Drenched in Light (8 page)

I woke up in the hospital two days later, a monitor hooked to my finger and IVs pumping glucose and electrolytes into my veins. My secret was out, and there was plenty of time to think about what I’d done to myself, to my career, and to Jonathan. I felt as if someone had yanked the floor out from under me, and I was floating in space, just like Dell in her essay. . . .

I looked up from my desk, and Dell was standing in the doorway, watching me through soft, contemplative eyes. I felt myself being drawn into the steadiness of her gaze before my mind kicked into gear, causing me to motion her in. Grabbing a Kleenex, I pretended to reach for something on the floor as I wiped my eyes.

“Allergies,” I said, when I sat back up. Pulling the door closed, she moved along the wall and slid into the same chair she’d occupied the day before.

“Oh,” she muttered, ready to accept the excuse or the fact that I was crying in my office in the middle of a school day.
Whatever,
her look said.

“So . . .” I tried not to imagine my appearance from her point of view: bedraggled and off-kilter. “I guess you missed the Red Day assembly.”

She winced, her attention darting around my office as if she were looking for a hole to crawl into. “Am I in trouble?”

“No.”

“Are you gonna tell anyone?”

“No. I guess Mr. Verhaden didn’t see you, and you made it to your next class on time?”

Sagging with relief, she nodded. “I don’t think Mr. Verhaden cares. If I go in the storage room, I mean. Sometimes I go there during lunch. He doesn’t say anything.”

“You spend lunch in the instrument closet?” I said it with a little more shock than I meant to, not because the idea surprised me, but because I’d done the same thing myself during my years at Harrington— not for the same reasons Dell probably did. For me, hanging out in the instrument closet and sometimes the practice room or the library was a way of avoiding the cafeteria. I ate with my friends just often enough to keep anyone from becoming suspicious, but when I could get away with it, I slipped off to someplace quiet, where there were no food issues to deal with.

Crossing her slender arms defensively, Dell drew back. “Sometimes. Not all the time. Just when I have a sack lunch with me, and when . . .” Sighing hard, she focused out the window. “Some days there’s too many people. They’re all around and it’s too loud.”

I thought about the girl in the river, standing silent in the sunlight, or curled tightly into a ball against the rain, always alone. I realized again how different it was for her here.

“Sometimes I need it quiet, that’s all,” she added. “They’re always watching me here.”

“The other students?” I interpreted, and she nodded.

“And the teachers. I’m not used to it. I worry what they’re thinking when they look at me.” A ladybug crawled across her shoe, and she paused to watch it, looking peaceful for a moment before the arch of her dark brows straightened again, and she slid her foot to the file cabinet so the ladybug could crawl to safety. “My mind says it’s bad stuff—like I’m stupid and ugly and I shouldn’t be here. Karen—ummm, my foster mom—tells me I shouldn’t listen to that stuff when I hear it in my mind. I know she’s right. Grandma Rose says just ignore it and go on. She says you can’t know what anybody else is thinking, and anyway, ugly thoughts come from ugly minds.”

I chuckled. “It sounds like Grandma Rose gives some good advice.”

She fluttered a smile. “Grandma Rose don’t”—a quick shake of her head faded the smile—“doesn’t put up with much from people. I wish she was here to talk to Mrs. Morris.”

“I imagine that would be quite a conversation.” I pictured the evil Frau of English getting a no-nonsense lesson in kindness, civility, and treating other people the way she’d like to be treated. Then I remembered that, according to the paperwork, Dell’s biological grandmother was deceased. “Grandma Rose isn’t the grandmother you lived with in Hindsville?”

“Huh-uh,” she replied, focusing out the window again, seeming as far away as the wispy white clouds over the Kansas City skyline. “She’s my foster mom’s grandma. She lived across the river from my real granny’s house. Grandma Rose is how I met my foster parents in the first place. They knew me because I’d stay at Grandma Rose’s farm a lot when my real granny was sick and stuff. I think Grandma Rose was the reason James and Karen wanted to be my parents after my real granny died. Grandma Rose is more like a grandma than my real granny was. She understands stuff, you know?”

I nodded, thinking of my Grandma Rice, and how close we were during the years I was staying with her and going to Harrington. Of all the people I lied to about my eating disorder, she was the one I felt the most guilty about deceiving. Grandma Rice was closest to my heart. She sat through hours of rehearsals, never missed a dance performance, helped me with my homework, and fixed the four-course lunches I threw in the trash every day. In some ways I was glad she’d passed away before the truth came out. “Grandmas are good that way, sometimes,” I agreed.

“She told me I ought to write it down when I think things that bother me.” With a shrug, Dell indicated the notebook papers on the desk.

Pulling them closer, I pretended to read the words again, but they were already etched in my head. “So, if Grandma Rose were here, what do you think she’d say about your skipping the Red Day assembly today?”

Dell considered the floor under my desk for a moment. “I dunno.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“About what?”

“Skipping the assembly. How do you feel about it?”

Brows knitted, she shrugged, as if she couldn’t imagine that her feelings would matter. “I just couldn’t go, you know? It makes me think about . . . things.”

“About your mother?”

“My real mom, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like to talk about her.” Her lips trembled, and she pulled them into a firm line. Focusing on her hands, she picked mercilessly at her short fingernails. “Karen wants me to talk about her sometimes, and I tell her I can’t remember anything. My granny took all the pictures of Mama and burned them after Mama gave Angelo to his daddy. They had a big fight, and then the guy with the long black hair came to pick Mama up. Mama wanted to take me with them, but Granny said no. Mama just loaded her stuff in the truck, and before she left, she picked me up me like I was a baby, like Angelo. She was all sweaty and shaking, and I just wanted her to let me go. Then she did, and I was sorry I thought that, because then she did drugs until she died from it. When I was a kid, I always figured maybe I made it happen with all those mean thoughts.”

The sentence ended with a silent question mark that found me wanting to cross the space between us, fold Dell into my arms, replay and recast that embrace from her mother. I couldn’t, of course. No one could, but I understood the yearning. Even after all these years, and as much as I loved my dad, I still wondered about my biological father. I wondered why he didn’t want me, or if he ever knew I existed.

“But now that you’re older,” I said, hiding my own thoughts behind the therapist’s mask, “you know that you were not the cause of what happened. Your mother’s choices were her own. We all have to take ownership of our decisions.” A textbook psychologist’s phrase. Something Dr. Phil might use on his show. Small comfort to a kid abandoned by both of her biological parents.

“I know.” Obviously, she’d heard that line before. Slanting a glance upward, she checked my reaction. “She decided to leave and go do drugs again. It’s not as easy as Just Say No.”

“No, it isn’t,” I agreed, and I knew we understood each other.

The bell rang, and Dell jerked in her seat, glancing over her shoulder as the corridor filled with students and staff members. “Great, now they’re gonna see me in here. Everyone’s gonna think I’m a suck-up.”

“Why don’t you wait a minute until after the halls clear, and I’ll give you an admit for class,” I suggested, picking up my pad.

“I better not.” Standing up, she straightened her body, taking a fortifying breath, bracing for the tide of people outside the door. “I’ve got Mrs. Morris next hour. If I’m late, she’ll make me read out loud and everybody’ll laugh.”

“I see.” I had the strongest urge to walk down the hall and wrap my hands around Mrs. Morris’s bony neck—a fantasy I’d entertained many times back in middle school.

“I’m gonna flunk her class anyway,” Dell added, looking glum. “All we do is read stupid books, and I hate reading.”

“Really?” I motioned to the papers on my desk. “I would think you’d love reading. You write so beautifully.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Seriously,” I said.

With a shrug, she started toward the door. “Reading’s different. You don’t already know the words. When you write, you can use the words you already know. I read that stuff in Mrs. Morris’s class, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

Reading comprehension problems,
I thought.
That could explain a lot of things.
Kids who didn’t read well had trouble in every subject, and kids who grew up in homes without books often didn’t read well.

I was surprised to find myself actually thinking like a real guidance counselor. Apparently, I had learned something in graduate school. For the first time in a long while I had a sense of being useful, rather than just a burden to everyone else. It felt good. “What book are you reading in class now?”

“Today we’re gonna start
The Grapes of Wrath,
” Dell said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. “Mrs. Morris said the school board put it on the list, and she doesn’t even like it. It’s got bad grammar in it, and she doesn’t see how we’re gonna diagram the sentences, like we usually do.”

“You diagram the sentences from what you read?” The words came out with more disbelief than I meant to show. Criticizing a teacher in front of a student was strictly unprofessional, but nobody diagrammed sentences anymore.

“Yes.” Huffing a breath, Dell glanced nervously toward the hall clock. “And I can’t do that part, either. We have to do fifteen sentences every day from what we read.”

Drumming my fingers on the desk, I stood up to walk her to the door. No sense making her late for Mrs. Morris’s house of linguistic horrors. An idea struck me as I rounded the corner of my desk. “Dell, what would you think if I set up some daily tutoring sessions for you?”

“With you?” she asked hopefully, and I found myself nodding, even though what I’d actually intended was to find her a tutor—maybe a high school student. The National Honor Society kids were required to do school service hours, and tutoring would fit the bill.

Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, she surveyed the office with a pained look. “Would I have to come here? Because everyone would see.” She ducked her head, seeming worried that she’d said the wrong thing. “Y’know?”

“I’ll work something out.” Though I couldn’t imagine how, exactly. I couldn’t start tutoring every academically challenged kid in Harrington middle school.

“ ’Kay,” she replied doubtfully, then hovered in the doorway, looking toward Mrs. Morris’s room like a prisoner heading down death row. Pausing, she vacillated in place, as if there were something more she wanted to say but was uncertain.

“Anything else?”

She turned halfway toward the door. “We’ve got Jumpkids after school near here,” she mumbled, pulling a slim brown foot out of her clogs, curling her toes, then slipping them back in. “You said I should . . . I don’t know . . . tell you when we did. On Fridays we’re at Simmons-Haley Elementary. We feed the kids a snack, and do singing and dance class with them until five, and then they get dinner at the school cafeteria before they go home.” She pointed vaguely toward the window. “It’s over that way a few blocks by that big old Catholic church with the tall bell thing.”

I was momentarily blindsided by the invitation. I had no idea she’d remember, much less care, that I’d expressed interest in her foster mother’s after-school arts program. “Sounds great.” I felt an unexpected rush of warmth for the shy teenager in the doorway. “What time?”

“Three thirty. Right after school.”

“Hmmm,” I mused out loud. “I’m on duty until four thirty.”

Dell’s shoulders went up, then slumped. “It’s OK,” she muttered, surrendering like a kid who was accustomed to being brushed off. Stepping backward into the hallway, she turned toward her English class. “See ya later.”

“Well . . . wait.” I followed her into the corridor. “What if I come by after four thirty? Will I be interrupting anything?”

Walking backward into the fray of students, she grinned, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears. “No, that’d be cool.” An eighth grader brushed past her, knocking her off balance with his backpack, and reminding her that she was in the hallway, where other kids might see her making nice with the counselor. Holding her hand near her waist, she gave a quick, covert wave, then hurried away.

I went back to my desk and made notes to myself.
Tutoring—find location, get copy of sixth-grade textbooks, check out
The Grapes of Wrath
from library. . . .

When I looked up, the principal was hovering in my doorway. “Got that matching-funds app for the new PAC ready yet?” he asked, snapping his fingers and holding his hand palm out, as if I could make the thirty-page grant application materialize by magic.

“Not yet,” I said, pulling the application booklet from under the stack of attendance papers that had coagulated on my desk.

Suddenly, the job that had seemed boring and pointless yesterday was crammed full of demands and activities. Some of which actually mattered.

“I’ll get right on it.” Opening the booklet, I folded my elbows on my desk and waited for him to move on, but he didn’t. “Anything else?”