Stolen Child by Laurie Gough

Author:Laurie Gough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2016-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

I continued my email the next morning.

Tina, he’s back to OCD-ville. But at least the experiment put him to sleep. He asked me if I’ll do it again tonight.

CHAPTER 13

Afer my mother left and Thanksgiving weekend was over, it was obvious that Quinn was in no condition to go to school. He was engaging in a storm of compulsions and hourly changing rituals of magical thinking that debilitated his entire day. Going to school was out of the question. He couldn’t even read anymore because he had to read the sentences backward after reading them the first time, to erase them. Rob proposed he and Quinn spend the mornings doing the exposure response prevention exercises they’d been working on.

At the end of the school day, I went to talk to Quinn’s teacher Mr. DeFranco, to pick up school work Quinn could possibly do at home and to explain why he was absent. The young teacher’s eyes were full of concern as I spoke. “Come over here,” he said, beckoning me to Quinn’s desk. He pulled out Quinn’s math workbook. “I was going to tell you this so I’m glad you’re here now. Take a look.” I stared down at the pages of the workbook, which was supposed to be full of solved multiplication problems. Instead of numbers, tiny words were scrawled in Quinn’s printing all across the bottom of the pages, the same words, dozens of times over, the same ones we’d heard for weeks: “Please come back, please come back. I love you. Please come back.” I flipped back the pages. It was the same plea over and over, a boy’s impossible prayer hidden in a worn math notebook.

I felt the room starting to spin. A kid I knew, a casual friend of Quinn’s, bounded into the class just then to riffle through his desk to find something. Quinn had helped teach this kid how to ride a unicycle not that long ago. The boy said hi to me and his teacher and shot out of the room again: untroubled, shoes untied, a regular kid on his way to build a fort or buy a chocolate bar with his friends at the dépanneur. Why wasn’t that Quinn? I felt the cruel randomness of life weighing me down like never before.

It was around this time, in mid-October when Quinn wasn’t at school, that I could feel myself withdrawing from my familiar social world. It didn’t matter that I knew people’s lives were never perfect and that life could be complicated for everyone. The people around me still gave off the impression that things were fine, but the happy family life that Rob and Quinn and I had known had long ago skipped town.

Rob told me that night how hard it had been for him to find behaviours for Quinn to work on, meaning behaviours Quinn wasn’t supposed to engage in, or at least behaviours that he was supposed to try delaying for a period of time. The idea of ERP,

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