Ghost Girl (23 page)

Because of the unsettled nature of the day, I decided to allow the children to work on their journals immediately after morning recess instead of doing the activity planned. This was greeted with cheers from Jeremiah, who loathed the post-morning-recess period, because it was usually a time for serious academic work. Jadie and Reuben took their journals out with a little more decorum.

For the first fifteen minutes, I sat with Brucie, doing one-to-one work while the others were busy. Our goal of getting him to dress himself wasn’t progressing too speedily, and after two months, he could just about manage his underpants. Thus, I spent a scintillating quarter hour repeatedly pulling Brucie’s pants down for him to pull up again. His patience for this pastime exceeded mine, so whenhis interest finally began to wane, I gratefully turned him loose to scribble on a piece of newsprint with a crayon.

Coming over to Jadie, I pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. She hadn’t written anything in the journal but was, instead, making a picture with felt-tip pens. The first figure, carefully drawn, was of a standing cat. Next was a bell-shaped figure with eyes, legs, and nothing else. The next figure was even less distinct, and as she progressed, she drew as if she’d been powered by clockwork and was slowly running down. Each figure grew smaller and less distinct.

“That looks interesting,” I said.

“It’s supposed to be my family,” Jadie mumbled, her voice sounding weary, as if she weren’t too pleased with the results.

“Ah, I see.”

“That’s Jenny,” she said, pointing to the cat. “She ain’t with us anymore, but that don’t mean she ain’t part of the family. She is, ’cause I still remember her. She was my best pet.”

Jadie paused, laying the pen down and sitting back. “She had stripy fur. Did I tell you that before? Sort of gray-brownish with black stripes on it. I looked it up in a book at the library once, and it said you call those kinds of cats tabbies. And she had an orange nose and pink lips. That was my favorite part, her pink lips.” Jadie picked up a pink pen to amend the picture.

I was anxious to discuss the human figures in the picture, but I managed to keep quiet while shelavished attention on the drawing of the cat. At last she laid the marker down. “And who’s this?” I asked, pointing to the bell-shaped figure.

“That’s me. And that’s Amber. And that’s Sapphire. And that’s my mom and my dad,” she said, pointing to each figure in turn. She paused and again touched the last two figures, which were nothing more than minute blobs on the paper. “I didn’t do them so good, because I got sick of drawing. I don’t really feel much like doing this today.”

“Yes, I can tell.”

Jadie didn’t respond.

Leaning forward, I examined the picture more carefully. “What made you feel like drawing a picture of your family in your journal today?”

She, too, leaned forward to look at it, but she didn’t answer.

“What I notice is that you and Jenny are the only two important ones in this picture. Everyone else gets smaller and smaller. Your parents are much smaller than you. Do you feel like you’re the big one sometimes?”

Jadie shrugged. “I dunno.” A pause. “I feel like I’m the one who’s got to take care of everyone.”

“Usually that’s the mom and dad’s job, isn’t it?”

“Well, maybe they’re not there. Maybe they’re far away. Somewhere else. Then someone else in the family’s got to do it.”

“Is that what happens in your family sometimes?”

She frowned but didn’t speak.

I examined the picture in more detail. “You know, the only one in this picture who has a mouthis the cat. Look, you haven’t drawn a mouth on you or Amber or anyone else.”

“That’s ’cause everyone’s ghosts there, that’s why.”

“Oh.”

“Ghosts can’t talk. They can talk to other ghosts and that’s how come Jenny can understand me, but ghosts can’t talk to people. People can’t hear them, so they don’t really need mouths.”

“I see. You’re saying there’s no point to talking, because people don’t hear you anyway.”

She nodded. “That’s right.”

The following week started very quietly. Sated by their Halloween excitement, all five settled down and worked hard. There were few disruptions.

Jadie, like the others, seemed more settled. She hadn’t been in after school since the Monday before Halloween, and we went the first four days of that week with no visits. Then, on Friday, while I was cleaning out the rabbit’s cage, she turned up.

“Do you mind if I play with those dolls?” she asked from the classroom doorway.

“Sure, that’s all right. I’m just about done here anyway. You go ahead, and then I’ll be in shortly to do my plans.”

Jadie had located the key in my desk drawer and locked the door into the hall by the time I came into the cloakroom. Shutting and locking the other one, she returned the key to my desk and then went to pull the box of dolls up onto the right-hand bench. I settled down to do my plans for Monday.

Several minutes passed in total silence as Jadie bent over the box and pawed through the contents. The boy and girl dolls were all laid out, except for the blond-haired one, which Jadie still had at home, yet these didn’t seem to satisfy her. She pawed deeper into the box, extracting handfuls of doll clothes and laying them on the floor. Then she came across one of the baby dolls. On previous occasions Jadie had never shown any interest in the baby dolls, and as a consequence, this one still wore the clothes put on it by some long-ago child. Now, however, Jadie lifted the doll up and inspected it.

“My sister’s a baby,” she said casually. “She’s one now, but that’s still a baby.”

“You mean Sapphire.”

“Well, my other sister’s not a baby, is she? She’s six.” There was a note of annoyance in her voice.

A pause.

“Me and Amber, we’re big. We know things. We understand things. But babies don’t. Babies know hardly anything.”

Bending over the doll, she started to remove its clothing, her fingers delicately attempting to unfasten the minute buttons on the cardigan. “Babies, really, they’re sort of like animals. You got to do things for them all the time. And you got to be nice to them, ’cause they don’t understand when you’re being mean.”

“Do you like babies?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not a lot. They’re too big a bother.”

At last the cardigan came off and Jadie held the doll up to examine it. Then she laid it back in her lap and continued to undress it. When she finally undressed it completely, she removed its diaper. “Hey, look!” she cried. “It’s a boy! Look here at what it gots. A peanut.” Looking up, she giggled coyly. “That’s what I call it sometimes. A peanut.”

I smiled good-naturedly.

“None of them other dolls got this, none of them big boys. They’re just dolls. But look at this baby. Look what it gots.”

Jadie regarded the doll’s tiny penis for several moments and then touched it gingerly with her index finger. Unexpectedly, she blew a loud, derisive raspberry. “That’s what I think. And you know what I’m going to do? This.” And she spat heartily between the doll’s legs before flinging it across the cloakroom. The doll hit the opposite wall with a resounding thud and fell to the bench below.

“Seeing that penis seemed to make you feel very angry,” I ventured.

She had a strangely defiant expression on her face, although it was inward and not directed toward me. “They make us play peanuts,” she murmured, her voice brittle. “J.R. and Bobby and them. They take out their dickies and then everyone says, ‘Peanut, peanut, who’s got the peanut?’ and me and Amber, we got to …” Her voice trailed off.

Oh God
.

“Actually,” she said, “I hate them.” She glanced in my direction, I suspect to gauge my reactions. Not trusting my words, or, for that matter, even my voice, I simply nodded.

The silence came then, washing in around us, but it wasn’t divisive. There was an unexpected sense of fellowship. The silence soothed, spanning the distance between us and joining us.

“I don’t want to see them take Sapphire,” Jadie said at last, her voice quiet. “And they’re going to. I guess they already have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the other night, last week, they put her upside down on the stick.” Jadie twirled her hands in demonstration. “Me and Amber, when we go upside down, we have to put our legs around the stick and they tie them, but Sapphire was too little for the ropes to reach, so they did her like this.” Jadie looked over to see if I understood her gestures.

“When you’re on the stick,” Jadie continued, “the men come around and put their dickies in your pranny or sometimes up your bottom. But the other night, when Sapphire was on the stick, they put their fingers in instead. I think ’cause she was too little. But everybody had to do it, even me and Amber.” Jadie lifted her left index finger and regarded it. “When it was my turn, I kissed Sapphire afterwards, to make her feel better. I wanted her to know I was sorry, that I wasn’t doing it ’cause I wanted to.”

Stunned into silence, I just sat.

“I hate ’em doing that to me and Amber, but with Sapphire, it’s just too much. It hurts a lot.

I know, ’cause it hurts me, and she’s just little. She’s only a baby and you’re supposed to take care of babies. Even when they cry.”

“That shouldn’t be happening. That definitely shouldn’t be happening. Not to Sapphire, and not to you or Amber either.”

“Miss Ellie says we gotta. They don’t do it every time, but when they got their faces on, you know it’s going to happen.”

“No, you don’t ‘gotta,’ Jadie. That’s wrong, what they’re doing. Putting fingers in your vaginas? And in your bottom? And men putting their penises in. That is what you’re saying in all this, isn’t it?”

Jadie nodded faintly.

“That is something they should not do, and I’m very glad you’ve told me.”

“You believe me?”

“Yes, I definitely do.”

An expression of such obvious relief broke over Jadie’s face that I was instantly overwhelmed by regret for not having pressed this matter harder, sooner.

“What we need to do now is stop them,” I said.

The relief still relaxing her features, she smiled and nodded. “Yeah. You can stop them, can’t you? I told Amber that. I said if we told you, you could make them stop.”

“You bet I can. And the first thing I think we need to do is go down and talk to Mr. Tinbergen. That’ll probably be the best place to start.”

Bewilderment overtook Jadie. “Mr. Tinbergen? What do you mean?”

“Well, first we’ll talk to Mr. Tinbergen and then—”

“No!”
she cried, cutting my words off.
“No!
We can’t
talk
to anybody. We
can’t
tell. Just you. You’re the only one I want to know about it.”

“Jadie, I have to tell.”

“No.”

“Jadie, I have to. To get help. Those people are doing something very, very wrong to you and Amber and Sapphire and we must stop them.”

Jadie went into an absolute panic, leaping up from the bench in terror.
“No!
You
can’t
tell anybody. Don’t you understand? I’ll die! I mean it, I’ll die.
You’ll
die! Oh, please, you can’t tell anybody else. You can’t! Please don’t. Please, please, please, please!” In a frenzy, she ran for the door, then realizing it was locked, ran back for the key, rumbled with it, dropped it. This proved too much for her and she sank to her knees, sobbing.

I rose from my place and approached her. “Lovey, come on,” I said and physically lifted her from the floor. She trembled in my arms.

“Please,
please
don’t tell anyone else. Don’t tell them I told. I’m going to die, if you do. Please, don’t. Promise me. Please, please promise me.”

“All right,” I said, overwhelmed by the intensity of her distress and not knowing what else I could say.

“I just want
you
to make it stop,” she said amidst her tears, “but I don’t want you to tell anyone else. I shouldn’t even have told you. If Miss Ellie knew I did, she’d make me die.”

“The problem is, lovey, this isn’t the sort of thing I can stop by myself.”

“But you
can
. I know you can. You’re God.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not God. I’m a person, like you are. I need help sometimes, too.”

“But I want you to be God,” she said, dissolving into tears again.

I felt like crying myself, then.

O
nce again, I found myself sitting alone in the cloakroom, feeling overwhelmed to a point of nauseous numbness. There was only one question: what was I going to
do?
And it seemed damned near unanswerable.

There was little doubt in my mind that Jadie was being sexually abused, although the wild framework within which she set her account remained a mystery to me. If what she said was true, I was obliged by law to report what she had told me. Turning my head, I gazed at the half-ajar door through which Jadie had departed. What should I do? If she told me what she had in confidence, clearly expecting it to go no farther, did I have the moral right to take it farther without her permission? On the other hand, how would I live with myself, if I knew a child was being brutally abused and I allowed the abuse to continue even a moment longer?