name’s Torey, and you and I are going to be working together each day.” I pulled out a chair adjacent to hers and sat down. “Can you tell me why you’ve come to the unit?”
Her dark eyes locked on mine, and for a moment or two she stared intently, as if she expected to find the answer there. Then she shook her head faintly. “No.”
“What about your mom? What did she tell you about why you were coming here?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Okay,” I said. I bent down and opened my box of materials. Taking out plain paper and a smaller cardboard box, I laid them on the table. “Most of the children I work with come to the unit because they have problems that make them feel bad. Sometimes, for example, they have problems in their family. Maybe someone in the family is really unhappy and it makes them do hurtful things. Maybe there’s been a divorce. Maybe there’s lots of fighting at home. For some of the children who come here, it’s other things. Maybe they’ve been in an accident or a really scary situation, or they’ve been very ill. Some have been treated or touched in a way that felt wrong, or people tried to make them keep secrets that hurt. And sometimes … sometimes kids don’t even know the reason they have troubles. They just feel angry or worried or scared all the time. So these are some of the reasons children come to the unit.”
Cassandra watched me with unusual intensity, as if she were really trying to take in what I was saying, trying to absorb it, almost. Nonetheless, there was an oddly blank quality to her stare, almost as if she were listening so carefully not for the content of what I was saying but rather because I was speaking to her in a foreign language she didn’t quite understand.
“Hearing about reasons for other children coming to the unit,” I said, “do you think any of those describe you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll share with you some of the things other people have told me about you. You can then say if you think they are true or not.
“Your mom, for instance, tells me that you had a scary thing happen to you when you were five. She says that she is divorced from your dad and that you and your sister were supposed to live with her and not see him. Then one day your dad came to school and had you get into his car, even though that was against the rules. He drove off with you and wouldn’t bring you back, and he wouldn’t phone your mom to tell her that you were safe, and he wouldn’t let you phone your mom. She says you were gone a long time – about two years – and during the time you were with your dad, some very scary things happened to you. Is that right?”
Cassandra nodded. Her demeanor was pleasant, cheerful even, as if I’d said no more than “Your mom says you are in third grade.”
“Your teacher tells me that you like school, that you can be very enthusiastic about what is happening in class. She says you are quite a smart girl and can do really well sometimes.”
Cassandra smiled.
“But she also tells me that at other times you have lots of problems. You can get very angry and have a hard time following the rules. Occasionally when you are at school, you get very upset and then you stop talking. Mrs. Baker says there are sometimes days and days when you don’t want to say anything to anyone, and this makes it difficult to do your work in class. But she tells me while these are bad problems, they aren’t the biggest problem. She says the biggest problem is that you very often don’t tell the truth. You make up stories about people that get them into trouble, and you often talk about things that aren’t really happening at all.”
I paused. “What do you think? Do you think these things have caused trouble for you?”
Cassandra shrugged. It came off as almost a comical gesture, the way she did it. She brought her shoulders way up and rolled her eyes in an exaggerated fashion that was tinged with tolerant good humor, as if to say, “Silly grown-ups, who make mountains out of molehills.”
“These are the reasons the grown-ups have given me, when I asked, ‘Why is Cassandra Ventura on the unit?’”
Cassandra rolled her eyes again, then looked up to the right, then up to the left, then back to the right.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Do these things seem like problems to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m interested in your thoughts. There isn’t a wrong or right answer to my questions. We’re just exploring.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember what? If you do those things? If people think those are problems? Or you don’t remember what I just said?”
Again she shrugged and rolled her eyes.
I pushed one of the plain pieces of paper in front of Cassandra, then I opened the small box. Inside was an assortment of marking pens, pencils, and crayons. “I want you to draw me a picture of your family.”
She hesitated. “I’m not a very good draw-er.”
“That’s okay. They can just be stick figures, if you want. You can make them any way that’s easy for you.”
“Like bubbles? Instead of sticks, can I draw them round, like bubbles?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Fish!” she said with sudden animation. “I draw really good fish. I figured out this way. Let me show you.” She picked up an orange crayon. “See? You make a circle. Then you draw a little triangle on one end with the point sticking against the circle and that’s the tail. See?” She made several more fish along the side of the paper. “Can I make them fish?”
“You decide,” I replied.
But she didn’t make fish. And she didn’t make stick figures. Instead, Cassandra dropped the crayon and took a pencil. She began to draw very small, very carefully proportioned people. First a man, then a girl, then a smaller girl, then a woman. A pause. Cassandra considered the picture. Then she added another figure next to the mother. This was a second man. Then she added a third man. Another pause.
Everything thus far had been done in pencil. Indeed, she’d chosen a very sharp, hard-lead pencil and so the drawings were quite faint. She then put the pencil down and reached over for the box, pulling it closer. Looking through, she picked out different crayons and set about placing her family in a pleasant scene of grass, blue sky, and bright sunshine. She worked carefully, coloring in the grass after drawing the lines and then the sky. She assiduously avoided coloring over the orange fish so that it looked almost as if they were balloons in the air. She pressed hard when making the sun, turning it waxy yellow, many of the rays extending out over the crayoned blue of the sky.
While Cassandra had been careful not to color over her fish at the edge of the paper, she had had no such compunctions about coloring over the family. They were hardly visible through the blue she’d used for the sky.
“There,” she said, then paused to regard the picture. “No, wait.” She reached out and took up a black magic marker. Carefully she penned in a smiling
