Somebody Else’s Kids (32 page)

Birk leveled most of his attention back at the pipe. “If we were making flashlights or automobiles or garbage disposals here, I’d be mighty upset with you for all the trouble you’ve caused Dan and me, for pushing us out on a limb and then trying to saw it off on us. But the way I see it, we’re working with human beings. And once in a while things just have to bend.”

The kids were at work when I came back into the classroom. Claudia was reading. Tomaso labored over math problems at the table. Boo and Lori were on the floor near the animal cages. Lori had a huge sheet of blank newsprint in front of her and she and Boo were drawing on it, only Boo was more absorbed in coloring the fingers of one hand rather than the paper.

I came over to them. Taking a pillow from the reading corner, I propped it against Benny’s driftwood and lay back.

“You want to help us?” Lori asked.

“What are you doing?”

“Me and Boo, we’re drawing ourselves a flower garden, aren’t we. Boo?” She held up a handful of felt-tipped markers. “Here. You can help us if you want to.”

“I think I’ll just watch, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” Lori again bent over the newsprint. Boo grabbed a red marker and started scribbling in his corner of the paper. Lori paused momentarily to watch him.

Sun streamed down through the window and illuminated hundreds of dancing dust motes. As I was watching Boo and Lori work, I thought of the blue bird picture she had made for me back in January. Even now it made me smile.

“Where were you gone at?” Lori asked.

I shrugged. “Just out.”

“Tomaso said you weren’t coming back.”

“I’ll always be back, Lori.”

She smiled at me and went back to drawing. “I know you will.”

“Lor?”

“Yeah?”

“How’s Libby?”

“Okay.”

“She used to come visit me every night when you were absent.”

“Yeah, I know. She told me. She even told me when she skipped ballet. Daddy found out. Libby got a spanking for it.” Lori gave me a private grin. “But she didn’t mind too much. I think she wishes she got to be in this here class.”

“I like Libby.”

Lori nodded. “But Libby’s not like me. She’s smart. She can do anything.”

“Oh? And you can’t?”

Another grin. “Well, I can do almost anything.”

“Yes, I thought so.” I sat up and slid across the floor to them. Sorting through the markers I found a blue one. “Are you going to make any birds in this garden?”

In an appraising inspection of the artwork, Lori even moved Boo’s hand back to get the full effect. “I don’t know. What do you think. Boo, should we oughta have birds?”

Boo gave her a wide, goofy smile.

“May I make some?” I asked.

“Sure. Go ahead. Over there. Above the flowers. You can make some birds.”

I nodded. “Good. I feel like making blue birds.”

A
pril lay across us gently. Easter vacation came and went. The lilacs began to bloom. Buds on the dogwood promised May. As I was sitting at my desk at home one Saturday, I nipped forward and counted the weeks left to us this school year. Only six. My time was almost up.

Boo continued to make erratic, snail-paced progress. More and more frequently he would talk to us, really talk. I had discovered a few ways of orienting him to the reality and seducing him into communicating. Wiggling his toes to elicit the nursery rhyme was surefire. The kids and I were thrilled by even this modicum of progress, but having to take off his shoes and tickle his feet every time we wanted him to talk to us was not the most convenient method.

Boo advanced in other areas too. With Claudia’s help, I had managed to indoctrinate him in the proper use of the toilet. Pretty much, anyhow. Although I think the training was probably more of us than him, he did stay dry about three-fourths of the time now. Another area of progress was Boo’s increasing ability to attend to a task over a period of time. In the beginning he could never stay with things more than a minute or two. Now, depending on the task, he could remain involved up to a half an hour. Most of the credit went to Lori for that improvement. She had devoted hours, especially during the last month since she had been released from reading, to including Boo in numerous activities and making sure he knew how to do them. Together they colored, used the Montessori materials, cooked, cleaned the animal cages, put together puzzles, sorted books and generally kept the room in order. Now Boo could do several of these tasks alone without supervision or with minimal guidance, if we could keep him from self-stimulating.

Even better was the fact that this new behavior had carried over to home. Mrs. Franklin reported that Boo was now picking up things in his room when told, and he could occasionally participate in family activities. Although Boo still did not call her Mama, Mrs. Franklin was tearfully excited while telling us that Boo had actually hunted for Easter eggs with his cousins and had helped prepare salad for the Easter dinner. Hardly a notable accomplishment for most nearly eight-year-old boys, but for Boo it was the top of a small Everest.

Tomaso, too, continued to show improvement. No explosions at all for almost four weeks, a real record. No more foul language – well, almost no foul language. Gains in all his academic areas. Since he had arrived in November, Tomaso had gained nearly eighteen months in reading scores. That meant he had acquired more than three months’ worth of reading skills for every month in the class. Although he was still behind his peers in that area, the gap had closed considerably.

Math was coming slower. While Tom had never been as far behind in math as he had in reading, he seemed to have a learning disability in that area. No matter how well he memorized the facts, he could not put them together meaningfully. Word problems were especially difficult. If a problem said that Janet had ten apples and wanted to give each of her five friends an equal number, Tomaso had no way of determining how many each would get. He could not discern whether he needed to subtract five from ten or multiply it or whether the five went first or the ten did or the other way around or if both numbers were even important. On the other hand, if I simply asked him what was ten divided by five, he knew immediately that the answer was two.

Despite these difficulties, Tomaso was an energetic learner, fascinated by science. Hardly a day went by that he did not come in with something he had found outside or some tale about volcanos or dinosaurs or air balloons. His greatest love was a set of outdated
National Geographic
magazines I had in the back of the room. He knew more about the tombs in China, foxes on Gull Island and trekking the Northwest Passage than I ever would.

Tomaso’s father still lived with us, perhaps not so obviously as before, but he was still there. At one point I suggested to Tom’s social worker that Tomaso might profit from some therapy at Mental Health. It was never followed up. Unfortunately, in Tomaso’s case I had been a little too effective. To the social worker he had improved so much since entering the class that additional psychotherapy would, in her opinion, be redundant. I hesitated to point out that I was a teacher, not a practicing psychologist, and I had no business messing with the head of a kid who daily fantasized about the father murdered in front of him six years earlier. Yet someone, I thought, ought to be paying attention to that. My suggestions came to naught. Since it could not be clearly shown that these fantasies made Tomaso dangerous or about to go off the deep end, getting psychological help for someone of his status in the system was remote. So Tomaso and I continued to stumble along together the best we could.

Claudia was an excellent student: orderly, mannerly, task-oriented. She had progressed through her studies with ease, and we had long since finished the required work to pass her out of sixth grade. Now I designed enrichment activities, broadened her knowledge in weak areas and often let her choose research fields in which she was personally interested. But it was not Claudia’s intellectual state that gave me worry. There had been no progress in getting her any sort of support, either with her pregnancy or her other problems. I continued to watch her cope, day after day, and I knew we had a time bomb. Helplessness became second nature to me in relating to Claudia. I hated it. I hated every minute of it.

And Lori. There was Lori with me all day now. She was learning too, in many ways. I tried to validate all the trouble she had caused me by reviewing how much she had gained in areas other than reading and writing. The truth was she was progressing, but the lesion on her brain continued to cast a shadow on many tasks. In math she excelled, even among her peers in the regular classroom. Of course, it all had to be done orally or with manipulatives because once reading or writing got tangled in, there was no way to tell what she did or did not know. However, without the bondage of symbols, Lori could rattle off answers as fast as I could ask her questions.

Lori also shared Tomaso’s fascination for science. In the last weeks, since the moratorium on reading, she had turned more and more to science projects. I had a book of simple experiments meant for older children with reading problems. The steps were illustrated clearly with line drawings and relied minimally on words. If someone explained the point of the experiment to her, she could usually conduct the process on her own. And recently she had decided that what she wanted to be when she grew up was a scientist who worked in a laboratory with animals and chemicals. I did not disillusion her. Free time invariably found her and Tomaso with a
National Geographic
spread out between them and the soft murmur of Tom’s voice as he read the text and the picture captions. In time Lori, too, knew all there was to know about tombs, foxes and ice.

In the areas that Lori and I were currently working on since dropping reading, she was not progressing as fast as I had hoped. She could tell time to the quarter of the hour now but we could not refine it any more than that. It was just too confusing. She still could not tie her shoes, a frustrating fact for both of us. I could not tell if the problem was in poor fine motor control or an inability to follow the pattern of a bow. We tried and tried and tried, with shoes, with Montessori boards, with things I made. When finally she managed to make a loose bow in a large strip of cloth I had brought to school one morning, she wore it around her waist all day long.

We spent a lot of time in what I was coming to think of as “pre-reading” activities, things I hoped would help her get around old reading troubles by using environmental clues. I taught her how to recognize all the other children’s names, not by reading them but by counting how many letters there were in each one, how many high ones, how many low ones. We went out in the neighborhood and matched road signs and billboards with pictures, their locations and what good sense should tell us they would say. Lori worked doggedly at it. I decided that if she could never become a scientist, she might make one hell of a good detective.

Now the year was about to close. As I sat at my desk and fingered the calendar, I wished that I had more time. Another year, another quarter, another month. If only I could stem the tide of time, hold off their growing up a moment longer, then maybe … It was a perennial wish.

Claudia was absent for five days. Attendance in our room was always good, a thing I had noted with other special education classes. Thus, when she did not show up, I was concerned.

On the second day of her absence I called her house. No answer. Over the next days the secretary in the office continued to call, but apparently the family was out of town. I thought it was strange that they had not notified us, but maybe it was an emergency trip. After enough days passed, I ceased to think about it

On Monday of the next week Claudia was back in school. She looked dreadful, with white, almost translucent skin, and dark circles under her eyes.

“We missed you,” I said when she arrived.

She came over to where I was standing near the animal cages. The female finch had laid another clutch of eggs that had failed to hatch and I was trying to extricate them before they rotted. Claudia watched me for a short time and then held out her hands to take the eggs.

“Guess what?”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to a psychiatrist.”

I turned. Was there something in the tone of her voice. Pleasure? Hope? Relief? I could not tell. So I just nodded with a smile.

“His name is Dr. Friedman. He’s really nice.”

“That’s good.”

An expectant pause followed. It was full of that same hungry eagerness to communicate that she had brought with her when she first entered the class. Although not quite smiling, her lips were turned up at the corners. “I’m glad about it,” she said. “I’m real glad.”

The afternoon passed, and Claudia fell back into her routine without difficulty. I was troubled by her appearance; she did not look at all well. And she seemed tired. I caught her once, nodding against her geography book.

Not until nearly the end of the day, when the others were occupied with their own activities, did I have a chance to sit down with her. “Do you feel okay, Claud?”

“Yeah, I’m all right.”

“Sometimes when a person wants to get back to school, he or she might come back before really feeling good. I would hate that to happen. I mean, with the baby and all.”