Stolen Child

by Laurie Gough

  “The Rooneys’ house? Why?”

  “Just do it. You’ll see why.”

  Splashing through puddles as I traipsed my way in the rain to the Rooneys’ house — their street was blocked off from traffic that night — I passed more hoards of trick-or-treaters: a self-assured get-out-of-my-way Hermione Granger leading a pack of witchy girls with less intimidating gaits, a boy (or possibly a girl) dressed as a barbeque, and someone who looked like a badass Shirley Temple. Little boys with husky voices always crack me up and here was one coming at me dressed as an old man stumbling and grouching along the street with a cane. I thought for a moment he was the real thing, an old geezer four-and-a-half-feet tall, out trolling the neighbourhood for free candy, but then he called me by name and I recognized his voice as belonging to a kid in our neighbourhood.

  When I knocked on the front door of the Rooneys’ house, Brenda Rooney answered. She’s a striking woman in her sixties with straight, glossy silver hair and intelligent green eyes. As soon as she saw me, she took my wrist and pulled me inside. A lively Halloween party was happening and the house was filled with people I knew from Theatre Wakefield. Once in her living room she took me by both shoulders. “Laurie, my dear, I saw that email you wrote. Come with me.” Leading me by the arm she escorted me into her kitchen, then sat me down at her kitchen table. “Wait here a second.” She patted my back and left. A guy I knew was seated across from me, dressed as a garden gnome. Someone else at the table was dressed as a fallen fairy. This was the first year I hadn’t even thought about a costume. The year before I’d been Carol Burnett. Brenda returned with a glass of red wine. She set the glass down in front of me. “Drink this, you need it. On second thought, take the bottle.” She thunked the entire bottle of wine in front of me. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach more than one glass that evening but adored the gesture.

  I felt like something inside me was shaking loose, some unnamed raw emotion. I loved these people. They had no idea how much I needed all of this right now. Wakefield is such a caring community! Thank God I sent that letter! I took a gulp of wine. A friend named Zoe came over to say she wanted to treat me to a pedicure at the local spa because it was obvious I needed a break. People started telling me how sorry they were to hear about Quinn. Quinn had helped out as a stagehand in a play that Rob and I had been in the year before. They all knew Quinn. “He’s such a nice kid,” they said. “This is so sad. How can we help? Anything, anything at all.”

  “By doing exactly what you’re doing.” I took another swig of wine. “This is it right here. Just … talking to me. Thank you!”

  Over an hour later, someone came to tell me that Quinn had just been at the door with his friends and had given the message to meet him later at the Wakefield General Store. The kids wanted to keep trick-or-treating, to go to their English teacher’s condo because her boyfriend worked at Costco and the couple had lots of candy.

  I set my wine down on the table. Had someone else embellished this message? How could all those words have come out of Quinn’s mouth? Did one of his friends explain the long and detailed story?

  At the Wakefield General Store parking lot I sat in the car watching rain pelt the windshield. Through the mist, the silhouettes of stick-bare trees wavered in the wind beside the river. Nobody else was around. I couldn’t believe how long they’d been out there getting candy in this weather. Finally, Quinn in his ninja costume came sprinting toward the parking lot. He flashed me a wide grin and clambered into the back seat, ushering in a spray of rain along with him. Before I even got a word out, he said, “Whoa! You would not believe how many Kit Kats I think I have in here! And Coffee Crisps! And yippee, Tootsie Rolls! And Peanut Butter Cups! Hey, there’s some weird religious comic book in here, too. Oh, and bubble gum!”

  I held my heart in my throat for more, dangling suspended in starlit space. And then more came, the sound of riffling through the candy bag, the crinkling of wrappers. “And Smarties! And Caramilk! There must be twenty of those in here! And Rolos! I love Rolos! Wow, and SweetTarts! And a toothbrush?”

  Who was this child in my car?

  I turned on the ignition, creeping at a snail’s pace out of the parking lot, not wanting to drive too fast for fear of breaking the spell — whatever the spell was. I just knew I wanted this fragile moment never to end. I wanted this child in my back seat who was acting like the old Quinn to continue acting like the old Quinn.

  We kept driving toward home, the dark trees shimmering and dancing in the rain, a bright flicker of moon rising up through my chest. Quinn was talking with a jubilance that I’d almost forgotten used to inhabit his every breath. “I had so much fun, Mummy! We went to every house on Burnside! I saw lots of funny costumes. Lots of kids I know. All my friends were there. Oh, and I want to go back to school.”

  I cranked up the windshield wipers to the fastest setting, not sure why my vision was suddenly so blurry. “Great idea! Yes, I think you definitely should!”

  Quinn, are you really back? Did you fly through God’s body and come out saying trick-or-treat on someone’s doorstep? Have the child-stealing fairies brought you back to me? What is happening?

  I didn’t dare ask him what was happening. I didn’t want to jinx it. All I knew was I felt like we were inside some kind of quietly enchanted miracle as I drove us home in the rain that night.

  I seemed to have my son back.

  CHAPTER 26

  Every step in the dark turns out, in the end, to have been on course after all.

  — John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans that Will Save Your Life

  When we arrived at home, Quinn emptied the contents of his candy bag onto the living room floor and began sorting through chocolate bars, nacho chips, and various junky jellied things, talking non-stop about what candy looked interesting and what he’d throw away. There was no backtracking, no clenched fists, no erasing in our living room. Instead there was a regular happy kid with too much Halloween candy. The three of us lay sprawled on the floor around the mountain of junk food.

  “Daddy, one kid went as a soccer player. I might do that next year. Or maybe I’ll be Tom Branson from Downton Abbey. Oh, and you should have seen this one house. They gave out two chocolate bars each! I think some kids went back there twice. And you know Devon? Devon kept tripping because he had these dark glasses over his mask. We had to lead him around. And my English teacher? Her husband gave us so much candy from his work! Like, so much. Wanna see it?”

  Quinn’s voice had somehow become unleashed, was running free like a wild dog. I looked at Rob over a stash of potato chip bags in the throwaway pile. He gave me a look back that said, Is this real? Is this Quinn? Inside I was quietly exploding with joy.

  Quinn went back to school immediately after Halloween. What felt so strange about his return to himself was the un-strangeness of it all, that Quinn acted as if he’d never been gone in the first place. He was so completely the old Quinn that I was often overcome with an eerie sense that the previous months had been a hideous dream, one of those dreams where you are so deeply lost and absent from yourself that you feel like you’ve been buried in the ground for centuries and have to claw your way out of it. But then you wake up and the bad dream is suddenly, miraculously … over. Every day I’d say to Rob, “Is this really happening? He’s back? He’s actually outside with Liam and they’re on their bikes? He’s at the soccer field? He’s down the street with the whole gang playing kick the can?”

  One evening soon after Halloween, when I was still on shaky ground, still not convinced the OCD bully wouldn’t make a return call, I attended another meeting of the Ottawa OCD Parent Support Group in the diner on the outskirts of Ottawa. Around the circle we shared our stories. One woman told us about her ten-year-old son who had an irrational fear of contamination from bats. “He stays locked in his bedroom most of the day just in case there might be bat colony lurking around. It’s not as if
we have any pet bats flying through the house. All I’m allowed to do is open his bedroom door a crack, just enough to hand him a Lysol wipe. He’s missing his childhood because of this.” An older couple told us about their twenty-something son who should, they kept saying, be living on his own now, not in their basement sleeping all day. “He sleeps all day because he stays awake all night putting our house in order. All the Coke cans have to be lined up perfectly on the shelves, all the soup cans have to be lined up according to his rules. The worst is the recycling. He monitors it. He goes through every square inch of lousy paper to make sure it really is recyclable. We’re scared to throw stuff in there in case we’ve got it wrong. We go to bed early so he can get at it, start the ordering. It’s driving us completely bonkers.” This couple had never been to one of these meetings before and didn’t yet know about exposure response prevention. The wonderful woman who runs the support group suggested they not enable the OCD because that only feeds it and makes it worse. She suggested they stay up late to upset his routine, throw the recycling out any way they felt like it. “Stop letting OCD boss you around,” she told them.

  One man, a lawyer with spiky silver hair, regaled us with stories about his twenty-year-old son who’d had OCD for twelve years but was now over it. “When Jake was about ten he decided to stop putting his feet on the floor. That made walking kinda hard. One night there were all these firemen in our building because of some emergency. They saw Jake trying to crawl on his hands and knees down the hallway and felt so bad for him that you know what they did? They came back the next week with a goddamned fancy wheel chair with a big red bow on it!” He slapped his knee and cackled. “They thought he was too poor to afford a wheelchair.” After we all chuckled about this story the lawyer continued. “We finally got so fed up when he was nineteen that we sent him to an OCD treatment centre in Toronto. He was really excited about going but when we finally got there, he refused to get out of the car. My wife and I looked at each other in the front seat. We knew we had no choice but to tell him to get out. It’s the saddest thing to have to boot your unwell kid out onto the street. But you know what? He got better. Not at the treatment centre. He never went inside. But when he found himself suddenly out on the street he had no choice but to pick himself up and figure it out. Somehow he did that. He figured it out. He found people’s couches to sleep on. He found food. I don’t know how he did it, but he came back home his old self again.”

  I nodded, trying to blink back the tears stinging my eyes. “Something like that just happened with us,” I said. “At Halloween.”

  As one day passed into the next without a single sign of the OCD bully — our bright, funny boy completely himself again — I started to breathe normally, to sleep full nights. After a while, I realized I didn’t have to tiptoe around the subject so lightly. Quinn and I were riding our bikes across the covered bridge one afternoon in late November, the wind whipping up from the river below and smacking our chilled hands. “So, Quinn, how did your OCD just go away like that on Halloween? It just disappeared. I’m still in awe. In one moment it was just, poof ! Gone! How?”

  Quinn was riding beside me, his hair blown back from the breeze inside the bridge. “Mummy, it didn’t just go away in one moment. I had OCD all that night. I just wanted to be with my friends and to get candy more. The OCD kept wanting me to walk backward and count all my steps. I just pushed through. I just wanted to go out for Halloween.”

  And that was how he did it. With the determination of a soldier forging a raging river he made his way up that street crowded with costumed kids, broke through his thought-storms, and set himself free. Somehow on that Halloween night, not in a heartbeat or the pinprick of an instant after all, but gradually, door to door, he clawed his way back to himself.

  The way I think of it now is a perfect storm of events leading up to Halloween. He’d built a cocoon around himself with his OCD so nothing could hurt him again after his grandpa’s death. But everything began to change the day he climbed the tree, sending “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into the sky to join my dad, finally saying goodbye to his grandpa for good. (I would read later that we humans have an association of goodness with aboveness, our upper field of vision associated with abstract thinking, religious thought, and hallucinations. The afterlife of many religions and much ancient mythology is associated with the sky — heaven, sky burials, Mount Olympus. Jim Davies writes about how the association of “up” with goodness has persisted across cultures and time even for the nonreligious. To this day I’m fascinated that Quinn chose to let my dad go while he was high up in a tree. Also, just the fact that he was in a tree at all for that moment of letting go meant a lot. I believe we’re all deeply connected to trees more than we know — our ancient ancestors lived in them after all — and our collective psyche is still entwined in them. Kids the world over seem to feel this naturally every time they climb one.)

  After that emotional healing, Quinn still needed to get rid of the OCD etched in the pathways of his brain. The habits had become too strong just to disappear on their own. That’s where all the cognitive behaviour therapy came in. The ERP exercises that he and Rob had been working on so tirelessly did wonders. We were incredibly lucky that his brain was still young enough, still malleable enough, to change back so easily. Thank God for brain research. Then there was the letter. I never could have anticipated how much power there was in releasing our story out to our community like that. We needed normalcy back and we got it. But more than that, our desperate reaching out resulted in so much love and concern coming back to us that I believe some sublime community healing power was at work. I will be forever grateful for all the tender, passionate wide-open hearts of Wakefield, all tramping toward the sun’s evening reflection on the river and toward easing other people’s sorrows with a raised glass and a fundraiser.

  And finally, there was Halloween. Some have suggested it was the costume. He wasn’t Quinn that night, he was a powerful, masked, sword-spinning ninja. Others have suggested it was the magic of the night itself, when the veil between the worlds of the living and dead is at its thinnest, that perhaps my dad reached a hand down to Quinn that night and pushed him on his way. Gave a final nudge goodbye. Rob thought it was because the rewards of Halloween were so immediate and enormous (friends, free candy), unlike anything before where the rewards of “not doing OCD” were vague and long-term.

  If I could see into the secret life of the world, I’d go with what Quinn said. His OCD vanished because he simply, finally, told it where to go.

  Journal

  I’m walking down the hill of our white, slick road under the stars, snow creaking beneath my feet, the air like brittle glass. It’s minus 33 degrees Celsius. Apparently this is the coldest winter on record.

  Quinn gave his French speech to his class today. The topic was his love of cars. He said all the kids laughed and seemed to like his speech, especially the part where he told them he knew every single car in Wakefield, knew what kind of car each of their parents had, and even named several of those cars. “For instance, Tobias, your parents have a Kia Soul, and Jack, your dad drives a Ford Escape, and Luke, I noticed your parents traded in their Audi Allroad for a Mazda 3. Interesting choice.” At the end of the speech he suggested his French teacher upgrade to a Ferrari. She told him she would if she could afford it.

  Every day I am thankful for our unbelievable fortune in having Quinn back. Sometimes I just stand there gawking at him as he tells me some story about skiing after school with his friends, or as he demonstrates a new soccer deke in our living room, or when he sneaks into the cupboard for cookies and I catch him and he says, “Oh, jolly good, just perusing the shelves is all,” in an English accent. I think: hold on to this moment. It’s a gift as precious as life itself.

  We escaped what could have been. Looking back now I see we took a trip around the dark side of the moon, not realizing it was a round trip. Rob kept saying that hope was all we had, that
without it we were lost. I don’t know how he knew this and I’m not sure he knows himself, but I am so grateful and awestruck that he did know. For myself, on some of those bleak days, hope was a no-show. I was once lucky enough to meet the author Barbara Kingsolver at a writers’ festival in San Miguel de Allende and I remember her talking about hope. She said that hope isn’t a state of mind, but something we actually do with our hearts and our hands, that helps us to navigate ourselves through difficult passages in life.

  Sometimes the past hurls itself at me out of the blue. What happened to the three of us will live on in each of us in its own way. I can still call it up now, the magnitude of those days, the inconceivability of them, the sudden miraculous ending, and the weight of the relief of that ending. Often, Rob and I shake our heads and say, Can you believe that life threw us that curveball? That we almost lost the Quinn we knew but now he’s off running around with his friends as if the whole thing never happened?

  Does the ghost of the OCD monster still haunt us? Does it lie in wait in the dark corners of the house? Sometimes I imagine I see it shimmering in my periphery but more often I see it in my dreams, skulking back to steal my son again and ransack our lives. But as the months go by I believe more and more that it has been cast out of our family once and for all, banished to the badlands, a dictator deposed. Our family doctor mentioned to me recently that she believes that since Quinn did ERP so early on he’s inoculated against OCD for good. I breathe in the hope that that’s true and that the three of us are free to resume our regular lives like we didn’t pass through purgatory at all.

  Purgatory. I recall something I once heard about purgatory, that it’s the stretch of time before death when you regret all the chances you missed to be human. Perhaps that’s one positive thing that came out of this. When life as you know it is cycloned away from you, you learn something about yourself that you never would have had the chance to learn otherwise. I learned I’m lousy at emotional calamity. I can barely keep it together without falling to fractured pieces in a parked car. But I also learned something that all parents I’m sure must share but don’t usually have the occasion to experience: that love for your children is so deep and bottomless that you are willing to throw everything away in a heartbeat if it means getting your child back. Not material things, that’s easy, but everything else, too. I’d have gladly been stricken with OCD myself if it meant Quinn could be free of it.