Ghost Girl (11 page)

“And now something’s happened to her? What was it? Did she get hit by a car?”

Rubbing the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, Jadie shook her head. “No, she was in the shed, but she’s not anymore.”

“Was this just a little kitty you’d found? A stray?”

Too choked up to say anything, Jadie didn’t respond.

“Well, she’s probably all right. Most likely she’s just moved on. Sometimes wild kitties do that. They aren’t very used to being with people, and even when you’re good and kind to them, they don’t know they’re supposed to stay in one place.”

“She
didn’t
run away,” Jadie replied. “She couldn’t. She was in a box.”

“In a box? Where?”

“In our shed, like I was just telling you. Out in back of my house. That’s where I was taking the food to her and I was putting it in the box. But now it’s gone.”

“How’d she get in a box? Who does the box belong to?”

“They’ve taken her away and they’re going to kill her,” Jadie cried, her voice trailing off into a whine.

“Who’s going to kill her?”

“Them.”

“Them who, Jadie? I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

The tears evaporated and Jadie’s eyes grew wide and dark. She sat very still, as if holding her breath. Then she inched closer to me on the bench.

“Who’s taken your cat?” I asked.

“Miss Ellie,” she whispered.

“Pardon?”

“Miss Ellie,” she said a little louder.

“Miss Ellie who?”

“Miss Ellie. Who’s with Bobby and J.R.”

“Miss
Ellie?
”
I
echoed in disbelief. “The lady who’s on TV?”

“Sometimes she’s on TV, but sometimes she comes to my house.”

“Miss
Ellie?
”

Jadie looked up, a pained expression on her face, and I realized she knew I didn’t believe what she was saying. Anxious not to destroy the trust growing between us, I backed off quickly.

“So, Miss Ellie has your little kitty.”

Jadie nodded, tears filling her eyes again.

“And she comes to your house? What does she do there?”

“She comes,” Jadie said, her voice small and apologetic. “She comes to be on TV sometimes, but mostly she just comes. To get me and Amber. To have us go with the others.”

“The others? Who else is there?”

“Bobby and Sue Ellen and J.R. Pam’s there sometimes and Clayton and some of the others, but I don’t know everybody’s names.”

Absolutely baffled, I tried my best to make sense of all this without seeming to disbelieve her. Jadie’s earnestness gave me no reason to suspect she was knowingly making this up. “These are the Ewings you’re talking about? From ‘Dallas’?”

Jadie nodded slightly. “It’s the Ewings, but I’m not sure where they come from.”

I sat back and a small silence ensued.

“Is Jenny Miss Ellie’s cat?” I asked finally.

“No. They just caught her, I think. I don’t know whose cat she is. Don’t belong to nobody, I think. Just a little cat.”

“But who caught her? How did she end up in a box in your shed?”

Jadie shrugged. “She was just there.”

“Maybe she got into the box accidentally. Kitties do get into very strange places sometimes. That’s just the way cats are, especially young ones. Maybe nobody really caught her after all. Is that possible?”

Jadie’s shoulders sagged, and she shook her head.

“Well, Miss Ellie wouldn’t hurt her, would she? Maybe she’s just going to give her a new home.”

Shaking her head, Jadie began to cry. “No, it isn’t like that.”

I looked at her.

“She’ll kill Jenny. Miss Ellie’ll eat her.”

T
he hardest adjustment I had to make in returning to teaching after three years at the Sandry Clinic was the sudden and total loss of professional peers. Teaching was a natural activity for me, and I found I fit back into the routine of a school very quickly indeed. And I unashamedly loved it. I got on well with Mr. Tinbergen and the other teachers, enjoyed the camaraderie of the lounge, joined in the gossip, and took up my position in the pecking order. However, I soon realized that, while I’d always find a sympathetic ear when I wanted one, I wasn’t necessarily going to find good advice. In the Pecking school district, I was state-of-the-art where special education was concerned.

This came as a disheartening insight, because if I’d learned anything over the years, it was how much I didn’t know. Access to a wide range of professional colleagues—psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, social workers, speech therapists, other special education teachers—had always been an important part of my method of operation. If I couldn’t come up with a solution of my own to try, I’d find someone who could, or, at the very least, someone to shoot ideas around with. Suddenly, however, I was isolated. Twenty-three miles separated me from even the nearest special education teachers, who were in Falls River. And while Falls River undoubtedly had a full complement of mental health services and related resource personnel, I knew none of them personally and was too shy in my reduced status as teacher to phone them and ask for complimentary advice out of the blue.

My single professional contact was Arkie Peterson. I’d only seen her a handful of times since January, usually at meetings, and as a consequence, we’d had very little opportunity to talk. A brief look at district statistics told me why I didn’t see her more often. Arkie was responsible not only for the Pecking school district but for more than twelve hundred other students spread over a wide, sparsely populated rural area. Although based in an office in the administration building in Falls River, she spent most of her time on the road and was scheduled to be at her desk only on Thursday afternoons. Hence, the biggest trick of all with Arkie was catching her.

Increasingly, I felt the need to discuss Jadie’s case in depth with another professional. In the classroom, Jadie was making slow but steady social progress. While still disinclined to speak spontaneously, she did now join in with the boys and participate in group activities, and just occasionally Jeremiah could provoke her into arguing. However, it wasn’t the classroom that concerned me most. Rather, it was our little after-school sessions, and I honestly did not know what to make of those.

As time went by, I was beginning to doubt the likelihood of any significant brain damage. When Jadie did speak, she was generally forthright and articulate. There was none of the hesitance or slight spaciness that I had come to associate with aphasics; instead, she maintained the aura of intense control that so characterized elective mutism. Thus, I was satisfied that Jadie’s problems were psychological, without physical underpinnings. The question that remained unanswered was to what extent she was disturbed. In class she gave every indication of being well grounded in reality and functioning on a fairly high level, certainly much higher than any of the boys. On the other hand, after school, when she was alone with me, Jadie’s conversations were often weird and unreal.

Arkie was the only person I felt I could turn to in regard to Jadie. My affinity for Arkie, based mostly on that first meeting in January, had been instant. Despite her Dolly Parton appearance, she struck me as an intelligent, articulate woman with sufficient experience to give the kind of feedback I was feeling so in need of.

“Hey!” Arkie cried cheerfully down the phone, when I finally managed to track her down. “How are you surviving?”

I explained that things weren’t going too badly in general but that I felt I needed a chance to discuss Jadie’s case more completely, especially now that we were coming up to the end of the school year and needed to make decisions for the next year’s placement.

There was a pause and through the phone I could hear the shuffling of paper. “Listen, Tor, I’ll tell you what,” Arkie said. “My schedule’s pure hell at the moment, and if I waited for a decent amount of time to get out to Pecking, it’d be next fall already. So what are you doing next Friday night? You want to come up here? What about dinner? Shall we have dinner somewhere and talk about everything then?”

That sounded divine.

Arkie and I met for dinner in a small, extremely popular restaurant in Falls River called Tottie’s. By the time we arrived, the place was congested and noisy, and we were escorted to a table the size of an average serving tray and located at the junction between the kitchen and the public toilets.

“Hi there! I’m Keith,” a young man cried enthusiastically when he saw us. “I’m your waiter for the evening, and our chef tonight is David.”

“Great. I’m Arkie and I’m your customer, and, listen, Keith, haven’t you got anything better than this?” Arkie gestured widely to indicate the table’s location.

“Now, let’s see, Arkie, what have you booked? Party of two? Yup? That’s what I’ve got.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve got, too, but I wasn’t planning on spending my evening conferring with David and I pretty much can from here, so what do you say we give him some peace? Suppose you find us somewhere else.”

Thunderstruck by Arkie’s calm audacity, I shrank meekly behind. Keith, too, seemed a bit stunned. He checked his list again, then glanced around, as if seeking help. “Well, I suppose there is a table over there by the fireplace. They haven’t arrived yet … I suppose you could probably have that one and then …”

“Good,” said Arkie. “I suppose we could.”

“Now,” said Keith as we sat down, “can I bring you girls some wine? We have three choices of house wine, sold by the glass, the half carafe, or the carafe. Or perhaps you’d like Debbie to bring you the wine list.”

Arkie, covering her eyes with one hand in mock exasperation, lifted a finger and looked over at me. “Makes you sorry for our generation, doesn’t it?” she whispered.

Arkie and I spent a pleasant twenty minutes or so in choosing our meals, ordering, and then, just small talk. As with our first meeting, I was greatly impressed with Arkie, her calm assertiveness, her relaxed friendliness. Talking with her was like being back with my colleagues at the clinic: a nice mix of wit, personal topics, and shoptalk.

The conversation eventually came around to Jadie. I told Arkie how Jadie had been coming in to see me after school, how she locked the door and seemed to need the safety of the cloakroom before she could be wholly open. I mentioned the doll play with its faintly sexual overtones, and finally, I spoke of Tashee, Miss Ellie, and the others.

“Whee,” Arkie muttered when I’d finished. “You’ve got yourself a live one there, don’t you?”

“Let’s just say that I don’t think we have to make any immediate plans for moving her back to the regular classroom.”

“Well, no, there’s a point. But where do you think all this is coming from?” Arkie asked. “When I was working with her, I got no wind of this. What do you make of it? Is it just fantasy?”

“I don’t know. This is the problem for me. At this point, I honestly don’t know what to think about her behavior. In the classroom, I get an extremely withdrawn, hunched-over, shuffling mouse. She’s cooperative, concentrates well, performs academically, and yet hardly makes a spontaneous movement. In the cloakroom, I get this brash, noisy, provocative creature who swings from the pipes and flings the toys around. Never in all my career have I come across such extremes.”

“Dual personality?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Can’t really imagine it.”

“Do you think she could be hallucinating? Particularly when she’s talking about all these ‘Dallas’ characters?” Arkie asked.

“I’d hate to think that,” I replied, and I would. My worst fear was that Jadie was genuinely losing occasional contact with reality, since this would indicate a much more severe emotional problem than elective mutism. The prognosis for a child suffering from any kind of hallucinatory psychosis is very poor, and I dreaded being the one who might have to officially identify such a problem and thus pass the life sentence that would probably result.

“But do you think it’s a possibility? Or is she just making them up?”

“But why?” I asked. “Why have all these secret relationships? Especially as she doesn’t seem to actually
like
any of these people, other than Tashee?”

Arkie forked through the remainder of her food, shifting the leftovers to the sides of the plate.

“Is there any history of abuse in the family?” I asked.

Arkie looked up sharply. “What do you mean? Being beaten? Is there evidence of that?”

“I was thinking sexual …”

“No, there hasn’t been anything,” Arkie replied, her eyes wide. “How come? Are you suspecting something?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s just that …” I paused. “In the past, I’ve found quite a high correlation between certain types of abuse—among them, sexual abuse—and some kinds of elective mutism, so it’s something I always need to consider. And in Jadie’s case … there is a sexual quality to some of what she does. Nothing more, really, but I do get that certain feeling, if you know what I mean. That sense that there’s more to it than what’s on the surface.”

Arkie frowned and took up her wine glass. Slowly, she shook her head. “No. Nothing I’ve heard of. They seem sort of an inadequate couple to me, especially him. He strikes me as a real wimp. I always get the feeling that he’s bowled over, having to cope with a house full of females. The mother doesn’t seem like a particularly forceful personality either, but I don’t think she’s bright enough for it to matter. But there’s been nothing to make me think any of the children have been abused. We’ve been involved with the family since Jadie was about three, and the girls have always seemed reasonably well cared for. It’s just Jadie. The other two have been fine, but she’s always been the odd one out.”