Mistletoe and Miracles

“Not personally, no,” Trent admitted. He hadn’t been practicing long enough to have encountered a wide sampling of the afflictions that affected a child’s behavior. He saw Laurel’s face fall. “But I read a lot,” he said, offering her an encouraging smile.

His hand still on her arm, he opened the door and looked out into the reception area. Rita’s small brown eyes darted in their direction the second the door was opened. It was, he thought, as if her eyes were magnetically predisposed toward movement, no matter how quietly executed.

Gently, he ushered Laurel out of the room. “Rita, would you please get Mrs. Greer some coffee?”

Laurel shook her head, declining. “No, I’m not thirsty.” At the moment, with her stomach knotting, coffee would only make her nauseous.

“Good,” Rita pronounced. Her tiny, marblelike eyes slid up and down like the needle on a scale. With a minute jerk of her head, she indicated the leather chair against the wall. “You can take a seat over there.” It was more a royal command than a suggestion.

Laurel nodded, then looked at Trent. A shaky breath preceded her words. “If you need me—”

He gave her his most reassuring look, even as he tried not to recognize that her mere presence slowly unraveled something within him, something that had been neatly stowed almost seven years ago. He’d thought it would never see the light of day again.

Wrong.

“I know where to find you,” he responded, his mouth curved in a kind smile.

Walking back into his office, he noted that Cody still stood stiffly. Trent closed the door and focused on his challenge.

“You can sit down if you like, Cody,” he said in an easy, affable tone. “The sofa’s pretty comfortable if you’d like to try that out.”

Rather than sit down on the sofa, Cody sank down on the floor right in front of it, his back against the leather, his legs crossed before him as if he were assuming a basic yoga position.

Or preparing to play a video game seated in front of a television set, Trent realized. He made a mental note to explore a few video games that he might substitute later for the ones that dominated Cody’s attention.

If he continued with the case.

“Floor’s not bad, either,” Trent allowed, never skipping a beat as the boy sank down. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

He’d found that keeping a desk between himself and his small patients only served to delineate territory, making him out to be an unapproachable father figure. He liked being close to his patients physically to help breach the mental chasm that could exist—as it obviously did in this case.

Cody made no indication that he had heard the question. His expression remained immobile as he stared off into space.

The boy’s line of vision seemed to be the middle shelves of his bookcase, the ones that contained children’s books he sometimes found useful, but Trent decided not to comment on that at this time.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Trent said, lowering himself down beside the boy, careful to leave Cody enough personal space to not feel threatened. He looked around and smiled. “Looks like a pretty big office from down here,” he commented amiably, then glanced down where he was sitting. “Also looks like the rug might stand to have a cleaning.”

Neither comment, meant to begin to create a sense of camaraderie, drew any reaction from Cody. It was as if his voice, his presence, were as invisible to him as the air.

“You know,” Trent continued in the same tone, “your mom’s pretty worried about you.” He noticed just the slightest tensing of Cody’s shoulders when he mentioned Laurel. It heartened him that there might be a crack, however minute, in the six-year-old’s armor plating.

Trent turned his attention to the elephant in the room, watching Cody intently beneath hooded lids. “She told me that you lost your father a year ago.”

Still not acknowledging Trent’s presence, Cody abruptly rose to his feet and walked over to the large window. Tilting his head down ever so slightly, he appeared to look down at the parking lot four stories below.

For the moment, Trent remained where he was, talking to the boy’s back. “It must have been hard, losing him at such a young age. You know, I lost my mom when I was five. Leaves a big hole in your heart, something like that,” he continued conversationally. “It also makes you afraid. Afraid that everyone’s going to leave you, even though they say they won’t.”

Knowing Laurel, he was certain she had tried to do everything she could to reassure her son that he was loved and that she would always be there for him. She’d mentioned her mother, so there was more family than just Laurel. Her late husband could have come from a large, close-knit family and there might be a lot of people in Cody’s world, but that didn’t change the fact that he might still feel alone, still feel isolated. Fear didn’t take things like logic into account.

Trent considered the most likely causes behind Cody’s silence. It could be as simple as what had plagued him all those years ago when he’d lost his mother, except that Cody had taken it to the nth degree, locking down rather than dealing with the fear on a daily, lucid basis.

Not that he had, either, at first.

“And sometimes,” Trent went on as if this were a twoway conversation instead of only the sound of his own voice echoing within the room, “you wind up being afraid of being afraid. You know, the big wave of fear is gone and you think maybe everything’ll be okay, but you’re afraid that maybe those feelings will come back. I know that’s how I felt for a really long time.”

Trent shifted on the floor, trying to get comfortable. He envied the flexibility of the very young.

“The funny thing was, my brothers felt the exact same way I did. Except that I didn’t know because we didn’t talk about it. I thought there was something wrong with me because I felt like that.”

Trent crossed his fingers and hoped that the boy was listening.

“That’s the real scary part, not realizing that there are other people who feel just the way you do. That you’re not alone,” he emphasized, and then he sighed. “I guess if I’d talked about my feelings to my brothers, I would have found that out and I wouldn’t have been so unhappy. It took my stepmom to make me realize that I wasn’t alone and that what I was feeling—lost, scared—was okay.” He ventured out a little further. “I felt angry, too.”

As he spoke, Trent continued to watch Cody’s back for some infinitesimal indication that he’d heard him, some change in posture to signify that his words had struck a chord with the boy. That he was getting through, however distantly, to Cody.

When he mentioned anger as another reaction he’d experienced, Trent noted that Cody’s shoulders stiffened just the tiniest bit.

Anger. Of course.

Why hadn’t he assumed that to begin with? he upbraided himself. Laurel said that Cody engaged in video games that exclusively involved cars. If he focused on crashing them, that was an act of hostility.

Trent wondered how much anger smoldered beneath Cody’s subdued surface. A measure of anger was a healthy response. Too much indicated a problem up ahead.

Something they needed to prepare for.

He continued talking in an easy, conversational cadence, trying to ever so lightly touch the nerve, to elicit more of a response, however veiled it might be. These things couldn’t be pushed, but children were resilient. The sooner they could peel away the layers, the better Cody’s chances were of going back to lead a normal life, free of whatever angst held him prisoner.

“I was angry at my mother for being gone, angry at the plane for crashing. Angry at my father for letting her go by herself, although there wasn’t anything he could have done if he’d gone with her. He certainly couldn’t have stopped the plane crash, even though I thought of him as kind of a superhero. I probably would have wound up being an orphan,” he confessed. “But that’s the problem with hurting, Cody. You don’t always think logically. You just want the hurt to stop.

“You just want your dad to come back even though you know he can’t.” He’d deliberately switched the focus from himself to the boy, watching to see if it had any effect.

He stopped talking and held his breath as silence slipped in.

Surprised by the silence, or perhaps by the fact that the hot feelings inside of him had a name, Cody turned from the window and actually looked at Trent for a moment before dropping his gaze to the floor again.

Yes! Score one for the home team, Trent thought, elated.

Given Cody’s demeanor, he’d estimated that it might take at least several sessions before the boy had this kind of reaction. In this branch of treatment, at times it was two steps forward, one step back, but for the moment, Trent savored what he had.

The boy was reachable, that was all that counted. It was just going to take a huge amount of patience.

Laurel glanced uneasily toward the closed door.

What were they doing in there? Had Trent managed to crack the wall around Cody? Even a little? Had her son said a word, made a sound? Something? Anything at all. Oh God, she hoped so.

The waiting was killing her.

Cody had been talking since he was ten months old. Sentences had begun coming not all that long after that. His pediatrician had told her that Cody was “gifted.” Matt had called him a little chatterbox. Cody could fill the hours with nonstop talk. So much so there had been times she longed for silence just to be able to hear herself think.