Twilight Children

by Torey Hayden

  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.

  “I’m going to change her clothes,” I said. “Right now she is wearing pajamas, but I think it’s time for some day clothes, don’t you?”

  Cassandra looked over at my doll. It was a slow, almost turgid movement, as if she were having to turn through a thick fluid. She said nothing.

  “What about this long dress? If we look through the box, we’ll find a sunbonnet that matches it.
Would you look for it for me?”

  Cassandra regarded me. She didn’t answer.

  “The lady who made this outfit wanted it to seem old-fashioned. Like perhaps one of the dolls was traveling west on a wagon train in the old days. So she made this long dress with lace on it like they wore in those days and a sunbonnet, because often the women and girls would walk alongside the wagon as they traveled and they didn’t want to get a sunburn.”

  Cassandra stared at the doll in my hands.

  “Cassandra?”

  Again, the slow, solemn turning of her head.

  “When we work together in here, I’ll always keep you safe.”

  She glanced only briefly at my face and then away, staring into the space beside my chair.

  “Sometimes we’re going to work on hard things together, but you will decide how fast we go. We’re not going to do anything that is too scary or too difficult. And I’m strong. If your feelings get too big, I’ll help you with them. They won’t be too big for me to handle. And I won’t be scared by them.”

  She continued to stare, unfocused.

  “Cassandra?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I reached out and turned her face toward me. “How does that sound to you?”

  She didn’t meet my eyes. Even though I had reoriented her head, she kept her eyes averted.

  A pause.

  I lowered my hand. Leaning forward, I sorted through the apple box until I found the sunbonnet.

  “Look. Here it is. See, it matches the dress.”

  She regarded the sunbonnet.

  “Would you like to try it on her?” I held the dark-haired doll out to her.

  She took it. Laying the doll on the table, she carefully pulled on the sunbonnet and tied it under the doll’s chin. Then she held the doll up.

  I smiled. “What do you think?”

  She didn’t say. Indeed, she didn’t speak again for the remainder of the session.

  Chapter

  7

  The next morning when Cassandra arrived for her session, she was once more her usual outgoing self. I had the box of dolls sitting on the table again, but this time she went right past them and over to the shelves behind me.

  “I want to draw today,” she said. “I can do what I want in here, can’t I? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?”

  “You’d like to draw today?”

  “That’s the way it worked at the psychologist’s I went to before. ’Cause I’ve been places like this before. If you thought you were special, you’re not. My other psychologist’s name was Dr. Brown. Adele Brown. But she wasn’t brown. She was pink. Whitey-pink. Ugly whitey-pink. She was ugly. You’re ugly. I think you’re ugly, too.”

  “I see.”

  “And at ugly whitey-pink Adele Brown’s, I could do whatever I wanted. That’s what she said. That I could do whatever I wanted. So that’s what I can do in here, too.”

  “You’re telling me you want to do whatever you please,” I said.

  “Yup. And I’m going to. And you can’t stop me.”

  “You can do as you please in here as long as it doesn’t involve destroying things or hurting yourself or me. I would stop you then. That isn’t allowed here.”

  Cassandra looked at me, a rather evil glint in her eye. “You can’t stop me doing anything, if I really want.”

  “If it’s necessary, I can,” I said quietly, “because those are the rules here and they’re here to protect us. So I won’t allow you to break them. But I am quite certain that isn’t how we want to spend our time.”

  “You couldn’t stop my daddy. He’s bigger and stronger than you.”

  “You feel your daddy is very powerful and he can do what he wants. But if he were here, he’d have to follow the rules, too. In here I don’t allow anyone to destroy things or hurt people.”

  “My daddy’s the Hulk! Boom!” she cried and threw her hands out expansively. “Nobody can stop him when he turns into the Hulk. He’d beat you up in a minute! Boom! When he gets angry, he goes from being ordinary to being huge. A huge green monster. All his clothes rip apart.” She leaped from the chair and demonstrated by pretending to tear off her clothes. “Even his underpants rip apart. Then you see his big green weenie. His weenie would hit you on the head and you’d fall down dead.”

  “That’s what you picture happening,” I said.

  “Yeah!” she cried enthusiastically, leaping around. “That’s what I want to happen. I want to see you dead.” I smiled slightly and didn’t speak.

  “That’s what would happen!” she said, as if I’d rebuffed her. “My daddy would kill you with his dick.”

  “You seem excited by that idea.”

  “Yeah! You’d be dead! My daddy’s so much stronger than you! Then I’d stomp up and down on your guts!”

  “Cassandra, sit down, please.”

  She didn’t. She continued jumping up and down.

  “Cassandra, sit down, please.”

  She continued to jump. However, the quality of the jumping changed almost immediately from frenzied to defiant.

  I watched her. Part of the reason I’d asked her to sit down was to help her keep from being swamped by what I sensed were very strong, scary emotions, but partly it was also to see how in control of her behavior she actually was, how much of it she was directing.

  Quite a lot, it seemed. She jumped boldly a few more times, staring me right in the eye, challenging me to stop her. When I simply sat but insisted again she also sit down, she gave two or three more jumps to save face, then stopped and sat down.

  Silence followed. Cassandra looked at me. Again I noticed what extraordinary eye contact she had. When caught in her gaze, I had almost a sense of violation. I found it hard not to want to escape it.

  A dominance technique? Had she discovered this was a good way to gain power over others? Or was it more self-protective than that? Was she watching me so carefully because she felt the need to anticipate what I was going to do next? I didn’t know.

  More silence. Cassandra kept watching me.

  “Know what? I don’t like you,” she said finally.

  “Yes, so you’ve said. Why is that?” I asked.

  “I don’t like the way you look. I think you’re ugly. I’m not going to work for you. I’m not going to do anything but sit here.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that because it will certainly be very boring sitting here every day, doing nothing,” I replied.

  “I’m going to do it because it’ll make you mad,” Cassandra said. “Whatever you want me to do, I’m not going to do it. So you might as well know that now.”

  “You sound very concerned about who’s in control here.”

  “I’m not going to listen to you either.”

  “Once I had a boy in here whose name was Liam. One of the first things he told me was that I couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want. He wasn’t going to do any work for me. He wasn’t going to listen to a single thing I said.”

  Which was a story. I’d never had a Liam. But I’d found one of the best techniques for approaching problem areas was to ascribe the difficult behaviors or incidents to someone else.

  “Liam thought that if he was—” I continued.

  “I’m not listening to you,” Cassandra said. She put her hands over her ears.

  “Liam thought that if he knew everything that was going to happen, then—”

  “I’m not listening,” she said, hands still clamped over her ears. “La-la-la-la-la!” she started to sing in an effort to drown out my words.

  “Yes, you’re right. If you don’t want to listen, I can’t make you listen. Just like I can’t make you talk, if you decide you don’t want to talk. You decide things like that. And as I said yesterday, we will not do anything that feels too scary or too difficult. If it feels too scary to listen, then we’ll start with not listening.”

  Cassandra exploded up gleefully, throwing her hands in the air. “So I can do anything I want in
here! You just said so yourself! I can do anything and you can’t stop me.”

  I sat back and smiled with what I hoped was a very patient smile.

  “I’m going to draw,” Cassandra announced. “That’s what I want to do.” She flounced around the table to where the paper was kept on the shelves behind me and took a handful of sheets. She returned to the table, opened my box of tricks, and took out the smaller box containing the crayons and marking pens.

  Then a pause.

  She pushed the first sheet of paper over in front of me. “I want you to draw first. Draw a squiggle.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Draw a squiggle, so that I can draw. That’s what my other psychologist did. She always drew a squiggle and then I would make a picture from it.”

  “I see,” I said. “So you want me to do the same?”

  “That’s what Dr. Brown did.”

  “You like things to go exactly the same, don’t you? You don’t want any surprises.”

  “Just do it,” Cassandra said. “I’m telling you, and you got to do anything I say.”

  “You want these sessions to be just like Dr. Brown’s sessions. You want to tell me what to do.”

  “Would you quit repeating what I say? Draw.” She shoved the pen right under my nose.

  This demand to draw felt to me less like an effort to connect and communicate and more like a plain old-fashioned power struggle of the sort I’d had much experience with while teaching. Consequently, I said, “No, thank you.”

  “Yes. I say.”

  “No. In here each person is responsible for her own behavior. You have the right to decide what you are going to do, but you don’t have the right to decide for me.”

  “Dr. Brown let me. It’s what you let kids do at the psychologist’s. You’re so stupid. You don’t know anything. I’m supposed to be able to do what I want in here, and I want you to draw a squiggle.”

  “You know what I hear you saying?” I said. “I hear you saying you want to control everything in here. You want to be able to say what you will do and you want to be able to say what I will do, too.”