding. All the boys except Stitch and a few of the girls behind Lauren applauded, too. Claire stepped closer to her, not clapping, close enough to take her hand, although she didn’t. Abby wasn’t clapping; Lauren could almost feel Abby’s breath on her neck. The applause died down, and then it was just Mr. Smith applauding, hard, like he was trying to hurt himself.
“Lauren, I’ll cut a deal with you,” he said, hitting his palms together three last times. “You learn the words to this song, you show up to rehearsal on time, and you can have your ‘busted typewriter’ line, okay?”
“What?” she said.
“What?” whispered Claire and Abby.
“That was a joke,” he said, his white mask glinting. “The terms of that deal will not be upheld. Let’s take a break.”
All the worst things Lauren had done had always been held with herself alone. Mirela was too young and Danielle too estranged to understand what happened at Lauren’s birthday party. And when Lauren told everyone at school that Danielle gave her a black eye, she was the only person who knew it wasn’t true—not even Danielle knew. Right this second, Danielle could be alone in her bedroom on Wellington Lane, sitting on the edge of her canopy bed with its Laura Ashley floral bedspread and eyelet dust ruffle tabbing out the chords to “Lithium” on her acoustic guitar and trying to remember if and when and how her head had made bruising contact with Lauren Brennan’s eye socket on ski bus two winters ago.
But this new secret was different, because someone else had seen the whole thing. Was seeing it. Had known from the start.
She had to keep the story straight. She had to remember what it was she told Mom about where she’d be late that evening. Had she said Paula’s house or Abby’s? Or rehearsal? Would Mom remember, had she been listening? What if she’d said Paula’s house, and then Paula called and Lauren wasn’t home? She could dissolve into these questions in the middle of any class, leaving the husk of her body behind. Words slid into page gutters, x and y axes switching places. Her outward attention idling on a patch of dried gum on the carpet, catching his anger. “Pay. Attention. Lauren. Thank you,” he said, almost like a hiss, like the sound Dad made when he wanted to yell and couldn’t.
“But she was paying attention,” Stitch murmured, from his desk directly behind her. She would have looked like a model student from behind—sitting up straight, head facing forward, hand holding pencil poised over her notebook. But Stitch couldn’t see all of her. She didn’t want him to, and she hadn’t asked him to. Even now, Stitch tried to be nice, but he was making assumptions.
She had to keep the characters straight, their motivations. The people at school and the people in the wood-paneled living room. There was a trench between the two spaces, an energy constantly traded between them, matter changing states: ardor then anger, anger then ardor. His anger a substitute for his ardor. His anger a waste product of concealing his ardor. She was ennobled, inert; she sympathized with his predicament, and her sympathy exalted her. She saw her body lying along the trench, or her body as a single match dragged along its seam, her hand engulfed in flame as she tried the knob on the front door of his house at night, as she tried to write on his classroom blackboard, neat, calm, everybody watching and no pain.
She made him mad, he said. She drove him crazy, he said.
The trench opened up and he pulled her down, her arms tight around his neck to break her fall.
How strange and funny that everyone else thought they could see her, that all eyes were on her from every side, that Stitch presumed to know where her attention lay—that he could see her face through the back of her head. There she was, fumbling questions in English class, flailing around onstage, off-key, off-step, pissing off Mr. Smith again. That guy was always up her ass. How did she get cast in the first place? Oh, she couldn’t do anything right. There was her crazy mother and crazier sister all over the news. It’s just one thing after another with that family.
But no one could see what was really happening. What she was making happen. She could decide when she wanted to slip through the gap in the chain-link fence through the yards into a parallel world, behind one-way glass. She could look back through the glass and smile, and know it was real where she was, elemental, irradiated, irrefutable. A living world of soil and salt and blood. She could smile through
the glass at everyone icebound, eyes midblink, mouths open and dumb, and she could laugh at them, because they would never know, and they couldn’t know, they weren’t capable of knowing, because even if she told them, even if she were telling them right now, she could not prove it, and they would never believe her.
Jane
Arden Attachment Center — Intake Form for New Students
Mirela Brennan, F
D.O.B. 03/01/1988 (est.)
Principal goals: Focus student’s goals are to learn skills related to trust, cooperation, and family integration.
Facts about the student and family: Focus student is a ca. 4-year-old girl who resides in a single-family home in western New York State with her adoptive family: mother, father, sister aged 15, brothers aged 12 and 11. She has lived in the home for 6 months and previously resided in a state institution for children in Ghiorac, Romania. She was admitted to Arden for the 2-week therapeutic intensive with her adoptive mother.
Areas of strength: Focus student is described by her adoptive mother as bright, friendly, and outgoing in public settings. She has rapidly learned many English words and phrases and is eager to practice her English with people she meets at shops, playgrounds, etc. She has high energy and enjoys running, climbing, and acrobatics. She approaches peers with confidence and enthusiasm. She takes great interest in her siblings and in her natural surroundings.
Areas for growth: Focus student exhibits both indiscriminate attachment and resistance to attachment. She attempts to show physical affection to strangers in public places, in the form of hugs, kisses, and hand-holding. She asks strangers if they can take her home. She rejects physical affection from family members, particularly the adoptive mother. Adoptive mother reports that focus student displays physical affection only if she wants something or if she suspects that she is in trouble for misbehavior. She hides or hoards food while also declining most meals and snacks and disrupting family mealtimes. Focus student has physically damaged or destroyed toys, dolls, books, and furniture provided for her enjoyment. Though focus student’s violent intent is mainly focused on objects, it is sometimes directed at other family members, most frequently at the adoptive mother, resulting in occasional minor injuries to herself and her adoptive mother.
Home setup: Focus student’s home is a two-story house on a one-acre lot on a quiet residential street. Because focus student exhibits a fear of stairs coupled with a lack of appropriate fear of heights, the ground-floor dining room has been repurposed as the focus student’s bedroom. Focus student’s adoptive father, who works as a contractor, has installed fire-rated steel doors that lock from the outside as well as steel bars over both windows following multiple escape attempts and incidents involving broken doors and glass. Focus student currently sleeps in a bare room on a mattress on the floor.
Precipitating event or events (if applicable): Focus student ran away from adoptive mother during a large public gathering, attracting local media attention.
The room at the Holiday Inn in Evergreen, Colorado, had one big bed for both of them. It was good in the room, quiet and dim, and Mirela had Jane all to herself. Mirela zonked out under the covers in front of the TV, before her usual bedtime.
They woke up in the deep dark, cold and wet. Jane flipped on the bedside lamp, called the front desk for new sheets, stripped the bed, peeled Mirela’s pajamas off. She soaked the pajamas in the bathroom sink and filled the tub with warm, sudsy water. Mirela didn’t fight the bath, although she did fight the towel, the rubbing of it, as if her skin could peel off with the water.
“Air-dry, all right, Mirela, whatever works,” Jane said. She felt a purposefulness that edged into happiness. She felt sated by what she’d accomplished. The two of them understood each other.
There was a knock on the door. Jane went to answer it, and a lethal wail went up behind her.
“Mirela, my love, it’s the new sheets, that’s all,” Jane said. “This nice helper is bringing us clean sheets for the bed.”
“Are you all right in there?” came the voice on the other side of the door.
“We’re fine, hang on a sec—just a tantrum situation with my kiddo—” Jane said over Mirela’s noise. Jane wanted to get the door open to get the new sheets. Mirela wanted it shut to keep out the light and sound and people. The door slammed into Jane’s hand—the fingers, between the big and middle knuckles—and Jane cried out, and Mirela was all of a sudden calmer. Now they were both in pain. Fair enough. Mirela curled up in front of the shut door.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the voice asked, and Mirela pounded her fists against the door to drown out the talking with a more righteous noise.
“Yes—please, just—I don’t mean to be rude, but it would be best if you would leave,” Jane said. “Thank you, good night.” She crawled past Mirela to the bathroom and stuck her hurt hand in the sink, with the soaking pajamas.
“Usually you love meeting new people,” Jane said from where she was kneeling next to the sink. “I wonder what’s different tonight.”
“I want nobody,” Mirela said from the carpet.
“Honey, do you want a blanket?”
“I want nobody!” Mirela yelled. She was naked and shivering. Jane wondered if shivering was even better than rocking, more precise and efficient in its calming effects, like a cat’s purr, a velvety real thing burring in her throat, curled inside her rib cage buzzing. Jane’s hand throbbed through her whole body, a rhythm in search of a discordant music. Her throbbing hand and Mirela’s shivering limbs in syncopation.
“We have an early start tomorrow,” Jane said, taking her dripping hand from the sink. “It’s going to be a big day, Mirela. The people at Arden will help us get better.”
She considered attempting to open the hotel room door and decided against it. With her hand that wasn’t hurt, Jane took the top bedcover off the floor, gave it a quick whiff to make sure it wasn’t soaked with pee. A shiny-satiny sheath of green. Jane laid it down a couple of feet away from Mirela. Mirela inched close enough to the blanket to kick it away.
“I want nobody,” Mirela said.
“You won’t always feel that way, sweetie,” Jane said, sitting down next to the heap of blanket. “The people at Arden will help you feel a different way. Don’t you want to get better?”
Mirela said something that Jane couldn’t hear.
“You look cold—are you sure you don’t want the blanket?” Jane asked.
Mirela said the same thing again that Jane couldn’t hear.
“What did you say, honey?”
“I want you.”
The cumulus cover of the pain had started to clear, and Jane could think a bit about this. This was, on the one hand, the type of “nice” thing Mirela would say when she thought she was in trouble. On the other hand, here they were, on the same side of the slamming door. Ordinarily, Mirela would be alone behind it. This was progress.
Mirela crawled over to the blanket and pulled it over herself. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her forehead on the floor.
Jane got up, lay down on her side on the bare mattress, and watched the quivering little heap on the floor.
“Do you want to come back into bed with me, Mirela?” she asked. “We could share the blanket.”
Mirela lifted the blanket to watch Jane with one eye. They watched each other to the beat of Jane’s throbbing fingers and Mirela’s waves of shivering.
“What are we doing here, Mirela?” Jane asked her.
Mirela lowered the blanket.
“Are we sure we want to do this, Mirela?” Jane asked.
Mirela didn’t answer.
With her good hand, Jane switched off the bedside light with a theatrical crispness, a gesture to extinguish all doubt.
Session 1 — Rapport-Building
MODULE: Establish relationship with therapist through directed small talk, enforced eye contact, question completion, and holding therapy.
Notes from session: Focus student appeared hap
py and engaged with conversation about favorite foods and activities. Focus student maintained poor or no eye contact. When co-therapist redirected her to resume eye contact, focus student deflected through laughter, jumping, turning, and making “funny faces.” Therapist interpreted this behavior as attempt to maintain control. Introduction of holding therapy led to similar deflective responses of smiling, laughter, fidgeting, and kicking.
Session 2—Body Work
MODULE: Rapport-building continues. Intensive verbal directives/corrections, compliance exercise, biographical narration, and holding therapy.
Notes from session: Focus student engaged with Simon Says and hide-the-shoe game. Deflective response (laughter, spinning, falling on ground) as commands became faster and more complicated. Deflective response (laughter) when therapist used therapeutic hostile command tone. Difficulty during biographical questions and answers. Focus student repeated questions back to therapist but did not answer. (Prompt questions included “Were you a bad baby?”; “Did no one take care of you?”; “Why didn’t anyone love you?”) Second holding therapy session cycled rapidly through deflective response to frustration response. Focus student exhibited physical resistance requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from co-therapist.
Session 3—Role-Playing, First Module
MODULE: Compliance exercise continues with additional rules, increased speed, and intensified therapeutic hostile command tone. Regression role-play followed by holding therapy.
Notes from session: Role-play cast therapist as focus student’s birth mother and co-therapist as orphanage nurse. A third co-therapist placed focus student in modified holding position. Focus student was asked how she felt to see her birth mother and nurse. This question only elicited laughter and other deflection. Third holding therapy session bypassed deflective and frustration responses to rage response, with extreme physical resistance to therapy requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from two co-therapists.
The Fourth Child Page 27