Ghost Girl (21 page)

She didn’t speak.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I smiled. “Are you feeling a bit better now?”

Her behavior was guarded, as if I were a stranger. Or perhaps simply an intruder.

“I’m sorry you’re not in class. We’re missing you. This afternoon we’re going into Mrs. McLaren’s class to make nut cups for the Halloween party next week. I’m sorry you won’t be there to help us.”

Jadie still did not speak.

“Shall I make one for you? To have at the party?”

Jadie shifted her shoulders slightly, although not sufficiently to produce a shrug.

Flustered by her stark silence, I glanced around the room. It was a typical little girl’s bedroom, with all the usual clutter of childhood. Jadie sat amidst tissues and discarded coloring books, crayons rolling around over the bedclothes. Briefly, I was transported back to my own childhood and the days off school with minor illnesses.

Jadie was watching me intently.

“I’ve brought you something,” I said at last. Bending down, I opened a paper carrier bag and took out one of the Sasha dolls. It wasn’t the dark-haired one that Jadie had imbued with Tashee’s qualities, but rather the one with long blond hair. “I thought maybe you’d like some company. I can’t give her to you, because she’s part of the set, but I thought that while you need her, you could keep her here at home with you, and then you can bring her back to school when things are better.”

Wordlessly, Jadie took the doll and pressed it close into the crook of her arm.

“The lunch hour is nearly up and I need to get back soon, but I thought this doll … well, if things get hard, you can look at her and know I’m thinking of you.”

She continued to regard the doll.

I rose from the bed. “I do need to go now. I hope you get to feeling better.”

No answer.

“Okay?”

Gently lifting her hand, she caressed the doll’s hair away from its face before looking up at me. Very, very slightly, she smiled.

Jadie’s mother was just outside the bedroom door when I came out. She was so close, in fact, that I literally bumped into her. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I was bringing Jadie some clean sheets. She gets herself in such a mess when she’s in bed like this.”

I nodded. “Thanks for letting me see her.”

“I seen that doll,” Mrs. Ekdahl said and smiled. “That was real sweet of you to do. I can see why she likes you so much, ’cause you do do the nicest things for her. Her and Amber are always playing dolls together, so that’s going to make her real happy.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“It looks just like you, that doll. Got blond hair, just like you,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “Jadie’s going to like that. Going to make her feel she isn’t missing you so much, and Jadie always was one for having her dolls look like people.”

On Monday, Jadie was back and quite her usual self. She had the blond-haired doll with her and she kept it with her, laying it on the table beside her as she did her morning work.

“Look what girlie-wurlie’s got,” Jeremiah said.

“Yes, I know.”

“She stoled it. I seen her, ’cause she had it down on the playground before school. And it’s one of them dolls you brung in.”

“No, she didn’t steal it. I’ve lent it to her for the time being.”

“You did?” Jeremiah cried in an injured tone. “You never lent me nothing.”

“You want a doll, too?”

“No, I mean nothing of yours from here in the classroom. You never let me take nothing home.”

“This was a special circumstance, Jeremiah. I lent it to Jadie for a special reason, and when I feel you have a special circumstance, then I’ll lend you something, too.”

Jeremiah made a derisive noise. “What would I want fucking school stuff for anyways?”

At the end of the day, I took the boys down to their rides. When I arrived back upstairs, I found Jadie still hadn’t departed. She was in the cloakroom, her boots on, her coat down from the hook and lying on the bench. The box containing the other Sasha dolls had been pulled out, and she was involved in silent play with the dark-haired doll, holding it upside down against the wall. When I appeared in the doorway, Jadie started and whipped the doll down.

“You particularly like that doll, don’t you?” I said.

She nodded. “But I like the one you gave me, too. I like her best, because I pretend that’s you.”

I smiled and came around to stand beside her. “This one looks more like Tashee, doesn’t she?”

Jadie looked up sharply.

“Shall we close the doors?” Without waiting for a response, I went and did it. “So, how was your weekend?” I asked. “How was Amber’s birthday?”

Jadie picked up the dark-haired doll again.

“Did she have a party?” I asked.

“No.”

“What about within the family? Did you do anything special for her at home?”

“Yeah. My mom made a cake. It was yellow and it had candles on it.” A pause, and Jadie wrinkled her nose. “You know what stupid thing Amber wanted on her cake? Sugar daffodils.
Daffodils
. And this is October, even. But my mom said that was okay for her to want, ’cause it was her birthday.”

“Did she get presents?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“My mom and dad gave her some clothes, and she got a My Little Pony, too. And my grandma gave her a tapestry kit, only she’s not really big enough to do it. I gave her a Mars bar, but Sapphire didn’t give her anything, ’cause she’s too little to have an allowance.”

“So, Amber turned six on Sunday. She had a cake and presents. Did anything else happen?”

Jadie shook her head.

“She didn’t die, did she?”

Jadie turned the dark-haired doll upside down and watched its long hair fall. She cocked her head a little to see the doll’s face better.

“Amber’s all right,” I said quietly. “She’s turned six and she’s fine.”

“No,” Jadie replied and there was a brittle edge to her voice.

“She is. I saw her myself this morning down in Mrs. Havers’s class.”

“No
. They’ll still come. It doesn’t have to be on her birthday. It’s because she’s six now. That’s the number they kill you at. That’s the number Miss Ellie says is for dying. They’re gonna do just like they done with Tashee. I know they will.”

“Who?”

“Them
. I keep telling you. Them. Miss Ellie and Bobby and them.”

“But who are they? Where do they come from? How do you get to be with them? Do they take you? Do they come to your house? Are your mom and dad there?”

Jadie looked up, bewildered.

“Do you know?” I asked.

“Usually, I’m asleep in my bed. Miss Ellie comes in and wakes me up. She brings me Coke to drink. For both me and Amber. Sometimes we go out in the living room. Sometimes we go other places.”

“Like where?”

Jadie paused, a confused expression on her face. “I don’t know where.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, Miss Ellie puts a scarf over our faces. It’s at night anyway. I can’t see. But she takes us to this other place and when we get there, we drink more Coke, and sometimes Tashee comes.”

“I thought Tashee was dead.”

“She is, but then she gets alive again, because Miss Ellie puts her bones back together.”

“And your parents? Where are your parents when all this goes on?”

“Asleep?” she asked, uncertainly. “I think maybe they’re in their bedroom asleep. That’s why we always got to be real quiet when Miss Ellie and them come, ’cause I don’t think she wants to wake my mom and dad.”

“But why don’t you wake them? If you don’t like all this, why don’t you just scream when Miss Ellie comes, and that’d wake everybody up.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. Miss Ellie’d make them die. She might make me die.” Jadie paused. “You can’t never do anything Miss Ellie don’t want you to. Not ever. ’Cause if Miss Ellie’s spiders ever seen you were doing that, nobody’d be left alive.”

O
ne of the nicest aspects of working in the Pecking school was everyone’s general acceptance of my children. This was the first place I’d worked where I felt my special education class was genuinely integrated into the life of the regular school. We were included in all the activities and always given genuine and meaningful ways to participate, not simply token ones. Indeed, it was usually taken for granted that we would pull our weight, which was probably the greatest compliment of all, because it made us no longer “special.” As a consequence, our class was given its own part to play in the traditional Halloween activities at the school, which included a costume parade through the halls, followed by an afternoon-long party in the school gym. Each classroom was making its own contributions toward the decorations and party food. The sixth-graders, for instance, had carved pumpkins and were making black cat cupcakes. The fifth-graders designed the paper table-cloths and made spider-web pizzas. My class offered up our finally finished tissue paper pumpkin as a wall decoration and were assigned the job of making enough popcorn balls for the whole school.

The morning of the party, which was a Thursday, didn’t dawn quite as I had expected. For a start, Brucie was absent, which meant his mother didn’t bring in the popcorn popper that she’d promised. So there I was with six pounds of popcorn to be popped and no way to do it. Second, Jeremiah didn’t arrive.

“Ng-ah-ah!” Philip cried excitedly when he came into the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “could you try that again?”

“Ng-ah-AH!” and he gestured wildly. Philip was now receiving intensive speech therapy and being taught sign language in an effort to help him communicate more successfully. Unfortunately, he hadn’t quite got the idea and assumed any gestures would work. His hands and arms flailed frantically.

Just then, Mr. Tinbergen appeared in the doorway. “They’ve put Jeremiah off the bus. He was causing his usual ruckus—you know how Jeremiah gets—and Fred said he’d just had enough. He turned the bus around, took him home, and dumped him off.”

“Oh jeez,” I muttered. “And today, of all days.”

Jeremiah had long-standing problems coping with the half-hour bus ride to school. In years gone by, his excessive behavior had often been dealt with by returning him home, and this response had been moderately successful. I, however, had vetoed it when I’d come, as it seemed self-defeating to me. If anyone needed the structure and stability of the classroom, it was Jeremiah. So we’d been using a strict reinforcement system, whereby he earned tokens for behaving well and lost them for troublesome behavior. On the other hand, I could sympathize with Fred, the bus driver, who commented on occasion that if he actually took a token away every time Jeremiah misbehaved, Jeremiah’s daily token balance would average about minus twenty-seven.

The class seemed empty with just Jadie, Reuben, and Philip, but we didn’t have much choice but to get on with things, so I took them down to the teachers’ lounge with me, where we spent the first ninety minutes of the day making batch after batch of popcorn in a small pot on a hot plate. At recess, I hopped in my car to run out and get Jeremiah.

He knew I was coming, because Mr. Tinbergen had phoned earlier; so there he was, sitting cross-legged in the dust at the top of the track that led back to his house.

“Fucking bus driver,” he said to me as he got into the car. “Fucking bastard. You know why he hates me? ’Cause I’m an Indian kid. ’Cause I got brown skin and he’s got white skin. That’s why he don’t take no care about my feelings.”

“Do you really think that?” I asked.

“Look, what d’you expect? I’m poor. I don’t got nothing good, like you got. My folks don’t got no Lincoln Continental, like this.”

“It’s a Fiat, Jeremiah, not a Lincoln Continental.”

“Well, it
looks
like a Continental. Can’t blame me for that. I need glasses. My folks so poor they don’t even get my eyes checked.”

The temptation was to mention that he was blaming everyone for his behavior but the culprit, but I didn’t. He knew. I knew. He knew I knew. Some things are best left unsaid.

Then worse happened. Just as we got inside the classroom, Jeremiah gave a wild scream and fell to the floor, as if in a faint. “Oh
no!
” he wailed. “I forgot my costume!” And he then did something I’d never seen him do before. He burst into tears.

I think I’d seldom felt so bad for a kid. Helping him off the floor, I walked him over to the table.

“I was gonna win,” he sobbed. “I was gonna be best.” I tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable.

Jadie, sitting across the table from us, continued molding her popcorn balls for several moments and said nothing. Then, slowly, she leaned forward. “I can get him a costume,” she said, her voice soft.

I looked over.

“My aunt came last week from Lower Falls and she brung me and Amber costumes to go trick-or-treating in. But Jeremiah can have mine, if he wants. I’ll give it to him.”

Jeremiah’s face brightened instantly. “Hey, what kind of costume is it? Is it good?”