Jennifer Haigh (30 page)

"Maybe so," said Ms. Lister. "But I never
see
this homework. He manages to misplace it somewhere between home and class." She counted on her fingers: "Ian is easily distracted. Disorganized. He shows poor impulse control. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar."

"All of it," Scott said with feeling. "All of it sounds familiar."

Penny shot him a fierce look.

"I thought so," said Ms. Lister.

"Wait a minute. I have no idea what you're talking about," said Penny.

The teacher leaned forward in her chair. "I think Ian should be evaluated for attention deficit disorder. And perhaps depression and anxiety as well."

Scott blinked.
He's eight
, he thought.

"Ian's always been a happy boy," said Penny, responding to the word
depression.
Scott had learned long ago not to overload her; she processed ideas one at a time. Whether she was stupid or simply very focused was a question that plagued him. After all these years he still wasn't sure.

"Maybe he's depressed because you keep throwing him out of class," Penny said."He's so embarrassed. He won't say so, but I can tell. "

"If that's true, I'm sorry," said Ms. Lister. "Ian can be very sweet, when he wants to be."

This was true. Scott thought of his son as he'd been the night before, fast asleep in front of the television; the boy clinging to his shoulders as Scott carried him to bed.

"When he acts up, it's because he's frustrated," said Penny. "He's having a hard time with math. I think he needs extra help."

Ms. Lister nodded manically. "Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying: extra help. But I have twenty-four other children to consider.

There's a limit to what I can do." Her fingernails, Scott noticed, were bitten to the quick. He felt a rush of sympathy. Charged with a class of twenty-five Ians, he would chew his fingers bloody.

"Do you have any suggestions?" he asked.

Ms. Lister turned to him."These are common issues, as I'm sure you know. Parents deal with them in a variety of ways. Medication is one option—"

"Forget it," Penny said."No way is Ian taking drugs. No way."

The teacher raised her hands, as if in self-defense. "That's your call, of course. No one can decide that for you. I will say, though, that until Ian is evaluated, I can't have him back in my classroom."

"You're kicking him out?" said Penny. "It's a public school. You can't just throw him out."

"True," Miss Lister agreed. "But this situation has gone on long enough that we need to look at other options. A special-needs classroom, for example."

"Ian's not retarded," said Penny.

Just
, Scott thought.
Shut. Up.

Ms. Lister glanced at her watch. "All I'm saying is that Ian may need more help, or a different kind of help, than
any
public school can offer." She took a brochure from her desk drawer and handed it to Penny. Scott leaned close to take a look, nearly capsizing his desk.

"Whoops," said Ms. Lister, reaching out to steady him."Fairhope is an independent school in Fairfield County. An old classmate of mine teaches there. They've gotten incredible results with kids like Ian. If you're dead set against medicating, it's something to consider."

Penny handed Scott the brochure. The photos reminded him of Pearse: the stone buildings, the grassy lawns and towering trees. He turned it over, scanning downward. The information he sought was in tiny print at the bottom of the page. More zeroes than he would have thought possible.

"Good luck to you," said Ms. Lister, rising. "I wish you and Ian all the best."

They drove home in silence, Penny at the wheel. It was a peculiarity of their marriage Scott couldn't account for: anytime they were in a car together, Penny always drove. This marked them different from every other couple he knew. What it meant, he had no idea. He was the sexual instigator, and the breadwinner. Not a very successful one, it was true; but what bread they had, Scott had won.

Penny's silence was damp and heavy; he sensed a storm approaching. Scott waited, his senses heightened. After ten years of marriage he was like an old geezer who ached from humidity, who felt the weather in his bones.

"I can't believe you," she said at last.

Scott felt his muscles relax, a palpable easing of tension. Like the punishments of his boyhood, fights with Penny were never as bad as waiting for them.

"You sold Ian down the river. You just agreed with everything she said. Is that how you defend your son?"

"Defend him from what, Pen? Getting an education? A teacher who's concerned and wants to help?"

"She wants to put him on
drugs,
Scotty. You call that help?"

He took a deep breath. "Ian's in trouble. He can't get through a school day without freaking out. And the tantrums, the bullying. You told me yourself that Nathaniel Moss won't play with him anymore."

"Nathaniel is a spoiled brat."

Stay on target,
he told himself. "I agree: Nathaniel is spoiled.

But what about the way Ian torments Sabrina? The hitting, the hair pulling—" He paused."The biting."

"I give him time-outs," said Penny.

"I know: you're doing everything you can. But how bad does it have to get before we admit it isn't working? That we need professional help?"

"You sound just like Ms. Lister," said Penny.

"Well, maybe she's right. It was pretty decent of her to spend half an hour talking to us. After the day she puts in, she wants to go home and mix herself a good stiff drink. Not sit in the classroom with two hostile parents."

"Hostile? When was I hostile?" Penny ran a red light, narrowly missing another minivan coming from the opposite direction. The schools had just let out; at this hour Quinnebaug Highway was like a bumper-car ride, with Plymouth Voyagers standing in for rubberized cars.

"He's always been a happy boy,"
Scott mimicked.
"Maybe he's de
p
ressed because you kicked him out of class.
Was that necessary, Pen? How is she supposed to take us seriously after a comment like that?"

"Take us
seriously
?" She looked at him in wonderment. "I don't care if she takes us seriously. Why do you care what she thinks?" She hit the brake."That's what this is about for you. What it's always about.

What will people think?
"

"What?" He stared at her, genuinely baffled. It was the conversational equivalent of a squealing U-turn in rush-hour traffic.

"You're ashamed of us," said Penny."Of Ian, and me, and us."

Not this again, he thought. Ever since they'd moved to Connecticut, it had been a recurrent theme in their arguments. As near as Scott could figure, the charges stemmed from two incidents in the winter of 1995: 1. While shopping for a new couch at an off-price furniture outlet called Rooms Unlimited, Penny had screamed at Sabrina and Ian to stop jumping on the demo mattresses, in a voice that made several heads turn. When Scott had asked her, in a calm, well-modulated voice, to stop cawing like a fishwife, she had stormed out of the store.

2. The evening of the Ruxton faculty holiday gathering, Penny had emerged from their bedroom in a dress cut down to her navel, revealing a third of each breast; they had swollen to the size of grapefruits during her second pregnancy and had never returned to their original dimensions. When Scott wondered aloud if a skirt and sweater wouldn't be more appropriate, she had told him to go fuck himself. He had gone to the party alone.

"I couldn't believe the way you sucked up to her," Penny said now.
"I know how it is. I'm an educator too."

He winced at her gruff imitation of his voice, aware, on some level, that he had mocked her first. The dull churlishness of their fights depressed and mortified him. He felt strongly that marital spats should display some
esprit
: some brittle cleverness, some Edward Albee-like theatricality. His parents had fought brilliantly, though his mother had often resorted to tears in the end. Penny, luckily, was not a crier; but neither did she engage in clever repartee. Together they sounded like children on a playground.

"I was trying to show some empathy," he said."Sow a little goodwill. It was working too until you opened your mouth."

"It was
working
?" She spat out the word like a knot of phlegm.

"What do you mean, 'working'? She wants to put our son on
drugs
!"

"Since when are you so righteous about drugs?"

He had her there. The early years of their marriage had been an out-and-out potfest. Recently, out of concern for Scott's urine—Ruxton teachers were subject to random drug testing—she had instituted a strict zero-tolerance policy in the house, but they were both prone to lapses.

"Scotty, we're talking about
Ritalin.
That's gnarly stuff."

With the reverence of a former surfer, Penny reserved the term
gnarly
for the truly atrocious: ritual killings, self-immolations and child torture, the lurid subject matter of
Faces of Evil
, a tabloid TV show she watched every evening while preparing dinner.

"You may be right," he allowed."But it won't kill us to do a little research. We're not doctors, Pen. Let me call my brother."

"Billy?" Again the van swerved."Billy barely knows Ian."

Please God
, Scott thought,
get us home in one piece.

"Well, he saw what happened at Christmas."

"Please. Don't get me started on Christmas. Your mother and that freezing-cold house. She makes the poor kid sit at the table for hours on end. And all that fussy food! You can't expect kids to behave like adults. She doesn't know the first thing about children."

Scott regarded her with amusement. "Well, she raised three of them."

"Oh, please. Don't tell me you and Billy and Gwen sat at the table for an
hour
every night!"

"That's just it, Pen. We
did.
I don't know how we felt about it, or if we even gave it any thought. It's just what we
did
." As he said this, he remembered a time his mother had stormed away from the dinner table in frustration and refused to return.
You deal with it, Frank. I've had them all day.
The exact nature of his infraction, Scott had forgotten, but he was sure, from the guilt curdling his stomach, that the misbehavior was not Billy's or Gwen's. It was his.

"We weren't perfect, of course," he added. "But that's not the point. What matters now is Ian, and what we can do for him."

"A different teacher, for starters. This one doesn't know what she's doing. And she obviously has it in for him."

"I don't think that's true," he said."And anyway, I doubt we have that option, unless we want him in special ed."

"No!" The van swerved, finally, into Canterbury Lane. "Those kids get
tortured
, Scotty. My stepbrother Benji—" Her voice broke. To his astonishment, two fat tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Easy."Tentatively he touched her shoulder, trying to remember if she was premenstrual."Benji? In Idaho?"

She pulled into the driveway and engaged the brake. Finally he relaxed his grip on the door handle.

"He wasn't retarded, Scotty. He was actually very smart. He just had some trouble reading, and he was very shy." She spoke softly now, just above a whisper."My asshole stepfather let them put him in special ed, and oh my God, you wouldn't believe what the other kids put him through. Finally he couldn't take it anymore, and he ran away."

She sniffed loudly. "I'm dead serious. He ran away to California. He never came back."

"Okay," Scott said, stroking her shoulder. "No special ed. We'll figure out something else. I promise."

That evening, at the basement computer, Scott clicked through Web sites, avoiding those plastered with drug advertisements:
Meds by Mail. Ritalin and Adderall. PharmCanada. Rock-Bottom Prices.
Finally he found what he was looking for, a sober list of diagnostic criteria.

There were two types of attention deficit disorder—inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive. Scott scrolled down the page and read:
1. Inattention often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
Just then he became aware of a banging on the ceiling above his head. "Honey!" Penny shouted from upstairs. "I've been calling you for five minutes."

"Jesus, what?"

"The garbage disposal is still making that noise. I thought you fixed it."

"I did," he said."I will." He stared at the screen.

often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace

"You said that last week," Penny crowed.