The Tiger's Child (17 page)

I was also becoming very conscious of a hidden agenda. Conversation after conversation with Sheila I sensed we were talking on two levels at once, that she was addressing another matter as
well as the one at hand. I had the distinct feeling that she was aware of what this hidden agenda was and that it fueled a good deal of the sparky anger Sheila had demonstrated over the course of the summer.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t so hidden. Sheila had spoken in no uncertain terms during our visit to Marysville about the pain and anger she’d felt when the school year had finished and I’d departed. Perhaps the fault had been mine in not bringing the subject up again. I had been so startled by the intensity of her feelings that night in the motel room and then distracted by the need to deal with the here-and-now of her running out, that I hadn’t handled the issue as deftly as I might have in a more controlled location, like the clinic or the classroom. And she was right: the car after summer school was not the appropriate place for such a discussion.

I looked at my calendar. We were meeting with Alejo’s parents on the following afternoon, so I wouldn’t be able to see Sheila then. In fact, it was a very busy week, due to the ending of the summer program. Jeff and I had several evaluation meetings, in addition to our usual clinic commitments. Pulling the diary over, I penciled in Sheila’s name on Friday. She seemed so desperate to come over to my house, I thought, so maybe Friday evening we could do something special together.

The next morning was one of chaos. It started with the minibus driver, who brought several of the children to the school, announcing to us that Violet
had been sick on the ride over, and indeed, she had, everywhere and over everyone. This involved all four of us in cleaning up. Then, when I phoned Violet’s mother, she explained that she couldn’t come to get Violet, because her husband had the car. Miriam volunteered to take Violet home, but it was quite a distance, so that left us without Miriam for the first half of the morning.

Tamara, who had become quite reliable about not hurting herself, seemed to find all the attention the minibus children were getting was simply too much. While we were all distracted, she managed to locate a large pair of scissors and cut a long gash on her inner arm, almost from wrist to elbow. It wasn’t deep, but it was bloody and by that point it was just Jeff, Sheila and I. The other children were becoming very unsettled with all this disruption, and frankly, we did not have control of things.

Jeff, being the doctor, got the job of bandaging Tamara back together, while Sheila and I tried to quell fears and get everyone re-oriented. The summer school had not been running enough weeks to develop the very useful group camaraderie that I’d always cultivated in my classrooms. There was still no real center with this bunch, such that when disaster struck, things flew apart easily. I tried a few songs to keep up the cheer, but Joshua and Jessie, our two autistic children, both screamed and a couple of the others just kept wandering off.

The only humorous moment came when, in the chaos, I noticed David, Alejo and Mikey were
gone. Panicked, because I realized that in all the commotion, we had not searched David that morning for matches, as we usually did, I dashed out to hunt for them. It took me five or ten minutes to locate them. The three boys were outside. I was still inside, when I heard their voices through an open window, and I approached cautiously because I wanted to see what they were up to before giving my presence away. Sure enough, David had started a very small fire of grass and twigs in the lee of the school building.

“See, there it is,” he said to Mikey. “I told you I could do it.”

I was just about to make myself known when, much to my pleased surprise, I heard David say, “But now we got to put it out.”

“How?” Alejo asked.

David cast around a moment for something to use, then his small face brightened. “I know. Like this.” And he unbuttoned his jeans. “Okay, all together. On the count of three, everybody
pee.
”

Afterward, Jeff and I had the meeting with Alejo’s parents, so I wasn’t able to take Sheila down to Fenton Boulevard. Instead, she left on foot for the bus stop near the school, while Jeff and I headed back to the clinic.

Alejo was the only child in the group who was not a client of either Jeff or myself, so as a consequence, neither of us knew his parents, Mr. and Dr. Banks-Smith. Indeed, my only contact had been with his father, the first day of the program, when
he had brought Alejo in. I had never met Alejo’s mother at all. Jeff had had a little more contact, as he had done the full workup on Alejo a couple weeks earlier, but for the most part we had relied on Alejo’s psychiatrist, Dr. Freeman, for our information on his family.

Alejo’s mother was a doctor practicing family medicine, while his father was an insurance man. They were both tall, attractive and Nordic-looking, the kind of couple usually dreamed up by advertising executives. They greeted us warmly, shaking both Jeff’s and my hand, and then turned to exchange pleasantries with Dr. Freeman before sitting down. What struck me forcefully as I watched them was the knowledge that a dreadful mistake had been made. This was the wrong set of parents for Alejo.

The second thought to strike me was that Mr. and Dr. Banks-Smith had not bonded with Alejo. As we passed out our various test results, papers and compilations of data, they each examined them in turn and asked articulate, intelligent questions, but they did so in the same thoughtful yet detached way that Jeff, Dr. Freeman and I did. They spoke to us not as parents, but as fellow professionals.

“So, you say Alejo is functioning at a lower level than his age group,” Mr. Banks-Smith said to Jeff. “This translates into what, IQ-wise?”

“If you look at it as a bell curve, with the average IQ—i.e., most of the population being here in the middle where it’s fattest—”

“No, just his score, please. What is his IQ?” Mr. Banks-Smith asked.

“I’m often reluctant to tie us down to specifics,” Jeff replied. “IQ is a relative measure, and tests don’t always reflect a true picture.”

“Come on, just the numbers,” Mr. Banks-Smith replied.

“Well, I gave him the WISC. He had a verbal score of sixty-five and a perceptual score of seventy-nine, which gives him a total IQ of seventy-four.”

“That’s in the retarded range, isn’t it?” Mr. Banks-Smith said.

“We generally regard seventy as the cutoff, but really, sir, we don’t like to put a lot of emphasis on single scores, particularly in a case like Alejo’s, where cultural issues may have influenced the results.”

“And you,” Dr. Banks-Smith said, indicating me, “you said there are definite indications that he is brain-damaged?”

“Possible, not definite. It’s very difficult to be definite about such matters,” I replied.

“What caused it?” Alejo’s father asked. “Was it inflicted? A result of his deprivations?”

“No way of saying. He shows indicators of aphasia, which involves an inability to use and understand words in the usual way. The majority of children I’ve seen with this disability have been born with it.”

“So, he could have been damaged all along, is that what you’re saying?” he asked.

I didn’t want to be saying that, but unfortunately, it was probably the truth.

“Alejo’s problems can’t really be helped, can they?” Dr. Banks-Smith said.

“They can be helped,” Jeff said quickly. “Alejo’s made very good progress in the summer program in terms of his interpersonal relationships. He is getting on quite well socially and has made friends with some of the other boys. We’ve seen a nice change in him, haven’t we, Torey?”

I nodded.

“I think if he continued at the clinic—” Dr. Freeman started, but Dr. Banks-Smith cut him off with a wave of her arm.

“No, what I’m asking is: he basically can’t be helped. You can’t make him more intelligent. You can’t repair the brain damage.”

“Well, no …” Dr. Freeman said.

I felt myself pulling back, as if slipping down a long tunnel. We’d lost. Perhaps we had lost even before we’d started. I suspect Mr. and Dr. Banks-Smith had already decided to send Alejo back to South America and, indeed, had already begun the process before ever coming in for the conference. Whatever, at that precise moment, I knew there was no hope. Alejo was condemned.

“I
thought perhaps you would like to come over to my place tomorrow night,” I said to Sheila as we drove down to Fenton Boulevard the next day. “It’s Friday, so we don’t have to worry about work in the morning. Maybe I could do us something on the barbecue.”

“Barbecue? Where do you have a barbecue in an attic apartment?”

“I have a door out onto the garage roof. Wait until tomorrow. I’ll show you.”

Sheila smiled sweetly. “Yeah, I’d really like that.”

There was a small period of silence before Sheila looked over again. “How did that meeting go last night with Alejo’s parents?”

I shrugged.

“What are they like, his folks?”

“All right. Nice, in a way. If I had met them at a party or something, I think I would have liked them,” I replied.

She pulled a strand of hair down and examined it. “So, what’s going to happen to him? Are they going to try and send him back?”

“I don’t know for sure. Dr. Freeman will cover it with them, because he’s Alejo’s therapist, but we didn’t go into it.”

“Yeah, but you’re going to do something, aren’t you? You and Jeff? You’re going to try and stop them,” Sheila said, an urgency coming into her voice. “I mean, like, you won’t
let
them.”

Pulling my lips back over my teeth, I sucked my breath in. “I don’t want to let them, but I’m afraid if they want to, there won’t be much I can do to stop them.”

“But you won’t let them?”

“Like I said …”

Bending forward in her seat, Sheila put a hand on either side of her head, as if in pain. “Oh, it can’t happen. Oh, geez, he’s been brought here. He’s been given all these things. Everything’s so nice.”

I could hear the tears in her voice. Unexpectedly, I felt my own tears. They welled up without warning, blurring the road ahead of me. The enormity of what was happening to Alejo, and, through him, all unfortunate victims, suddenly overwhelmed me. “It makes me want to cry too,” I said.

Startled, Sheila looked over at me.

I reached up and wiped the tears away. “I feel so
helpless when something like this happens. I want to change things so badly and I just can’t.”

Her forehead wrinkling, she gazed in amazement. Unlike me, she had remained dry-eyed.

“Sometimes it helps,” I said of my tears and wiped the last of them away. “In these circumstances, it’s about all there’s left for me to do.” I smiled at her.

“I want to cry sometimes, but I almost never do,” Sheila replied. “I feel it building up and then just when I think I’m going to, the feeling disappears.”

I nodded.

“Actually, I make it disappear,” she said. “Not that I necessarily mean to. It’s just I suddenly think, what is this? It isn’t real. What is any of it? A bunch of chemicals rushing around in our brain. A bunch of molecules. What kind? Carbon? Hydrogen? And what does that amount to? Nothing. It’s all really nothing.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“
Really
?”

She shrugged. “It just comes to me, whether I want it to or not.”

We celebrated our last Friday together with a special activity: finger painting using chocolate pudding instead of paints. Both Miriam and I had done this activity on previous occasions, so we were well prepared for the extraordinary mess it generated. Miriam arrived with an assortment of
old shirts to protect clothing and we cleared back the tables and set out newspapers on the floor before putting down the large sheets of paper for painting. Then we mixed up huge bowls of instant pudding.

Both Sheila and Jeff were highly amused with our proceedings. Jeff with his Freudian training saw all too much meaning in the gloppy brown mixture, but he was the first one to plunge his hand deep into the bowl and scoop pudding out onto Violet’s paper. Exuberantly, he provided all the children with generous splats.

The kids, of course, loved it. More went in their mouths than on the paper, and within a short time, there was chocolate pudding from ear to ear on most of them, but that was the glory of it. Of the various activities I had done through the years with my classes, this had become one of my favorites. All such terribly messy things are releasing, but there is a special freedom in those surrounding food. The squishy, cold feel of the pudding, the copious quantity, the permission to smear with the fingers, to slurp up from the paper with tongues produced an unhindered gaiety. Every child in the room was lively and open.

Sheila was seduced too. Indeed, she had been unusually outgoing all morning, chatting spontaneously with several of the children, lifting Mikey way up in the air above her head. Alejo had initially been reluctant to touch the chocolate pudding, so Sheila sat down beside him on the floor and started off his painting for him, encouraging him to join
her. Scooping a fingerful of the pudding up from the paper, she held it out for him to taste. He wouldn’t, so she ate it herself, smearing it playfully across her lips. Alejo laughed at this. He had a gorgeous laugh, very bright and boyish, and we all turned in surprise to hear it. Lifting up a finger loaded with pudding, he let it drip into his mouth, then burst into giggles.

I was delighted with the success of the project. Everyone was laughing and talking and I felt a deep sense of fulfillment watching them.

Sheila appeared at my right and said, “I’m going to take Alejo down to the rest room. He needs to go and he’s absolutely covered with pudding, so I’ll sluice him off.” Through a coating of chocolate, Alejo grinned up at me.

“Yes, I think it’s time we all clean up,” I replied.

Giving the children a five-minute warning before terminating the activity, I went over to Jeff and Miriam and suggested that once we had the worst of the mess off the children, they could take them outside for break time and I would volunteer to clean up the classroom. This met with approval and I was soon left alone with what appeared to be the aftermath of an explosion in a pudding factory.

There was such a mess that I never made it outside at all. I could hear Jeff’s voice filtering through the open window, as he supervised a game of Sharks and Mermaids, and it evoked far-off memories of my own childhood. The warm, dry summer heat, the light falling in across the floor, patterned by the cottonwood trees outside the window, the
sound of children’s voices all combined to lend a moment’s transcendence to the mundane tasks I was doing.

A good half hour passed before the kids came back inside and we resumed normal activities. As everyone was getting settled, I surveyed the classroom. “Where’re Sheila and Alejo?”

“I was just going to ask you the same thing,” Jeff replied.

I looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’d assumed they were in here helping you during the break. I thought maybe you’d sent them down to the janitor’s room to get something.”

“What? They weren’t outside with you?”

Jeff shook his head.

“Miriam?” I called. “Have you seen Sheila and Alejo? Weren’t they with you outside?”

Surprise crossed Miriam’s face. “I thought they were with you.”

The meaning of that expression of one’s blood running like ice came home to me just then, as a physical sensation of cold flowing down through my body suffused me.

“When did you last see her?” Jeff asked me.

“Ages ago. She took Alejo down to the toilets. I was in here all along and I just
assumed
…”

I tried to quell the sense of rising panic I felt, as I went out into the hallway and down to the rest rooms. Bursting into the girls’, I slammed open the doors to the stalls and looked around the corner
where the trash bins were kept. Then I went next door to the boys’ and did the same. Nothing and no one.

Back in the classroom, Jeff and I huddled in the back by the sink, discussing what to do next, while Miriam attempted to keep the children occupied.

“What’s happened? Where could they have gone?” Jeff asked.

“I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on. Sheila was fine when she came in this morning.”

“Is she a runner?” Jeff asked.

“No. I don’t think so,” I replied. “Well, I don’t know. She wasn’t when she was six.”

“That’s a long time ago,” he said acridly.

“But why would she go? She wasn’t unhappy, not that I could see. She was delightful this morning, in very good humor.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff blackly. “The way suicides are, once they’ve made their minds up.”

Silence then, as we regarded one another.

“But why’s she taken Alejo?” he asked. “There’s the dangerous question.”

The moment Jeff voiced it, I knew the answer. “She was worried about Alejo, about the possibility that his parents might send him back to South America.”

“Oh, God. So she’s done a bunk with him, you think?” Jeff asked.

A pause.

“Why didn’t you tell me this
was
a possibility, Hayden? We should have been alerted that she was capable of this.”

“I didn’t think it
was
a possibility, no more than I would think it was a possibility that you would take one of the kids and go,” I hissed back in an angry whisper.

“Well, you seem convinced enough of the reason now. You had no trouble coming up with that; so you must have known there was the possibility she might act on it.”

“I
didn’t.
Would I act on it? Would you act on it? We were both upset by the Banks-Smiths’ reaction the other night; why not us? Why should I have suspected Sheila?” I cried.

Jeff looked at me darkly.

For all the times I had found Jeff able to keep his humor in adversity, on this occasion he couldn’t. He was genuinely angry with me, acting as if I had kept great secrets from him about Sheila’s mental stability. Because I hadn’t, because this was coming as a big surprise to me too, I felt hurt and angry, as well. This did nothing to help our situation, because for the first fifteen minutes of the crisis, neither of us was thinking straight.

Jeff was right in saying that I was convinced that Sheila had run away with Alejo. While it had never occurred to me beforehand that Sheila might try such a thing, once it had happened, everything fell clearly into place for me. She was desperate, and desperate measures were called for. The first logical step was to search the school thoroughly; so once Jeff and I had gotten over the initial stages of accusing one another, we helped settle Miriam on
her own with the kids and then divided up the school building between us.

I went methodically through every room, cupboard and storage area that we had a key for and some that we didn’t. My hope was that even if Sheila was serious about taking Alejo away, she would try hiding in the school until we were all gone, so I tried to leave no area unchecked. When nothing turned up, I rejoined Jeff and we went outside to scour the playground and the park area across the road. Nervously, I kept checking my watch. I dreaded the moment when the minibuses and taxi arrived to take the children home, because we would then have to acknowledge to the driver who transported Alejo that we had no Alejo to transport. Jeff had settled down, but he was still prickly. Consequently, I kept my feelings to myself.

Unfortunately, search as we did, there was no trace of them. Twelve-thirty came and Miriam brought the children out front. When we saw the taxi pull in to take Alejo home, we had to acknowledge defeat. I explained nothing to the driver, just said that Alejo wouldn’t be coming with him, which he accepted grumpily as an annoying last-minute change to his routine. Meanwhile, Jeff went inside to do the unwelcome task of phoning Dr. Rosenthal and Alejo’s parents.

Miriam, who had other commitments after lunch, went home, leaving Jeff and me alone, regarding one another.

“Oh, God,” Jeff muttered. “Why did it have to
end like this? We were doing so well. This has been such a super experience. Why did it have to end like this?”

Dr. Rosenthal was next on the scene. When his gigantic frame appeared in the classroom door, the seriousness of the situation really came home to me. He had never visited our site. He’d followed the program closely, because Jeff and I had to submit weekly reports, and he had sat in on several parent conferences, but otherwise, this had been our project. Seeing him here now gave me a sudden sense of a stern parent come to sort out his children’s mischief. Jeff and I were so much younger than anyone else at the clinic, so much less experienced that, in contrast to the other psychiatrists’ suit-and-tie formality, we’d always seemed like kids. I’d gotten a bit of a kick out of it on other occasions, but now, seeing this tall man in his elegant dark suit and graying hair, all I could think of was what a stupid little twit I was.

He crossed the classroom to where Jeff and I were at the table and lowered himself into one of the small schoolroom chairs. “Did you know this girl was a risk?” he asked me.

Normally I’m quite cool under pressure, but just then I wasn’t. It was past lunchtime and I was hungry. I was worried and I was worn down by the guilty suspicion that this might all be my fault. Dr. Rosenthal’s question, although straightforwardly put, sounded all too much like those last ninety minutes of Jeff’s questioning. Consequently, I started to cry.