The Tiger's Child (18 page)

This unsettled Jeff, who squirmed and turned away, but with surprising gentleness, Dr. Rosenthal rose and came around to my side of the table. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come right.”

I’m glad he thought so.

Alejo’s father arrived at one-thirty. “What’s this? What’s going on? Who is this girl?” he asked. Like Jeff, his worry took the form of anger. He waved a fist threateningly at us. “Why weren’t you watching?”

Dr. Rosenthal relieved Jeff and me of the necessity of explaining. “I understand you’re contemplating returning Alejo to Colombia,” he said to Mr. Banks-Smith.

This comment caught him completely off guard. He looked blankly at Dr. Rosenthal.

“Yes?” Dr. Rosenthal persisted.

“Well …” Mr. Banks-Smith foundered a moment, glancing back and forth among the three of us. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“The girl who has gone off with Alejo, she’s formed a very close attachment to him. She was worried he might be returned to the orphanage.”

Mr. Banks-Smith dropped his eyes to the floor.

“I don’t think Alejo is in any danger,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “From my staff’s experience of her, she’s a sensible, streetwise girl. So what I think we need to do is respond to this in a calm, rational manner. It’s a very unfortunate thing to have happened, but I’m sure it will turn out all right.”

I could have kissed Dr. Rosenthal just then, so grateful was I for his supportive approach. For the
first time since it had started, I began to feel perhaps things weren’t so bad.

There was one last thorough search of the school and its environs. Dr. Rosenthal contacted the school caretaker, who supplied keys to the areas of the school that we had not been able to get into; consequently, we were able to search every nook and cranny. Unfortunately, there was not a single clue as to their disappearance.

At four, we transferred back to the clinic. Dr. Banks-Smith met us there. Dr. Rosenthal had managed to dispel Mr. Banks-Smith’s anger so successfully that he had become a supportive member of the search team at the school. Now his wife joined in the conversation in the conference room, giving us helpful suggestions on Alejo’s anticipated behavior in this situation. Sheila’s father had been contacted at his work and we all awaited his arrival.

Dr. Rosenthal came over to me as we milled about in the clinic corridor with our coffee cups while waiting for Mr. Renstad. “Come in my office a moment, please,” he said.

In contrast to the bright lights and nervous bustle in the area around the conference room, Dr. Rosenthal’s unlit office was dim and silent. As director, he commanded the biggest office, a room of late-Victorian elegance with a mahogany fireplace and corniced ceilings. There was a thick carpet on the floor and wonderfully squishy leather chairs—womb chairs, Jeff called them, for their propensity to envelop the sitter in comforting
softness—as well as the obligatory psychiatrist’s couch.

“Tell me more about this girl,” Dr. Rosenthal asked me. “What’s her background?”

“She’s a former student of mine,” I said. I’d already given a brief summary of Sheila’s relationship to me in the conference room, but now I went into detail. I told him of her deprived background and her history of abandonment and abuse.

Nodding, Dr. Rosenthal reached across his desk and turned on a cassette recorder that was sitting on the window ledge. Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 began. He cocked his head and listened to it. The somber first notes of the allegro sounded foreboding to me.

“It’s quite understandable, isn’t it?” Dr. Rosenthal said at last. “Here’s a child who was, herself, abandoned by her mother. She identifies with the boy, who was abandoned in Colombia. He’s been rescued, but now he’s about to be abandoned again.”

I nodded.

He looked over at me. “It says a great deal for her, really. She’s a good girl at heart.”

“I think … if I’m reading my experiences lately with Sheila right … that there may be even deeper identification. You see, Sheila and I … well, I’ve gotten mixed up in the abandonment issue. I think she sees me in the same role as Alejo’s parents, that I helped lift her out of her former life by bringing her into my classroom, accustoming her to a more stable environment, more reliable adult
relationships, and then, when the school year ended …”

There was a deep silence. The music, which should have filled it, emphasized it.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It’s hard for me to come to terms with the fact that what I thought of as such a good experience she’s interpreted as abandonment … She doesn’t even remember being abandoned by her mother, but she remembers my doing it. And now this.”

“Ah,” said Dr. Rosenthal and he said no more. Leaning back in his chair, he looked up at the patterned design on the ceiling. The music washed over us.

Sheila’s father was in the conference room when I came out of Dr. Rosenthal’s office. He had been called over from work and was wearing filthy jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. His metal-toed boots clicked against the legs of his chair and the conference table. The moment I saw him, I knew having him present was a mistake. His scruffy appearance was off-putting, but worse was his mouth. I’d tried to downplay the more lurid aspects of Sheila’s childhood, feeling that the things she had done when she was five or six were hardly to be held against her at fourteen. Without anchoring it to this early time, Mr. Renstad readily acknowledged that Sheila had been in trouble with the police. I challenged him and he admitted that, no, she hadn’t been in trouble since being in my class, almost a decade earlier, but then he added that she
had caused serious problems in her last foster home, because she’d kept running away, and had eventually been sent to a secure children’s home. By the time he finished talking, the Banks-Smiths were wild-eyed and they insisted the police be called in.

At six forty-five, two police officers arrived. One was a big, burly fellow named Durante, the other a woman with short blond hair and a steel glint in her eye named Metherson. Still sitting around the conference table in the clinic were Dr. Rosenthal, Sheila’s father, the Banks-Smiths and Jeff and I, and once again, Jeff and I recounted our tale. I was numb by then, my emotions having run on high for too long, so I just related it as it had happened and did not try to give meaning to any particular aspect. Afterward, Officer Durante stayed in the conference room with the others, while Officer Metherson, Jeff and I went into our office to review Alejo’s file and discuss the summer program in more depth. We returned to the conference room to discover someone had ordered sandwiches from the deli on Nineteenth Street. Neither Jeff nor I had had lunch, so we fell upon them like dogs.

Time ground down, nearly to a halt. The police officers had come and then left, but we all remained, not knowing quite what else to do. In contrast to the hectic urgency of the afternoon and early evening, there was nothing left but to wait. And eat. Another order was sent out to the deli and someone popped across the street to the doughnut
shop and brought in a dozen doughnuts. Dr. Rosenthal made fresh coffee and Jeff raided the pop machine. After not eating for the whole course of the working day, I easily overate while sitting there with nothing else to do. This only contributed to the murky, depressed sense of lethargy I felt.

On my way back from the rest room about 9 p.m., I met Mr. Renstad loitering around the front door of the clinic. He wanted to go home; I suspect he had wanted to go home from practically the moment he had arrived, but by now there was an urgency to his restlessness.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said wearily. “Don’t help none staying in this place. She’s not going to come here.”

I nodded.

“We just got to wait her out, that’s all. That’s all you can do with Sheila.”

“How often has this happened before?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Often enough.”

“Where does she go?”

He shrugged again. “She don’t tell me and I don’t ask. She’s got her mother in her. Does what she wants, when she wants, how she wants, and I just sit home hoping it don’t cause trouble.”

“She
hasn’t
been in trouble with the police recently, has she?” I asked, almost dreading his answer.

He shook his head. “No.”

There was a small silence between us. I glanced out through the double doors at the summer twilight. “Could you tell me a little about these
occasions when Sheila was in foster care? It’s something she hasn’t talked much to me about. How many has she been in?”

Mr. Renstad puffed out his cheeks and expelled the breath. “Quite a few. I don’t know. Ten, maybe?”

“
Ten
?” I said in surprise. I had thought it’d been three or four. “On what occasions? When you were … away?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Them times I was in Marysville. And I was down at the state hospital. Down twice, getting dried out. You know.” He gave an embarrassed smile.

“But it was
ten
times in, what? Six, seven years?”

“She just didn’t settle. She was okay the first time. She was, like, eight, maybe, when she went in the first foster home. And they seemed real good. They used to bring her down to see me. That’s when I was in Marysville and they used to bring her down every month for a while, then all of a sudden, it stopped. Turns out he was fucking her, the old man. Showing this real good face to me and then fucking my kid at night.”

I searched his face.

“She didn’t say nothing about it, but she ran away from there. Actually, she never has said, but the guy got done for fucking the next kid they put in with him, so I reckon that’s what he was doing to my kid too.”

Oh, God, I was thinking, did this never stop?

“He made a runner out of her, that guy. She never run before that, but now anytime you get
mad at her, she goes. And just like a hare she is. They keep putting her in different places, but nothing stops her. Got her mother’s blood, I tell them. If she wants to go, she’s gone, and no one the likes of who’s in there,” he said, gesturing toward the conference room, “is going to find her.”

N
othing came of all our waiting, and at last we had to give up and go home, leaving the affair to the police. Once home, I couldn’t sleep. Around and around in my head went all the aspects of my relationship with Sheila. It had been too easy to think that what I had done with her at six had been enough, that I had made a difference. Now sleepless in the gloom of night, it became too easy to think I had made no difference at all.

The next day was Saturday. I didn’t go back into the clinic, as there was little we could do from there anyway, but I remained close at hand for the phone. Allan came over for a little while, but he had come with the intention of our going upstate for the afternoon to nose around in the small antique and secondhand places that dotted the sleepy rural communities of the corn belt. When I
explained what had happened, he was astonished and remarked several times about never having known anyone before who got herself involved in such things as I seemed to get into. Although sympathetic, he was a bit disconcerted. I also suspect that he didn’t want to spend such a bright summer Saturday afternoon in the city. As a consequence, Allan soon left and I spent the rest of the day on my own.

The phone rang a lot. Dr. Rosenthal rang three times to catch me up on things. Officer Metherson phoned once, as did Dr. Freeman, Alejo’s psychiatrist from the clinic. Jeff rang twice. And I telephoned Mr. Renstad late in the afternoon to see if he had heard anything. The police were at his house when I called, so I had another opportunity to talk to Officer Metherson. There was still no news.

Making myself supper, I took it in front of the TV. That not holding my interest, I reread the newspaper and did the crossword. Restless, I toyed with the idea of going swimming at the health club. I could have used some exercise at that point and the thought of a hard workout and a soak in the Jacuzzi really appealed to me, but in the end I decided against it. Gathering my dishes up, I took them to the kitchen to wash them.

A knock at the door.

Sheila? The thought shot through my mind like a brightly sent arrow, lifting my spirits as it went. “Just a minute,” I called, lifting my hands from the soapy water and drying them. The knock came again, louder, more insistent. I hurried to open it.

Jeff.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Now there’s a friendly greeting, if ever I heard one,” he replied and came on in. He glanced around. “So, this is
chez
Hayden, is it? I like your paneling there.”

“
What
are you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d come over. You’re by the phone, I’m by the phone. We might as well be by the phone together. You play chess? I’ve got my chessboard along. Could do Trivial Pursuit, but it isn’t much good with two people. But I’m wicked at Trivial Pursuit,” he said and grinned.

“I just bet you are.”

He scanned my bookshelves. “So where’s this book you’ve written?”

“It’s not published yet. Won’t be out till next April, but that’s the manuscript over there.” I pointed.

Jeff went over and picked it up, while I returned to the kitchen to drain the sink and finish cleaning up. A few minutes passed before Jeff wandered into the kitchen, the pages of the manuscript in his hands.

“What’s this, Hayden?”

“What?”

“Right here, Chapter One, page one. ‘The article was a small one, just a few paragraphs stuck on page six under the comics. It told of a six-year-old girl who had abducted a neighborhood child.’” He looked up. “Is this Sheila?”

A sense of horror came over me.

He continued reading. “‘… she had taken the three-year-old boy, tied him to a tree in a nearby woodlot and burned him. The boy was currently in a local hospital in critical condition.’” Jeff paused to regard me. “You never told us about this.”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“Didn’t
think
of it, Hayden? She’s done this before and you didn’t think of it?”

That wasn’t quite the truth. I had thought of it, at great length, in fact, particularly during the night when I’d been lying awake, but I wasn’t quite sure how it fit in. It sounded so horrible, that incident. It
was
horrible. Yet, did it have any bearing on what she was doing now? I doubted it. As with inadmissible evidence in a trial, to have mentioned it at this stage would only have prejudiced people without contributing anything useful. I said this to Jeff.

He raised an eyebrow. “Be careful. You’re setting yourself up as judge and jury in this thing.”

“So you think it needs to be brought out?” I asked.

“Well, to Dr. Rosenthal, at least. I mean, this was hardly a small incident, was it? All the things you’ve told me about her, you never gave me the impression she was up to this kind of thing as a child. Sounds like she almost killed the kid.”

“It was a one-off. A cry for help. She never did anything else like it,” I replied. That I felt was the truth, although this had been the one unspoken area between Sheila and me. When she was in my classroom we’d talked about every other aspect of her life, including her abandonment, her abuse and
her difficulties adjusting to our expectations, but we had never once touched on that abduction. I’d thought of it often enough during those five months she was in my class, but I had never pressed the matter. I wasn’t a trained psychologist at that point in my career and I didn’t feel it was my place to press the issue, if Sheila showed no willingness to discuss it. And the fact was, she never did.

Jeff was uncomfortable with this new knowledge. “She
could
do something,” he kept saying, as if it weren’t true that we all “could do something” if the circumstances were right. Then came the lawsuit side of the matter. “They could sue us, if something happened and we hadn’t told about this.”

“They could sue us anyway, if they got the urge, just because we let Sheila in the summer program. She’s been a risk all along,” I replied. “But for pity’s sake, she was a little child when she did these things. I mean, when I was six, I used to steal Hershey’s bars from the grocery store. Does that make me a security risk now? Of course not. Because when I was old enough to know better, people expected me not to do it and treated me as someone who wouldn’t.”

“This is rather different from Hershey’s bars, Hayden.”

“No, the point is she shouldn’t be treated like a criminal now for something she did when she was a very little girl.”

Jeff shook his head. “No, Hayden, the point is that this girl already has a history of abducting little
boys and harming them, and if we don’t tell somebody we know that, we’re talking big trouble here.”

In the end, Jeff won the argument and we phoned Dr. Rosenthal. He listened solemnly. No, please, not the police, okay? I’d asked, but Dr. Rosenthal gently made all the same points Jeff had. Consequently, half an hour later, Officer Durante was sitting at my kitchen table with Jeff and me.

By the time everyone had gone home, I was well and truly depressed. What was it with this girl? She had so much to offer, so much promise, yet at every turn things went wrong. Running myself a hot bath, I tried to soak the problems away.

The door again. Glancing at my bedside clock, I saw it was almost eleven-thirty. Officer Durante had said he was going to check up the details of the abduction in Marysville and if he had any questions, he’d come back to me. Wearily climbing out of bed and pulling on my robe, I went to the door. Didn’t this guy ever call it quits?

It was Sheila. Sheila and Alejo standing in the dim light of the apartment-building hallway. “Can we come in?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said in surprise. “Yes, come in.” I stood aside to let them pass.

Sheila flopped down on my sofa, with Alejo dropping down beside her. He looked as if he had recently been crying. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed. Sheila just looked tired.

“Where have you been? Do you know everybody’s looking for you?” I asked. “Do you realize the police are involved?”

Sheila grimaced. “Could you make us something to eat? We’re so hungry.”

I made them tuna-fish sandwiches, and when they’d devoured those, they moved on to peanut butter and toast. All the time, I was trying to puzzle out how to handle this situation. It didn’t seem inconceivable to me that Sheila might flee if I was too quick about telling everyone else she was here, but knowing how desperate Alejo’s parents were, I was anxious to let them know he was safe.

Alejo answered the matter for me. I turned from putting the peanut butter away to find him sound asleep, face down on the table.

“Come on, lovey,” I said and reached down to pick him up. Carrying him into my bedroom, I removed his shoes and slipped him under the comforter. He never really woke up.

Back out in the kitchen, Sheila, sitting slouched down in a chair at the table, looked in about the same shape as Alejo. She braced her head with one hand, her fingers shielding her eyes from my view.

“I’m going to have to call and tell them you’re here,” I said.

“I know,” she murmured wearily.

“Why did you do it? We were so worried, Sheila.”

Looking up at me, her face crumpled. “Don’t be mad at me. Just do with me like you did with him, okay? Just say, ‘Come on, lovey,’ and let me know you’re glad to have me back.”

By the time Alejo’s parents arrived, both Alejo and Sheila were asleep. I’d moved Alejo out to the sofa, because he was so far gone that lights and noise scarcely made him stir, and I put Sheila to bed in my bedroom. Alejo’s parents roused him briefly with hugs and kisses, but he was asleep again before they had him in the car.

Officer Durante, just going off his evening shift, stopped by on his way home. I showed him the bedroom and he stood in the doorway, watching Sheila asleep in the darkened room. “Silly girl,” he murmured and turned back into the living room.

“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.

“Depends if the parents press charges or not. Depends what everyone does.”

“Could it just end here?”

He shrugged affably. “Possibly.” He met my eyes. “Is she really such an okay kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, tell her to smarten up.”