Somebody Else’s Kids (23 page)

“Lor? Lori? Are you all right?” Down on my hands and knees again, I peered under. Releasing the resource kids early had brought me about fifteen minutes in which to talk her out. “Come on, babe, won’t you come out and sit with me? We’re all alone and nobody’s going to hurt you.” I came closer so that my forehead was against the edge of the cabinet I could smell the stale sourness of vomit.

There was no response at all. The crying had stopped and now there was nothing to indicate she was any more alive than the lint under there.

Rising into a sitting position, I pressed my cheek against one knee and felt the rough cloth of my jeans. “Lor? Come on. Lor, come out.” Silence. I was feeling terrible, not only because she was so upset but also because I had not seen it coming. This behavior was an earmark of serious problems. Not having wanted to recognize Lori’s descent into disturbance, I had waited too long to intervene. And now here we were. I felt awful.

“Listen, Lor, I’ve got to get up now and do my work. The other kids will be here soon. You can stay there as long as you want, I guess. We won’t bother you. Nobody will make you come out. And I’ll be here, I won’t go away and leave you.”

The remainder of the morning went quietly. The resource children did not even know she was there. Lori never stirred.

I did not go down to the teachers’ lounge for lunch as was usual. Taking out my peanut butter sandwich, I ate it at the worktable.

Billie, the speech therapist, came into the room about halfway through the period. “Hey, hey, what is this, Hayden?” She laughed in a carefree infectious way. “I was looking all over for you. Weren’t you coming down to the Burgerteria with us for the salad bar?”

I loved Billie. She was one of those marvelous, one-of-a-kind people one encounters so rarely. A black woman from South Carolina, she had moved clear across the country to the Northwest almost ten years before, newly divorced, with five kids under twelve and virtually no skills. Those who had said she would never make it, however, did not know Billie. Now with a master’s degree in speech therapy nearly completed and three of her five kids in college, she still sought new frontiers. She headed a local program for battered women, she had written a grant for funding of a child-abuse hot line; she was chairwoman of the Mother’s March for the March of Dimes. And even with the two dozen things Billie forever had going, she would always manage to make each one of us lucky enough to know her feel like the only person in the world she really cared about.

Yet for all my love of Billie, I could not bring myself to tell her why I sat alone, choking down a dry peanut butter sandwich. For no reason I could identify, I did not want to give Lori away. Even to Billie. So I made some feeble excuse about having to work.

Then the door opened again. Dan Marshall. Billie rolled her eyes. “Here comes Trouble.”

Dan was not up to Billie’s good humor. Brushing past her he came to me. “Is she still there?”

I nodded.

A long silence followed, uncomfortable because Dan said no more and I could not find any words either. Billie looked from one to the other of us trying to discern the problem.

“Are you just going to leave her there?” he asked. A genuine question, no challenge in it.

“I guess so. She’ll come out in time,” I said. I hesitated, weighing the advisability of talking in front of Billie. “Dan, what really happened down in Edna’s room?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Tor. I honestly don’t.”

“Sometimes I don’t think she’s fit to teach,” I said. “She kills some of these kids.”

Wearily he shrugged. “I’m sure she was a little hard on Lori, but what can we do? She’s going to retire next year anyhow.”

Silence again.

“This really concerns me, Torey,” he said; jerking his head toward the cabinet. “No joking. I wonder if we shouldn’t call someone or something. I really am worried.”

“So am I.”

We gazed at each other across the expanse of the worktable. Finally Dan nodded and turned. “I’ll catch you later. Keep me posted.”

“I will.”

He left.

Billie’s eyes widened. “
Honey
, what is going on?” She sat down in a chair next to me, and I told her.

12:40. Boo arrived first. What was I going to tell the kids? I thought frantically when I saw him. When last I looked, Lori was still hiding, body drawn up in a fetal position, head hidden.

Like Dan, I was worried. I did not even dare acknowledge how very worried I actually was. What were we going to do? What should we do? Dan wanted to get someone to help. Who? Mental Health? Did they have some brigade that would come out and extract a little girl from under my art cabinet, like firemen rescuing a stranded kitten? I was in a moment of failing faith. I knew the Mental Health people had no answers. Good people, but without answers. How about Lori’s father? Would he understand more than we what had happened to his daughter? Cripes. I was lost.

Tomaso came bounding in, a bundle of energy. “Hi, Tor. Hi, Boo.” He did a little dance around the worktable and picked up his assignment folder. When Claudia arrived, he hopped in her direction. “Hi, Claud.”

A huge pause. Tomaso spun around. “Where’s Lori at?” All year long, Lori had never missed a day. Tom spun around again. “Where is she?”

“You want to come over and sit down, please?” I asked.

“Where’s Lori?” he persisted.

“That’s what we’re going to talk about.”

Fear darted through his eyes. “What happened to her? Is she sick?”

“Sort of.”

It was a hard discussion. Hard solely because I did not know what to say. “Lori’s not having a good day today. Something happened in her room and she’s very upset.”

“But where is she?”

What was I going to say? This was just not coming out right. Letting my shoulders drop, I spread my hands out on the tabletop before me. “This is hard, guys.”

They watched me. Their faces were so open, so guileless that I smiled. “I guess she needed to hide a while because she’s so upset. She came in here. She’s under the art cabinet.”

Tomaso and Claudia both turned to look. Then before I could stop him, Tomaso was up from his chair and on his way over.

“Tom!” I shouted. “Get back here and sit down.” He stopped in his tracks.

“I just want to see her.”

“Sit down. Now listen, I don’t want you bothering her. No going over, no peeking under, nor any other way of being trouble. Lori is upset. I want you to just leave her alone.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be left alone,” Claudia said.

“I think she does.”

“But how do you know?” Tom added. “You’re not her.”

A heavy sigh. I put my hand over my eyes and rubbed them. The day seemed endless. “I know I’m not. And I don’t know. But just trust me for once, would you, and don’t give me such a hard time.”

The afternoon dragged by. All three children were upset. Claudia kept starting her work and stopping it, whining to me about not being able to understand the assignment when she had been doing the same sorts of problems for days. Every little thing irritated her. Boo was uttering to himself too loudly and too much. Tomaso, when I pressed him for answers on his math, became angry. The minutes loitered by mercilessly.

I honestly thought I would strangle Tomaso as the time progressed. He would not stay in his chair. Up and down, up and down, around and around, nervously pacing back and forth. Down again, up again. He was a tinderbox waiting to be touched off. I feared a major explosion. Yet he would not help me in any way. Every single answer on his math work was wrong, all of them. My own worry was making me impatient. I yelled at Boo because I was afraid to yell at Tomaso, and Boo made the mistake of getting in my way. I finally yelled at everybody.

Recess came. I had to get out. My own sanity revolved around leaving that room for the weak March sunshine. Kneeling before the cabinet, I told Lori we were going for recess and would be back. She was sobbing again, or still, I did not know which. Her face was buried in her arms now. A small pool of fluid spread out to one side of her. I could not tell if it was vomit or urine or something else. Again, I told her we were going out. Again, I reassured her we were coming back. Then I left.

That final moment’s look under the art cabinet depressed me further: three hours since she had crawled under there and still no sign of change. Edna’s diagnosis was all too correct. However Lori had managed to maintain her mental health over these last months, it was gone now. Lori was broken.

I leaned against the wall of the school building and watched the children play. My mind was half a million miles away. At least.

“Tor, can I go use the bathroom?” Tomaso asked. He stood beside me and I had not even noticed him come up. One lank lock of hair hung over his left eye. He shook it back.

“Go ahead.”

What was I going to do? What if the school day ended and she still did not come out? I would have to pull her out.
Oh Lori
. I was feeling very guilty. I should have seen this coming. There were the little changes in her: the breakdown last fall, the slow deterioration in her ability to cope with even mild competition. Why hadn’t I faced it? Why had I let it go on? I knew better. I had been in the business too long for such foolishness.
Oh Lori, I’m sorry
.

Brusquely I was brought back to the real world by Boo throwing a ball against the wall next to me. I looked at my watch. The recess period was almost over. “Where’s Tomaso?” I called to Claudia.

“I don’t know. He went in and never came out.”

“Oh geez. Watch Boo a minute, would you? I’ll be right back.”

I trotted into the building, half afraid my carelessness had cost me another kid. “Tom?” I whispered into the boys’ rest room. “Tomaso?” Then on down to the classroom.

There he was. Legs crossed, sitting on the floor, bent forward so that his chest was between his knees, almost flat on the linoleum, he looked like a yoga master. He spoke softly into the space under the art cabinet.

Irritation frothed up in me and I grabbed him by the shirt collar. “Tomaso, get up off that floor this instant! I mean it. I told you to leave her alone and I wasn’t kidding. Now get up and get over to your chair and sit down before I really get mad. And don’t you move until I get the others. I mean it. Don’t you move an inch!”

Because I knew he had been explosive all afternoon, I half expected him to come back at me in full force, to be as angry as I was. In fact, I was in such bad humor by that time, I was almost picking a fight with him. Worry and fear had made me senselessly short-tempered and I wanted blood. It was the only thing that would release the tension built up inside.

Instead, Tomaso burst into tears.

“Oh good God, Tom,” I muttered at him and left to get the other children.

When we returned he was still sitting in his chair, just as I had commanded. His tears had stopped but when he saw me, they started all over again. “I was just trying to make her feel better. I wasn’t hurting nothing. Honest.”

There was Claudia standing beside me. “Can’t we even talk to her?”

“Sit down. All of you, just sit.”

Claudia drew up a chair. Boo sat on the table itself.

“Now look, this is a hard time. I’m not in a good mood myself. I’m just as worried and scared as you are. And I want to help Lori just as much. But nothing will work out if you drive me crazy first.”

“This sure isn’t much of a democracy,” Claudia muttered.

“Right now it isn’t.”

Tomaso blubbered, like some damn little kid. His voice went way up in a howl. “But she needs me!”

I melted. Worry was making us all a little goofy. Slumping into a chair across the table from him, I covered my eyes with one hand. Finally, spreading my fingers a little, I looked at him. He was watching me. Snot ran over his upper lip. His cheeks glistened. I had to smile.

“You foolish kid, you’re going to be the end of me yet.”

The last twenty minutes of school Tomaso sat on the floor in front of the cabinet and talked to Lori. I could not hear what he was saying most of the time; some of it was not even in English.

Dan Marshall came by. He stuck his head in the door and when I saw him I went over and slipped outside into the hall.

“How’s it going?”

I shook my head.

“I think we’re going to have to call her father to come get her,” he said. “This has gone on too long.”

I had a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Mr. Sjokheim was such a good man. I hated to return his daughter to him in this condition. Yet she needed more than we seemed to be able to give her. I nodded. “I guess so.”

“Okay,” Dan replied, turned and went down the hall, leaving me alone.

After the dismissal bell, I leaned against the door frame and watched down the corridor. I did not know how soon Dan would be able to get Mr. Sjokheim to come. Finally, I went back into the room and closed the door.

Alone. The classroom was heavy with undispelled tension. Going over to the cabinet, I sat down and leaned forward to look under. Lori had never moved. The space beneath was warm and humid and reeked of sickness and urine. Quietly, I went to the sink and dampened a washcloth. Then I returned.