Torey Hayden

Overheard in a Dream

A novel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The boy was so pale you would have thought he was a ghost. A wraith. Something insubstantial that would vanish into nothing at all. He was small for nine, slender and fine-boned. His hair was pale as moonlight, very fine, very straight. His skin was milky-white with a dull translucence to it, like wax. Such fair colouring meant that at a distance, he appeared to have no eyebrows or eyelashes at all, and this incompleteness only emphasized his ephemeral appearance.

“Meow?” said the boy.

“Hello, Conor,” James replied. “Won’t you come in?”

“Meow?”

Around his waist he wore numerous coils of string with bits of aluminium foil wrapped around them. Four of these trailed down behind him and onto the floor. He gripped a small toy cat by its hind legs. Extending the cat out in front of him, as if it were a scanning device, he rotated it slowly, pointing it at every corner of the room. Then he began to make an oddly mechanical noise, a sort of ratcheting “ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh” that sounded like a sluggish machine gun. Then a new sound started, a soft whirring sound. “Whirrrr. Whirrrrr. Whirrrrrrrr.” He stepped into the room just far enough to allow Dulcie to push the trailing strings forward with her foot and close the door.

The child avoided looking at James. His eyes darted nervously here and there. A hand came up alongside his face and he flapped it frantically. “Whirrrrrrrr,” he went again.

James rose from his chair in order to encourage the boy into the room, but the child reacted with panic, pointing the stuffed cat at James like a gun. “The cat knows!” he said loudly.

James stopped. “You don’t like me coming towards you.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh. Whirrrrrrr. Whirrrrrrr.”

“You would like me to sit down again.”

“Whirrrr.”

“That’s all right,” James said quietly and returned to the small chair beside the playroom table to sit down. “In here you can decide how things will be.”

Conor remained rooted just inside the door. He looked James over carefully, or at least that’s how James interpreted his behaviour, because Conor’s eyes never met his. Instead, the boy flicked his eyes back and forth repetitively, as if he had nystagmus, but James sensed it was simply a method of gaining visual information without eye contact. Then he extended the toy cat again and took a step further into the room. Still gripping the cat tightly by its hind legs, he raised and lowered it as if scanning James’s body. “The cat knows,” he whispered.

The play therapy room was spacious and painted pale yellow, a colour James had chosen because it made him think of sunshine. Not that this was really necessary, as there was usually a surplus of the real stuff pouring through the large east-facing windows and in the heat of summer, the room had a downright Saharan feel. Nonetheless, the colour pleased him.

As did the room itself. All the toys and other items in the room James had chosen with care. He knew exactly what he intended to create in the playroom: a place where nothing would constrain a child, where nothing looked too fragile nor too fancy to be touched, where everything invited playing with. When he’d first described to Sandy how he wanted to create a playroom, she had remarked that he’d never grown up himself, that it was his own childhood he was equipping. No doubt there was some truth in this, as the boy does make the man, but what she’d failed to appreciate was that these were also the tools of his trade and he’d quite simply wanted the best.

Very cautiously Conor began to move around the perimeter of the room. Holding the toy cat out in front of him like a divining rod, he went in a clockwise direction, keeping very close to the walls. The cat’s nose was touched to the furniture, the shelving, the various playthings along the way. “Meow? Meow?” he murmured as he went. It was all he said.

Having circumnavigated the room once, Conor immediately started on a second round. There was a low bookcase on the right-hand side where James kept many of the smaller toys. On top of the bookcase were wire baskets full of construction paper, glue, string, stickers, stamps, yarn, sequins, and other odds and ends for making pictures.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Meow?”

“If you want, you may take any of the things out of the baskets,” James said. “Everything in this room is to play with. All things are for touching. In this room, you decide.”

“Meow?” the boy replied.

The direction Conor was moving meant that he approached James from behind. The first time he had skirted widely around James as he sat at the small table. This time Conor slowed down as he drew near.

“Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat motionless so as not to frighten the boy.

“Whirrrr,” came the whisper behind him.

The child’s breathing was fast and shallow, giving a hollowness to the sound like a rheumy dog panting. Then came the very soft touch of the toy cat against the back of James’s neck. With staccato quickness it touched him and then was gone. The boy whirred. The nose of the cat came again, so lightly that it just tipped the hairs on James’s skin.

“Meow?”

James turned his head and there was the briefest moment of eye contact between them. James smiled.

“The cat knows,” the boy whispered.

Thinking that someone as well known as Laura Deighton wouldn’t want to sit out in the waiting room with Dr Sorenson’s clients, Dulcie had allowed her to go into James’s office to wait for him there. James hadn’t expected this. A flicker of alarm went through him when Dulcie told him, because, of course, Laura Deighton would notice that he had her books on the shelf and, quite understandably, she would then assume that he had read them.

James wasn’t a Laura Deighton fan. He knew her books only by what he’d read about them in The New York Times Book Review, that they were “complex,” “profound,” and worse, “literary,” which, James knew, were all euphemisms for pretentious and/or unreadable. However, Laura Deighton was native to this corner of South Dakota, and since James was a newcomer and hence an outsider, he was acutely aware of the need to show respect for local icons. Consequently, he had bought the books – in hardback, even – and had set them up prominently on the bookshelf in his office to show his local loyalty. He did intend to read them at some point. He’d just never quite got around to it.

When he entered the office, he found Laura Deighton’s attention was not on books, however. She was standing beside the window, her interest absorbed in something outside. She didn’t turn immediately.

“Dulcie will keep Conor busy for a moment so that we can talk,” James said. Going to his desk, he set down the folders and his notepad. He adjusted his suit jacket and straightened his tie. Only then did Laura Deighton finally drag her attention away from the window.

She was an unremarkable-looking woman. In early middle age with the mousy-coloured hair that is the aftermath of a blonde childhood and eyes that weren’t really any particular colour at all, neither brown nor green, she could have been mistaken for any ordinary woman down at the supermarket, any one of those of a certain age who go a little soft around the waist, a little saggy here and there, who don’t stand out for any reason.

Her clothes, James noticed, weren’t really appropriate to the situation. It wasn’t simply that they lacked style. They were too casual for a first meeting of this kind, even by South Dakota’s relaxed standards. Jeans … okay, maybe it was possible to pull off jeans if you were twenty-seven and leggy, or if they were a fashionable brand and dressed up, but Laura Deighton’s jeans were a cheap brand that the local ranchers favoured. The white shirt was nondescript and the tweed jacket fitted her carelessly. She wore no jewellery and little makeup. Depression? James wondered. Or maybe this was how creative genius dressed.

James felt vague disappointment on seeing her. He thought there’d be some aura of glamour around her, some presence that would make it impossible to mistake this literary giant, risen from the cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, there was nothing.

“Do sit down,” he said. He gestured broadly towards the sofa and chairs.

Laura ignored them. She came over, extended her hand to shake his and then sat down in the chair beside his desk. “I appreciate your seeing Conor at such short notice.”

Silence followed. James preferred to let the client set the tone of the interview, so he never started off by asking questions. This didn’t appear to unnerve her the way it did some parents, but she was obviously anticipating questions. She looked at him expectantly.

When he didn’t speak, she said once more, “Thank you for seeing Conor at such short notice. Conor’s paediatrician – Dr Wilson, over at the clinic – recommended we bring Conor in to you. He said you’d come here from Manhattan, that you’d been in a practice there.”

“Yes,” James said.

“He spoke very highly of you. Said it’s a renowned practice in New York, that to have been a partner there, you’d be a real high flyer.” She chuckled. “And I can tell you, that’s serious praise coming from Dr Wilson.”

“Thanks to him for that recommendation,” James replied, “but I’m sure there are also many good professionals out here too.”

Silence then. Again she looked expectantly at James. When he didn’t say anything further, she said, “Until now we’ve had Conor at the Avery School. In Denver. Have you heard of it?”.

“I don’t know it well,” James replied. “I’ve only been out here since February, but Dr Sorenson has mentioned it.”

“They work on a very structured behavioural program. Called ‘repatterning’. The school has an excellent reputation for success at socializing severely autistic children.”

A pause.

“Although,” she said with faint sarcasm, “maybe that’s simply because they do to the failures what they’ve just done to us. We received a letter right out of the blue saying they didn’t want Conor back this autumn. That they felt Avery wasn’t ‘helpful to his needs’. It was worded wonderfully. Like it was their fault things didn’t work out, when you knew they meant just the opposite. That they think we’ve got a funky kid. So here we are with absolutely no place to send him. Completely stuck.”

James looked at Laura closely. He was finding her difficult to read. On the face of it, she appeared straight-talking, but her words and body language gave off none of the usual subtle subtext. She sat absolutely still in a relatively neutral pose that was neither open nor closed. She made good, although not outstanding, eye contact. Her tone of voice was even but not very nuanced.

His inability to glean more intuitive information from her surprised James. He’d been prepared for other challenges in meeting Laura Deighton. Would her fame unnerve him, for instance? Or more likely, would he take an instant dislike to her? The literary people he’d known in Manhattan were, to a person, pompous and self-absorbed, and he hated these traits. When he’d discovered she was coming in, he caught himself feeling a certain gratification at the fact he’d never actually read any of her books. But her blankness was unexpected. There was just no discernible subtext. That was where James was accustomed to doing all his “reading,” where he got so much information about clients, there in that intuitive space beneath words and gestures. With Laura Deighton, it was as if this space did not exist.

“Has Conor always been in a residential program?” he asked finally. “Have you not found suitable programs locally?”

“It needs to be residential. Our ranch is out beyond Hill City. Realistically, we just couldn’t be driving him a long distance every day.”

“Was Dr Wilson clear with you about what kind of therapy I do?” James replied. “Because if I took Conor on, I would expect to see him three times a week.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, although perhaps not so much so that it could be interpreted as surprise.

“I’m a child psychiatrist,” James continued. “What I prefer to do with the children I see is traditional play therapy, which means having them in on a very regular basis.”

She was silent a long moment. “No. I hadn’t quite realized that’s what you did. So perhaps it’s not appropriate. Conor’s autistic. I know in the old days it was common to send autistic kids to psychiatrists, but, of course, we understand now it’s not a psychiatric condition. It’s neurological. Consequently we’ve always had Conor in behaviour-based treatment because that’s the proven way of teaching life skills to children like him.”

“Did Dr Wilson give you any reasons why he thought it might be helpful for Conor to come here?” James asked.

“No, he just suggested it.” She paused. Her silence was at first expectant, but grew longer and more indistinct.

Then without warning, the mask slipped. Her shoulders dropped in a gesture of despair. “Probably just because I’m so desperate. I know I’m driving Dr Wilson demented with my calls. It’s just that Conor’s so difficult. Home for a month and he’s destroying us.”

Sympathy washed over James. He leaned towards her, his folded arms on the desk, and smiled reassuringly. “Yes, I can understand. Children like Conor can be very demanding,” he said softly. “Don’t worry.”

The muscles along her jaw tightened. She wasn’t teary but James knew she was in that moment just before tears.

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how Conor is at home?” he said. “That’ll give us a better idea of whether or not coming here would be appropriate.”

Laura became teary.

He smiled gently and leaned forward to nudge the box of tissues towards the edge of the desk. “Don’t worry. This is a very hard moment. Most parents feel pretty upset.”

“It’s just … just such a nightmare. Like one of those nightmares where you keep doing the same thing over and over and it never works out, it never achieves anything.”

She took a tissue. The tears hadn’t really materialized, so she just clamped it tightly in her fist. James had a strong sense that she was feeling deeply conflicted in that moment, that self-control was a huge issue but that at the same time the burden of this boy was so overwhelming that she was desperate for help.

“Is Conor your only child?”

“No. We have a daughter too, who’s six.”

“When did Conor’s problems first start?” James asked.

Laura let out a slow, elongated sigh. “When he was about two. He seemed all right when he was a baby, although it’s hard to know with your first child. There were things I had always been concerned about. He was very jumpy, for instance. If you came up behind him or there was a loud noise, he’d always startle badly. Dr Wilson said it was just a temperament thing, that it simply indicated he was a sensitive boy, and not to worry about it. Otherwise, he was a good baby. He slept well. He didn’t have colic or anything.”

“Did he seem to develop normally to you?”

“Yes.” Her voice had a plaintive, almost querulous note of bewilderment to it and James wondered how often she’d had to give these details. Or was stopped from giving them. In this era of insurance and accountability, there often was little time spent on collecting psychosocial histories beyond what was needed to prescribe the appropriate drug. James had found listening carefully to the parents’ initial version of events was one of the most valuable thing to do, not only for the concrete information it provided in building up a picture of a child’s problems, but also as a way of cementing that crucial relationship with the parents, because they often felt so desperate and unheard.

“Conor was always timid,” Laura said. “He cried easily. He worried about things. Even as a little, little boy. But he was very bright and interested in things. He talked early. Even by a year old, he could use several words.”

“So you say the difficulties starting showing up after he turned two?”

Twisting the tissue between her fingers, Laura nodded. “It started with his becoming very clingy. He’d always been inclined to be clingy but suddenly it got much worse. He never wanted me out of his sight. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him. He began having these terrible temper tantrums. Dr Wilson was still telling us not to worry. Kids have tantrums at that age, he kept saying, but I don’t think he realized how bad they were. Conor would just go frantic and do things like literally rip the wallpaper off the wall with his fingernails. To complicate things, that’s when I got pregnant with Morgana and it was a challenging pregnancy. I had some serious medical problems. And we were having some financial difficulties, which meant the pregnancy wasn’t very well timed – it hadn’t been planned – so a whole lot was going on.”

“Can you describe Conor’s behaviour in a little more detail?” James asked.

“He got really hyper, really agitated. He wouldn’t sleep. He could go days without sleeping. Which, with a new baby …” She let out a defeated sigh. “And the screaming started. He’d be sitting, playing normally with his toys and then suddenly he’d get all panicky, and start screaming and screaming. He had been in a nursery program two days a week, but we had to take him out because his behaviour upset the other children so much. The school wouldn’t keep him.” She put a hand over her eyes for a moment in a gesture of desperation and then rubbed her face. “It just got so distressing to live with. Finally Dr Wilson arranged for him to go into the children’s unit at the university hospital in Sioux Falls to be assessed. That’s when autism was diagnosed.”

James nodded thoughtfully.

“And now …” Laura said. She sighed again. “It’s getting just like that all over again. ‘Difficult’ doesn’t half describe living with Conor. For example, everything has got to be just so. His room, his toys, his food. Everything must be in a special place and in a special order. I can’t do anything for him if it isn’t exactly the same way I did it before. Like at breakfast, I can’t put the eggs on the table if the juice hasn’t been poured 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 head jerked up abruptly. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” He stared straight ahead. The hand not holding the cat came up and fluttered frantically in front of his eyes. “Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

James sat very still.

Moments passed.

Slowly Conor exhaled. Extending the cat away from his body, he touched its nose to the edge of the shelf. “Wood,” he murmured very softly.

“Yes, that’s made of wood,” James said.

The cat was retracted instantly.

James watched the boy, who kept his head averted to avoid eye contact.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.” There was a long pause, then Conor whispered, “Brown wood.”

“Yes, the wood is brown.”

Conor turned his head. Not to look at James. His eyes never left the far distant point they were fixed on, but his head inclined a little in James’s direction. That was all that happened.

“Bob and I were thinking of going over to the Big Horns to squeeze in a couple of days of elk hunting,” Lars said and sank down in the beige-cushioned softness of James’s office. “You want to come?”

“That’s a very kind invitation, Lars, but I don’t know one end of a rifle from the other.”

“You can borrow one of Davy’s guns,” Lars replied. “Davy killed his first buck when he was just twelve. Did I tell you about it? A six-pointer.”

“Yes, you mentioned it.”

“So come with us. Time you got blooded, Jim. How else we gonna make a South Dakota man out of you?” Lars laughed heartily. “It’ll just be Bob and me. We’ll take some beers and some grub and have a great time.”

“When?”

“Next weekend.”

Relief flooded through James. “Well, damn! Wouldn’t you know it? I’ve got the kids coming out next weekend. Remember? Because I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off the following week.”

“Oh Jesus, yeah.”

“Darn. I’m sorry to miss it. Maybe next time.”

Stretching his arms up behind his head, Lars settled back into the chair. “So how’s it been going between you and Sandy? Is she getting any more reasonable about the kids?”

“Not really. They can come out at Easter but she says no way over Christmas,” James replied, but he couldn’t quite keep the disappointment from his voice.

“Why not? I thought you got to alternate Christmases,” Lars said.

“The court says yes. But Sandy keeps on about how disruptive it is for them at their ages.”

“Yeah, but they’re your kids too. You’ve got the right to spend time with them.”

“I know, but all this fighting over them isn’t good for them either. I don’t want them to grow up seeing Sandy and me at each other’s throats the whole time. And she’s probably got a point. It is disruptive for them at Christmastime. Sandy always goes to her folks in Connecticut. They have one of those big old Cape Cod houses and do Christmas with this enormous ten-foot tree and all the trimmings. The kids have their grandparents there, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their friends. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time. Desperately as I want Mikey and Becky with me, I want what’s best for them more.”

“You’re a pushover, Jim,” Lars said, shaking his head. “You need to learn how to stand up to her. To say: ‘This is important to me and I’m going to fight for it.’”

“I already have, Lars. That’s how I’ve ended up here.”

“Well, once in a lifetime isn’t enough. You need to keep at it.”

James nodded morosely. “Yes, I know.”

The day was one of those in autumn of pure lapis lazuli sky and crystal air. From the large playroom window, James could see out over the city to the open plains beyond. Below in the street the dappled tints of gold and orange flickered restlessly in the sunlight, but the sky stretched ever onward, a clear, almost luminescent blue.

Gentle joy always filled James when he stood at this window. Clichéd as the vision was, he knew there was a metaphorical eagle somewhere inside him that would one day spread its wings and soar in response to this infinite landscape. His heart still felt depressingly sparrow-sized most of the time, but seeing such immensity always gave him hope of greater things.

Not that his sparrow’s heart hadn’t had its own share of struggling to get free. The most horrible moment had come two years ago when, after ten years of training, James suddenly realized that he couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the sheltered prison of psychoanalytic theory. That moment still relived itself with soul-shattering clarity. He’d been fighting his way through heavy traffic on FDR Drive in Upper Manhattan when the insight mushroomed up with all the subtlety of an H-bomb going off. His hands went rigid on the steering wheel; sweat ran down the sides of his face and his heartbeat roared up so loudly into his ears that it drowned out whatever the hell was playing on that jazz station he always listened to but didn’t really like. He realized then that things had to change. He had to get out of the life he was living …

God, what that moment of insight did to Sandy. She’d been beyond furious when he told her. The rows they had. And some of her anger was justified. She’d supported him all those years. She’d put her own career on hold while he’d finished medical school, then the training, the internship, the residency and his own analysis to emerge as a fully qualified psychiatrist. Sandy had stuck through it all for the chance of a brownstone on the Upper West Side and private school for the kids. Those were her goals in life and she’d worked just as hard to achieve them as he’d worked for his.

“Theory?” she’d screamed when he’d tried to give voice to his confusion. “What the hell’s this sudden thing with theory? How can you wreck our entire lives over something like that? It isn’t even real. So what if you don’t believe it? You’re not a priest, for fuck’s sake. Believe in something else.”

How did he explain it, his inarticulate longing for something beyond the narrow corridors of analysis, the domineering views of his colleagues and the shadowy brick-and-mortar ravines of Manhattan? A panic attack in the middle of rush-hour traffic hadn’t been very subtle, but it got the message over.

James began to dream ceaselessly of escaping to a world where everything was simpler. He was, however, still dreaming of civilization. A small practice out in Queens perhaps. South Dakota had never entered his head. Then, in the fated ways some things happen, he had run into an old friend who had another friend who had known Lars from medical school and knew too that he was looking to expand his practice in Rapid City. James had gone home that night and looked South Dakota up on the internet, and the first picture to fill up the screen was of a lone pronghorn antelope standing on the flattest, emptiest land James had ever seen. The sheer otherworldliness of it felt like the answer to everything.

Except for Sandy, of course. The idea of moving to South Dakota quickly reduced the whole matter to a simple choice for her: staying with him or staying in the city. New York won, hands down. The gut-wrencher was that she got custody of the kids.

What kind of impostor filled a room with toys for strangers’ children and then hardly ever saw his own? He had access, of course, but now two thousand miles separated him from their routine of splashy bath times and “dinosaur kisses.” His greatest fear was that he’d become a stranger to Mikey and Becky. A very nice stranger, to be sure, but a stranger nonetheless.

When Conor arrived, James began reflecting his words immediately. If Conor said “doll’s house,” then James said, “Yes, that’s a doll’s house.” If Conor elaborated and said, “big doll’s house,” then James mirrored that back in a sentence, “Yes, that’s a big doll’s house.” James felt quite secure in interpreting Conor’s extensive naming of items in the playroom as an embryonic effort at interaction. It was conversation at a most rudimentary level, like an infant’s speech, but James recognized it as conversation.

Conor was increasingly attracted to the low shelves and their baskets of small toys. He didn’t take the baskets from the shelf, didn’t even touch them, but more and more often he would stand in front of them and press the cat’s nose against their mesh. “Meow? Meow? Basket. Wire basket. Silver wire basket.”

“Yes, silver wire baskets. Baskets full of toys. Toys you can play with, if you want. In here, you decide.”

Conor lifted the cat up and continued on his journey around the room. Coming to the expanse of windows, he paused. He didn’t go near them enough to look down on the vast view visible from the playroom, but he reached the cat out and pressed its nose to the glass. “Window. Meow?”

“Yes, those are the windows. We can see out,” James said.

Conor moved on.

In the far corner was what James called his “road sheet”. Made of heavy-gauge white plastic sheeting, it was about four by four feet in size and printed with an elaborate layout of roads just the right size for toy cars and little buildings made of Lego bricks. It had been folded up on the shelf when Conor had been in the playroom previously, but now it was lying flat on the floor.

Coming up to it, Conor stood stone still. Not a muscle quivered. A full minute passed, feeling an eternity long. “Meow?” he whispered.

“That’s the road sheet,” James said. “Toy cars can drive there.”

The muscles tensed along Conor’s jaw as he stared at the plastic square on the floor. Raising one hand, he flapped it frantically in front of his face for a few moments.

“Man on the moon,” he said with very precise clarity. “July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong accompanied Buzz Aldrin. Apollo Project. Put the first man on the moon. July 20, 1969.”

Surprised by this sudden burst of speech, James studied the boy. Exact regurgitation of overheard conversations was common with autistic children, but it was the first time in the three weeks Conor had been coming that James heard him do it. Did Conor have any understanding of the words he had just said or was it simply autistic echolalia?

“Something has made you think of the men who went to the moon,” James said carefully.

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

James probed further to discover if there was any glimmer of meaning. “Yes, that is what Neil Armstrong said when he stepped on the moon, isn’t it?”

Conor raised his head. “The cat knows.”

Chapter Three

In an ideal world, all child therapy was family therapy. As a child’s problems virtually never arose in isolation, James considered it as vital to see the mother, the father and the siblings as it was to see the child him- or herself.

Everyone in the business knew this, of course, but things seldom worked out that way nowadays. Philosophies had changed. The business model had taken over psychiatry just as it had everything else. “The bottom line” and “accountability” had replaced “self-discovery” and “insight”. Insurance companies often refused to pay for more than twelve sessions of therapy. Behavioural contracts and token economies provided a swifter intervention than play therapy. Drugs provided an even swifter one. Both mothers and fathers worked and were generally unavailable for therapy during office hours. And everyone was in a hurry. Impatience had become the motif of modern life. As a consequence, the main function of many psychiatrists was simply to prescribe drugs. James often felt like a dinosaur for trying to turn the clock back to a slower, more humanistic model.

South Dakota hadn’t been a good place to choose for a renaissance of traditional therapeutic values. They were a self-reliant people, not used to talking to strangers about their personal problems, so it was hard enough to get them through the door at all. And with agriculture still the main industry, they understood “bottom lines” acutely well. Many parents of his young patients had refused outright to come in for therapy sessions themselves because of the additional cost. In the end, James had had to go “commercial” to create a genuine family therapy setting by coming up with the concept of a “package deal” – that he would see each member of the immediate family for three sessions for one set price. Truth was, he was quite proud of that idea and thought it would work, but no. Too often he still had to charm them in.

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.”

“Aur-och,” James murmured.

“Oar-ock. Auroch. Yes. The cat says yes. An auroch. A wild cow.” The words were spoken very deliberately, as if they took effort. He set the plastic animal on the table. “The cat knows.”

James felt excited. They had communicated. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as one of those scientists who operated the big satellite dishes that listened for signs of alien life in outer space, that were alert for the slightest variant crackle that might indicate conscious intelligence. You heard it and that was enough to go on, to keep up the belief it existed. The slightest crackle, the smallest sign.

Chapter Four

From the moment James saw Mikey emerging from the skyway wearing only his underpants, he knew things weren’t getting off on the right foot. Becky came mincing along behind in that way she had when she found her brother totally disgusting. Then she saw James and virtually bowled Mikey over in her excitement to reach him. “Daddy!” she cried and threw herself into his arms.

James scooped his eight-year-old daughter up into a bear hug.

“Guess what?” she said gleefully. “Mikey threw up. That’s how come he’s got no clothes on. Look. He got throw-up on my dress.”

“Hey, Michael, buddy, what happened to you? Too many yummy airplane meals?” James endeavoured to lift both children at once which made them squeal.

“He had too many M&Ms,” Becky replied. “Because Mum bought the bag for both of us, but then I went to the bathroom and Mikey pigged down practically all of them while I was gone. So it’s his own fault. I don’t feel sorry for him.”

“You should, you little monster,” James said playfully and smooched her on the nose. “He’s your brother, no matter what.” Then he whisked Mikey up in his arms again. “I bet you threw up polka dots, huh, if it was M&Ms?” Mikey giggled. “Your mum should know better than to give you a whole bag of candy.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” James said, as he collected their bags and headed for the car.

“What is it?” Becky asked as they left the terminal building.

“Just wait and see. Out here. In the car park.”

“A pony?” Becky asked hopefully.

James laughed and ruffled her hair. “No, silly, I wouldn’t come to pick you up riding a pony, would I?”

“Uncle Joey says everybody rides horses out here.”

“No, look at Daddy’s cool car!” James pointed to the copper-coloured ’71 Ford Mustang convertible. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

Sandy had kept the Range Rover because it was a safe car for the kids. James drove out to South Dakota in a clapped-out Ford Taurus his brother Jack had picked up off eBay. Buying the convertible with its over-sized, futuristic bonnet and powerful Boss 429 engine was James’s first acknowledgement that his old life was over.

Becky wasn’t quite so impressed. “It’s just a car,” she said with disappointment.

“It’s a classic car.”

“It’s an old car,” she replied disdainfully. “It’s a cool car. For cool people. Like us, huh, Mike? What do you think? Does your dad drive a cool car or what?”

“Yeah, I like it,” he said and ran his hand along the fender.

Becky peered through the window as James put the suitcase in the boot. “The back seat’s really little. I don’t see how you get in. There’s no back doors.”

“Here. You open the front door, then press the lever down on the back of the front seat and tip it forward, like this.”

“It’s kind of stinky in here. Like somebody smoked.”

“That was a long time ago, so don’t worry about it. Just get in. You too, Mike. And fasten your seat belts.”

“Where’s your other car?” she asked. “The real one.”

“If you mean the Jeep, that one isn’t actually mine. It belongs to Uncle Lars. Usually when you visit, we trade. He takes this car, because yes, you’re right, there isn’t really lots of room for getting in and out. But Uncle Lars is hunting elk this weekend, so he needed to use the Jeep himself because it has four-wheel drive. Anyway, this car’s way nicer. You’ll see. If the weather stays nice, I’ll put the top down. You’ll love it then.”

“Daddy?” Mikey asked. “Is Uncle Lars our real uncle?”

“He’s not an uncle by blood. Uncle Lars is my partner in the practice. But he and Aunt Betty are Daddy’s good friends and they always remember you in nice ways, so we make them honorary members of the family.”

“Yeah, we got another uncle like that,” Mikey replied. “His name’s Uncle Joey.”

“Yes, the guy who thinks we all ride horses out here. So who’s he?”

“Well, basically he’s Mum’s boyfriend,” Becky replied.

“Then he’s not your uncle,” James muttered irritably.

“Mum said we should call him that. Probably just ’cause like with you and Uncle Lars, he’s her good friend,” Becky said.

“Uncle Jack’s your uncle back there. He’s your real uncle. And I’m your real dad.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Yes, well, be sure to remember it.”

James missed the kids so much that it had become easy to want the visits to be perfect, to cram in all the treats and fun he missed sharing with them on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, a little spoiling never hurt.

Their new family tradition had become a trip to Toys ’R’ Us for a shopping spree on the day Mikey and Becky arrived. It always started with James playfully exclaiming that because they were not with him all the time, he “didn’t have enough toys at his house” and they needed to “get something to play with” while they were there. This always generated squeals of excitement and a pleasurable orgy of toy shopping.

Before going to Toys ’R’ Us, James first stopped off at the house to take the suitcase inside. It was at that point Mikey vomited all over the kitchen floor.

“I wonder if he’s got stomach flu,” Becky said.

“Let’s hope not,” James replied as he filled a bucket with water and disinfectant.

“Let’s hope I don’t get it,” Becky said. It sounded like a threat.

Mikey wasn’t well at all. Clutching a plastic dishpan, he lay down on the couch in front of the TV.

Becky, tired from the long journey and miserably disappointed at this turn of events, started to moan. She didn’t like what Mikey was watching on TV. She didn’t want to be around him because he was sick. There weren’t any good DVDs to watch. The clothes in her suitcase were all wrinkled. She’d forgotten to pack her hairbrush. Most of all, however, she moaned about not going to Toys ’R’ Us. She wanted to go. Now! Desperately. Please couldn’t they go? Why couldn’t Mikey just walk around for a little while?

James gently explained that Mikey was too sick at the moment to be taken out.

Becky wasn’t in the mood to be understanding, wailing what was the point of coming all this way when there was no trip to Toys ’R’ Us?

“I hope there are other reasons for coming besides toys,” James said, feeling a bit hurt.

“This is the worst visit in the world,” she exclaimed, adding “I wish I was home” as she stomped off.

Things went from bad to worse overnight. Mikey continued to vomit, and James was up and down all night comforting him. He came out bleary-eyed into the kitchen to find Becky spooning sugar into her Coco Pops.

“Hey, not the whole bowl,” he said

“I wish you had a parrot, Dad,” Becky replied brightly.

“A parrot?”

“Uncle Joey’s got a parrot. His name is Harry and he can say 23 words. I wish you had one, so I could talk to it.”

“I don’t have one because parrots really shouldn’t be kept in captivity. They’re too intelligent. They need lots of stimulation. It’s cruel to keep them as pets.”

“Guess what else Uncle Joey has?” she said. “A house out on Long Island right on the beach. He’s going to take me and Mikey and Mum out there on the weekends when it’s summer.”

“Lucky you,” James replied.

“Know what he got me? That Barbie horse that I’ve been wanting so bad.”

“Becky, I got you the Barbie horse.”

“No, not that one. That’s the old kind. Uncle Joey got me the one that has legs you can bend so that you can pose it like it’s really walking. And guess what else? He got me the carriage that goes with it too and I didn’t even ask for it.”

“What’s Joey do to afford all this loot? Rob banks?”

Becky laughed. “No, silly. He’s a lawyer.”

“Pretty much the same thing.”

Mid-afternoon and Mikey was still vomiting, so James packed up Becky, Mikey and the dishpan into the Mustang and headed for the walk-in clinic.

During the interminable wait to see a doctor, Mikey staged a sufficient recovery to want a Coke out of the vending machine. It took two hours, a blood test and most of James’s patience to learn that Mikey had “just one of those things kids get”. Mikey sipped the rest of his Coke and looked generally pleased with himself.

“If Mikey’s feeling better, can we go to Toys ’R’ Us now?” Becky asked.

“That’s clear on the other side of town and it’s practically dinnertime. I think what we really need is a decent meal.”

“I want to go to McDonald’s. They have a playground.”

“No, we need something healthy. What about that Italian deli that does take-out? We could pick up some of their lasagna and take it home. You loved that last time, remember? You can help me pick out a salad.”

By the time they got to the deli, Mikey wasn’t feeling so hot any more. He didn’t want to go in and smell food.

“Okay, look, here’s what we do,” James said. “I’m going to park here by the window where I can see you the whole time. Becks and I are going to pop in and get our food, and we’ll be right back. You lock the door while we’re gone. We’ll be just in there.”

The deli was unexpectedly busy. James wasn’t focusing on anything other than getting through the mob of people to place his order, so he jumped at the tap on his shoulder and someone saying hello. He turned.

There in the other queue stood Laura Deighton.

“Mummy, look at this,” a small voice called. “Can we get some of these?”

“Bring it here so I can see it, Morgana,” Laura said.

James looked over. Morgana? Conor’s sister? He gaped in astonishment. She was everything Conor was not: a sturdy, athletic child with enormous brown eyes and a tangle of loose, dark curls bouncing down over her shoulders. When she caught James staring, she met him with a bold gaze and broke into a cherubic smile. Yin and yang. That was the first thought to cross James’s mind.

“Is this your daughter?” Laura asked, looking down at Becky. “What a pretty little girl.”

“Yes. Yes, this is Becky. My son’s out in the car. He’s not feeling very well.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Laura said.

“We’ve just popped in to get some decent food so he doesn’t have to smell us cooking,” James said wryly.

“We’ve come in for goodies,” Laura replied. “Alan has Conor tonight, so we’re having a girls’ night out.”

James looked down again at Morgana, who was clutching a bag of amaretti biscuits. She was an astonishingly beautiful child with her vibrant eyes, curly hair and little bow mouth, like one of those idealized children painted on heirloom plates to commemorate a golden era that had never really existed. Beside her, Conor would appear as pale and insubstantial as a ghost.

Becky, ever the social butterfly, was delighted by this unexpected opportunity to make friends. With smiley openness she said hello to Morgana, asked how old she was and within moments the girls had wandered off together to look at displays of cookies on the adjacent shelves while James and Laura waited in the queues.

“It’s great to see you. How are you doing?” Laura said brightly, as though they were old friends.

This took James by surprise because over the weeks he had been seeing Conor, Laura had made herself remarkably scarce. So scarce, in fact, that James had had the distinct feeling she was avoiding him. And while she had agreed to the family therapy format which meant she would have at least three individual sessions herself with James as part of Conor’s treatment, Laura had made no arrangements to follow through on this. As a consequence, James built up an image of her as reclusive, anxious and, most likely, tongue-tied. Now, however, he found her quite the contrary: friendly, relaxed and genuinely interested in the children. She commiserated with James about Mikey’s sickness and his experiences at the walk-in clinic.

James glanced around to see where the two girls had gone.

“They seem to be enjoying each other,” Laura said.

James smiled. “It’ll be the highlight of Becky’s day. She always misses her friends terribly when she’s here.” He craned to see over the low shelves. “Oh good heavens. Hold on a second. They’ve gone out to my car.”

James started for the door but at just that moment the two girls burst back in. “Hey, Daddy!” Becky cried. “Guess what! Mikey’s thrown up everywhere!”

“Shush, shush, not such a loud voice,” James said, catching her by the shoulder.

“He missed the dishpan! It’s all over your car.”

“Oh geez,” James said. “Listen, go tell the man at the counter we can’t wait for the lasagna. Tell him sorry.”

Laura materialized beside him. “Let me help you.” She pulled napkins out of the holder on one of the small tables. “Morgana, you and Becky go in the restroom and bring us some paper towels.”

Becky hadn’t been exaggerating. Mikey had vomited over his clothes, across the console, the gear shift and onto the adjacent seat.

“Hey, fella, you okay?” James asked, reaching in to ruffle his son’s hair, which was just about the only part of him free from vomit.

“Sorry, Daddy,” Mikey whimpered.

“Accidents happen. As long as you’re okay.” Standing in the brisk October dusk, James felt bleak at the prospect of trying to clean up Mikey and the car with a handful of deli napkins.

Laura put a hand on his arm. “Why don’t we just mop things up enough for you to take Mikey home? Becky can come in my car and I’ll follow you. That would be easiest.”

James knew it was a bad idea. As he drove home, he tried to reassure himself that letting Laura do this was not breaking the rules. It was so important that he not make any mistakes this time around. Good boundaries with clients did not include any kind of personal relationships with them. But then he was in a genuinely bad situation. She was simply helping him, like any decent person would. Besides … if he was honest with himself, James had to admit she intrigued him. She wore her fame, her accomplishments so lightly they were almost illusory, as if they were nothing more than stories themselves, and yet there was something also illusory about Laura, the way she could be so friendly, so concerned and willing to help with Mikey and yet eluded James’s efforts to get her in to talk about her own son.

Chapter Five

When they arrived at the apartment, the two girls bounded off together, Becky chattering excitedly about a toy horse she wanted to show Morgana. Laura lifted Mikey out of the car and took him inside while James went in search of cleaning supplies and a rag out of the box at the back of the garage. By the time he came into the apartment, Laura had run a bath and was washing Mikey, as if it were the most natural thing to enter a strange house and bathe a child she’d never met before.

James took over from there. With Mikey finally clean and tucked into bed, he came back into the living room to find Laura, hands sunk deep into the pockets of her jeans, scanning the bookshelves. Embarrassment shot through him. While he owned most of her books, they were all in his office, because the only point of buying them had been so people at work could see he owned them. The novels on these shelves were the sort he actually read – Terry Pratchett, Tom Clancy, Stephen King – relaxing, unpretentious storytelling that you could leave on the back of the toilet or risk dropping in the bath.

“That’s my fun reading,” he said sheepishly.

She smiled enigmatically.

“I do have yours,” he added quickly. “But they’re at the office at the moment. I’m always switching back and forth.”

Her smile eased into a grin and she glanced over. “So does that mean you’ve actually read any of them?”

James felt his cheeks redden. There was an uncomfortable pause and then he admitted, “I wish I could say yes. I intend to. It’s just been very busy since moving out here.”

“At least you’re honest.”

Desperate to move the conversation away from his embarrassing lack of intellectual reading, James said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Then we can try to pull the girls apart.”

Laura followed him into the kitchen. Hands still deep in her pockets she strolled around the room, studying the kitchen with the same care as she had his bookshelf. The way she circled the room, inspecting everything, reminded James of Conor.

That brought to mind the fact that Laura had not yet mentioned her son. Normally parents he met outside the office pounced on him, anxious to ask how things were going, to tell of their child’s progress or get some free advice. James was grateful, of course, that she hadn’t done any of these things, since it would have been inappropriate to discuss a case outside the privacy of the office, but it was still curious that she never mentioned Conor at all, even casually.

Taking the coffee to the table, James sat down. “I’ve been hoping to see you in the office,” he said.

Laura ignored his comment. She lifted the coffee and sipped it. “Mmmm. Good coffee. Tastes like New York coffee.”

“Can I get Dulcie to give you a call this week and make an appointment?” James asked.

Laura’s brow drew down as she looked into the mug of steaming liquid. A silence developed and several moments slipped by with no response. “I’ve got to admit, I’m not really into that concept,” she said at last.

“Which concept is this?”

“Therapy.”

“Why?” James asked.

Setting the mug down on the table, Laura leaned forward on her forearms and stared into it as if some answer were in there. Finally she smiled at him. “Because everyone’s reality is different.”

That was an unexpected answer. James cocked an eyebrow.

“Therapy, the way I see it, trades on the assumption that ‘normal’ exists and that my perceptions, whatever they might be, should be brought into line with it,” she said. “Whereas I think there is no ‘real world’ out there. No absolute reality. Everything is subjective. So why should I accept what you tell me is reality?”

“That’s an interesting take,” James said. “I get the impression you’re worried your perspective will be overridden or judged as not as good or acceptable as other perspectives. Perhaps you think that a therapist might get in there and try to change perceptions you don’t feel are wrong.” He smiled at her. “But that’s not quite what therapy is. It’s simply about fixing things that don’t work. Just as if your car stopped working. You’d take it to a garage and let a mechanic repair it. You wouldn’t expect him to do stuff you hadn’t wanted done or to customize the car to his liking and not give it back to you. You’d expect him simply to find out what’s wrong and repair it so that you can enjoy your car again. Same here, except that I work with people, not cars. Your relationship with Conor has stopped working. So you’ve brought Conor to see if I can fix that. And because relationships always involve more than one person, I need to see everyone involved to do my job properly. I’m not going to make anyone think or do anything they don’t want to. I’m just going to try and fix what’s broken.”

Her cheeks flushed. She ducked her head and James saw tears come to the corners of her eyes. He sat back in a casual manner to lessen the intensity of the moment, because this wasn’t the time or the place. Indeed, he was deeply relieved that the girls had remained occupied playing in Becky’s room.

“Sorry,” Laura murmured. “I hadn’t meant it to get this far.”

“Not to worry.”

“I think it was the ‘relationships stopped working’ comment.” She was tearful again. “Sorry.”

“Not to worry.”

“It’s just … well … ‘relationships not working’ is a bit of an understatement,” she said wearily. “Because it’s not just Conor …”

James knew he ought to stop her right there. The appropriate place for this conversation was the office. Here at his own kitchen table, with the girls chattering in the next room and apt to burst in at any moment, was most definitely not the place to encourage the conversation in the direction it was going. But James sensed a rare chink in Laura’s armour, and if he had learned anything from that whole tragedy in New York, it was to recognize that sometimes you had to break the rules. So he said, “What’s happened?”

“Alan left me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s given me such a shock,” she said and tears thickened her voice.

“So how did this come about?” James asked.

“We had the stupidest argument. Over a lawnmower, would you believe?”

James smiled sympathetically. “That must have been upsetting.”

“It was so stupid. Al had been in town and found this lawn-mower on sale. It was a good price, but it was this huge, heavy thing and wasn’t self-propelled. I’m the one who cares for the yard, so any lawn-mower we get, I’m the one who’ll be using it. I wouldn’t even be able to push that beast. So I said he needed to take it back.

“Al flatly refused. We’ve got this weird relationship regarding money. We always have. And that’s what this was about. He’d paid for it, so he wasn’t going to take it back, because then it was as if I’d said he made a bad choice with his money. It escalated from there, because I didn’t want to get stuck with this crap machine and he didn’t want to take it back. So in the end I just said, okay, I’m going to take it back. I went out and got in the pickup, because the lawn-mower was still in the back of it and I took off for town.

“This isn’t like me,” she said and looked over. “I’m normally not at all confrontational. Before I even got into town, I was regretting I’d made a big deal out of it. I almost turned around then …” Her voice caught. “But I didn’t. I’d gone all that way, so I thought I might as well make use of it. So I went to the grocery store. When I got back to the ranch, he was gone. And, of course, he’d taken the kids.”

Laura’s shoulders dropped. She let out a long, slow breath. “That was the very worst moment I’ve ever had.” The tears glistened yet again. “Coming into the house, finding it empty, realizing they were gone.”

“When did this happen?” James asked.

“Last Friday. Alan’s come back since. He was only gone over the weekend. Took the kids to his mum’s. But it made me realize I’ve got to do something. We’re in serious trouble.” She paused and looked over at James. “I’m thinking, okay, maybe I’ll do this with you. Maybe I’ll come in.”

“Lawnmower?” Alan said in disbelief. “Laura thinks this was all about a lawnmower? She thinks I moved out of my house because I was upset over a fucking lawnmower?” Leaning back into the sofa, he shook his head. “Well, there’s a beautiful example of just why we’re going to hell: Laura lives in another world. She completely misses what’s happening in this one.”

“You’re saying Laura commonly misinterprets things?” James asked, curious. Surely a good writer would be skilled at insight and interpretation.

“Not ‘misinterprets’. Laura’s not misinterpreting. It’s more that she’s got her own version of the world. Things aren’t true and untrue to Laura. Not the way they are for most of us.” Alan paused and lowered his head, thinking. “How exactly do I explain it? I don’t want it to come off sounding like I think she’s a pathological liar or something, because it’s not that clear cut. Lying means there must be a truth somewhere and you know you’re not saying it. With Laura, it’s all much more fluid than that. Almost as if no truth exists and so you create it as you go along.”

Like a storyteller does, James thought.

“In the early years that’s why I loved her so,” Alan said. “I mean, you’re around Laura for a while and you realize she isn’t quite like other people. She’s got this weird, wonderful way of thinking, not the sort of thing you can get at with just intellect. There’s a passion about creative people, don’t you think? Growing up in a family of bankers and accountants, I admired that. Maybe even identified with it a little, because I think what gave me trouble as a kid was that I was just that bit more free-thinking. Nothing like Laura, of course, but enough to know there was something better to be had than just making money. And I got off on the idea that she wanted to be with me. In a way, that’s what attracted her in reverse. She wanted ordinary. That’s actually what she told me once. That I was ‘real’ to her. I was her anchor …

“But this fey quality, it isn’t special anymore. It’s just frigging hard work. These days I feel like one of those game show contestants who has to guess what’s behind the curtain. You know? Guess between this one and that one and you win the prize. But when the curtain opens, there’s another curtain behind it. Or a box to be opened. And inside is another box. Nothing is like it looks. Everything just hides something else. I’ve never found the real Laura. To the point that I’m not sure she even exists.

“I’m fed up with it. With all the lies and evasions. You ask her something and she’ll tell you whatever story is in her head at that moment. And she’s so good at it. You never know if it’s the truth or not.”

Finally Alan looked over at James. “You want to know the real reason I left. It had nothing to do with lawnmowers whatsoever. Shall I tell you what happened?”

“Yes, of course,” James said.

“Our daughter, Morgana, is six. She was supposed to go to this kid’s birthday party right after school last Friday. She was so excited about it, because she doesn’t get invited to a lot of birthday parties. Morgana seems to get on with kids okay, but she plays by herself a lot. Mostly just because we live so far out. Anyway, so this was special. Morgana kept chattering on about what she wanted to wear and what she wanted to get this little girl for a present and all that. It’s all she talked about.

“The day of the party happened to be the same day Laura threw her tantrum over the lawnmower. I was pretty fed up and didn’t want to be around when she came back. Since we’d already arranged that I was going to pick Morgana up from the party, I decided to go into town early. I popped Conor in the car and thought I’d take him to the car wash with me. He likes that.

“Anyway, there were roadworks on the main street, so I took a different way that goes down around the park. As I’m driving by the park, who should I see there but Morgana, playing there all on her own.

“I thought, what the hell? I jammed on the brakes and leaped out and grabbed hold of her. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She started crying right away – bawling – and I just felt such relief that chance had taken me down that road.

“Morgana was so upset I couldn’t really get an explanation out of her as to what had happened. All I could reckon was that whoever was in charge of this little girl’s birthday party had taken the children to the park and then hadn’t done a very good head count when they left. This got me fuming, so I stormed over to their house.

“I was rattling the door and saying ‘What the hell is wrong with you, leaving a six-year-old alone in the park?’ and this girl’s mother looked at me like I was a madman. She says, ‘Caitlin isn’t having a birthday party today. Her birthday’s in August.’”

Alan’s shoulders dropped in a defeated way. “Anyhow, so then the story came out.” He looked over at James. “Turns out Morgana had made the whole thing up. She was desperate to be able to play in the park on her own, because that’s what the town kids did. She’d wanted to wear that new outfit to school but Laura had told her she couldn’t, that it was for special occasions like birthday parties. And the damned set of marking pens we’d bought for this girl’s birthday present was something Morgana had been wanting for herself. So she cooked up this whole birthday scenario and carried it off. This is a goddamned first-grader we’re talking about.

“Something inside me just snapped when Morgana told me that. I thought, here she is, at six, doing just what her mother does. Showing that same devil-may-care attitude towards the truth. Acting like you can just make it up as you go along and it’s the same as if it were real. I thought, hell, this is the fucking future. Morgana is going to become another Laura. So since Conor was already in the car with me, I just took off. I thought, I’m not going to let this happen. I’m not going to let Laura fuck both these kids up. So, I didn’t go home. I took the kids and went to my mother’s house in Gillette.”

Alan drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The problem is, it was just a gesture. I can’t leave the ranch. Not really. It’s my ranch. I’ve got too many responsibilities there to be able to just walk out altogether. Besides, walking out would hurt the kids too much. Laura and I have to sort this out like adults. But it was a gesture that needed to be made, because it finally got the point across to her that I’m fucking serious. Things have got to change or else I will take Conor and Morgana away from her.”

Chapter Six

Clad in jeans and running shoes, her hands sunk deep into the pockets of an oversized grey sweatshirt jacket, Laura looked to have just come from the gym the day she arrived for the first session.

“Won’t you come in?” James said, pleased that she’d kept her promise to show up.

As before, Laura eschewed the carefully laid-out conversation centre in preference to the chair beside his desk. Sitting down in it, she kept her hands in the pockets of the open sweatshirt jacket, crossing them over in front of her to closely wrap it around to her as if the room were chilly. Such a contrast, James thought, to the confident woman he’d met at the deli.

“How are your kids?” she asked. “Did Mikey get better in time to enjoy some of his visit?”

“Yes, they’re both fine, thank you. It was just a twenty-four-hour thing. He was his normal tornado self the next day,” James said and smiled.

“Did they get back to New York okay? That’s a long way for little ones to travel?”

“They’re a couple of little adventurers. They enjoy the excitement of going on their own and all the fuss the airlines staff make of them.”

Laura wrapped the sweatshirt jacket even more tightly around herself. “I’m feeling very nervous,” she said at last and smiled apologetically.

“Why is that?” he asked gently.

She shrugged slightly. “I dunno. I guess because I know Alan’s already been in. You’ve already heard his version of everything. I worry I’m disadvantaged.”

“I’m not here to take sides,” James replied. “Remember the other week at my place? When I was saying that what this is all about is simply getting things working again? That’s the truth. I’m not here to judge either of you. That wouldn’t be helpful. I’m only here so you and Alan and Conor can untangle things.”

“Yeah,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

A moment passed in silence. Laura glanced around the room. Finally she gave him a brief moment of eye contact. “What do you want me to talk about then? Conor? Alan?”

“In here you decide. You’re in control of the session.”

“If I were actually in control, I’d control it by not being here,” she said and grinned.

“You have that choice as well. If you need to leave, you can. In here you do decide. That’s what it’s all about.”

James could tell from her expression that it had not occurred to her that she actually did have the freedom to get up and walk out. Now she seemed even more unnerved.

“You really are feeling uncomfortable,” he said to give her a way into talking to him.

“Yes.”

A couple of moments of silence passed.

“I wish it were more natural, this. Like the night at your place. I mean, I can talk.” She laughed self-consciously. “It’s just when I get in a situation like this, I lose it.”

“That’s okay,” he said gently. “Don’t worry about it.”

The room grew quiet. She was looking down at her hands as they rested one on top of the other on her lower abdomen. They were still inside the pockets of the sweatshirt jacket, so she stared at the grey material.

“What’s making this hard …” she started tentatively, “… is … that before we discuss Conor or Alan, I want to tell you about something else. Because it’s informed my whole life … you need to know, if you’re going to understand what’s happening. But I don’t know how to start telling you.”

“That’s all right,” James said. “Take your time. The pace is yours. There’s no hurry.”

“It’s just, well, more that I’ve never really told anybody about it.” She frowned. “No, that’s wrong. I have. I’ve told quite a lot of people, actually. But never in a context like this. Never in a way that acknowledges its legitimate place in my life. Never truthfully, from beginning to end.” She shrugged apologetically. “That’s what’s actually kept me so long from coming in. I just can’t figure out how to start this without making everything sound crazy. Yet, at the same time I know I’ve got to. Because what if I really did lose Alan? Or Morgana? Or Conor? That can’t happen. So I’ve got to start with telling you about this one thing, because otherwise, nothing else will make sense.”

James nodded.

There was total silence, so complete that the subtle noises of the outer office and waiting room flowed into the room like an incoming tide.

Laura finally took a very deep breath and let it out with measured slowness. “It starts the summer I was seven. In my home town, which is west of here in the Black Hills. In June. Early evening, maybe about 7 pm. I was walking alone along this little dirt path that ran from the end of our street, which is called Kenally Street, through an empty lot that bordered the lake and then out to meet the next street over, which is Arnott Street. It was just a kids’ path through a vacant lot that belonged to an old man named Mr Adler. You know the kind. We used the path as a shortcut to school and as a quick way to get down to the pier at the end of Arnott Street.

“Anyway, that particular evening we’d had thundery showers in the late afternoon. When the clouds finally parted, the sun was left hanging just above this low, humpbacked mountain that everyone calls the Sugarloaf. I was walking directly into the sunlight and I recall looking up at it and wondering why it was that you could look directly at the sun when it is that low in the sky and it doesn’t hurt your eyes.

“Then just to my right, I caught motion in my peripheral vision, stopped, turned my head and found myself still sunblind. I couldn’t see clearly for a moment or two, but when I could, there was this woman standing there.”

Laura paused and drew in a deep breath.

“She was like no one I’d ever seen before. Not even in my dreams. She was in her twenties, tall, with broad, bold features and dusty-coloured skin. Her hair was a soft black colour like charcoal, thick and very, very straight. It hung loose just past her shoulders. This caught my attention straightaway, because this was in the early 60s, before the Flower Power generation, so women wore short Doris Day ’dos or Jackie Kennedy bouffants. If their hair was longer, it was done up in a chignon or French roll. I’d never seen a grown woman who had her hair loose and unstyled.

“The other really noticeable thing was her muscles. She was quite thin but she had these taut, prominent muscles. I remember thinking that if I reached out and touched her, her flesh would feel hard like my brother’s, not soft and mushy like Ma’s.

“More than anything else, though, the feature that defined her most was her eyes. They were deep-set, beneath dark, ungroomed eyebrows, and they were the most extraordinary colour. A light, light grey that towards the edges of the iris was vaguely yellowed, like the eyes of a wolf.

“All her clothes were creamy white. The top was loose and blousy and had an elaborate design embroidered down the front and on the cuffs, but the embroidery was white on white, so you couldn’t actually tell what it was without looking closely. Her pants were like these baggy shorts boys wear now that end just below the knees, but they were made of the same white woven material as her top. On her feet she was wearing Roman-style sandals, the kind that lace up over the ankles.

“I remember staring at her because she looked so strange. And also because she looked really very beautiful in a wild sort of way. She stared right back at me. Not discreetly, the way adults usually look at people they’d interested in. She stared. The way young kids stare at each other. She had this bewildered expression on her face, as if she were as startled to see me there trotting along the path through Adler’s vacant lot as I was to see her.

“That moment of staring felt like forever to me. We just stood, locked in one another’s gaze. I wasn’t frightened of her at all. If anything, I felt a wary excitement.

“Finally she turned away and started moving towards the corner of the lot. There wasn’t a way out onto the street there. Just an old, untended lilac hedge. The lilacs were tall and scraggly but even so, you still couldn’t get through them. I never bothered to wonder why she was going that way. All I knew was that she was getting away and I couldn’t let that happen. I had to follow her. So I did.”

Laura stopped.

James raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“My next memory was of getting hit by crab apples that my foster brother was throwing. When I looked around, I was standing in the alley at the other end of the path. Over by the gate into our backyard. This was more than half a block away from where I’d seen the woman.

“I remember looking down and seeing the knee-deep weeds in the alley, seeing their colour. They were that pale yellow everything goes when it is baked dry in the summer heat, and there was hard, rutted soil beneath them. For a moment I wondered if this woman had magicked me there because it was quite a way away from the path through the empty lot. I was seven and still hopeful about things like fairies and magic. But I wasn’t a naïve kid. I think I already knew by then that those things didn’t really exist. I was also experienced enough with my imagination to know that it did. This wouldn’t have been the first time I’d become so engrossed in playing an imaginary game that I’d lost track of where I was and ended up somewhere else.”

“So you recognized seeing this woman as an imaginary experience?” James asked.

“Oh yes. Definitely yes. I’m not talking about aliens or the paranormal or anything like that. I imagined her. Real as she looked to me in Adler’s lot, I knew even then that if I’d reached my hand out, I could never have touched her. I knew she had come from inside me.”

“So what do you think happened to you during that period between seeing her and your ending up at the gate into your backyard?” James asked.

“Simple. I’d followed her. I walked into another world that evening,” Laura said quietly. “A world inside my head. Nowhere else and I knew it was nowhere else. But it was another world, nonetheless, and no less real for being in there instead of out here. I experienced it with immense clarity. As vividly, as vibrantly as I can see this room around us right now.”

She looked directly at James. “Does that sound crazy?”

James smiled gently. “No, not crazy. Many children are gifted with astonishing imaginations and can create some very detailed fantasies.”

“It was astonishing all right. But it proved to be much more than a child’s fantasy because it didn’t end there with my childhood. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about. Because there is a type of craziness about it and I do know that.” She studied her fingers a moment. “But I also need to tell you about it. Because that night on the path through Adler’s lot has influenced everything that’s ever happened to me since.”

This had not been what James had been expecting at all. Fascinated, he leaned forward towards her. “Fantasy tends to be a reflection of our lives, of needs that aren’t being fulfilled, of desires we have,” he said. “I’d be very interested to hear what your childhood was like at that point.”

Laura grew thoughtful for a moment. “Most people stereotype my childhood straightaway when they hear that I was a foster child,” she said at last. “They assume it must have been unsettled and full of traumatic events. The truth is, for the most part, it was actually quite a good childhood. I was happy.

“I only ever lived with one family. I had been with them since I was only a few weeks old, so it always did feel like my family. My foster parents had four sons of their own, all older than me, so I was the daughter they’d never had and I felt very cherished. Mecks was their name. I called them Ma and Pa and they always treated me as if I were their own child. I was well loved and knew it.”

“How did you come to be in foster care?” James asked.

“My mother developed an embolism and died only two days after I was born. I was a bit of an accident anyway, as my two brothers are eight and ten years older than I am. This was not an era when men were very domestic. My father felt he could cope with two school-aged boys but not with a tiny baby. So, I went to the Meckses very early on.”

Laura grew pensive. “In many ways it was an idyllic life for an imaginative child. I was essentially a last-born child, which meant I was spoilt a bit, given my way, left largely free of expectations. And it was an amazing environment to grow up in. The Meckses had this huge, old, turn-of-the-century house with a big staircase in the front hall and a banister you could slide down, just like kids do in the movies. Everybody in town called it ‘the lake house’ because it was built right at the very end of Kenally Street and so backed onto Spearfish Lake. We even had our own bit of shoreline. Thinking back on it now, I suspect the house wasn’t as grand as I remember it. In fact, it was probably downright shabby by adult standards, because there was a lot of peeling paint, stained wallpaper and squeaky floorboards by that point. But it was a kid’s paradise.

“Pa had converted part of the attic into a bedroom for me when I was five. It was gigantic – this huge, dark, draughty space that baked in summer and froze in winter, I couldn’t stand upright in three-quarters of it because of the slope of the roof – and I thought it was heaven on earth. I was one of those kids who was always making things, always had a ‘project’ going. And always collecting things. I was big into collecting. Rocks, leaves, horses – you know, those plastic Breyer horses that were so popular in those days – all sorts of things. Pa built me shelves under the eaves for everything and made a desk out of an old door.” She grinned charmingly at James. “It was wonderful.”

“And into all this came your imagination,” he said.

“Oh god, yes. That was my favourite thing of all – pretending. At seven I was in my horsy stage. I desperately wanted a real one, but there was, of course, just no way to have one. So I spent about two years pretending to be one myself. ‘Butterfly the Trick Pony’.” She smiled. “I used to wear this towel over my shoulders for a horse blanket.

“In the attic I’d also ‘built’ myself a horse by attaching a cardboard head and a yarn tail to the stepladder. I’d straddle the top of the ladder and pretend I was Dale Evans’s very best friend, and she and I would ride out to meet Roy on the range or we’d round up wild horses and shoot bad guys.

“In fact, that’s why Torgon stood out so much. While I wasn’t at all surprised that a strange lady had popped up in Adlers lot, what was remarkable was that she wasn’t a horse!” Laura laughed heartily.

“Torgon?”

“Yes, that’s what I called her. Right from the beginning, because I knew that was her name. I thought her arrival was very auspicious. It happened right at the point where I was always pretending to be Butterfly the Trick Pony. One of the horsy things I liked to do was eat raw porridge oats and Ma was convinced eating so much roughage would give me appendicitis. I overheard her tell Pa how much she was looking forward to my outgrowing my horsy stage. So I have this wonderful memory of sitting in the bath that night I’d first seen Torgon. I was sluicing water up and down my arms with a washcloth and thinking about what had happened, and I remember feeling such an incredible sense of pride in myself because I had seen Torgon and not simply another horse. I just knew it meant I was growing up!” She laughed so infectiously it was hard not to join in.

“What about your natural family?” James asked. “Did you have contact with them?”

“Oh yes. My dad was living here in Rapid City at the time. He drove up to see me every third Sunday like clockwork. My brothers Russell and Grant always came with him, so despite the fact I didn’t live with them, we were still all quite close.

“Dad would pick me up at the Meckses and we’d always go out on the highway to this diner called the Wayside and have their Sunday special, which was a roast beef dinner with apple pie for dessert. Then afterwards, if it was at all nice, we’d go for a drive through the Black Hills. If the weather was bad, we went bowling.” Laura grinned. “As a consequence, I’m a devilish good bowler, even today!

“I lived for those Sundays. My dad was very good at knowing how to make a kid feel special. He always arrived really enthusiastic to see me, always full of news he thought I’d like to hear, and without fail he brought a present. A good present, you know? Not just a couple of pencils or socks or something. Mostly it was a new Breyer horse statue for my collection. This meant so much to me. I absolutely coveted these horses. They cost quite a bit of money, so most kids didn’t have many of them, but because my dad gave me one almost every month, I had the biggest collection of anybody else in my class. I didn’t have a lot of status otherwise, but in this one way, I was best.

“Of course, what I wanted most was to actually live with my father and my brothers. Content as I was at the lake house with the Meckses, it was different from what other kids had, and different is awful when you’re little. I hated always having to explain why my last name wasn’t the same as theirs, how I came to live with them, why I didn’t live with my own family. So I dreamed relentlessly of the day when I’d be reunited with my birth family. Dad liked this game too, this idea that I was at the Meckses only temporarily. One of the happiest rituals of those Sunday visits revolved around his telling me how he was always just on the verge of taking me back to him, and then we’d plan how it was all going to be when he did. He was always telling me this was going to happen in about six months. Once he got a new job or bought a house with a yard, then he would come for me. Or his favourite reason: when he got a new mum for me. He loved talking about this. Every visit he would regale me with tantalizing stories about all the current prospects and whether I’d approve or disapprove. Then we’d make lots of exciting plans about what we and this new mum were going to do once we were all together again.

“I was incredibly gullible,” Laura said lightly. “I never doubted him. Not once. Month after month, year after year my dad would tell me these stories about what he was doing to get me back with him and I always believed him. I must have been at least nine before I even fully realized ‘in another six months’ was an actual measure of time and not just a synonym for ‘someday’.”

“Did you feel resentful when you did figure that out?” James asked.

“No, not at the time. He was so reliable in other ways, like the way he always came every third Sunday, always brought me a present, always took me out to do fun things. Even when I did realize that a lot of actual six-month periods had gone by, I still believed he was trying his hardest to reunite us.”

“And throughout this time did you have this imaginary companion? This Torgon character you were telling me about?” James asked.

Laura nodded. “Oh yes. Torgon and I were only just getting started.”

Chapter Seven

“Hi Becks!”

“Daddy! Hi ya! Guess what? When the phone rang, I said it was going to be you! I told Mum. She and Uncle Joey were going to take us ice skating tonight, but I told her I wanted to stay in because I thought you might phone. And you did! I got psychic powers, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, probably so, Becks,” James said and chuckled. He didn’t remind her he phoned most Friday evenings.

“Thanks for sending me that Ramona Quimby book, Daddy. I didn’t have that one. And it’s really good! I’m almost clear through it already and I only started it last night. I was so happy when I opened up your package and saw that’s what it was.”

“Well, thank you for your nice long newsy letter,” James said. “I got it on Monday. What a nice surprise in my mail box.”

“It was so long, it was practically like a Ramona Quimby book too, wasn’t it?” Becky replied gleefully. “My teacher says I’m probably going to be a writer when I grow up, because I’m so good with details.”

“Yes, you certainly are. I like your details. And I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying gymnastics so much.”

James’s words were interrupted by noises of a muffled struggle on the other end of the line. “Get off!” Becky was muttering. “I’m still talking!”

“Daddy! Daddy!” Mikey’s voice broke through.

“Hi, Mike, how’s it going?”

“Becky won’t let me have the phone and it’s my turn.”

More muffled struggling and the sound of Becky muttering, “Pushy little pig. You give it back to me afterwards.”

“Did you get the postcard I sent, Daddy?” Mikey asked. “It’s got a lighthouse on it.”

“Yes, I did. Thank you very much.”

“I did all the writing on it myself. I even wrote your address.”

“And a Superman job you did too,” James said. “It was very easy to read. The mailman got it right to my door with no trouble at all.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, Mike?”

“When can we come to your door again? I miss you. I want to see you.”

“Yes, I miss you too, Mikey. Big lots. And that’s one of the reasons I’m phoning. To make arrangements with Mum for you two to come out over Thanksgiving.”

“I don’t want to wait that long. I miss you now.”

“Yeah, I know. Me too,” James said. “Every night I say, ‘Goodnight, Mikey. Goodnight, Becky’ to that picture beside my bed.”

“Yeah, every night I say ‘Goodnight, Daddy’, to your picture,” Mikey replied. “But I wish it was really you.”

“So why don’t you put your mum on the phone so we can make some plans.”

“Okay, Daddy. Kiss you,” he smacked into the phone. “Love you forever.”

“Love you forever too, Mikey.”

A moment’s pause as Mikey dropped the phone noisily on the table. Then Sandy’s voice, deep for a woman’s voice but soft and darkly fluid, like molasses over gravel.

“Well, yes, I got your email,” she said. “And I want to know exactly what you’re playing at.”

“It should have been quite plain, Sandy. I’m not paying the kind of mortgage I’m shelling out on that place to have Joey living there and I know he is, because the kids have told me. Let Joey pay the damned mortgage.”

“The mortgage was part of the settlement, James.”

“Not if he’s living there.”

“The mortgage was part of the settlement,” she repeated in short, clipped words that emphasized their meaning. “Because our kids are living in this house. That’s still happening. So why are you even bothering with this shit?”

“Because I’m earning a South Dakota wage and paying for a West Side brownstone. Joey’s a fucking corporate lawyer. In Manhattan, for Christ’s sake. He can afford to pay his own way.”

“Well, if you think you can have the kids any time you want and then turn around and say you aren’t going to pay the mortgage …”

“This has nothing to do with when I get the kids. We agreed those dates in mediation, Sandy.”

“Yeah, well, we agreed the mortgage in mediation too.”

“Sandy.”

She slammed the phone down.

“You got to ignore her, Jim,” Lars said. “It’s like in playing football. If you want to complete a good pass, well, then you just got to think of nothing but that pass. You got to totally ignore the other team because they’re doing nothing but trying to put you off your concentration. Same with Sandy. She doesn’t want you to complete any passes, whether it’s getting the kids out here at Thanksgiving or telling the shifty lawyer guy to move the hell out of your house.”

“I know it,” James said in frustration and sank back into the chair. “It’s just when she starts in with that patronizing tone …”

“It’s interference, Jim. Nothing else. She’s just running interference. You got to take your mind off her and put it on the positive. On what you want to accomplish.”

“She so knows how to twist the knife,” James muttered. “She knows she can hurt me through the kids.”

“Jim, don’t let her get to you.”

“She makes me feel pathetic. That’s what I hate. She acts like in coming out here, I’ve run away when in fact, I’ve done just the opposite. I’ve faced up to myself, to where I went wrong. I made some bad choices and took some wrong turnings but when I realized that, I took action to create a better life. It just wasn’t the one she thought she was signing up for.”

Very slowly, Conor began to talk more. It was difficult to tell if it was meaningful speech or simply echolalia because it was made up largely of phrases James himself had used first, but it became increasingly clear that Conor wanted to interact.

One morning when he arrived, Conor said, “In here, you decide,” at the doorway of the playroom, almost as if it were a greeting.

“Good morning, Conor. Won’t you come in?” James replied.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

For a long moment Conor remained in the doorway. He pressed the cat against his face, over his eyes, then lowered it and pointed it around the room.

“In here, you decide,” he said again. “In here, you go around the room.” He began his usual counter-clockwise perambulation. Once, twice, three times he went around the room.

“Where’s the boy’s auroch?” he said suddenly. “In here, you decide.”

“Yes,” James said. “In this room you can decide for yourself if you want to play with the toy animals.”

“Where’s the boy’s auroch? You decide.”

“Would you like me to help you find the basket?” James asked.

“Find the basket with the animals,” Conor replied, although James couldn’t discern if it was a genuine response or simply an incomplete echo.

Rising from his chair, James crossed over to the shelves. “Here are the animals,” he said, and lifted the red wire basket out. “Shall I take it to the table for you?”

“In here, you decide.”

“That’s right. You decide if you want me to take it to the table.”

“Take it to the table.”

Conor followed. Lifting the cat up, he scanned the basket, then reached in and lifted an animal out. “Here is a dog,” he said and set it on the table. This seemed to please him. There was almost the hint of a smile on his lips. “Here is a duck.” He set that up too.

James watched him as he progressed through the basket of animals. While the boy’s actions were slow and obsessive, they were not quite the same as the rote repetitions of an autistic child. They were nuanced in a way that made James quite certain they had meaning, although he couldn’t even speculate at this point what it might be.

“Here is the boy’s auroch,” Conor said with emphasis. “The auroch will stand with the others.” He surveyed them. “There are many animals. How many? How many is many?” Then he started to count them. This was new. James hadn’t heard him count before. “Forty-six. Forty-six is many. Forty-six in all,” Conor said.

“You like seeing many animals,” James said. “I hear a pleased voice counting.”

“There is no cat.”

“No, there’s no cat among them.”

“Many animals. Forty-six animals. But no cat,” Conor said.

“No. All of those animals, but none of them is a cat,” James reflected back to indicate he was listening carefully.

“Now they will die,” Conor said matter-of-factly. “The dog will die.” He pushed the dog on its side. “The duck will die. The elephant will die.” One by one he went through the plastic animals, pushing them over on to their sides. There was no distress in his voice. The animals all died with the same equanimity as they had lined up.

“Died. Many animals have died,” Conor said. “No more in-and-out. No more steam.” He pulled his toy cat out from under his arm where it had been stashed. He scanned it over the fallen animals, pushing the cat’s nose up against each individually. “The cat knows.”

The cat knows? James thought. The cat knows what? Or perhaps he had been misunderstanding all this time. Perhaps it was “the cat nose”. Perhaps Conor believed the cat was capable of scenting something.

“Where’s the rug?” Conor said suddenly and looked at James.

James looked up blankly.

Conor turned his head and glanced around the room. Abruptly his face lit up and he crossed over behind James to get the box of tissues.

Coming back to the table, Conor pulled tissues out of the box and laid them one by one over the plastic animals. This took up most of the space on the table. And most of the tissues too.

When he was finished, Conor surveyed his work. “Where is the dog?” he asked. Then he lifted one tissue. “The dog is here. Where is the duck? The duck is here.” Repetitively he went through all the animals, asking where an animal was and then lifting the tissue to say that here it was. There was a repetitive, sing-song quality to his questions and answers. This reminded James of a baby’s game of peek-a-boo. However, there was also a stuck-record quality to it, as though once started he couldn’t stop himself.

“You are concerned that the dog won’t be there, that the dog might not be under the tissue, if you can’t see him,” James ventured to interpret. “You want to look again and again to make sure.”

For a brief moment, Conor looked up, looked directly at James, his eyes a cloudy, indistinct blue. He had registered James’s comment and by his reaction James guessed his interpretation must have been correct.

“You are worried about what you will find under the tissue, so you must look,” James reiterated.

“The dog is dead,” Conor replied.

“You think the dog is dead and so that’s why you’ve put a tissue over it.”

“A rug.”

“So you’ve put a rug over it.”

“The cat knows.”

“The cat knows the dog is dead?” James asked.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehhh-ehhh.”

“You are making your worried sound,” James said.

“The dog is dead,” Conor said very softly. “The duck is dead. The auroch is dead.” He looked down at the toy cat in his hands. “Someday the cat will die too.” And as he stood, a single tear fell, wending a wet path down over his cheek.

Chapter Eight

“So what exactly happened to you that night you first saw Torgon?” James asked, once Laura was settled for her next session. “When you experienced this intense imaginative episode?”

Laura sat in silence for a few minutes. “Well, as I followed Torgon towards the lilac hedge, I was in her world. One moment I was on the path through Adler’s vacant lot and the next moment I was on this high promontory of chalky white stone. The soil itself was white. Not crumbly like in the Badlands, but actual rock that was pushed up in great, distinct ribs to form the cliff, as if a giant had slammed together a handful of blackboard chalk. Below us was this massive broadleaved forest that stretched off in all directions. Sort of what I’d expect the Amazon Basin to look like, if you viewed it from high up. I remember the trees undulating restlessly in the breeze, almost like waves in an ocean. That’s how it got its name. From that point on, I always called it the Forest because of that view from the cliff.”

Laura paused pensively. “When I say ‘I went there’ or ‘I went with her’, that’s not quite right. It’s hard to describe what really happened, because I was aware ‘I’ myself wasn’t there. This was one thing that was different about the Forest from my other fantasies. In all of those, I was always at the centre of the action, imagining myself as the star, doing things with the characters I created. The Forest was completely different. It was more like seeing a movie.

“At first I couldn’t figure out what Torgon’s role was. It was immediately obvious that she was a leader of some kind. You could tell that straightaway from the way people treated her. I assumed at first that she was a queen, but came to realize that she was, in fact, a kind of holy person. Not a priestess exactly, but of that type. The word in the Forest people’s language for her role was benna.”

“So they had their own language?” James asked.

“Yes. Although the only time I was aware of it was with words like benna that didn’t have an equivalent in English. I’d ‘hear’ those words.”

James listened with fascination. He had always found children’s imaginary companions intriguing, partly because he’d had no similar companions himself so it was hard to conceptualize the experience. Becky, however, had gone through a phase at three when an invisible tiger named Ticky had accompanied her everywhere, so that had given him a valuable second-hand experience. He knew that imaginary companions, outlandish though they could seem, were a normal, healthy part of childhood and usually indicated a child of above-average intelligence. It was unusual that Laura’s imaginary world had come into being so late, as the more usual age for this sort of thing was between three and six, but it wasn’t unheard of, especially in highly creative children

James looked at Laura. As she talked about the Forest, she relaxed. The anxiety of the previous session had entirely gone and she sat back in an open, comfortable position. Her eye contact was excellent, her smile ready.

“Torgon didn’t live in the village where the others lived she said,” because she was considered divine by her people, an embodiment of their god, Dwr. So she lived in a walled compound in the forest, a sort of monastery. There was another high-status holy person living there as well. His name was Valdor, but he was always called the Seer because he had divine visions. This was actually his role, sort of like an oracle. He wore long, heavy white robes with gold embroidery on the edges and he was very old when I first saw him – in his mid-seventies, perhaps. There were some women also living in the compound. Like nuns. And children. Lots and lots of children of all ages. They came from the village, from wealthy families mostly, to get an education at the compound. They were called acolytes, even though they didn’t do anything very religious.

“That first night I went …” Laura gave a small quirky smile. “I was actually a bit disappointed to find out all this. Up until then my life had been all about comic books and TV shows. I was passionate about Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and I can remember thinking, why couldn’t it have been Dale Evans who popped up in Adler’s lot? But it took no time at all for me to fall in love with Torgon. She was this amazing person. Very charismatic. And intelligent. Really savvy, you know? In a streetwise sort of way. But she was also very emotional. Her moods could change with breathtaking suddenness and she was never the least bit inclined to rein them in. Yet she could still be so appealing, so charming, even in the midst of the most unreasonable behaviour. I loved that about her, that complicated wildness.”

“Who knew about Torgon? Did you tell anyone? Your father, for instance?”

“Kind of,” she replied and became thoughtful for a moment.

“I’m hearing something more in your voice,” James said. “Did your father not approve?”

“It’s not so much that he disapproved. Just that he didn’t get it, so there wasn’t much point in telling him. I spoke to him about it, but he didn’t ‘hear’ me, if you know what I mean.”

“Can you clarify that a bit?”

She considered James’s request, then nodded. “Like, for example, I remember once when I was eight. I was on my annual visit to his house here in Rapid City. I came every August to stay a week with him and my brothers. It was the highlight of my life in those days. Not Christmas, not my birthday, but that last week in August when my dad took his vacation and I got to come and stay with him.

“I slept on this rollaway bed that he put in the corner of his bedroom. For a long time, it had become my practice to go to the Forest during that period between getting in bed and falling asleep. I liked to do it then as it was a nice relaxing time and I didn’t get interrupted. At the Meckses no one ever even noticed because I was up in the attic, so I’d never paid much attention to whether I was talking out loud or not. But, of course, in Dad’s small apartment, he heard me and came in to see what I was doing. I remember him silhouetted in the doorway, asking, ‘Are you talking to one of us?’ I said no, that I was just playing.

“He came on into the room then and sat down on the edge of the bed and said, ‘You seem to be having an awfully good time in here by yourself. What are you playing?’

“Torgon had been coming to me for about a year by then and I was really into all the details of her life. For example, she was the elder of two daughters and had this sister four years younger who was named Mogri, and I knew all about the kinds of things they had done together growing up. I knew tons of other stuff too. The Forest society had an incredibly rigid hierarchy of castes and which caste you were born into counted for everything there. It determined who you were, what work you could do, which other members of society you could associate with. The highest caste was a religious ruling class that consisted of the Seer, the benna and their offspring. They were almost like a royal family, because they had absolute rule. The next highest caste was the elders, who made laws and arbitrated on civil matters. Then it was the warrior caste, and then the merchant caste and the traders, and so on and so forth. The very lowest caste was composed of the workers, the people who did manual labour. They weren’t even allowed to live in the same part of the village as those of the higher castes. They were actually walled off and kept out of the main village, except to do their work. Torgon and her family belonged to this lowest class. Her mother was a weaver, and her father built and repaired carts. Because she was low-born, it had come as a huge shock to everyone – including Torgon herself – when she was identified at nineteen as the next benna. So suddenly here she was, thrown from the lowest class to the highest. She was twenty-three at the point she had appeared to me in Adler’s vacant lot, and even then, she was still finding it hard to adjust in her work.”

“Goodness, that is all complex,” James said, thinking these were most extraordinary thoughts for an eight-year-old to be having. Trying to envisage Becky saying things like this to him, he could easily imagine how disconcerted he would feel as a once-a-month father to find out Becky spent most of her time playing pretend games about holy people and caste systems, and worrying over an imaginary twenty-three-year-old’s vocational problems.

“The thing is,” Laura replied, “I did know that. By the time I was eight, I had already realized other kids didn’t think about these kinds of things, or if they did, then not in this kind of detail. I didn’t know why I did. I didn’t know why it was in my head and no one else’s, but it was. When my dad asked me what I was doing that night, it was like he had come in partway through a movie. I was following the storyline and everything made sense to me, but how did I catch him up on that when he didn’t know all the stuff that went before?

“And I remember that sense of confusion. I lay there, studying his face in the gloom and not saying anything because I didn’t know what to say. I could tell by his expression he was hurt. He thought I was keeping things back from him on purpose, that I was probably sharing these stories with the Meckses because they were my everyday folks but not with him, because he wasn’t around enough. Which wasn’t true at all, because I didn’t share it with anyone, but I could tell he was thinking that. So I told him I was playing make-believe because I wasn’t sleepy yet, and was filling time until I was.

“My dad gave me this special smile he always saved for whenever he was going to do something he thought would really please me, and he said, ‘You know what? I’ve got a good idea. I think you deserve a later bedtime. From now on, you can stay up an extra half-hour each night. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To stay up later?’

“I said yes because I could tell he wanted me to be really happy about it, although the truth was, I didn’t want a later bedtime. I preferred going to bed when I did because I wanted to be with Torgon.

“He smiled warmly. ‘And one of these days, you’ll grow up, Laurie. When you’re little, pretending is lots of fun, but as you get older, you don’t need to pretend anymore because you have real things to think about and real things are always much nicer.’”

Laura leaned back in the chair. “I remember my father kissing me then and pulling up the covers. Tucking me in, and leaving. Torgon was gone for the moment and I was there alone, lying in the darkness.

“I’d always known, of course, that people outgrew their imaginary games. By eight most of my friends already had. I’d convinced myself, however, that I was going to be an exception to this and it would never happen to me. I’d hold on to Torgon and the Forest forever. That night, however, was the first time it dawned on me that I might be wrong. Maybe I wouldn’t be different, and someday Torgon would be gone.

“This huge, aching loneliness washed over me in that moment and I started to cry. I was thinking, if losing all this is growing up, then I don’t want to do it. But what if I had no choice? What if the time came when I could no longer see the Forest? What if my mind stopped being able to fill up with its sights and sounds and scents? What if I was no longer privy to the complexities of Torgon’s life? I remember thinking that I’d have too much mind for my head if Torgon wasn’t in it. She was different than my pretend games like Butterfly the Pony. Torgon was organic. She was not so much something I’d created as something I’d discovered. She was my other half, the part of me I needed in order to be whole. She was the union of me and not-me.”

Laura’s session stayed with James in a way that didn’t usually happen. Part of it was undoubtedly the strangeness of this imaginary companion. People motivated to come into therapy because of the breakdown of a marriage usually talked about relationships. James had already noticed that Laura wasn’t going to be drawn into conversations about Conor. He could accept that perhaps that relationship had broken down so far that there was going to have to be some new groundwork laid before Laura could be coaxed back into a bond with her son. However, as the breakdown in her relationship with Alan had been the reason she herself had given for agreeing to therapy, James had assumed that was where they’d start. That she’d chosen instead to talk about her relationship in childhood with an imaginary person was curious but also gripping.

Part of the session’s staying power was also the manner in which Laura spoke. While living in New York James had made the acquaintance of several writers, mainly because Sandy thought they made impressive guests at dinner parties. He had often been less than impressed. Most had seemed joyless and unpleasantly pretentious, forever fretting about the demands of their “gift” and, in equal measure, the world’s lack of appreciation thereof. Laura’s dissimilarity to those former dinner guests was starkly apparent straightaway. Here was such a natural storyteller that while James didn’t have trouble maintaining the appropriate professional objectivity with Laura herself, he was struggling to keep his distance from her story, to remember to stop the narrative occasionally to ask questions or analyse what was said instead of getting caught up in it.

Going over to the bookshelves in his office, James took down one of Laura’s novels. He looked at the cover, which was unusually plain. The top four-fifths was pale blue and the bottom fifth was off-white. Spare as the design was, James still got a sense of the South Dakota plains from it. Too much sky against a flat, pale earth. Laura’s name was in a large plain font across the top. The title, The Wind Dreamer, was written small in comparison and in a handwriting font at an angle that slashed downwards through the blue into the minimalist earth like a spent arrow.

Turning the book over, James looked at Laura’s photograph. She was smiling. Looking directly at the camera, she had a very appealing expression. Very open. James was struck by this openness because it had not yet been an expression he’d seen in real life. What crossed his mind was that perhaps it was here, in her books, that Laura truly was most herself.

Sitting down in his office chair, he opened it.

“Hey, you!” The door to James’s office pushed open and Lars popped his head in. “I’m off,” he said. He paused. “What are you reading?”

James lifted the book.

Lars raised an eyebrow in amusement. “Becoming a fan?”

“Nah. Just doing homework.”

“What’s she actually like?” Lars asked with curiosity.

“Interesting,” James replied. “Complex.”

“Well, yeah, I could guess that.” Lars paused. “My cousin knows her brother quite well. According to him, it was a very ordinary family. Clever. They all did extremely well at school. But no literary background, nothing especially creative. Her brother’s an insurance salesman. But that’s what he said too. ‘She’s complex’.”

James nodded.

“Extraordinary talent fascinates me. Especially when it comes out of nowhere,” Lars said. “I always wonder how it happens.”

“Yes.”

A pause.

Lars shrugged. “Listen, what I actually came in to say was: when you come over tonight, would you bring that fishing reel you bought? That one you said you couldn’t get set up right? I got the rest of my ice fishing gear out last night and if we can’t get that reel sorted, I found another one you can use.”

James grinned. “You’re determined to get me out there killing some innocent creature, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, well, more just still trying to get the city stink off you,” Lars said and laughed. “Anyway the game on TV starts at eight, so the rest of the guys will be coming in about a quarter to. If you want to come over with the reel a little earlier, I can have a look at it.”

“Okay, see you later,” James replied.

When Lars had gone, James took the book over to the conversation centre. Settling back on the couch, he put his feet up on the coffee table and started reading.

It was the story of a young Sioux named Billy, who was haunted by his native culture. Born into a family who had left the reservation for the amenities of the city, given a white man’s name at birth and a white man’s education, Billy was a model of “modern integration” when he assumed his post as a teacher in a community college. However, his heritage, increasingly symbolized in the storyline by the South Dakota Badlands, overarched his contemporary urban lifestyle. He began to hear the voices of “the others,” of the sky and the land and the spirits of his ancestors.

The book opened with Billy’s poignant efforts at fourteen to give himself a native name. Having no real connection to the spiritual tradition of his heritage, the only native naming ceremony he had witnessed was on an episode of “Star Trek”. Thus it was First Officer Chakotay who guided him as he “received” his name from the only natural thing he encountered in his city apartment at that moment – the wind.

What was clever in Laura’s writing – beyond the simple fact that she had a compelling narrative style that quickly drew the reader in and didn’t let go – was that she was capable of creating a very substantial reality from Billy’s thoughts. Initially James couldn’t tell if these “others” Billy experienced were literal and Billy was having a paranormal experience, or if they were metaphorical and Billy was simply personifying his conflicts of identity.

This uncertainty bothered James at first. Gripping as the style of writing was, he was irritated at not being able to tell if he was reading a realistic exploration of the human mind or just a fantasy. Indeed, it bothered him so much that he got up and did a quick search on the internet for reviews to see how others had resolved the issue.

The reviews made much of Billy’s Native American ancestry and the tendency in these shamanistic cultures to incorporate visions and visitations into their religious beliefs, often brought on by drug use, sleep deprivation or fasting. None of the reviews labelled the book as fantasy or “magical realism,” so James took this to mean the spirits were all in Billy’s head and reading the remainder of the book would make this clear.

James knew what the reviewers didn’t, however, and that was about Torgon. Laura’s vivid description of her childhood encounter loomed over Billy’s experiences of “hearing” the sky or “seeing” his ancestors flying before the thunderclouds on the plains. Had the novel been an acceptable way for Laura to explore her own experiences with Torgon?

Drawn back into the story, he read on.

When James next looked up, it was 9:45. He stared at the clock in astonishment. How had it reached that time? The long-planned evening of beer and football with Lars’s buddies would be almost over by now, to say nothing of how worried Lars would be that he hadn’t shown up and that he wasn’t at home or, indeed, reachable on his mobile phone, since he always left it turned off at work.

Had the phone in the front office rung at any point? He hadn’t heard it, if it had. Closing the book, James stared at its deceptively plain cover.

This scared him, this unexpected enthrallment. He found it deeply unsettling that Laura Deighton’s imagination had so successfully managed to overpower his real world.

Chapter Nine

“Close the door,” Conor said abruptly. He was just inside the playroom. Dulcie had already shut the door and gone.

“Today you want the door shut,” James said.

“Today you want the door shut,” Conor echoed. There was a pause. His eyes flicked over James’s face and moved on. “Shut the door,” he said.

James caught the slight grammatical change and it intrigued him. Conor wasn’t always echoing. He often manipulated sentences, changing their structure subtly. It was easy to mistakenly believe they were just echoes, because normally one paid conscious attention only to the meaning of conversation, not the grammar unless it jarred. Increasingly, however, James noticed that Conor was doing this.

Changing the grammatical construction indicated Conor understood the meaning of the words. But then why echo so much? Was it for safety reasons? The echoed phrase was safe because someone else had said it first. Conor knew he wasn’t risking anything by echoing. Following the echo up with a subtle re-phrasing made the sentence his own.

James decided to pursue this possibility. “That’s right,” he said. “Shut the door. You know how to use words, don’t you?”

“You know how to use words, don’t you?” Conor echoed.

“Sometimes it’s scary to say things that are different.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh,” Conor replied.

“Don’t worry. In here you decide. If you want to use your own words, you can. But if you prefer to use my words, that’s all right too. It’s your choice.”

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh.”

James opened his notebook to write.

“Shut the door,” Conor said tentatively.

There was a pause.

“Close the door,” Conor said.

“Shut the door. Close the door. Yes, that’s right,” James said. “Two different words can do the same job. You’re smart about words, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Conor replied and James suspected it wasn’t an echo.

“What’s so depressing to me,” Alan said at the start of his session, “is that I’ve already fucked up one marriage. I’ve been through all the shit of fighting with an ex, of losing kids, of not getting to see them grow up. Been there, done that. So I can’t see how, for the life of me, I’ve ended up here again. I so thought I had it right this time.”

“What about your life before Laura?” James asked.

“I come from a family of high flyers who’ve been out in Wyoming since early pioneer days. My great-granddad founded the first bank in Gillette. When he retired, his son – my granddad – became the bank president. Then when the time came, it passed to my dad, who was his son. So, of course, it was just assumed that I’d go into banking too.

“I did try. I went to college and got the necessary business degree. I found my trophy wife in Fran. We got married in June the year I graduated and she was pregnant with our first daughter by July. I was in the bank by August. I did everything I should. But I hated my life. The world of banking just seemed so hideously dull and dusty to me. I was crap at it because I just didn’t care.

“It was through the bank, though, that I got into dealing cattle. Started out by giving loans. That’s part of why I was so bad at it, because I kept lending money to these dirt poor ranchers who wanted to do something stupid like go buy some fancy continental bull like a Charolais that was completely inappropriate for Wyoming conditions. Pretty soon I was going out to see the cattle. Just checking out our investment in the beginning, but I liked going. I liked getting out of the bank. Before I knew it, I’d bought a few myself. And then I bought a small ranch to keep them on. That’s what did it. Up until that point I could keep up the pretence that I was really a banker. But I was good at cattle. I could do with cattle what my dad could do with numbers, and I loved it. That was a new feeling for me – doing something I loved – and I loved everything about it. The sounds, the smells, being outdoors. Being successful.

“When my father found out about the ranch, he went cold as the North Pole towards me. To him it was all about the legacy, about who was going to take over the bank after him, who was going to keep the McLachlan name on the office door and I was letting him down. I wasn’t living up to my obligations. I hadn’t even managed to produce a son, just three daughters.

“To Fran, the ranch was an insult. It was blue-collar work in her eyes. She kept saying ‘But I married a banker,’ as if by buying the ranch, I had reneged on some deal we had. She absolutely refused to move out to the country, which was, of course, all I wanted to do. And what I needed to do, if I was going to make a decent business of it.

“I stood my ground. I was almost thirty by then. Old enough to understand you can only go so far in fulfilling other people’s dreams, no matter how much you want to make them happy. But I lost a lot while learning that lesson. My relationship with my dad never did recover. And Fran and I only lasted about a year more. Then she met someone else and that was that. Which gutted me, because I had three gorgeous little girls and I hardly got to see them after that.

“So it was a lot different this time around. I went into this marriage with my eyes open and have really tried to avoid making the mistakes I made the first time out.”

“How did you meet Laura?” James asked.

Unexpectedly, Alan laughed. “I ran over her foot at the gas station!” And he laughed again, a deep, full-throated guffaw. “Really. I did. I’d stopped at this place out on the Pine Ridge reservation for gas. She was already there, but she’d driven up on the wrong side of the pump. So she was trying to pull the hose around to her gas tank. I was thinking, ‘Stupid woman driver’, because she’d blocked the way to the other pump. I tried to squeeze my truck by and I ran over her damned foot.”

James’s eyes widened.

“Broke it too,” he said cheerfully. “So it only seemed gentlemanly to ask her out to dinner.”

“It’s surprising she went after you did that!”

He laughed again. “Yeah, I thought so too. But she did. Whatever else you might say about her, she’s a good sport, is Laura.”

A small, wistful silence drifted in. “I can still remember our first date, that night I took her out to dinner. We went to this place called the Mill. She had the cast on her foot, so we couldn’t dance or anything. We just had a meal and talked, but it was really noisy in there, so I said, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ I was thinking of the Bear Butte Lounge over on the highway, because that’s a nice quiet spot, but when we got in the car, Laura says, ‘Let’s go out to the Badlands.’ That sounded a pretty strange idea to me, but I thought, ‘What the hell? Why not?’ It was a nice spring night. All starry. So, we went out past Wall and we parked at one of the overlooks and just sat in the car and talked.

“We talked and talked.” His smile grew inward. “And you want to know what happened? We actually talked all night long. About the Black Hills mostly. I remember telling her about the ranch and my cattle, and she started telling me all these stories about how the land where the ranch was had been sacred ground to the Sioux. She was working out on the reservation at the time, so she was really well-informed on all this Indian stuff. And Laura can be such a fantastic storyteller, if you get her going.”

He laughed. “I was bowled over. All I could think of was that here was somebody who thought about the land just like I did, who loved this country, you know, right into her soul. So we talked and talked and never did anything else. Never even kissed that night. Not once, which makes us sound like a couple of real squares, but it was so good to talk like that with someone.

“Anyway, next thing I knew, it was five thirty in the morning and we were still sitting at the overlook in Badlands, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what the hell am I going to say to Patsy?’ Patsy’s my middle daughter, and she was home from college for the Easter break and staying at the ranch with me. I just knew she was going to go back and tell my ex-wife I was staying out all night with women! I didn’t get home until after eight, because the Badlands are a good ninety minutes away from the ranch, and there’s Patsy in the kitchen when I came in. ‘Good date?’ she asks. And I said, ‘It’s all right, Pats, it’s not what it looks like.’ And she laughs. I could tell she didn’t believe a word I said. She says, ‘Don’t worry, Dad. I understand.’ But I knew she didn’t.

“I felt protective of Laura. I didn’t want Patsy to think Laura was the kind of woman you’d just take out and get it off with on the first date. So, I said, ‘Pats, if you’re going to tell your mother about all this, you might as well know I’m going to marry her. You can tell your mother that too.’” Alan laughed heartily. “So, that’s the point when I decided I was going to make Laura my wife, although it was almost two more years before I informed Laura of it!”

“It sounds as if your attraction was pretty instantaneous,” James said.

“It was. I just knew it was the right thing. Straight off.” Alan looked over at James. “So now I keep asking myself: how did it all go so wrong?”

Chapter Ten

Conor’s strange relationship with speech made James think of Laura, as he watched the boy moving around the room. Wind Dreamer’s eerie world still haunted James, hanging like cobwebs in the quiet corners of his mind to catch his thoughts at unexpected moments, pulling them back into the ghostly realm of the Badlands and the young man’s quest experiences. Interesting, James thought, how she could create something so powerful with words alone. Interesting, likewise, that Conor seemed to find words so dangerous that he confined himself to naming things, describing their obvious physical characteristics or repeating things that others had already said.

While doing his usual circumnavigation of the playroom, Conor had stopped at a large basket of Lego on the floor. He paused and pushed the cat’s nose into it. Reaching in, he then picked up a little Lego person. He studied it carefully. “Here is a man. With black hair and yellow shirt.” Putting the man into the same hand as the stuffed cat, he bent down and looked into the box again.

“Garden things!” he cried with unexpectedly delighted surprise. He lifted up some Lego flowers.

“You sound happy that you have found some flowers,” James said.

Conor bent back over the box. “And trees. Flowers and trees. Things for a garden.” He rooted energetically through the basket.

Astonished by Conor’s sudden animation, James leaned forward to watch.

“Many trees. See?” Conor said. He didn’t make eye contact but he was definitely interacting with James. As he took them from the basket, he set them up on the edge of the bookshelf.

“Yes, there are lots of trees in there and you are finding them.”

“There are trees on the moon,” Conor replied.

This was said with equanimity, slipped in quickly as if it were nothing more than another descriptor. “Three trees on the moon.”

As the toy trees ran out, Conor’s cheerfulness waned. He pawed through the Lego, just in case one had been missed but said nothing more.

Finally he straightened up and began arranging the ones he’d found in a very straight line along the bookshelf. He counted them, not aloud, but with his finger.

“What’s this?” he asked. It was the plastic road sheet, folded up on the shelf where he was lining up his trees.

“That’s the plastic sheet with roads drawn on it,” James said. “Remember? We’ve looked at it before. When it’s laying out on the floor, children often like to drive toy cars along the roads or make houses from Lego and create neighbourhoods.”

Clutching the cat to himself with one hand, Conor used the other to gingerly pull the sheet off the shelf and let it fall to the floor. It was heavy-gauge plastic, so it fell open easily, but it fell upside down. This seemed to mesmerize him. He bent and straightened the upside-down sheet out.

“The roads are on the other side,” James commented.

Conor rocked back on his heels and looked at it. “I think it’s the moon.”

James recalled Conor’s previous encounter with the plastic sheet and his odd echolalic comments regarding the moon landing. It had seemed a bizarre response. James could see no connection between the white sheet or, indeed, the plastic Lego trees and the moon.

Taking the Lego man from his other hand, Conor attempted to stand him up on the sheet. The plastic wasn’t quite flat, so the toy fell over. He tried again. Again it fell over. Frustrated, he shoved the little man under the sheet until it disappeared completely from view.

This pleased him. Conor pulled it out and then put it under again in a way that reminded James of his earlier fascination in covering up toy animals with tissues. However, as with so many other things Conor had done in the playroom, an intensity then began to overtake his actions and he repeated the behaviour several times obsessively.

Obsessive and compulsive behaviour is normally associated with anxiety and James noticed the way the boy’s muscles were beginning to stiffen with anxiety as he moved the figures. Conor brought a hand up and flapped his fingers frantically.

“Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh. Ehhh-ehhh-ehh-ehh-ehh,” he cried.

“I hear your worried noise. You feel frightened when you think of the moon,” James ventured.

The boy began to rock back and forth. Bringing his hand up, he waggled his fingers in front of his face.

“Conor?”

“The cat knows,” the boy murmured.

James watched him. Knows what? What does that damned cat know?

When clarifying his therapeutic philosophy, James had come up with his mantra “in here you decide”. In his experience, people only made substantial and lasting changes in their lives when they themselves actively decided to do it, but even more importantly, if they felt they were in control of doing it. So many of the difficult issues people had with life were about control.

This was the cornerstone of his approach with children, who were by default powerless, but he found it equally important to apply this principle to his adult clients. Consequently, he tried to say nothing to Laura or Alan that might make them feel he was pushing them in one direction or another.

When Laura came in for her next session, James decided not to mention that he had read The Wind Dreamer in case it made her feel on show as a writer.

“I’m curious about this imagination of yours,” he said instead. “From what you said the other day, it’s clear you spent a lot of time with Torgon and her world. How did this work out in relation to other children? Kids at school, for example. Did you have many friends when you were that age?”

“All this stuff going on in my head probably makes me sound like I must have been a lonely, friendless kid but it wasn’t really that way,” Laura said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I didn’t want that. I loved my own company. With my kind of imagination, I always had something fun and exciting to do.

“I did have one really good friend and I think this was because she loved pretending as much I did. Her name was Dena. I met her in first grade and we were absolute best friends from that moment.

“We were an odd couple in some ways. While I didn’t live in a conventional family setup, the Meckses were solidly middle class and everyone had solidly middle-class expectations of me. For instance, both my brothers were honours students all the way through school, so my dad expected to see straight A’s on my report card too. It was all so different for Dena. She was the middle child of seven and came from this brawling, beer-drinking cowboy family who were all packed into a dinky house on the alley behind Arnott Street. Every Friday night all her aunties and uncles and cousins would come in from the country and they’d spill out into the yard, playing cowboy music on their guitars and getting drunk. Dena was a dead loss at school. She could never understand math and was always in the lowest reading group, and yet she was perfectly happy. No one in her family ever cared what she got on her report card. Often as not she forged her mother’s name on it and they never even saw it. And they didn’t seem to notice.

“What Dena and I did have in common were our imaginations. When Torgon came, I told Dena about it straightaway. I knew she’d understand. And she did. She thought it was wonderful. Almost immediately we made up our own game based on Torgon. We played it in this enormous cottonwood tree on the alley beside Dena’s house. Shimmying up to great heights, we fought off hostile natives and tigers and bears and all the other fierce things we could think of, even though these things didn’t really seem to exist in Torgon’s world. Horses didn’t exist there either, but even so, in our game I gave Torgon the most beautiful grey horse to ride that was just the colour of her eyes.”

Laura smiled. “None of this was the real Torgon, of course. It was just our play version. Like pretending to be Dale Evans didn’t resemble the real Dale Evans’s life. It’s hard to express that – how the game we were playing was different to the real Torgon and her world, even though both of them were inside my head. But Dena always understood the distinction.”

James nodded. “She sounds like she was a very good friend.”

“Yes, she was. I lost touch with her when I moved away at twelve. I’ve always regretted that.”

The poignancy of other times, other roads not taken intruded. The small silence grew thoughtful as it lengthened.

“I suppose I did want more friends,” Laura said. “In a way. I mean, I don’t recall consciously wanting it, but then maybe it was just because I knew deep down it wouldn’t happen.”

Laura readjusted her position in the chair and sat back quietly for a moment. “I remember this one girl in particular. Her name was Pamela. She was one of those ‘perfect’ kids. You know the kind. They do everything right. Everyone loves them or at least longs to be like them.

“I fantasized quite a bit about being friends with Pamela. She was in the fast group in math like me, so I was sure if I showed her my science projects in the attic, she’d think they were cool. She read a lot, so I dreamed of us making plays together of stories we’d read. And I just knew she’d understand about Torgon, about the real Torgon, who was so much more than a game of make-believe in a cottonwood tree.

“My chance came in the spring of fourth grade. When I was out playing, I found a duck sitting on a clutch of eggs in the underbrush by the lake; so during Show-and-Tell, I told everyone in the classroom about how, if the duck sat on them long enough, the eggs would hatch and we’d have ducklings in 28 days’ time. I must have talked quite eloquently, because afterward the teacher allowed me to stay up in front of the class and answer questions from the other kids. I was Celebrity-for-a-Day because of it.

“At recess, Dena and I were playing hopscotch when Pamela strolled over. I remember her standing beside the hopscotch diagram and watching us, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets.

“‘You wanna play?’ Dena asked.

“‘No,’ she said in a bored sort of way. When it was Dena’s turn, Pamela beckoned me over beside her. ‘Come here. I want to ask you something.’

“I readily abandoned Dena.”

“‘Can I come over to your house after school tonight?’ Pamela asked. ‘I’ll ask my mum at lunchtime if I can come, but she’ll probably let me. I want to see the duck. So can I?’

“Of course I said yes. Indeed, I was delirious with joy. I shot out of the school at lunchtime and ran all the way home to tell Ma the news. Pamela, who had never so much as talked to me in the playground, wanted to come to my house to play! I could hardly eat a thing for lunch, because I had so much to get ready. I rushed up to my bedroom to straighten up my things and make my bed. Maybe Pamela would want to see my horse collection or my rocks or my pressed leaves. Maybe Pamela would like to see how I could turn blue water clear, like magic, with my foster brother’s old chemistry set. Maybe Pamela would feel like drawing. Just in case, I clambered up to reach the top shelf where I kept the box containing drawing paper. Then I asked Ma if she would bake some of her special peanut butter cookies that were shaped like cats’ faces.

“Pamela did come. She walked home with me. She came into my house, looked at my room and had a glass of milk and cookies at my table. She wouldn’t eat any of the peanut butter cats, because she said she didn’t like peanut butter cookies; so Ma opened a package of Oreos for her. Then Pamela said, ‘Can I see the duck now?’

“I took her down by the lake. We crawled on hands and knees into the willowy darkness and Pamela muttered about the awful smell of duck poo. The duck, sitting on her nest, hissed at us.

“‘I want to see the eggs,’ Pamela said. I fended off the duck and got one for her. Pamela examined it carefully. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked. I didn’t think to say no or even wonder what she wanted it for, since she didn’t have any way to hatch it. I just gave it to her. Then we crawled out of the underbrush again.

“Pamela put the egg into the pocket of her jacket. ‘Okay,’ she said casually, ‘see you at school tomorrow.’ She turned around and started walking off.

“‘Hey,’ I cried. ‘Wait a minute! Don’t you want to play?’

“She shook her head. ‘No, I got to be home by 4:15. I need to practise my piano. I promised my mother I wouldn’t be late.’

“‘But … but, we haven’t done anything yet,’ I said.

“‘I only came over to see your duck eggs, Laurie. Now I’ve seen them, so I got to go.’

“‘But don’t you want to do something together?’

“‘I said, I need to practise my piano.’

“‘Do you want to come another time? My horse collection usually looks nicer. I polish them with hand lotion and it makes them really shiny. Do you want to come see them after I’ve polished them? I’d let you play with Stormfire. He’s the one that’s white and bucking up on his back legs. He’s my best horse. When Dena and me play, I always save him for myself and she never gets to play with him, but I’d let you.’

“‘No.’

“‘Ma doesn’t always make peanut butter cookies. Lots of times she makes chocolate chip. Do you like them better?’

“Pamela said, ‘Laurie, didn’t you hear me? I only wanted to see your duck eggs. I’ve seen them, so now I want to go.’

“I stared at her blankly.”

“‘Why do you think I’d play with you?” she said ‘You’re crazy. Everybody at school knows you’re crazy.’

“‘That’s not true!’

“‘Yes, sir,’ Pamela replied. ‘You talk to yourself and that means you’re crazy. That’s why nobody wants to play with you.’

“‘I’m not crazy,’ I retorted indignantly. ‘And lots of people want to play with me.’

“‘Just Dena. And you know what her dad does? He works at the water treatment plant. He stands in people’s poo all day.’ She pinched her nose. ‘That’s why she plays with you, because she’s too stinky to play with anybody else.’

“‘She is not stinky,’ I said. ‘Besides, she’s not my only friend. I have lots of friends. Friends you don’t even know about. Friends who wouldn’t even like you.’

“‘Yeah, sure, Laurie, I bet. Like who, for instance?’ she asked.

“‘You don’t know them.’

“‘Yeah, because probably you just made them up.’

“‘No, sir, real friends.’

“‘Crazy people think everything’s real. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re crazy,’ Pamela said and gave me a haughty little smile. Then she turned, let herself out through our gate and walked on down the street.”

Laura paused. She leaned back into the softness of the sofa and sat for several moments in deep silence.

“The thing was, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “This is what people always kept accusing me of. That what I experienced wasn’t real, and therefore it had to be lies. Black and white to them. Real or unreal. Truth or lies. But it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t making it up. It wasn’t false. There was another world there. Like ours, but different. I could see it, but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t. I don’t know why. But that didn’t make it unreal.”

There was a long, reflective pause.

“I remember learning about bees when I was in fifth grade,” she said softly, “about how bees can see beyond the visible colour spectrum. Humans look at a white Sweet William flower, they see it as plain white. To us that’s true. But if a bee looks at the same flower, it sees intricately patterned petals. That’s because bees can see on the infrared spectrum beyond what human eyes can. The pattern is there for them, but it’s invisible to our eyes. And when I read that, I remember thinking, ‘That’s just like it is with the Forest.’ Simply because we can’t see the pattern on the flower, that doesn’t mean the bee is lying. Because I can see the Forest and other people can’t, that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”

Laura stopped speaking and looked at James. Again the silence, spinning out around them like thread.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to share this whole thing about Torgon with you in a way that shows the vibrancy of it all; how something can be real and unreal at the same time and so beautiful. Because if you can’t get a sense of that, then it does quickly reduce what I’m saying to nothing substantial …”

Her breath caught and James sensed a sudden upsurge in emotion. He didn’t speak. He let her rest in her feelings without pressure.

Finally, Laura leaned forward and lifted her handbag off the floor. “I did a lot of writing when I was younger. Recording Torgon’s world. That’s how I learned to write, trying to capture all that. So I was thinking … perhaps if I gave you some of the stories …” She lifted a small sheaf of typewritten pages from her bag. “I thought maybe this would give her world more immediacy for you than my third-person account of what was going on … it would make it easier to understand what I was saying …”

James reached his hand out. “Yes, that’s a good idea. I’d like that.”

“They aren’t all that well-written. I was a teenager when I did most of them.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

“They’re just stories. Events that happened in Torgon’s world. I’d see it and then I’d write about it as a way of understanding it better. That’s what I always used writing for. To make sense of things.”

Chapter Eleven

It wasn’t until that evening when James was home that he had time to look at the material Laura had given him. It was old. James recognized the uneven pressure of a manual typewriter in forming the words, and that the edges of the pages themselves were yellowing and gently foxed, as if turned many times.

Pouring a glass of wine, adding another log onto the fire against an unexpectedly stormy autumn evening, James sat down and began to read.

There was a knock at the door, but without waiting for an answer the acolyte pushed it open.

“It’s dark in here,” she said with sudden surprise. This was Loki. She was only eight and had just been sent to the compound to start her life as an acolyte. She hadn’t mastered the rules yet.

“Usually one waits outside the benna’s quarters until given the command to enter,” Torgon said and then added, “and when an acolyte does enter, the first act is obeisance.”

Loki flapped her hands in frustration. “Oh, I am sorry. I always do it wrong. What do you wish I should do now? Go out and come in again?”

“No, just remember it for next time.”

Loki glanced around inquiringly. “It is very dark in here, holy benna. Did you not notice? My mother says one shouldn’t work in darkness for it offends the eyes.”

“Aye, your mother’s right,” Torgon said and threw back the coverlet to rise.

Loki’s eyes went wide, “Holy benna! You have no trousers and no boots!”

“I returned during the heavy snow. My trousers became wet, so I’ve removed them to let them dry more easily.”

“I didn’t know you would have legs like everybody else,” Loki said, astonished. “Or feet. For feet are very ugly, don’t you think?”

Torgon laughed. “I am all over just as any other woman, Loki, ugly feet and all.”

The girl blushed. “Oh, I did not mean offence to your feet!”

“My feet are not offended. Nor am I, not by your words nor by my feet. Before Dwr chose me as his benna, I was a worker’s daughter and had much need of my feet for standing on, when toiling in the fields.”

“You were a worker’s daughter? Truly?”

“Aye. So this is why one must always tend one’s tasks with pride, for Dwr takes as much pleasure in good work as in good breeding.”

Loki nodded.

“Anyway,” Torgon said, “it is in my mind you must have come here on a task, Loki, for I did not bid you come.”

“I was sent to say the evening meal is ready.”

“Ah, well. Say to the Seer that I shall take no food tonight.”

“Why? Is something wrong with you?”

Torgon grinned. “You are very new among us, aren’t you”?

The girl ducked her head. “I’m sorry. Am I not supposed to ask you questions?”

“Well, perhaps not quite so many.”

Within moments of Loki’s departure, the Seer entered. “You are unwell? What overtakes you?”

“No real illness, Just a minor grumbling, but my stomach wants a rest from eating.”

The Seer came over and leaned down very close to Torgon to scrutinize her face. She looked back at him, studying his watery old man’s eyes, as it would be unseemly not to meet them. Clasping her head firmly between his hands, he probed her jawline with his fingers. “We shall burn the cleansing oils tonight,” he said. “I can feel evil building in your bones.”

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