Chapter Three

      Cassandra and I sat together at the table, examining the drawing she had done of her family.

      “That’s really quite an elaborate picture. Can you tell me more about it?”

      “There I am. Up in the sky,” she said. “I look down on everyone. I can see everyone. I can see everything from the sky.”

      “That sounds interesting, being able to see everything.”

      She nodded. “I like being an alien.”

      “If I were an alien, I think I would feel lonely,” I said, “because I’d feel I was different from everyone else. I’d feel like an outsider.”

      “No, not me. I like it,” she replied. “Because I can travel in a rocket ship.”

      Cassandra was a rather wriggly little girl, squirming around in her seat, bending her head down and around in a way that allowed her to look up at me while I regarded the picture. There was something coy about her behavior. This made me wonder if she had chosen to draw herself as an alien because she genuinely felt like an alien or if she had chosen to do it as a way of engaging me, as a sort of savvy assessment of what she’d thought a therapist would be interested in.

      “And here we have your family,” I said. “Yes? Your mother, your stepfather, your two sisters – ”

      “And the fish. The fish, too,” she interrupted and pointed to them.

      “Ah, I thought they were leftover from when you were experimenting with shapes …”

      “No, they’re living in the sky like it was an aquarium. Goldfish. Really, they’re a family, too. That big one’s the dad. And that’s the mom goldfish. And those are the babies. They belong to my other family.”

      “I see.”

      “Those are my other family there. Remember, because I told you already. They’re outside the aquarium, looking in. That’s why they’re small.” She pointed to the snakes. “Really they’re not snakes. They got snake costumes on.”

      “They’re not snakes?”

      Cassandra laughed at this. “Silly! They’re people!” She laughed again. “That’s Daddy Snake and Mama Snake and the kid Snakes. And there’s the Minister Snake. And that’s Cowboy Snake. And that’s Fairy Snake.”

      “I thought you just said they were people,” I replied, a little confused.

      “They are,” she said cheerfully. “‘Snake’ is their last name. That’s because they dress up in snake costumes all the time, so that’s why people started calling them that. And really I’m Cassandra Snake when I live with them.”

      “Why do they dress up in snake costumes?”

      “Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!” she replied in an unexpectedly loud, singsong voice.

      I sat back.

      She laughed shrilly.

      I sat quietly without speaking.

      “Ding-dong, willy-nilly, Peter Pan!”

      She laughed again, writhed in her seat, and fluttered her hands. Then taking up a black marking pen, she drew strong black lines across the picture in a random, rather frenzied manner. The lines didn’t color over anything or appear to be there to cover up anything. The way she did them, they appeared to be just marks, slashes across the page, as if her inner environment had become too much to control and these marks simply exploded forth like lightning strikes.

      Saying nothing, I just sat, waiting.

      This outburst lasted about three minutes. Then slowly Cassandra came back into herself and grew quieter. She was still laughing in a rather peculiar way. It was almost what I’d describe as a lascivious, sleazy kind of laugh. Certainly it implied sexuality to me, which, I suppose, given the “snakes” and the outburst regarding “ding-dong,” “willy,” and “Peter,” was perfectly possible.

      Still I said absolutely nothing. I kept my expression as bland as possible so that she would not interpret my silence as disapproving, but I continued to sit motionless.

      At last Cassandra fell completely quiet. The interesting thing about this episode, to my mind, was that not once did she take her eyes off me during the whole course of it. Her eye contact was quite extraordinary, but it also implied to me that my reaction was very important to this whole little drama. I sensed she was doing it for me, that she was expecting me to behave in a certain manner as well and she had to keep a close watch in order to see what I was going to do or, possibly, to adjust her own behavior as necessary.

      When she was finally reduced to sitting quietly again in the chair beside me, her great dark eyes still fixed on my face, I said, “You know, I think you did that as a way of getting away from what we were talking about. Sometimes magicians do that trick. They say, ‘Look over here,’ because they want your attention over here so that you aren’t paying attention to over there and they can hide something away without your noticing.”

      There was a long, long silence. She pressed her hands together prayer fashion and pushed them down between her legs on the chair. Straightening her elbows, this pushed her shoulders up, like a frozen shrug. Her eyes were still locked on mine.

      There was a flicker. She looked away for just a very brief moment, then back at me. “Can I go now?” she asked. “I’m tired. I’m done with this. I want to go back to the dayroom.”

      The children’s psychiatric unit was on the seventh floor of the hospital. When one first came off the elevator and turned left, there was a long corridor that contained administrative offices, many of which were not affiliated with our unit. At the far end were the two sets of double locked doors through which one entered the unit itself. Immediately beyond the doors to the left was the nurses’ station, and to the right, the dayroom where the children gathered to relax and play when they weren’t in the unit classroom, attending therapy sessions, or participating in activities. The sleeping rooms were down two short corridors that branched off the opposite side of the dayroom from the nurses’ station. Most accommodated two children each, although there were four single rooms. All locked. In all, the unit could accommodate twenty-eight children between the ages of three and eleven.

      Beyond the dayroom, to the left of the nurses’ station, was a third short corridor, and it was here where the two therapy rooms were, plus a miscellany of utilitarian rooms – an examination room, a med room, a walk-in linen room, and an odd little room that was about twenty feet long but only about six feet wide. Various kinds of technical equipment, like video cameras, recorders, and monitors, were stored just inside the door, whereas at the far end, there was a teeny, tiny kitchen, narrow as a boat’s galley.

      It was down among these rooms that I had my office, which I shared with Helen, a clinical social worker, whose main task was liaising with children after they had left. Consequently, she spent only a small amount of time each week actually on the unit, and I normally had the office to myself.

      The room was a curious mixture of the industrial and the macabre. A set of cast-iron pipes went through the room. This would have been ordinary enough, had they been in the corner of the