Ghost Girl (3 page)

After three weeks of substitutes, it was only fair to expect the children to be disrupted and disruptive. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy coming in midyear and trying to recreate order. I’d appreciated that fact when I accepted the job. Jadie, Philip, and Jeremiah, however, seemed to take one more new face in their stride. Reuben couldn’t. Nothing I did all day long managed to orient him to any meaningful activity. Most of the time he was up, dashing in broad circles around the classroom. When finally persuaded to sit down, he constantly rocked and flicked his eyelashes with his fingers.

Philip made an effort to join in during the afternoon. He liked the easel and paints and enthusiastically slopped bright blobs of color over piece after piece of paper. “Red?” I’d say encouragingly. “Orange?” This made him grunt something back in reply, although goodness knows what.

“That’s baby painting,” Jeremiah said, as he passed the easel. “Man, boog, that’s not even a picture. Want me to show you how to paint something
real?
” He snatched the paintbrush out of Philip’s hand. Picking up the container of black paint, he dipped the brush in and began to draw a long, black line over Philip’s blodges of color. Indignant at this interference, Philip howled.

“Jeremiah,” I cried, abandoning Reuben to halt what I feared would turn into real trouble. “That’s Philip’s painting. Now give him back his brush. You’ve already had your turn.”

“Jesus, lady, I’m just going to help the little booger. Look at this, it ain’t even a picture. And
you
sure ain’t teaching him how to do it right.”

Philip had begun to dance in frustration, trying to grasp the brush from Jeremiah’s hand. Jeremiah, both bigger and more agile, kept it just out of reach. Black paint dripped everywhere.

“Give it back,” I demanded.

“Want me to teach you how to make Mr. T?” Jeremiah offered suddenly. “You ought to like that. He’s a black guy, just like you, only he’s a big booger. You gonna be a big booger someday? Yeah? I bet you are.” He put his free arm around Philip’s shoulder in buddy-buddy fashion. “But you know something I can never figure out about you black people?” Jeremiah continued, as Philip, charmed by his attention, wrapped an arm around Jeremiah’s waist. “I can never figure out how come the blackness just sort of wears off your hands. How come that happens? Look much better to me, man, if you was black all over.” And with unexpected swiftness, he began painting Philip’s palm black and then continued right on up his shirt sleeve.

Philip howled again. I separated the two boys, sending Jeremiah off to the “quiet chair” I’d placed just outside the cloakroom door and explaining he needed to sit there until he could keep his act together.

Jeremiah was not enthusiastic about this imposition on his freedom and got up immediately, shouting and swearing, I physically replaced him and was then obliged to stand over him for the fifteen minutes or so it took him to settle down. Even then, he muttered crossly under his breath, “Man, lady, you’re gonna regret this.”

Jadie might as well have been a ghost. No one spoke to her, looked at her, or even acknowledged her presence in the room. And this attitude was mutual. Jadie went about her business with absorption, but she gave no indication that there was anyone else in the room besides herself.

When it was Jadie’s turn at the easel, she painted an elaborate picture of a white house with a blue roof. Beside it grew a lollipop-shaped tree and in front was a peculiarly shaped figure, rather like a bell with legs coming from it. It had yellow hair flowing down the sides, so I took it to be a person, probably a girl. The painting was small, covering only the bottom third of the paper. She made a strip of blue sky at the top and added a shining sun. This left the middle largely blank.

“I like that,” I said, when she’d stepped back to view it. “You’ve used a lot of colors. Who’s this?” I pointed to the figure.

“Man, lady, don’t you take no hint?” Jeremiah shouted. “She don’t talk. You been told that already. So don’t go hassling folks about what’s wrong with them. How’d you like it, if people kept getting at you for being so dumb? You can’t help that, can you?”

“Thank you for your thoughts, Jeremiah, but I’m talking to Jadie just now.”

At that moment the recess bell rang. Jeremiah shot out the door and Philip scampered after him, leaving me with Reuben and Jadie. I realized I should have been hustling out the door after them, either to catch Jeremiah and bring him back for a more appropriate exit or at least to supervise his departure, but I didn’t. I stood a moment longer to see if anyone would reappear in the doorway or if any horrible noises would signal disaster. When nothing happened, I glanced over at Reuben, self-stimulating happily in the far corner, and then back to Jadie. Pointing directly to the figure on the painting, I asked again, “Who’s this person?”

Silence.

“Who’s this?”

Still silence.

I knew I had to work quickly now to keep the silence from growing potent. My research had yielded a highly successful method of treating the most salient symptom of the elective mutism syndrome—the refusal to speak—and it was both simple and efficient. All that was needed was for someone unknown to the child to come in, set up expectations immediately that the child would speak, and then provide an unavoidable opportunity to do so. Consequently, as a new teacher, I was in an ideal position to get Jadie to speak, but I had to do so right away before we’d established a relationship that included her silence. I also knew that to provide the “unavoidable opportunity,” I had to be persistent, clinging like a terrier to my question, and not let the inevitable wall of silence deter me.

“Who’s in this picture?” Silence. “Tell me what figure we have here.” Silence. “What person is this?”

Still silence. I could see her muscles tense. Her hands began to tremble.

“Who’s
this?
” I asked again, intensifying my voice abruptly, not making it sound angry, not even louder, just intense. And unavoidable. I tapped the picture smartly with the eraser end of the pencil I was holding.

“A girl,” she whispered.

“Pardon?”

“A girl,” she murmured in a hoarse half whisper.

“I see. What’s her name?”

Silence.

“What do you call her?”

“Tashee.” Still the hoarse whisper.

“Tashee? That’s an interesting name. Is she a friend of yours?”

Jadie nodded.

“What’s Tashee doing in this picture?”

“Standing in front of her grandma’s house.”

“Oh, so this is her grandma’s house. It’s pretty, all blue and white like that. Especially the door. You’ve made a beautiful door. And how old is Tashee?”

“Six.”

“Same age as you, then?”

“No, I’m eight. I was seven, but I just had my birthday at Christmastime.”

“I see. Do you and Tashee play together sometimes?”

“No.”

“Have you been to her grandma’s house with her?”

A pause. Jadie regarded the picture. “I don’t know her grandma. She just talked about her sometimes.”

“Oh.”

Jadie touched the figure on the paper with one finger and some of the yellow paint smeared. Lifting her finger, she examined it. “I should have made her hair black.”

“Tashee doesn’t have yellow hair?”

Jadie shook her head. “No. Her hair was black, like Jeremiah’s. Black and straight. I think maybe she was an Indian, but I don’t know for sure.”

“I see.” Then I smiled at her. “I like this picture a lot. Maybe we can put it on the back counter to dry. Then I think maybe we’d better get outside to join the others, don’t you?”

Jadie bent to put the lids back on the paints. I glanced over to see what Reuben was up to. Curled in a fetal position among the cushions, he lay, eyes closed, and gently stroked the skin alongside his temples. “Reuben? Reub, come on. Time to go outside.”

“Y
ou
didn’t?
Holy cow. Holy Toledo. Glen? Glen, did you hear this? She’s been here six hours and she’s got Jadie Ekdahl talking. You hired Wonder Woman.”

Mortally embarrassed, I ducked my head to hide my blazing cheeks. “Just coincidence, really … This was my research specialty …”

The speaker was Alice Havers, fiftyish maybe, small, trim, neatly turned out. She taught kindergarten and had coped with Jadie through two years of school. “So how’d you do it? What’s the secret? What do we do now?”

Lifting my head, I glanced around at the others in the teachers’ lounge. They were all there, from Mr. Tinbergen to Mr. O’Banyon, and they were all watching me. I smiled sheepishly and looked back at my hands. What would be best, I explained mostly to my fingernails, would be to treat Jadie as if she’d always spoken. No big fuss. No lavish praise. I explained how a lot of these children, in my experience, seemed to stay silent more from fear of the amount of attention they’d provoke when they started to talk again than anything else, and so it took a lot of work to gain the courage to try. And others seemed to feel they’d been defeated and somehow lost face by being persuaded to talk again. So it was very important to minimize the attention. After all, it wasn’t the act of speaking that should get the attention, it’s what people said that was important.

There, I thought, I’d said it. Given my lecture. Not even managed to make friends yet; in fact, I didn’t even know everyone’s name, and I’d already made a brilliant impression—Wonder Woman and wiseacre. It was too much for a first day. At the first available moment, I smiled politely, grabbed my coffee cup, and retreated to my room.

About twenty minutes later, Lucy McLaren appeared. “How’re you settling in?”

I rolled my eyes. “I felt like a real dolt down there in the lounge. I wasn’t trying to show off with Jadie, but that’s what it came off sounding like.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lucy said and smiled. “Alice is top class. She wasn’t trying to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that she’s had Jadie for two years, so she knows what Jadie’s like.”

“The whole secret is in being an outsider—an unknown quantity to the child. That and not cosseting the child. You instinctively want to be gentle and supportive with these kids, and that’s generally how the kid gets control. In most cases, you’ll find the elective mute is a master of manipulation.”

Lucy sat down on the tabletop across from my chair. “Yes, I can believe that. Poor June. She was the teacher here before. It was nothing but one big power struggle between her and Jadie. And June tried everything. In the beginning she was really nice, really warm, thinking Jadie was just needing confidence and once she felt secure, she’d speak. Of course she never did. So then June tried star charts, saying Jadie could earn all these privileges, if only she’d say answers to things. Then June got Jadie’s parents to make a tape recording of Jadie at home and tried to prove to Jadie that she knew she could talk. She tried being underhanded, doing things like making Jadie run so that she’d make noise by panting. And this one time …” Lucy paused. “Poor June, she was so thoroughly fed up. This one afternoon, she just said, no, Jadie couldn’t go home until she’d said good-bye and that was that. So there they sat. And gosh, what an ordeal. Jadie did nothing. Just sat there. Picked her nose and that was about it. Poor June was right up the wall, trying to wait her out, but she couldn’t manage it. Five-thirty came and she
had
to let Jadie go. June had to give in.”

I nodded. “They’re not kids to get into a power struggle with, because they’ve usually had a lot more practice at it than you have. That’s why being a stranger helps, I think. The groundwork for the power struggle hasn’t been laid yet, and if you’re canny and a bit of an actor, you’ve got a chance of making them think the game’s up …” My words trailed off and we fell silent. I lifted my head and looked out across the room to the back window and from there to the playground beyond, white with snow.

Lucy, still on the tabletop, studied her fingernails. I cast a sidelong glance in her direction. She was younger than I was, no more than in her midtwenties, although considerably more formally dressed than was characteristic of our generation. She was pretty in a natural, lively sort of way, although carefully applied makeup gave her more sophistication than beauty. Her dark hair was in a well-cut pageboy. What really caught my eye, however, was the remarkable height of her high heels.

Then I glanced around the room again, surveying the neat organization. “Why did June leave midyear?” I asked. It sounded funny calling her by her first name, when I’d never even met her.

Lucy looked over and her eyes widened. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Well, I didn’t think I should really ask. I felt it would be sort of nosy.”

“Oh, golly. Did they
really
not say anything to you?”

“No.”

A grimace. Briefly, she searched my face and then dropped her eyes again to her lap. “June committed suicide.”

“Oh.”

An appalled silence followed. What did one say in reply to something like that? Not having known her personally, I found myself filled with morbid curiosity and wasn’t too pleased at having it.

“What on earth did they tell the children?” I ventured at last.

“We couldn’t really beat around the bush. At least not about the fact she had died. But it was awful, believe me. It was right in the Christmas season, and we were in full swing with parties and plays and all the jingle-bell stuff.” Another grimace. “Let me tell you, it was a downer.”