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How had she come to this place? She and Cody had always had so much fun together. He’d been her saving grace when things had gotten so bad with Matt. And now, now she didn’t even know him.
Laurel supposed that was what had finally driven her to seek out help from a field she would have never thought to tap. She’d never believed in psychiatry or its cousin, psychology. They were for neurotic people with too much time and money on their hands. But now she was rethinking everything, and she was desperate.
She felt estranged from her own son. Worse than that, she felt as if she were losing him, as if he were slipping away into some netherworld that only he occupied.
She looked down into his face. It was vacant, as if there were no one there. Laurel pressed her lips together, struggling against a wave of hopelessness.
These days, Cody didn’t even look at her when she talked to him. He didn’t disobey her, didn’t throw tantrums, didn’t show any emotion at all. It ripped her heart out that he behaved as if she weren’t even in the room. She supposed it could have been worse. He did go where she told him to go, ate what she set in front of him and went to bed when she told him. But she missed him terribly. It was like having a windup toy, a clone of her son. He looked like Cody in every way except that there was no personality, no sign of the laughing, bright-eyed, intelligent boy he’d been a year ago.
More than anything else in the world, she wanted him back.
Laurel went to the door and picked up her purse, sliding it onto her shoulder. For the thousandth time, she cursed her cowardliness for not standing her ground that day. The last day of Matt’s life. She didn’t believe in omens, but she’d had an eerie feeling all morning, a feeling that something would go wrong. Some unnamed instinct had told her to keep Cody close, to either keep him home or go with him. She’d chalked it up to her general uneasiness at the time. Matt had dropped his bomb on her only the night before.
Divorce was an ugly word and it had sent tremors through her world.
When she’d tried to tell Matt about her premonition, for lack of a better word, he’d called her manipulative and vetoed both of her ideas. Cody wasn’t staying home with her and she wasn’t going with them. He was breaking Cody in on the life of a time-shared child.
Nerves had danced through her like lightning bolts during an electrical storm as she’d watched them drive away.
Watched Matt drive away for the last time.
“He’s very nice,” she repeated to Cody.
Tears came to her eyes. They seemed to come so easily these days. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t allow Cody to see her cry, but since he hardly ever looked at her, it seemed like a needless vow.
“Oh, Cody, come out, please come out,” she pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Anything.”
Her entreaty didn’t seem to penetrate the invisible wall that surrounded the boy.
With a sigh, she pulled herself together. “It’s time to go, Cody.”
As if she’d turned on a switch, the boy walked toward the door. She opened it and he walked outside in measured steps.
“Maybe Trent will have better luck,” she murmured under her breath, silently adding, Please, God, let him have better luck. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
“Trent, this is my son, Cody.”
Framed in the doorway of his office the way she had been yesterday, Laurel stood behind the boy. She rested her hands lightly on her son’s shoulders, as if she were afraid that withdrawing them would make Cody disappear.
Trent immediately rose to his feet. He’d been in the office a full forty-five minutes before this first appointment of his day, preparing. Preparing what, he wasn’t certain.
He’d never felt anxious about meeting a new patient before. Oh, there’d always been that minor shot of adrenaline to begin with, but that was to be expected. He’d never been anxious before. First sessions were about ground rules, about getting to know the face that was turned to the world. Even children had their secrets and it was his job to unlock them so that his small, troubled patients could go on to have happy, well-adjusted lives.
But how did you prepare for a child who wouldn’t talk? Who perhaps couldn’t talk despite not having anything physically wrong with him. He knew firsthand that the bars a mind could impose were stronger than any steel found in a prison cell.
As he watched Cody now, it startled him how much the boy resembled Laurel. Neatly dressed, Cody’s silken blond hair was a bit longer than stylish. A testimony to the free spirit that Laurel had so desperately strived to be, Trent recalled. If Cody’s hair had been longer, he would have been the spitting image of Laurel at eight.
The Laurel, he thought, who had captured his heart the first moment he’d seen her. Was eight too young to fall in love? He would have said an emphatic yes if he hadn’t been there himself.
Approaching the boy, Trent held out his hand. “Hello, Cody, my name’s Trent,” he said in his warmest voice.
Trent didn’t believe in standing on formalities or drawing a sharp line in the sand to separate children from adults. Every adult had a child within him and every child harbored the makings of the adult he was to be. Trent focused on uniting them rather than keeping them apart.
Cody stared past his shoulder as if he hadn’t spoken. As if there were no one else in the room but him.
Trent dropped his hand to his side. It was at that moment that he stopped thinking about himself and about Laurel. All that mattered was the boy in the prison of his own making.
Chapter Three
It was time to get started. Trent shifted his eyes toward Laurel, who was about to sit down on the sofa.
“Laurel, would you mind taking a seat outside in the reception area?” Laurel stopped and eyed him quizzically. “Rita looks formidable, but we have it on good authority that she doesn’t bite. At least, we’ve never seen her do it,” he deadpanned.
He tried to use humor to ease her out of the room, but it didn’t work. The concern on her face intensified.
She glanced toward Cody uncertainly. The boy remained oblivious.
“I can’t stay?” It wasn’t a question as much as a request.
Unless he specifically called for a group family session, he found that parents, however unwittingly, tended to interfere with their child’s progress far more than they helped.
“It’s usually better if patients don’t feel someone is looking over their shoulder during a session.” Trent lowered his voice. “They tend to open up more.”
Distress entered her eyes. “But I’m his mother. I only want to help him.” Realizing that her voice was close to cracking, Laurel stopped for a second to collect herself. Even so, there was a plea in her voice as she said to Trent, “I want to understand what’s wrong.”
He sympathized with her, he really did. But it was far too early to bend the rules. He needed to see what he was up against and how deeply entrenched Cody was in this silent world. For all he knew, the boy might be reacting to his mother. He needed time alone with the boy to assess a few things for himself.
Very gently, Trent took her arm and steered her toward the door.
The brief, almost sterile contact awoke distant memories of other times, happier times. Times when he had believed that the world was at their feet. Before he’d learned differently.
But that was then and this was now, Trent reminded himself. And she had sought him out in a professional capacity. As a licensed clinical psychologist, he had both an oath and a duty to live up to and they both revolved around doing the best for his patient. In this case, her son.
“So do I,” he told Laurel quietly. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Cody. Usually, when an adult’s voice dropped, a child did his or her best to listen more closely. Cody didn’t appear to have even noticed that anyone was speaking. “And so does Cody.” He saw hope flicker in her eyes. “Progress in cases like this is very slow and I need to do everything possible to make Cody feel more comfortable.”
Whatever that might be, he added silently.
“He’s not comfortable with me?” It was one thing to feel it, another to hear it said out loud. She felt as if her heart were being squeezed in half.
“He’s not comfortable with himself,” Trent told her.
The revelation took her aback. She searched for something to cling to, however small.
“You’ve had cases like this?” she asked, recalling what he’d just said.
If Trent had had cases like this, then maybe he really could cure Cody. A shaft of hope shot through her. She knew she’d been right in coming to him, even though she’d been hesitant at first, afraid of the ghosts that might crop up between them. The ghosts of things that hadn’t been and the things that had. She felt far too vulnerable to cross that terrain again.
And far too guilty.
“Not personally, no,” Trent admitted. He hadn’t been practicing long enough to have encountered a wide sampling of the afflictions that affected a child’s behavior. He saw Laurel’s face fall. “But I read a lot,” he said, offering her an encouraging smile.
His hand still on her arm, he opened the door and looked out into the reception area. Rita’s small brown eyes darted in their direction the second the door was opened. It was, he thought, as if her eyes were magnetically predisposed toward movement, no matter how quietly executed.
Gently, he ushered Laurel out of the room. “Rita, would you please get Mrs. Greer some coffee?”
Laurel shook her head, declining. “No, I’m not thirsty.” At the moment, with her stomach knotting, coffee would only make her nauseous.
“Good,” Rita pronounced. Her tiny, marblelike eyes slid up and down like the needle on a scale. With a minute jerk of her head, she indicated the leather chair against the wall. “You can take a seat over there.” It was more a royal command than a suggestion.
Laurel nodded, then looked at Trent. A shaky breath preceded her words. “If you need me—”
He gave her his most reassuring look, even as he tried not to recognize that her mere presence slowly unraveled something within him, something that had been neatly stowed almost seven years ago. He’d thought it would never see the light of day again.
Wrong.
“I know where to find you,” he responded, his mouth curved in a kind smile.
Walking back into his office, he noted that Cody still stood stiffly. Trent closed the door and focused on his challenge.
“You can sit down if you like, Cody,” he said in an easy, affable tone. “The sofa’s pretty comfortable if you’d like to try that out.”
Rather than sit down on the sofa, Cody sank down on the floor right in front of it, his back against the leather, his legs crossed before him as if he were assuming a basic yoga position.
Or preparing to play a video game seated in front of a television set, Trent realized. He made a mental note to explore a few video games that he might substitute later for the ones that dominated Cody’s attention.
If he continued with the case.
“Floor’s not bad, either,” Trent allowed, never skipping a beat as the boy sank down. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.
He’d found that keeping a desk between himself and his small patients only served to delineate territory, making him out to be an unapproachable father figure. He liked being close to his patients physically to help breach the mental chasm that could exist—as it obviously did in this case.
Cody made no indication that he had heard the question. His expression remained immobile as he stared off into space.
The boy’s line of vision seemed to be the middle shelves of his bookcase, the ones that contained children’s books he sometimes found useful, but Trent decided not to comment on that at this time.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Trent said, lowering himself down beside the boy, careful to leave Cody enough personal space to not feel threatened. He looked around and smiled. “Looks like a pretty big office from down here,” he commented amiably, then glanced down where he was sitting. “Also looks like the rug might stand to have a cleaning.”
Neither comment, meant to begin to create a sense of camaraderie, drew any reaction from Cody. It was as if his voice, his presence, were as invisible to him as the air.
“You know,” Trent continued in the same tone, “your mom’s pretty worried about you.” He noticed just the slightest tensing of Cody’s shoulders when he mentioned Laurel. It heartened him that there might be a crack, however minute, in the six-year-old’s armor plating.
Trent turned his attention to the elephant in the room, watching Cody intently beneath hooded lids. “She told me that you lost your father a year ago.”
Still not acknowledging Trent’s presence, Cody abruptly rose to his feet and walked over to the large window. Tilting his head down ever so slightly, he appeared to look down at the parking lot four stories below.
For the moment, Trent remained where he was, talking to the boy’s back. “It must have been hard, losing him at such a young age. You know, I lost my mom when I was five. Leaves a big hole in your heart, something like that,” he continued conversationally. “It also makes you afraid. Afraid that everyone’s going to leave you, even though they say they won’t.”
Knowing Laurel, he was certain she had tried to do everything she could to reassure her son that he was loved and that she would always be there for him. She’d mentioned her mother, so there was more family than just Laurel. Her late husband could have come from a large, close-knit family and there might be a lot of people in Cody’s world, but that didn’t change the fact that he might still feel alone, still feel isolated. Fear didn’t take things like logic into account.
Trent considered the most likely causes behind Cody’s silence. It could be as simple as what had plagued him all those years ago when he’d lost his mother, except that Cody had taken it to the nth degree, locking down rather than dealing with the fear on a daily, lucid basis.
Not that he had, either, at first.
“And sometimes,” Trent went on as if this were a twoway conversation instead of only the sound of his own voice echoing within the room, “you wind up being afraid of being afraid. You know, the big wave of fear is gone and you think maybe everything’ll be okay, but you’re afraid that maybe those feelings will come back. I know that’s how I felt for a really long time.”
Trent shifted on the floor, trying to get comfortable. He envied the flexibility of the very young.
“The funny thing was, my brothers felt the exact same way I did. Except that I didn’t know because we didn’t talk about it. I thought there was something wrong with me because I felt like that.”
Trent crossed his fingers and hoped that the boy was listening.
“That’s the real scary part, not realizing that there are other people who feel just the way you do. That you’re not alone,” he emphasized, and then he sighed. “I guess if I’d talked about my feelings to my brothers, I would have found that out and I wouldn’t have been so unhappy. It took my stepmom to make me realize that I wasn’t alone and that what I was feeling—lost, scared—was okay.” He ventured out a little further. “I felt angry, too.”
As he spoke, Trent continued to watch Cody’s back for some infinitesimal indication that he’d heard him, some change in posture to signify that his words had struck a chord with the boy. That he was getting through, however distantly, to Cody.
When he mentioned anger as another reaction he’d experienced, Trent noted that Cody’s shoulders stiffened just the tiniest bit.
Anger. Of course.
Why hadn’t he assumed that to begin with? he upbraided himself. Laurel said that Cody engaged in video games that exclusively involved cars. If he focused on crashing them, that was an act of hostility.
Trent wondered how much anger smoldered beneath Cody’s subdued surface. A measure of anger was a healthy response. Too much indicated a problem up ahead.
Something they needed to prepare for.
He continued talking in an easy, conversational cadence, trying to ever so lightly touch the nerve, to elicit more of a response, however veiled it might be. These things couldn’t be pushed, but children were resilient. The sooner they could peel away the layers, the better Cody’s chances were of going back to lead a normal life, free of whatever angst held him prisoner.
“I was angry at my mother for being gone, angry at the plane for crashing. Angry at my father for letting her go by herself, although there wasn’t anything he could have done if he’d gone with her. He certainly couldn’t have stopped the plane crash, even though I thought of him as kind of a superhero. I probably would have wound up being an orphan,” he confessed. “But that’s the problem with hurting, Cody. You don’t always think logically. You just want the hurt to stop.
“You just want your dad to come back even though you know he can’t.” He’d deliberately switched the focus from himself to the boy, watching to see if it had any effect.
He stopped talking and held his breath as silence slipped in.
Surprised by the silence, or perhaps by the fact that the hot feelings inside of him had a name, Cody turned from the window and actually looked at Trent for a moment before dropping his gaze to the floor again.
Yes! Score one for the home team, Trent thought, elated.
Given Cody’s demeanor, he’d estimated that it might take at least several sessions before the boy had this kind of reaction. In this branch of treatment, at times it was two steps forward, one step back, but for the moment, Trent savored what he had.
The boy was reachable, that was all that counted. It was just going to take a huge amount of patience.
Laurel glanced uneasily toward the closed door.
What were they doing in there? Had Trent managed to crack the wall around Cody? Even a little? Had her son said a word, made a sound? Something? Anything at all. Oh God, she hoped so.
The waiting was killing her.
Cody had been talking since he was ten months old. Sentences had begun coming not all that long after that. His pediatrician had told her that Cody was “gifted.” Matt had called him a little chatterbox. Cody could fill the hours with nonstop talk. So much so there had been times she longed for silence just to be able to hear herself think.
