Too Far Under (12 page)

“Not that we lose very often,” Judith said.
“But we never pass up a chance to play.”

They sat together on the couch and I took the
chair across from them. Might as well start things off on a
pleasant note, I thought. So I followed up on the tennis thing. “It
sounds like you’re both serious tennis players,” I said. “Is your
tournament here in Boulder?”

“It’s here at the university tennis complex,”
Derrick said. “I used to play professionally and if I had my wish,
I still would. In fact I’d love to spend most of my time playing
tennis. But I have to balance my tennis life and my business life.”
I nodded. With his black curly hair, blue eyes, fit body and tanned
skin, I could easily picture him as a tennis coach hanging out at
the courts helping cute young girls improve their backhand.

“Derrick could still be a pro,” Judith said
imperiously. “In fact we both could. But with all my books and
academic articles, plus my grants and national committees, not to
mention teaching two graduate seminars, I don’t have that kind of
time.”

Whew! This woman sounded like the president
of her own fan club. I didn’t want to hear any more of her resume,
so I said, “Thinking of time, I know you’re both busy—and this
meeting is an extra for my schedule too—so let’s talk about why you
wanted to see me today.

“We don’t want you seeing Angelica again,”
Judith said. “Just to be perfectly clear, neither Lacey nor Shane
has legal authority to make decisions regarding Angelica, so they
can’t bring her here without Derrick’s permission. We’re willing to
overlook your seeing her without our permission yesterday if you
promise to stay strictly away from her from now on.”

Derrick didn’t look quite as sure as Judith
did and he, not Judith, was Angelica’s parent, so I waited to see
what he would say. He stayed silent, so I turned to him and said,
“How do you feel about this Derrick?”

He leaned forward in my direction. “Actually
Angelica is a very disturbed child. I don’t know if she told you
that she thinks she’s some kind of special child—Indigo—who doesn’t
have to do things the way other children do. Unfortunately Mirabel
supported her in that. In fact she’s the one who came up with it. I
tried to get her to see reason, but I never got anywhere. Now
Angelica refuses to do half her schoolwork because she says it’s
irrelevant. I know she needs therapy and I’m sure you’re a good
therapist, but Judith has found another therapist for her.”

“Yes, she’ll be starting therapy tomorrow and
her pediatrician will be starting her on Ritalin,” Judith said.
“Angelica needs to learn to focus and do her schoolwork. She may be
gifted in some areas but she’s out of control and she needs
stability.”

I hadn’t seen any evidence of Angelica being
out of control, but I had seen that she was grieving the loss of
her mother and her sister. I doubted that Ritalin was a good choice
for her. I wasn’t her therapist and they weren’t asking my advice,
but I still felt a need to remind Derrick that he had some
responsibility as a father.

“I can see you’re concerned about Angelica,”
I said, addressing Derrick. “She’s been through a lot losing her
sister and her mother. She’s going to need a lot of your attention
while she’s dealing with all that.”

Derrick’s face sagged. “I know that,” he said
softly, “but I’ve never had that kind of relationship with her.
I’ve tried everything, but she won’t talk to me about how she’s
feeling.”

“Does she talk to anyone about how she’s
feeling?” I asked.

Derrick sighed. “Just Lacey,” he said. “And
now she and Lacey have come up with this notion that Mirabel was
murdered. I don’t blame Angelica. She’s young, and as you say,
she’s been through a lot.” He frowned and his voice took on an
angry tone as he went on. “But Lacey should know better than to
encourage Angelica’s crazy ideas.”

Judith put her arm around his shoulders and
looked him directly in the face. “Derrick, you know Lacey likes to
stir the pot. She thrives on conflict. You need to keep her away
from Angelica as much as you can.”

Judith did have a point about Lacey loving
drama, but the idea of keeping her away from Angelica was cruel.
Fortunately Derrick stood up for Lacey and Angelica. He shook his
head and nixed Judith’s demand. “No, I can’t do that, Judith.
Angelica needs someone to talk to and Lacey is the only one she
feels close to right now.”

“That’s why we’re starting Angelica in
therapy,” Judith said. “But we can discuss this later. There’s no
reason for Dr. Sims to be involved.” She turned toward me, “So I
assume we’re clear here. We’d prefer you to stay out of our family
business. Unfortunately, we can’t stop Lacey or Shane from coming
to you. But they do not have our permission to bring Angelica and
you do not have our permission to treat her.”

I had certainly gotten the message by then
and I was more than ready to see the last of Judith. “You’ve made
you point,” I said. “Now I have phone calls to return and paperwork
to catch up on.” I stood up and headed toward the door to the
waiting room. They followed.

Derrick made a half-hearted attempt to make
nice. “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,” he said. He
smiled, shook my hand, and added, “I’ll probably be seeing you over
at Shady Terrace dealing with that mess. I still haven’t figured
out where my dad will live now that the place is closing.”

As I closed the door behind them, I wondered
what Derrick saw in Judith. Was her tennis game so strong that he
was willing to overlook her nasty disposition? Or did she have some
other hold over him?

I sat in my office for a while contemplating
the issues Judith and Derrick had raised. Was Angelica making up or
imagining her Indigo-child status as a way to get out of doing
stuff she didn’t want to do? I certainly wasn’t any expert on
Indigo children. Had Angelica’s sense of what had happened to
Mirabel come from an over-active imagination rather than a
spiritual connection?

I felt a need for more information so I typed
“indigo child” into my Google search engine. Over a million hits. I
started with Wikipedia. Their entry described Indigo children as a
controversial New Age concept with no scientific evidence to back
it up. Believers describe Indigo children as bright, empathetic,
highly intuitive kids who are here on earth to remake the world
into a place of peace, but who function poorly in conventional
schools due to their rejection of authority, being smarter than
their teachers and a lack of response to guilt-, fear- or
manipulation-based discipline. Okay, that sounded like
Angelica.

Skeptics say that the traits attributed to
Indigos are so vague they could describe anyone and that applying
the Indigo label to a disruptive child may delay proper diagnosis
and treatment the child needs. A good summary of Judith’s point of
view.

Wikpedia continued with a paragraph about how
some children whose parents believe they are Indigos are diagnosed
with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by the school system
because they are impatient and easily bored at school. When school
psychologists suggest a drug like Ritalin to treat the ADHD, these
parents refuse. They insist that Indigos are a new stage of
evolution who require special treatment, not medications.

Angelica didn’t strike me as a hyperactive
child, but that diagnosis was outside my areas of expertise. Also,
I had only seen Angelica in a few limited settings. I didn’t feel
competent to judge whether Judith was right about Angelica.

Next I went to the Indigo Childern website,
where I read a long warning about how the Wikipedia entry is a page
filled with misinformation and bias. The writer admitted there is
no scientific evidence of the Indigo phenomena but insisted that
these children are the beginning of a change in human nature
described by many around the world as a new consciousness.

Another site had a list of questions to help
a person know whether they are an Indigo. Do you sometimes feel
wise beyond your years? Does your family misunderstand you? Do you
have strong intuition about certain things that most others do not?
Do you have trouble conforming to the ways of society? Do you often
feel misunderstood when you try to talk to people about what’s
real? If you answer yes to such questions, you are most likely an
Indigo who has come to earth to build a new society.

Or, I thought, maybe you’re a child who feels
lost after the deaths of both her sister and her mother, and who
feels misunderstood by her father and his bossy live-in
mistress.

I turned off my computer. More information
wouldn’t help. I needed to clarify my thoughts. Was Angelica
Indigo? For that matter are Indigos real or are they merely wishful
thinking on the part of their parents? Had Mirabel encouraged
Angelica’s oddness and given her this special label as a way for
them both to overcome their grief over Kari’s death? Was Angelica’s
strong intuition that Mirabel had been murdered an important
insight by a child with special abilities? Or was it a cry for help
from a grief-stricken child who felt misunderstood? If I encouraged
her to pursue her intuition would I be making it harder for her to
accept the loss of her mother and move on? Should I reconsider my
involvement?

The sun slipped behind the mountains, leaving
me in the dusk as I tried to resolve these stubborn questions.
Suddenly a familiar voice came from a far corner of the room.

“Yo, Cleo. You can’t bail in two feet of
water. You’re heading for a nose-dive.”

Tyler! I couldn’t see him in the dim light,
but there was no mistaking that voice or that surfer slang. This
time I was going to get some answers. “Tyler, can you come closer
so I can see you? I really need to talk to you.”

Usually he ignores my requests, but to my
surprise he did what I asked. Suddenly I could see him perched
cross-legged on the windowsill, wearing his usual “Never Stop
Surfing” tee shirt and rubber sandals. I was encouraged that he had
responded to my request. Maybe he was in an unusually helpful
mood.

“Tyler, I feel like I’m already in a
nose-dive. I want to help Angelica and Lacey, but this is a messy
situation. I don’t know who to believe.”

“Believe in yourself. Don’t sit in the
channel and watch. Get into the lineup. Don’t back down. You’ll
blow it if you miss the good wave.”

I groaned in frustration. “Argggh! Tyler, if
you know so much you must know that what you’re saying doesn’t mean
anything to me!”

I should have known better. Tyler never hangs
around when I get confrontational with him. He bounced off the
windowsill and floated off toward the corner, where he melted into
the wall and vanished. But his words trailed behind him like a
gusty tailwind. “Forget about meaning, Cleo. It’s time to hit the
surf. Angelica’s in the impact zone.”

After Tyler left, I went through the rest of
my phone messages. Surprisingly one of them was from Shane Townes.
He’d left a cryptic voice mail. “Hey, Cleo. Could I buy you a drink
after work? There’s some stuff I’d like to run by you.”

Buy me a drink? The image of Shane yesterday
in his torn jeans and Lord of the Rings tee-shirt talking about
online games brought to mind a high-school age geek—someone who’d
be more at home in a coffee house than a bar. But then I remembered
the Shane from the wedding dressed in the pricey pinstriped suit.
He definitely had his sophisticated side. And he was twenty-four
and he’d gone to USC, so he was probably no stranger to trendy
bars.

Anyway, I didn’t have any plans for the
evening, and a drink could be just what I needed to defuse the
lingering tension I felt from tangling with Judith. Also, my
curiosity got the better of me, like it always does.

He was old enough for me to talk to without
permission. So why not give him a call and see if he was free. I
did. He was. We agreed to meet at The Med at 5:30 for their
happy-hour drinks and tapas.

The Med is on Walnut not far from my office,
so I walked over. I didn’t feel like waiting so I was happy to see
Shane walking up when I arrived and even happier when we managed to
get a table in the bar right away. In keeping with its name, the
Med’s décor is Mediterranean—terra-cotta floors, white stucco walls
accented with colorful tiles, plants and fresh flowers everywhere.
We ordered the red Sangria and a selection of small
plates—tapas—which are their specialty and a great deal at happy
hour. We chose skewers of Moroccan spiced shrimp, fried garlic
calamari with Spanish sauce, hummus with black beans and cilantro,
and roasted mushrooms in garlic herb butter sauce.

I wanted to get to know Shane a little before
we started in on the family issues, so I indulged my curiosity and
asked him about his work. “You said you have a job working on an
online game. What’s it like? I’ve heard about games like Second
Life but I’ve never played one.”

Shane speared a roasted mushroom, swirled it
around in its garlic butter sauce and popped it in his mouth
without dripping even a tiny bit of the sauce. Then he leaned
forward and spoke with an intensity that reminded me of one of my
students trying to convince the class of a favorite theory.
“Gyaki-Birquit is a virtual world on another planet in the future.
Like on Second Life, everyone who plays is represented by an
avatar—a computer-generated character that can walk around,
interact with other characters, teleport to other parts of the
planet, and that’s just a start. You can customize your avatar’s
looks, clothes, skills, personality and more. But because it’s all
in the future everyone has super abilities like being able to
teleport or send out shock waves that stun people near them. When
you’re in Gyaki-Birquit your avatar is you, and you can make
yourself anyone you want to be. You could be a person a lot like
who you are now or someone totally different.”