Kitabı oku: «Overheard in a Dream»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The boy was so pale you would have thought he was a ghost. A wraith. Something insubstantial that would vanish into nothing at all. He was small for nine, slender and fine-boned. His hair was pale as moonlight, very fine, very straight. His skin was milky-white with a dull translucence to it, like wax. Such fair colouring meant that at a distance, he appeared to have no eyebrows or eyelashes at all, and this incompleteness only emphasized his ephemeral appearance.

“Meow?” said the boy.

“Hello, Conor,” James replied. “Won’t you come in?”

“Meow?”

Around his waist he wore numerous coils of string with bits of aluminium foil wrapped around them. Four of these trailed down behind him and onto the floor. He gripped a small toy cat by its hind legs. Extending the cat out in front of him, as if it were a scanning device, he rotated it slowly, pointing it at every corner of the room. Then he began to make an oddly mechanical noise, a sort of ratcheting “ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh” that sounded like a sluggish machine gun. Then a new sound started, a soft whirring sound. “Whirrrr. Whirrrrr. Whirrrrrrrr.” He stepped into the room just far enough to allow Dulcie to push the trailing strings forward with her foot and close the door.

The child avoided looking at James. His eyes darted nervously here and there. A hand came up alongside his face and he flapped it frantically. “Whirrrrrrrr,” he went again.

James rose from his chair in order to encourage the boy into the room, but the child reacted with panic, pointing the stuffed cat at James like a gun. “The cat knows!” he said loudly.

James stopped. “You don’t like me coming towards you.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh. Whirrrrrrr. Whirrrrrrr.”

“You would like me to sit down again.”

“Whirrrr.”

“That’s all right,” James said quietly and returned to the small chair beside the playroom table to sit down. “In here you can decide how things will be.”

Conor remained rooted just inside the door. He looked James over carefully, or at least that’s how James interpreted his behaviour, because Conor’s eyes never met his. Instead, the boy flicked his eyes back and forth repetitively, as if he had nystagmus, but James sensed it was simply a method of gaining visual information without eye contact. Then he extended the toy cat again and took a step further into the room. Still gripping the cat tightly by its hind legs, he raised and lowered it as if scanning James’s body. “The cat knows,” he whispered.

The play therapy room was spacious and painted pale yellow, a colour James had chosen because it made him think of sunshine. Not that this was really necessary, as there was usually a surplus of the real stuff pouring through the large east-facing windows and in the heat of summer, the room had a downright Saharan feel. Nonetheless, the colour pleased him.

As did the room itself. All the toys and other items in the room James had chosen with care. He knew exactly what he intended to create in the playroom: a place where nothing would constrain a child, where nothing looked too fragile nor too fancy to be touched, where everything invited playing with. When he’d first described to Sandy how he wanted to create a playroom, she had remarked that he’d never grown up himself, that it was his own childhood he was equipping. No doubt there was some truth in this, as the boy does make the man, but what she’d failed to appreciate was that these were also the tools of his trade and he’d quite simply wanted the best.

Very cautiously Conor began to move around the perimeter of the room. Holding the toy cat out in front of him like a divining rod, he went in a clockwise direction, keeping very close to the walls. The cat’s nose was touched to the furniture, the shelving, the various playthings along the way. “Meow? Meow?” he murmured as he went. It was all he said.

Having circumnavigated the room once, Conor immediately started on a second round. There was a low bookcase on the right-hand side where James kept many of the smaller toys. On top of the bookcase were wire baskets full of construction paper, glue, string, stickers, stamps, yarn, sequins, and other odds and ends for making pictures.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Meow?”

“If you want, you may take any of the things out of the baskets,” James said. “Everything in this room is to play with. All things are for touching. In this room, you decide.”

“Meow?” the boy replied.

The direction Conor was moving meant that he approached James from behind. The first time he had skirted widely around James as he sat at the small table. This time Conor slowed down as he drew near.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat motionless so as not to frighten the boy.

“Whirrrr,” came the whisper behind him.

The child’s breathing was fast and shallow, giving a hollowness to the sound like a rheumy dog panting. Then came the very soft touch of the toy cat against the back of James’s neck. With staccato quickness it touched him and then was gone. The boy whirred. The nose of the cat came again, so lightly that it just tipped the hairs on James’s skin.

“Meow?”

James turned his head and there was the briefest moment of eye contact between them. James smiled.

“The cat knows,” the boy whispered.

Thinking that someone as well known as Laura Deighton wouldn’t want to sit out in the waiting room with Dr Sorenson’s clients, Dulcie had allowed her to go into James’s office to wait for him there. James hadn’t expected this. A flicker of alarm went through him when Dulcie told him, because, of course, Laura Deighton would notice that he had her books on the shelf and, quite understandably, she would then assume that he had read them.

James wasn’t a Laura Deighton fan. He knew her books only by what he’d read about them in The New York Times Book Review, that they were “complex,” “profound,” and worse, “literary,” which, James knew, were all euphemisms for pretentious and/or unreadable. However, Laura Deighton was native to this corner of South Dakota, and since James was a newcomer and hence an outsider, he was acutely aware of the need to show respect for local icons. Consequently, he had bought the books – in hardback, even – and had set them up prominently on the bookshelf in his office to show his local loyalty. He did intend to read them at some point. He’d just never quite got around to it.

When he entered the office, he found Laura Deighton’s attention was not on books, however. She was standing beside the window, her interest absorbed in something outside. She didn’t turn immediately.

“Dulcie will keep Conor busy for a moment so that we can talk,” James said. Going to his desk, he set down the folders and his notepad. He adjusted his suit jacket and straightened his tie. Only then did Laura Deighton finally drag her attention away from the window.

She was an unremarkable-looking woman. In early middle age with the mousy-coloured hair that is the aftermath of a blonde childhood and eyes that weren’t really any particular colour at all, neither brown nor green, she could have been mistaken for any ordinary woman down at the supermarket, any one of those of a certain age who go a little soft around the waist, a little saggy here and there, who don’t stand out for any reason.

Her clothes, James noticed, weren’t really appropriate to the situation. It wasn’t simply that they lacked style. They were too casual for a first meeting of this kind, even by South Dakota’s relaxed standards. Jeans … okay, maybe it was possible to pull off jeans if you were twenty-seven and leggy, or if they were a fashionable brand and dressed up, but Laura Deighton’s jeans were a cheap brand that the local ranchers favoured. The white shirt was nondescript and the tweed jacket fitted her carelessly. She wore no jewellery and little makeup. Depression? James wondered. Or maybe this was how creative genius dressed.

James felt vague disappointment on seeing her. He thought there’d be some aura of glamour around her, some presence that would make it impossible to mistake this literary giant, risen from the cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, there was nothing.

“Do sit down,” he said. He gestured broadly towards the sofa and chairs.

Laura ignored them. She came over, extended her hand to shake his and then sat down in the chair beside his desk. “I appreciate your seeing Conor at such short notice.”

Silence followed. James preferred to let the client set the tone of the interview, so he never started off by asking questions. This didn’t appear to unnerve her the way it did some parents, but she was obviously anticipating questions. She looked at him expectantly.

When he didn’t speak, she said once more, “Thank you for seeing Conor at such short notice. Conor’s paediatrician – Dr Wilson, over at the clinic – recommended we bring Conor in to you. He said you’d come here from Manhattan, that you’d been in a practice there.”

“Yes,” James said.

“He spoke very highly of you. Said it’s a renowned practice in New York, that to have been a partner there, you’d be a real high flyer.” She chuckled. “And I can tell you, that’s serious praise coming from Dr Wilson.”

“Thanks to him for that recommendation,” James replied, “but I’m sure there are also many good professionals out here too.”

Silence then. Again she looked expectantly at James. When he didn’t say anything further, she said, “Until now we’ve had Conor at the Avery School. In Denver. Have you heard of it?”.

“I don’t know it well,” James replied. “I’ve only been out here since February, but Dr Sorenson has mentioned it.”

“They work on a very structured behavioural program. Called ‘repatterning’. The school has an excellent reputation for success at socializing severely autistic children.”

A pause.

“Although,” she said with faint sarcasm, “maybe that’s simply because they do to the failures what they’ve just done to us. We received a letter right out of the blue saying they didn’t want Conor back this autumn. That they felt Avery wasn’t ‘helpful to his needs’. It was worded wonderfully. Like it was their fault things didn’t work out, when you knew they meant just the opposite. That they think we’ve got a funky kid. So here we are with absolutely no place to send him. Completely stuck.”

James looked at Laura closely. He was finding her difficult to read. On the face of it, she appeared straight-talking, but her words and body language gave off none of the usual subtle subtext. She sat absolutely still in a relatively neutral pose that was neither open nor closed. She made good, although not outstanding, eye contact. Her tone of voice was even but not very nuanced.

His inability to glean more intuitive information from her surprised James. He’d been prepared for other challenges in meeting Laura Deighton. Would her fame unnerve him, for instance? Or more likely, would he take an instant dislike to her? The literary people he’d known in Manhattan were, to a person, pompous and self-absorbed, and he hated these traits. When he’d discovered she was coming in, he caught himself feeling a certain gratification at the fact he’d never actually read any of her books. But her blankness was unexpected. There was just no discernible subtext. That was where James was accustomed to doing all his “reading,” where he got so much information about clients, there in that intuitive space beneath words and gestures. With Laura Deighton, it was as if this space did not exist.

“Has Conor always been in a residential program?” he asked finally. “Have you not found suitable programs locally?”

“It needs to be residential. Our ranch is out beyond Hill City. Realistically, we just couldn’t be driving him a long distance every day.”

“Was Dr Wilson clear with you about what kind of therapy I do?” James replied. “Because if I took Conor on, I would expect to see him three times a week.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, although perhaps not so much so that it could be interpreted as surprise.

“I’m a child psychiatrist,” James continued. “What I prefer to do with the children I see is traditional play therapy, which means having them in on a very regular basis.”

She was silent a long moment. “No. I hadn’t quite realized that’s what you did. So perhaps it’s not appropriate. Conor’s autistic. I know in the old days it was common to send autistic kids to psychiatrists, but, of course, we understand now it’s not a psychiatric condition. It’s neurological. Consequently we’ve always had Conor in behaviour-based treatment because that’s the proven way of teaching life skills to children like him.”

“Did Dr Wilson give you any reasons why he thought it might be helpful for Conor to come here?” James asked.

“No, he just suggested it.” She paused. Her silence was at first expectant, but grew longer and more indistinct.

Then without warning, the mask slipped. Her shoulders dropped in a gesture of despair. “Probably just because I’m so desperate. I know I’m driving Dr Wilson demented with my calls. It’s just that Conor’s so difficult. Home for a month and he’s destroying us.”

Sympathy washed over James. He leaned towards her, his folded arms on the desk, and smiled reassuringly. “Yes, I can understand. Children like Conor can be very demanding,” he said softly. “Don’t worry.”

The muscles along her jaw tightened. She wasn’t teary but James knew she was in that moment just before tears.

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how Conor is at home?” he said. “That’ll give us a better idea of whether or not coming here would be appropriate.”

Laura became teary.

He smiled gently and leaned forward to nudge the box of tissues towards the edge of the desk. “Don’t worry. This is a very hard moment. Most parents feel pretty upset.”

“It’s just … just such a nightmare. Like one of those nightmares where you keep doing the same thing over and over and it never works out, it never achieves anything.”

She took a tissue. The tears hadn’t really materialized, so she just clamped it tightly in her fist. James had a strong sense that she was feeling deeply conflicted in that moment, that self-control was a huge issue but that at the same time the burden of this boy was so overwhelming that she was desperate for help.

“Is Conor your only child?”

“No. We have a daughter too, who’s six.”

“When did Conor’s problems first start?” James asked.

Laura let out a slow, elongated sigh. “When he was about two. He seemed all right when he was a baby, although it’s hard to know with your first child. There were things I had always been concerned about. He was very jumpy, for instance. If you came up behind him or there was a loud noise, he’d always startle badly. Dr Wilson said it was just a temperament thing, that it simply indicated he was a sensitive boy, and not to worry about it. Otherwise, he was a good baby. He slept well. He didn’t have colic or anything.”

“Did he seem to develop normally to you?”

“Yes.” Her voice had a plaintive, almost querulous note of bewilderment to it and James wondered how often she’d had to give these details. Or was stopped from giving them. In this era of insurance and accountability, there often was little time spent on collecting psychosocial histories beyond what was needed to prescribe the appropriate drug. James had found listening carefully to the parents’ initial version of events was one of the most valuable thing to do, not only for the concrete information it provided in building up a picture of a child’s problems, but also as a way of cementing that crucial relationship with the parents, because they often felt so desperate and unheard.

“Conor was always timid,” Laura said. “He cried easily. He worried about things. Even as a little, little boy. But he was very bright and interested in things. He talked early. Even by a year old, he could use several words.”

“So you say the difficulties starting showing up after he turned two?”

Twisting the tissue between her fingers, Laura nodded. “It started with his becoming very clingy. He’d always been inclined to be clingy but suddenly it got much worse. He never wanted me out of his sight. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him. He began having these terrible temper tantrums. Dr Wilson was still telling us not to worry. Kids have tantrums at that age, he kept saying, but I don’t think he realized how bad they were. Conor would just go frantic and do things like literally rip the wallpaper off the wall with his fingernails. To complicate things, that’s when I got pregnant with Morgana and it was a challenging pregnancy. I had some serious medical problems. And we were having some financial difficulties, which meant the pregnancy wasn’t very well timed – it hadn’t been planned – so a whole lot was going on.”

“Can you describe Conor’s behaviour in a little more detail?” James asked.

“He got really hyper, really agitated. He wouldn’t sleep. He could go days without sleeping. Which, with a new baby …” She let out a defeated sigh. “And the screaming started. He’d be sitting, playing normally with his toys and then suddenly he’d get all panicky, and start screaming and screaming. He had been in a nursery program two days a week, but we had to take him out because his behaviour upset the other children so much. The school wouldn’t keep him.” She put a hand over her eyes for a moment in a gesture of desperation and then rubbed her face. “It just got so distressing to live with. Finally Dr Wilson arranged for him to go into the children’s unit at the university hospital in Sioux Falls to be assessed. That’s when autism was diagnosed.”

James nodded thoughtfully.

“And now …” Laura said. She sighed again. “It’s getting just like that all over again. ‘Difficult’ doesn’t half describe living with Conor. For example, everything has got to be just so. His room, his toys, his food. Everything must be in a special place and in a special order. I can’t do anything for him if it isn’t exactly the same way I did it before. Like at breakfast, I can’t put the eggs on the table if the juice hasn’t been poured first. All these little rituals have to be followed precisely. Like those wires. Did you see those? Those bits of string around his waist? There must four of them. Exactly six feet long. Each with twelve bits of foil. Then there’s that frigging cat. That cat rules everything in the house. It goes everywhere he goes, does everything he does, investigates every molecule that comes in contact with Conor.

“This all makes even the smallest, most ordinary task a trial. Try giving a bath to a kid who must have string, foil and a stuffed cat on his person at all times. Or putting him to bed. It’s like putting Frankenstein’s monster to bed. All those wires have to be attached to the bedpost and crisscrossed over the bed just so. If they’re not just so, he’ll sit there ‘adjusting’. He can be up for hours ‘adjusting’, scanning the cat over them, ‘adjusting’ some more and all the while he is making noises – buzzing and whirring, or worse, meowing. This then wakes Morgana. She goes in to see what’s going on. She means no harm. She’s just being your typical, nosey six-year-old. But if she tries to help him or she touches his cat, he freaks. So then I yell at her for upsetting him and she cries. Then he cries. Like as not, I end up crying too.”

James smiled sympathetically. “That must be very difficult. What about your husband, Alan? Does he help much with Conor?”

Laura leaned back in the chair and expelled a long, heavy breath. “Well, there’s another issue …

“It’s not so good between Al and me at the moment,” she said softly, and James could hear emotion tightening her words. “That’s a whole other story. A long one and I don’t want to go into it right now. But the short answer is: yes, he helps when he can. It’s just I don’t know how long that’s going to last, because we’re splitting up.” She looked over tearfully. “So, see, this is why I can’t cope with Conor at home. Even I have to admit I need help.”

Chapter Two

“Laura Deighton, huh?” Lars said, leaning over the appointment book that was lying open on Dulcie’s desk. “So is the boy coming in then?”

James nodded. “I couldn’t get her to agree to three times a week, but we’re going to do Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“What’s she like?”

“Seems okay,” James replied.

“Not all …?” Lars wiggled his hand in a gesture that James took to mean “above herself”.

“No, not really. Just trying to cope with some big challenges, like all parents of autistic children.”

Lars rolled his eyes teasingly. “But then you’ll be used to celebrities, won’t you? The high-falutin’ crowd. City Boy.” He grinned.

City Boy, indeed. Culture shock was too mild a word for what James had experienced in moving from Manhattan to Rapid City. South Dakota might as well have been the dark side of the moon. James did manage to do what he’d dreamed of – set up his own private practice in family therapy – but it hadn’t turned out to be exactly like his fantasies. Even at South Dakota prices, James had discovered he couldn’t afford to go it alone. Consequently, he’d ended up in partnership with a local psychiatrist, Lars Sorenson. If James had wanted freedom from the strict Freudian theory that had ruled his life in New York, he couldn’t have done better than Lars, whose ideas of psychiatry had more to do with football scores or gilt hog prices than Freud. James’s former colleagues would have frozen stiff at Lars and his homely country doctor approach. Indeed, James himself had taken so much thawing out when he first came that he’d probably left puddles behind him, but if Lars had noticed, he’d never let it bother him. In the end, James was grateful for the partnership. Lars was never in such a hurry that he wouldn’t stop and listen or answer one more stupid question about “real life,” as he liked to call living and working in Rapid City. And while there was a lot of good-natured teasing, he had never once laughed outright at James’s city-bred ideas.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh,” Conor murmured. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh, ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” As before, he stood only just inside the playroom door.

James listened carefully to the noise. It had a distinctive mechanical sound, like a car ignition turning over on a cold morning. Turning, turning, turning but never catching.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh, ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

Conor had the stuffed cat clutched tightly against his chest. Slowly he lifted it up until it was pressed under his chin, then higher still until the head of the cat lay against his lips. He stopped the ignition sound. Taking one hand off the cat, he flapped it frantically. “Meow?” he said.

Was he making the noise on behalf of the toy? James wondered. Was he trying to make it ask something that Conor dared not voice himself? Or was it the other way around? Was the cat putting its words in Conor’s mouth?

“Meow?”

“When you’re ready, Conor, you can come all the way into the room and we’ll shut the door,” James said. “But if you wish to stand there, that’s all right too. In here you can choose what you want to do.”

The boy remained immobile in the doorway, the toy cat pressed against the lower half of his face. His eyes flickered here and there but never to meet James’s gaze.

An expectancy seemed to form around them and James didn’t want this. He didn’t want Conor to feel there were any expectations of what he should or shouldn’t be doing, so James attempted to diffuse it by lifting up his spiral notebook. “This is where I take my notes. I am going to write in it while I sit here. I will write notes of what we are doing together so that I don’t forget.” He picked up his pen.

For a full five or six minutes Conor stood without moving, then very cautiously he began to inch inward. As with the first session, he stayed near to the perimeter of the room and kept well away from James, sitting at the small table. Once, twice, Conor circumnavigated the room and pressed the cat’s nose lightly against things as he went.

He was saying something under his breath. James couldn’t hear at first, but as Conor passed the third time, he could make out words. House. Car. Doll. Conor was naming the items he saw, as he passed them. This was a good sign, James thought. He understood the meaning of words. He knew things had names. He had at least some contact with reality.

So it was when Conor came again on Thursday. And again the next week. Fifty minutes were spent quietly circling the room, touching things lightly with the nose of the stuffed cat, naming them. James didn’t intrude on this activity. He wanted the boy to set his own pace, to construct his own sense of security within the room, to understand that James had meant what he’d said: that Conor alone would decide what he wanted to do in here. That was how trust was built, James believed. That was how you made a child feel safe enough to reveal all that was hidden. Not by schedules. Not by reward and punishment. But by giving time. There were no shortcuts. Even when it meant session after session of naming.

Three weeks passed. During the sixth session Conor circled the room upon entering and again touched everything he could easily reach with the toy cat’s nose, still murmured the names, but this time it was different. He elaborated. Red house, he whispered. Brown chair. Blue pony.

For the first time, James answered Conor’s murmuring.

“Yes,” James said, “that’s a blue pony.”

Conor’s head jerked up abruptly. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” He stared straight ahead. The hand not holding the cat came up and fluttered frantically in front of his eyes. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat very still.

Moments passed.

Slowly Conor exhaled. Extending the cat away from his body, he touched its nose to the edge of the shelf. “Wood,” he murmured very softly.

“Yes, that’s made of wood,” James said.

The cat was retracted instantly.

James watched the boy, who kept his head averted to avoid eye contact.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” There was a long pause, then Conor whispered, “Brown wood.”

“Yes, the wood is brown.”

Conor turned his head. Not to look at James. His eyes never left the far distant point they were fixed on, but his head inclined a little in James’s direction. That was all that happened.

“Bob and I were thinking of going over to the Big Horns to squeeze in a couple of days of elk hunting,” Lars said and sank down in the beige-cushioned softness of James’s office. “You want to come?”

“That’s a very kind invitation, Lars, but I don’t know one end of a rifle from the other.”

“You can borrow one of Davy’s guns,” Lars replied. “Davy killed his first buck when he was just twelve. Did I tell you about it? A six-pointer.”

“Yes, you mentioned it.”

“So come with us. Time you got blooded, Jim. How else we gonna make a South Dakota man out of you?” Lars laughed heartily. “It’ll just be Bob and me. We’ll take some beers and some grub and have a great time.”

“When?”

“Next weekend.”

Relief flooded through James. “Well, damn! Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve got the kids coming out next weekend. Remember? Because I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off the following week.”

“Oh Jesus, yeah.”

“Darn. I’m sorry to miss it. Maybe next time.”

Stretching his arms up behind his head, Lars settled back into the chair. “So how’s it been going between you and Sandy? Is she getting any more reasonable about the kids?”

“Not really. They can come out at Easter but she says no way over Christmas,” James replied, but he couldn’t quite keep the disappointment from his voice.

“Why not? I thought you got to alternate Christmases,” Lars said.

“The court says yes. But Sandy keeps on about how disruptive it is for them at their ages.”

“Yeah, but they’re your kids too. You’ve got the right to spend time with them.”

“I know, but all this fighting over them isn’t good for them either. I don’t want them to grow up seeing Sandy and me at each other’s throats the whole time. And she’s probably got a point. It is disruptive for them at Christmastime. Sandy always goes to her folks in Connecticut. They have one of those big old Cape Cod houses and do Christmas with this enormous ten-foot tree and all the trimmings. The kids have their grandparents there, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their friends. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time. Desperately as I want Mikey and Becky with me, I want what’s best for them more.”

“You’re a pushover, Jim,” Lars said, shaking his head. “You need to learn how to stand up to her. To say: ‘This is important to me and I’m going to fight for it.’”

“I already have, Lars. That’s how I’ve ended up here.”

“Well, once in a lifetime isn’t enough. You need to keep at it.”

James nodded morosely. “Yes, I know.”

The day was one of those in autumn of pure lapis lazuli sky and crystal air. From the large playroom window, James could see out over the city to the open plains beyond. Below in the street the dappled tints of gold and orange flickered restlessly in the sunlight, but the sky stretched ever onward, a clear, almost luminescent blue.

Gentle joy always filled James when he stood at this window. Clichéd as the vision was, he knew there was a metaphorical eagle somewhere inside him that would one day spread its wings and soar in response to this infinite landscape. His heart still felt depressingly sparrow-sized most of the time, but seeing such immensity always gave him hope of greater things.

Not that his sparrow’s heart hadn’t had its own share of struggling to get free. The most horrible moment had come two years ago when, after ten years of training, James suddenly realized that he couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the sheltered prison of psychoanalytic theory. That moment still relived itself with soul-shattering clarity. He’d been fighting his way through heavy traffic on FDR Drive in Upper Manhattan when the insight mushroomed up with all the subtlety of an H-bomb going off. His hands went rigid on the steering wheel; sweat ran down the sides of his face and his heartbeat roared up so loudly into his ears that it drowned out whatever the hell was playing on that jazz station he always listened to but didn’t really like. He realized then that things had to change. He had to get out of the life he was living …

God, what that moment of insight did to Sandy. She’d been beyond furious when he told her. The rows they had. And some of her anger was justified. She’d supported him all those years. She’d put her own career on hold while he’d finished medical school, then the training, the internship, the residency and his own analysis to emerge as a fully qualified psychiatrist. Sandy had stuck through it all for the chance of a brownstone on the Upper West Side and private school for the kids. Those were her goals in life and she’d worked just as hard to achieve them as he’d worked for his.

“Theory?” she’d screamed when he’d tried to give voice to his confusion. “What the hell’s this sudden thing with theory? How can you wreck our entire lives over something like that? It isn’t even real. So what if you don’t believe it? You’re not a priest, for fuck’s sake. Believe in something else.”

How did he explain it, his inarticulate longing for something beyond the narrow corridors of analysis, the domineering views of his colleagues and the shadowy brick-and-mortar ravines of Manhattan? A panic attack in the middle of rush-hour traffic hadn’t been very subtle, but it got the message over.

James began to dream ceaselessly of escaping to a world where everything was simpler. He was, however, still dreaming of civilization. A small practice out in Queens perhaps. South Dakota had never entered his head. Then, in the fated ways some things happen, he had run into an old friend who had another friend who had known Lars from medical school and knew too that he was looking to expand his practice in Rapid City. James had gone home that night and looked South Dakota up on the internet, and the first picture to fill up the screen was of a lone pronghorn antelope standing on the flattest, emptiest land James had ever seen. The sheer otherworldliness of it felt like the answer to everything.

Except for Sandy, of course. The idea of moving to South Dakota quickly reduced the whole matter to a simple choice for her: staying with him or staying in the city. New York won, hands down. The gut-wrencher was that she got custody of the kids.

What kind of impostor filled a room with toys for strangers’ children and then hardly ever saw his own? He had access, of course, but now two thousand miles separated him from their routine of splashy bath times and “dinosaur kisses.” His greatest fear was that he’d become a stranger to Mikey and Becky. A very nice stranger, to be sure, but a stranger nonetheless.

When Conor arrived, James began reflecting his words immediately. If Conor said “doll’s house,” then James said, “Yes, that’s a doll’s house.” If Conor elaborated and said, “big doll’s house,” then James mirrored that back in a sentence, “Yes, that’s a big doll’s house.” James felt quite secure in interpreting Conor’s extensive naming of items in the playroom as an embryonic effort at interaction. It was conversation at a most rudimentary level, like an infant’s speech, but James recognized it as conversation.

Conor was increasingly attracted to the low shelves and their baskets of small toys. He didn’t take the baskets from the shelf, didn’t even touch them, but more and more often he would stand in front of them and press the cat’s nose against their mesh. “Meow? Meow? Basket. Wire basket. Silver wire basket.”

“Yes, silver wire baskets. Baskets full of toys. Toys you can play with, if you want. In here, you decide.”

Conor lifted the cat up and continued on his journey around the room. Coming to the expanse of windows, he paused. He didn’t go near them enough to look down on the vast view visible from the playroom, but he reached the cat out and pressed its nose to the glass. “Window. Meow?”

“Yes, those are the windows. We can see out,” James said.

Conor moved on.

In the far corner was what James called his “road sheet”. Made of heavy-gauge white plastic sheeting, it was about four by four feet in size and printed with an elaborate layout of roads just the right size for toy cars and little buildings made of Lego bricks. It had been folded up on the shelf when Conor had been in the playroom previously, but now it was lying flat on the floor.

Coming up to it, Conor stood stone still. Not a muscle quivered. A full minute passed, feeling an eternity long. “Meow?” he whispered.

“That’s the road sheet,” James said. “Toy cars can drive there.”

The muscles tensed along Conor’s jaw as he stared at the plastic square on the floor. Raising one hand, he flapped it frantically in front of his face for a few moments.

“Man on the moon,” he said with very precise clarity. “July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong accompanied Buzz Aldrin. Apollo Project. Put the first man on the moon. July 20, 1969.”

Surprised by this sudden burst of speech, James studied the boy. Exact regurgitation of overheard conversations was common with autistic children, but it was the first time in the three weeks Conor had been coming that James heard him do it. Did Conor have any understanding of the words he had just said or was it simply autistic echolalia?

“Something has made you think of the men who went to the moon,” James said carefully.

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

James probed further to discover if there was any glimmer of meaning. “Yes, that is what Neil Armstrong said when he stepped on the moon, isn’t it?”

Conor raised his head. “The cat knows.”

Chapter Three

In an ideal world, all child therapy was family therapy. As a child’s problems virtually never arose in isolation, James considered it as vital to see the mother, the father and the siblings as it was to see the child him- or herself.

Everyone in the business knew this, of course, but things seldom worked out that way nowadays. Philosophies had changed. The business model had taken over psychiatry just as it had everything else. “The bottom line” and “accountability” had replaced “self-discovery” and “insight”. Insurance companies often refused to pay for more than twelve sessions of therapy. Behavioural contracts and token economies provided a swifter intervention than play therapy. Drugs provided an even swifter one. Both mothers and fathers worked and were generally unavailable for therapy during office hours. And everyone was in a hurry. Impatience had become the motif of modern life. As a consequence, the main function of many psychiatrists was simply to prescribe drugs. James often felt like a dinosaur for trying to turn the clock back to a slower, more humanistic model.

South Dakota hadn’t been a good place to choose for a renaissance of traditional therapeutic values. They were a self-reliant people, not used to talking to strangers about their personal problems, so it was hard enough to get them through the door at all. And with agriculture still the main industry, they understood “bottom lines” acutely well. Many parents of his young patients had refused outright to come in for therapy sessions themselves because of the additional cost. In the end, James had had to go “commercial” to create a genuine family therapy setting by coming up with the concept of a “package deal” – that he would see each member of the immediate family for three sessions for one set price. Truth was, he was quite proud of that idea and thought it would work, but no. Too often he still had to charm them in.

Laura Deighton was going to be one such, James could tell. It became apparent almost instantly that from her perspective, Conor had sole ownership of his problem. When James raised the issue of family therapy, of seeing her, her husband and their daughter as well as Conor, Laura had actually stood up. She literally started to leave and James had no doubt she would have done so, if he hadn’t pulled back immediately. This reaction fascinated him, because, of course, it said so much more to him about how unwilling she was to look at the problem than words could have done.

Conor’s father, Alan McLachlan, however, was just the opposite. When James explained how Conor’s therapy would work, Alan agreed straightaway. “Yes, of course,” he said. He’d be happy to come in.

With the same care that James had put into designing the playroom, he had laid out his office for use in interviews and adult therapy sessions. Beyond the desk, he’d created a rectangular-shaped “conversation centre” with soft, comfortable chairs and a sofa. The coffee table, the end tables and the plants had all been chosen with care to give a pleasant, airy, relaxed atmosphere. He’d purposely picked real wood and natural materials to help mitigate the artificiality of the situation and used a pale beige upholstery to give the room an open, positive feeling. Lars kidded him about such attention to detail, but James was pleased with the effect. He felt it worked.

Laura Deighton had shown little interest in his conversation centre and seated herself beside his desk before he’d had the chance to encourage her elsewhere. When Alan came in, however, he had moved naturally to the sofa. Sinking into the beige-cushioned softness, he settled down comfortably. So comfortably, in fact, that he soon was resting one scuffed and, as James noticed, rather dirty cowboy boot on the edge of the coffee table.

Alan wasn’t a tall man. James was six foot, so not a giant by any means, but he must have had three or four inches over him. Alan’s hair, thick and rumpled by the removal of a red-and-white duckbilled hat, was the uneven grey of galvanized metal. His eyes were the same misty Celtic blue as Conor’s. He looked older than his fifty years. His face was ruddy and lined, his skin long since gone to leather from a lifetime spent outdoors, but he still had about him a worn-out handsomeness.

James had been a little nervous about Alan. He’d never come face to face before with that iconic stereotype of the West – a cowboy – a man who rode horses as part of his daily working life, who gathered cattle, branded them, calved them and, when necessary, wrestled them to the ground and cut off their balls. It all spoke to James of the kind of mythic masculinity that existed only in movies, and he worried about finding common ground. Alan didn’t help James’s confidence at all with the way he’d so casually put his boot onto the coffee table. It was like territorial marking. Subtler than peeing, perhaps, but James felt like it meant pretty much the same thing.

“Thank you very much for coming in,” James said.

“Nope, my pleasure.”

There was a pause then while James waited for him to set the tone of the session. In the brief silence James found himself wondering about Alan and Laura as a couple. What had attracted her to this country man? How did he cope with having a world-famous wife?

Alan didn’t give James much time to think, however, as he almost immediately asked, “So how’s Conor doing?”

“We’re still establishing trust,” James replied. “He seems very uncertain in the new situation.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t deal with new situations well. Autistic kids are like that.” A pause. “So what do you actually do with him in here?” Alan asked. “Because I wasn’t quite clear what this was all about from the way Laura explained it.”

“And how was that?” James enquired.

“Well, it’s her version, so who knows. To be honest, I’m pleased you’ve asked me in yourself, because this way I actually stand a chance of understanding what’s going on.”

“You feel you haven’t been consulted as much on Conor’s treatment in the past as you’d like?”

Alan let out a long, heavy breath. “I don’t think it’s not being consulted so much as that I’ve long ago lost track of what led to what led to what.”

A pause.

James waited calmly. He was getting the sense of a man who thought quite deeply but wasn’t quick with words, who took time to organize his thoughts and get them out. How had someone like that ended up with a woman whose life was made of words?

“I never wanted Conor in that Colorado school,” Alan finally said. “That’s the first thing I want to make clear. I mean, who sends their young child seven hundred miles away? We shouldn’t ever have done that. Autism happens. A lot of people have autistic children. They cope with it. They don’t put the kid away.”

“So how did the decision come to be made?” James asked.

“Laura. This, here,” he said with a broad sweep of his hand. “It’s about the fact that Laura needs treatment.”

James was not quite certain what Alan meant. “You’re saying that coping with Conor is causing problems for Laura? Or coping with Laura is causing problems for Conor?”

“Both, really. I don’t think they’re two different things,” Alan replied. “But the biggest problem up to now has just been getting Laura to take responsibility for it. When she said this was a family therapy thing, that we couldn’t get Conor in here unless we were involved too, I thought ‘Thank God. She’s finally taking me seriously.’ She’s always pooh-poohed the idea of therapy and been so quick to blame it all on Conor, make it all Conor’s problem. But it’s also been about Laura not being able to cope with him. That’s how I got railroaded into sending him to Avery.”

“Can you tell me how you saw Conor’s problems starting?” James asked.

“We had a couple of absolute shit years. It was about the time Conor was two or three. Everything just happened at once. I was having some serious money problems with the ranch. People assume because Laura’s work is well known that we must be wealthy, but there is a big difference between literary and commercial. The truth is, both ranching and book-writing are very uncertain ways to earn a living.

“So we were having major financial problems. Right in the middle of it, Laura got pregnant. It was unplanned and quite complicated. We thought Laura had actually lost the baby, because she miscarried, but apparently it was a twin pregnancy and she’d lost only one. Anyway, cue for lots of medical problems and bills just at a time when we desperately needed her earnings. Poor Conor. His little life just got turned on its head. I was gone all the time because I was hiring out to other ranches to earn some extra money and Laura felt so unwell. Conor’s always been a sensitive kid, and this just made it worse. He got fearful of just about everything. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I thought he’d settle down once things were more stable, once I was able to be around more and the baby was born. What I didn’t appreciate was that during all this time I was away, Laura was falling apart too.

“I felt bad – feel bad even now – because I know I left Laura to cope on her own too much of that time, even when I did see signs of trouble. But, Christ, it’s hard to know what’s right. I was working all the hours God sends to save the ranch and I just couldn’t be in two places at once.

“The turning point came when the preschool told us they couldn’t keep Conor any longer. After that, he was home all the time. Laura just was not handling it. So that’s when she started looking into residential placements for Conor … I felt I had to let Laura have a chance to recover, because otherwise … Well, to be honest I was afraid if I didn’t, I was going to end up on my own with two young kids.”

Alan fell silent.

James sat back in his chair. “So did placing Conor in the residential school help Laura recover?” he asked.

“Things settled down.” Alan lifted his shoulders in a faint shrug. “But I guess ‘recovery’ implies they got better. That didn’t happen. It just got buried, because that’s Laura’s way of handling things. And I’ve about had my fill of it.”

“Horse?” Conor said in a sing-songy tone that was halfway between a statement and a question.

“Yes, that’s a horse,” James replied.

“Whirrrr, whirrrr.” Conor stood the small plastic animal up on the table. He reached into the basket and drew out another animal. “Elephant?”

“Yes, that’s an elephant.”

“Whirrrr, whirrrr. Pig?” he said, taking out the next animal.

Conor didn’t look over as he did this. He didn’t encourage the slightest amount of eye contact. James was interpreting Conor’s behaviour as an attempt to interact, but it may not have been. If James wasn’t fast enough responding, Conor would quickly move on to the next animal. It could be simply the self-referencing play so typical of autistic children.

The next animal out of the basket was one that James himself wasn’t all that sure about. A wildebeest or something else equally odd to be in a child’s play set. Conor looked at it and perplexity pinched his features. “Cow?” he asked and his high-pitched tone betrayed a genuine question.

“You’ve found a cow,” James replied, reflecting back Conor’s words to indicate he was listening. Whatever the creature was, it was undeniably cow-like so James was comfortable with calling it a cow.

“Ehhh,” the boy muttered under his breath. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh!” Then his fingers abruptly splayed wide and the plastic animal clattered to the table top as if it had become too hot to hold. Snatching up the stuffed cat, Conor clutched it tightly. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh! Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh!”

James could see the boy was becoming agitated. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh,” he kept repeating, like an engine that refused to catch. He started to tremble. His pale skin and colourless hair gave him a naked vulnerability that made James think of newly hatched birds, owlets and eaglets, almost grotesque in their nakedness.

“You didn’t like it when I said that,” James ventured. “Are you worried that it may not be a cow?”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

“You want to know precisely what that animal is. You don’t like not knowing,” he interpreted.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh! Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh!” Conor sputtered frantically. Bringing up the stuffed cat, he pressed it over his eyes. “Meow? Meow?”

James picked up the plastic animal and examined it. “Perhaps it’s a wildebeest. Or a yak. No, I don’t think it’s a yak. They have lots of hair. Perhaps it’s an auroch. That’s a kind of wild cow.”

Without warning Conor took the cat by its hind leg and swung it like a weapon in a broad arc that cleared the table entirely. All the plastic animals went flying, as did James’s notebook. Making a shrill, piercing noise that caused the inner parts of James’s ears to vibrate, Connor screamed. His complexion went from white to red to a deep blotched colour like clotted blood in milk. He slid off the chair onto the floor and pressed the cat over his eyes.

Emotional upset was an expected part of play therapy and as long as the child was not hurting himself in any way, James found the best response was to remain in his chair, calm and composed, to show things were still in control and then endeavour to put words to the child’s inarticulate distress.

“You’re feeling very frightened,” he said quietly as Conor lay on the floor and howled. “You feel so scared you want to scream and cry.”

His words seemed to upset Conor more, because the boy began to shriek even louder.

“In here, it’s all right to scream, if that’s what you need to do,” James said. “No one will be angry. No one will be upset. It’s safe to cry in here. Nothing bad will happen.”

Minutes ticked by. Still Conor thrashed and shrieked. Temper? James wondered. He didn’t think so. There hadn’t been any precipitating event that he could discern. Panic? Just plain terror at a world full of things the boy didn’t know? Or frustration, perhaps, at his wordlessness?