Overheard in a Dream. Torey Hayden

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ