Ghost Girl (10 page)

F
or the next few days, Jadie didn’t come after school. One afternoon I was busy with a meeting; another was Reuben’s birthday and she’d been invited to his party; a couple more slipped by and she simply didn’t turn up. Then, on Friday, there she was.

As always, the first thing she did was lock the doors and test their security. The second was to run to the box of dolls, which was still sitting on the bench. “Where are you? Where are you?” she called anxiously, flinging off the dolls that lay on top. However, any anticipation I might have had about a continuation of the tender scenes from Monday was rudely dispelled when she jerked the dark-haired doll up from the box.

“Poopy pants!” she shrieked, then gathered all the dolls up in her arms and flung them down across the floor. “All these dolls got poopy pants. And you know what I’m going to do? I got to change them and get all this poop out. Shit. That’s what it is. Shit. Gonna get a big pile of shit right here.” She indicated a place on the bench. Sitting down on the floor, she began tugging the overalls off the dark-haired doll.

There was an unmistakably manic quality to her play. She yanked, jerked, shouted, and threw. The doll so tenderly put away on Monday was screamed at and flung around with the others.

“Did you poop your pants, too?” she inquired of one doll. “You did, did you? Well, let’s get the dish then.” Putting down the doll, Jadie glanced around quickly. “Where’s something I can use?” she asked absently, then jumped up. “There. That Play-Doh. Gimme that. I need it.” She pointed to a canister sitting on the far edge of my desk. I handed it to her. Prizing off the lid, Jadie returned to the dolls. “This is going to be the dolly’s shit.” She pinched off bits of dough and stuffed it into the doll’s underpants.

Her play did not include me. She wasn’t making any special effort to shut me out, but her comments were all to herself. I just happened to be in the same room.

The entire scenario revolved around dirty pants. Carefully, Jadie laid out all the boy and girl dolls and inserted Play-Doh feces into their underwear; then there was a big to-do about standing each doll up, peering down the back of the underpants, and discovering the contents.

“Oh, look! Have you done something shitty in your pants? Is there something there? Has everyone shat in their pants?” Over and over she went through this, with ever-increasing volume, until she was virtually shouting at the last doll. Then she took one of the small bowls from the doll-sized tea set in the box and began collecting the bits of dough from the underpants. “There. There. There,” she muttered each time she extracted some Play-Doh. “There’s plenty now. Look how much poop.”

Sitting silently at my desk, pen still in my hand, I watched with fascinated horror. There was an urgent, compulsive quality to her play which would have made any interjection from me an interruption, so I did nothing but watch.

Once she had all the Play-Doh out of the dolls’ underwear, she completely undressed them all and laid them out side by side on the bench. “Here. Here’s what’s going to happen now,” Jadie muttered to herself as she picked up the small bowl of Play-Doh feces. “Now you’re going to eat it.” Taking a piece of dough, she pushed it onto the doll’s mouth. When that didn’t satisfy her, she smeared it all over the eyes, nose, and face. “
Eat
it,” she demanded. “
Eat
it.”

“Why should they do that?” I inquired, enable to stay silent any longer.

Jadie must have forgotten about me entirely because, at the sound of my voice, she started violently, spilling most of the rest of the contents of the little bowl. Leaping up from where she’d been kneeling, she flung the bowl at me.

“Shit!” she cried. “Shit on you! That’s what it means. Shit on you!” And she tore off around the room in a frenzy, hitting against the benches, stumbling, leaping up again. “I’m going to get you now! I’m going to get you! I’m going to kill you now!” she shouted, but her words seemed directed more at thin air than at me.

On about her fourth circle around the room, she careered by my desk. Reaching out, she snatched the felt-tip pen from my hand. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” she continued to shriek. Bumping into the far wall, since the room really was far too small to run in, she whipped up the pen, and before I realized what she was doing, she had drawn several encircled crosses on the wall.

“Hey ho,” I said, jumping up. “I can’t let you do that, Jadie.”

“You can’t stop me!” And she continued to draw more.

“I
can
,” and I did, catching her by the arm and pulling her up close against me.

“You can’t. I can kill you,” she retorted and attempted to draw the cross with the circle around it on my skin, until at last I pinned her arm down and removed the pen. Jadie struggled violently for several moments, kicking and jerking to get free, but I held on, eventually enveloping her in a massive bear hug to the point where she could no longer move. Her hysterical screaming degenerated into sobs and we both sank wearily to the floor. Jadie wept, first from frustration at being unable to get free, then finally the desperate note disappeared and she just cried, pushing her face into the fabric of my blouse.

“I’m sorry,” she began to say through her tears. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”

She reached to rub away the marks she’d made on my skin with the pen. When she couldn’t remove them, she brushed her fingers across her cheek and then tried to rub them out with her tears. The poignancy of this gesture affected me, and I pulled her closer.

“Don’t be upset. They’re just marks. They won’t hurt me.”

“I don’t want you to die. Don’t die.”

“It’s just felt-tip pen, Jadie. I can wash it off. Don’t cry about it.”

“Just don’t die. Please don’t die.”

I came away from school that night deeply unsettled. I don’t know if it was the intensity of what had happened or simply the unexpectedness of it, but I couldn’t leave the incident behind me at school the way I usually did with things that happened during the day. Under normal circumstances, I enjoyed living alone. The silent serenity of my apartment and the total lack of demands was a healthy contrast to my work; however, with its lack of distractions, my apartment was not a good place to take problems I couldn’t shake. So instead of going home that evening, I drove out to the supermarket-cum-drugstore on the edge of town to do some shopping. Even then, as I wandered up and down the brightly lit aisles, reading labels on the breakfast cereal and contemplating what flavor of cat food might tempt my confirmed mouse-eater away from things that required regurgitation on the carpet, I still couldn’t keep my mind from wandering back to Jadie.

On the way home, I impulsively stopped by Lucy’s house. We’d become quite good friends at school. She was a likable, easy-to-talk-to person, and youth was our common ground in a workplace where most were members of the AARP; however, we’d never made the transition to friendship outside school.

Even within the confines of a homogenizing environment like school, the contrast in our lives was obvious. Lucy was a local girl, married at twenty-one to the boy literally next door, in a storybook wedding with carriages and white horses and most of the community present. She’d gone to the state university to get her teaching degree and she and Ben, her husband, had done a three-week tour of Europe for their honeymoon; otherwise, Lucy’s entire world was Pecking. I envied her her connectedness and her certainty about her place in the universe. When we talked about it, she said she envied me my freedom, but I’m not sure she really did.

“Hi!” she cried in delighted surprise when she saw me at the door.

“Sorry for bothering you on a Friday evening, but I was coming by and I still have that material on the teaching centers in my car. Thought I’d drop it off.” Which was true enough, although not the whole reason I’d stopped.

“Oh, how nice of you,” she remarked cheerfully. “Want to come in?”

I entered a small, neat-as-a-pin living room with green shag carpeting and an electric organ against the far wall.

“Ben’s out for the evening. He and his dad. They’re pricing a job in Falls River, and so he’s not going to be back ’til late.” Lucy smiled. “So it’s nice you stopped by.” She disappeared into the kitchen. “You want some soup? Have you eaten? I was just heating some up.” She returned, carrying a can. “It’s this kind. Vegetable-beef. Do you like that? Or I could open something else.”

“No, that’s fine.” I followed her into the kitchen. “What’s Ben do? He’s a builder, isn’t he?”

Lucy nodded. “Yes, he and his dad did this house.” She gestured widely. “Afterwards, after we eat, I’ll show you around. It’s got three bedrooms. That’s for when we get around to starting a family. At the moment we’ve got Jilly in the second bedroom, and she’s doing the family bit. Wait ’til you meet Jilly.”

Jilly turned out to be a toy poodle, proud mother of three-week-old pups. Lucy also showed me her needlepoint and then her wedding photographs. That put us on to the honeymoon pictures of Europe. I needed the distraction, and Lucy was providing an ample amount.

When we came to the last of the honeymoon photographs, Lucy lingered over the album. “I probably don’t need to be showing you these,” she said quietly. “You’ve been to Europe, too, haven’t you?”

“Yes. But not as many places as you and Ben have seen.”

“You’ve been all over, though. You’ve been to New York.”

I nodded.

“How come you came here?”

“It looked like an interesting job, and I was fed up with the city. My own hometown isn’t much bigger than Pecking. I’m perfectly happy in small places.”

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We haven’t got the kinds of problems they have in the cities. That’s what I like about it. You hear about all this junk, like drugs and child abuse, and I’m just really glad I don’t have to deal with it. But I bet you came across it a lot up in the city, didn’t you?”

I looked over. “It’s probably here, too. Those sorts of things don’t really respect boundaries.”

“Well, yeah, probably out on the reservation.”

“Probably right here in Pecking. Odds are, at least with child abuse, right in your classroom.”

Lucy was silent.

“It’s hard to think that these kinds of things happen to people we know, but, unfortunately, that’s often the case.”

Lucy looked down at the album with its soft, pale gray leather-effect cover, trimmed in gold. “I’ve probably lived a pretty sheltered life.” A pause. “But I can’t say I’m not thankful for that. It’s easier to believe in the good in people if you don’t know all the bad.”

I studied Lucy’s face. What I wanted more than anything was to share the eerie experience of being locked in the cloakroom with Jadie. I was so confused, not knowing what to think about her behavior. Was she aphasic? Brain damaged? Was there an organic basis for what she did? Or could it all be psychological? Mutism had ceased to be a problem from the first day, as Jadie now responded to anyone who spoke to her, but only with me did she speak spontaneously. Why? What for? How come? I did enjoy my new life in Pecking, but it had brought with it unaccustomed isolation. My network of professional colleagues and friends remained in the city, and I had found making new contacts here slow going. But did I tell Lucy about life in my classroom? Was it the right thing to do? Was it fair, either to Lucy or to my children?

In the end, I said nothing. Instead, Lucy took me into the kitchen, where she showed me how to make brownies in the microwave in only ten minutes. Then we sat down in front of the television, scoffed brownies, and drank tall glasses of milk, all the while laughing like a couple of schoolgirls.

After school on Monday, Jadie joined me in the cloakroom. She was late, arriving at twenty to five. The first thing she did was to take the key and lock the two doors and then secure the masking tape over both keyholes. She didn’t really test the doors this time, however, just locked them and handed back the key. Nor did her posture improve. Still hunched over, she shuffled to one of the benches and sat down.

“You don’t look very happy.”

No response.

“You’ve been quiet all day. Do you feel okay?”

“Yeah.”

“How was your weekend?” She shrugged.

A moment’s silence passed between us. She was bent almost double, her dark hair tumbling down over her shoulders.

“You look like you want to cry,” I commented.

At that, her mouth dragged down in a grimace of tears and she bent forward on the bench, burying her face in the jacket on her knees.

Rising from my chair at the desk, I came over and sat down beside her. Gently, I put my arm around her shoulder. “What’s the matter, lovey?”

“I don’t got my cat no more,” she wailed.

“Oh dear, how awful. What happened?”

“She isn’t there no more. She’s gone.”

I hugged her to me.

“She was just little,” Jadie sobbed, pulling back to look up at me. “She wasn’t even grown up yet.”

“Poor puss. Poor Jadie.”

“She was skinny. I always saved some of my supper in my napkin and then I’d take it out for her to eat. ’Cause she was always hungry. She was a girl cat. I named her Jenny.”