Read The Tiger's Child Online

Authors: Torey Hayden

The Tiger's Child (5 page)

Chapter 8

S
heila was three months short of her fourteenth birthday when I finally located her. I hadn’t seen her in seven years—half her lifetime past—and other than the poem I’d received through the mail two years earlier, I hadn’t heard from her in five. I found her back with her father, living in an outlying suburb of Broadview. After a telephone conversation with her father, I asked if I could visit.

They were living in a duplex, a brown-colored building with peeling paint, in a run-down area where the yards were littered with car bodies and rusting appliances; however, compared to Sheila’s home in the migrant camp, this was luxurious.

I knocked at the door. A long moment passed with no sound beyond the door and I found to my surprise that my knees were shaky. All the ghosts of long ago came crowding in around me as I
waited on the doorstep and I could hear them so clearly. A child’s laughter echoed, shouting, squealing, the sounds of a classroom, and then the dark, blowy silence I remembered experiencing as I had stood on the doorstep of Sheila’s tar-paper shack in the migrant camp. Then, back to the present. Footsteps came toward the door and it opened.

I don’t think I would have recognized Sheila’s father if I hadn’t assumed it would be he opening the door. He had changed dramatically in seven years. The dumpy, overweight boozer I recollected was not there. Instead, the man opening the door was slim and athletic-looking and, most startling to me,
young.
I had been in my early twenties when I had last seen him and I had always regarded him as being in my parents’ generation. Now, with shock, I realized he was, in fact, not much older than I was.

“Mr. Renstad?” I asked tentatively.

He nodded.

“I’m Torey Hayden.”

He smiled in a genuinely welcoming fashion and held the door open. “Come in. Sheila’s not here at the moment. She’s just run over to the store for some milk, but she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He opened the door to let me into the living room. It was small, with a television, a well-worn brown sofa and two old-fashioned armchairs. Indeed, the whole room had a sort of brownish quality to it, but it was comfortable.

Sudden shyness struck us both. All these years I had pondered this moment and now that it was
here, I didn’t know quite what to say. He obviously felt just as uncertain.

After a moment, he snatched a photograph from the top of the television. “Here, you want to see this? These are my boys.”

It was the photo of a baseball team, the boys appearing to be about ten or eleven. They were posed in two rows, the first kneeling, the others behind. Mr. Renstad was on the left of the back row.

“I been coaching a year now,” he said, moving beside me to look at the picture. “See that kid? His name is Juma Washington and you listen out for that name, because he’s going to be great someday. Like Hank Aaron, that kid. And it was me that taught him to hit. Wouldn’t do nothing for us when he first came. Was a wild, jazzy kid. And now he’s gonna make the major leagues. You watch and see. I know he’s gonna make it big.”

“That’s super.”

He looked at me. “I’m clean now, you know. Sheila tell you that? No more booze or stuff. I been clean eighteen months now and now it’s me helping them.”

“I’m pleased,” I said.

“I mean it. I’m not having no trouble at all anymore, and now I got these boys. We won four games already this season. Didn’t win no games at all before I took ’em over. Were wild kids, crazy as monkeys. But we’re making it big now. Got Juma. Got a couple of other good ones too. Here, let me show you.” He took the photograph. “Him, that’s
Salim. And him, Luis. You ought to see ’em play. Can you come down some Saturday?”

Just then the door banged and there stood Sheila.

Sheila?

Who stood there was a gangly adolescent with—honest to God—orange hair. Not strawberry blond, not red. Orange, like a road cone. It was longish, and permed into frizzy ringlets, a Cubs baseball cap pulled down over the top of it.

Would I have known this was Sheila if I had encountered her on the street? She’d grown taller than I’d expected. She’d been such a tiny, malnourished thing when I’d had her, that I had always kept her small in my mind, but here she was, a good five feet four or so and only thirteen. Adolescence hadn’t worked its full magic with her yet, however. She was gangly and still had the undeveloped figure of a child.

No question about whether or not she recognized me. On seeing me, she stopped abruptly, as if seeing a most unexpected sight. Her cheeks colored. “Hi,” she said and smiled shyly. That smile did it. Her features grew familiar instantaneously.

“Hi.”

All three of us were uncomfortably self-conscious. After anticipating this reunion for so long, I hadn’t expected to find myself at a loss for words, but that’s what happened. Sheila, equally thunderstruck, clung on to her half gallon of milk and stared at me. Only Mr. Renstad seemed able to find his voice. He went back to talking about his baseball
team; however, he never asked me to sit down, so we all continued standing there in the middle of the living room.

Sheila’s father just kept chattering. Several times he reassured me that he had given up drugs and alcohol and put his past behind him. This embarrassed me, making me feel as if he were interpreting my visit as checking up on him. He appeared to think Sheila and I had had much more contact with each other over the years than we’d had and so alluded to events that I knew nothing of. I felt it would be indelicate of me to inquire further at this point and thus said nothing, but from what I could make out, Sheila had been in foster care between the ages of eight and ten and then again for a while when she was eleven. They had been living together since his last parole, about eighteen months earlier.

Sheila said absolutely nothing. Like her father and me, she still stood in the middle of the living room, but she made no effort to join in the conversation. I stole glances at her, particularly at her dyed hair, because it was such an unusual color. Then at her clothes. When in my classroom, she had had one single outfit—a brown-striped boy’s T-shirt and a pair of denim overalls—which she had worn day in, day out until her father had finally accepted the dress Chad had bought for Sheila after the March hearing. Sheila didn’t look as if she was faring much better these days. She wore an enormously oversized white T-shirt with a ragged jeans jacket minus the arms layered over the top.
Underneath the T-shirt I assumed there was something besides underwear, as I could see what might be the fringed edge of cut-off jeans, but I wasn’t sure. Contemplating the outfit, I assumed this was fashion and not poverty showing.

Finally, when her father paused, I turned to her. “I passed a Dairy Queen coming over. Would you like to go get a sundae with me?”

Alone in the car with me, Sheila remained silent. It was by no means a hostile silence, but it was uncomfortable enough. I found myself wandering back to the very first day I had met Sheila. She had been silent then too, fiercely silent, breaking it only to announce with tigerish vehemence that I couldn’t make her talk. I kept calling back to mind that charismatic little girl I had known and trying to find her in this nervous adolescent. I was only too aware that I didn’t know this strangely clad, deerlike thing at all.

Pulling into the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, I looked over. “Remember when I used to take everybody over to the Dairy Queen and buy those boxes of Dilly bars? And how Peter always wanted something different? Never mattered what it was, he never wanted what everyone else was having.”

“Who’s Peter?”

“You remember. In our class. He used to always tell those awful jokes. The real groaners. Remember him?”

A pause. “Yeah … I think. He was Mexican, wasn’t he?”

“Well, actually, he was black.”

We chose our sundaes and then went out to sit at a picnic table in front. Sheila hunched over her ice cream in a manner that evoked memories of her early days in the class, when she would clutch her lunch tray up close to her, wary, like an animal, in case someone tried to take it away from her before she finished. She began to stir her sundae. The ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipping cream all went together in a gooey mess.

“So how’s school?” I asked.

“All right, I guess.”

“What courses are you taking?”

“Just the usual stuff.”

“Anything good?” I asked.

“No, not really.”

“Anything hard?”

“Not really,” she said and stirred more energetically. “Boring, most of it.”

Looking for some angle to get a conversation started, I resorted to an old trick I’d used in the classroom to stimulate a child to talk. “So what do you hate most about it?”

“Being youngest,” she said without hesitation. “I
hate
that.”

An accusation? She knew I had been responsible for moving her forward a grade. Was there a second meaning here? “What do you hate so much about it?”

She shrugged. “Just being youngest, that’s all. Littlest. I was always so much shorter than everyone else, right up until just this last year. And
always the baby of the class. Everyone picked on me.”

“Yes, I can see where that might cause problems,” I said, “but it was hard for us to know what was best for you.”

Another shrug. “I’m not complaining or anything. It’s just you asked.”

Then silence. I wondered whether to draw her out on this issue and chance getting into something heavy, which I didn’t feel would be appropriate just at the moment, or whether to soldier on searching for new topics of conversation. I felt amazingly uncomfortable. This wasn’t the Sheila I had expected at all.

More silence. Taking small bites of my sundae, I concentrated on the flavors.

Suddenly, Sheila expelled a noisy breath and shook her head. “This is so weird,” she said. “Like, I always think of you as someone I know well.” She looked over. “But really, we’re no more than strangers.”

That broke the ice, that admission. Truth was, we
were
strangers and neither of us had anticipated that. Once it was acknowledged, talking became far easier than it had been when we were pretending that the previous seven years hadn’t intervened.

Spontaneously, Sheila began to talk about her school. She didn’t like it. She was just finishing ninth grade and apparently doing well academically, but in listening to her I could tell virtually none of it had touched her. The authorities were getting after her about her hair and her clothes and her
general attitude, and the way she related it, I suspected she was dealing with it by playing truant.

Perversely, the only subject that appeared to be engaging her was Latin, a language I didn’t realize was still being taught in schools. The teacher, an elderly man, was unfashionably strict and held unenlightened views about girls’ academic abilities, but this combination had somehow goaded Sheila into working hard enough to “show him.” As a consequence, she talked animatedly about the class and the curriculum, even though she professed to hate it.

In turn, I told her what I had been up to over the interceding years, about my other classes of children since leaving the one we had shared, about my stints at graduate school, and about the change to the clinic in the city. And about writing the book.

“I have it in my car,” I said. “I want you to read it.”

“A
book
?” she said incredulously. “You wrote a book? I didn’t know you could write.”

I shrugged.

“It’s got
me
in it? Our class? God. Weird.” Then a slight smile. “That’s, like, mega-weird, you know?”

“You need to be prepared for the fact that it’s going to sound a little different to what really happened. Everybody’s gone on from there, so it wouldn’t really be right to invade people’s privacy. Consequently, I’ve had to change the names and things and put some events out of order, but still, I think you’ll recognize everything.”

“This is so weird. A
book
? About me?”

“Anyway, I want your thoughts on it,” I said. “It is your story, well, yours and mine, but you’re the big part in it. I wouldn’t want to include anything you didn’t think was right.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t matter much. I hardly remember a thing about it.”

“Oh, you will,” I said and grinned back.

She shrugged, her expression still benevolent. “You got to keep in mind, Torey, that I was nothing but a little kid then. That all happened more than half my life ago. Like, I’m going to love to read this, but if you want to know the truth, you could write anything you want. Honest, I remember nothing.”

Chapter 9

“G
od, did it really happen like this?” Sheila asked, a curiously amazed tone to her voice. It was the following Saturday. We were in her bedroom and she was curled up, the pages of the manuscript fanned out around her.

Smiling, I nodded.

“Wow, you were pretty brave to take me on, if I was like this.”

“A lot of people thought that at the time. I did a bit myself, sort of.”

“It wasn’t your choice, was it? They just said you got to take … me.” She looked back down at the sheaf of papers. “I think I might remember Anton now. I didn’t when you first mentioned him the other day, when we were at the Dairy Queen, but reading this kind of brings him back to mind.”

“You know what he’s doing now?” I asked.
“He’s working on his master’s degree in special education. He works with mentally handicapped children and has had his own classroom for three years now.”

Sheila looked up. “God, you’re really proud of him, aren’t you? I can tell by your voice.”

“I think it’s amazing, what he’s achieved. That’s taken hard work. He’s had a young family to support through all of this and his whole history had been with the migrant workers.”

Regarding the typewritten pages, Sheila didn’t speak for a few moments. “All I can recall is this really tall Mexican guy. He seemed like about seven feet tall to me then, but I don’t remember a thing about what he did.”

“Do you remember Whitney?” I asked.

“No. But I do recall that time with the rabbit poop. I remember painting all those little balls. God, it’d disgust me now. Imagine. I was actually picking up shit with my bare hands.” She laughed. “What a disgusting kid.”

I laughed too.

“The weird thing is, you never think you are when it’s happening to you,” Sheila added. “I remember being really serious about painting those things.”

“What about Chad?” I asked. “My boyfriend, the one who defended you at the hearing? Remember him?” I asked, but before she could answer I grinned. “Guess what? He’s married now and he has three kids. And guess what he’s named his oldest girl?”

A blank look. “No idea.”

“Sheila.”

“After me?” she asked in amazement.

“Yes, after you. I mean, he thought the world of you. We had such a marvelous time that night after the hearing.”

A pause followed. Sheila glanced down again at the pages in her hand and appeared to be reading the top one for a moment. “Shit. Shit. This is just so weird. I can’t get over it.”

“Weird in what way?”

“I dunno. Seeing my name here. It’s somebody else here, really, but it’s me, too.”

“You don’t think I’ve done it right?” I asked.

“Well, no, not that … Maybe it’s just seeing myself as a character in a book … I mean, mega-weird.” Another pause. “
You
seem real enough. This is just like I remember you. Reading this makes me feel like I’ve been sitting down and having a nice chat with you, but … Was that class really this way?”

“How do you remember it?” I asked.

“Mostly, I don’t. Like I said last week …”

Silence again.

What entered my mind as I listened into the silence was the horrible nature of some of the things that had happened to Sheila over the course of the time she was in my room. In bringing the book here for her approval, I hadn’t given serious consideration to the possibility that she might have dealt with her past by forcing it from memory. Such a reaction seemed un-Sheila-like to me and I
hadn’t anticipated it from her. Now, suddenly, I feared for what I had done. It was an upbeat story, but that was from my point of view.

Turning her head, Sheila gazed out the window beside her bed. It was an insignificant view—the side of the neighboring house, its gray-green paint peeling, the neighbor’s window, a venetian blind hanging crookedly across it. She seemed to study it.

I, in turn, studied her with her long, straggly orange hair, her thin, undeveloped body clad in torn jeans and a rather strange, clingy gray top that looked like a piece of my grandpa’s underwear. This gangly punk fashion plate wasn’t quite what I had expected to find and I was having to fight the disappointment.

“What
I
remember are the colors,” she said very softly, her tone introspective. “As if my whole life had been in black and white, and then I went in that classroom … Bright colors.” She made a little sound. “I always think of them as Fisher-Price colors, you know? The toys? Fisher-Price red and blue and white. All those primary colors. Remember that riding horse you could sit on and move around by pushing with your feet?
That’s
what I remember. Every single color of him. Of sitting at the table when I was supposed to be working and looking at his colors. And where it said ‘Fisher-Price’ on him. God, I wanted that horse so bad. I used to dream about that horse, about how it was mine, that you let me take it home and keep it.”

I probably would have, had she ever said it meant that much to her, but she never did.

“And that parking garage,” she said. “Remember that? With all those little cars that’d go down the ramps and those little people who didn’t even look like people. They were just plastic pegs with faces, really. Remember how I used to steal them? I was so desperate to have them. I used to line them up on the floor beside where I slept, this whole line of them—the guy in the black top hat, the guy in the cowboy hat, the Indian chief—do you remember me taking them?”

Over the years there had been so many toys in so many classrooms. I remembered garage sets and riding horses, but they could have been any of a dozen such I had had.

“You never got mad at me for it,” she said, turning to look at me. She smiled. “I kept stealing them and stealing them and you never got angry with me.”

In the hurly-burly of that class, truth was, I probably hadn’t even noticed she was doing it.

“That’s what seems so weird to me about this book, Torey. You make out like we’re always fighting. Like, in it you seem to be getting mad at me about every other page. I don’t remember you
ever
doing that.”

I looked at her in surprise.

Then she wrinkled her nose and grinned conspiratorially. “Are you just spicing it up, like? So they’ll want to publish it?”

My jaw dropped.

“I mean, I don’t mind at all. It’s a terribly good story. And, like, it’s brilliant, thinking of myself as a character in a book.”

“But, Sheila, we
did
fight. We fought all the time. When you came into my class, you—”

Again she turned to look out of the window. Silence ensued and it lasted several moments.

“What exactly
do
you recall?” I asked at last.

“Like I said …” And then she didn’t say. She was still gazing out of the window and the words just seemed to fade away. A minute or more passed.

“We
did
fight,” I said softly. “Everybody fights, whatever the relationship, however good it might be. It wouldn’t
be
a relationship otherwise, because two separate people are coming together. Friction is a natural part of that.”

No response.

“Besides,” I said and grinned, “I was a teacher. What would you expect?”

“Yeah, well,” she said, “I don’t really remember.”

I couldn’t come to terms with the fact Sheila had forgotten so much. Driving home on the freeway that evening, I turned it over and over in my mind. How
could
she forget Anton and Whitney? How could the whole experience be reduced to nothing more than a fond recollection of colorful plastic toys? This hurt me. It had been such a significant experience for me that I had assumed it had been at least as significant for her. In fact, I had assumed it was probably more significant. Without me, that class, those five months, Sheila most likely would now be on the back ward of some state hospital. I
had
made a difference.
At least that’s what I’d been telling myself. My cheeks began to burn hot, even in the privacy of my car, as I realized the gross arrogance of my assumption. I was further humbled by the insight that those five months might well now mean more to me than to her.

She had been only a very young child. Was I being unrealistic in expecting her to remember much? At the time she had been so exquisitely articulate that it had given her the gloss of a maturity even then I knew she didn’t really have, but I had been accustomed to associating verbal ability with good memory.

As I sped through the darkness, I tried to recollect being six myself. I could bring to mind the names of some of the children in my first-grade class, but mostly it was incidents I could recall. There were a lot of small snippets: a moment lining up for recess, a classmate vomiting into the trash can, a fight over the swings, a feeling of pride because I drew good trees. They weren’t very complete recollections, but if I tried, I could identify the locations and the names and appearance of the individuals involved. Still, they were nothing akin to the clarity of my memories as an adult. I was probably being unrealistic in expecting her to remember more.

Yet, it nagged at me. Sheila wasn’t just any child, but a highly gifted girl who had blown the top right off almost every IQ test the school psychologist had given her that year. Sheila’s prodigious memory had been among the most notable of
many outstanding characteristics. She had used it like a crystal ball for gazing in, as she spoke to us all so poignantly, so eloquently of love and hate and rejection.

Love and hate and rejection. It couldn’t be all arrogance on my part to expect that she should be remembering more. Her amnesia seemed so uncharacteristic, but still, it was not hard to imagine what might be causing it. Although I didn’t know any specifics about what had happened since Sheila had left my room, I knew these hadn’t been easy years in between. She had been in and out of foster homes, had moved to different schools and coped with her father’s instability. If these years only half mirrored the nightmare she had been living when she’d come into my class, they would have given her ample reason for forgetting. She’d been such a brave little fighter that I didn’t like to think she had finally buckled under the strain, but in the back of my mind, that’s what I was beginning to accept. Yet … why had she so thoroughly forgotten
our
class? The one bright spot, the one haven where she had been loved and regarded so well? Why had she forgotten us?

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