In the photos the daughter’s face appeared more angular and symmetrical than her mother’s. Her hair was light brown, the color Margaret’s must have been before it had gone to gray.
In a large framed photo that Margaret had shown him, one taken some years ago, he had seen the daughter standing between her mother and her father, who was no longer alive. He could see both of their faces in the girl’s. But while the father’s smile and attractive features were easily noted in the daughter’s face, it was in the eyes of the two women where the most striking resemblance was to be found. Grayish-blue in color, the mother’s and daughter’s eyes looked out from the photo with sharp and focused gazes, both formidable and caring. It was this look in her eyes that Amir first noticed about the woman speaking to him, confirming in his mind that she was indeed his foster mother’s daughter.
“It’s very beautiful here,” Alice indicated more by the look on her face than by her words as she gazed about the setting. “I can see why you like spending so much time outside.”
A small blink of a smile appeared on Amir’s face in response to Alice’s comment. He hadn’t understood what she had said, though he could feel her expression all the same.
After a few moments of shared, silent appreciation, Alice looked at Amir and nodded her head in the direction of the house. Her smile saying, “Shall we?” the two turned to walk side by side in easy stride down to the house.
“Well, I see that you found each other,” Margaret remarked with a smile to her daughter and foster son as they entered the kitchen. “Here, let me take your coat, Amir.” Margaret signed its removal, and that of Amir’s knit cap, with her hands.
“Come, sit here.” Alice’s mother patted the seat of a stool next to the island counter and held up an apple for Amir to see. “We’re making pies from your apples.”
“Alice, could you hand Amir the bowl of apples, please? He likes to keep busy. He can peel them while I finish making the crust.”
The daughter passed the bowl to Amir, handing him the peeler along with it.
Amir received the bowl of apples, looking at the peeler as he did so. After several passes of the peeler he shook his head and handed it back to Alice.
“What? You don’t want to peel them?” Alice queried, her face showing her question.
Amir responded by making a circular motion with his right hand around the apple he held in his left.
“What’s he saying, Mom?”
“I’m not sure,” Margaret said, turning the palms of her hands upward, hunching her shoulders, and giving the boy the look she used to indicate that she didn’t understand.
Amir shook his head once more and hopped down from his stool, skipping quickly over to the far counter, where a wooden block held the kitchen knives. Selecting a small paring knife, he mimed the action of drawing the blade back and forth across a sharpening stone. Margaret pointed to a drawer, her smile growing at the boy’s animation. He seemed unusually happy that day.
Working the knife over the stone with precise, quick strokes, it was clear the boy knew the art of keeping a cutting tool sharp. Coming back to the counter, Amir took an apple in his hand and then looked up to Margaret and Alice as if to say “watch” before returning his focus back to the red fruit. The paring knife began its circumnavigation of the apple with sure and expert movements, the razor-sharp knife blade peeling the fruit even more closely than the peeler could have. When done, Amir held a long, unbroken strip of apple peel in the air, its length spiraling downward. A tiny grin of pride appeared on his face as the women applauded appreciatively. The boy picked up another apple to peel while Alice cut the first into pieces to fill the pie shell.
Later that evening, during dinner, Alice noticed how little Amir served himself, even of the pie whose filling he had so proudly harvested and helped prepare. His eyes scanned between her and Margaret in short, brief glimpses before returning to his meal, or he directed his gaze at the center of the table, where two lit candles flickered in their silver holders.
The clinician in Alice observed the boy’s behavior, his attention, the movement of his eyes, his hands, and their reactions to the stimuli that engaged them. Uncharacteristically, her mind began to wander, straying from her practiced clinical observation to a more distanced perspective, where she saw the boy simply as himself without reference to any symptomatology that might define him.
With dinner finished, the three retired to the library, Margaret lighting a fire from the wood Amir carried in and stacked next to the fireplace. While the boy paged through one of the simple children’s books Margaret had given him to help in developing his English skills, mother and daughter relaxed into casual conversation. Later, after Amir had gone to bed, the topic turned to the boy and the change he had brought to Margaret’s life.
“What are your impressions of Amir?” Margaret asked her daughter.
“Well, I can see why you fell for him,” Alice responded with a smile. “Beneath the silence, there seems to be a lot going on in there. I like him a lot.”
“I’m glad of that. It was apparent that he liked you as well,” Margaret said, rising from her chair to stir the coals of the fire and add another log to its flames.
“Was it? It was difficult for me to get a read on how he felt toward me. But maybe that’s just him being shy. I was impressed by how polite and respectful he was. At first I wondered if his politeness was a kind of emotional shield, but on the other hand it felt very natural and genuine.”
“Yes, the depth of his politeness is unusual for a child of his age. At least in our culture. However, I think that’s not so much the case in the society he grew up in. But I do think there is also something of a buffer in his deference. While there’s no question in my mind that his politeness is genuine, it is reasonable to expect, given all he’s been through, that he would be prone to also using it as a defensive mechanism. His behavior is sometimes almost too good to be true. Hopefully, he’ll begin to feel secure enough to be able to be less than perfect.” After a pause, she added, “Would you like some tea? I’m going to make myself a cup before bed.”
“Yes, that would be nice. I’ll help.”
Returning to the kitchen, Margaret filled the teakettle with water and placed it on the stove, while Alice took out cups and placed a teabag in each, not needing to ask her mother what kind she wanted. A cup of peppermint tea before bedtime was one of her mother’s long-established rituals.
“By the way, Mom,” Alice said, continuing their conversation, “I’m curious to know: has it been determined whether Amir was born deaf and mute?”
“The results from his initial health screening indicated that it isn’t a congenital condition. The attending physician recommended that Amir be sent to someone experienced in dealing in post-traumatic stress disorder for further examination. That’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“You’re looking for a referral?” Alice responded.
“Yes,” Margaret answered with a nod. “The agency in charge of Amir’s care is a good one, but they have many constraints, financial and otherwise. Given his past, I’d like to see that he gets the most thorough examination possible, with someone who’s experienced enough with children like Amir to understand the possible complications.”
“A behavioral pediatrician would probably be the most appropriate starting place, rather than a referral to a psychologist,” Alice said. “Behavioral pediatricians have the advantage of their medical training as well as their subspecialty training in developmental and behavioral problems. They’d be able to consider both the medical and the psychosocial aspects that might affect a child.”
“Yes, I agree. That would be best.”
“I’ll make some calls and see what I can come up with,” Alice said after a pause. “Mom, you said that Amir is living with you as a long-term placement. What does that mean? Six months, a year, two years, more?”
“There’s no defined time limit. It’s difficult to say in Am
ir’s case. His relocation to the US is based upon an agreement that he’ll be repatriated back to his homeland as soon as the political situation becomes stable there. Right now it’s a war zone. Who knows when it will be stable enough for him to return? It could be a year. It could be two or three or, most likely, even longer. The big question in Amir’s case is to what and to whom he would return. Are you concerned that caring for him will be too much for me?”
“No, not really. I’m more concerned that you’re going to grow very involved and then he’s going to be removed. I’m worried that will be very difficult for you. I think it’s going to be hard keeping yourself from becoming too attached to him.”
“Yes, there is that,” Margaret acknowledged. “But somehow it doesn’t seem a worry for me. Maybe it’s just a denial of future possibilities. I don’t know. Given all of the change that caring for the boy has brought to my life, thinking about his leaving someday seems very distant. And if that should come to be, the agency has other children in need. Just think of it as me getting good practice at becoming a doting grandmother. How’s that going, by the way?”
“We’re working on it,” Alice smiled. “Paul has to keep reminding me not to be anxious about it, that we should enjoy the process. He says it with a leer, thinking he’s cute. It’s very annoying. But my ovulation seems to have improved, so we’re hopeful.”
“Well, I am too,” Margaret said, pausing a second in thought. “A child can be said to be a universe of its own. There is so much there to learn…for both the child and the parent. Sometimes it’s hard to say who’s teaching whom. It took me too long to realize that.”
“We survived it,” Alice laughed, “and now here we are chatting away like a couple of old girlfriends.”
“We did, didn’t we?” Margaret smiled, taking her daughter’s arm in hers, the two slowly making their way upstairs to bed.
Chapter 14
The first few weeks of sharing her home with Amir had been a time of exploration, the orphaned boy and retired professor slowly getting to know one another, finding in the quiet, deliberate manner of their ways a sense of kindred spirit. But the honeymoon, Margaret knew, was drawing to a close. There was so much for her to do. The issue of where Amir would attend school grew more pressing every day. Should he go to public school, private school, or continue with the homeschooling she had begun in the interim? Would they find that none of those options would work well and that Amir would ultimately be better off in a school for the deaf? In order to make that decision, they needed to better understand his disabilities.
With the agency’s approval, Margaret’s daughter sought out a behavioral pediatrician experienced in war trauma. Alice, a pediatric surgeon at a major Boston hospital, had a number of contacts in the field. With the help of sympathetic colleagues, she was able to find a well-respected behavioral pediatrician who was willing to fit Amir into his already-overloaded schedule the following week.
On the day of the appointment, Margaret drove to Boston with Amir, first stopping to drop off their overnight bags at her daughter’s home in Cambridge. The house, which had been hers before she had deeded it over to Alice, held a host of memories. She and her husband had purchased the property nearly forty years prior, worried that they’d taken on too big a challenge in fixing up the rundown, large white Victorian, a white elephant that could drain their incomes and savings. But they persevered through a series of small renovations, one project at a time, and in the end the house became a home.
Pulling into its driveway, Margaret felt both immediate and distant, as though she was, on the one hand, stepping back into the rhythm of daily routine, and on the other, returning to a childhood home whose absence was measured in decades. Visions of the past rose from the front walkway her feet had traveled countless times. The plants and shrubs, planted by her own hand seemingly a lifetime ago, greeted her like old friends. The house called out its welcome as well, and as Margaret stood outside gazing upon it in fond remembrance, she could recall the view from each window as though they were old, familiar paintings. Though the interior of the house had changed since her daughter had moved in—the walls now of brighter, more uniform color, the old drapes replaced with ones less formal in look, its furnishings of a modern style suited to a young professional couple—the smell and the feel of the home remained as she remembered it.
While Margaret’s mind wandered in memories, Amir marveled at the grandiose scale of the houses he had seen in the Cambridge neighborhood. These buildings were even larger than the ones in the town where he lived with Margaret, an idea he found difficult to reconcile against the memory of the modest village homes he had known in Bosnia. Walking into the spacious foyer of Alice’s home, he wondered how many people lived in it, even though by this point he had learned that in his new country the size of a home didn’t necessarily correlate to the number of inhabitants who might live there. That only Margaret’s daughter and her son-in-law would live alone in such a grand house seemed to Amir an unfathomable idea. After dropping off their overnight bags at Alice’s, Margaret drove Amir to his appointment in Boston. The hospital where she took him felt vast and impersonal to Amir, and the rooms where he waited had the feel of places of internment to him: boxes formed of windowless walls, painted in bright colors, with tubes of ersatz sunlight strung across the ceilings that filled him with cold instead of their promised illusion of warmth. Margaret noted a distinct closing down of the boy’s emotional state the moment they stepped into the large medical complex, and she gently took his hand in hers so that he might feel the touch of human warmth to ease his anxiety.
The behavioral pediatrician who Alice had arranged for them to meet, Dr. Richard Caron, was experienced in working with children suffering from war trauma. After sitting for a short time in a waiting room, Margaret and Amir were ushered into an examination room by a friendly nurse. The two sat down on metal-framed chairs, Margaret resting back into hers, Amir sitting on the edge of his. Margaret signed to Amir not to worry, that the doctor would come soon and that there was nothing to be afraid of. Amir nodded his understanding, but his body stayed rigid and his hands fidgeted as he nervously looked about the room.
When the doctor entered a few minutes later, he introduced himself and greeted the two warmly, engaging both Margaret and Amir in casual conversation, with Margaret serving as translator for the boy. The behavioral pediatrician scanned the report written by the eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist Amir had previously seen. He then ran a series of tests to assess Amir’s sensory, motor, and cognitive skills. With Margaret translating his words into sign, he asked Amir questions about his general state of health and how he was adjusting to life in his new country. At the very end of the examination, Dr. Caron asked Amir several general questions about his life in Bosnia, carefully observing the boy’s reaction to the mention of his former homeland. When he had completed writing down his observations, he gently asked Amir to sit in the waiting room while he and Margaret discussed his findings.
“OK, let’s see,” Dr. Caron said, looking to the notepad he held in his hands, “to begin with, I noted some ageusia, analgesia, and apraxia—taste loss, insensitivity to pain, and the inability to engage in purposive acts. Amir’s thinness appears to be anorectic, and I noted that he exhibits a general unresponsiveness as well as some loss of organic function.”
Dr. Caron paused, looking from his notes to his watch and then to Margaret. He was aware of her professional history, having been told by Alice. He knew that Margaret had taught at the graduate level and authored several psychology texts. She didn’t need him to lead her from A to B. “Look, I can go through a number of the other details from my notes if you want, but my guess is that they will only corroborate your own observations up to this point, so if it’s OK with you I’ll cut to the chase.”
Seeing her nod, the physician continued. “Some years back, I worked with an organization up in Lowell providing services to the Cambodian refugee population that arrived in the afte
rmath of the Khmer Rouge. Amir exhibits a number of the symptoms that I saw in the Cambodian children who survived that war. I’m sorry to say that I think it is very likely the trauma Amir suffered in the conflict in Bosnia is even more severe than his records indicate.
“Given the loss of both speech and hearing capability without any severe physiological trauma to explain its cause, it’s my feeling that we might want to begin exploring the possibility of somatoform dissociation. It’s fairly rare, and there’s very little historical data available on it. It’s a syndrome that can last a week, a month, or years, but that in its physiological manifestation, at least, generally goes away.”
“I see,” Margaret replied, keeping her voice steady and reasoned. “Could you run through some its symptomatology for me?”
“Yes, of course. Essentially, somatoform dissociation is the loss, or deficiency, of normal integration in a person’s sensory or motor components. There’s not been a lot of study on this as it relates to war trauma. But there is some history of mutism and deafness as being part of the symptomatology. Somatoform dissociation can also affect seeing, movement, and feeling. It’s not an easy thing to diagnose. The symptoms sometimes appear to be inconstant or even contradictory. They can initially occur as the result of an actual physical experience—a concussion, an explosion, those sorts of things—as well as from the experiencing of horrific acts.”
Margaret listened as the doctor continued speaking, but her thoughts began to wander, visions of what Amir might have suffered interrupting her focus on what the physician was saying.
“I know,” Dr. Caron said, seeing Margaret’s attention drift, “that it’s not easy to think about what your foster son might have experienced in Bosnia. Hearing the stories that come from these children, I often find myself trying to make sense from something that has none, to find some kind of rational explanation for the most irrational of human acts.”
The Solace of Trees Page 14