Overheard in a Dream (18 page)

“So, when he got there, I said, ‘I brung you this book,’ and I told him I wasn’t supposed to, but I’d done it anyway because I knew he’d want to see. And know what he said? He said, ‘You shouldn’t have stoled it.’ I said, ‘I
didn’t
steal it. It belongs to my family and I’m part of my family, so it isn’t stealing.’ He says, ‘You still shouldn’t have tooken it.’ He says, ‘You shouldn’t never get knowledge by stealing it.’ So I got really mad at him.”

“You took a risk to bring him something nice and it felt like he didn’t appreciate it,” James said.

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about it now?” James asked.

“I’m still mad at him because he doesn’t understand. He likes to see pictures of lions and tigers and things and these were really good. But he wrecked it. He wouldn’t even look at the pictures. We just fought with each other.”

“You must have felt disappointed too, as well as mad,” James said.

She nodded. “He’s always telling me off. He says when you’re born you got a plan that makes you part of things and you’re supposed to follow it. You can choose
not
to follow it and that’s called free will. But really, you’re supposed to use your free will to choose
to
follow it because that’s the right thing to do.”

“
How
old did you say the Lion King was?”

“He’s eight.”

“He sounds like a very unusual boy.”

“That’s just the kind of stuff him and his cousin learn. A man comes to their house to teach them, but all he seems to teach them is about being good and bad. The Lion King says he’s got to learn it to make him a good king when he grows up.”

“And yet this man doesn’t teach him how to read?” James asked.

“No. The man doesn’t know how to read.” Suddenly Morgana’s face brightened. “But guess what? The Lion King knows all his letters already. I taught him the alphabet song.”

“Does his cousin come to play with you too?”

“No, she stays at home. We don’t want her anyway. It’s a secret, him and me playing together.”

“Why is that?” James asked.

“We don’t want anyone to know we see each other. So don’t tell, okay? I’ve only told you because you said I could tell you secrets.”

“Your parents don’t know about this little boy?”

“No.”

Concerned, James said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, keeping a secret like that from your parents”

“My dad wouldn’t like him.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s got long hair,” Morgana replied. “Daddy says boys with long hair are hippies and he doesn’t like hippies ’cause they camp on our land without asking. So he’d tell me not to play with him. Then he’d say, ‘How come are you playing with a boy anyway?’ He’d want to know why he doesn’t have any friends his own age to play with. It takes too much ’splaining to tell my dad stuff.”

“What about telling your mum?”

“My mum’s got too much else to think about. Besides, I like having secrets.”

“Some secrets are not good to keep,” James said. “I’m thinking your parents may feel very worried if they find out you have friends they didn’t know about. I think they should know.”

“No, I don’t think so. I never go where I’m not suppose to. I’m just down by the creek. I’m allowed there ’cause it isn’t very deep, and I always tell them when I go out to play. And the Lion King would never, ever hurt me.”

“Here is paint,” Conor said. “Coleman School Supplies,” he read on the side of the jar. “Blue. Blue finger-paint. Coleman School Supplies.”

“You read well,” James said.

“You read well,” Conor echoed.

“Perhaps today you would like to finger-paint. Have you ever done it?” James asked.

Conor looked up briefly. “Blue and red and green makes brown.”

“Yes, I suppose they would.”

Conor picked up a jar of red finger-paint and unscrewed the lid. He sniffed it. Very gingerly, he touched the surface of the paint with one finger. “Jelly.”

“Because it’s finger-paint, it’s very thick,” James explained.

“The boy will paint,” Conor said decisively.

“Shall I get you some paper?” James asked. “Or would you like to get it yourself? The paper for finger-painting is kept right there. Then we need to put some water on it first so the paint will work.”

“A brush!” Conor replied abruptly. “The boy won’t use messy paints.”

“Today you don’t want to finger-paint. You prefer to paint with a brush.”

“Yeah.” He set the jar of red finger-paint down on the shelf.

“The brush paints are over there in the tray of the easel,” James said, pointing.

Whirring softly, Conor went to the easel. Picking up a brush from the yellow paint, he made a broad smear across the paper.

“Here is what isn’t,” he said and added another broad stroke of colour.

James didn’t quite understand, so he didn’t comment.

Conor turned slightly towards him. He seemed to be aware of James’s confusion because he said, “Here is what
isn’t
. Now is. Now is colour. Now isn’t ‘isn’t.’”

“You are telling me that there wasn’t anything there before?” James asked. “But now you have made something. You have created something that wasn’t there before.”

“Yeah. It isn’t ‘isn’t.’”

There was a very faintly detectable note of pleasure in Conor’s voice at the word repetition. A glimmer of a sense of humour? Conscious word play? This was sophisticated thinking.

Conor stepped back to regard his painting and said, “Where is ‘isn’t’ gone?”

When James didn’t answer, Conor turned around. His eyes rested briefly on James’s face. “Isn’t there,” he said. “‘Isn’t isn’t’ isn’t there.” And smiled.

When he came to pick Conor up after the boy’s session, Alan asked, “Can I have a word? Do you have time?”

James nodded. “Yes, come on back to my office. Dulcie? Could you mind Conor for a few moments?”

Alan said, “I’ve got something really great to tell you. Over the weekend I was out in the corrals by the house, fixing one of the water troughs. Conor was just hanging out with me, and all of a sudden this dead leaf was blown into the water in the trough. I didn’t notice it right away but then Conor says, ‘There’s a maple leaf.’ Clear as day. Just plain as anything. That’s how he said it. Then he got a stick and fished it out.

“I haven’t heard him speak like that – you know, in a
conversational
way – in years. Actually, not since he was a toddler. And he just said it so normally – ‘There’s a maple leaf.’”

“That’s excellent news,” James said warmly. “That’s a real breakthrough.”

Alan smiled self-consciously. “I mean, I suppose it’s not much. My nine-year-old kid manages a complete sentence. Hardly like he’s ready for Harvard. But … you can’t imagine how amazing it is to hear him say something normal.”

“I don’t want to sound over-optimistic here,” James said, “but I have begun to seriously question the diagnosis of autism. It’s understandable how it came about, given his rigid behaviour and echoing. But the truth is, the longer I work
with Conor, the more convinced I am that we need to start thinking outside the box.”

Alan’s eyes widened.

“While he does show some distinctly autistic-like behaviour, overall he’s a more flexible and imaginative thinker than youngsters on the autism spectrum typically manage. I’m seeing moments of abstract thinking that would be quite extraordinary even in a normal nine-year-old. I’ve certainly never seen it in an autistic child.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Alan asked, his voice going soft with hope. “That he could get better?”

“Perhaps it’s wiser just to say that I am feeling more positive every time I see Conor.”

“
Wow
. That
is
fantastic news. It really is,” Alan replied.

“I could really do with a chance to pick your brain, though,” James added. “This morning I was re-reading Conor’s file and looked through some of those reports from the in-patient unit that diagnosed him with autism. But I feel I’m missing a really clear picture of what was going on for Conor at that point. Not so much his behaviour as what was happening in the world around him then. You gave me an idea during our first meeting, but I’d find it very helpful if we could talk about it in more detail.”

“Sure,” said Alan and he crossed over to sit down in the conversation centre. After a pensive moment, he said, “It was Hell. For me it was the ranch. It started with an unusually cold spring, so I’d already lost calves and had huge feed bills. Then in June, I had a bad outbreak of TB among my cattle and the ranch ended up being quarantined. I had to slaughter almost a quarter of my herd and I wasn’t allowed to sell any of the rest until there was an all-clear. As you
can imagine, I got in the red very quickly. Seriously in the red.

“Up to that point, Laura and I had always pretty much kept our finances separate. We’d just kind of fallen into that pattern and it worked well for me, because I never wanted people thinking I’d married her for her fame or her money. Not that Laura was ever that wealthy, but you know how people think. Anyway, that year it got to the point where I had to admit how bad things were to her, because I was going to go bankrupt otherwise. I had to borrow money from Laura to keep things afloat until the quarantine was lifted, which made me feel like crap.

“Conor hadn’t really been a problem before this. He was a sensitive kid. And a bit of a mama’s boy maybe. Laura adored him so she fussed over him a lot. I decided to start taking him out on the ranch with me some, just to give him a little time in a man’s world. I’d sit him up in front of me in the saddle and we’d ride together.”

“How old was Conor then?” James asked.

“I dunno. Hardly been walking. Eighteen months, maybe? But he loved that. He was just the most enthusiastic little guy then. And smart. I’m not just saying this because I’m his dad. He really was quick to learn things, and he’d remember everything you taught him. Like, for instance, he loved the wild birds, and so I’d tell him their names. He’d sit in the saddle and say, ‘Bluebird, Daddy! Meadowlark!’ and he was always right. He was a little sponge.”

Alan’s expression darkened. “Then everything started to change …

“It was strange how the change happened,” he said. “The first thing I noticed was that Conor started getting clingy. Not
all at once, but a bit more and a bit more until it got serious. Until he got to the point where it wasn’t Laura hanging onto him all the time, but instead him hanging onto Laura.”

Alan ran a hand over his face and let out a long breath. “Laura and I had been married about three years by then and the honeymoon was very definitely over. I’m not saying our marriage was on the rocks or anything. We were doing okay. But I’d realized by that point that the woman who’d sat there talking to me all night in the Badlands wasn’t really the woman I married.”

“How do you mean that?” James asked.

“What I’d loved about her that night was how easy and open she was. But once the first glow of love wore off, I realized that like an iceberg, nine-tenths of Laura is below the surface, that most of her is just never going to be visible to me.”

“So in saying nine-tenths is not visible, are you saying you feel that Laura was shutting you out of large parts of her life?”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s purposeful. That’s the trouble. I don’t think she does it to hurt. It’s just that everything’s a story to her. Real and unreal blend together so seamlessly in her mind that you never know which is which. You never know if what she is saying is authentic or simply her version of things and has no substance. It’s like a mirror image. Like a reflection of what’s real.

“When we first married, I didn’t even appreciate it was happening, but after a while I started catching her out. And they are often the silliest little matters, but she just seems to want to keep this labyrinthine maze around herself for the sake of doing it. You ask her something and if she’s in the mood, she’ll tell you the truth; if she’s not, she’ll tell you whatever story’s in her head. After a while it just felt evasive to me.
It gives me the feeling that she doesn’t
want
me to know what’s really happening to her.”

“Can you give me an example of this lying behaviour?” James asked.

“I can give you a very good one. It was during this time when I had all this stuff going on with the ranch and my financial problems and Conor was starting to go downhill. I discovered something pretty strange. I answered the phone one day and this policeman was on the other end of the line. They wanted to talk to Laura about an injunction she’d just taken out. I’m, like,
what
?!” Alan stared at James. “It turns out, Laura was being threatened by some demented fan. He was actually stalking her. But she never told me a
single
thing about it. Never mentioned it once. Can you imagine that? Doesn’t that seem weird?”

“Do you suppose that with Conor and your financial problems and everything, she was simply trying to protect you?” James asked.

“This guy was threatening her
life
. And I’m her
husband
, for Christ’s sake. She was being so supportive of me during this financial crisis on the ranch. She never criticized me or made me feel like I was failing her, so I thought we were really close. I mean, doesn’t it seem bizarre to you that someone who lives with you, who ostensibly loves you, wouldn’t share this kind of thing with you? That’s bringing self-reliance to new heights. And it made me feel like shit when I found out. I was already feeling half a man, and now she wouldn’t even let me give a hand in protecting her.”