Read The Tiger's Child Online

Authors: Torey Hayden

The Tiger's Child (20 page)

“Yes, it was. I remember it. And we were on the road. I can remember the lights going by, the streetlights, and then dark, like this. You pulled over to the side of the road and told me to open the car door and get out.”

“That wasn’t me, Sheila.”

“It was, ’cause I can remember your car. That little red one. You called it Bingo. You used to take us all in it and we’d sing that song, B-I-N-G-O, for the little red car.”

I smiled. “Yeah, I remember the car, because it was my first one. But I only took you kids out in it two or three times, and never at night.”

“It was at night,” she insisted. “We were all sitting in back. I had the door against me on one side, and on the other, I was next to … Jamie? No, there wasn’t a Jamie, was there? Billy? No. Well, I can’t remember his name, but he was next to me and we were fooling around, making noises. Fart noises, I think. And you said to shut up. Shut up or you were going to stop the car and make us get out. We were just fooling around, but you got really angry and I got scared. I shut up. That’s what made me so upset all these years, Torey, because
I
shut up. But Jamie didn’t, he made this other big fart noise and you veered the car over to the side of the road. I remember that really clearly, because there was such a big jerk we all screamed. And you said, ‘Get out.’ I was crying by then. I knew it wasn’t me, but you were so angry. I was scared to say it wasn’t and
I could tell I had to get out. And then you just drove off.” She took a deep breath. “I mean, like,
that’s
why it’s been so hard for me to settle down since you got back. You kept saying ‘Remember this? Remember that?’ and if I tried to remember any of what happened then, all that came into my head was that you left me. You got me used to thinking I was special and then you just pushed me out.”

Horrified, I looked over at her. “Sheila, that
wasn’t
me!”

“It was you, because I remember your car.”

“It was
not
me. That was your mother. And it wasn’t Jamie sitting next to you, it was Jimmie, your brother. You’ve confused me with her.”

Sheila’s expression was one of utter bewilderment. “It was you. You were the one who left me. I don’t even remember my mother.”

Seeing a rest stop on the side of the road, I pulled my car in. There were bright overhead lights, which in contrast to the darkness in the car threw everything in sharp relief and I saw a look of genuine terror run across Sheila’s features. Caught as she was between confused worlds of memory, I think she half expected me to tell her to get out now, so I hurriedly turned the engine off. The fact was, the conversation we were having was too powerful to carry on and still drive safely. I realized this needed my whole attention.

“Sheila, I never had you in my car at night. You were in Chad’s car with me after the hearing and in my red car maybe two or three times when we had
class outings, but otherwise, you were never in my car.”

She sat as if paralyzed. Gazing straight ahead, her eyes unfocused, she remained stock-still for several moments, then slowly shook her head in a faint, confused fashion. “I
remember
it,” she said softly, her voice perplexed. “Telling me to get out. Reaching back and opening the door. I was so scared. I was crying and so scared and I wouldn’t do it. I could hear the cars going by and I was just crying and crying and no one came to get me.”

“That wasn’t me,” I said gently.

“I was so sure it was,” she replied, her voice going way up into a whimper. Tears came over her cheeks. Putting her hands up to cover her face, she bent forward. “No, oh no,” she cried in dismay.

Leaning across the space between the seats, I took her in my arms and held her close against me. “That’s because I left you too, didn’t I? I’m sorry, lovey. I never realized how much it must have hurt.”

Chapter 25

I
n the end, the only consequence to come out of Alejo’s abduction was the general feeling of Dr. Rosenthal and Alejo’s parents that it would be better if Sheila did not return to work at the summer program. This was understandable and we all agreed. We were in our last week anyhow, so it didn’t make much difference.

Because she didn’t come back to the program, I didn’t get a chance to see Sheila until the following Wednesday evening. She phoned me that afternoon at the clinic and asked if she could come over to my apartment. She was sounding cheerful but rather lonely, so I agreed to let her make me her famous tuna-fish-and-mushroom soup combo for supper. I arrived home to find her sitting outside on the doorstep of the apartment building, a brown paper bag full of groceries on her lap.

“You shouldn’t have spent your money,” I said. “I probably have all the ingredients.”

“That’s okay. I wanted to pay you back for Saturday night. And Sunday.” Rising from the step, she followed me into the building and up the stairs to my apartment.

Sheila was ebullient that evening. The contrast between the silent, sullen teenager I’d first encountered in May and this eager, chatty girl was marked, and it was easy to be with her; indeed, to want to be with her. However, there was an undercurrent to her cheerfulness, something poignant that made Sheila seem terribly vulnerable to me.

We had much that needed talking about. The realization on Sunday night that Sheila had confused me with her mother and my departure with her initial abandonment had shocked me deeply, as, I suspect, it did her, and both of us were so overwhelmed with emotion that we were not capable of discussing it in any depth then. However, I definitely did want to discuss the matter with her. The insights from that revelation were causing me to see the whole situation with new eyes.

The problem was, the topic did not raise itself naturally that evening. Perhaps we were still too dazed by the discovery to be ready to discuss it. I don’t know. Whatever, our conversation skirted around the edges of it.

Sheila repeatedly got off on complete tangents. She was
very
chatty and for the first time seemed keen to unleash the full extent of her brain power, describing to me the most extraordinary projects
she had in mind. She was quite good with computers, for example, and told me at some length about working on programs on the school computer. Still keen on Roman history and Caesar, she had come up with the idea of trying to develop an extension to a program on one of the computers that would allow the machine to construct 3D models of Roman buildings that you could walk through. Knowing what school computers were like, I couldn’t imagine what kind of program she might be thinking of modifying, but it was fascinating listening to her talk.

And so the evening passed pleasantly, as friend to friend, rather than teacher to student or therapist to client, and perhaps that’s how it should have been. It was only toward the very end, when it was getting late and I knew I was going to have to send her home or I wouldn’t be worth anything at work the next day, that Sheila touched briefly on matters at hand. She had grown rather melancholy toward the end of the visit. Deep down, I think she had been angling for an invitation to spend the night and was sad that this wasn’t forthcoming and she’d have to go home.

“You know what?” she said, as I was rising to collect the odds and ends we had scattered around the living room and putting them away. “I don’t even remember my mother. My mind is, like, absolutely blank. I’ve never even seen a picture of her. Dad hasn’t got any. So she could look like anyone.”

A silence came, gently fringed with the clinking of the mugs as I picked them up.

“I look when I go in crowds. I look at the different faces and think, Are you my mother? I wouldn’t know. And she wouldn’t know me. And that, like, strikes me as
so
weird. I mean, think of it, Torey. This woman carried me inside her. She made me. She
created
me and half of what I am is from her, yet I wouldn’t even recognize her on the street.”

Sheila remained in the armchair, the table lamp bathing her in a golden tungsten glow. I carried the dishes out to the sink and came back. All the time, Sheila kept her eyes on me. “Why do you suppose she left me?” she asked.

In the glow of the lamplight, I could see tears in her eyes. They didn’t fall, but they shimmered, sparkling faintly as she moved her head.

I paused a moment to think of the best answer. Before I could say anything, she spoke again. “Tor? Do you think it’s ever going to come right for me?”

“Do you mean, are you ever going to find your mother?”

She shrugged. “No, not necessarily. Just is it ever going to be all right? Do you think? Am I ever going to have a chance just to be normal?”

Slowly, I nodded. “Yes, I think so. It’s going to mean coming to terms with things. Accepting that an appalling thing happened to you when your mother left you … two appalling things, because I left you too. I didn’t mean to, or at least I didn’t mean for it to feel like that’s what I was doing, but I can see now that it did. And it means accepting that perhaps they both had to happen, that
circumstances wouldn’t allow otherwise, but that they weren’t your fault. They happened to you, but you didn’t cause them. And finally, you have to forgive and let go.”

“Do you think I can do that?”

I nodded. “Yes. It’ll take sinew, but then you always have been a tiger.”

I didn’t see Sheila for the rest of that week. We were busy with the final aspects of the summer program, with parent conferences and clinic evaluations. Then came the weekend and Allan and I had a flying trip out of town to the ballet planned. It wasn’t until the following Wednesday that I realized how long it had been since I’d heard from Sheila and tried to phone. There was no answer.

I’m not particularly good at contacting people. I don’t enjoy using the telephone and procrastinate phoning people for an embarrassing amount of time for just that reason. Most of my friends, aware of this bad habit, were accustomed to maintaining the lion’s share of keeping in touch. So it had usually been with Sheila. She had almost always telephoned me. When it became my responsibility, another three or four days slid by before it occurred to me to try her again. Again, there was no answer. I did begin to wonder at this point, simply because since we had been reunited in May, two full weeks had never gone by without my hearing from her.

No answer. No answer. No answer. Then, on the Thursday three weeks after the night Sheila had
made dinner for me, I tried her house again. This time a recorded message came back: the line had been disconnected.

My first thought was that Mr. Renstad had failed to pay his phone bill. This was certainly within the realms of possibility, knowing him. Nonetheless, I felt disconcerted. So, after work, I drove down to Broadview to investigate for myself.

Given the distance and the traffic, I didn’t get to Sheila’s house until after eight. The street was already in evening shadows, as I pulled the car up in front of the beige duplex. In the left-hand unit where another family lived, there were lights and the sounds of a television playing. In the Renstads’s unit, there was only darkness.

I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still nothing. Going around to the side of the house to see if there was a second door, I tried that. Obviously, they weren’t home. Coming around to the other side, I rose up on tiptoe and attempted to peer in through the window.

“Hey, what are you doing there?” a voice called.

Startled, I pulled back and looked over to see a man sticking his head out from the door of the other unit in the duplex. “Oh, hi,” I said. “Do you know where these people are? No one seems to be home.”

“You’re not going to find them here,” he replied. “They moved out about three weeks ago.”

“Moved out?” I said in surprise.

“Yup.”

“Where’d they go? Do you know?”

“Nope. No idea. Sorry.” Then he shut the door and disappeared inside.

Utterly overcome, I just stood there on the sidewalk beside the house and stared at it. Moved? Sheila had said absolutely nothing about moving to me. And Mr. Renstad had given us no indication when we had seen him that weekend. He had a steady job, he had his baseball team. Why would they move? And where?

Sheila and her father had disappeared. I couldn’t believe it. I ran through the whole gamut of emotions over the weeks that followed: shock, anger, dismay, regret, sadness. Very definitely sadness. It had taken me the better part of three months to re-form a relationship with Sheila, then it all evaporated.

I simply couldn’t believe it. Over and over again I discussed the whole affair with Jeff and tried to puzzle out where they might have gone and what signs I had missed that were pointing to their leaving. Together, we endeavored to find out where they had disappeared to. This was much harder than I had hoped. We didn’t have any legal reasons for finding Sheila or her father, so straight-forward inquiry did not open many doors. I was reluctant to lie or otherwise falsify my intentions, so this left me with nothing more to fall back on than deductive reasoning, persistence and good luck. The first two I probably had enough of, but the third I simply had to wait for.

As much as I hated to consider it, the first thought to come to mind was that Mr. Renstad had
committed a new offense and was back in prison. I couldn’t find anyone who would willingly confirm this, given privacy laws. Chad seemed my only chance when I ran up against a blank wall, so I called him and asked if he could find out. A stickler for maintaining client confidentiality, he was reluctant to do much, but he did confirm that Mr. Renstad was not on his firm’s client list. This seemed to decrease the chances that he was in the penitentiary again.

Jeff suggested that perhaps they had simply fled, from bills or maybe some dodgy loan shark or the like. If we were lucky, he said, perhaps they were still in the city and it would just be a matter of waiting for Sheila to contact me. That, I suspected, was what it was going to boil down to anyway—waiting for Sheila. She knew where I was, and unlike the previous occasions when we’d lost contact, she was now old enough to initiate the process of finding me.

Anyhow, that was the end of it. Sheila, once more, was gone.

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