by Torey Hayden
Loki smiled.
“You must miss your family now that you are here,” Torgon said.
“Yes, a little,” she said, then glanced up nervously. “Is that wrong of me to say?”
“No. It is natural, because you love them. I missed my family too when I first came to the compound. Indeed, it often made me cry at night.”
“It did?” Loki said, shocked. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to? Did she not say it would shame your father if you cried?”
“My father is a worker. He does not shame that easily.”
“Truth be said, holy benna, I do find a little water in my own eyes sometimes. I didn’t say for fear you would be angry with me.” A pause. “Truth be said, holy benna, you are much different than I thought you’d be.”
“For one thing, you thought I’d have no legs!”
Loki laughed. “It’s just I thought you’d be even more frightening than the Seer is, since you are holier than he. I thought you’d have no wish to speak with little children.”
“Not so. Indeed, I find your talk makes me feel rather better.”
“Truly?” Loki asked with a surprised smile. Then her small face brightened. “You know what you should do? Ask holy Dwr to make it so you won’t fall ill. That would be good, not so?”
“Except I couldn’t,” Torgon replied.
“Why not? You’re godly. And to my mind it isn’t a very godly thing to bring your stomach up.”
Torgon smiled. “But I am not a god.”
“The laws say you are ‘god-made-flesh’. That’s why we must do obeisance to you.”
“Aye, but god-made-flesh means I am the same as any other person.”
Loki’s brow furrowed. “How can that be so?”
“What point is there in being flesh, if a god does not experience all of what being flesh entails? That includes falling ill. And bringing up one’s supper. So, you see, it wouldn’t be right to ask Dwr to spare me this, for this is how Dwr wants me.”
Unconvinced, Loki pondered.
“Besides, illness isn’t Dwr’s domain. Dwr governs the realm of consciousness, of choice and good and evil. All else is in Nature’s great realm and even holy Dwr can not change the laws that Nature’s given.”
“But is not illness a kind of evil?” Loki asked, “for otherwise why do we call in the wise woman to frighten off bad spirits? Are they not evil? Would that then not make it part of Dwr’s domain? And therefore should we not fight against it and try to change it to make the world a better place?”
Torgon raised an eyebrow. “Be careful with your speech, little one.”
Loki ducked her head. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Have I said something wrong again? It is a fault of mine. There is so much to learn here. So very many rules. I’m not good at it. I fear that I must not be very clever.”
“It is not that you are not clever, child. Your real problem is that you are.”
“How old were you when you wrote that story?” James asked at the start of Laura’s next session.
“I can’t remember now exactly,” Laura said. “I didn’t start putting the stories down on paper until in my mid-teens, but I remember very clearly how old I was when I first experienced it. Eleven. I even remember the day. It was a Saturday morning in the fall and that afternoon Dena and I got together to go to the park. I remember us perched right up at the very top of the monkey bars, sitting there like a couple of sailors in a crows’ nest, just talking. Adolescence was very much on Dena’s mind by that point. She was telling me how she had been counting her pubic hairs and then asking me if I had any starting to grow. As Dena was talking, I remember gazing off across the park at the trees flickering gold in the sunshine. Torgon wasn’t with me at that moment, but for no particular reason the glinting sun on the coloured leaves made me think of her.
“I said, ‘I feel like I’m going to explode sometimes.’
“‘How come? What’s the matter?’ she asked.
“‘Torgon and stuff. The way Torgon’s world sort of lays down over everything I see. It’s like a transparency. So that everything here has a kind of layer of that world over it.’
“‘You’re still playing that?’ Dena asked, surprised. Because she didn’t realize. The winds of change had long since blown through our relationship. By the time she was about nine, Dena was no longer interested in pretending, so, slowly it stopped being part of what we did together. I had to explain that yeah, I did still have it all in my head.
“I said, ‘It’s never gone away. I still hear them all the time, talking to each other. I hear everything Torgon says. Even what she thinks and doesn’t say aloud. I hear her thoughts. I feel what she feels.’
“‘Weird,’ Dena said. ‘How do you do it?’
“I shrugged. ‘I dunno. It just happens.’
“‘Know what?’ she said brightly, ‘I got this picture of your mind like one of them big radar dishes that they track satellites and alien spaceships and stuff with, kind of turning back and forth, picking up these weird voices.’
“‘No, it’s more ordinary than that,’ I said. ‘More like I’m just in the next room and can hear them talking through the walls, and then I can go in their room, if I want.’
“‘Okay, so do it now,’ Dena said. She wasn’t challenging me. She was just curious. She said, ‘Go where Torgon is now and let me see you do it.’
“Immediately I was in Forest. I didn’t even have to do anything. It just appeared before me. Torgon was in the altar room with the Seer. It was later on the same evening that she’d been talking to Loki but now she was busy with some part of the holy rituals. I looked back at Dena and said, ‘There.’
“She said, ‘Oh give over, Laurie. You didn’t do anything.’
“I said, ‘I did. You asked me if I could go where she was and I have.’
“‘Oh, give over, Laurie.’
“I was annoyed because I knew she thought I was just making it up. I said, ‘OK, so I’ll tell you the whole story about what was going on right from this morning. About how Torgon was in her room when this little girl named Loki came in and Torgon wasn’t feeling good. She felt sick to her stomach. And you know what, Dena? When she felt like that, it sort of made me feel sick to my stomach too. I could feel what she felt.’
“‘Did she puke?’ Dena asked. ‘Did you see her puke?’
“‘Dena, stop it. I’m trying to tell you something serious.’
“‘Yeah, well, so did she puke? That’s what I want to know.’
“‘In the end, yeah, but so what?’
“Dena’s eyes got wide. ‘Wow. Weird. You got somebody puking in your brain.’ She paused a moment, shaking her head. Then she looked over at me. ‘I got to tell you something,’ she said.
“‘What’s that?’
“‘Well, I don’t think you ought to go around talking to a lot of people about this. It’s okay with me. I understand you because I’m your best friend.’
“‘I don’t go around talking to a lot of people,’ I said. ‘Just you.’
“‘Yeah, well, the reason I’m saying this is that … I hate to say it, Laurie, but you do sound sort of nuts when you talk about this.’
“‘But I’m not. You know that.’
“‘Well, yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘but sometimes when you’re talking to me, I got to remind myself of it.’
“Then without even a pause Dena said, ‘Know what Keith Miller did in Miss MacKay’s class yesterday? He came up behind Sally and ran his hand right down her back to see if she was wearing a bra.’
“As Dena spoke, I remember watching the light through the leaves again, autumn gold against autumn green, fleeting, flickering colours, and wondering, what is real? What determines if something exists? And I remember I could still feel that faint, sickish feeling.”
Chapter Twelve
At the end of his next session, Alan said “I want talk about the possibility of your seeing Morgana too. That was part of the package, wasn’t it?
Part of how it works in here?”
James nodded.
“Good. Because like I said in that first session, Morgana is already starting to do stuff I don’t want her to get in the habit of.”
Alan paused. “Shit, isn’t it awful to hear me say that?” He grimaced. “To even consider the possibility that we’ve fucked up two beautiful, innocent kids? That’s not saying much for us as parents, is it?”
“Don’t think about it that way,” James replied. “It’s important not to focus on problems in terms of ownership. I know that’s a very popular attitude these days, but it’s narrow-sighted, because nothing happens in a vacuum. The family is a milieu and Morgana is part of the family. So it’s natural she’s both affecting and affected by what’s happening.”
“Okay.”
“This is the reason I find it so important to include parents and siblings in therapy when I work with a child.”
Alan said, “It’s also because I can see what you are doing is helping Conor and I want that for Morgana too.” He smiled. “I am beginning to notice changes. Just little things, but they’re there. Sometimes, for example, I can tell Conor’s listening to me. He’s not quite as much in a world of his own.”
“Conor’s doing well in here,” James said. “We’re moving slowly, but it’s steady. He’s definitely starting to be more responsive.”
“That is so great to hear,” Alan said with feeling. “It would just be the best moment of my life, if we can turn Conor around.”
At the start of the next session Conor went straight to the shelves and pulled the plastic road sheet out. He scanned it with the cat and then laid it on the floor upside down so that its plain white surface was uppermost. He ran his hand over it, smoothing it out flat. “Eh-eh-eh. Whirrrr. Brr-brr-brr.”
Pushing his hand underneath the sheet, Conor left it like that for several moments. Then he began to move it here and there, like a kitten under a blanket.
“Terria,” he murmured and lifted his hand out.
“Pardon?” James asked.
“The Taurus-Littrow landing,” he replied and smoothed the sheet out with his hand. “There is no grave here. Where’s the man?”
James wasn’t able to follow the boy’s train of thought at all. He jotted down “Taurus-Littrow” and a phonetic spelling of the word “terria” in his notebook.
Conor looked up, looked right at James. “Here is terria.” There was a certainty to his speech that James hadn’t heard before and with it a slight urgency, as if he could perceive that James didn’t understand what the word meant and that this worried him. It also gave Conor’s words a definite sense of communication.
“Here is terria,” Conor said again. He patted the upsidedown road sheet. “Terria. Yes, that’s terria. Where’s the man?”
“Do you mean the toy man? That you were playing with last time?” James asked. “He will be in with the other Lego toys. There. In the basket.”
Conor’s shoulders sagged in such a clear gesture of defeat that James knew he hadn’t made the right guess. He felt a bit defeated himself because despite Conor’s so obviously wanting to tell him something, he just couldn’t get it.
Giving up, Conor rose and left the white plastic mat on the floor. The cat clutched to his chest, he wandered towards the large windows. Until this point, he’d always ignored them. Now he stopped and looked out. Several moments elapsed in silence.
“Where’s the man in the moon?” Conor asked.
“We can’t see him at the moment, because the moon hasn’t risen yet.”
Alarm spread over Conor’s features. He lifted the stuffed cat up and pressed it against his face. “Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
“I hear your worried noise,” James said. “You don’t like not being able to see the moon?”
“Where is the moon man gone?”
“You mean the men who landed on the moon? They’re not there anymore. They landed on the moon a long time ago, but now they are back home on earth.”
“The man in the moon can see us, but we can’t see him. He can see us. Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
“Do you feel afraid of the man in the moon?” James said gently. “He isn’t real, Conor. There isn’t a real man there. It’s just patterns on the surface of the moon and when we look at them from earth, it looks like a person’s face to us. But there isn’t really a man in the moon.”
“The Taurus-Littrow landing site. 1971,” Conor cried out.
“It’s confusing, isn’t it?” James said in an effort to interpret Conor’s fear. “We say ‘man in the moon’ to talk about how the moon looks to us from earth, but that isn’t talking about a real man. It’s just an expression. But then there have also been astronauts who have walked on the moon and they are real men. But they didn’t stay on the moon. It’s too barren. No one could live there. So now they’ve all come back home to earth.”
The boy started to cry. “No! Don’t want the man in the moon to come home!” Pressing the stuffed cat over his face, he crumpled, sobbing, to the ground.
Unlike the boisterous, self-assured child James had seen chasing Becky through his apartment, Morgana stood in the waiting room, clutching her father’s hand tightly and regarding James with a suspicious gaze.
“Hello,” James said. “How nice to see you again.”
She pressed herself against Alan’s leg.
James offered his hand. “The playroom is this way. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll show you.”
Reluctantly Morgana kissed her father goodbye and took James’s hand. He walked with her down the short hallway from the waiting room and opened the door to the playroom. She hung back a moment and peered in, then stepped cautiously through the door. No matter how much he coaxed her, James couldn’t talk her into coming further. Closing the door gently, he crossed to the small table and sat down.
“I’ve never seen a doctor’s office that looks like this,” Morgana said dubiously as she surveyed the playroom. “Dr Wilson’s is lots different.”
“Dr Wilson and I are different kinds of doctors. He’s the kind who helps us keep our bodies well. I’m the kind who helps us keep our feelings well.”
She glanced over. “Does your kind of doctor give shots?”
“No, not usually.”
A look of enormous relief crossed her face. “Oh good.”
“Were you worried that I might give you a shot?” James asked.
Nodding fervently, she said, “Yeah, ’cause I thought all doctors gave shots.” She smiled sheepishly. “So I didn’t like coming in here by myself. If I was going to have a shot, I wanted my daddy here too.”
She looked around the room with more confidence. “There’s sure lots of toys here. Do all these belong to Becky and Mikey?”
“No. Their toys are at my house. The toys in this room are for the boys and girls who come here to see me.”
“Like my brother, huh?”
“Yes,” said James, “and today, like you too. So, while you’re here, you can play with anything that interests you. It’s up to you. In here, children choose what they want to do.”
“That sounds nice.” She gave him a cheerful grin. “What’s that?”
“My notebook. I like to write notes to help me remember what we’ve been talking about.”
“How come?”
“Because perhaps we’ve been working on solving a problem and I wouldn’t want to forget anything important a child has told me,” James said.
Placing her hands flat on the table, Morgana leaned forward on them and looked at James closely. Her eyes twinkled. “Know what my brother does?” Her tone was conspiratorial. “He piddles in the garbage can in the kitchen because he thinks it’s a toilet.” She laughed heartily. “But that’s a secret. Don’t say to my mum I told you.”
“Why not?”
“Because my mum would say it isn’t nice to tell you.” She laughed again.
James laughed too.
“I told Becky. She said Mikey piddled in the bath
once. She said he even did a Number Two once and it floated.”
“Yes, I’m afraid she’s right.”
“Boys can be really disgusting.”
James nodded.
“How come Becky doesn’t live with you all the time?”
“Because Becky’s mum and I are divorced. Mostly Becky lives in New York with her mum, because that’s where her school is and her grandma and grandpa and her cousins. But even though things didn’t work out between Becky’s mum and me, I still love Becky – and Mikey too – just as much as always, so we want to spend time together too. That’s why she and Mikey come out here.”
Morgana’s smile had faded. “My folks are doing that too. Getting divorced, I mean.”
“How do you feel about that?” James asked.
“I don’t want them to.”
“Can you tell me more about it?”
“At school I know this girl named Kayla, and when we were in kindergarten, her folks got divorced. Now she only gets to see her dad two days a month and sometimes he forgets. I don’t want that to happen to me. I really love my daddy a lot.”
“Of course,” James said.
“You don’t ever forget Becky, do you?”
“No. Dads never forget their children, even if they can’t always see them.”
“There’s something else too about why I don’t want them to get divorced,” Morgana said.
“What’s that?”
“Our ranch. ’Cause I love our ranch. I really, really, really love our ranch and I want to live there forever. Even when I’m grown up. I’m going to be a rancher like my dad. But my mum says when she and Daddy are divorced, then me and Conor can’t live at the ranch anymore because we’ll live somewhere else. But I don’t want to. But then I want to be with my mum too.”
“You have some big worries.”
“Yeah,” Morgana replied, her brow wrinkling, “I do.”
She watched James’s pen as he wrote. “Except, know what?” she said. “Kayla says she’s gets two Christmases now. First she gets one with her mum and then she gets another with her dad and his girlfriend. And know what else? Santa Claus comes to both places!” Morgana gave an impish smile. “I wouldn’t mind that part.”