Twilight Children

by Torey Hayden

  “He must have loved her very much to do that,” I said.

  Edward gave a half shrug and twitched up the corner of his mouth. “I suppose they did love each other. In a way. But it was love without respect. One of those marriages of the kind they had in those days, when people had to stay together for economic reasons. I mean, how could my father respect someone who didn’t want to do anything with herself but live out in the sticks with a bunch of animals? My mother is just plain stubborn. She acts so meek and mild, but she controlled us all that way. Not by doing things, but by not doing things.”

  “Yes, families can be challenging, can’t they?” I said.

  “It’s not that I don’t care about her,” Edward replied. “I do. But she is just plain stubborn. She wants things all her own way. The number of times I’ve said to her, ‘Mother, you need to move into town. Why don’t we sell this place and you can get one of those nice apartments in a retirement community.’ We have a couple of them near us, where we live in Detroit, and that would have been ideal. I could take care of her then. So I have offered to help. But what does my mother say? She says, ‘What about my cats?’ I told her, ‘Well, they’re not going to take dozens of cats, are they? But then nobody needs dozens of cats.’ I said, ‘Get it down to one. Maybe we can find a place that would take one.’ But, of course, she’d rather have cats than people. Which goes to show what her mind is like. And it always was like that. She always preferred cats. I used to shoot them when we got too many. I learned to use a .22 that way, shooting those blamed cats, because half of them were wild anyway. But Mother is just like her sister, my aunt Louisa. Both of them loved to be miserable and gloomy.”

  As he talked, I just sat, staring into my empty Styrofoam cup. There was nothing I could say.

  I didn’t want to go in to see Gerda afterward. I didn’t want to look into her eyes after this meeting. On some level it felt as if I had betrayed her. I hadn’t, of course. Things had been no more in my control than hers. Being there as a professional, however, being there among the decision makers, I nonetheless felt guilt by association.

  But then, what choice was there? How could the decision have gone any other way? Unable to walk, to talk, to stand, to bathe herself, to use the toilet alone, she couldn’t live alone. As she was, she wouldn’t yet even be able to cope with assisted living. So it had been a fair, reasonable, and inevitable decision. Sadly, just not the way life should have to be.

  After another cup of coffee to fortify myself, I did go in to see her, walking the long, narrow corridor of the rehabilitation center to her door, second to last on the right. Sitting up in the chair beside the bed, she was alone in the room.

  I pulled up the orange plastic visitor’s chair. “I’m sorry about the way things have gone. Sorry you aren’t getting to go home.”

  She gazed at me. Something in the damage the stroke had done seemed to make it difficult for her to communicate straightforwardly, even with gestures, so she seldom even nodded or shook her head in response to conversation.

  “Perhaps further down the line,” I said. “Perhaps if you keep working hard. Because you have improved a lot since the stroke.”

  She continued to gaze at me a moment or two longer, her blue, blue eyes on my face. I gazed back, studying their blueness, seeing the cloudiness of age and wondering vaguely if blue eyes went bluer in old people, because it seemed that way to me.

  “Sitting in the twilight,” Gerda said.

  I smiled at her.

  Her eyes drifted away from me to some unseen point beyond.

  “Fire in the haystack that autumn,” she said softly. “We didn’t have no hay for the winter. Mama says sell the horse, can’t feed the horse and us, too. Papa says, ‘No money in that horse, except for the glue factory. Won’t no one buy that horse for anything else.’”

  Gerda paused.

  “Sitting outside in the twilight,” she continued quietly. “A cold night. Frost is coming. Moon’s coming up. Autumn moon, laying on the hill. Tim’s in the corral. Munching. I say, ‘Don’t eat so much, boy. Please, don’t eat so much.’ I say, ‘I’ll take care of you.’ I’m going to work. I tell Papa this. Papa says ‘You’re useless, girl.’”

  “How old were you?” I asked. Gerda didn’t seem to be able to answer direct questions when she was expressing one of these memories. Any time I asked, she went on as if I had said nothing. But I kept trying.

  She just sat.

  When she didn’t answer, I said, “That must have been hard for you, your parents threatening to sell Tim.”

  “Mama had too many mouths to feed. Sitting outside on the step, no one notices. Twilight’s come. No one notices.”

  “It’s awful when you’re little and you can’t make anyone hear you. Especially when you’ve got feelings about something and no one realizes,” I said. “I remember when I was small, we had this mother cat who kept having kittens and my family were always getting rid of them. I always tried to stop them, but lots of times I couldn’t. It upset me so much.”

  “Sitting on the porch steps in the twilight,” Gerda said. “Not day nor night. Nothing. No one can see what’s in the twilight. Might as well be nothing. Papa can’t see I was there. Says we’ll sell Tim. Didn’t matter what I wanted. Can’t see I was there.”

  Chapter

  33

  Tor once, when I arrived for my session with Cassandra, she wasn’t in the seclusion room. Indeed, she wasn’t even in the dayroom, where she usually waited for me. She was in the unit classroom with the other children, who were all sitting around a big table, doing work in the individual folders sent in from their various schools.

  This unexpectedly ordinary scene startled me, making me aware of how seldom I had seen Cassandra in any context that might be deemed “normal.” It pleased me as well. Chaotic and traumatic as the last week had been, clearly we were making progress.

  Cheerfully Cassandra came with me. She was dressed in her dancer’s clothes again—black leggings and long-sleeved T-shirt with a brightly colored short-sleeved T-shirt over top—and for some reason had only socks on and not shoes. She sprinted ahead of me and turned not one but three cartwheels in a row down in the corridor.

  “You’re very lively today!” I said.

  “Yeah, I know.” She turned a fourth cartwheel.

  My first inclination was to correct her, to point out that the corridor was not really a place for turning cartwheels, that the floor was hard and that wearing only socks meant she might slip and hurt herself, that there were doors all along the corridor and someone might come out and bump into her; however, I held my tongue. Cartwheels weren’t an ideal thing to do there, but they were a whole lot more acceptable for an energetic child than being a pterodactyl or throwing oneself against the walls of a padded cell. So I smiled instead and put my arm out when we arrived at the therapy room.

  “Come here. Here’s our room.”

  Cassandra bounded in past me.

  “We’re going to do something different today,” I said. I turned out the lights and closed the door. As it was overcast outside and the room faced north, we fell into murky daytime darkness.

  Cassandra had meanwhile leaped up onto the table. She ran from one end to the other and jumped down.

  Going over to a small cassette recorder on the shelf, I turned it on. Soft, slow classical music started playing.

  “Hey, cool!” Cassandra cried and leaped back up on the table. She shot to the other end again and leaped off.

  “I can see you have lots of energy today. In fact, I’m a little concerned you might hurt yourself doing that. Come over here. We’re going to do something different. See these pillows on the floor over here? We’re going to sit on them. We’re going to lie back and get really relaxed.”

  “How come?”

  “Because we’re going to talk today. And I want us to feel lazy and relaxed.”

  “Why are we going to talk? What are we going to talk about?” Cassandra asked. She started to climb
on the table again. “I don’t want to talk. I want to draw.”

  “Yes, I’m sure you do. But today we’re going to do this.” Coming to the table, I grabbed hold of her as she prepared to charge off. I didn’t want it to appear I was restraining her, so I made a big playful show of wrapping her in a bear hug, which, of course, was around her thighs, as she was on the table. Grabbing her tightly, I lifted her right off the table.

  “Wow! You’re strong!” she cried as I started to carry her over to the pillows. “Wow! Do that again! Catch me again off the table!”

  “No. We’re going to sit down here and do this.” I was still holding her tightly around the thighs. I didn’t set her down. “All right?”

  Cassandra drummed playfully on the top of my head.

  “All right?” I asked again, keeping my tight grasp.

  “All right,” she said in a somewhat deflated voice.

  I let her down. After a moment’s hesitation, she did sit with me on the pillows.

  “So what’s so important to talk about?” she asked.

  “We’re going to relax first. Get really comfy. Listen to how soft the music is. Take deep breaths so we feel really good. Then I want you to tell about what happened to you when you were with your dad.”

  “Why do you keep making me talk about that?”

  “Because the way we get rid of your Troubled Place is by opening it up and cleaning it out, so there is nothing in it anymore.”

  “Dr. Brown never made me talk about it.”

  “I’m not Dr. Brown,” I said.

  “Dr. Brown’d tell you not to do that.”

  “Not to do what?” I asked.

  “Make me talk about my dad taking me. Dr. Brown said to my mom, ‘Don’t ever make her talk about it. She’ll get psychological damage.’” Cassandra looked at me in a pointed way.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “She did say that. I heard her. I was in the other room, but I was sat really, really close to the door. And she said that.”

  Silence.

  Cassandra was watching me in that intent, unflinching manner she had. Indeed, she’d sat bolt upright again to fix me more firmly in her gaze.

  “Know what?” I replied. “If I heard someone say that about an experience I’d had, it would make me feel scared.”

  Cassandra’s expression was one of confident superiority. She even had a little smile on her lips. “I’m not scared. Dr. Brown was just trying to take care of me. She was a better doctor than you.”

  “To me,” I replied, “Dr. Brown saying that makes it sound like talking about your abduction would be a very dangerous thing to do. Doesn’t it? If it were me in your shoes, I’d think ‘Wow, that experience must be really powerful. Even just talking about it can hurt. And I actually had to live through it, so I must be really damaged already.’ If I were in your shoes, I’d probably even think, ‘I better never say anything to anyone about what happened. Then I’d get more damaged. Even worse, if I talk about it, maybe I will damage the people I tell it to as well. Maybe I will hurt my mom and people I love if I tell them about this. I better lock it up good and tight inside me, so no one gets hurt.’”

  Cassandra was no longer smiling, but she didn’t take her eyes from my face. The energetic silliness had vanished. She sat very still.

  “You’re a very clever girl, Cassandra. You pay careful attention to many things. And that’s good. But I’m going to tell you an important secret now. Something you really need to know. And it’s this: not everything you hear is right. And in this instance, that thing wasn’t right.”

  “But Dr. Brown said it. She said it to my mom. I heard it.”

  “Yes, I believe you. But it still doesn’t make what you heard true. There’s several possible reasons why you heard Dr. Brown say that. One possibility is simply that Dr. Brown was wrong. Just because people are grown up or well educated or important doesn’t mean they are always right. Perhaps she didn’t understand the matter herself quite correctly, so she thought she was saying something that was true, but it wasn’t. Another possibility is that Dr. Brown said something like that but you didn’t quite hear it right, because sometimes it’s hard for kids to understand what adults say. Another possibility is that Dr. Brown was answering some very specific question your mother asked and for that specific thing, it was best not to talk about it more, or for that specific period in time it was best not to talk about it more, but Dr. Brown didn’t mean forever. Or another possibility is simply that Dr. Brown and I do things differently, that we will arrive at the same point eventually but we have different ideas of how to get there. And because you are working with me now, we will go my way, because I know it best. And my way says that that is untrue. Talking about what happened will not hurt you. And it is an important part of getting well.”

  Cassandra grimaced.

  “It’s also important for me to say here that I’m never going to make you talk about these things,” I said. “I’ve told you this before, but it is worth reminding you of it. If at any time any of this is too scary or too hard, all you have to say to me is ‘Stop’ and we’ll stop. We’ll do something else for a while, until you feel more ready. I promise that. But simply talking about your abduction, talking about how it happened, what happened, who was involved, all those things—they are important to talk about. Know why?”

  “Unh-unh,” she said and shook her head.

  “Because then they aren’t secret anymore. Then you will not have to keep a Troubled Place inside you to hide all these things in.

  “Our minds are kind of funny things. When something really big happens to us, it tends to stay really big in our minds and won’t become a proper memory unless we talk about it. Our minds, on their own, don’t seem to be able to get big events sorted out enough to squish them down into a size to fit with our other memories. We need to talk about it. Talking helps our minds to organize what happened—helps us understand how it occurred and how we felt and what we did. Sort of like you have a big laundry basket full of clean washing, sitting in the middle of your bedroom floor. It takes up lots of room. You see it every time you come in your room and maybe you’ll trip over it, if you aren’t watching out. But if you organize it—fold all the towels, roll up the socks—then you can put everything away neatly. Talking does that for our thoughts. It lets us put away things that have happened to us, so that they aren’t in the way every time we are thinking.

  “This isn’t just true of bad things. It’s true for anything big, even really good things. If you won a million dollars, for example, the first thing you’d want to do is tell everyone, wouldn’t you? You’d want to talk about it and relive it and remember every little detail until you got used to the idea of yourself as someone who won a great prize. It’s the same way if something bad happens. If, for example, you have a bad fall from your bike. You want to tell people about it, don’t you? You want to tell them what it felt like, where you were hurt, exactly how the accident happened. That’s how we cope with big things. We talk about them until our mind gets organized about what happened. Then they’re not such a big deal anymore. Finally they start to feel more like ordinary memories and we can stop thinking about them all the time. We don’t forget them. We never forget that we won that prize or we fell off our bike, but they’ve become just ordinary memories. They stop taking up all our thinking, just like the clothes in the laundry basket stop taking up all the space on our bedroom floor once the clothes are put away in the drawers. Then we can get on with what’s happening now in our lives and not worry any more about it.

  “But just the opposite happens if we have to keep something big a secret. First of all, we have to create a special place in our heads to keep it, and this is what the Troubled Place is. The Troubled Place is chock-full of stuff you can’t tell. Usually this is bad stuff. Scary stuff. And you have to do a special kind of trick with your mind to get the door shut on a Troubled Place so that all this bad, scary stuff doesn’t slip out into all your other thoughts.
You have to lock it up really tight, so even you can’t get in there very easily. If you don’t, then you don’t have any room in your mind for other thinking.

  “When you first do it, first create a Troubled Place and manage to get it locked up, it’s easy to think you’ve made it go away. But, in fact, this is the weird thing about Troubled Places. Just the opposite is true. A Troubled Place works just like a freezer does. Everything you put in there, it keeps really fresh, like it’s just happened. So if you accidentally crack open the door on the Troubled Place and look at anything that’s in there, that thing will hurt horribly all over again.”

  Cassandra had lain back on the pillows as I was talking. She was no longer looking at me, and she didn’t speak.

  “If you heard Dr. Brown say no one must talk to you about what happened, that must have been scary for you. I think if I’d heard someone say that, I would have felt what happened to me must be so awful that even the grown-ups around me were scared of it,” I said. “I’d be really frightened then because I’d think I needed to really keep my Troubled Place locked up tight. I mean, what would happen if I didn’t? What if it got out? What if I did say something, even accidentally, and it did lots of damage?”

  Tears had formed in the corners of Cassandra’s eyes. She was on her back on the pillows and the tears escaped, one running down either side of her temples.