Ghost Girl (15 page)

I stifled a laugh at Jeremiah’s unintended pun and then propelled Brucie in the direction of the table.

“Don’t he talk?” Jeremiah persisted. “What is it with this class? How come I’m the only one who can talk?”

“Because you’re the only one lucky enough.”

“I ain’t lucky. Shit, man, luck don’t got nothing to do with it. You’re
supposed to
be able to talk. There shouldn’t have to be no luck about it.”

“There shouldn’t have to be luck about a lot of things, Jeremiah, but, in fact, that’s the way it is.”

Brucie’s grin grew less cherubic and more dumb and vacant. Once seated at the table, he started to pound on it rhythmically, as if presented with a set of bongo drums.

“Hey ho,” I said and reached over to quiet his hands. “Too much noise.”

“He don’t half know how to bug a person,” Jeremiah commented. “You didn’t do us no favors letting him in here. I don’t think he’s going to do the class a lot of good.”

We set about reestablishing ourselves in the room. Philip, Reuben, and Jeremiah located their old cubbies and examined the things left in them from the previous school year. They reclaimed favorite coat hooks, bounced again on the floor cushions, visited the animals, and then looked for old friends among the books, toys, and games. Meanwhile, I sat down with Brucie to see what sense I could make out of him.

Just after 9:45, Mr. Tinbergen appeared at the door. He beckoned me out into the hallway. “Will you go down to Alice’s room?” he asked, when I came out.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Your Jadie is down there. Her sister is in kindergarten this year, and, well … We don’t seem to be having much success in separating them. Would you go down and see if you could get her to come up here?”

My
Jadie, indeed!

Downstairs, I found the class seated on the floor around Alice and singing a lively version of “The Wheels on the Bus Go ‘Round and ‘Round.” In a far corner of the room beyond the sand table was Jadie and, behind her. Amber.

Without interrupting Alice’s activity, I went over to Jadie and her sister. “Time to come upstairs now,” I said, matter-of-factly.

The summer hadn’t changed Jadie much. Her thick, tangled mass of hair was perhaps a little longer and a little more matted, but that was all. Hunched deeply over, arms drawn up, hair spilling down, she reminded me briefly of some fairy-tale witch. Amber, cowering pale-faced and wide-eyed behind her, enhanced this image.

“I’m sure you’re ready to join the others with their song,” I said to Amber, reaching my hand across Jadie’s back.

Jadie sprang up to prevent my touching Amber and crowded her sister farther back into the corner. The music momentarily paused, and I could sense the breath-held attention of the rest of the class.

“No, Amber belongs here. This is her room and her teacher.”

The other kindergarteners watched in horrified silence as I firmly pulled Amber up over the top of Jadie and carried her across the room to Alice. Jadie scrabbled along swiftly, grasping, grabbing, finally managing to get hold of one of Amber’s feet before I could transfer her to Alice. Amber began to cry, breaking the appalled silence that surrounded us, although whether her tears were from fear of Alice or from pain at having her foot pulled, I did not know.

Then the moment Alice had hold of Amber, I spun around and grabbed Jadie. Physically lifting her off the ground, I carried her out of the room.

Once I had picked her up, Jadie didn’t struggle any further. In fact, once we were outside the kindergarten classroom, the fight seemed to go out of her entirely, and she wavered uncertainly on her feet when I set her down. The sound of music once again filtered through the door.

“She’ll be all right,” I said quietly. “I know you were just concerned. You were being a good sister. But you don’t need to worry. Mrs. Havers will take good care of Amber. And now it’s time for you to come upstairs to our room. Everyone else is already there.”

We walked up the stairs together, hand in hand, Jadie hobbling laboriously from one step to the next. As we passed the door between the hall and the cloakroom, Jadie paused.

“I used to go in there,” she said.

“Yes.”

We’d reached the classroom door, and beyond I could hear the rise and fall of Mr. Tinbergen’s voice, as he tried to get Jeremiah to stop doing something. I was momentarily distracted by it, worrying what Jeremiah might be up to, but Jadie gently tugged my hand to keep me from opening the door.

“Do you remember that?” she asked, her voice soft but insistent. “Last year? When I used to go in there?”

I nodded.

“You used to let me lock it.”

“You liked to lock it,” I replied.

“Do you remember what I used to be like then? Do you remember what I used to do?”

“You mean when we locked the doors?”

She nodded.

“Yes, I remember.”

She gazed up at me, not an easy thing to do from her doubled-over position. It meant wrenching her head to the side and peering sidelong upward, which gave her a broken, deformed appearance. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?” she asked.

“No,” I said and smiled. “You don’t frighten me.”

“
I
made you go away.”

I raised an eyebrow quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“That last day. I made you go away. Like I done with the other teacher. And I didn’t think you were going to come back.”

“You didn’t make me go away, Jadie. It was the end of the school year and time for summer vacation, and that’s why I went away. Now summer vacation is over, so I’ve come back again.”

“You’re strong,” Jadie murmured.

I smiled faintly, for want of a better expression.

“I knew you were strong,” she said, as she prepared to go on into the classroom. “I knew you’d come back.”

In a new school year I always reckoned on needing about eight weeks to establish control and bring the children together into a cohesive, well-functioning group. The time in the interim was one of limit setting and limit testing, of taking one another’s measure. With this group, I’d hoped the period of adjustment would be shorter, since all but Brucie were old-timers. This wasn’t the case, however. Chaos was the byword for those early weeks.

Brucie threw a real monkey wrench into the works. Previously, the old four had paired off well. Reuben and Philip functioned on much the same level, while Jadie and Jeremiah functioned on another. But God alone knew where Brucie was. Most of the time he was like a great big baby, willing to lie on the floor until physically repositioned, never making any effort to do things for himself. This made him appear both much younger and much less capable than either Reuben or Philip. It also made him a great deal of work. On the other hand, he had some truly inspired moments of activity. All that time flopped about in a heap had not been wasted; Brucie had unusual savvy about what made others tick, no doubt acquired from so much observation, and his sole joy appeared to come from disrupting relationships. In fact, my gut feeling about Brucie was that he had devoted so much effort to manipulating those around him that he’d had no time left over for normal development.

As a consequence, Brucie wreaked havoc in the classroom during those early weeks, in many respects, simply because of the amount of time he required from me, which was enormous. Feeding him, changing his diapers, dragging him physically from one place to another would have been time consuming enough on their own; encouraging him to do any of these things for himself could easily absorb the entire day. Worse was what he did to the other children. In nasty, small ways he pitted Philip against Reuben, Jadie against Philip, and Jeremiah against everybody. Indeed, Jeremiah suffered most. Impulsive, distractible, and quick to temper, Jeremiah fell and fell again for Brucie’s subtle manipulations, and no amount of forewarning got through to him in time. The quiet corner did a roaring trade. The classroom was seldom quiet and never peaceful.

During this period, I didn’t have much chance to see Jadie alone. Most of her afternoons after school were spent on the playground with Amber. I knew, because I often saw them from the classroom window as they played on the swings. For me, the afternoons in those early weeks seemed to be one long round of staff meetings, in-service training, and individual conferences, making me not very accessible anyway; and the afternoons I did have free, I spent trying desperately to plan for a more successful day than the one I’d just survived. In any case, Jadie gave little indication of wanting to see me. Like the other pupils, she simply came and went with the bells.

Summer left us behind, and the first breath of winter could be felt in the air. Even in the best of years, autumn was a short season across this broad expanse of plains, a brilliant pause between the dry, brown heat of August and the all-too-soon winter whiteness; but this particular year, we had virtually no fall whatsoever. September withered us with eighty-degree heat well into the middle of the month, then came a wet and windy weekend, a frost, and the leaves died on the trees, turning brown and falling within the space of ten days. The wind backed to the north, and the first arctic air mass moved southward. We were dusted with snow by the beginning of October.

It was a gray, overcast afternoon, and I was at the table in the classroom, putting the next day’s work into the children’s folders, when I heard a noise in the hallway. Looking up, I saw Jadie peering in through the window in the classroom door. The unlit hallway had been plunged into premature darkness by the weather, making Jadie, who was standing a bit back from the window, indistinct.

I beckoned to her, but she didn’t respond. Finally, I rose and went to the door. “Do you want to come in?”

She was heavily dressed against the weather, her features disappearing under hat and muffler.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked again.

Nodding slightly, she entered the classroom.

“I’m just getting things ready for tomorrow,” I said and reseated myself at the table.

Slowly, laboriously, she began removing her outer clothing. Piece by piece she laid it on the chair next to her. Finally down to her cardigan and ratty little cotton dress, she stopped. Then she stood. A minute, two minutes passed in complete and motionless silence.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

Slowly, she drew out the chair opposite and then sat. Again, complete silence.

“How are things going?” I asked, trying to keep my tone pleasant and conversational.

There was no answer.

“Are things going all right for you?”

Nothing.

“Amber? How’s Amber liking school?”

Still nothing.

“And Sapphire? I’ll bet Sapphire’s getting big. How old is she now? Can she walk yet?”

I looked over to see Jadie shrunk down and hunched over almost to a point of having her face on the tabletop. Silence thumped down around us like a wet blanket.

“You know what? I’ve still got that key. If we went into the cloakroom, we could lock the door,” I suggested.

Although she didn’t look up, I saw Jadie’s shoulders relax slightly.

“Let’s go in there. It’s cozier. Besides, I think I’ve got things to do at my desk that I’d forgotten about.”

Even after we’d gone into the cloakroom and I’d locked both doors, Jadie remained tense. Sitting down on the right-hand bench, she slumped forward until she was nearly doubled over, her arms clutched around her middle like someone with a bad stomachache. Not wanting to focus too directly on her, I sought something to occupy myself with at the desk.

Several minutes passed without a break in the silence. Jadie, still bent double, shifted her hands to support her head, first covering her face with them, and then eventually turning her head to allow her to see around the room.

“You’re finding it hard to talk?” I asked quietly.

Her eyes searched my face.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

Back to the silence.

“Has that man come?” she asked at last.

“Which man?”

She raised her head slightly to see me better. “That spider-killer man you told me about last year.”

“You mean the fumigator? From the pest-control company?”

She nodded.

“Well, Mr. Tinbergen has them come twice a year, so, yes, I expect he’s just been. Probably right before school started last month.”

A pause.

“You’re not very fond of spiders, are you?” I said.

“I
hate
spiders.”

“How come?”

“They get everywhere. They see what you do.” A great weariness seemed to overtake Jadie at this point, and she dropped her head to rest it right on her knees. For a brief moment she closed her eyes, then reopened them. “What do
you
do with spiders?” she asked. “Do you kill them?”

“Not usually. I’m not frightened by them, so if they don’t put their webs in my way, I leave them be.”

“But they watch what you do.”

“I’m sure what I do is not of great interest to spiders,” I replied.

A small pause ensued.