Ghost Girl (13 page)

I quickly traced the sound of Reuben’s sobs to this toilet. Judging he was in distress, I didn’t bother to try to get him to open the door himself. Instead, I stopped by Mr. O’Banyon’s cleaning closet to pick up a screwdriver and flipped the latch on the door.

When I opened the door, my jaw dropped. There was Jadie, sitting on the toilet, her dress hiked up around her waist, her underpants around her ankles. Reuben, standing in front of her, his overalls down, was howling pathetically as Jadie clutched his penis.

“Let go of him
now!
”

Jadie had frozen stock-still at the opening of the door, but she didn’t let go. Surprisingly, she didn’t look particularly embarrassed at being caught, either. Instead, there was an odd, challenging expression on her face.

“I said, let
go.
” This time she did. “Now, get your clothes on and go wait for me in the classroom.” This, too, she did.

Alone with Reuben, I did my best to comfort him as he stood, clutching his penis and sobbing.

The room was a mess. There was urine on the floor and toilet paper strewn everywhere. Taking paper towels from the dispenser, I attempted to wipe the floor as best I could and then disposed of the unraveled toilet paper. Concern about the other children, about the impending buses, and about what Reuben’s parents were undoubtedly going to say, was filling me with a nasty, rushed sort of feeling.

“Oh, poor, poor Reubs,” I said and cuddled him against me. “That frightened you awfully, didn’t it?”

“Wee-wee,” he sobbed.

“Yes, you went for a wee-wee and what happened? Can you tell me what Jadie did?”

“Wee-wee,” he wailed.

Frustrated, because I knew I would probably never get the straight story, I continued to comfort him. “Did Jadie come in while you were using the toilet? What did she do?”

“Wee-wee!”

“Yes, you wanted to go wee-wee and Jadie frightened you.”

He tugged impatiently at me. “Reuben’s wee-wee,” he cried and then took his hand away from his penis for the first time. With dismay, I saw it, red and swollen, the human teethmarks all too apparent.

Jadie was gone by the time I got back to the classroom. The clock hadn’t quite reached 3:30, but the buses were out front and chaos was reigning generally. Suspecting that something had held me up, Lucy had taken charge of Jeremiah and Philip, but Jadie was nowhere to be found.

Turning a whimpering Reuben over to his nanny, I explained briefly what had happened and apologized profusely. His parents could phone me, I said, if they wished to discuss the matter further, and I gave my home telephone number. And again, I said how sorry I was that it had happened. And I was. I hated these sorts of incidents, which were inevitably traumatic, and for which, in my own mind, I could never absolve myself completely of responsibility.

Back upstairs after the children had left, I dropped into Lucy’s desk chair while she finished some last-minute putting away.

“She
what?
” Lucy asked in disbelief, when I explained what had been happening.

“You heard me, I’m afraid,” I replied.

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Yeuccch. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? If she’s gone, she’s gone. It’s probably not worth going over to her house, especially as this is the last day. I mean, what would I do anyway? I can’t make it unhappen.” I sighed. “But what an awful way to end the year.”

Lucy paused at what she was doing and looked over. “She hasn’t done this sort of thing before, has she?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well …” There was another pause, more contemplative, and Lucy looked down before looking back to me. “Where would a little girl learn something like that? I mean, that’s sick, Torey. She wouldn’t think of doing that kind of thing herself. Would she?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. With the kinds of things kids can see these days—on videos, on TV, for that matter—who knows? I suppose it’s possible she has seen such a thing done before, but …”

“But it’s sick,” Lucy filled in. “Maybe I don’t know a lot about what’s going on in other places. I know you think I’m kind of inexperienced sometimes, and you’re probably right, but I don’t care what anybody says about something like that. Little girls doing that is sick.”

Back in the classroom, I finished up my own end-of-year details. There wasn’t much to do and I hoped to get home early. Putting the few things of my own that I didn’t want to leave in the room over the summer into an apple box, I carried it downstairs and around the building to the teachers’ parking lot. Bending down, I set the carton on the ground and then unlocked the trunk of my car and opened it. When I closed the trunk after putting the box in, Jadie had materialized between my car and the next one.

“Well, hello,” I said.

She’d obviously been home, because she was now wearing a sunsuit, one of the cheap cotton kind bought at discount stores. It was orange, a bright contrast to her dark, tousled hair that ruffled across her face in the gentle breeze. She wore no shoes. I looked at her. She was a sensuous-looking child with her pure blue eyes and dark lashes, her wide, rather pouty lips, and her long, tangled hair. This fact was not lost on me.

“I’m glad you came back,” I said. “I wouldn’t have wanted us to end the school year on an unhappy note.”

Jadie regarded me.

“Do you want to go back up to the room with me so that we can talk?”

She was like an apparition, standing there between the two cars. I could easily have believed I’d simply imagined her there. The fact that she didn’t speak enhanced this sense. The breeze blew a rather large lock of hair across her face, and Jadie put a hand up to push it away, the first substantive movement she’d made since soundlessly appearing between the cars.

“I’d like to understand what happened between you and Reuben,” I said. “I’d like you to tell your side of it.”

I could sense she wasn’t going to come up to the room with me and that if I wanted to straighten the matter out, I was going to have to do it here and now in the parking lot.

“I’m going to think that what you did to Reuben was a mistake,” I said softly. “I’m going to assume that you didn’t know any better, that if you’d realized how unhappy it was going to make Reuben, you wouldn’t have done it.”

Jadie sucked her lips between her teeth.

“There are parts of a person’s body that are private. That means they belong to that person and that person alone, and nobody else has the right to touch them or do anything to them the person doesn’t want. On a boy or a man, the private areas are his penis, his testicles, and his bottom. On a girl, it’s her vagina and her bottom, and as she gets bigger, it also includes her breasts. These are all special, sensitive areas that feel different when they’re touched, and because of that, we keep them private and we have the right to decide who touches them.
No one
has the right to touch them without permission.”

Jadie’s eyes, wide and unreadable, remained on my face.

“Do you understand that?” I asked.

A faint, terse nod.

“That’s why I can’t ever let you touch anyone again the way you touched Reuben this afternoon. If Reuben doesn’t want to be touched on his penis, he has the right to tell you no and expect you not to do it. And it’s my job to make sure you don’t.”

Tears filled Jadie’s eyes.

“Like I said before, I assume you just didn’t know this. Now that I’ve told you, we won’t have to worry about it happening again, will we? So we’ll just put this incident behind us.” I extended my arm to bring her in for a hug. When I reached out, however, she stepped back and eluded me.

“You said you could help me,” she murmured.

“How do you mean?”

“When you first came.” The tears thickened her voice. “You said you knew about kids like me. You said you were going to help make it better.”

I regarded her.

“I believed you that day, that day when you came. That’s why I talked to you. I thought you were going to help me. I thought you said you could.”

T
he first few weeks after school let out, I remained in Pecking to do the hundred and one small jobs I’d never quite gotten around to while I was working. Mostly, I spent time on the apartment, which had remained in a rummage-sale state since I’d moved in. Having had to locate a place to live on such short notice, I’d never had a chance to do more than sweep the apartment out before moving in. Consequently, I’d never really moved in at all, having told myself that the place needed a good cleaning and a lick or two of new paint first, and it was easier to move boxes than bits and pieces. Of course, I’d never envisaged the boxes still being there in June, but they were. So at long last I got around to buying the paint, stripping the walls down, painting, and finally, emptying all the boxes out.

There was an odd finality in doing all this. Despite having lived in Pecking for almost six months by that point, I don’t think I’d ever considered myself a resident. I remained a willing outsider, a transient putting foot temporarily to earth, and with everything still in boxes, it was possible to conceive of flitting elsewhere as easily as I’d flitted here. With the boxes gone and everything put away, I could only conclude that I was genuinely living in this place.

The summer warmed, and I idled away the first few weeks after settling in. The only person from school whom I saw with any regularity was Lucy. She and Ben had a small powerboat, which they kept at a nearby reservoir for waterskiing on weekends. I was pleased the first time she and Ben invited me to go along. Having always been athletic, I looked forward to the opportunity to learn to waterski and fancied I’d cut quite a figure when I did. Fact was, I was awful at it and hated the sensation of being dragged through the water, which was what always happened. All that could be said for my efforts in the end was that I didn’t drown. However, I did continue going with them most weekends, because I discovered I enjoyed driving the boat and I could barbecue a mean hamburger.

The last six weeks of the summer were spent back in the city, where I’d agreed to participate in a training course at the clinic. Initially, I was going to stay in temporary accommodations rented from a nearby university, but in the end, I accepted the offer to stay with my former boyfriend, Hugh.

Since moving to Pecking, my private life had been a shambles. Indeed, it probably had been for some considerable time before that. Hugh and I had had a fairly serious relationship for the better part of the three years I’d been at the clinic. We’d never considered marriage during this time. With a blossoming career and a fickle, footloose side to my nature, I knew I wasn’t ready for a long-term commitment, and neither was Hugh. He already had one failed marriage under his belt, and he was not impressed with the institution. We did share an increasingly close relationship, however, and finally decided to move in together.

We didn’t. In the time it took me to notify my landlord I was moving and get my things together, the relationship disintegrated. This was no great surprise, I suppose, as we were two very different people. I was cast as the intellectual, the professional, the goody-two-shoes to Hugh’s hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth good old boy, and most of our humor, banter, and spirited times together revolved around this disparity. So did most of our arguments. Hugh was a college dropout who’d set himself up in business as a pest exterminator, and, having a keen business mind, he’d parlayed it into one of the largest independent exterminating businesses in the city. Indeed, it was this occupation that had initially attracted me to him, because he drove around downtown in a van with dead bugs painted all over it, and I admired the humor and devil-may-care confidence that allowed it. Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t a line of work that lent itself naturally to small talk at clinic cocktail parties, and inevitably, after any evening spent with my friends, Hugh’s taunts about my being an “uptown girl” were guaranteed to get a rise. He saw my work as well meaning but unreal, and, as he was very fond of pointing out, for all my education and expertise, I made much less money than he did.

What had kept me going for so long in the relationship was the laughs, because Hugh was a genuinely good-humored man. This was where the disparity between us worked well, because no matter how difficult my day had been, I could always fall back on Hugh to put things in perspective and cheer me up. Also, I enjoyed the slightly schizophrenic experience of being as comfortable in Hugh’s world of country-western bars and pancake houses as I was in the theaters and restaurants I frequented with clinic colleagues. However, reality hit us with the decision to live together. We both seemed to realize simultaneously that we needed something more than our differences to survive sixteen hours a day of each other. The parting was mutual, and, like the rest of the relationship, it was good natured.

That had been in August. In January I’d come to Pecking, and in the interim there hadn’t been any special relationships. I’d been out occasionally, but for the most part, Pecking was a social desert. When I’d agreed to go back to the clinic for this six-week period in the summer, it hadn’t been for social reasons, and certainly it hadn’t been with the intention of starting up with Hugh again; however, we’d never lost touch in the intervening months, and when he suggested I stay with him, it sounded more friendly than staying on my own, so I said yes.