Читать книгу Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 7

What a pair Shemona and Geraldine made. They were two halves of a whole, rather than two separate children. Shemona was truly mute, spending every day in total silence. She had one of the most closed, unreadable faces I had ever come across in a child. It was as if someone had stuck up one-way mirrors behind her eyes, because, while Shemona constantly watched me, I could never see anything in return. And she did watch me. Even when I turned to look directly at her, she never averted her eyes. She simply continued to study my face. At those moments it was hard to remember she was a five-year-old. There was no innocence about her.

Geraldine, however, was clingy, noisy and infantile. From the beginning, she insisted on being physically close to me whenever possible. If I sat down, there she was, climbing on my lap, hanging over my shoulder, fondling my hair and my face. If I was standing, she would come up and move very close to me. Everything I owned was a target for kisses and caresses: my hair, my hands, my belt, whatever she could reach. On one occasion, she actually kissed my shoe before I realized what she was doing. Being a physically oriented person myself, I was surprised to find how irritated I became with all this attention. I liked being touched, but Geraldine was another experience altogether. She treated my body as if it belonged to her.

On their own, their individual problems would have been enough to merit psychological intervention. However, it was the relationship between the two girls that made them both fascinating and maddening for me. Geraldine did everything but pee for Shemona. Whatever whim Shemona might have, be it for a pencil or a paper or a glass of water, Geraldine was off getting it for her without Shemona’s ever giving an indication that I could perceive. At recess, Geraldine did up Shemona’s coat with motherly care; she wrapped the muffler around her sister’s neck, pulled the hat down over her ears. At lunch, Geraldine cut her sister’s food, carefully leaving a bite on the fork when she’d finished. I seldom saw her more than three feet away from Shemona at any given time. She guarded Shemona; she attended Shemona; she spoke for Shemona. No one could have found a more effective bodyguard than Geraldine.

Shemona seemed fairly dispassionate about all these ministrations. She accepted them more than appealed for them, and I got the feeling that it was Shemona, not Geraldine, who was the dominant member of the team. Shemona behaved like a little queen. Geraldine was the toady.

The most noticeable problem, of course, was Shemona’s muteness. I puzzled over what to do about it. During the seventies, I’d done an extensive amount of research with children who refused to speak, a psychological disorder called elective mutism. If Shemona had been any one of the legion number of elective mutes I had encountered during those years, I probably would have leapt right in with both feet, the way I always had. But here, now, I hesitated. Without an aide, I was unable to work with her in the uninterrupted one-to-one mode I was accustomed to. More specifically, I couldn’t get her separated from Geraldine, and I knew full well that with the two girls together, I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting her to speak. So the first weeks slipped by, and I accomplished nothing.

After the girls had been with me about three weeks, I asked Mr. and Mrs. Lonrho to come in and see me after school. To work more effectively with the sisters, I felt I needed to know more about their lives at home.

Mrs. Lonrho seemed relieved at the chance to talk about Shemona and Geraldine. She and her husband had four children of their own as well, all near in age to the two sisters, so they had expected no trouble in taking these, her brother’s daughters.

“I’d met them in Belfast,” Mrs. Lonrho said. “I’ve tried to get back there every couple of years or so. Most of my family’s still there, and I want my kids to know their roots.”

“Did the girls seem okay to you when you last saw them in Belfast?” I asked.

She nodded. “They were just kids, like any kids.”

“Shemona was always the quieter,” Mr. Lonrho added. He spoke with a broad western drawl. His wife, I noticed, was incorporating his accent. She still had the burring lilt of Northern Ireland in her words, but the vowel sounds were growing broad and flat.

Again Mrs. Lonhro nodded. “Yes, she was. She was always a self-possessed little thing. Independent, you know? She must have been about three or three and a half when we last saw her. She’d made herself a little house out of a blanket over a chair. Spent hours in there on her own. You never had to entertain Shemona. I remember thinking what a good quality that was for a child to have, because our four were a bunch of hooligans. Forever whining, wanting to do something, getting into trouble doing it.”

“And Geraldine?” I asked.

“She was at school during the day, so we didn’t see as much of her. But she enjoyed playing with our lot in the evenings.”

“I don’t remember much about her, to be honest,” Mr. Lonrho said. “She was the sort of kid to blend in with the wallpaper.”

“That was the thing,” his wife said, “they were just ordinary kids. When all this other happened and we found the girls were on their own, it seemed only natural to take them. We didn’t think two thoughts about it. You expect there to be some upset, but we assumed they’d adjust. Get them here, give them plenty of love, and they’d come out of it. We never expected it to be like this.”

“Are they getting any outside help? Any psychological help?” I asked.

Mrs. Lonrho frowned. “They were. We had Shemona to see a guy over at the clinic. But she wouldn’t talk. Eight weeks and she did nothing but sit there. And for their prices, well, I’m afraid she’s going to have to do her sitting at home.”

“Has Shemona been mute all this time?”

“Not a single word,” Mr. Lonrho replied.

“I don’t know when she started this,” his wife added. “It’s been going on a while now. The girls were with my sister Cath before coming here and Shemona wasn’t talking there. And that was about a year ago. We didn’t think anything much about it when Cath mentioned it. We just thought it was a kid’s thing and she’d stop being so silly once she and Geraldine got settled.”

“Does Shemona talk to Geraldine?”

Mrs. Lonrho shrugged. “I think she has to, but I’ve never heard her.”

“We’ve tried everything we can think of,” Mr. Lonrho said. “We’ve tried the psychologist. We’ve tried his ideas. We’ve tried the other school’s ideas. We’ve talked to our priest. We’ve talked with Bet’s sisters. I thought separating the girls would make a difference. Bet didn’t agree with me. She thinks they need each other. Anyway, one weekend I took Geraldine down to see my mother, and it was hell. She screamed the entire time. And Shemona still never talked.”

“How is it you decided to take Geraldine and Shemona?” I asked. “Surely you still have quite a lot of family in Belfast.”

“My sister Cath’s the only one who could take them. And most of hers are already grown and gone. And she’s got a job to think of and everything. Things just weren’t working out. And we didn’t want them in a foster home. They’d been in a foster home part of the time as it was. We just wanted to give them a fighting chance.”

A small silence sprang up unexpectedly. Both of them had grown thoughtful. I was jotting notes, and when I looked up and saw them, I was unwilling to intrude on their thinking.

Then Mrs. Lonrho raised her head. “Shemona cries at night,” she said softly. “It’s the only time I hear her. Usually she does it after Geraldine is asleep, but if I go in to her, she falls silent. I put the light on and I see her lying there, her face all red and puffed up. I change the pillowcase. Sometimes I even have to change the pillow, it’s so wet, but if I try to touch her, she moves away. She hates to be touched. She pulls away and faces the wall. You know, I ache to hold her then. She’s so little. But I don’t dare. You can tell by looking at her face that you’d better keep your distance.”

The following morning when we were outside on the playground at recess, Geraldine and Shemona came to stand next to me, as was their custom. I was leaning back against the brick wall, hands sunk deep into the pockets of my jacket. Geraldine leaned too, her arm linked through mine, while Shemona was hunkered down fingering through the dirt at our feet.

“Do you miss Northern Ireland?” I asked.

Geraldine did not respond immediately; however, Shemona looked up from where she was squatted. She had a collection of tiny twigs in her hand. I studied her face and wondered if, at five, she knew what Northern Ireland was.

“Shemona misses it,” Geraldine said.

“Do you?” I asked her.

Another pause and then she nodded slowly. “Yes, Miss.”

She pressed close to me. She’d had only one arm linked through mine but now brought up the other. I extracted my hand from my pocket and put my arm around her shoulders, drawing her against me.

“Would you like to go back?”

She nodded without hesitation. “I am going back. Shemona and me both. When we’re bigger. We’re here because we’re just wee girls.”

“It must be very hard for you and Shemona to have lost your mother and your father and have had to come so far from home. Any one of those things would have been very upsetting to cope with, but to cope with all of them at once must be extra hard.”

“Our brother Matthew died too, not just our mam and dad,” Geraldine added.

“Yes. That must have been very hard. You’ve lost a lot. It must make you feel very sad sometimes.”

Silence fell between us. Mariana had a ball and was bouncing it enthusiastically against the brick wall not far from where Geraldine and I were standing. The rhythmic thuds from wall to pavement and back again filled up the silence.

“Now Shemona is youngest,” Geraldine said. “Used to be me, then Shemona, then our Matthew. Now she’s youngest. And I’m the oldest. I’ll always be oldest.” A small pause. “Unless I get killed too. Then Shemona will be an only child.”

The other parents I wanted to see were Mr. Considyne and Dr. Taylor. Leslie was making no noticeable progress whatsoever. Like Shemona, she suffered from my lack of auxiliary help. By the time I had finished diapering her, checking her sugar levels and injecting her with insulin, there was hardly any time left to work with her. What work I did do seemed to have negligible effect.

I wanted to know more about Leslie’s behavior at home. Watching her interactions with her mother in the brief moments I saw them together, I got the impression that Leslie was more responsive to her mother than to me. Did Leslie interact more in general at home? Was she less withdrawn?

The other issue I felt I could no longer live with was Dr. Taylor’s drinking. Just as Carolyn had predicted, Dr. Taylor went through a spell of arriving to pick Leslie up stone drunk more often than not. I was appalled both by the severity of her drinking problem and by everyone else’s complete acceptance of it. I’d encountered alcoholic parents and some pretty spectacular displays of drunkenness over the course of my career, but nothing to equal the grueling, day-in, day-out consistency of Dr. Taylor’s problem. And I had certainly never experienced anything equivalent to the attitudes of the people around me, when I expressed concern. I was treated as if I had the problem, not her.

It became clear to me that Dr. Taylor was the person everyone loved to hate. Her legendary aloofness went beyond the point of rudeness; her hostile arrogance was all the more bitter for its silence. More than a few people openly felt she deserved such a comeuppance. More to the point, however, she gave the impression of being a very dangerous woman. Rich, powerful and antagonistic, no one interfered with her because I suspect no one dared.

I didn’t dare either. I thought about it a lot. I had fantasies about standing up to Dr. Taylor, but when it came right down to looking her straight in the eye and hanging onto Leslie, I never quite managed. On the other hand, I hadn’t given up. Despite failing time and again to keep Leslie from going with her intoxicated mother, I was still prepared each afternoon to try again. I was still taking hold of Leslie’s coat collar. Dr. Taylor and I were still having our daily battle of glares. I think even she knew by that point that, while I might not have the courage of a tiger, I had the tenacity of a terrier.

The meeting was arranged for very late on Friday afternoon, a time I chose because I knew the building would be relatively empty. When Dr. Taylor came to pick Leslie up after school, I reminded her of the meeting. With relief, I noticed that she was sober. But when the time arrived for the meeting, no one came. I sat, waiting, at the table. Neat piles of Leslie’s work and my records lay beside me. I fiddled with them, stacking them and then restacking them, lining them up straight. The clock ticked noisily, and I couldn’t avoid listening to it.

At last the door opened and closed beyond the shelves and, shortly, Tom Considyne’s huge frame appeared around the corner. I rose and extended my hand to him and asked him to sit down. We exchanged a few brief pleasantries before he pulled out one of the child-sized chairs next to me and lowered himself into it in a surprisingly graceful manner.

“I’m afraid my wife isn’t going to be able to make it,” he said. “She isn’t feeling well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’d just talked with her when she came to fetch Leslie at 3:30.”

“It’s her stomach. Incredible problems with it.”

“Oh. I see.” I opened Leslie’s folder and began to take out examples of her work. I laid out other things, charts and graphs mainly, that I’d used to keep track of her progress. I explained my concern, because, as he could see, the progress had been minimal.

Even though Carolyn had filled me in, Tom Considyne startled me by being so friendly and garrulous. Having met him only that once, I had little personal experience to judge him on, but I’d assumed automatically he’d share some of his wife’s distant reserve. Not so. Warm and expansive, he talked, listened, asked questions, gesticulated, joked and laughed heartily. He was also a bit of a flirt, using just enough sexual innuendo in his conversation to keep me slightly uncomfortable.

What surprised me more was the fact that he was uncommonly astute about the methods I was using with Leslie. Obviously, he had encountered them before and he’d paid attention. The methods he was less sure of, he studied in minute detail. It became apparent that he adored Leslie, in spite of her handicaps.

“She loves your class,” he said at one point. He had one of her papers in his hand and smiled tenderly at it. “I take that as the best indicator of your abilities. She’s always so anxious to get here in the mornings. Right out of bed first thing. She has no sense of time, you know. It’s charming in some ways. Up at 3:30, dressing to come to school. She was like that Saturday. I’d told her at bedtime that there’d be no school in the morning, but she forgot. And so there she was, 5:45, in our bedroom, taking the covers off my wife, putting Ladbrooke’s slippers onto her feet to make her get up. Leslie had her clothes on and everything. We had no choice but to take her into bed with us to get her back to sleep.”

This all sounded like considerably more life than I’d ever noticed in Leslie. I couldn’t imagine her dressing herself. I mentioned this to her father.

“She’s not good with strangers. Like her mother in that respect, I’m afraid. A bit shy.”

“It seems like rather more than shyness to me,” I said. “She’s virtually nonexistent some days.” I didn’t mention the fact that I hardly considered myself a stranger to Leslie.

He nodded. “Yes.” A second nod, more resigned. “Yes, she does that at home sometimes too. She’s rather unpredictable.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes she’s okay. Depends. If she’s interested in what you’re doing, if it’s food or something, she can be very responsive. Or if it’s something she knows you don’t want her involved in …” He grinned. “But …” The grin faded to be replaced by a wearier expression. “She’s hard work some days.”

“I can well imagine.”

“It’s just the way she is, though. I don’t fight it anymore. We used to, you know. Christ almighty, we went to every professional in the book for a while. We turned ourselves inside out for them, but nothing worked.” Then he shrugged. “No more. We’ve come to accept the situation. That’s been the only way to handle it. Leslie’s just different.”

“Does your wife accept it as well?”

He went silent, rubbing the stubble on his chin in a pensive manner. Then he nodded slowly. “I think so. My wife doesn’t have the kind of patience Leslie needs. Ladbrooke’s a very—what would you say?—a very mental person. And Leslie, well, you don’t really think about Leslie. You feel Leslie. Leslie is. You do Leslie by instinct. My wife has a hard time with that kind of thing. She finds Leslie difficult to cope with some days. I guess we both do, occasionally.” He smiled gently at me. “Saying that I can accept Leslie for what she is doesn’t mean that I always find her easy to live with.”

I nodded and relaxed back into my chair. “Are there any areas where Leslie’s particularly hard to cope with?”

He thought a moment. “I think we get into the most trouble at night. Leslie doesn’t seem to need much sleep. It’s incredible, really. She can go to bed at eleven and then be up at three and never go back again. Other times, she goes to bed easily enough but wakes up every hour or two, right through the night. You get up six or seven times with her. And this has been going on for years now. You can’t really believe what it’s like until you live with it. Nothing works. We even tried drugs at one point, but unless you knocked her right out twenty-four hours a day, she still woke up.”

“Does she stay in her bedroom when she wakes up?”

“No, not really. I must admit, I can’t come to terms with the thought of locking a child in somewhere. That appalls me every time someone suggests it. Leslie seems to need this chance to go through the house when there’re no other distractions. She needs the security of checking in all the drawers and cupboards and seeing everything is still there. I think that helps her define her life in some way.”

“What do you mean exactly, when you say ‘checking in all the drawers and cupboards’?”

“Well, when she gets up at night, she likes to open the cupboards and dressers and things. She goes in the kitchen and the bathroom mainly and takes things out. You know, just to check they’re all there.”

Astonished by the thought, I pursued it. “You mean Leslie gets up in the middle of the night and goes around taking everything out of the cupboards?”

“Oh, she’s very careful. She’s not destructive; she almost never breaks anything. She just takes things out and leaves them.”

I was trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a house with a child doing that sort of thing nightly. I had visions of my own apartment, of waking in the morning to find the contents of my cupboards and drawers removed.

Mr. Considyne seemed unaware of the curiosity value of such behavior. “About the only problem we have with her is over smearing things. She does love to rub things around, you know, like jam or ketchup or toothpaste. Anything spreadable. Sometimes I take her out to the studio and let her use my paints.” He paused. A smile crossed his lips, and he chuckled. “Boy, did she make a beaut of a mess a couple of weeks ago. She got up and no one heard her. The next morning we went downstairs to the kitchen and found she’d opened the freezer and taken every single item out and laid it on the floor. She’d taken the lids off the ice cream, and it was spread all over the tiles. God, you never saw anything like it.”

There was an oddly indulgent tone in his voice. I think I would have been a bit more appalled to lose the contents of my freezer in that manner.

“What does your wife think of all this?” I asked.

“Oh, it was her fault. She didn’t remember to lock the freezer.”

“No, I mean, in general. Doesn’t she mind that Leslie does this kind of thing?”

He shrugged. “Ladbrooke gets impatient with the mess sometimes. But like I said, Ladbrooke isn’t the world’s most patient person. She has no real understanding of kids. I try to explain to her that Leslie needs this. I think it’s expression for Leslie. Besides, Ladbrooke has household help. She doesn’t need to worry about the mess. I wouldn’t stick her with that.”

“I see.”

There was a small silence. Mr. Considyne looked down at his hands and then over in my direction without looking directly at me. He smiled sheepishly. “I’m rambling on, aren’t I? You’ll have to forgive me. I don’t get a chance to talk about Leslie very much. Most people don’t understand really, do they? Most people aren’t very interested.”

“That’s all right. I’m definitely interested. This gives me a much clearer picture.”

“God, I love that child,” he said. “It’s hard to explain to people. All they see are her defects. But if I had to admit it, I’d say I love her more than my two normal kids. She’s so pure. So untainted. She just feels and does. There’s no inhibition. No fucking intellect. Just purity. A completely natural person.” Then he paused and shook his head. “But that’s not to say she’s not a challenge some days.”

“I don’t think most people realize what living with a child like Leslie entails,” I said.

“No,” he replied in a very heartfelt way.

A small silence came. I could hear the wind pick up beyond the window. I’d opened it slightly after school to let in a little fresh air, and now the silence was filled with a greedy, sucking sound.

“Do you have help specifically for Leslie?”

“We have Consuela. She’s not really just for Leslie. She’s a cook and housekeeper, in fact, but she spends a lot of time with Leslie.”

I nodded.

“Consuela’s been with us forever. I don’t know what we’d do without her. She makes the difference between sanity and insanity around our place more often than I’d care to admit. I’m afraid Ladbrooke isn’t exactly what you’d call domesticated. We’d all fall apart without Consuela. And she has the patience of Job with Leslie, with all of us.”

“Does she sleep in Leslie’s room?”

“No. No, she has her own rooms at the other end of the house.”

“Who gets up with Leslie then, when she does all this waking?”

“We do. My wife and I.”

“And this is every single night?”

He nodded.

I scribbled a note of this on the upper edge of Leslie’s file.

“I suppose, if I’m honest, I have to admit Ladbrooke does most of the getting up. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Most nights I never hear her.”

Another small silence intruded. Mr. Considyne reached out to finger one of the papers on the table.

“When did your wife give up her work?” I asked.

“Quite a while back now. Three and a half years, maybe.”

“What made her decide to stop?”

“Her project ended. She’s a physicist, you know, and she was doing some experimental work with some other people at Princeton University. But they needed to meet quite often, and she found commuting too much, especially with Leslie to think about. And their funding kept giving them trouble. It always had. When the new administration came in in Washington, she knew they weren’t ever going to get any increase in their grant. It was going to have to end sooner or later; so, she just wound up her involvement in things.”

I studied his features as he spoke. All along I was thinking how different his version of his wife’s circumstances was from Carolyn’s. I wondered who was right. Or if either was.

“And she’s not worked since?”

“No. Leslie started getting very bad about that time. My wife has a full-time job with her alone.” Then, as if to amend the way that sounded, he added, “Anyhow, it wouldn’t be feasible for her to go back to work. Isn’t much call for someone in her profession in a place like this, is there?”

I shook my head.

“Was Leslie planned?” I asked.

He smiled in a very knowing way. “Oh no. Not at all, believe me.”

I nodded.

“That’s not to say she isn’t loved. Or wanted.”

“No, I know.”

He smiled, his features creasing into a tender expression. “You could say Leslie’s been one of life’s unexpected pleasures.”

Silence came, and this time it stayed. Neither of us spoke. I glanced at my watch. Mr. Considyne, appearing comfortably draped over the small chair, gave no indication of preparing to leave. I was wishing he would. If he went now, I’d have an excuse to say nothing more. But he just sat, unperturbed by the silence.

My stomach knotted. The tightness started around my navel and worked its way upward, tensing muscles all along my trunk. I thought absurdly of the image of being squeezed by a python.

“I’m finding it sort of hard to say what I’m going to have to say next,” I murmured.

He looked over. “What’s that?”

The python was up to my neck. “It’s regarding your wife.”

“You mean the fact that my wife’s an alcoholic?” he asked, his voice as casual as it had been all along. He remained in his relaxed pose, but his eyes had left my face and gone to gaze on the steel shelving and the posters I’d stuck up on them in an effort to disguise their presence. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“It’s no secret, love. Wish that it were, but it’s not, least of all to my wife and me.”

“Has anyone encouraged her to join AA or something like that? Has anyone talked to her seriously about her problem?”

A derisive smile came to his face. He laughed slightly. “You obviously don’t know my wife.”

“No, I don’t. That may be one of my problems.”

Still the sneer. He was looking back at me now, and I could feel the mood changing almost imperceptibly. The pleasant camaraderie we’d shared was slipping away.

“There are a lot of good programs around these days. I’m sure if she’s not interested in AA, there’s still something suitable available. There are plenty of alternatives. I’d be quite glad to find the information for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and there was a patronizing tone to his voice. “It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but I doubt Ladbrooke would be interested. She’s not a joiner. She’s really not into that kind of thing at all.”

He was still looking over at me. His eyes were very watery, giving him a look of permanent tearfulness, but the expression in them had hardened and they had become veiled in much the way I’d seen Shemona’s do. He turned away finally, scratched his head, then shrugged wearily.

“Look,” he said, his tone gentler, “it is sweet of you to be concerned. I’m sure you mean well. But we’re used to it. The way I see it, you’ve just got to accept certain things about people. I wish Ladbrooke didn’t drink. I wish, if she did, she wouldn’t feel obliged to make such a public ass out of herself in the process. I wish she could just pull herself together, once and for all. But it’s like with Leslie. You’ve got to accept people for what they are, not what you wish they’d be.”

“This is perhaps a little more acceptance than is good for either one of them. I’m scared to death every time your wife comes to pick Leslie up. I’m terrified that sooner or later someone is going to get killed. I know I’m going to upset your wife something terrible if I interfere, but one of these days I’m going to have to. I’d feel entirely responsible if anything happened to Leslie as a result of my letting her go with her mother.”

“Don’t worry about Ladbrooke’s driving, if that’s what you mean. It’s only two-and-a-half miles, and I’ve gotten her a good, safe car. She’s never had an accident. I doubt she ever will. She’s a very reliable driver.”

I didn’t know what further to say.

Tom Considyne reached across the table for his coat. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “In a way it’d probably be better if she did have an accident. It’s going to take something like that to wake her up.”

“Or kill her.”

He shrugged. “She’s doing that to herself anyway.”