Читать книгу The Tiger’s Child and Somebody Else’s Kids 2-in-1 Collection - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 22

After the morning ended and all the children had gone home, the four of us went out to lunch. Miriam, who lived locally, suggested a whole-food restaurant down by the lake and so we found ourselves on benches gathered around a wooden plank table in the cool interior of the restaurant.

We discussed the morning’s events, evaluating how the various activities had gone and making plans to adjust them as necessary. Sheila didn’t say much, even when we went over our observations of Kayleigh in the group. She appeared absorbed in a tradescantia hanging in the window beside our table, its long branches stretching down to a point where she could fiddle with them.

After lunch, I offered to drive her the five miles down to Fenton Boulevard, where she could catch a direct bus back to Broadview.

“So, what did you think?” I asked, once we were alone in the car together.

Sheila was silent for several moments. “I don’t like your partner very much. What’s all this crap about regression motivating neuroses and stuff?”

“Jeff’s a Freudian. You’ve got to excuse him that.”

“It’s crap. Why doesn’t he just talk English?” Sheila asked.

“Freud’s ideas have had very wide-ranging applications. While a lot of people don’t agree with all of them anymore, they’ve still done a great deal to help us understand how minds might work. And people like Jeff, who have really studied the theories, seem to make good progress using them.”

Sheila raised her lip in an expression of disgust.

We went a few moments in silence before I looked over again. “So, Jeff excepted, what did you think? Did you like it? Did you enjoy working with Kayleigh?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Why doesn’t she talk?” she asked, her head turned away from me to watch out the window. “And not Jeff’s kind of explanation. Not ’cause she’s got an anal fixation or something.”

“I don’t know why.”

“I told her that when I was her age, I didn’t talk either,” Sheila said.

“Did Kayleigh respond to that?” I asked.

“Dunno. She just kept coloring.” There was a pause. “I wanted to ask you about that other kid. The kid with the Spanish name.”

“Alejo?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s very difficult at school. He fights with the other kids all the time, quite a vicious little boy, and he does very poorly at his work. We’re trying to determine at the clinic whether this is as a result of psychological problems or a mental handicap.”

“Jeff said he’s adopted.”

“Yes. He’s from Colombia.”

“Where are his real parents?” Sheila asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. He was abandoned. The report I read said that someone had found him living in a garbage can and had then taken him to these nuns who ran the orphanage.”

Forehead puckered, Sheila looked over. “Really?”

“Apparently there are a lot of street kids in some of these South American cities. It’s a serious problem in some places.”

“His folks abandoned him in a garbage can?”

“Maybe he was just sheltering in one. I don’t know. The report’s pretty scant and probably about fifth-hand.”

Sheila was pensive a long moment, before turning back. “Did I hear you guys saying that the parents he’s got now were going to send him back to where he came from?”

“I don’t know. There’s some talk of it. They’re an older couple, both professionals, not very used to accommodating children, and he’s been quite a handful.”

“Can they really do that?” Sheila asked. “Just send him back to Colombia, like he was damaged goods or something?”

“I guess.”

Then came silence. Plagued by red lights and roadwork, I wasn’t making very speedy progress toward Fenton Boulevard. Sheila leaned her head against the window and gazed out. She looked tired. Had it been the rigors of the morning? Or had she come tired? The thought suddenly struck me that I was taking the stability of Sheila’s home life for granted. Sneaking a look, I studied her. God, that orange hair!

“I think … well, I guess I can see now what got you attracted to this kind of work,” she said, her voice quiet and rather distant-sounding. “’Cause you hear about these things happening to people, and they are so unfair that they make you feel you just got to do something. That’s my reaction, anyway.” She paused. “Well, that’s one reaction.”

“What’s the other?” I asked.

“I just want to put my hands over my eyes and my fingers in my ears and stop it from getting in. I mean, I already know the world’s bad. I’m not sure I can stand knowing it’s really worse.”

Our first “incident” happened the next morning. The school was across the street from a small park. It wasn’t an elaborate place, but there were swings and a large wooden structure built for climbing and plenty of room for running around. What made it particularly hospitable on a hot summer’s morning were the trees. There were a dozen or more, with enormous trunks and long, overhanging branches. Some particularly forward-thinking person in the parks department had had attractive wooden seating built around three of the trees nearest the play equipment.

We decided to take our juice and cookies outside and let the children play on the swings and climbing frame during their break time. David and Mikey thought this was wonderful and went tearing off at such a rate that Jeff had to run after them and catch them before they went into the street.

Although I had agreed happily when Jeff had suggested that we take the children over to the park at break time, I realized the moment David and Mikey ran off that it was a mistake. We were all too new to each other. But by that time, we were already underway.

Right from the beginning, it was small-scale chaos of the sort that kids adore and grown-ups abhor. Joshua went into a self-stimulated frenzy on the swings. Jessie just stood on the grass, arms out, and spun dizzyingly around and around. David, Mikey and Alejo immediately fell into playing some dreadfully noisy war game that required an enormous amount of tearing around and much shouted large-artillery fire. Violet appeared to get rather turned on by this. I couldn’t tell if she simply wanted to join in and did not have the appropriate social skills to get the boys to include her, or whether she found it all genuinely sexually stimulating. Whichever, she began to indulge in open masturbation, while shouting out cheers and gunfire noises to the boys as they tore by.

Needless to say, our break time was quickly turned into a rowdy, deafening affair. Only Kayleigh and Tamara did not join in. Clinging to Miriam’s hand, Kayleigh watched the other children apprehensively. Tamara, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly frightened by the mayhem, but she withdrew away from all of us. Taking her paper cup of juice and her cookies, she went off into a cubby-hole formed by tires on the underside of the climbing structure.

After fifteen minutes, Jeff and I went to herd everyone back together, while Miriam sat down on one of the benches and tried to keep hold of those we had captured. Sheila proved fairly hopeless. Whether it was the noise or the sudden hyperactivity around her, I don’t know, but she simply froze in the midst of it all and the more I shouted at her to go get one child or another, the more solidly she seemed to be rooted to her spot.

One by one, we rounded them up, until we only had David, Mikey and Tamara left. I was chasing David down when I heard Jeff cry out. “Oh, my God!”

We all stopped then and looked over. He was extracting Tamara from her tires and as she stood up, I saw she was covered in blood. While the rest of us had been absorbed elsewhere, Tamara had taken the opportunity her privacy afforded her to gouge long lines into the skin along her jaw with a small, sharp stick she had picked up from the mulch put down to cushion falls from the climbing frame. They were not particularly deep cuts, but they bled dramatically.

Then, abruptly, from the group of children with Miriam, frantic screaming started up. Instinct told me it was Violet and I spun around, but it wasn’t. It was Alejo. Seeing Tamara’s blood, he put a hand to either side of his face and screamed and screamed. I ran toward him, but this seemed to make matters worse. Shrieking incoherently, he fled across the grass until he came to one of the other trees and then, like a little monkey, he swarmed right up it and into the branches.

We all stood there, stunned. Even Tamara, Jeff’s handkerchief pressed to her face, gazed up in amazement. Alejo kept climbing until he must have been the better part of fifty feet in the air.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jeff muttered. “What now?”

I glanced around us and then back up in the tree. “Alejo? Are you all right?”

He wasn’t screaming any longer, wasn’t doing anything other than standing on a branch and looking down at us.

“It’s okay. Everything’s fine here. Nothing wrong with Tamara. She just scratched herself. But it’s nothing serious. Why don’t you come on down now?” I called.

“Alejo?” Jeff said. “It’s time to come down.”

He didn’t budge.

“You reckon I can climb up?” I asked Jeff.

“Don’t be stupid, Hayden.”

Miriam was beside us now. She was holding Kayleigh in her arms. “How about the fire department? Do they do these kinds of things?”

I looked around at the others just in time to see Joshua strolling out into the road. “Oh, cripes. Josh? Come here, Josh.” I ran after him. Snagging him by the T-shirt, I hauled him back into the group. It was then I noticed Sheila sitting on the ground. She was unlacing her work boots.

“I can get him,” she said, and before any of us had a chance to protest, Sheila had leaped into the branches and was pulling herself up.

“Oh, God,” Jeff cried, “two of them up there. Why did you let her do that, Hayden?”

“Well, at least we’ve got a doctor on the premises.”

Then silence, as we all watched.

“We’re gonna get sued out of our lives …” I heard Jeff mutter under his breath.

Sheila climbed the tree with no difficulty, shimmying up through the branches as easily as Alejo had done until she reached the one just beneath him. I heard her talking to him, but I couldn’t discern what she was saying.

Minutes went by. All the while I was racking my brains for the best solution, as no doubt Jeff was doing as well. Should we call the fire department? The police? Dr. Rosenthal? Alejo’s parents? Or could we risk just waiting him out? What about the other children? It was only ten forty-five and the program ran for another hour and forty-five minutes. Should Miriam and I take the rest back in and try to pretend everything was normal?

Then, just as I was about to suggest phoning for help, I saw Sheila begin to descend, and within a few moments, Alejo started down behind her. Jeff, Miriam and I all sighed a collective sigh of relief.

“Hey, you’re a hero,” Jeff said to Sheila as we all finally started back to the school. He reached an arm out and slipped it over her shoulder. “You really did great there. I bet you’re proud of yourself.”

Nodding, Sheila ducked to free herself of his touch.

“I hope you are proud of yourself,” I said to Sheila as I drove her down to Fenton Boulevard after lunch. “What you did was very brave.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” She put her hands behind her neck and lifted her hair up off her shoulders. “I didn’t think about it.”

“What did you talk about when you were up there? How did you convince him to come down?” I asked.

“I spoke Spanish to him. I didn’t say anything special, just, like, I knew he was scared and I would help him come down, but I spoke in Spanish.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you spoke Spanish.”

“You don’t know everything about me.”

“No.”

“I mean, like, you have been gone a few years, Torey.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

There was a few moments’ silence, while Sheila, her face turned away from me, watched out the window. Then she added, “All those years in the migrant camp and not learn to speak Spanish? Shit, I would never have had anybody to talk to.”

I didn’t answer. There was a sparky undercurrent to Sheila that showed itself more often than I was comfortable with. Much as she seemed to want to be with me, she also seemed easily irritated with me. Probably just adolescence. I wasn’t particularly gifted with adolescents, so that didn’t help any either. Whatever, I found it mildly upsetting.

Sheila seemed to sense this and came back with a conciliatory tone. “I thought talking in Spanish might make him feel better. Like, more secure. It was just an idea.”

“It was a good one. And did he understand you?”

“I am fluent,” she retorted.

“No, I mean, it will have been a long time since Alejo heard anyone speak Spanish to him, and even then it may have been a dialect.”

“Yeah, he understood me. He came down, didn’t he?”

Silence. I was approaching a major interstate junction on the freeway. There was the omnipresent roadwork and quite a lot of congestion, so for several minutes I concentrated on my driving. Once the traffic eased and I could relax, I listened into the silence.

“You know, Sheila, I get this sort of ongoing feeling that you’re angry with me,” I said.

“Me?” she replied with disbelief.

“If there are things or people I like, you seem to go out of your way to show you dislike them. If I say something, you seem to make a point of proving me wrong. And there’s just this general tone of voice.”

“Shit, you’re just listening to, like, every little thing I say, aren’t you?” she retorted. “And judging it.”

“I’m not trying to.”

“Well, you know, I don’t think you’re so great either,” she said. “In that book you wrote, you come off sounding so patient with everything and you’re not, you know.”

I looked over. “What do you mean?”

“You get angry with everything. Like, you swear at all these drivers.”

“I’m not swearing.”

“You might as well be,” Sheila said. “It’s like ‘Come on, lady!’ ‘Hurry up and get out there, mister,’ every second sentence, Torey. And, like, you got mad at me when I tried to get in the car and had hold of the door handle so you couldn’t unlock it.”

“I didn’t get mad at you.”

“You did! You said, ‘Let it go’ in a really bitchy tone of voice. Not like you talk in your book at all. In there, you’re so patient and kind. You wait forever in your book and never say a cross word, but now I can see how you really are and you get mad every other second.”

“Not every other second, I’m sure.”

“Seems like it to me,” she replied.

“I’m human, Sheila. I get irritated sometimes. And irritable.”

“That’s not like you are in One Child.”

“No, maybe not. That’s a character in a book. People are too complex to be portrayed in their entirety on paper. And, in some parts, too boring.”

Sheila snorted. “So you’re saying it’s not you.”

“That character is the essence of me, but it isn’t me, no. I’m me. Here. Now.”

Sheila snorted again. “Hot shit.”