The Tiger's Child (13 page)

And there on the path around the duck pond was Sheila, little Sheila in her bright-orange sunsuit,
running, skipping, laughing. She threw out her arms and spun around, letting her head fall back, her long hair sail out in a sunlit halo. Around and around and around she turned, completely oblivious to the other walkers on the path, the other children, us. Eyes closed against the sun, lips parted in a half-smile, she satisfied some inner dream to dance.

Did she remember? I glanced sidelong at the gangly adolescent beside me. Intuition told me she was remembering something, and I longed to know her thoughts just then, but I dared not ask.

“I was happy here,” she whispered after a long silence. It was said so softly that I couldn’t detect the emotion it held. Finally she turned away from the duck pond. Crossing the grass to reach the lane again, we started back to the car.

We were soaking wet by then. It was warm summer rain. I wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, but everything was dripping. Sheila bent to pick up a long, brown locust pod that had fallen on the walk.

“When I think of Marysville, I always think of locust trees,” I said. “I remember how they used to scent the air when they were blooming. I remember driving into Marysville the first time. I’d come along the highway and as it dips down the hill into the valley, I can recall having my car window down, and I could smell Marysville before I got here. And when the blossoms start to fall, it’s like snow. I remember coming out in the mornings and my car would be covered.”

Sheila stopped, turned and looked back down the lane toward the duck pond, no longer visible. Pausing, she slit open the locust bean with her fingernail and took out the seeds, letting them drop to the wet pavement. “These are poisonous, did you know?” she asked and threw the empty pod out into the road. “They can actually kill you.”

Sheila grew increasingly moody. Keen to rescue the situation, I suggested we go for a couple of games of bowling, a sport I knew she enjoyed very much. No, she didn’t want to do that. An ice-cream cone at Baskin & Robbins? No. Was she sure? I’d pop for a banana split with extra nuts and whipped cream? No. A browse around the bookstore? No. All she wanted to do was just drive around more.

Having more or less exhausted the town, I tried the countryside, heading north along a network of small rural roads. We were soon into open countryside, comprised mainly of corn- and wheat fields. The area was hilly and Marysville had quickly disappeared from view to leave the fields stretching away from us in an undulating fashion for as far as the eye could see.

I made a few efforts at conversation, but they were useless. Sheila sat absolutely silent. Arms folded across her chest, she gazed out the passenger window so motionlessly that I could have been driving around with one of those inflatable dolls in the front seat beside me and no one would have discerned the difference.

The rain lessened, then finally stopped altogether, and very slowly the clouds began to break up. It was already early evening, so when the first patches of blue sky began to appear in the west, the sun came slanting across the hills.

“Stop!” Sheila cried. Not only was it the first word she had spoken in the better part of an hour and a half, which made it startling enough, but she said it with such suddenness that I fully expected to hit something with the car. I slammed on the brakes sufficiently hard to throw us both sharply forward. This made her smile briefly in my direction, before pointing to the east. “Look at that.”

For a short, shining moment, color was sovereign. The wet asphalt of the road gleamed black against the sudden gold of the sunlit wheat. Beyond the ruffling grain rose the dark remains of the storm clouds, pierced through by a rainbow. Only a very short part of the rainbow was visible; there was not even enough to form a clear arc, but that small section shimmered brilliantly above the restless wheat.

“Oh, God,” Sheila murmured softly, as she regarded the sight, “why do beautiful things make me feel so sad?”

B
ack at the motel, we had our evening meal and then went out to enjoy the pool. The rain had cleared away entirely to give a cloudless night, the stars dimmed by the town’s lights but still faintly discernible.

Sheila remained subdued. There was a heavy, almost depressed feel to her quietness. For the first time, she put aside that smoldering anger I always sensed just below the surface. In its place was nothing, just a great emptiness.

The exercise did me good. The pool was cool enough to let me swim hard and I did, blocking out everything except the feel of the water rushing over me, until at last I surfaced, tired and relaxed. Sheila wasn’t a very good swimmer. I suspect she had never been taught and just got by on what she’d figured out over the years, but she kept at it almost
as long as I did. Then we both retreated to the warmth of the Jacuzzi.

Back in the motel room, she stood before the mirror toweling her hair dry. She studied her reflection as she worked.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

Having finished with my shower and changed into my nightgown, I was lying on my bed and inspecting the TV schedule. Her question caught me unawares. “Well, yes, of course I do.”

“I know I look stupid,” she said to her reflection. “I know you think I do.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she said. “You do. Everybody does. I do too.” She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing it down. “You see, I just don’t want to look like me. That’s why I do it. I can put up with looking stupid, if there’s a chance that it might make me into someone else.”

Once she was in her bed, I turned the light out. It wasn’t all that late, only a little after eleven, but the swimming, combined with the emotional rigors of the day, had left me exhausted. I was ready for sleep and drowsy almost immediately.

Sheila turned restlessly in her bed. The room was very dark, so I could only hear her, not see her, but the sound of her movements kept intruding.

“Torey? You asleep?”

“No, not quite.”

Silence.

“You wanted to say something?” I inquired.

A second long pause. She turned again. “A lot’s changed,” she said quietly.

“In what way?”

“In the migrant camp. It’s a lot different to what I remember it.”

I didn’t answer.

“I do remember it. I haven’t forgotten everything.” A pause. “My memory’s like Swiss cheese. It’s got big holes in it. But other things … I saw the camp today and it was, like … well, like I’d never been away. I can remember it so good.”

Silence then, long enough that I felt myself growing drowsy again.

“You know what I used to do at night, when we lived in the camp?” Sheila asked into the darkness.

“What’s that?”

“Well, my pa used to always be out drinking,” she said, using her old name for her father for the first time since we’d been reunited. “He used to leave me. Nearly every night. He’d give me, like, a bag of corn chips or something and tell me to go to bed, and then he’d go out. And once he was gone, I used to get up and go out into the camp and walk around. It was dark. It was, like, really late at night, and I would look for places with lights on. We didn’t have any electricity then, just a kerosene lantern and a flashlight. So, I’d look for these places with lights and then I’d go peek in their windows. All the time. Every night.”

“Why? Because of being alone? Or the light?” I asked.

“Yeah. I wanted light, I remember that. But mostly just to see what they lived like. A lot of the people weren’t a lot different than us, but I just wanted to see.”

A pause.

“I got in trouble for it. My pa catch me and I’d be whipped red for it.”

Catch.
I heard the word in its present-tense form, echoing Sheila’s old childhood speech patterns. We never had found out why she spoke like that and since we had been reunited, she had used remarkably impeccable grammar for an adolescent. It was eerie to lie in the dark and listen to these long-ago words and speech patterns begin to reemerge.

“The police got me once. More than once, I think. People thought I was stealing things, but I wasn’t. I’d just been looking.”

“I can understand,” I said softly. “It must have been lonely, being left on your own so often, when you were such a young child.”

“Yeah,” came the quiet, disembodied voice through the darkness. “It was.”

A long silence followed. I had woken fully up by then and lay staring up. The curtains were heavy to shut out the motel security lights, but the occasional car turning into the parking lot shot a brief spear of light over the top. This threw the stucco ceiling into sudden relief.

“Can I tell you what happened sometimes?” she asked.

“Here? When you were little?”

“Yeah. When we lived in the migrant camp. When I was in your class.”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“I had a mattress on the floor. That’s where I slept. My pa slept on the couch. But he’d go out boozing and when he came home … there were always people with him. Women, usually. And they’d fuck on the couch.”

“Yes, I can remember you telling me once,” I said.

“But sometimes …” She stopped.

I listened into the darkness. She was breathing shallowly, her breaths audible to me in the next bed.

“Well, he was doing drugs. You knew that too, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Smack mostly. And these guys got it for him. There were two. Sometimes he’d come home with them. Sometimes it was one or the other, sometimes both of them, but he never used to have enough money to pay them. I can remember lying there listening to him pleading with them. Begging them to give him the stuff, telling them how he was going to get them money. He’d even cry some of the time; I can remember hearing him.”

I watched the patterns flash black and headlight-yellow across the ceiling.

“Well, this one guy, he used to give it to my dad cheap if … He liked me to lay down with him … He didn’t fuck me or anything; it’s just he liked little girls. Like to feel them over. And if I sucked his cock, my pa got his stuff cheap.”

My blood ran like ice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“How do you say that when you’re six? Besides, it was my life. I was used to it.”

I lay awake long after Sheila fell asleep. Memories came back to me, one after another, of the days in our classroom. Things had been
so
bad for her. She had been such a deprived, neglected child that there would have been no way of doing everything that had wanted doing, of undoing all the harm. I had known that then and had approached her one small issue at a time, changing what I could. Yet somewhere between then and now I had come to believe I had saved her from the worst. To realize now that even while in my room she had continued to suffer hurt me; that I had never even perceived it hurt me worse. Over and over and over I pondered on what more I should have done.

The next morning, Sheila was back to her usual, rather off-the-wall self. She spent ages in the bathroom doing her hair to emerge looking not a whole lot tidier than when she had arisen from bed, and her outfit, a cute little number involving exceptionally ragged cut-off jeans and a shimmery green top that would have been more at home in a Las Vegas floor show, needed to be seen to be believed.

It was the Fourth of July and our agenda for the day included the picnic with Chad and his family. I was very much looking forward to this. Chad and I had remained on good terms throughout the metamorphosis of our relationship from the physical to the platonic, and in the last few years it had
matured into a genuine friendship. We were now in contact frequently, exchanging stimulating letters and lengthy phone calls, but the fact remained that I had never met his wife nor seen his three young daughters. Bringing Sheila with me created the prospect of an even more enjoyable reunion.

We drove over to Chad’s house at three. He lived down a quiet, unpaved lane on the very edge of town. His was a beautiful house, new and huge, with a three-car garage and a tennis court to the side. I must confess to a twinge of remorse, or perhaps it was jealousy, when I saw it, knowing that this could have been mine. Not that I was particularly keen on houses of that sort or wanted that kind of lifestyle, and I didn’t even play tennis, but it was impossible to ignore his level of success.

“Wow,” Sheila murmured as we pulled into the drive and summed the whole matter up in that one word.

Before we were out of the car, Chad was at the door, opening it wide. “Welcome!” he said and children came spilling out around him.

His wife, Lisa, appeared beside him. Of Latino descent, she had the most exquisite eyes, dark and sparkly. She was a lawyer too and I had heard so much about her reputation as a killer in the courtroom that I had been expecting something quite different from what I saw. She was sweetly pretty and quite petite, rather the way one imagines fairytale heroines.

“And here,” Chad was saying, as he pulled a small girl in front of him, “here’s my Sheila.”

His Sheila and my Sheila eyed one another. Like her mother, Chad’s daughter was pretty in a girlish sort of way. Her hair was dark and curled naturally in long, loose ringlets down over her shoulders. She was dressed impeccably in a two-tone green designer-brand outfit that beautifully showed off the rich color of her hair.

“Sheila’s five,” Chad said, lovingly clasping her to his side. She smiled up at him. “And these … girls, come here. Stand still a moment. This is Bridget, who’s four. And this is Maggie. How old are you, Maggie?”

Laboriously, Maggie worked at holding up two fingers.

“That’s right. Clever girl! Maggie’s just had her birthday last Saturday.”

Like their elder sister, both Bridget and Maggie were blessed with dark curly hair and laughing eyes, and both were attractively dressed in practical, but expensive clothes. All three girls were friendly, open children, chatting easily with Sheila and me, inviting us to come around to the backyard and see the picnic table and the box of fireworks.

At the back of the house, we found a large redwood deck ingeniously laid out to include a sandbox near the patio doors and to progress away on one side to a large wooden swing set and climbing frame and on the other to a large, landscaped garden that ended with a fence that overlooked open fields.

“Come see our horses,” Chad’s Sheila called cheerily and ran down the grass ahead of us. “Do
you like to ride, Sheila? Do you want a ride on my horse? I’ll take you.”

“Thanks,” Sheila replied, her voice hesitant. “Thanks, but not just now, okay? Maybe later.”

“Well, come down and see them. Mom? Mommy, give us apples.” She came running back up to the deck. She took Sheila’s hand. “Come on. We’ll get some apples and go down. I want to show you.”

Chad and I, sitting in chairs on the deck, watched the two girls go off down the lawn toward the fence at the bottom.

“There’s something I never thought I’d see,” he said, his voice thoughtful.

“No.”

There was a long moment’s pause. “She’s changed, hasn’t she?” he said.

I didn’t know quite how to respond. That had been my first impression too, but increasingly I was realizing that, no, Sheila hadn’t actually changed much at all.

“I mean, that
hair
,” he continued, when I didn’t speak. “And those clothes! She’s going to scare the horses.” He laughed. “I suppose it’s just adolescence, but I must admit, I didn’t expect it of her. She always seemed such a practical little thing.”

“She didn’t have much choice in those days.”

“How’s it going for her?” Chad asked.

Sitting in my deck chair, I watched her with little Sheila, feeding apples to the two horses. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

I sensed there was trouble fairly early on. Sheila mooched around on the outside of the crowd almost from the beginning. The little girls tried to engage her in various activities, ranging from riding the horses to grilling hot dogs on the barbecue, but for the most part, Sheila resisted their efforts. Initially, she wasn’t unpleasant about it, just distant. However, as the afternoon progressed into evening, she became increasingly detached from the group. Long periods were spent wandering around the perimeter of the yard or swinging listlessly on one of the swings.

Feeling responsible for her, I tried to gloss over her behavior, especially to Lisa, who was going out of her way to try and include Sheila. I think perhaps things might have worked out better if Lisa simply could have ignored her and let her join in at her own rate, but this seemed to go against Lisa’s innate way of dealing with children. It had become apparent very early on that Lisa was a doer and a joiner. Wanting to see Maggie, Bridget and Sheila sufficiently stimulated and socialized, she had provided schedules so full of lessons and extramural activities for her daughters that they probably maintained their own Filofaxes. Likewise, the picnic had been planned with exquisite attention to detail aimed at giving everyone a Very Good Time. That Sheila was refusing to join in implied she was not having a Very Good Time and this troubled Lisa to no end.

Sheila contributed to this. Discerning that she could bug Lisa so easily, she began to go at it wholeheartedly as the evening went on. Her ennui
grew more obvious. The little girls irritated her, making her frown evilly at them when they came around her, and worst of all, she turned her back on the fireworks. Chad would light one, up it would go. Flash! Bang! Then all the oohs and aahs, while Sheila, bored, leaned against the deck railing and stared through the patio doors at Chad’s dining-room table.