Mistletoe and Miracles

How had she come to this place? She and Cody had always had so much fun together. He’d been her saving grace when things had gotten so bad with Matt. And now, now she didn’t even know him.

Laurel supposed that was what had finally driven her to seek out help from a field she would have never thought to tap. She’d never believed in psychiatry or its cousin, psychology. They were for neurotic people with too much time and money on their hands. But now she was rethinking everything, and she was desperate.

She felt estranged from her own son. Worse than that, she felt as if she were losing him, as if he were slipping away into some netherworld that only he occupied.

She looked down into his face. It was vacant, as if there were no one there. Laurel pressed her lips together, struggling against a wave of hopelessness.

These days, Cody didn’t even look at her when she talked to him. He didn’t disobey her, didn’t throw tantrums, didn’t show any emotion at all. It ripped her heart out that he behaved as if she weren’t even in the room. She supposed it could have been worse. He did go where she told him to go, ate what she set in front of him and went to bed when she told him. But she missed him terribly. It was like having a windup toy, a clone of her son. He looked like Cody in every way except that there was no personality, no sign of the laughing, bright-eyed, intelligent boy he’d been a year ago.

More than anything else in the world, she wanted him back.

Laurel went to the door and picked up her purse, sliding it onto her shoulder. For the thousandth time, she cursed her cowardliness for not standing her ground that day. The last day of Matt’s life. She didn’t believe in omens, but she’d had an eerie feeling all morning, a feeling that something would go wrong. Some unnamed instinct had told her to keep Cody close, to either keep him home or go with him. She’d chalked it up to her general uneasiness at the time. Matt had dropped his bomb on her only the night before.

Divorce was an ugly word and it had sent tremors through her world.

When she’d tried to tell Matt about her premonition, for lack of a better word, he’d called her manipulative and vetoed both of her ideas. Cody wasn’t staying home with her and she wasn’t going with them. He was breaking Cody in on the life of a time-shared child.

Nerves had danced through her like lightning bolts during an electrical storm as she’d watched them drive away.

Watched Matt drive away for the last time.

“He’s very nice,” she repeated to Cody.

Tears came to her eyes. They seemed to come so easily these days. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t allow Cody to see her cry, but since he hardly ever looked at her, it seemed like a needless vow.

“Oh, Cody, come out, please come out,” she pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Anything.”

Her entreaty didn’t seem to penetrate the invisible wall that surrounded the boy.

With a sigh, she pulled herself together. “It’s time to go, Cody.”

As if she’d turned on a switch, the boy walked toward the door. She opened it and he walked outside in measured steps.

“Maybe Trent will have better luck,” she murmured under her breath, silently adding, Please, God, let him have better luck. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

“Trent, this is my son, Cody.”

Framed in the doorway of his office the way she had been yesterday, Laurel stood behind the boy. She rested her hands lightly on her son’s shoulders, as if she were afraid that withdrawing them would make Cody disappear.

Trent immediately rose to his feet. He’d been in the office a full forty-five minutes before this first appointment of his day, preparing. Preparing what, he wasn’t certain.

He’d never felt anxious about meeting a new patient before. Oh, there’d always been that minor shot of adrenaline to begin with, but that was to be expected. He’d never been anxious before. First sessions were about ground rules, about getting to know the face that was turned to the world. Even children had their secrets and it was his job to unlock them so that his small, troubled patients could go on to have happy, well-adjusted lives.

But how did you prepare for a child who wouldn’t talk? Who perhaps couldn’t talk despite not having anything physically wrong with him. He knew firsthand that the bars a mind could impose were stronger than any steel found in a prison cell.

As he watched Cody now, it startled him how much the boy resembled Laurel. Neatly dressed, Cody’s silken blond hair was a bit longer than stylish. A testimony to the free spirit that Laurel had so desperately strived to be, Trent recalled. If Cody’s hair had been longer, he would have been the spitting image of Laurel at eight.

The Laurel, he thought, who had captured his heart the first moment he’d seen her. Was eight too young to fall in love? He would have said an emphatic yes if he hadn’t been there himself.

Approaching the boy, Trent held out his hand. “Hello, Cody, my name’s Trent,” he said in his warmest voice.

Trent didn’t believe in standing on formalities or drawing a sharp line in the sand to separate children from adults. Every adult had a child within him and every child harbored the makings of the adult he was to be. Trent focused on uniting them rather than keeping them apart.

Cody stared past his shoulder as if he hadn’t spoken. As if there were no one else in the room but him.

Trent dropped his hand to his side. It was at that moment that he stopped thinking about himself and about Laurel. All that mattered was the boy in the prison of his own making.

Chapter Three

It was time to get started. Trent shifted his eyes toward Laurel, who was about to sit down on the sofa.

“Laurel, would you mind taking a seat outside in the reception area?” Laurel stopped and eyed him quizzically. “Rita looks formidable, but we have it on good authority that she doesn’t bite. At least, we’ve never seen her do it,” he deadpanned.

He tried to use humor to ease her out of the room, but it didn’t work. The concern on her face intensified.

She glanced toward Cody uncertainly. The boy remained oblivious.

“I can’t stay?” It wasn’t a question as much as a request.

Unless he specifically called for a group family session, he found that parents, however unwittingly, tended to interfere with their child’s progress far more than they helped.

“It’s usually better if patients don’t feel someone is looking over their shoulder during a session.” Trent lowered his voice. “They tend to open up more.”

Distress entered her eyes. “But I’m his mother. I only want to help him.” Realizing that her voice was close to cracking, Laurel stopped for a second to collect herself. Even so, there was a plea in her voice as she said to Trent, “I want to understand what’s wrong.”

He sympathized with her, he really did. But it was far too early to bend the rules. He needed to see what he was up against and how deeply entrenched Cody was in this silent world. For all he knew, the boy might be reacting to his mother. He needed time alone with the boy to assess a few things for himself.

Very gently, Trent took her arm and steered her toward the door.

The brief, almost sterile contact awoke distant memories of other times, happier times. Times when he had believed that the world was at their feet. Before he’d learned differently.

But that was then and this was now, Trent reminded himself. And she had sought him out in a professional capacity. As a licensed clinical psychologist, he had both an oath and a duty to live up to and they both revolved around doing the best for his patient. In this case, her son.

“So do I,” he told Laurel quietly. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Cody. Usually, when an adult’s voice dropped, a child did his or her best to listen more closely. Cody didn’t appear to have even noticed that anyone was speaking. “And so does Cody.” He saw hope flicker in her eyes. “Progress in cases like this is very slow and I need to do everything possible to make Cody feel more comfortable.”

Whatever that might be, he added silently.

“He’s not comfortable with me?” It was one thing to feel it, another to hear it said out loud. She felt as if her heart were being squeezed in half.

“He’s not comfortable with himself,” Trent told her.

The revelation took her aback. She searched for something to cling to, however small.

“You’ve had cases like this?” she asked, recalling what he’d just said.

If Trent had had cases like this, then maybe he really could cure Cody. A shaft of hope shot through her. She knew she’d been right in coming to him, even though she’d been hesitant at first, afraid of the ghosts that might crop up between them. The ghosts of things that hadn’t been and the things that had. She felt far too vulnerable to cross that terrain again.

And far too guilty.