Overheard in a Dream (4 page)

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?

Conor grew hoarse. Pulling himself into a foetal position, knees up, head down, arms around his legs, the stuffed cat tucked in against his heart, Conor at last fell into hiccupping silence.

Several more minutes passed with James still sitting quietly at the table and the boy curled up on the floor. Then finally Conor struggled slowly to his feet. Carefully he checked the status of his four strings and adjusted them at his waist, then he looked over at James, staring him straight in the eye. Tears were still wet over his cheeks and snot ran onto his upper lip.
In an unexpectedly normal, boy-like gesture, Conor raised his free arm and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Here,” James said, getting a box of tissues. “Would you like one of these?”

Suspiciously, Conor regarded the box.

James pulled out a tissue and lay it on the table near where Conor was standing.

For a long moment Conor simply regarded it, his brow furrowing as if it were a mysterious object. Then he reached out for it. With great care he began to smooth the tissue out flat on the tabletop, a difficult task given that he was still clutching the stuffed cat against him with the other hand.

“York?” Conor said unexpectedly. Reaching down on the floor, he picked up the small plastic cow-like animal. He examined it carefully. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, the cat says yes.” He nodded. “York.”

“You mean ‘auroch’?” James ventured.

“Yeah,” the boy responded in his typical high-pitched singsong voice. He didn’t lift his head to acknowledge James had spoken. “York. Ee-york.”