Authors: Torey Hayden
‘I’m always here,’ she said cheerfully and reached to take the grocery bag from me to see what was in it.
‘Yes, I
know
you are. That’s what I’m asking. How come?’ I flung open the door and turned on the hall light. ‘Why don’t you ever go to your own home sometime and leave me alone?’
‘’Cause I like it here,’ she said, as deaf as ever to what I was saying.
‘But you don’t
live
here. I do.’
I went out to the car to get the other bag of groceries and returned to the house. Charity was still standing on the porch, her eyes dilated to blackness in the half-light cast out from the hall. She held the door open for me. I put the groceries on the hall chair. ‘Charity, does it ever occur to you that you’re over here an awful lot? That maybe I have other things to do sometimes?’
‘Well, I’m not stopping you from doing them.’
‘Yes, you
are
. I want to do them alone.’
Her forehead wrinkled. ‘You don’t want me?’ Her voice grew suddenly small.
That was right. I didn’t. I wanted to be able to go in and sit down and have an evening to myself for once, maybe run a hot bath, jam up the stereo until the floor vibrated, drink something warm and soothing and lose myself in some mindless book that wouldn’t suffer if dropped in the bath. I knew I couldn’t do any of it with Charity there. Yet, seeing her face drop as she stood there in the wan hallway light, I didn’t have the guts to tell her to get lost.
However, Charity took my pause for what it was, affirmation that she wasn’t wanted. Abruptly tears welled up. She looked positively grief-stricken and I felt rotten to the core.
‘No, no, no, of course I want you, Char. Come on in. I’m just tired and had other things on my mind, that’s all.’
But Charity refused to move. She put her hands over her face to hide her tears.
I came down on my hands and knees to be closer to her height. ‘Look, Charity, I was rude. I’m sorry. Of course I want you. Come in and we’ll make supper, okay?’
‘I even brang you my good school papers,’ she sobbed through her hands. Then she fished out a grubby little wad from her pocket. ‘I thought you might wanna see how good I done at school. And now you don’t even want me.’ And she wailed melodramatically.
‘I said I was sorry, Charity. Now come on, don’t worry about it. Listen, I got us fish sticks for supper. You like fish sticks. Let’s go fix them for supper.’ I had my arm around her but she wasn’t willing to accept my comfort.
No luck. She howled louder.
‘Okay, all right, suit yourself. I’m going in. We’re heating the whole out-of-doors standing here like this.’ I dragged her through the doorway and shut the door behind her. Then I left her and lugged the groceries into the kitchen. Dumping them on the counter, I began to put them away.
While I was reading the directions on the fish-sticks box, Charity came trailing in. Her nose was running, and she rubbed at her eyes in great, dramatic swipes.
‘Do you like me?’ she asked as I knocked the fish sticks out onto a baking sheet.
‘Yes, of course I like you.’ I touched her head as I went by.
‘You still going to be my Big Sister?’
I stopped to look at her. ‘Yes, of course, I am. People do get tired, Charity. And it makes them a little short-tempered sometimes. But it had nothing to do with you. It’s not your fault that I’m tired.’
‘Can I have a cookie then?’ she asked, and the old gleam was back in her eye.
‘You can have one after supper. We’ll be ready to eat when these things are done.’
‘My mom always gives me a cookie if I stop crying.’
‘I have no doubt she does. But I’m not your mom, am I?’
‘No,’ said Charity and climbed up on the counter to sit beside me. ‘But I wouldn’t mind if you was.’
Charity settled down in front of the television with three cookies, half a can of Dr Pepper and a bowl of popcorn. I went off to the bedroom to go through my file cabinet. I had been reading a lot on the treatment of kids who hate and I thought I had cut out an article from a psychiatric journal and filed it somewhere.
It was a mistake. Opening the middle drawer of the cabinet, I came across all my old teaching materials. Folder after folder of teaching ideas, overhead-projector templates, pictures from bulletin boards, ideas snipped from teaching journals, handouts I’d gotten and handouts I’d given, magazine articles that had caught my eye and even not-quite related bits and pieces, like an editorial by a newspaper columnist, describing the grief he had suffered at the recent death of his wife. They were all stuffed together in intimate, idiosyncratic order. And there, too, were the folders of schoolwork from old pupils. Taking those out of the drawer, I sat down on the floor and began paging through them, paper by paper. Sheila was there and Cliffie and Joyce. Stephen, Sandy, Tommy, Adam, Lucio, Yolanda, Leslie. Each one, their pictures, their notes to me, their stories, their classwork, many of the papers already yellowed a little by the passage of time. The carefully handprinted letters dissolved away from the pages into the rich fabric of my memory.
I had a gifted imagination. From the dog-eared school papers I could re-create my world then so vividly that it paled the world around me. My adrenaline, already high from dealing with Kevin of late, surged. It was a feeling I had grown so accustomed to in those years spent in the classroom. It was like a drug fix, I think. I got hooked on the feeling all that adrenaline coursing through my blood brought, and it took me years to get used to living without it when I had finished with special education. Even now, with all my concern over Kevin, I did not have the long, sustained, hour-by-hour involvement I’d had then that kept my heart always running a little fast and gave me the privilege of eating a 3000-calorie lunch and never gaining weight. Re-created in my mind as I sat on the floor of the bedroom were those children, those days, those months, even the smell of those classrooms. And my body responded without any outside stimulation, sending that familiar tingling sensation rushing along my arms until my hands shook so badly that I couldn’t hold the paper any longer.
What had happened to teaching? Why wasn’t I there anymore? I was an unwilling exile. As I fingered the schoolwork, lifeless except in my imagination, I ached to turn back the clock, to return and appreciate a little more what I had had before I lost it.
Those had been simpler times. I hadn’t thought so then. But, looking back, the difference in responsibility was great. Closing my classroom door and creating my own small world in the eye of the hurricane, I had felt in control. In a small way, maybe I had been. But mostly, I hadn’t. By and large the school district decided who came to my room and who left and how long they stayed. They even decided if
I
would continue to exist.
Here, it was very different. Suddenly I actually had the control I had wanted in those earlier years, not only over my fate but over other people’s as well, over the innocent people Kevin might injure or kill, if I guessed wrong, over the children I could have been working with, if Kevin proved hopeless and was sent to permanent hospitalization or imprisonment, and of course, over Kevin himself in a very real way. His fate depended on me, literally. I could do things and say things that would steal away years from his life, maybe his entire lifetime. Conversely, but much less easily, I could give his future back to him, if we were lucky.
That was too much responsibility for any person. Playing God was a good name for it because God we were being, doing this sort of work, and playing at it was all we were capable of. Yet I knew someone had to do it. I just wished it had never had to be me.
Among the papers in my lap was a little poem written by one of my children years before.
A parrot is a funny bird,
I wonder, when it talks,
If it knows it speaks in human words
But still has parrot thoughts.
That was me, the Parrot of God.
W
e barreled on full tilt through December. I became more and more vigilant, more and more absorbed in Kevin’s drama, as I tried to maintain some semblance of control. It eventually grew to be like riding a runaway horse. On one hand, one is terrified of falling off; yet on the other one develops sort of a nervous, challenged giddiness after a while, which feeds upon the terror, and sooner or later, one develops a taste for it. My adrenaline mounted. My weight dropped. My sleep was poor. Yet there was something addictive about it. I kept coming back, day after day, to see the thing I had let loose.
January arrived with a deep snowfall and sub-zero temperatures. When I came in the office one morning after my sessions with Kevin, I found Jeff sitting in his desk chair with his head hanging down between his knees. I had to shed a couple of layers before I was able to speak.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I have a headache. I’m letting all the blood rush to my brain so that it’ll go away.’
‘And
you’re
a doctor? Heaven help us. Why don’t you just take an aspirin? I have some in my desk.’ Still wearing my jacket and trailing a muffler, I went over to rummage through a drawer for the bottle. It had been in there quite a long time and smelled like vinegar when I uncapped it. ‘Here.’
He kept his head on the floor. ‘I don’t want to pollute my body,’ he replied.
Jeff never failed to amaze me. What a hypocrite. He regularly drank beer, which he and his roommate brewed up in their bathtub. ‘Take the stupid aspirin, Jeff.’
‘I’m just tired, that’s all,’ he said and sat up. He took the pills from me. ‘I was up almost all last night at the hospital.’
‘Here, I’ll fetch you a glass of water,’ I said. When I returned, Jeff had smashed the aspirin into powder in his palm with the eraser end of a pencil. He was the only doctor I knew who couldn’t swallow pills.
‘So what was going on down at the hospital?’ I asked.
‘Cheri Bennett. Once again.’ And he rolled his eyes.
Returning from taking Charity home that evening, I heard the phone ring as I was putting the car in the garage. Madly, I fumbled with the keys to get the door open, but by the time I reached the telephone, it was too late.
Although it was just a little after nine, the long weeks were beginning to tell on me and I decided to run a hot bath and go to bed early. Just as I lowered myself below the surface of the water, the phone rang again.
It was Jeff. He’d had more than a headache that morning; he had strep throat. Now at home with a 103-degree fever, he wondered if I could take over any emergencies for him. Standing shivering and dripping wet at the phone, I was willing to agree to anything. Then I returned to a less-than-hot tub.
Jeff must have known what was coming. Less than an hour later when I was warm in bed, reading, the psychiatric unit of the hospital rang up. Could I come down? Cheri Bennett had gone on a rampage through the unit and was now holding the nurses at bay with a broken light bulb.
Wearily I rolled out of bed. It was almost ten-thirty.
I knew all about Cheri Bennett. She was fifteen and had, I think, a mad crush on Jeff. She was also a very seriously disturbed girl who made persistent and dangerous suicide bids. Nothing Jeff did seemed to affect her perilous course toward self-destruction. When she had been committed to the unit the previous Monday after leaping from the Seventeenth Street flyover, Jeff was almost tearful with frustration.
Although I had never seen Cheri Bennett, she wasn’t too hard to recognize. She was the one up on the windowsill, her back to the glass, bravely thrusting at the air with her light bulb, like a fencer.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she hollered at me.
‘Dr Tomlinson’s sick,’ I yelled back over the ruckus of the aides and nurses.
‘But who the hell are
you?
’
‘I’m Torey Hayden. I’m one of Dr Tomlinson’s colleagues.’
‘Are you a doctor?’
‘No. I work with Dr Tomlinson. I’m here in his place. He’s sick. I’m here to help you.’
‘Who said I wanted your help? Who the fuck cares who you are anyway. You aren’t even a doctor. How do you expect to help?’
It was not an easy night. Cheri was one of those kids who instantly endeared herself to me by her wild, anguished bravado. But unfortunately, the same was not true in reverse. It took me more than an hour just to get her to come down off her perch on the windowsill and sit on the bed.
I stayed all night. It took several hours to calm her down enough to get rid of the light bulb and the nail file and the bathrobe tie and all the other weapons she had managed to devise. After all that, I didn’t have the heart to turn her over to the hospital staff to be drugged out of her misery and left in the dark, waiting for sleep or whatever else comes in the night. So once I had her calmed down and more relaxed, we talked.
The night shift changed. The morning crew came around, all full of laughter and good cheer. I didn’t leave until breakfast arrived, and when I did, Cheri did nothing more than shrug her shoulders after me and turn away to eat.
At 8:20 in the morning I returned home again. It was just in time for Jeff to call again. He sounded horrible as he croaked a few directions to me regarding stuff at the office. A few things, he said, that he’d left undone at work. When I got there, I found he had left more undone than done. I couldn’t face any of it. I rang Dana at Garson Gayer and explained what had happened. Then I stopped in the office and told Shirley that as far as I was concerned, Hayden, Tomlinson & Co. were closed. Then I went home and slept the rest of the morning away.