Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened. Torey Hayden
so he called the police. It was Cassandra.
No one ever knew precisely what had happened to her during those twenty-six months. Cassandra was totally mute for the first weeks after her return. Her father, when found, was in a drug-addled stupor, and he seemed incapable of giving much information beyond indicating the motive behind the abduction had been revenge against his ex-wife. “I wanted to make her suffer for what she’d done” was his only real explanation.
Cassandra had been not quite six when she was abducted and was now approaching eight. She was very dirty and suffering from malnutrition, giving the impression she had spent at least part of the time living rough or in very poor conditions. No one knew whether this was in the company of her father or others, because her father gave a muddled, inconsistent picture and Cassandra said nothing. Even when she did begin to speak again, she usually refused to talk about the abduction. The few things she did say turned out to be mostly lies.
The longed-for homecoming proved to be nothing like Cassandra’s mother had dreamt about for so long. In place of the cheerful, loving daughter who had been abducted that autumn afternoon, she welcomed home a wary, mute stranger.
Cassandra found it impossible to settle back into her former life, which, in fact, was not her “old life” at all, but rather a completely different one from what she’d been living before the abduction. She hated her stepfather and wouldn’t tolerate him in the room. She refused to talk to him or even look at him. She fought constantly with Magdalena and did many small, nasty vengeful things to her. With her new sister, Mona, she was so spiteful and short-tempered that her mother didn’t dare leave the two of them alone together.
Cassandra startled easily, was prone to unexpected tantrums, suffered horrific nightmares, and alternated between shouting at everyone and not speaking at all. She lied constantly, stole from everyone in the family, and had chaotic eating problems, tending to hoard and hide food, or else taking too much, consuming it too fast, and vomiting it back up, occasionally while still at the table. She also had digestive problems and was plagued by many other minor illnesses associated with a compromised immune system.
In addition, it appeared Cassandra had not attended school at all during the time she was gone. Indications when she was in kindergarten were that Cassandra, like her elder sister, would be an able student. Old enough to be in second grade when she returned, she was now behind in everything and could neither read nor do basic adding and subtracting.
Cassandra’s mother and stepfather attempted to deal with the situation as appropriately as they could. Her parents decided to restart Cassandra’s education from the beginning, so she was placed in first grade, a year below where she should have been for her age. This still left plenty of catching up, as the academic year was well under way when she returned, so she was also given extensive resource help. To deal with the psychological trauma of the abduction, Cassandra had individual therapy with a child psychologist for twelve weeks, which was the length of time covered by the Navarros’ insurance.
And Cassandra did start to recover. She began to speak reliably again. First it was at home and then, more slowly, at school, although she could still be oddly unpredictable and sometimes went silent for hours and occasionally even days. She was making reasonable academic progress and generally keeping up with her class. At home she was still difficult and prone to tantrums, but the family felt this was improving, too.
Yet …
It was Cassandra’s third-grade teacher, Earlene Baker, who kept pressure on the Navarro family to seek further help for their daughter. Mrs. Baker found Cassandra’s behavior disconcerting and difficult to cope with in the classroom. She was most concerned about the amount of very manipulative behavior Cassandra engaged in, which mostly took the form of lying and “storytelling.” A number of the lies, she said, seemed completely pointless, such as coming to school in a pair of running shoes she wore almost every day and insisting they were new. Many others were malicious, such as on one occasion when Cassandra had purposely hidden her schoolwork and then told the school staff that another child had stolen it from her. The only thing that had saved the other child from serious trouble was a playground aide who had happened to notice Cassandra placing something carefully into a trash bin outside the school and had later gone to investigate. Most of the lies, however, were about hideous but outlandish things, like her little sister falling in the canal and being swept under the culvert but then being rescued by an unidentified boy who just happened to be passing.
Mrs. Baker said she was aware that in all likelihood Cassandra had suffered terribly during her abduction and she tried to take this into account, but even so, why would a nine-year-old spend recess cheerfully helping the school janitor sweep leaves and then come in and say he had tried to push her down the stairs?
Mrs. Baker also wondered if Cassandra could be suffering petit mal seizures. It was a bit of joke with everyone at school, even Cassandra, that she “should have been born blond” because she could be very “ditzy” – not paying attention to what was going on around her, not remembering obvious details about ordinary things. Mrs. Baker didn’t always find the behavior funny. She felt the forgetfulness, which could be very abrupt and out of the blue, was often manipulative in nature and just a further extension of the lying. Occasionally, however, she said Cassandra did genuinely seem not to remember things that had just happened, and this occurred often enough for it to interfere with learning and social interactions. This led Mrs. Baker to wonder if there could be a neurological underpinning for such behavior.
Cassandra’s erratic speech also bothered her. Most of the time, Mrs. Baker said, Cassandra was chatty to a point of being verbose; however, every once in a while she’d suddenly refuse to speak to anyone, and this could last anywhere up to a few days. Mrs. Baker saw no particular pattern to these silences, but they did occur at home as well. Cassandra’s mother was resigned to them, feeling they were another outshoot of the traumatic abduction and the best response was to give Cassandra peace and support and not call attention to them. Mrs. Baker couldn’t be this lackadaisical because not talking interfered with the learning process. Given the randomness of the behavior, Mrs. Baker’s mind again went back to the question of a neurological basis. When she spoke to me, she mentioned Cassandra’s father’s drug problems and wondered if Cassandra had been the victim of any drug-taking while she was with her father, or if there had been some kind of horrible abuse that might have caused brain damage, which was now throwing up these odd neurological signs.
The final concern was what Mrs. Baker called Cassandra’s “creepy” behaviors – actions that, while there was nothing inherently wrong with Cassandra’s doing them, made Mrs. Baker uneasy. Among these was a tendency for Cassandra to turn otherwise ordinary conversations into nonsense. She would be chatting normally and then unexpectedly get what Mrs. Baker described as her “Bad Seed” look. Suddenly her replies would become off-topic, occasionally provocative, and often make little sense. This was a very disconcerting behavior, Mrs. Baker said, because it “felt crazy.” And very off-putting. Other children quickly became disconcerted or irritated and avoided her.
Another creepy behavior was Cassandra’s tendency to pretend she was some kind of animal, like a vulture or a bear, and then only relate to people using shrieks or growls. Often she picked a violent animal and then used the animal’s normal aggression as an excuse for hitting, biting, spitting, or doing other hurtful things. Mrs. Baker said Cassandra often did this playfully, as if she were in control of the behavior and it was only a game; however, she could persist with the animal-like behavior for several hours, despite repeated requests to stop or even punishment.
Neurological investigations turned up no evidence of seizures. The doctors concluded Cassandra’s problems were psychological, most likely part of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the abduction, a diagnosis she already carried. She was given a prescription for antidepressant medication and sent home.
Mrs. Baker didn’t see a significant change in Cassandra on the antidepressant, so she persisted in her efforts to pressure the parents into getting more treatment for Cassandra. She claimed the various difficult behaviors were soon going to make it impossible to keep Cassandra in regular education. She kept insisting the parents continue searching for help. Consequently, Cassandra was eventually referred to one