The Tiger's Child (15 page)

T
uesday morning found Sheila back with us. As with me the afternoon before, she behaved as if nothing in particular had happened and there had been no absence. I had threatened Jeff to keep him from making an issue of it. Miriam inquired politely and Sheila blithely lied through her teeth, saying she had been ill.

Alejo was charmingly pleased to see Sheila. When she came through the door, his small face lit up and he ran across the room to throw his arms around her in an enthusiastic hug. This caught all of us by surprise, as Alejo had remained an aloof, unpredictable boy throughout the weeks, but none of us more so than Sheila. An expression of alarm crossed her face first, when the boy so eagerly grasped hold of her, but then she smiled and bent to hug him back.

Throughout the summer program, Sheila, like Alejo, had been a guarded soul. It was apparent by now that this was not a particularly natural setting for her. She did not innately respond to young children in the way that some teenaged girls do, and she found some of the more difficult situations unsettling, because, I suspect, they still came just a little too close to home. Jeff and I had discussed this and felt it was best to let her continue to the end, as we were not that far off now, but we agreed that to expect more in the way of help from Sheila was probably unrealistic.

She appeared genuinely happy to be back with us. Her mood was positive, if not downright sunny. Thus far, among the children she had only responded in a relaxed and natural way to Alejo and occasionally to David. The girls, in particular, she had shunned, which was a pity, as we could have done with a good role model for Kayleigh, Tamara and Violet. However, on this morning, she showed genuine warmth and generosity toward several of the children. Even Violet.

Over the course of the summer, Violet had developed what could only be described as a crush on Sheila. She had struggled vainly to catch Sheila’s attention, to sit near her, to hold her hand. A big, ungainly girl with plain features and annoying persistence, Violet wasn’t very easy to accept, even in the best of circumstances. Sheila had found her obsessional fervor irritating and Violet’s repeated efforts to touch her horrid. I tried to explain to Sheila that such crushes were fairly normal in girls
of Violet’s age and implied nothing serious, but Sheila, not fully comfortable with her own sexuality, continued to find these advances revolting. On this morning, however, Sheila listened patiently to Violet’s various ramblings, and while not allowing Violet to go so far as touch her, she did let the girl sit next to her at snack time.

After snack time, we took the children over to the park across the street and Sheila continued to play actively with them, pushing Kayleigh on the swing, boosting David and Mikey up to the uppermost reaches of the climbing frame.

I realized what was happening. Like the swan, so graceful above water and paddling like hell below the surface, Sheila was working actively on serenity in hopes that all the turmoil brought up between us would disappear, or at least no longer be apparent. Watching her through the morning, I pondered on how much of a behavior pattern this was for her.

Feeling the need to confront this issue, rather than allow her to bury it, I cornered her during the ride down to Fenton Boulevard.

“This might be a good time for us to talk,” I said, as I pulled away from the school.

“Oh? About what?”

“About us. About the Fourth of July weekend. There were obviously some very strong feelings and I think it would be better if we cleared them up.”

Sheila shrugged, as if I were talking about something completely unknown to her.

“I get the feeling you think I walked out on you when you were little.”

“I never said that.”

“What I heard was how angry you felt. How you felt that I set you up, how it seemed to you that I didn’t care and I just left you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not angry now,” she replied.

“These things need facing, Sheila. If you have such strong feelings, they won’t go away just because you pretend they have.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sooner or later everything else in my life goes away, why not them as well?”

“
Sheila.
”

“Okay, okay, so I was upset,” she said wearily. “So what? People get upset. I’m over it now, so let’s just leave it at that.”

I didn’t answer.

Looking over, she smiled beguilingly. “You want me to say I’m sorry, okay? I was stupid. I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s all right to be angry with me,” I said. “I don’t mind, but let’s just be up front about it.”

“No, I wasn’t angry. Just stupid, that’s all. I get like that. So let’s forget it. Let’s go on like it didn’t happen.”

“But it
did
happen.”

“Not if I say it didn’t.” She looked over at me. “Things only exist if you believe they exist. That’s true. I’ve read it. And it’s true, because I know it.”

“So, you’re saying that if you don’t believe we had the argument, we didn’t have it?” I asked.

“Things can only bother you if they exist. And they can only exist if you let them.”

Silence came then. I was drawn back abruptly across the years to a dark school closet where I had retreated with Sheila after she had gotten into serious mischief in another teacher’s room. That teacher had sent her to the principal, who gave her “swats,” the form of corporal punishment acceptable in my school at the time.

Distressed to have lost control of the situation myself and have a child who I already knew was physically abused at home, then experienced swats at school, I had withdrawn with her into the only private place I could find to try and sort the matter out. Sheila, however, had seemed to take the whole experience in her stride. Indeed, she pointed out with some pride how she had not cried at all when the principal struck her.

“Don’t you feel like it?” I had asked in amazement. She was six and I was twenty-four and I felt like it.

“Ain’t nobody can hurt me that ways,” she’d replied matter-of-factly. “They don’t know I hurt if I don’t cry. So, they can’t hurt me.”

Seven years later and I realized Sheila was still operating under a variant of that theory.

We had only two full weeks of the summer program to run. Both Jeff and I were immensely pleased with how it had turned out. There had been hiccups, to be sure, and plenty of things we would do differently the next time around, but in general, it had worked well.

One obvious advantage to providing a program of this nature for our clients was the opportunity to work with them in such a natural milieu. Some of the children, among them Kayleigh and Mikey, had responded well to the group situation and the supportive setting and were well on their way to putting their problems behind them.

Equally useful were the diagnostic advantages of such a setting. A few of the children had been with the clinic for some time without any marked sign of progress. Being with them for three hours a day, five days a week, in such varied circumstances allowed Jeff and me to assess their problems much more accurately than had been possible in the confines of the clinic and its psychiatric hour.

Tamara was a good example of such a child. She had first come to the clinic when she was six on referral from her family doctor. He had treated sores on her forearms, which refused to heal, despite all his efforts. His suspicions that Tamara was inflicting the injuries herself and then preventing the wounds from healing were soon confirmed.

Initially, Tamara had seen one of the other psychiatrists at the clinic, but after eighteen months of therapy, she was referred to Jeff in hopes that she might progress faster with a male therapist. Jeff had been seeing her weekly in play therapy for a further ten months and felt he was still no nearer to helping Tamara control her destructive urges.

The summer program showed us a complex, deeply unhappy little girl, who had difficulty relating to just about everyone, young and old alike.
There probably was an element of depression in Tamara’s behavior, just as her copious files said, but then depression is a fairly natural reaction to sensing no one likes you. Unable to get the attention she needed through more traditional means, Tamara had discovered that injuries received a lot of notice. Over the course of the program, we saw her draw blood on several different occasions when things didn’t go her way. Jeff, armed with these insights, was now working with Tamara to help her improve her interpersonal skills and felt at last that they were moving forward in therapy.

Alejo was another child who had been included for diagnostic purposes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t enjoying such a happy ending. Increasingly, Jeff and I were having to acknowledge that the majority of his problems stemmed less from emotional trauma than from low intelligence and, most likely, brain damage. There was no doubt that his traumatic early years had had an effect on him, and this showed itself in his abrupt, sometimes violent, responses to actions around him; however, many of his more trenchant behaviors were simply the result of a boy mentally incapable of coping with the usual demands of school and home. This had become particularly apparent in the ebb and flow of daily activities in the program and Jeff and I were making preparations to discuss the matter with his parents.

I was dreading telling Sheila this, even more than Alejo’s parents. Of all the children, Alejo alone was special to her. There had been a natural
affinity between them, right from the beginning, and we had encouraged it. Now I regretted having involved her so closely, because I knew Sheila would find the final verdict on Alejo unacceptable.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to tell Sheila. Instead, she overheard Jeff talking to me at the end of one session when we were cleaning up.

“What do you mean, he’s got a low IQ? You mean he’s retarded?” Sheila asked, coming back to where we were standing.

“Jeff did the official workup last week,” I replied.

“Last week? When I was gone? You just waited till I was gone, didn’t you?” she retorted.

Jeff turned away, unwilling to get drawn into an argument with her.

“He’s not got a low IQ. He’s perfectly normal,” she said.

Miriam, who was coming back to us with the boxes of crayons and marking pens, said, “He’s still a lovely boy.”

“He’s
not
retarded. That’s not why he’s not talking. You think he’s not talking for that reason, don’t you? But it isn’t that. He talks to me.”

“He talks to us too, Sheila,” I said. “But he doesn’t say much and why he doesn’t say much is because some of the areas of his brain aren’t working quite like they should. It’s called aphasia.”

“I don’t care what it’s called,” she snapped back. “He hasn’t got it. He’s perfectly normal. He just doesn’t talk to
you.
He talks to me just fine. He
talks in
Spanish.
So how do you expect him to tell you things when you don’t even speak the same language as him?”

Jeff tapped my shoulder. “This isn’t worth getting into, Hayden,” he murmured quietly.

“Yeah, sure, you’d say that,” Sheila said to him. “It’s not you they’re calling stupid.” Throwing down the rag she’d been wiping the tables with, she stomped off.

“You can’t let that happen to Alejo,” Sheila said to me in the car afterward. The anger had gone from her voice, to be replaced by urgent concern.

“No, it’s a very difficult situation.”

“But you realize what they’re going to do, don’t you?” she said. “Send him back to Colombia.”

“We don’t know that for sure. His parents have discussed a lot of different alternatives and that’s just one of them.”

“You mustn’t let it happen.”

There was silence between us then. I focused my attention on getting us out onto the freeway.

“You don’t
want
it to happen, do you?” she inquired.

“No, of course I don’t.”

“So, Torey—”

“It isn’t my choice, kiddo. He’s a lovely boy, but he is brain-damaged, of limited intelligence and emotionally disturbed. That’s a lot to cope with. I can encourage his parents to keep him and I certainly will do so. Both Jeff and I will, but we can’t force them.”

“But what if they want to send him back to Colombia?” she cried. “What if they put him in the orphanage again?”

“Sheila, I haven’t got much control over this situation. In fact, he isn’t even my client, or Jeff’s. So, technically, we have
no
control. I do desperately hope they don’t send him back. It would hurt him and I think it’s wrong, morally; but I can’t make them do anything they don’t want to do. Nor stop them from doing anything they do want to do. They are legally Alejo’s parents.”

Sheila sputtered in angry frustration. “Look what’s happened to him! He’s been found living in some garbage can and brought here and people have been giving him nice toys and food and TV and everything. And now what are they going to do? Put him back in the garbage can. And you’re going to just sit there and let it happen?”

“We’re not going to ‘just sit,’” I said. “We’re going to
try
to keep that from happening. We’re going to try to help Alejo change his behavior. We’ll try to find an acceptable alternative for his parents.”

“And what if you fail?” Sheila asked.

“I’ll feel terribly sad.”