Beautiful Child (32 page)

“You’d ask Alice?”

She nodded faintly. “I want to know, why does she talk to her hand so much?”

V
enus’s depression remained. It clung to her like a cobweb. She sat hunched over in her wheelchair day after day, as if she were stuck to it. She always seemed tired to me, her movements slow and sluggish, as if everything were too much of an effort.

In spite of this, she was making progress. She was interacting more. She did talk, after a fashion, with Alice. She did answer yes or no, if one waited long enough. And as with the discussion during de-briefing, she did very, very occasionally begin to participate in class. It was still not what I’d term spontaneous, but it was inching closer.

The one thing, however, we could not do was get her to try standing on her feet or walking. She remained steadfastly in the wheelchair, and no matter how much physiotherapy she was given, how much encouragement, how
much reassurance from the doctors, her foster parents, me, or anyone else about how she
could
now try regaining normal movement and no longer needed the wheelchair, Venus refused to try. She was an absolute deadweight on those occasions when I lifted her to her feet. Except for when I took her to the toilet and needed her up enough for me to adjust her clothing, she would not even attempt standing, much less taking steps.

The third week of May there was a big conference over Venus, and everyone met in an effort to coordinate her extended care. It was the first time all the people now involved with her were together in one place, and it included social workers, her foster mother, the child psychiatrist who’d been appointed by the hospital, Sam Patterson, who was still processing the abuse case for the police, two physiotherapists, and, of course, Bob, Rosa, and me. Everyone talked about what kind of progress Venus was making and where we needed to go. I told them about how depressed she seemed, and the psychiatrist said that, yes, this was normal in such a case. It happened quite often. I asked why. He said something rather fuzzy about mourning all that she had lost. At which point somebody else said, “Like what? Sleeping naked in the bathroom? Being beaten until her bones were broken? Not much to mourn in losing that.”

The psychiatrist gave a faint shrug in understanding and then a quick gesture of helplessness with his hand. “I guess it’s all she had.”

The physiotherapists discussed how important it was to
get her walking again because her muscles were deteriorating from lack of use. Her feet were going to cause her problems if she did not start bearing weight on them, because the areas where the toes had been amputated were healing without the feet being allowed to create a new weight-bearing configuration. A long discussion ensued about the psychological ramifications of recovery from amputation.

In the end, I think we all got a bit waylaid by the idea that Venus was missing these amputated toes. Someone suggested this was behind her depression, and several others nodded sagely. She was mourning her loss of wholeness. That made sense.

Not to me. Undoubtedly this loss was distressing to her, but I couldn’t imagine it was all that was behind such an all-encompassing depression or her refusal to stand or walk. Indeed, we got waylaid generally while discussing depression and the physical importance of getting her back on her feet until we finally lost the plot. People started into long discourses on theories of depression, and the conversation locked into party lines, the psychiatric people supporting psychological reasons, the physiotherapists supporting physical reasons, the social workers going off on some completely different tangent involving care in the community. Despite the skills of all these high-powered professionals – the kind of people I’d so wanted involved with Venus from the beginning, indeed, the kind of professional expertise I would have wished for all my children – we found it hard
to identify the source of real problems, much less come up with any real solutions. I was glad to attend the meeting and glad to see so many people from different disciplines involved, but I came away frustrated.

Life in class went on. Four of us – Jesse, the twins, and I – had birthdays in late May or early June, so we decided to have a group celebration. We made plans for a big party of the kind we hadn’t even dared contemplate at Halloween or Christmas. I promised to bake a special cake. Rosa was going to bring ice cream. As Shane and Zane were birthday boys, their mother volunteered to bring cookies, and we were going to stir up our very own fruit punch as part of cooking in the early afternoon.

Because we hadn’t managed any really serious parties earlier in the year, I wanted to go all-out and give the children a day to remember. So on the afternoon before, I allowed the last thirty minutes before going-home time to be spent “decorating,” which was a bit of a recipe for disaster, as it involved a lot of leaping around from table to table to hang streamers, which resulted in some wild behavior from the twins, who needed no encouragement to jump and climb on furniture, and a lot of bossing from Jesse, who, since Billy was away at his AP class, claimed this chance to run the show. But we managed it, and the bell rang before anyone killed anyone else. Or themselves.

The day of the party, the twins showed up in ties and
little suits. I hadn’t meant it to be
that
kind of party and was worried that they might spoil their clothes if things got rowdy, which I feared inevitably would happen, but they were both anxious to show off their “dress-up” clothes.

“This is my wedding suit,” Shane said proudly.

“What? You got married?” Billy asked and laughed. “Who’d you marry? Alice?”

Shane made a fist and shook it fiercely.

I pointed to the traffic lights up on the chalkboard. Less and less often I was actually carrying the disks. The boys were more able to control themselves now without my having always to reward or punish with the disks, so I wanted to ease us away from such a highly structured approach. Nonetheless, the threat of the traffic lights still worked well. All I had to do was point and the more controlled children, like Billy, would get the message.

“Take it back!” Shane shouted.

“I was just joking,” Billy said and looked over at me with an expression of disdain. “Nobody here can take a joke. You guys would never last a minute in my AP class.
There
, everybody jokes.”

“Take it back!” Shane shouted again.

“I wouldn’t want to marry pukey old you anyway,” Alice responded from her seat.

“Billy,” I said menacingly.

“It was
just
a joke.”

“Jokes only work if everyone finds them funny,” I said.

“Okay, sorry, Shane. I didn’t mean it,” Billy muttered.

“Guess what,” Zane said. “At the wedding, Shane peed in his pants. Right in the church and it went on the floor.”

“Take it back!” Shane shrieked in horror.

And so the rest of the morning went.

Venus too had arrived at school dressed for a party. She was wearing a lovely little frilly pink top and matching pants and she did look really pretty. Alice commented on it when she first saw Venus arrive in the morning, but it was Rosa who made the big fuss when she came in the afternoon.

“Look at you, little blossom! Aren’t you just the beautifulest thing?” She swooped down and kissed Venus on the cheek. I would have expected Venus to pull away in surprise, but she didn’t. Indeed, I think there might have been a smile touching Venus’s lips then, just slightly.

We tried to carry on a normal day for as much of it as possible. We intended to have the party in the forty-five minutes between afternoon recess and going-home time, so it wasn’t until recess itself that Shane and Zane’s mother arrived with the cookies and I laid out the cake I’d brought. It was chocolate and made in the shape of a little train. To avoid too much squabbling, I’d made an individual freight car on the train for each child, putting his or her name on the side of it and decorating each car with
exactly
the same number, color, and kinds of candy and frosting. I put my name on the engine and Rosa’s on the caboose.

In order to keep the party from caving in entirely, I kept things fairly structured. We’d play games for the first fifteen
minutes, then we were going to listen to some relaxing music while making a party hat to wear, then eat our cake, cookies, and ice cream the last fifteen minutes. If there was any time left over, I had gotten permission from Bob to let everyone go outside on the playground early, as I reckoned that was just about all the excitement any of the children could cope with indoors without going homicidal.

For the game Billy wanted to play Twister, which he had brought from home. This consternated me a little, as I suspected it was just an elaborate means for looking up Alice’s skirt, but I promised one game. Surprisingly, this came off quite well. Alice was relatively modest in her moves, and the boys seemed preoccupied with twisting themselves up in as many crazy positions as possible. Indeed, everyone was laughing so much that I agreed to a second game.

Venus, of course, did not join in. I encouraged her to call out the colors, but she wouldn’t do it. She did spin the spinner for me a couple of times, but beyond that, she just watched.

Rosa, not wanting to see her sidelined, came over while we were getting ready to play the second game of Twister. “You can come help me make the things ready for our hats, no?”

Venus looked at her.

“We will make beautiful hats, no? You can make a pretty pink one to go with your lovely pink clothes. Doesn’t she look beautiful today, Torey? That pink makes you so pretty. Come on, you come help me, beautiful child.” She took
hold of the handles and wheeled Venus’s chair over to the table where the art materials were being laid out.

I started up the new game of Twister. The boys and Alice played enthusiastically and, indeed, very happily. There was a bit of pushing and shoving, but it was all taken in the spirit of the game.

We were just about to the end when Rosa came over to me. She leaned close to my ear and said, “There’s something wrong with little Venus.”

I looked over. I couldn’t see because the back of the wheelchair was toward me.

“She’s crying,” Rosa said. “She started to cry when I took her over. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ but she will not say. I thought maybe she did not want to leave the game. I said, ‘You want to go back? I don’t mind,’ but she will not say. She just cries. So, I think perhaps it is best to get you.”

I nodded. “Can you finish this off?” I gave her the spinner for the game, rose, and went over to where Venus was sitting.

She was indeed crying, her mouth pulled down in a grimace of tears, her cheeks awash, but she made almost no noise.

I knelt down beside the wheelchair. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

She just cried.

Rising, I lifted the box of tissues from the shelf and pulled one out. Kneeling back down, I reached over and wiped the
tears from her cheeks. If anything, this made her cry harder.

I caressed her head. “What’s wrong, Venus?”

It was unusual for her to cry. The last time had been in those weeks just before the abuse was discovered and I still smarted with the thought that I had not been sufficiently sensitive to her distress, that if I’d taken a little more time with her then, the horrible episode that had landed her in the hospital might have been prevented.

Nonetheless, the same pressures that had been on me then were on me now. Venus refused to talk. And then the game was over and the other children came bounding over, clamoring for attention.

I rose up on my feet. “Could you oversee this?” I asked, feeling horrible as I did so because it was a lot to ask of Rosa, but I wanted just a little time alone with Venus.

“Sure, muffin,” she said and patted my shoulder in a rather motherly way. “You get on with God’s work.”

I wheeled Venus and the box of tissues out into the hallway. There wasn’t much of any place else to go, what with her wheelchair and the layout of the building.

I knelt down beside the wheelchair again and touched her face. She still cried, softly and inconsolably.

Several minutes passed with me crouched on the floor beside her. It was an uncomfortable position. I was either going to have to sit all the way down on the floor, which put me in a rather awkward position to comfort her, or else I was going to have to stand. Neither worked well.
Finally I rose. “Here, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said to her and put the brakes on the wheelchair. Then I reached down and lifted her up into my arms. Sitting down in the wheelchair myself, I set her on my lap. Wrapping my arms close around her, I held her.

She pressed her face into my shirt and cried.

Beyond the door behind us I could hear the other children. Voices went up and down. Excitement made them loud, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded too dangerously near fighting. I murmured thanks to whatever power might be listening for having sent me Rosa.

I looked down at Venus. She was all snot and tears. Taking one of the tissues, I wiped her face.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You just need to cry?”

She nodded.

“That’s all right. You cry. Sometimes we feel that way.”

She nodded and took the tissue from my hand. She pressed it against her nose.

“Sometimes that’s all there is to do about life,” I said.