by Torey Hayden
“I’m a little confused,” I said. “Made what up? In relation to what? When you say Drake can’t talk, how do you mean this?”
“That he can’t talk,” she wailed. “I made it up.”
“You made up about him talking? How did you do that? I’m still confused, Lucia. Are you meaning he can’t talk to anyone else except you? Or do you mean he actually can’t say much? Like, for example, when I listened to the tape you made, you were only doing nursery rhymes. Are you trying to say he can’t talk beyond that kind of thing?”
“That’s not Drake,” she wailed. “It’s my nephew.”
“Where? How do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.
“On the tape. When I was sitting him for my sisterin-law. I made the tape with him. It isn’t Drake.”
I stared in disbelief.
“Drake has something wrong in his genes. His voice box is not proper.” She was sobbing again as she said this, her own voice too agonized to be soft. Everyone else in Starbucks was getting embarrassed by this time, so we were perhaps the most alone we’d thus far been.
“So let me see if I understand this,” I said. “You are saying Drake has a genetic problem that has physically affected his ability to speak? That that wasn’t him on the tape? That he literally cannot speak?”
She nodded.
“But …” I said, “that report from the Mayo Clinic? It said there was nothing physically wrong with Drake.”
“I rewrote it.”
“What?”
“When it came, I rewrote it. I photocopied the pages and then wrote new things and pasted them over and photocopied it again, so that it had the letterhead on it. So everyone thought that’s what it said when it came. But really it didn’t. It said about the genes. About his cords being deformed. And he has other problems. It affects his legs as well.”
“Who all knows about this?”
“No one,” she said in a tiny, tiny voice.
“What about Drake’s father?”
“No. I could not tell him. He has so many worries that he is not perfect for his father. How could I tell him I have given him a deformed son? The burden would be too great for him.” Then she collapsed into tears yet again.
I got up to get us more napkins, to get myself more coffee, and, for just that moment, to get some breathing space.
When I returned, Lucia was more composed. Head still down, she had her shoulders drawn up around her ears almost as if she expected me to strike her.
“That must have been very hard to tell me,” I said, as I sat down. “I appreciate that you did. For Drake’s sake, we need to know the truth on this matter.”
“It is so important to Father Sloane that everything is perfect,” she murmured. “He is so hard on Skip. Skip has nerves because of it. He takes pills every morning. To keep from—He cannot face his father. He cannot even stand in the same room.” And she broke down again.
“So all this … ‘disguising the truth’ … has happened because of Mr. Sloane? Old Mr. Sloane? You’ve done this because of … what? Pressure? Pressure to …”
“How could I say my son was deformed? To him? Say I have these bad genes in me to make a defective child? I cannot sleep at night, knowing I have made a son like this, because Father Sloane will be so angry when he finds out. He will disown Drake. He will insist Skip divorces me.”
“Surely not,” I said. “Those are ideas from another era. Having met Mr. Sloane, I can well imagine how angry he might be, but he wouldn’t be able to actually make you and Skip get a divorce, if you didn’t want to. Men don’t have that kind of power in this country.”
“It is not so simple,” she replied. “What laws say in a country and what laws say in a family are often different.”
Which was true. Abuse comes in many forms. And merely because it is against the law doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
I sat back. All that was in my mind was poor, poor Drake, shouldering a burden that had proved too heavy for both his parents to carry.
Chapter
29
We had been in the coffee shop over two hours, and I was growing anxious about the time. I didn’t know what kinds of arrangements Lucia had made for Drake or the rest of her life during our meeting, but I was concerned she was not going to be able to stay much longer, and I feared she might suddenly bolt.
Where from here? I looked at the police brochure on domestic violence, still on the table in front of me. That wouldn’t do much good. Indeed, none of the things I’d brought with me would be much help. Here, almost two hundred miles from my own support network and too far away to be able to see either Lucia or Drake myself on a regular basis, I was frighteningly aware of having to “think on my feet” here. I felt quite inadequate for the job.
Meanwhile, Lucia, at long last, seemed to be regaining a hold on her composure. The horrible story finally related, she looked exhausted but increasingly relaxed.
“We have a dilemma here,” I said. “Time’s getting on. I’m concerned you’ll need to get back shortly because of Drake. Or because Skip or Mr. Sloane will miss you. I’m thinking also that you’re probably feeling very tired by this point.”
She nodded in a heartfelt way.
“The dilemma is that we’re a long ways apart. If both you and I were in the city, I’d suggest we meet together a few more times so that we could explore the situation more thoroughly and come up with the best way of resolving all of this. Unfortunately, we don’t really have that option.”
“No,” she said.
“But I think we do need to resolve it. The way things are now, it’s very unfair to Drake. He isn’t getting the services he needs, for one thing. Worse, however, is that when he is with people like myself, we are trying to make him do something he genuinely can’t do. The whole time he was on the unit, I was working hard with him to get him to talk and my methods would have been acceptable if he were really electively mute. But because he wasn’t, I was putting pressure on him to do something he, in fact, couldn’t do. That must have made him feel terrible.”
Tears sprung to Lucia’s eyes again.
I reached across the table and touched her arm. “No, it’s okay. I’m not trying to make you feel bad saying that. I know you already feel bad; I know this has had to be so very hard on both you and your husband. People don’t do extreme things unless they feel there are no other alternatives. So I know, however badly things may have turned out, you weren’t trying to hurt Drake.”
Lower lip clenched between her teeth, she shook her head.
“But now that we know what’s going on,” I said, “the time has come to say things have gone far enough. The time has come to stop supporting the old man’s view of the world and start supporting Drake’s. We just have to figure out how to do that.”
“I don’t know how,” she said tearfully. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s all right. That’s why we’re both here. We’ll do it together. I’m not going to say, ‘I’m off now, back to the city. You sort it out.’ I’ll help you do it. But we need to figure out how to go about it, given that I don’t live very close.” I smiled at her. “But we will figure it out.”
Opening another napkin, Lucia wiped her eyes. She nodded.
“What needs to be done, of course, is to tell the old man the truth,” I said. “That’s going to be the hard part. But eventually we do need to do it.”
She grimaced but nodded faintly.
“Perhaps the place to start all this would be by telling Skip. Telling him you altered the Mayo report. And made the tape with your nephew, not Drake.”
Lucia didn’t respond.
“Do you think you could do that?”
There was a long pause followed by a long sigh. She squirmed slightly. “I do not want to give him more problems. He already takes the pills. They are so he does not try to take his life.” A small pause. “Because this happened. Last year. He was in the car in the garage.”
“I see.”
“So I do not want to give him more problems.”
“Yes, I can understand,” I said. “And I can understand better why it felt right to you to keep Drake’s disability a secret, if your husband has felt under such great pressure from his family himself and has tried to take his own life. But keeping secrets from him might not be a helpful way to deal with all this. My experience is that what is kept from us is often much more destructive to us than what we know.”
Lucia nodded.
“So perhaps the place to start is for you to tell Skip. Do you think you can do that?”
Lucia drew in a breath. “I will try.”
“Good. Then phone me. When Skip knows, give me a call. We’ll make plans of where to go from there,” I said. “In the meantime, I’d like to see the original report from the Mayo Clinic. Would that be all right? Would you give me permission to write them and ask them to send me a copy?”
“Yes,” she said.
A small silence slipped in, allowing the clink of dishes and silverware, the steamy whoosh of the coffee machines, and the chatter of the other patrons in the coffee shop to loom up around us.
“And, of course, at some point,” I said softly, “there’s going to be an unpleasant confrontation. No virtue in pretending that isn’t going to happen. But it’s usually easier to tolerate such things if you have support, if you know that others will care what is happening to you and you can share it with them. It’s also usually easier if you know you are doing the right thing. So, whatever the old man says or tries to do, you don’t have to bear it alone. None of you does, not you, not Skip, not Drake. If the old Mr. Sloane can’t tolerate the fact Drake isn’t the perfect grandson he needs, then it may be time to leave him to his views and make a different kind of life for yourselves. The whole world is not here in Quentin. There are many people who will understand and accept Drake and you and Skip, just as you are. As for doing the right thing, have absolutely no doubt this is what you are doing in talking to me now. And know you have already done the hardest part, which is to own up to having made a mistake.”
“Okay,” Lucia said. She let out a long breath and looked at her watch. “I do need to go now. But thank you. Thank you very much.”
“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.
Chapter
30
When 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.