He relaxed conspicuously. “Explain why. Yes, yes, I can see your point. There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody knows why. The bastard never let on and nobody knows. Now if you’ll excuse me, Doctor, I really must be going.”

On Monday, Melissa was in a great mood, cooperative and polite, no more testing of limits, no remnants of the last session’s power struggle. But reserved, less eager to talk. Asking if she could draw instead.

The typical new patient.

As if all that had happened till now had been some kind of probation and this was the real beginning.

She started with the same kind of benign productions she’d presented to me during our first session, then progressed quickly to deeper pigments, sunless skies, patches of gray, foreboding images.

She sketched sad-looking animals, anemic gardens, forlorn children in static poses, flitting from subject to subject. But by the second half of the session she found a theme that she stayed with: a series of houses without doors or windows. Bulky, drunkenly listing, visceroid structures fashioned of painstakingly rendered stone and set amidst groves of skeletal trees under a gloomy, crosshatched sky.

Several sheets later she added gray shapes approaching the houses. Gray that turned to black, and became human. Men-shapes wearing hats and long coats and bearing lumpy sacks.

Drawing with such fury that she ripped the paper. Starting over.

Pencils and crayons diminished to nubs, consumed like kindling. Every finished product was shredded with glee. She worked that way for three weeks straight. Leaving the office without comment, at session’s end, marching like a little soldier.

By the fourth week she began to round out the last ten or fifteen minutes with silent stretches of game playing: Chutes and Ladders, Crazy Eights, Go Fish. No conversation. Competing with great determination and little apparent pleasure.

Sometimes Dutchy brought her to the office, but increasingly it was Hernandez, who still regarded me with a jaundiced eye. Then other chaperons began to appear: a series of dark, lean youths- young men who smelled of work-sweat and looked so alike that, in my mind, they became interchangeable. I learned from Melissa they were Hernandez’s five sons.

Alternating with them was a big, doughy woman about Dutchy’s age with tightly braided hair and cheeks like wind-bellows. The owner of the deep Gallic voice. Madeleine, the cook/maid. Invariably, she arrived sweating and looking fatigued.

All of them slipped away the moment Melissa stepped over the threshold, returning to pick her up precisely at session’s end. Their punctuality- and avoidance of eye contact- smacked of Dutchy’s tutelage. Dutchy, the few times he showed up, was the most adroit at escape, not even stepping into the waiting room. No follow-up on my request to collect data. I should have been resentful.

But as time went on, it bothered me less and less.

Because Melissa seemed to be getting better. Without him. Without any of them. Ten weeks since therapy had started and she was a different child, unburdened, conspicuously calm, no more kneading, no more pacing. Allowing herself to smile. Loosening up as she played. Laughing at my repertoire of grade-school jokes. Acting like a kid. And though she continued to resist talking about her fears- about anything substantive- her drawings had become less frantic, the sack-men were vanishing. Windows and doors sprouted like buds on the stone faces of houses that now stood plumb-straight.

Drawings that she preserved and presented to me with pride.

Progress? Or just a seven-year-old putting on a happy face for her therapist’s sake?

Knowing what she was like outside the office would have helped my assessment. But those who could tell me shunned me as if I were a virus.

Even Eileen Wagner was out of the picture. I’d phoned her office several times and gotten her answering service, despite being careful to call during business hours. Slow practice, I supposed. She was probably moonlighting to make ends meet.

I called the Medical Staff Office at Western Pediatrics to find out if she had another job. They had nothing else listed. I phoned her office again, left messages that went unanswered.

Strange, considering the dedication she’d shown in arranging the referral, but everything related to this case smacked of strange, and I’d gotten used to it.

Remembering what Eileen had told me about Melissa’s fulminating school phobia, I asked Melissa the name of her school, looked up the number, and called it. Presenting myself as her doctor and not clarifying when the clerk assumed pediatrician, I asked to speak with Melissa’s teacher- a Mrs. Vera Adler, who confirmed that Melissa had missed a good deal of school early in the semester but since then her attendance had been perfect and her “social life” seemed better.

“Was she having social problems, Mrs. Adler?”

“I wouldn’t say that, no. I mean, she was never a problem of any sort, Doctor. But she wasn’t the most outgoing child- kind of shy. Off in her own world. Now she mixes more. Was she ill before, Doctor?”

“Just the usual stuff,” I said. “Just following up.”

“Well, she’s doing fine. We were starting to worry, she was absent so much, but she’s fine now. A very nice, extremely bright little girl- she tests out on the Iowa at the ninety-ninth percentile. We’re so glad she’s gotten adjusted…”

I thanked her and hung up, heartened. Said to hell with the grown-ups and continued to do my job.

By the fourth month of treatment, Melissa was treating the office as if it were a second home. Sauntering in smiling, making a beeline for the drawing table. She knew every cranny, could tell when a book had been moved from its usual place, was quick to put it back. Restoring. Showing an unusual eye for detail that jibed with the perceptual sensitivity Dutchy had described.

A child whose senses ran on full throttle. For her, life would never be boring. Could it ever be tranquil?

As the fifth month began she announced she was ready to talk again. Informing me that she wanted to be a team- just like I’d said at the beginning.

“Sure. What would you like to work on?”

“The dark.”

I rolled up my sleeves, ready to muster every kernel of wisdom I’d gathered since grad school. First I taught her to recognize the physical warning signs of anxiety- how she felt when the fear came on. Then I trained her in deep relaxation that evolved into full-blown hypnosis because of her ease at drifting into imagery. She learned self-hypnosis in a single session, could sink into trance within seconds. I supplied her with finger signals she could use to communicate while under, and finally began the desensitization process.

Seating her in a chair, I told her to close her eyes and imagine herself sitting in the dark. A dark room. Watching as her body grew taut and her index finger popped up, I warded off the tension with suggestions of deep calm and well-being. When she’d relaxed once more, I had her return to the dark room. On/off, over and over again, until she could tolerate the image. After a week or so, she’d mastered the imaginary darkness and was ready to tackle the real enemy.

I drew the outer office drapes and manipulated the light-switch rheostat, getting her accustomed to gradually increasing dimness. Stretching the time that she sat in partial darkness and reacting to evidence of tension with instructions for deeper and deeper relaxation.

Eleven sessions into the treatment, I was able to pull the blackout drapes closed, plunging both of us into total darkness. Counting the seconds out loud and homing in on the sound of her breathing. Ready to move in at the merest catch or quickening, determined she’d never experience prolonged anxiety.