Beautiful Child (29 page)

“Lord, I’ve never seen a room like this, bursting into song
like you do,” she said when we started up a rousing round of “High Hopes” while waiting for everyone to get ready to go out for afternoon recess.

“Do you like it?” Jesse asked.

“I think it’s screwball,” Alice said.

“God has little angels to sing for him in heaven,” Rosa replied. “I feel like I have little angels to sing here on earth. That must be a good thing, no?”

“I think it’s nuts,” Alice said.

“Why’s that?” Rosa asked.

“I don’t know the words.”

“I don’t know the words either,” Rosa said. “So I just sing la-la-la instead. That’s okay, no? La-la-la will do.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I still think it’s nuts,” Alice said. “I think this room is just plain weird.”

“Well,” said Billy in a philosophical tone, “
you’ve
found the right place to be then.”

The day that had started so challengingly ended on a pleasant note. While I took the children down to their rides, Rosa went down to the teachers’ lounge and brought a can of soda pop back to the room for each of us. We sat at the table chatting. I found out she was forty-eight and originally from a small village in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. She’d come to the United States when she was ten as a migrant worker. She’d married Joe, a garage mechanic, in her teens and had six children in quick succession, which included
two sets of twins. She’d started working as an aide for the school district when her youngest started kindergarten because the hours coincided with the children’s hours. The children were all grown now, all with families of their own, except for her youngest daughter, who was getting married in the fall. “She’s a schoolteacher,” Rosa said proudly. “Three of mine are schoolteachers. We got education in our blood.”

I found out more in that half hour about Rosa than I’d known about Julie in the entire time she’d been with me. We were still chatting when Bob appeared in the doorway.

“Tor?”

I looked up.

“We’ve got a meeting.” He held up his watch and tapped it. “Five o’clock with Social Services. Down in the county offices.”

I lifted my eyebrows in question, as I was unaware of a meeting.

“Venus,” he said. “They wanted to talk to us before they talked to the press.”

Bob and I were ushered into a spacious conference room. It was a bright, airy room, decorated in pale beige tones. A huge oval table took up most of the space. I recognized several of the people there: the director of Social Services, two of the social workers I knew to be involved. Both Officer Millwall and Sam Patterson were there. But there were
many more people, including uniformed police. Fifteen people seated themselves around the table. More joined us after the doors were closed and stood against the walls.

“I wanted to have an official briefing on the Venus Fox case,” the director said. “I appreciate everyone’s involvement in this case and I want to thank all of those who have given their time.”

And then came the full story.

Venus had been brought to the hospital unconscious the morning after the second big snowstorm. She was suffering from hypothermia and frostbite. Her mother had told the doctors at the hospital that Venus had wandered out into the night during the storm, which was how this had happened. When undressing Venus to treat her, the hospital staff noticed she was undernourished and had various bruises and abrasions consistent with child abuse. She was x-rayed and discovered to have five broken bones in various states of healing, indicating they had been done over a period of time. There was evidence of twenty-two old breaks, all of which had healed.

The director spoke slowly and calmly as he explained all this, all the hideous little details of what had been broken, whether it was healed or not, where the little abrasions were that indicated she had had her hands tied, how her hair was lightening, indicating the start of malnutrition.

I sat there as cold and unable to move as granite.

“How did hypothermia come into this?” someone asked. I didn’t know who he was.

“I’m getting there,” the director replied in the patient voice of a teacher with slow students.

That’s when I discovered “bad” could always get worse.

The reason Venus had hypothermia was because she was being made to sleep naked in an unheated bathroom. The suspect in all of this was Danny, Teri’s live-in boyfriend, and his defense had been that she wet the bed and this was the only place suitable for her. The director said that evidence given during the police investigation indicated that Venus may have been sleeping in the bathroom for several weeks and that apparently she was locked in there most of the time she was at home. She was apparently being fed only when Wanda remembered to give her something. Indeed, Wanda appeared almost solely in charge of her care. Danny forbade the other children from interacting with her.

I lost what he said after that. I’d heard too much. My brain went into overload. I sat, staring at the table. The grain of the wood of that table was all that entered my mind. I would never again hear the word
abuse
and not get a mental picture of the grained white pine beneath the glossy polyurethane of that table.

How had we missed the indicators of this catalog of horrific abuse? That was the only question, and it flooded my mind. I suspect it was the only question in all of our minds. There Venus had been among us – battered, tortured, starved – we had seen her almost every day, yet we had not
known. She had been locked in a
bathroom
? Sleeping
naked
? Fed on scraps? For weeks?
Months
?

How had it happened? How had we gone from thinking “something isn’t right with this girl” to this? How could we be around her and not know the extent of it?

In the aftermath of that meeting, I felt bereft. I felt it very powerfully as a great hollow maw, as if the marrow had been sucked right out of me. This surprised me. I would have imagined myself to feel horror. Or revulsion – the kind that made people throw up when they encountered something so shocking. But while horror had clouted me during the meeting, afterward I felt only loss.

Loss of what? I wasn’t sure. Of my own innocence, I suspect. Of the belief that when I was at the helm, things like this would never happen. Of the confidence that I was somehow better than those people you read about in newspaper articles who never managed to notice the horror going on around them. I had just assumed this wouldn’t happen to me. And now it had. I had been in the classroom, in all those private moments reading and watching videos with Venus, and it had
still
happened. Of everybody there at that meeting, it was I who had spent the most time with Venus. Of everyone, I’d had the best chance to identify this. Of everyone, I was the most guilty for not having done so.

B
ob and I went out to dinner afterward. His wife, Susan, joined us when she got off work. We picked a small Italian place that looked like some bad 1970s movie set – cheesy mandolin music played rather too loudly, drip candles in Chianti bottles on red-checkered tablecloths – but the food was good and the wine was cheap and plentiful.

We spoke briefly of the case to fill in Susan, but we were both overwhelmed by then to where our conversation seemed stuck in a rut, and we kept returning again and again to the same points. Mainly “How?” and “Why?” Or maybe that was because without answering these two questions, there was nothing much more we could say. And we couldn’t answer them.

So we meandered off onto other topics. None of them were very cheerful. Susan had a friend with brain cancer
and it looked to be terminal. We discussed that. The food reminded me of Rome and I asked Bob and Susan if they’d ever been there. They said no. Finances just never worked out. Bob talked about how, during his childhood, his father had gone bankrupt and it had left him with a pathological fear of not having enough money. So we didn’t get far with a vacation conversation. Finally, we ended up talking about the past, about that first year Bob and I had worked together. Inevitably, it worked its way around to how idealistic we both had been, although we’d been loathe to acknowledge this at the time, thinking we were such “realists.” We talked about all the little things along the way that had taught us what true realism was. This conversation served to cloak the fact that I, at least, was still mastering this concept, having that afternoon sustained a body blow to whatever little bit of idealism I had left.

The lawyers involved in the abuse case discouraged me from going up to the hospital to see Venus. It was felt that this, somehow, might be prejudicial to the case, that she might say something or I might encourage a point of view that would harm things.

Everything was in a state of confusion. There were so many parties involved now that it was hard to keep information straight, to find out what was happening, to clarify what I
could
do. Venus’s brothers and sisters had all been taken into care immediately, of course, but this meant dispersing them all over town because there were so many of
them. All of them were gone from our school within days. Wanda disappeared. I heard that she had been placed in a group home for younger children. But then again I’d heard she had been sent to a supervised adult group home in a neighboring town. Danny was being charged with the crime, but Teri was being charged as an accessory, so they were both detained in jail.

In the end, the best I could do to keep contact with Venus was send things to her at the hospital. So we made up a little booklet. I had each child draw a self-portrait, tell a little bit about what they were doing in school, and say something nice about Venus, if they could manage that. Then we bound it all together with a ribbon, so that extra pages could be added. My plan was to send at least one page each day thereafter, telling her what was happening in class.

Rosa helped Shane do his, while I helped Zane. They just drew pictures and wrote “Get well. Come back soon.”

“I’m sorry you’re in the hospitale,” Billy wrote. “I used to call you ‘Siko’ and I’m sorry. I never ment to hurt your feelings. I hope you’ll come back someday. We are making Play-Doh with salt and oil for our cooking. If you are lucky, I will send you some. I am still going to my AP class. I learned about ants there. If you are lucky, I will send you a picture of them. We have them in a farm. Only it isn’t a real farm. It’s an ant farm. You wouldn’t want to tip it over. Love, Billy.”

Jesse wrote, “Dear Venus, Come back. We miss you. I thot you were nice becose you didn’t make lots of nosie. We
got a new gurl. Her name is Aliss. I was in the hospital ones and got my toncil out. It hurt a lot and gave me a bad sore throte but I got to eat a lot of ice cream. Any time I want. Maybe you can have ice cream. We are not doing anything interesting in class. You are not missing anything here.”

And, of course, then there was Alice’s contribution. “You don’t know me. I am 8. I like rabbits, chipmonks, horses and about every other animel. I don’t like boys or scramble eggs. I have small feet for my age. I just came in this class. I don’t know why I have to do this becus you don’t know me and I don’t know you and it seems nuts to do this. I am a girl so we will have two girls in this class whenever you finaly come back. Come back! There are too many boys!!!!! I hope you get well soon. Come back soon. Your frende, Alice.”

We had almost two weeks of confused waiting with little news and even less accurate information, because everything was now in the hands of the police and the courts. I heard that Venus had been released from the hospital and was now in foster care, but I was not told where.

On two occasions, Sam Patterson visited my classroom after school and talked to me about my experiences with Venus. She looked at the meager number of things I had that recorded Venus’s existence in our class. She had been so reticent to work that there were none of her papers displayed around the room, as there were for the boys. There was little more to show than Venus’s place at the table and the She-Ra sword.

On another occasion Bob and I met with the attorney prosecuting the case. He looked over my anecdotal records, which clearly mentioned Venus’s numerous absences and my exasperation with them. He talked about my experiences with her. He commented on how frustrating this case was to him because Venus still did not speak to anyone. I asked if he knew what had become of Wanda. He didn’t. Bob asked if he happened to know if Wanda was really Venus’s biological mother, the way Bob had heard. The lawyer gave a short nod.

“Not a very promising family, is it?” the lawyer finally muttered in a world-weary sort of way.

Bob nodded in agreement.

I was thinking how easy it was to write people off in a few sentences. And how brutally hard it was to accomplish anything, if you tried to do the opposite.

Then, on a Friday morning about ten days later, there was a hump-bump sound up the stairwell outside my classroom. I was standing on a chair and putting up a new May bulletin board when I heard the noise. I paused and turned, trying to discern what it was. It was only 8:20, still fifteen minutes before the bell rang for the children to come in.

Through the window in the door, I saw Bob’s head appear. He was carrying something. Rumble-bump against my door and it pushed open. A wheelchair came through with Bob behind it. In his arms was Venus.

“I’ve got someone for you,” he said in a cheerful sort of way.

“Hello!” I said and came down off the chair.

Bob set her in the wheelchair.

She was a changed child in many respects. The long, tangled hair was gone. It had been cut boyishly short. All the crusty dirt was scrubbed away. The scabs and impetigo were gone. She had on a pretty little outfit consisting of a green gingham top and green pants with matching trim. Over bandaged feet, she wore dog-shaped slippers.

Because of the frostbite, she had lost toes on both her feet. She should have been up and walking with the help of crutches, but so far she hadn’t tried. I could imagine that. As unresponsive as she had been before, I could guess at the challenge involved in trying to do physical therapy with Venus. As a consequence, she was wheelchair-bound for the time being.

When Bob had left, I knelt beside the chair. “I’m glad you’re back,” I said.

A moment’s hesitation. What to say to her? I wanted to apologize. Desperately. I wanted her to know that I hadn’t meant to be so blind, that I most certainly hadn’t meant to be an inadvertent party to her suffering. But this was
my
guilt talking. So there was a moment’s awkward silence between us.

“I’m sorry you had so many bad things happen,” I said softly. “I hope from now on, it’ll be better.”

She stared at me without responding.

“Do your feet still hurt?” I asked.

For a very brief moment she glanced to her slippers, then back to me. She didn’t answer.

“Perhaps soon they will be better. But for now I’ll take you over to your table. I’ll show you what we’re doing now.”

The children were delighted.

“Hey, you’re back,” Billy cried. “Cool! A wheelchair! Can I ride in it?”

“What you got a wheelchair for?” Jesse asked. He walked around Venus’s table, leaned down, peered under. “What’s wrong with your feet?”

Shane and Zane whizzed by. “I got a present for you!” Shane called. He ran to his basket. “Look. I made this for you.” He took out a crumpled piece of tissue paper. The week before we had made tissue paper tulips for art, so this was obviously where he got his idea, but this was just a piece of pink tissue paper. He thrust it under Venus’s nose. “It’s a paper flower. I made it for you.” He set it on her table.

Zane, a little overexcited, pounded on Venus’s table and then jumped up on his own. I lifted him down again.

Alice strolled over nonchalantly. “Memories of days gone are a means to resurrect the past,” she said.

“Alice, why don’t you try introducing yourself?” I suggested.

“The pain and terror of being so incomplete will never go away.”

“Okay, well, maybe later,” I said. I still hadn’t figured out
Alice’s weird phrases, but she seemed inclined to say them when feeling threatened, so I left it at that.

The morning went normally. I needed to come down quite hard with the traffic light system to get everyone settled, because there was a party atmosphere in the room. It was less Venus causing such excitement, I suspect, than Venus’s wheelchair, which everyone wanted to try themselves or push. Plus, it was our first really sunny, warm spring day, and everyone sensed summer. So there had to be a lot of “mean teacher” behavior to get us back on track.

In the back of my mind, I think I’d expected Venus to be different. I’d expected some cataclysmic change to have taken place in her over the last few weeks because of the way she had evoked it in me. But not so. She was her normal silent, unresponsive self. If anything, she was more silent and unresponsive than before, because she let the boys bounce around her wheelchair in a way that would have provoked a furious explosion in days gone by. As it was, she just sat, immobile, her face a mask.

The difference now was forced intimacy. I had to carry her up and down the stairs on those occasions we did not want to bother with the small, creaking elevator on the far side of the building. I had to take her to the toilet. This involved presuming to know when she needed to go, because, of course, she didn’t say. So, at each of the breaks I carried her into the rest room, helped her with her clothes, and lifted her on and off the toilet. It felt strange, this
presumptuousness about such private acts, and I felt like I was being forced to cross boundaries I shouldn’t, but there was no choice. Instead I focused my attention on trying to convey gentleness, on giving her by osmosis a sense that someone
did
care about her body, that it mattered to me that she not be jostled or have her clothing removed roughly or suffer overlong the discomfort of a full bladder. It became important to me that she know the world was full of people like myself and not just the people she had known.

Wanting to resume some form of normalcy as quickly as possible, I went down to find Venus at lunchtime as soon as I had eaten. She had been wheeled out onto the playground, and one of the playground aides was standing beside her.

“Do you want to come up?” I asked.

Venus lifted her eyes to meet mine. They were enigmatic. Her expression was completely unreadable.

I waited for some response.

Nothing.

“Do you want to come up and watch a video?” I asked.

No response.

“Well, why don’t we try?” I said and took the handles of the wheelchair to push her inside.

We went to the elevator and waited for it to arrive. It was a very lethargic thing. I could have walked the stairs two or three times while waiting for it. “It’ll be good when
you can walk again, won’t it?” I said as I set her in the wheelchair outside our room and dug in my pocket for the key. “That elevator is a pain.”

I unlocked the door and wheeled Venus in.

“Shall we watch a video? I have a new one. A friend gave it to me.”

No response.

I took the tape out of my desk drawer and held it out.

No response. Venus did not move her hand to accept it.

“It’s hard getting started again, isn’t it?” I asked.

No response.

I laid the video in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She didn’t move.

I knelt down beside the wheelchair and put my hand on her face to make her look at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t know what was happening to you, Venus. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to help.”

She raised her eyes then and met mine.

She looked at me. A long, searching gaze, locking my eyes with hers.

“I didn’t know. I really didn’t. I didn’t know you were in trouble,” I said. “If I’d realized, I would have tried to help. I’m really, really sorry I didn’t.”

Silence then.

She regarded me a moment longer and then dropped her eyes. She looked at her hands in her lap. They’d been folded. Now she twisted them.