Somebody Else's Kids (18 page)

“You want to keep the baby?” I came to the table and sat down.

“Certainly.” She paused briefly and a smile slipped across her lips, an inward smile as if she were thinking pleasant thoughts. “It’s going to be all mine. My baby. I’m going to fix it so that it loves just me. Just me.” A pause. “And Rebecca maybe. A little. But mostly me.”

“Are you planning to take care of it?”

She nodded. “Me and my mom. I’ll feed it and stuff. And change its diapers. I won’t mind that. And she can do the other stuff. My mom said to me once, once at night when we were talking and my dad was out at the Elks Club, she said she missed having babies around. Rebecca’s hardly a baby anymore. And she said she wanted another baby.”

“But your mother works, Claudia. She’s gone all day.”

“Yeah, I know. But … It’ll work out.”

“Babies aren’t like dolls. You can’t just set them up on the shelf when you don’t feel like taking care of them.”

“I know that. Don’t worry about it so much.”

“I can’t help it.”

A small stillness grew long. It was so quiet I imagined that I heard the snow falling. Claudia studied her fingers, ran a hand over the very slight curve of her belly, looked away from me. I rose to pace back to the window again.

“It’ll work out. I know it will.”

I hoisted myself up onto the wide window ledge. The glass was cold against my back. When I did not speak, she fidgeted in her chair.

“It will, Torey. You always worry about things. It’ll come out okay. Something will happen.”

Yes, something would happen all right. For Claudia, who at twelve had left the Good Fairy and Santa Claus behind such a short time ago, there was no lack of confidence. For me there was no lack of doubt. Already three-quarters of her life was written for her, if she kept the baby. That was the way it was for 90 percent of all teenage, unwed mothers. Dropping out of school or at least never making it to college, never finding a job that paid enough money to support her and her child, never settling the rift the baby’s birth had caused in an already disturbed family, marrying to get out of a situation too unbearable, and so on and so on and so on. Perhaps most of all, though, never getting to finish being a child herself before she was forced to be an adult – something that would hurt both her and the baby. Even as I sat I could hear the doors of opportunity closing, the click of the locks reverberating in my ears.

“Claudia, have you ever thought of giving the baby up for adoption?”

Horror electrified her face. “No. Of course not!”

“I know that’s a terrible thing to think about, especially after you’ve carried the baby all those months, but sometimes it is the right thing to think about. For both you and your child.”

“No! Be quiet; don’t even say that. I’d never give it up. It’s
my
baby. My own, and nobody has the right to take it away from me unless I say.”

“Claudia …”

“Be quiet!”

I opened my mouth to speak, but she gave me such a determined frown that I closed it again.

Claudia began to cry. “How can you even say such things to me? You’ve never had a baby; you don’t know what it’s like. I want this baby. He’s going to fix things right.”

Oh. My heart sank.

She rose from the table and turned as if to run. I thought she would. She did go clear to the door. There she stopped, leaned her head against the door frame and sobbed.

I sighed. Lately someone seemed to be in tears all the time in this place. It made me tired. Pushing myself off the window ledge, I went over to her. She immediately moved away from me. However, instead of going out the door she turned back into the classroom, ran to the reading corner and flopped down on the pillows on the floor.

Remaining by the door, I regarded her. I knew I had gone too far, had been too blunt. For our first discussion I should have only planted the thought and then left it. I could recognize now that it was too emotional an issue for both of us.

I did not know what to do. Claudia was a champion when it came to bringing out inadequate feelings in me. That in itself made me feel worse.

Claudia was sobbing into a pillow. Going over to the reading corner, I stood over her a few moments. I wanted to kneel and take her in my arms as I would have done with Boo or Lori, but the same shyness that I had felt before stayed me. She seemed older to me than I did myself; she had problems I did not know how to cope with. Those were not a child’s tears.

I could not overcome my reticence. “Listen, Claudia,” I said finally, “I’m going down to the teachers’ lounge for a few minutes, okay?”

No response.

“I’ll be back.”

The truth was, I needed to get out.

In the lounge I bought myself a can of Dr Pepper from the pop machine. Sitting with the cold can pressed against my forehead, I paged through back-dated teaching magazines. Maybe there were some hints in there about what to do when you felt tired and confused and in water over your head.

Back in the room all was silent. January dusk was already settling into the corners. The fluorescent lights often bothered Boo, so we had gotten used to working without them except on the darkest days. We seldom noticed the gloom. Now I did.

From where I stood in the doorway, I studied Claudia. Although she had ceased crying, she remained in the reading corner, still stretched out on her side on one of the pillows. Her back was to me. This was too much, I thought, for a young girl to cope with. She should be home pinning up pictures of her favorite movie star and listening for good songs on the radio.

I came over to her. I knelt on the rug. “I brought you some pop. I hope you like Dr Pepper.”

She turned and regarded me briefly before sitting up. Her eyes were red and swollen. Slowly she reached for the can of pop, grasping it in both hands, and drank deeply. Afterward she set it down on her knee, still clasping it between the palms of her hands. There came between us all the stillness of the January twilight.

“Claud, I’m sorry,” I said, and then I had to stop because I couldn’t explain what I was sorry for. Just for being so fallible, I guess, for having presumed the position of authority when I, too, had no answers.

She looked at me. For the first time she looked directly into my eyes. Her brow furrowed. “Why’s it matter to you what I do? Nobody else cares.”

I did not have an answer.

She continued to watch me. “I can’t figure your game out. We’re all just somebody else’s kids in here. What do we matter? Why do you care?”

The dusk had stolen what little color I could discern from her eyes. There were tears there again, brimming but not falling. She caught her lower lip between her teeth to stop the trembling of her chin. I had reached a hand out to touch her but stopped halfway. We were trapped in each other’s gaze and I felt like Alice in the rabbit hole, falling, falling, falling. So much I perceived, so little I understood.

Then Claudia dropped her head. With one hand she brushed back her hair. A long sigh, then she looked back up. She smiled very slightly. “You’re weird, did you know that?”

I nodded.

And then there was Lori. For every wrong moment, for every lost chance, for every mistake I made, Lori could make it all worth the effort. I wished there was some way to bottle her spirit and carry it with me, although in truth, I did not even know quite what it was about her that I found so uplifting. I could never capture that airy, quintessential quality when describing her to someone; yet, it was so much the essence of what Lori was.

The day following my afternoon with Claudia, I was sitting at the worktable over the noon hour, finishing my lunch. Lori came bounding into the classroom, a piece of paper in hand. When I pushed my chair back from the table, she jumped in my lap.

“I brung you something,” she announced.

“You did?”

“Yup.” She sat, straddling my legs, her back to my chest. “You wanna see what it is? Here.” She lifted the paper over her head so that it was against my nose. I took it.

The picture was of a bird, a blue bird with black wings and very yellow legs. It was a rather tottery-looking bird, because Lori’s ability in art followed her ability in other things done on paper. But happiness was clearly written all over that bird’s beak.

“I think this is just the best picture I ever drew. I used my best crayons, the ones with the points still on them. And do you see? I stayed in the lines this time. Pretty good, anyhow. It’s just about the best thing I ever done.”

“Oh, Lor, you’re right. It is.”

“Mrs. Thorsen thought so too. She wanted to put it up on the bulletin board even.” Lori squirmed around to look at me. “But I told her I’s making it for you, so she couldn’t have it.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have. This is beautiful. You should have let her put it on the board. This is a picture to be proud of.”

“I am proud of it. But I made it for you.”

“Well, I’m glad to have it. It is a good picture. Maybe I can find a place on our bulletin board to put it, so everyone else can enjoy it too.”

Lori took the picture from my hands and held it out in front of her. Thoughtfully, she examined it. “You know what I was thinking when I made this?”

“What was that?”

“Well, I was thinking that it isn’t as good as a real picture. You know, as a photograph. Like in a magazine or something. And I really wanted it to look just best with no mistakes. But it wouldn’t come out like I was trying to make it. It wasn’t perfect.”

“Oh Lor, don’t say that. It’s beautiful. Better than any old photograph.”

“No. No, that’s not what I’m saying. It isn’t right because that wasn’t the way I wanted to draw it. It wasn’t perfect, like I wanted it to be. But you know, Tor, what I was thinking about …” She paused, her voice trailing off while she gave the picture another thorough viewing. “What I was thinking about was: It
is
perfect. Not the part you see but what’s inside you. In my head, I could see this bird perfect.” She turned to look at me briefly and gave me a smile. “And that’s sort of enough for me to like this picture even though it isn’t really very perfect. Because … well, because I kind of know it could be …”

She turned to me again. “You know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Yes, I think I do.”

“Things never really are perfect,” she said. “But inside you, you can always see them perfect, if you try. That makes things beautiful to me.”

“You’re a dreamer, Lor.”

She gazed at me, her eyes dark and round and beyond smiling. She said nothing.

“That’s a good thing to be.”

The blue bird picture never made it up on our bulletin board. I took it home with me. I hung it on the wall over my bed to remind me at least twice a day about beauty in an imperfect world.

S
chool time is not marked off by months as is time in the rest of the world, but rather by holidays. There are Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, of course, but there are also the in-between times like After-St.-Patrick’s-Day-But-Before-Easter and Not-Quite-the-End-of-School, when one has to make do with kites or flowers on the bulletin boards.

We were moving into February, gearing up for St. Valentine’s Day. I tried never to emphasize the holidays too much because my kids got over-stimulated if we went on too long with anything. However, after the long drag of January, I always looked forward to St. Valentine’s color and was a little more lax.

Lori, of course, was our class celebrator. Before any of the rest of us was even thinking about a holiday, Lori was filling our discussions with plans for parties and presents and decorations. Valentine’s Day was no exception.

February had just begun and we were still in the first week when Lori arrived one afternoon with a huge grocery sack.

“I brung us some Valentine things,” she announced. “For us to put up on the walls and make it pretty.” And so she had. A cupid with a honeycomb heart, three worn wall decorations from the dime store and an empty heart-shaped plastic candy dish. And cards. “These here’s my Valentine cards to everybody.” She lifted up an assortment of odd-shaped envelopes. “Last night, me and Libby, we made ’em. She helped me write the stuff and I cutted out the pictures.” She handed them to me.

By now the others had arrived. Tomaso was leaning over Lori’s shoulder to peer into the paper bag. Claudia fingered one of the wall decorations. Boo spun in ever wider circles around us.

I held the cards and wondered what to do with them. We had not yet made folders to put cards in because Valentine’s Day was still so far away. I hated to put the cards on my desk. It was such a mess I feared I’d never find them when I had to.

“Shall I put these on the shelf over here?” I said to Lori. “Then when we make Valentine’s folders, you can put them in. All right?”

“No.” Lori put her hands on her hips. “These are Valentines for today. I want everyone to open them now. I made ’em special.”

“It’s only the fifth of February,” Claudia said.

“I don’t care. They’re still for today. My dad’ll buy me store Valentines for Valentine’s Day ’cause I have to have ’em for my other class then to. But these are for just you guys. For today. Open them now.”