Beautiful Child (26 page)

Laying her head against my chest, Venus sat quietly.

“And sometimes people say you shouldn’t tell, because if you do, they’ll do something bad to you. They’ll hurt you. Or they’ll hurt someone you love. Or they’ll take something away from you. Sometimes people even say they’ll kill you, if you tell. But none of this is true. They are only saying that to scare you.
They
have done something bad and they are afraid someone will find out and punish them, so they try to scare you into keeping their secret. But this is wrong. You shouldn’t have to do that. If someone says those things to you, you should always tell a safe grown-up who can help you.”

Venus never said a word.

For what felt like the umpteen millionth time in the last few days, I went down to Bob’s office.

“I see Venus is back,” he said.

“I’m getting really uncomfortable about all this. Why would this guy tell us that about homebound, if it wasn’t true?” I asked. “My gut instinct is that he’s trying to cover something up.”

“Probably. The question is: what?” Bob replied. “He’s a sleazy character. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. So he’s probably capable of being up to all sorts of things.”

“No. I’m thinking specifically to do with Venus. I mean,
the law says, if there’s the suspicion of child abuse, we need to report it. I think it’s time to go official,” I said.

“Venus has told you something?”

“Well, no…” I explained her uncharacteristic tearful behavior. “That, in conjunction with her absences and her inappropriate clothing the other day and that Danny’s strange excuses yesterday. I’m thinking something’s happening to her that’s making it so she
can’t
come to school these days.”

Bob was thoughtful. Finally he shook his head slowly. “I don’t think that’s enough to actually file a report, Torey. A hunch isn’t enough. We need bruises or her saying something or … something more concrete. About all I can do is alert Social Services to your suspicions. Again. Because I think they’re probably waiting to nail this guy too.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your take on this?”

Again, Bob was thoughtful. Moments drew out as he considered. “That you’re probably right,” he said quietly. He looked over. “That I wish I could save the world in the way you and I thought we were going to be able to back in the seventies. I wish it had turned out as easy to do as we’d believed it would be.”

I
n the middle of all this drama over Venus, I was starting to make the usual end-of-year plans for the children. Billy, I was certain, was ready to be mainstreamed back into the regular classroom. We didn’t think he was capable of handling the AP class on a full-time basis. While he was an intellectually gifted boy and identifying this exceptionality had gone a long ways toward helping him straighten himself out, Billy remained in need of considerable learning support. He still lagged behind his age mates in both reading and math, although he was starting to approach grade-level work in reading. And his behavior was still a little too ebullient for the average classroom, so it was important that he be in a program that maintained a fairly strict structure. We did want to keep him in the AP class part-time, as we felt this had made a real difference for
Billy. Unfortunately, all the regular classes at the school where the AP class was operated under an open-plan, learning-center system, which meant a fairly noisy, chaotic learning environment. Both Bob and I felt this was asking for trouble with Billy, who needed no help getting excited. So in the end we opted to keep Billy at our school, planning to place him in the regular fifth-grade class there and have him come into my room for resource work. In addition, he would continue to attend the AP class two afternoons a week with the hope that eventually it might be an appropriate full-time placement for him.

Jesse had also made very good progress during the year, and his aggressive behavior had improved dramatically. He was still inclined to “fly off the handle,” as Billy always called it, but he was gaining an increasing ability to pace himself, to understand what sorts of things triggered his outbursts, and to know how to withdraw gracefully from a situation until he was back in control. Indeed, Jesse had begun taking pride in his newfound self-control and often pointed out to the rest of us when he had managed something difficult.

The tics caused by his Tourette’s syndrome still gave Jesse a big challenge in terms of returning to a regular classroom. They varied in intensity, and sometimes he went through spells where they were not a big disruption. However, they tended to frequently worsen dramatically, especially when he was feeling stressed or unwell. His barking in particular could become almost nonstop on these occasions.
Through no fault of his own, this made him a noisy, distracting student. I was concerned that he might be bullied or, worse, be goaded back into his old acting-out behavior if he returned to regular education. His worst problem, however, remained his academics. He had made steady progress in both reading and math but still lagged more than a grade level behind his peers in both. I felt that he would do better in a more protected environment for another year, so in the end we decided to keep him at our school as well. He was to go into the regular fourth grade for half of each morning and afternoon and spend the rest of the time in the resource room with me. We hoped eventually to get him back full-time into the regular classroom, but this seemed the safest route for the time being.

This left me with the twins. For them, there would not be a less restrictive alternative. Both boys continued to be highly challenging children in an educational setting. Neither could sit still any length of time; neither could concentrate for more than a few minutes; neither seemed to retain much of what they were taught from day to day. They had mastered the tightly structured traffic light system, but it had to be applied with unerring consistency to keep them at it. The slightest deviation, such as a party where I forgot to monitor behavior with the traffic lights, and they would both lose the plot. We’d have to start all over with learning the rules of it the next day, as if it were something completely new to them.

I liked Shane and Zane. Indeed, they had moments of
being truly charming little boys, as they were both affectionate and eager to please. There was nothing particularly malicious in their misbehavior. They just could not keep their focus from minute to minute, so they required constant monitoring to keep them on-task and achieving.

Consequently, it was deemed unrealistic to try any kind of mainstreaming with either twin. Their parents were pleased with their current progress in the resource room, as were we. So we decided to keep them right where they were.

And Venus?

Bob and I didn’t even discuss her future. We were having too much trouble as it was with her present.

Then the weather turned. Down out of the north came a massive cold front. The temperatures, which had been on their seasonal climb upward into the fifties and sixties, suddenly plummeted toward zero Fahrenheit. Snow began to fall, weighing down the newly opened daffodils. And it fell and it fell until the daffodils disappeared altogether. We were paralyzed under almost two feet of the stuff. Everything came to a standstill.

The storm occurred on a Thursday. School was canceled for Friday because no one could move. I spent a relaxing day home by the fire, watching an old movie on TV, my enjoyment dampened only by the fact that Friday was normally my shopping day and I had almost no food in the house. So I had to make do with a supper of casseroled butter beans and an endive salad.

Saturday was spent digging out. Sunday, the weather turned nasty again. We still had almost all the snow, although the temperature had risen to near freezing, so it had gone soft. On Sunday came a second storm, only this time it didn’t go so cold. Instead of snow, the precipitation came as freezing rain and quickly turned to ice. Within hours, everything was glazed.

I’d never seen anything like it. The snowdrifts outside my door were like crème brûlée – if you tapped the hard surface, it cracked into shards to reveal the soft snow underneath. But I was unable to explore any farther than the door, because ice covered everything. It had glazed the shoveled sidewalks and plowed streets quite thickly, making it almost impossible to keep one’s footing. Driving too was treacherous. The town went eerily silent as everything came to a standstill for the second time in three days.

And then the gunfirelike banging started. The weight of ice clinging to the power lines started to bring them down all over town, and the noise came from arcing transformers. Before nightfall I’d lost my electricity, as had many other neighborhoods.

So school was canceled again for Monday. And even though a thaw had set in by Monday afternoon, it was canceled on Tuesday. Electricity still had not been restored to many parts of town, and driving remained a dangerous prospect on the slippery roads.

Not until Wednesday did we venture in again, and even then, there were many absences. Julie didn’t make it to
school that day. And neither did Venus, although this came as no particular surprise. Almost without exception, she missed the first day back from any kind of break, planned or unplanned.

Billy was his usual enthusiastic self, bouncy as Tigger. “Guess what we did, Teacher! Guess! We went sledding, only we made our
own
sleds.’ Cause we didn’t have enough. Not enough for my brothers and me and the kids next door. So we made ’em. Out of cardboard. You just cut up cardboard into squares and you know what? Works good as a store-bought sled. It does. I’m telling you that for real.”

“Billy, it’s not gonna be as good as a store-bought sled,” Jesse muttered. “How could it be as good as a store-bought sled? Otherwise why would people go pay money for something they could get just as good for free?”

The twins seemed to have suffered from their confinement. They were everywhere. Jumping up over the chairs and playing tag across the tables. I tried to snag them and get them to settle down.

“Well, it is as good,” Billy remarked. “Because I had just as good a time. If we’d had just our sled, we would have had to tooken turns and that would mean, like, about ten kids and one sled. But we made each our own with the cardboard, so that way we could all sled all the time. And it was
fun
.”

“Shut up,” Jesse said and hunched forward in his chair.

“Yeah, well, I’m right.”

“You dickhead,” Jesse snarled. “You’re just boasting.
You’re just a big boaster all the time. You think you know everything.”

“Jesse,” I said.

“Well, tell
him
. He’s the one who’s always spouting off.”

“Billy, take your chair,” I said.

Billy couldn’t resist this slip on my part. He grabbed his chair and spun it up over his head. “Take it? Take it where?” he chirped.

I grabbed the traffic disks and waved them menacingly. This was too late for Jesse, however. He lunged out of his chair and punched Billy. Not hard, probably not so much because he hadn’t meant it to be hard but because he came at an angle and it glanced off Billy’s shoulder. This was enough, however, to cause Billy to lose his balance and fall over and for the chair to come crashing down on top of him. And enough, for some reason, for Shane to feel he should join the fray. He bolted over the adjacent table and kicked Billy in the leg.

“
Hey
!” I cried. “Hey, hey,
hey
! What’s gotten into you today?” I jerked Shane off and plopped him firmly into the nearest quiet chair. “What’s all this fighting? We haven’t had fighting like this in ages. Jesse, get over in that quiet chair.”

Billy was howling, although I couldn’t tell if it was from pain, surprise, or hurt pride. I put my arms around him and gave him a tight hug.

“That was kind of silly, wasn’t it, spinning that chair like that.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” he sobbed rather too dramatically. “
He
hit me. I wouldn’t have dropped it, if he hadn’t hit me. It’s
his
fault. He could have killed me. He could have made that chair fall right on my head and killed me.”

“Well, thank goodness that horrible scenario didn’t happen, huh? Are you okay?”

“Noooo. I hurt my elbow.”

“Oh, poor you,” I said and rubbed Billy’s elbow. It was the wrong one. He held the other up and I rubbed that. “Now, sit down in your chair. And stay there. You’ve got work to do.”

I looked over at the others.

Zane was sitting in his chair. “I’m being
good
,” he said cheerfully.

“Well, thank goodness someone is. Have you got your folder? Can you get started?” I asked.

I looked over at the other two in their quiet chairs. “Okay, guys. If you can keep yourselves together, come back to your tables and get started.”

Shane, who was still a little flighty, bounded back to his seat. Jesse shuffled to his table and took out his chair.

I came over and knelt down beside him. “You seem to be having a hard day. Did something happen before you came to school?”

“No.”

“You seem like you aren’t in a good mood.”

His tics confirmed his stress. His head twitched and twitched.

“This is like the old days with you and Billy and everyone fighting all the time. But that hasn’t happened in a long time. Everyone’s pretty good about staying in control now. So, when I see you so angry, it makes me think there must be a reason.”

“No.”

I waited quietly beside his chair.

“I had to stay in the
whole
time,” he muttered.

“You mean while the storms were on?” I asked.

He nodded. “My grandma wouldn’t let me go out. She said it was too dangerous.”

“That must have been upsetting. Especially if you saw other children having fun,” I said.

Jesse nodded. “I couldn’t go out at
all
. She said, ‘Maybe you’ll get a tic and fall down on the ice,’ and I said, ‘I won’t,’ but she said, ‘This boy in Illinois slipped on the ice and hit his head and he died.’ She said it happened when he was walking to his grandmother’s. Like
that
made a difference. Like, just because I’ve got a grandmother and he got a grandmother, the same thing is going to happen to me. But I couldn’t make her see that. I had to stay in
the whole time
.”

“You must have felt very fed up,” I said.

“I
was
.”

“And you must have felt angry when you heard what a good time Billy had. Is that maybe what happened this morning?” I asked.

Jesse shrugged.

“Gosh, I’m sorry when you tell us that,” Billy said.
“Gosh, that sucks. The
whole
time? Gosh, that sucks big time, Jesse. No wonder you were so mad. I’d be mad too. Probably I’d punch a hole in the wall, I was so mad.”

“God, Billy, there you go bragging again. Everything you say is a brag, you know that?” Jesse retorted.

Standing up, I put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think he’s bragging, Jesse. He’s being sympathetic. That means he’s trying to share your feelings.”

“Yeah. ’Cause I’m your friend.
Trying
to be your friend, if you don’t keep punching me,” Billy said.

“Well, you could have come over and got me. If you were really my friend, you would have done.”

“I couldn’t. We couldn’t drive our car,” Billy said.

“You could have talked to me on the telephone.”

“You could have talked to
me
on the telephone. You could have told me what was happening and maybe my mom could have talked to your grandmother or something. It isn’t just my fault.”

There was a little pause.

“Anyway, I’m sorry when you tell us you got shut in,” Billy said. “I was thinking of you, Jesse. Really I was. I wanted you to come over. We would have had fun.”