The Perfect Child

by Berry, Lucinda

  Janie skipped over to the dollhouse in the corner. I hadn’t noticed it when Christopher and I had been there by ourselves. It was almost three feet tall with two stories. There was miniature doll furniture in every room, and the bedrooms had actual carpet. Someone had taken a lot of time to put it together and added special touches like knitted blankets on the beds and tiny throw pillows on all the couches. It was every little girl’s dream house.

  “Do you like the dollhouse?” Dr. Chandler asked.

  Janie nodded. Her face was flushed with excitement.

  Dr. Chandler walked over and sat next to her on the floor. She pulled out a container. “Why don’t you pick the family you want to put in the dollhouse?” The container was filled with every kind of doll imaginable—men, women, girls, boys, even animals. All different shapes and sizes.

  I stood rooted to my spot, unsure of my role. Was I just supposed to watch them play? Join in? So far, each therapist had been different. I looked to Dr. Chandler for guidance, but she was intensely focused on watching Janie search through the dolls. Janie carefully pulled them out one by one and studied them before sorting them into piles.

  “Why don’t we ask Hannah to join us?” Dr. Chandler asked after a few minutes had passed.

  Janie didn’t acknowledge she’d spoken. She just kept sorting the dolls.

  “Janie, did you hear me ask you a question?”

  No response.

  Dr. Chandler laid her hand softly on Janie’s back. “Why don’t we ask Hannah to join us?”

  Christopher was always trying to get Janie to include me, just like Dr. Chandler was doing. Janie responded now just like she did at home—nothing.

  “I’m going to ask Hannah to join us. I want her to play, too, because it’s fun to play together, and it might hurt Hannah’s feelings if we don’t include her.” Her voice was sweet but managed to convey authority at the same time. “Hannah, would you like to join us?”

  “Sure.” I moved over to the dollhouse and plopped down on the floor next to Dr. Chandler. I looked at the piles Janie had sorted. She’d separated the women from the rest of the dolls and put them in a pile all by themselves, away from the others.

  “I pick these,” she said proudly. She brought the dolls she’d selected to play with into the house. I wasn’t surprised when I saw she’d chosen a white male doll with a little girl doll. She set them at the dining room table and announced, “They’re going to eat dinner.”

  I looked over at Dr. Chandler. Had she noticed that Janie had gotten rid of all the grown female dolls? Did she see what Janie was doing?

  “What are they eating?” Dr. Chandler asked.

  “Hot dogs and ice cream.”

  “Yummy. That sounds delicious. I love ice cream.”

  “Me too,” Janie said.

  “Does Hannah like to eat ice cream too?”

  No response.

  “Does Hannah like to eat ice cream too?”

  Janie started humming underneath her breath.

  “Can you tell me about your family in the dollhouse?”

  She pointed to the man sitting in the chair. “This is the daddy.” She pointed to the little girl in the chair next to him. “And this is the girl.”

  “Is there a mommy?”

  Janie curled her lips in disgust. “No. There’s no mommy.”

  The rest of the session went the same way. I followed them around while they played, and Dr. Chandler asked her questions. Once it was over, she asked her receptionist to take Janie into the waiting room and read with her while she talked to me alone.

  “That must’ve been really hard for you,” she said as soon as she had closed the door behind her.

  I was on the verge of tears. “It wasn’t easy.” I forced a smile.

  She led me back over to the rug, and we sat down. Her face flooded with concern. “Janie clearly has some attachment issues, but they’re not with you.” She folded her hands on her lap. “She’s acting out her attachment issues with you, but they’re not directed at you, even though they seem like they are. They’re directed at her mother. Think about what we know about her mother . . .” She held up her fingers as she spoke. “She locked her in a trailer and never let her out. Not once. She tied her up with a leash like a dog and barely fed her. Didn’t take care of her. But that barely scratches the surface. We only know the story based on what her body tells us. We can only guess at the rest. It makes perfect sense that she hates her mother. But not just her mother—all mothers. She associates women with mothers, and unfortunately, you happen to be in that role. All her anger and feelings toward her biological mother are directed at you.” She took a deep breath. “But that doesn’t make it any easier on you. It has to hurt.”

  I desperately wanted to tell her that her theory only made sense if Becky was the one who had hurt her. There was no way to know if that was true until Janie started talking about it, since there was definitely no asking Becky about it. For a second, I considered breaking the rules and telling her that Janie’s mom wasn’t missing—she was dead—but Piper had assured us it was the best thing for everyone’s safety if we kept it a secret until they had followed up on all their leads. They wanted whoever had hurt Becky to think she was still alive or at least be unsure.

  I let out a deep sigh. “Nobody else gets to see how it really is. Christopher acts like it’s not that big of a deal, and it makes me feel crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy. She’s deliberately avoiding anything and everything that has to do with you.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing you can do right now,” she said. “She’s had a traumatic disconnect from love and attachment with a maternal figure. In her mind, the world isn’t a safe place, and mothers can’t be trusted. Think about it—usually when babies cry, they’re picked up or fed when they’re hungry. But Janie’s never had this. She doesn’t trust you, so she rejects you even though you’re exactly what she needs the most.”

  I listened as she rattled off therapy goals for Janie. The first thing she wanted to do was teach her how to identify and name her emotions. She explained young children thought abuse was their fault, and our overarching goal would always be helping Janie understand that she wasn’t bad. She’d work on developing their relationship and building some of Janie’s other skills before she tackled her attachment issues. It all sounded very intense.

  I filled Christopher in on the session when he got home that night. He got angry when I described the session, like I’d gone without him to create a secret alliance with Dr. Chandler, even though he’d known all about the appointment. We’d talked about it beforehand.

  “You told me to take her by herself,” I cried. “We could’ve rescheduled the appointment if you wanted to be there.”

  “I just didn’t know you’d make all these important decisions together.” His forehead was pinched.

  I threw up my hands. “We didn’t make any decisions. The only thing we decided was that Janie is going to need a lot of therapy, and we already knew that.”

  He watched Janie thumbing through books on the coffee table in the living room. She hummed under her breath while she looked. “She doesn’t even know she’s hurting you by ignoring you.”

  “Oh my God, Christopher. She knows she’s doing it, and she’s doing it on purpose.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice. Sometimes I caught her sneaking glances at me when she didn’t think I was looking, and there was no mistaking the smugness on her face when she talked with someone while I was in the same room or in close proximity.

  “It’s just not her fault.”

  “I wish you’d hear what I’m saying to you. I’m actually agreeing with you. It’s not her fault. She can’t help what her mom did to her, and she doesn’t even realize that’s why she hates me, but Christopher, she does hate me.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  I listened as Dr. Chandler explained again how Janie’s behavior was m
otivated by attention; it didn’t matter whether it was positive or negative. She’d drilled it into our heads since our second session that we needed to ignore her bad behavior whenever we could because she fed off the attention and emotional energy that we gave her when she was acting out. We only praised her and paid attention when she did something positive, no matter how small it was. So far, it was working. We’d had nine fewer tantrums this week.

  “I think it’s time that we tackled Janie’s selective mutism,” she said next.

  I hated the name and the fact that Dr. Chandler had stuck a label on her behavior. I didn’t like labeling children with psychological disorders. They were too young to be slapped with mental health diagnoses. Kids changed constantly. And besides, how could they make any kind of diagnosis about her psychological state when she was so traumatized and far behind developmentally? They needed to give her time to catch up first.

  “During your nighttime reading routine tonight, I want you to explain to Janie that you would like her to tell Hannah good night after you finish reading. All she has to say is good night. That’s it. Let her know that you’re no longer going to tell her good night unless she tells Hannah good night, too, because it’s not fair to say good night to you without saying good night to her,” Dr. Chandler said with conviction.

  “And if she doesn’t do it?” I asked.

  “Then you don’t tell her good night,” Dr. Chandler said as if it was going to be that simple.

  “It seems really mean.” And childish, I wanted to add, but I didn’t say it out loud. She was supposed to be the expert.

  “Janie needs to learn that the two of you are a unit and if she hurts Hannah, it hurts your feelings, too, because you care about Hannah as much as you do her.” Her voice reminded me of how she spoke to Janie—steady, never flying too high or sinking too low. “Children of trauma are experts at triangulation.”

  “Triangulation?” I asked.

  “The child will act a certain way with one parent and a different way with the other parent. They try all kinds of things to drive a wedge in the parents’ relationship.”

  “Janie doesn’t do that.”

  Hannah smacked the pillow she always kept cradled in her lap during our sessions. “Are you serious? She absolutely does too.”

  “When?”

  “When?” Her face contorted in anger. “All the time. Ever since I met her. Remember, she wouldn’t even talk to me that day?”

  “She was upset. She would’ve refused to talk to anyone.”

  Hannah vehemently shook her head. “I used to think that way, but I don’t anymore. She’s always been threatened by me.”

  I snorted. “Threatened by you? You act like she’s some jealous girlfriend. She’s a little girl, Hannah.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped.

  Dr. Chandler raised her hand. “Okay, I can see I’ve touched a nerve. This is good.”

  I looked at her like she was crazy. “How is this good?”

  “It illustrates perfectly how she’s worked to pit the two of you against each other,” she said.

  Both Hannah and I looked at her in confusion.

  “Right now, Janie thinks you’re on her side and that it’s the two of you against Hannah.”

  “But I am on her side . . .” I didn’t mean it like I was against Hannah, but I was Janie’s biggest cheerleader. I would always be on her side and looking out for her best interests.

  “There’re no sides. That’s the thing.” She leaned forward, getting closer to me. “The three of you are a family. Nobody is against anybody. All of you are together, and hurting family members is not okay. That’s what we’re trying to teach her through this exercise.”

  I’d forgotten all about the exercise.

  “What are we supposed to do if she doesn’t say good night to me?” Hannah asked.

  “Then you say good night to her, and Christopher doesn’t. After that, you proceed to do what you always do. It’s not like you’re ignoring her completely or anything like that. Stick to the rest of the routine.”

  “The rest of her routine means I go to sleep on her floor,” I said.

  “Then that’s what you do,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I told Hannah on the drive home. I hadn’t paid attention to the last ten minutes of our session because I’d been trying to wrap my head around purposefully manipulating a six-year-old child, especially one who’d been traumatized, into doing something you wanted them to. Dr. Chandler kept telling us Janie’s silence toward Hannah was her way of communicating her anger and hurt toward her mother. If that was the case, and I agreed that it was, then I didn’t understand how forcing Janie to talk to Hannah was a good idea. She was communicating her feelings in the only way she knew how, and everything I’d researched stressed the importance of letting abused children make their own choices.

  Janie had a right to be angry at her mom. Dr. Chandler was supposed to be working on helping her express her feelings toward her mother during their individual sessions. She said kids often played out what they’d gone through, and Janie was beginning to act out what she’d experienced. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just give Janie time to work through her feelings about her mom. Once she’d expressed them, I was willing to bet she’d start talking to Hannah on her own without us pushing her. I was against forcing her to talk to Hannah. Nothing about it sat well with me.

  She huffed. “What’s the point of going to therapy if you’re not going to do what the therapist suggests?”

  “Maybe she’s not the best therapist for us.” There were other therapists who specialized in attachment issues. I’d looked them up on my own after Piper had suggested seeing one. Dr. Chandler had great reviews, but so did many of the others.

  “Piper recommended her. She’s the best there is.” She glared at me.

  I dropped the subject, but I was nervous about doing it and grew more anxious the closer it came to bedtime. I didn’t disagree with setting boundaries with Janie, but she was too fragile to be pushed. What was wrong with letting her act out until she got it out of her system? Besides, hurting someone on purpose who’d already been harmed so much just seemed inherently wrong. Why couldn’t Hannah see that?

  We tucked her into bed together like we always did and read Harold and the Purple Crayon twice since it was her latest obsession. She knew most of the words by heart. Hannah reached over and gave her a big hug and kiss like she always did despite Janie’s unresponsiveness. Tonight was no different. Janie sat stiff as a board with her hands at her sides.

  “Good night, Janie,” Hannah said.

  Janie ignored her. I’d been hoping tonight would be the night she decided to start speaking to her again and I wouldn’t have to go through with the plan.

  “Honey, Hannah said good night to you, and it’s not nice to ignore her. It hurts her feelings when you ignore her,” I recited just as Dr. Chandler had instructed me. “We are a family, and it’s not okay for you to hurt Hannah’s feelings. I want you to say good night to her.”

  She glared at me.

  “I’m not going to tell you good night unless you tell Hannah good night because it’s not fair. We practice fairness in our family.” It all sounded right but felt wrong in my gut.

  She narrowed her eyes to slits. “No.”

  Hannah slid off the bed. “Come on, Christopher. It’s time for bed.”

  Janie turned to look at her with a murderous glare. Usually, she ignored her completely, like Hannah was an invisible woman. It was the first time in weeks I’d seen her respond to her at all. I didn’t know if it was a good sign or a bad one. Hannah held out her hand to me, and I took it. She led me down to the pallet of blankets on the floor like I was a child. Janie leaned over and stared at us.

  “I’m going to sleep now,” I said.

  “No! You have to say good night to me! Say good night to me!” Janie screamed.

  Hannah walked over
to the light and flicked it off. She left the room, but I saw her shadow hovering in the hallway. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

  Janie started wailing. “Say good night! Say good night!” She picked up her stuffed animals and hurled them at me. She ripped her bed apart and threw each piece of bedding at me until she was left with just the bare mattress.

  I gritted my teeth, forcing myself not to move. I wanted to comfort her so badly. It physically hurt not to speak or reach for her.

  You’re doing the right thing. Dr. Chandler said it would help, I recited again and again while I tried to stay strong.

  She alternated between screaming and crying for the next two hours. Finally, she was silent. I gave her a few more minutes before I breathed a sigh of relief that it was finally over. We’d made it through whatever weird psyche battle we were going through. I got on my knees and peeked up at her bed to make sure she was asleep.

  She was curled up against the wall, rocking back and forth. Her legs were pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. She’d ripped her clothes off, including her diaper, so she was completely naked. I looked closer. There was stuff all over her mouth, and her chest was covered in vomit. Guilt pummeled me. I’d made her cry so hard she’d thrown up. I jumped up, flicked the light switch on, and ran back to her. The sticky substance wasn’t vomit—it was blood.

  “Janie!” I yelled. I grabbed her face in my hands. Her bottom lip was gushing blood. Pieces of flesh were missing. Hannah had raced into the room when I had turned on the light, and she stood beside me, staring at Janie in horror.

  “How did that happen? I don’t understand,” she said in disbelief.

  “She chewed through her skin,” I said.

  CASE #5243

  INTERVIEW:

  PIPER GOLDSTEIN

  I stared at the picture in front of me. It was the one from Janie’s second emergency room visit—the time she’d gotten twelve stitches in her bottom lip. The same one that was in the file on my desk. I should’ve known it was one they’d use. I didn’t wait for them to ask questions.