Twilight Children

by Torey Hayden

  When Magdalena came out from her third-grade class, there was no sign of her younger sister. Her mother was called. The police were called. Nothing. No trace. Cassandra had disappeared.

  The Navarros’ efforts to find Cassandra were unrelenting. Police bulletins, news reports, searches over several states, posters in the local grocery store, on the side of milk cartons, efforts through Mr. Ventura’s parole officer—everything anyone could think of was tried in an effort to find out what happened that afternoon—but nothing turned up. It was as if Cassandra and her father had, as the old cliché goes, simply vanished into thin air.

  Twenty-six months passed without any word of Cassandra’s whereabouts. Then three states away, a young man working in a 7-Eleven convenience store discovered a small girl in the alley behind the store going through their garbage. Suspicious that she was there to steal something, he gave chase when she tried to run away, and caught her. When she wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t answer his questions about her name or where she lived, he called the manager. The manager realized immediately that the girl was too young to be alone in such a place at that time of day, and he was concerned about her unkempt appearance; so he called the police. It was Cassandra.

  No one ever knew precisely what had happened to her during those twenty-six months. Cassandra was totally mute for the first weeks after her return. Her father, when found, was in a drug-addled stupor, and he seemed incapable of giving much information beyond indicating the motive behind the abduction had been revenge against his ex-wife. “I wanted to make her suffer for what she’d done” was his only real explanation.

  Cassandra had been not quite six when she was abducted and was now approaching eight. She was very dirty and suffering from malnutrition, giving the impression she had spent at least part of the time living rough or in very poor conditions. No one knew whether this was in the company of her father or others, because her father gave a muddled, inconsistent picture and Cassandra said nothing. Even when she did begin to speak again, she usually refused to talk about the abduction. The few things she did say turned out to be mostly lies.

  The longed-for homecoming proved to be nothing like Cassandra’s mother had dreamt about for so long. In place of the cheerful, loving daughter who had been abducted that autumn afternoon, she welcomed home a wary, mute stranger.

  Cassandra found it impossible to settle back into her former life, which, in fact, was not her “old life” at all, but rather a completely different one from what she’d been living before the abduction. She hated her stepfather and wouldn’t tolerate him in the room. She refused to talk to him or even look at him. She fought constantly with Magdalena and did many small, nasty vengeful things to her. With her new sister, Mona, she was so spiteful and short-tempered that her mother didn’t dare leave the two of them alone together.

  Cassandra startled easily, was prone to unexpected tantrums, suffered horrific nightmares, and alternated between shouting at everyone and not speaking at all. She lied constantly, stole from everyone in the family, and had chaotic eating problems, tending to hoard and hide food, or else taking too much, consuming it too fast, and vomiting it back up, occasionally while still at the table. She also had digestive problems and was plagued by many other minor illnesses associated with a compromised immune system.

  In addition, it appeared Cassandra had not attended school at all during the time she was gone. Indications when she was in kindergarten were that Cassandra, like her elder sister, would be an able student. Old enough to be in second grade when she returned, she was now behind in everything and could neither read nor do basic adding and subtracting.

  Cassandra’s mother and stepfather attempted to deal with the situation as appropriately as they could. Her parents decided to restart Cassandra’s education from the beginning, so she was placed in first grade, a year below where she should have been for her age. This still left plenty of catching up, as the academic year was well under way when she returned, so she was also given extensive resource help. To deal with the psychological trauma of the abduction, Cassandra had individual therapy with a child psychologist for twelve weeks, which was the length of time covered by the Navarros’ insurance.

  And Cassandra did start to recover. She began to speak reliably again. First it was at home and then, more slowly, at school, although she could still be oddly unpredictable and sometimes went silent for hours and occasionally even days. She was making reasonable academic progress and generally keeping up with her class. At home she was still difficult and prone to tantrums, but the family felt this was improving, too.

  Yet …

  It was Cassandra’s third-grade teacher, Earlene Baker, who kept pressure on the Navarro family to seek further help for their daughter. Mrs. Baker found Cassandra’s behavior disconcerting and difficult to cope with in the classroom. She was most concerned about the amount of very manipulative behavior Cassandra engaged in, which mostly took the form of lying and “storytelling.” A number of the lies, she said, seemed completely pointless, such as coming to school in a pair of running shoes she wore almost every day and insisting they were new. Many others were malicious, such as on one occasion when Cassandra had purposely hidden her schoolwork and then told the school staff that another child had stolen it from her. The only thing that had saved the other child from serious trouble was a playground aide who had happened to notice Cassandra placing something carefully into a trash bin outside the school and had later gone to investigate. Most of the lies, however, were about hideous but outlandish things, like her little sister falling in the canal and being swept under the culvert but then being rescued by an unidentified boy who just happened to be passing.

  Mrs. Baker said she was aware that in all likelihood Cassandra had suffered terribly during her abduction and she tried to take this into account, but even so, why would a nine-year-old spend recess cheerfully helping the school janitor sweep leaves and then come in and say he had tried to push her down the stairs?

  Mrs. Baker also wondered if Cassandra could be suffering petit mal seizures. It was a bit of joke with everyone at school, even Cassandra, that she “should have been born blond” because she could be very “ditzy”—not paying attention to what was going on around her, not remembering obvious details about ordinary things. Mrs. Baker didn’t always find the behavior funny. She felt the forgetfulness, which could be very abrupt and out of the blue, was often manipulative in nature and just a further extension of the lying. Occasionally, however, she said Cassandra did genuinely seem not to remember things that had just happened, and this occurred often enough for it to interfere with learning and social interactions. This led Mrs. Baker to wonder if there could be a neurological underpinning for such behavior.

  Cassandra’s erratic speech also bothered her. Most of the time, Mrs. Baker said, Cassandra was chatty to a point of being verbose; however, every once in a while she’d suddenly refuse to speak to anyone, and this could last anywhere up to a few days. Mrs. Baker saw no particular pattern to these silences, but they did occur at home as well. Cassandra’s mother was resigned to them, feeling they were another outshoot of the traumatic abduction and the best response was to give Cassandra peace and support and not call attention to them. Mrs. Baker couldn’t be this lackadaisical because not talking interfered with the learning process. Given the randomness of the behavior, Mrs. Baker’s mind again went back to the question of a neurological basis. When she spoke to me, she mentioned Cassandra’s father’s drug problems and wondered if Cassandra had been the victim of any drug-taking while she was with her father, or if there had been some kind of horrible abuse that might have caused brain damage, which was now throwing up these odd neurological signs.

  The final concern was what Mrs. Baker called Cassandra’s “creepy” behaviors—actions that, while there was nothing inherently wrong with Cassandra’s doing them, made Mrs. Baker uneasy. Among these was a tendency for Cassandra to turn otherwise ordinary conversations into nonsense. She would be cha
tting normally and then unexpectedly get what Mrs. Baker described as her “Bad Seed” look. Suddenly her replies would become off-topic, occasionally provocative, and often make little sense. This was a very disconcerting behavior, Mrs. Baker said, because it “felt crazy.” And very off-putting. Other children quickly became disconcerted or irritated and avoided her.

  Another creepy behavior was Cassandra’s tendency to pretend she was some kind of animal, like a vulture or a bear, and then only relate to people using shrieks or growls. Often she picked a violent animal and then used the animal’s normal aggression as an excuse for hitting, biting, spitting, or doing other hurtful things. Mrs. Baker said Cassandra often did this playfully, as if she were in control of the behavior and it was only a game; however, she could persist with the animal-like behavior for several hours, despite repeated requests to stop or even punishment.

  Neurological investigations turned up no evidence of seizures. The doctors concluded Cassandra’s problems were psychological, most likely part of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the abduction, a diagnosis she already carried. She was given a prescription for antidepressant medication and sent home.

  Mrs. Baker didn’t see a significant change in Cassandra on the antidepressant, so she persisted in her efforts to pressure the parents into getting more treatment for Cassandra. She claimed the various difficult behaviors were soon going to make it impossible to keep Cassandra in regular education. She kept insisting the parents continue searching for help. Consequently, Cassandra was eventually referred to one of the senior child psychiatrists affiliated with our unit at the hospital. He spent time in Cassandra’s school, observing her, then met with both Cassandra and her parents. In the end he decided it would be beneficial to bring Cassandra to the unit as an inpatient for observation and assessment.

  The child psychiatrist, Dave Menotti, was to oversee the case, but I was given the individual daily therapy sessions with Cassandra. Dave’s thinking was that my experience with psychogenic language problems might prove useful here, even though her occasional mutism was not the presenting problem. He described her to me as a child “where something doesn’t add up,” which I knew meant we were still very much in the diagnostic stage. While we assumed we had the source of her problems—the twenty-six-month abduction—we had no understanding of how that pieced together with her difficulties now.

  Chapter

  3

  Cassandra and I sat together at the table, examining the drawing she had done of her family.

  “That’s really quite an elaborate picture. Can you tell me more about it?”

  “There I am. Up in the sky,” she said. “I look down on everyone. I can see everyone. I can see everything from the sky.”

  “That sounds interesting, being able to see everything.”

  She nodded. “I like being an alien.”

  “If I were an alien, I think I would feel lonely,” I said, “because I’d feel I was different from everyone else. I’d feel like an outsider.”

  “No, not me. I like it,” she replied. “Because I can travel in a rocket ship.”

  Cassandra was a rather wriggly little girl, squirming around in her seat, bending her head down and around in a way that allowed her to look up at me while I regarded the picture. There was something coy about her behavior. This made me wonder if she had chosen to draw herself as an alien because she genuinely felt like an alien or if she had chosen to do it as a way of engaging me, as a sort of savvy assessment of what she’d thought a therapist would be interested in.

  “And here we have your family,” I said. “Yes? Your mother, your stepfather, your two sisters—”

  “And the fish. The fish, too,” she interrupted and pointed to them.

  “Ah, I thought they were leftover from when you were experimenting with shapes …”

  “No, they’re living in the sky like it was an aquarium. Goldfish. Really, they’re a family, too. That big one’s the dad. And that’s the mom goldfish. And those are the babies. They belong to my other family.”

  “I see.”

  “Those are my other family there. Remember, because I told you already. They’re outside the aquarium, looking in. That’s why they’re small.” She pointed to the snakes. “Really they’re not snakes. They got snake costumes on.”

  “They’re not snakes?”

  Cassandra laughed at this. “Silly! They’re people!” She laughed again. “That’s Daddy Snake and Mama Snake and the kid Snakes. And there’s the Minister Snake. And that’s Cowboy Snake. And that’s Fairy Snake.”

  “I thought you just said they were people,” I replied, a little confused.

  “They are,” she said cheerfully. “‘Snake’ is their last name. That’s because they dress up in snake costumes all the time, so that’s why people started calling them that. And really I’m Cassandra Snake when I live with them.”

  “Why do they dress up in snake costumes?”

  “Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!” she replied in an unexpectedly loud, singsong voice.

  I sat back.

  She laughed shrilly.

  I sat quietly without speaking.

  “Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!”

  She laughed again, writhed in her seat, and fluttered her hands. Then taking up a black marking pen, she drew strong black lines across the picture in a random, rather frenzied manner. The lines didn’t color over anything or appear to be there to cover up anything. The way she did them, they appeared to be just marks, slashes across the page, as if her inner environment had become too much to control and these marks simply exploded forth like lightning strikes.

  Saying nothing, I just sat, waiting.

  This outburst lasted about three minutes. Then slowly Cassandra came back into herself and grew quieter. She was still laughing in a rather peculiar way. It was almost what I’d describe as a lascivious, sleazy kind of laugh. Certainly it implied sexuality to me, which, I suppose, given the “snakes” and the outburst regarding “ding-dong,” “willy,” and “Peter,” was perfectly possible.

  Still I said absolutely nothing. I kept my expression as bland as possible so that she would not interpret my silence as disapproving, but I continued to sit motionless.

  At last Cassandra fell completely quiet. The interesting thing about this episode, to my mind, was that not once did she take her eyes off me during the whole course of it. Her eye contact was quite extraordinary, but it also implied to me that my reaction was very important to this whole little drama. I sensed she was doing it for me, that she was expecting me to behave in a certain manner as well and she had to keep a close watch in order to see what I was going to do or, possibly, to adjust her own behavior as necessary.

  When she was finally reduced to sitting quietly again in the chair beside me, her great dark eyes still fixed on my face, I said, “You know, I think you did that as a way of getting away from what we were talking about. Sometimes magicians do that trick. They say, ‘Look over here,’ because they want your attention over here so that you aren’t paying attention to over there and they can hide something away without your noticing.”

  There was a long, long silence. She pressed her hands together prayer fashion and pushed them down between her legs on the chair. Straightening her elbows, this pushed her shoulders up, like a frozen shrug. Her eyes were still locked on mine.

  There was a flicker. She looked away for just a very brief moment, then back at me. “Can I go now?” she asked. “I’m tired. I’m done with this. I want to go back to the dayroom.”

  The children’s psychiatric unit was on the seventh floor of the hospital. When one first came off the elevator and turned left, there was a long corridor that contained administrative offices, many of which were not affiliated with our unit. At the far end were the two sets of double locked doors through which one entered the unit itself. Immediately beyond the doors to the left was the nurses’ station, and to the right, the dayroom where the children gathered to relax and play w
hen they weren’t in the unit classroom, attending therapy sessions, or participating in activities. The sleeping rooms were down two short corridors that branched off the opposite side of the dayroom from the nurses’ station. Most accommodated two children each, although there were four single rooms. All locked. In all, the unit could accommodate twenty-eight children between the ages of three and eleven.

  Beyond the dayroom, to the left of the nurses’ station, was a third short corridor, and it was here where the two therapy rooms were, plus a miscellany of utilitarian rooms—an examination room, a med room, a walk-in linen room, and an odd little room that was about twenty feet long but only about six feet wide. Various kinds of technical equipment, like video cameras, recorders, and monitors, were stored just inside the door, whereas at the far end, there was a teeny, tiny kitchen, narrow as a boat’s galley.

  It was down among these rooms that I had my office, which I shared with Helen, a clinical social worker, whose main task was liaising with children after they had left. Consequently, she spent only a small amount of time each week actually on the unit, and I normally had the office to myself.

  The room was a curious mixture of the industrial and the macabre. A set of cast-iron pipes went through the room. This would have been ordinary enough, had they been in the corner of the room or ordinary-sized pipes, associated with something like the central heating. These, however, sprung up about three feet in from the near-side wall and varied in size between three and six inches in diameter, so it was like having a stand of trees in the office. Iron trees. Or rather, just their trunks, passing through the room.

  Moreover, in the old days, the room had been used for electric shock therapy. This had long since been discontinued, but the evidence was still there in the form of odd knobs and disconnected wires and the indentations of long-since-removed equipment on the walls. These things had since been painted over, indeed, many times, giving them a blobby, indistinct form.