Just Another Kid (32 page)

She nodded. The thumb returned to her mouth.

“What happened after that?”

“I don’t know,” she said around her thumb.

I glanced over and smiled before returning to bandaging the toe.

“I remember after the fire,” she said.

“What do you remember?”

“We were outside,” she said. “It was dark and I still had my nightgown on. There was a man in a cold, black coat.”

“Your daddy?”

“No, his coat was cold. He was carrying me. He put me in a big car.”

“A fireman?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

I finished with her foot. Cupping it gently, I raised it and kissed the bandage. “There. Better now?”

She made no effort to get up. Instead, she remained on her back on the couch and kept her feet in my lap. Her eyes never left my face. “Do you want to tell me more about it?” I asked. “About the fire?”

“I don’t remember more.”

“I see.”

She kept the tip of her thumb in her mouth. Slowly, her gaze drifted upward from my face toward the ceiling. She seemed for a moment to be looking at something specific, and then her expression grew more inward.

“Our Matthew went to play with Baby Jesus,” she said softly, “in His palace. And Mammy went too, to take care of Matthew, because he was just a wee lad still.”

“So that left you and Geraldine and your daddy.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“What happened then?”

“We lived with Daddy for a while. We had chips and fried eggs for our tea every night because Daddy didn’t know how to cook anything else. Sometimes we had baked beans too. And I was going to be a schoolgirl. I had my satchel. Daddy bought it for me. But then we went to live with Auntie Meg, and I didn’t get to be a schoolgirl. And then we went to live with Auntie Aileen. And then we went to live with Auntie Cath. And then we came here. And we’re still here.”

“What about your daddy? Where’s he?”

“He got lonely for Mammy.”

I nodded.

Silence came then. Shemona gazed into space, her eyes unfocused.

“Do you know how the fire started at your house that night? Did anyone talk to you about it?”

“No.”

“Does Geraldine talk about it?”

She shrugged.

“What about the Troubles? About the Provies and the men your daddy used to do things with? The things Shamie and Geraldine talk about sometimes. Do you understand what they’re saying?”

“I know there’s fighting, but I don’t know why. I don’t know why everyone can’t be friends.”

I smiled at her.

She continued to lie with her feet in my lap. I rested my hands gently on her legs, and for the first time, she did not pull away from my touch.

“What kinds of things
does
Geraldine tell you?”

A slight shrug.

“Does she talk about your old home and your mammy and daddy much?”

“Sometimes.”

“Does she tell you other things? Things that frighten you?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Do you believe the things Geraldine tells you?”

“No, not always. Geraldine talks a lot of rubbish. Like Shamie says.”

“Yes, I think maybe that’s so.”

“Sometimes, I wish I was Shamie’s sister and not Geraldine’s,” Shemona said, her tone surprisingly heartfelt.

“Why’s that?”

“Shamie’s nicer to me. He doesn’t get so cross. He lets me play with his things and Geraldine doesn’t. But
she
plays with
my
things, without even asking. Like yesterday, she took my new crayons and she broke one. And she didn’t even say she was sorry.”

What struck me in listening to this was the absurd ordinariness of everything in the midst of such extraordinary circumstances. She could have been any six-year-old talking, just then.

“You know what Geraldine says?” Shemona asked.

“What’s that?”

“That I’ve got to do everything she tells me to. She says I got to always obey her and do whatever she wants.”

“Why does she say that?”

“Well, so she can take care of me. That’s what she says. But really, it’s so she can boss me around. And I don’t like it.”

“So do you do as she says?”

There was a slight pause. I looked over at her.

“Sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes I don’t.”

“What happens then?”

“Geraldine gets cross.”

“Are you afraid of her then?”

“A little. She can beat me up. And she takes my things sometimes.”

“Do you tell your Auntie Bet? Or Uncle Mike?”

Shemona shook her head.

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer. A sudden little silence slipped in around us. The thumb, which had remained poised at her lip, slid back into her mouth. She sucked softly for a few moments.

“What does Geraldine tell you about men, Shemona?”

No reply.

“Are you afraid of them, like she says?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Why?”

“She says that bad men are coming at night, like before. She says that’s what happened at home. She says they put petrol bombs through the letterbox and that’s what made the fire. She says it was the bad men who fought with Daddy. They made everything happen. They made the fire. They made us not have a mammy and daddy anymore. They made us come over here. And if I’m not good and do as she says so she can take care of me, then they’re going to come over here too.”

“And what do you say to her when she tells you all this?”

“I tell her Auntie Bet and Uncle Mike don’t have a letterbox. They’ve get a mailbox down at the end of the drive. But she says it doesn’t matter. They’ll find an open window or something. They’ll still come if I don’t do what she says so she can take care of me.”

“Do you believe her, Shemona?”

There was no answer, but I watched as tears puddled up in her eyes. Then very slowly, she nodded. “Yes, Miss,” she replied in a tight, tiny voice.

“Shemona, sweetheart, come here. Come sit on my lap. I want to tell you some secret things, and I need you very close so you can hear.”

She rose up then and crawled onto my lap. I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her in against my body. For a moment she remained tense and then, with an audible sigh, she pushed in closer, her face in the soft folds of my pullover.

“Geraldine is trying to be a good sister to you. She loves you and she wants things to be better for both of you, but she’s just a little girl herself, and she’s been just as scared by all that’s happened as you’ve been. So she doesn’t see things very clearly. What she’s telling you
isn’t
the truth, Shemona. It’s the way Geraldine feels. I think she believes it’s true, but it isn’t. No men are going to come and put petrol bombs in your house. Geraldine’s confused. It won’t happen here, not at your Uncle Mike’s house.”

Shemona sucked energetically on her thumb.

“When you want to know the real truth about something, you need to ask a grown-up. You need to talk to me or to Ladbrooke or your aunt or uncle. Not Geraldine. Because Geraldine doesn’t always know what’s true. And here’s the secret. You’ve got to remember it, remember that I’ve told it to you, because it’s
very
important. Do you want to know this secret?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“It’s this: What’s happened to you in Belfast is over. It was horrible, but now it’s over and it’s not going to happen again. You’re here and you’re safe with Auntie Bet and Uncle Mike and their family. And you’re going to stay safe. So if Geraldine tells you something scary about that time in Belfast, if she tells you that you have to do as she says or else those things’ll happen again, then you tell her
no
. You’re in on the secret now. You know it can’t happen again, because it’s
over
. That’s the truth, Shemona. These days are gone and they won’t come back.”

With one finger, she gently wiped the unfallen tears out of her eyes. Then pressing against me, she clutched my arm and pulled it tighter around herself.

I
left the discussion with Shemona convinced of one thing: the need to separate the two sisters. As it was, they were together virtually twenty-four hours a day, which gave Geraldine far too much opportunity to tyrannize her younger sibling. Although I was increasingly impressed with just how durable and resiliant Shemona actually was, it was expecting too much of her to continually fend off Geraldine.

My first thought was to place Shemona in a regular kindergarten class, but this was dealt a body blow by the discovery that Shemona was, in fact, still not talking to anyone else, anywhere, other than in the classroom. I was dismayed to discover this and irritated with myself for not having followed up things more closely. I’d talked to Mrs. Lonrho several times in mid-March when Shemona had first begun to talk, but she had never recontacted me, and I had never gotten back to her in the intervening weeks. When I’d heard nothing, I’d just assumed Shemona’s speech had carried over. No one had intimated that it hadn’t, but then I’d never asked.

So where from there? It probably wasn’t a good idea to cause a major upheaval by placing her in a new class and simultaneously expecting her to speak as well, not with everything else that was going on. So I contemplated the limited alternatives.

One afternoon, I had a fit of complete exasperation. Why had it taken me so long to reach this conclusion? Why hadn’t we coped better with the lack of speech? How was I going to place Shemona? Where could I put her? I cursed our stupid setup, here in the administration building. If we’d been in a regular school, as we should have been, it would have been a much simpler matter, even if Shemona had been unwilling to talk. I could have mainstreamed her for a few hours or put her in a resource room or something. It wouldn’t have been the major production that this was turning out to be.

Ladbrooke let me rattle on. “What about Carolyn?” she asked, when I paused for breath. “Would her room work?”

“No, they’re all preschoolers. And they’re all subnormal.”

“Yes, but she plays with them at recess and doesn’t seem to mind that they’re younger or handicapped. And she talks to them.”

I hesitated.

“She
does
talk to them, Torey. I mean, wouldn’t that be better, to be in there, where she’s already comfortable? Maybe just a couple hours. For art or music or something.”

I nodded slowly. “Maybe it would.”

And it was. I talked to Carolyn on Thursday evening, and she was quite interested in the idea. By the middle of the next week, Carolyn, Frank and I sat down with Mr. and Mrs. Lonrho and confirmed the change. By that Friday, Shemona was ready to go down with Lad for a morning in Carolyn’s class.

The only drawback to this switch was, of course, the lack of an appropriate curriculum. Carolyn’s children, while close to Shemona’s age, were much less advanced. Many of them weren’t toilet trained or able even to manage their clothes. Most of the school day was devoted to learning basic self-care skills Shemona had long since mastered. I wasn’t unduly bothered by this as there were a lot of other advantages to Carolyn’s room, beyond her convenient proximity. She had a beautiful selection of toys and trikes and trays for sand and water play. And the other children, while not as bright as Shemona, were, for the most part, friendly and sociable. Most children Shemona’s age were kindergartners, who only went half days anyhow, and as Shemona would return in the afternoons to my room, I felt she would be getting sufficient academic input. So I was satisfied, as were the Lonrhos, which was the most important.

The biggest surprise was Shemona’s completely undisguised relief at this change. Although I had known that she was under pressure in our room, not only from her relationship with Geraldine, but also from trying to keep up with children three and four years older than she was, I had not been aware of how heavily it must have weighed on Shemona. She’d never once intimated that she disliked our room or wanted out, but once she
was
out, she made no secret of her delight to be somewhere else.

I suspect Shemona’s biggest pleasure came on Friday of the following week, when she came back to class with a large construction-paper badge with the word “Helper” written across it. She explained to Lad and me that now she was a big girl in Miss Berry’s class and had to help with the other children. She had to show them how to do things the way big girls do them, and this was her badge, so they’d know to come to her for help. Carefully unpinning it, Shemona stowed it in her cubby. Each morning when she arrived, she brought it over to have it repinned on her clothes before going downstairs. That single small kindness on Carolyn’s part perhaps best epitomized the whole experience. At last Shemona was somewhere where she was biggest, smartest and most capable. She was also somewhere she could just play, and I think that was something that Shemona, in her short life, had not had enough of an opportunity to do.

Stung by my ineptitude regarding Shemona’s failure to generalize her speech to home, I made sure the Lonrhos were included in every aspect of this new development. I rang Mrs. Lonrho at every turn. We also tried to create parallel changes at home for Shemona. She and Geraldine changed rooms, for instance. Shemona went in with the Lonrhos’ younger daughter, four, while Geraldine went in with their twelve-year-old. I suggested that Mrs. Lonrho and her husband make a concerted effort to spend a regular amount of time with each girl individually. I also thought it might be best not to leave the two sisters alone together unsupervised, at least for the time being.

Interestingly, within days of these changes at school and at home, Shemona started, of her own volition, to speak to her aunt and uncle. Over the next few weeks she broadened her talking to include virtually anyone who spoke directly to her. This confirmed in my mind the suspicion that her mutism, at least in part, had been controlled by Geraldine. In the beginning, when Shemona had first ceased talking, perhaps that was a reaction to the traumatic events surrounding her, but its long duration I credited to Geraldine.

In regard to Geraldine herself, I anticipated—indeed, hoped for—some kind of interaction between the two of us as a result of all that had happened. Of course, I wanted it to be a positive interaction, such as mine with Shemona, so that we could at long last face some of Geraldine’s demons together and exorcise them, but I would have settled for a negative one. Even an out-and-out confrontation was better than the emotional no-man’s-land we seemed to have drifted into. I was sure Geraldine knew she’d lost control of Shemona on that morning Shemona and I had gone down to the teachers’ lounge. Shemona’s circumstances had changed so rapidly after that that Geraldine couldn’t have missed the connection. She was canny enough to have worked everything out, so I stayed alert and prepared, but Geraldine made no move.

Geraldine was not unaffected, however. Tension grew up between the two of us. She became surlier in the classroom, less able to cope with her schoolwork, less cooperative with the other children. She did nasty little destructive things, like breaking Mariana’s colored pencils or tearing up Dirkie’s cat drawings. And she began to bait Ladbrooke mercilessly, taking out on her all the anger I suspect she felt for me, but she made no overt moves whatsoever toward Shemona or myself.

In the end, I felt it would be best to bring the issue to a head; since Geraldine seemed unwilling to confront me, I attempted to make her talk. I cornered her and asked her directly if there was anything she wanted to say to me. I took her around into the privacy of the blackboard arm of the room and coaxed her along. I chatted casually on the playground with her. I aimed morning discussion in her direction. I queried her when we were working individually. But Geraldine remained unwavering. No, Miss, she’d always reply, I’ve nothing to talk about. She had an air about her of a fox run to ground—wearily alert and slightly desperate—but she wasn’t defeated. I may have caught Shemona, but she made it patently clear that I hadn’t yet caught her.

The time was coming to consider the future placement for all the children. We had only about a month and a half left before the school year let out. I had no doubt now that Shemona was going to be ready for regular first grade in the autumn. We were once again working on a plan to reintegrate Shamie into the nearby junior high. He was going over for just two classes three times a week, and this was fairly successful. They were both nonacademic classes, and he got on quite well with the teachers and other students. So I felt a normal placement for him, too, was quite likely. The only other student in the class who looked like possibly being able to return to the mainstream was Mariana. She was the dodgiest of the three. She still had absymal academic skills for her age, but she had made steady, albeit slow, progress all year long. At nine, her reading skills were only those of a seven-year-old and her math skills were even lower, but when she’d arrived in the classroom in September, they had been nonexistent, so she’d improved quite a lot. I didn’t expect that Mariana would ever be a scholar, whatever the setting. Her IQ just squeaked into the normal range, and what she was doing academically was probably consistent with her abilities. In fact, of all the children in the room, she alone was probably working up to her potential. So I thought it best she return to a normal setting. My kind of room could do no more for her academically than a resource room could in a regular school, and socially, she was held back here. Admittedly, Mariana was still a bit rough around the edges. We seemed to have gotten reasonable control over her more outlandish behaviors, such as the sexual precocity, but she was still distractable and impulsive. She would need a mature, organized, experienced teacher, and so I set about looking for one.

This left me with Dirkie, Geraldine and Leslie. All three would need continuing full-time self-contained special education. Frank had already contacted Mrs. Samuelson, the woman who was to take my place in this classroom. I’d talked to her on the phone, and we’d made arrangements for her to come spend more time in the class during early May to acquaint herself with her future students. Frank and I explored other possibilities for these three, but as things stood, all of them were due to return to this same room.

Dirkie had remained forever Dirkie throughout the school year. He had made some academic progress, but otherwise, there had been almost no change in his condition. He was squirrelly as ever, still obsessed by his cats and long hair, still spending much of his day hooting happily to himself from under the table. It was unfair to both Dirkie and ourselves to say we were no more than a holding pen for him, because he clearly got a lot out of the classroom experience and thoroughly enjoyed himself in the process. And of course, he gave a lot too. He had a cheerful, engaging personality, and I would have been genuinely sorry to have missed this time with him. But in realistic terms, he was unlikely ever to find himself in a normal classroom in a regular school, just as he was unlikely to find a future outside the sheltered caring of his foster parents.

Geraldine had proved to be my most enigmatic child that year. When she’d first come, I’d badly misjudged her. I’d had no idea she was as disturbed a girl as she eventually showed herself to be. Assessing her now, from several months’ vantage point, I knew she was and undoubtedly always had been, the most unbalanced child in the group. Nothing gave me the feeling there was anything organic or intrinsic about Geraldine’s problems. Hers was a genuine psychopathology, which, fortunately, was a fairly rare phenomenon in a class such as mine.

On numerous occasions I pondered what might have been responsible for the extent of Geraldine’s disturbance. Could she have tolerated life in what was essentially an emotionally disturbed city if it hadn’t meant the death of her parents? Could she have tolerated the death of her parents if it hadn’t meant disruption and separation from everything she knew? Or would she have been a problem child in any setting? The whole matter was academic anyway, a passel of what-ifs that no one, not even Geraldine, had the answer to. But I couldn’t help wondering anyway. What Geraldine’s future would be like was equally unknown. In my opinion, she certainly needed to be confined to a self-contained room. Deep in my gut I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was potentially dangerous. We knew so little about her, about what she felt, or even if she did feel, that it seemed wiser to keep her in a restricted setting until we understood better.

Of all the children, it had been Leslie who’d made the greatest gains over the course of the year. By April she was functioning at a surprisingly high level, considering how she’d entered the class in the autumn. There was still loads of room for improvement, and she was still what could only be called a severely handicapped child, but she had made heartening progress. Her academic skills, which I’d only worked on since the turn of the new year, were galloping ahead. She could read the same primer as Mariana, albeit in a lilting sing-song voice that gave no sense to the words, but she had mastered the concept of reading. By the same token, she could perform basic arithmetic. Socially, her gains had been slower, but still remarkable. She talked now, virtually nonstop. The majority was straightforward echoing, either of what had just been said to her or else regurgitated from earlier conversations. She also took to reciting things she’d read. I often heard her, while playing alone, reeling off lists of ingredients, such as one finds on the sides of cereal boxes. I loved this new-found noisiness in Leslie. It made her charming and alive, unlike the silent ghost we’d had earlier. Leslie remained toilet trained in class but made only very slow progress toward it at home. Even with us, it wasn’t very reliable and was the first thing to go if Leslie was under stress. So I mentioned in my notes to the new teacher not to be surprised if Leslie wasn’t dry at the beginning of the new school year. She could be and she would be, with persistence. And insistence.