Somebody Else's Kids (15 page)

Claudia’s actual arrival did much to dispel all our concerns. She was an inordinately shy girl with an eager smile. For twelve she was tall, a whole head taller than Tomaso, not much shorter than I was. She was angular about the face with high, prominent cheek bones, heavy dark brows and large eyes. Her hair was more than shoulder length, thick, not quite blonde but not quite brown either, with adolescent greasiness. Her eyes were some color I could never settle on. Yet for all her lines and angles, Claudia had a soft look about her, soft in an innocently provocative way, as a very young child has.

Lori and Tom were hardly models of etiquette upon Claudia’s arrival. Tomaso stayed half a room away from her, as if he might catch her condition, and stared at her stomach. Lori bordered on downright nosiness and I had to pull her aside more than once and make vile threats. However, Claudia bore through it all. She was polite to Lori far beyond what good manners would have considered necessary. She asked Tomaso if he missed his old school since he had had to come here. She was afraid she would miss hers.

I watched from afar when I wasn’t policing Lori. Claudia seemed so shy that it hurt to watch her in conversation. Her face would redden, she would bite her lip, draw her shoulders up, duck her head. I wondered how she had ever gotten close enough to a guy to get pregnant.

The other surprise in January was Boo.

All the time I had had him, all through September, through October, November and December, I tried relentlessly to get communicative language out of him. I tried programming it, forcing it, bribing it and coaxing it. Nothing worked. He spoke only at random moments, always meaninglessly. Most of his language was delayed echolalia – days and days of maddening repetition of television commercials and weather reports and conversations between other speakers. Sometimes he would parrot back obscure conversations I had had with Lori or Tomaso days or even weeks before. It was like constantly having small auditory hallucinations.

Along with the echolalia went the simple repetition of selected phrases. One, apparently picked up from my old sessions with Lori’s letters, was “What letter is this?” Some days he got stuck on that like a broken phonograph record, and the entire time all we would hear would be “What letter is this? What letter is this?” Over and over and over he would repeat it, half under his breath much of the time and in my exact intonation. “What letter is this?” in the bathroom. “What letter is this?” while he rocked and stared at Benny. “What letter is this? What letter is this? What letter is this?” And never, never any answer.

Yet despite all that vocalization, not once did there appear to be any communicative value to his words. The most impersonal of all his sounds, the small hroops and whirrs, seemed to be the only ones he ever made directly to someone, usually to Benny, sometimes to Lori. And none of us understood those.

My spirits had flagged during December. While I continued my attempts to elicit speech, most of our energy turned away from that to self-help skills – toilet training, dressing, keeping clean – whose mastery seemed more feasible.

“For pity’s sake, Boo, sit down, would you?” I hollered. Lori and I were taking down the remnants of our Christmas decorations. She was up on the window ledge and I was standing on a table trying to reach our paper chain pasted to the light fixtures. It was Friday afternoon of the first week back and almost time to go home, so I was not being too particular about what the kids were doing. Tom had some small racing cars and was playing on the floor. Claudia was reading. But Boo persisted in spinning, arms out like a ballet dancer, eyes closed in self-stimulated ecstasy. I had gotten down to stop him once. I was more afraid of his running into something and hurting himself or stepping on Tomaso’s playthings than of the spinning itself. However, it had persisted so long and had forced so many interruptions that I was losing patience. So I hollered.

Lori climbed down from the ledge and went over to him. She reached out to envelop him in her arms, the way I did with Tomaso.

“Lor, leave him alone, please. He can hear me and I’d like him to get used to listening to words. Boo, come on, now, stop and sit down.”

Still he spun.

Sometimes he would hear me. Despite his lack of useful speech, he had developed quite good receptive language, if only he would use it. But when he got into persistent self-stimulation, we often as not had to reorient him physically.

Suddenly Boo spun into the corner of Claudia’s desk and knocked the book from her hand. He tumbled over onto the floor. I leaped down from the table and grabbed him.

“You’re going to be the end of me yet, Boothe Birney,” I said and pulled him to his feet.

“You’re going to be the end of me yet, Boothe Birney,” he said back in a high singsong. Both Lori and Claudia giggled.

I groaned and lugged him over to the toy box. Lori came too and pulled out a top for him as I pushed him into a sitting position. “Here, he likes this,” she said and started the top. Yes, he did like it. It was another type of self-stimulation. He would bend over and watch the spinning colors with great fascination. But not now. He was on his feet the instant I let go of him. His arms went out to spin.

“I said, sit down. Boo.” My no-nonsense teacher voice.

“What letter is this? What letter is this?”

I grabbed him firmly. “Sit
down!
” I shouted right into his face. One hand under his chin, the other tangled in his curls, I started to push him down into a sitting position again. “Sit down,” I said more softly as I did it, and put my face up close to his and looked deeply into vacuous green eyes. “I mean it. Boo. Sit.”

All the other kids were watching us. Lori hovered around the edges. Boo was still her baby. “I’ll get him something to play with, okay?”

“Not okay. Lor. He’s gotten himself a little too excited already. I want him to just sit and get a hold on himself again.” I still had a hand on top of Boo’s head and I had shoved him down, cross-legged on the floor. We stared at one another like a snake charmer and his cobra. “Sit,” I said. Carefully I lifted my hand. It was like adding the last card to a card house. “Sit, Boo.”

He stayed on the floor and continued to watch me. I was unable to tell if he was alert or still spacey.

“Sit there. Boo. Here, here’s a magazine. Can you look at pictures?”

He let the magazine fall through his hands and continued to stare. I backed away and prepared to climb back onto the table to take down the decorations.

Not a very unusual interaction between us, those few minutes. Countless times before he had become over-stimulated by his spinning or flapping or something else. Always, if I could get him to sit down and be quiet a few moments, he would calm down. For a while.

Lori and I went back to work. She was chattering to me. In the background I could hear Boo mumbling. I did not think much about it. Boo always mumbled. It was Lori who was listening.

“What’s that, Boo?” she asked right in the middle of an involved conversation with me over her sister and a shared bedroom.

I turned to look at Boo.

“Leave that alone, Boothe,” he said. “I told you once, I told you a million times now, leave that alone. Now you do it!”

“He’s just talking,” I said to Lori.

Lori jumped down from the window ledge. “Leave what alone, Boo?”

Boo had cocked his head as if he were talking to an invisible person. Over and over he scolded himself. He lifted one finger and flapped it expansively. “Leave that alone right now! You’re going to be the end of me yet, Boothe Birney. Now I mean it, leave that alone!”

“Leave what alone?” Lori persisted. She had come over to stand in front of him. Wearily I climbed down from the table again, my intention being to get Lori back on the job, but as I came around in front of Boo, he looked up at me. The familiar vacant glaze was on his eyes.

Lori knelt down. “What you supposed to leave alone, Boo, leave
what
alone?” She shouted in his face as if she were talking to a deaf person.

“Don’t bug him. Lor.”

Then Boo raised his head to her. Recognition seeped into his eyes. “The plug places. Boothe Birney, leave them plug places alone.”

“Plug places?” Lori’s nose crinkled in confusion.

I came down on my knees beside her. I touched his face, although he needed no reorientation. He was watching us, his eyes squinted slightly, as one trying to see a great distance.

“Leave what alone, Boo?”

“The plug places. Leave them plug places alone, Boothe Birney,” he answered. Slowly, as one sleepwalking, he rose to his feet and pushed past us. Going over to an electrical outlet on the wall, he touched it cautiously with one finger. “Leave them plug places alone, Boothe.” He turned to us. “They bite if you put your finger in.”

I was immobilized. Not a very brilliant conversation, this. To be technical, it probably could not be considered a conversation at all. Mitigated echolalia, a purist might call it, the ability to echo an appropriate answer to a question. But still, Boo had spoken to us. For the first time since he had come into the classroom, he had responded to us verbally. He had communicated an idea.

Then Boo turned around and put his back to the wall and the outlet. He fluttered the fingers of one hand at the fluorescent light overhead.

“Mostly sunny days are forecast for the region. Daytime highs in the low thirties. Overnight lows 15 to 20. Fog in the low-lying areas. Windy at times along the east slopes of the Rockies.”

S
anta Claus had not overlooked Lori. During the second week of January, after the excitement of Claudia’s arrival and Boo’s talking had died down, Lori felt obligated to show us all her loot. She staggered in one afternoon with a big box. Her doll.

It was Baby Alive, a masterful creation which drank from a bottle while moving its lips and ate a vile-smelling gelatinous goop from a plastic spoon. Lori had to demonstrate every one of its marvelous accomplishments right down to the evil truth that the goop came out a big hole in the doll’s rear end onto a disposable diaper.

Tomaso was inordinately patient with the exhibition. He sat at the worktable with the rest of us and did not once make a sarcastic remark, a groan of ridicule, or a fart. This pleased me, particularly in light of the fact that Lori had gotten long-winded and was telling us details none of us wanted to know. I mentioned it to him.

Tomaso shrugged off my compliment. “You know, once I had this teddy bear and I liked him a whole lot. I was always showing him around and junk. So I know how it is. Little kids are like that. I was myself.”

Touched by his sensitivity, I smiled. “Well, I appreciate your being thoughtful about it and not making fun of her.”

Lori was listening now. She pulled out a chair and sat down, the doll cradled maternally against her breast. “Do you still got your bear? You and me, we could play dolls sometime, if you brung it.”

Tom gave a tolerant smile. I knew he would have decked anybody else who might have suggested that. “No. I ain’t got my bear anymore.”

“What happened to it?” Lori asked.

“Well … well, back at this other place I used to live a long time ago, it got tooken away from me. This bigger kid who lived there, he took it and threw it out the window. And me and him got in a big fight over it, so when my foster dad got home, he said I was too old to have a bear anyway and so he threw it in the garbage and burned it.”

Lori’s brow furrowed with concern. “How old were you?”

Tom shrugged. “Just little.”

“Littler than me?”

Another shrug. “I don’t remember.”

Shivers ran down Lori’s back and she clutched her doll close. “Nobody better try and throw
my
toys away in the garbage can!”

A paternal smile from Tomaso and he patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Shrimp. I wouldn’t let ’em. I’d smack ’em for you, if anybody tried.”

“I’d smack ’em myself!” Lori paused while considering the matter. Cocking her head to one side, she scrutinized Tomaso’s face. “But don’t you got any other bears or anything? Was that the only one you had?”

Tomaso nodded. Not looking at her, he studied his fingers instead.

“But don’t you got nothing?”

“Well sure I got things,” he replied. His voice was a bit indignant. “I got me a game of Sorry! And some Lego toys. And where I live now, they have kids about my age and sometimes they let me go in their kidses’ rooms and look at their stuff. Once, this one kid, his name is Barry, he even let me try on his baseball glove. And he even said maybe someday he’d let me play with it.”

“But don’t you got no bears or stuffed things?”

“Aw, Lori, shut up, would you? Jesus, those are girls’ toys, don’t you know? What do I need anything like that for? He was right, my other foster dad was. I’m too old for things like that. Quit being dumb.”

“But what you got to love?”

“Jesus Christ, Lori, you’re bugging me. Tor, make her quit, would you? Jesus. But this, but that. But I don’t know, Lori Sjokheim. Does that satisfy you? I got plenty of junk to love. I got me my game of Sorry! Didn’t you hear me say that? Your ears full of wax? And I got my Lego toys. And I bet I can build a hundred million times more betterer with it than you can do. And I got me Barry’s baseball glove to love. What more does a guy need? So lay off me before I get mad.”