Somebody Else's Kids (38 page)

The rain did come before the bus. But as it was, we never noticed.

I
t was a time of endings. Only a week and a half left to us. Tomaso’s absence created a tremendous gap. I think we all were thankful to be leaving soon and not to have to continue for long without him.

In the middle of the next week Claudia told me that the night before she had had a false alarm with the baby. “I got pains right here. My mom timed them and they were twenty minutes apart. So my dad took me to the hospital.” Then she rolled her eyes. “But it didn’t happen. Still four more weeks.”

Claudia looked at me. She wrinkled her nose. “Tell you the truth, I wish it was last week. My back hurts, my front hurts, my feet hurt, everything hurts. I’m sick of this.”

I smiled.

“You know, I got names picked out. If it’s a boy I want to call him Matthew. And if it’s a girl, I’m going to name her Jenny. Don’t you think those are good names? What do you want it to be?”

“Healthy.”

She grinned.

I never saw Claudia again. The first time was a false alarm. The second was not. Early the following morning Claudia delivered a 4-pound 4-ounce girl prematurely. When Claudia’s mother called, she said both mother and daughter were doing well, although the infant had jaundice and was in the intensive-care nursery. They named her Jenny.

“This is just like the old times. Isn’t it?” Lori said to me wistfully the next afternoon when I told her. “Just Boo and me.”

I nodded. “Just Boo and you.”

“And you too.”

“And me.”

She opened her reading book and stared momentarily at it before looking back at me. “You know. Tor, I don’t think I like it so good without the others here.”

“You know, Lor, I don’t think I do either.”

We went on with our normal routine. In our daily practice with Dick and Jane, Lori was beginning to show some of the old difficulties she had always had with reading, because the number of words was increasing and she could not rely so heavily on sheer memory of the story. Four stories into the book now, she was expected to have a reading vocabulary of seven words. I never gave her any other support materials such as workbooks or flash cards because I knew failure lay there. This venture with Dick and Jane was not for the purpose of teaching Lori how to read. I did not delude myself into thinking I could so easily do that. It was simply an effort to give her confidence enough to believe she was capable of learning. She had summer school coming up and then the next year. Time enough for reality. I needed to give her dreams.

Boo continued on, his usual wacky self. I remembered back to the days when I first had Boo and Lori together and how lost I had felt. How would I ever manage two such different students together at the same time? Now with Tomaso and Claudia gone, I had so much time on my hands that it seemed scandalous to have only two students. I could not imagine how I had ever felt overwhelmed.

I had made my own plans for the summer. I was going home to Montana for a while; then I planned to take some summer courses to keep my teacher certification up to date. Nothing spiffy. And I was moving. My current place had grown too small to accommodate all my books and teaching materials and the million and one other things I had acquired without realizing it. Besides, it was too far from school. I always had to drive. So I located a closer, larger apartment. I wanted to go home to Montana as soon as school ended and I wanted to get moved and settled first, so my evenings were filled with packing.

One night shortly into June, Billie came over to dinner to lend a hand in the boxing up. We had the place in shambles from one end to the other such that when the telephone rang I actually could not find it at first. Billie was laughing hysterically.

“Hello?”

Noises on the other end. I could not tell what they were.

“Hello? Hello?”

Someone was crying. Snuffling into the phone. I motioned Billie to be quiet.

“Who is this?”

“Torey?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s me. Claudia.”

“Claudia! Claudia, what’s the matter?”

Sob. Snuffle. “I’ve been thinking …” More whimpering. “I’ve thought about things … about Jenny. She’s so little, Torey. She just got out of the incubator. She’s so tiny.” Claudia dissolved into sobs.

“Claudia? Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

“I’m gonna give her up, Torey. I signed the papers this morning. I did, and my mom did. I’m gonna give her up.”

“Oh Claudia –”

“The lady at the agency, she said they had a good home for her. Her mommy and daddy’ve been waiting a long …” Sob. “A long time for her.” Loud weeping.

“You did a good thing, Claudia. I’m proud of you.”

“I didn’t want her like Boo. I didn’t want to hurt her.”

And then it was the end. The last day. Nobody was working. There were parties all over school. Lori asked to spend the day in the first-grade classroom because they were having a celebration. She told me she would come by to clean out her things and say good-bye at the end of the day. Then she skipped down the hall.

Boo and I stripped the room of its final reminders of the year. The open bookshelves had to be covered with butcher paper and taped down. The sink and the counters had to be scoured. All the cupboards had to be inventoried and taped shut. We worked together silently. Boo willingly joining me. When we had finished, we took a walk to the park not faraway.

So different this, from my other years as a classroom teacher. Last days had always been filled with that poignant sadness endings bring but yet with the promise of a long vacation and the raucousness of a final day. But now, here I was with my one vacant student, probably the least busy teacher in the school. To Boo it was just another day.

We walked around the duck pond and fed the greedy ducks and geese the last of the finches’ food. Afterward we strolled through the small zoo. I took Boo’s shoes off so that he could run through the grass. In the end I took mine off too. We waded in the stream and tried to catch water skippers. On the way back to school I bought ice-cream cones for us from a sidewalk vendor.

Mrs. Franklin was waiting for us when we returned. She took Boo’s hand from me.

“Good-bye, Boo,” I said.

He stared off into space. Mrs. Franklin reoriented his face so that he had to look at me. Even then he averted his eyes.

“Boo? Good-bye, Boo,” I said and bent close to him.

“Tornado watch! Tornado watch!” he cried and let out the long, piercing warning signal that always came over the television to alert viewers to an impending storm. He raised his fingers between our faces and began to twiddle them.

Mrs. Franklin smiled apologetically. Then a few words, a smile, a hesitant pat on my arm and it was over. Standing alone with my sandals in my hand, I watched Mrs. Franklin and my fairy child walk away down the sidewalk. His beauty lay upon him with the shining stillness of a dream. I had not sullied him.

Back in the room I stood in the middle of the floor. The papered and taped shelves gave it a cold, foreign appearance. The animals were gone, the rug rolled up, the chairs upended on top of the worktable. Yet even so, the walls spoke to me. So much had happened here. Like every year, I wished it were not over.

The door opened.

Lori.

She did not look at me. Instead she went across the room and started yanking stuff out of her cubby and dropping it on the floor. She was on her knees, pulling the things out when suddenly she stopped. She let what was in her hands crash to the linoleum. Then she bent forward and covered her face with her hands.

“Lor? What’s the matter?”

“I didn’t pass.” Grabbing her report card, she flung it out across the floor at me. Then she began to cry. Folding her arms across her knees she hid her face in them and wept the heavy, inconsolable tears of one who had really tried, of one who believed that evil old adage about trying hard enough. In the face of all the odds, Lori had never lost her dreams.

From my place in the middle of the empty room, I came and sat down beside her on the floor. We had no tissues left and had to make do with paper towels. Lori mopped furiously at her tears, pushing them back, swallowing them. “It’s just that I don’t like to think of myself as stupid.”

“You’re not stupid, Lor.”

“I flunked kindergarten. Now I flunked first grade. I’ll probably be a million years old by the time I get out of school.”

“You’re not stupid, Lor.”

“It’s just the same thing as being stupid, if I’m not.”

Not knowing what else to say, I remained quiet.

“It hurts me to flunk. Didn’t they know how much it hurts?” Then she looked at me. The resentment was obvious. “Didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“But didn’t you know?”

A long pause. “Yes.”

“Then how come you didn’t stop it?” She was angry with me. Her eyes were full of accusation.

“I couldn’t, Lori.”

“Yes, you could have. If you’d really wanted to, you could’ve done it.”

I shook my head. “No, Lori. It wasn’t my decision. Other people thought it would be better for you to be in the first grade another year and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

She regarded me a long, long moment before turning away. “You knew how bad I wanted to be in second grade. You knew. How come you didn’t make it so I could be?”

“Lori! I
couldn’t
.”

“But why not?”

I caught hold of her chin with my fingers and turned her face to me. “Listen to me. I could not do anything about it. There are some things in this world that I cannot do, no matter how much I wish I could. This was one of them.”

She began to weep in earnest then, the tears bubbling up and over her cheeks and down onto my fingers. “You couldn’t?”

I shook my head.

My fall from Heaven hurt – both of us.

We were without words for many minutes. Lori sobbed, bent over with her head against her knees again. I sat quietly and did not touch her, not knowing if my comfort would be wanted.

Finally she snuffled and swallowed and brought up the front of her dress to dry her face.

“What am I going to tell Libby?” she asked. “Now we’re not going to be twins anymore. And Libby really wants us to be. She’s going to be awfully upset.”

“Sure you’ll be twins. You’ll always be twins, Lori. Nothing can change that.”

“Uh-uh. We won’t be the same age anymore. She’ll be older.”

“No, she won’t. She’ll just be in a different grade, that’s all. Like this year she was in a different room. But you’ll still be twins. Nothing can change a really important thing like that. Certainly not anything as silly as school.”

“I wanted to be in second grade too. I wanted it
bad
.”

“I know.”

Again we sat in silence. Lori had stopped crying, but I still did not dare to touch her, so we sat side by side on the floor. The building around us was absolutely soundless. Only faraway calls of children free from bondage could be heard. The emptiness of the room weighed in on me.

Lori picked up a paper from the floor in front of her, one of the things she had thrown out of her cubby earlier. It was a drawing she and Boo had done together.

“Is Boo gone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t even get to say good-bye to him.”

“Remember, you said good-bye earlier. I told you he’d be gone.”

She nodded. “He’s not coming back next year, is he?”

“No.”

“And Claudia, she’s not coming back either?”

“No.”

“And Tommy’s not coming back,” she said softly. “Just me. Just me coming back. Just me.”

“And me,” I added.

Lori looked over at me. Then she nodded. “Yup. Just you and me.” She held out the picture and studied it. I pushed a piece of dirt around on the floor with my finger.

“Hey, Lor?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s go celebrate.”

“Celebrate!”
Her face puckered with irritation. “What’s there to celebrate?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know especially. I just feel like it.”

No response.

“Well, maybe we could celebrate its being the very last day of school,” I suggested. “We have the whole summer ahead of us. How about that?”

“No. I have to go to summer school.”

“Hmmm, well, I saw that Southby’s have opened up the swimming pool for the summer.”

“I don’t care about that. I can’t swim.”

“It isn’t raining anymore. It’s a nice day out. We could celebrate that.”

“It’s too hot. I’m sweaty.”

“You’re making it hard on me, Lor. I’m trying and you’re not helping.”

“I don’t care.”

“Ho, ho. What a little Scrooge we’ve become. Well, listen. Boo and I discovered an ice-cream man down on the corner of Seventh and Maple. What do you say we go get an ice-cream cone? And guess what? He has butter brickle.”