The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (24 page)

Technically, this psychologist was a graduate student who worked under the supervision of a licensed professional, and it gave Tasha access to some of the newest therapy techniques available. It helped dramatically with her anxiety. Plus, it was how she had connected so quickly with others her age after June left her in such a bad position.

The therapist welcomed the visitors (William and me) and explained the rules, largely for our benefit. These were high school students using poetry and storytelling to exorcise their strongest demons. The emphasis was
not
on factuality, but on emotional depth. Everything shared was private and not to be repeated elsewhere. I wondered how it would play out with William’s echolalia but nodded my agreement so they could begin.

The students went around the circle sharing painful stories of abuse and mental illness. There was poetry of the teen angst variety, only these teens had more cause for anguish than some of their other age peers. The poems followed a similar pattern, with a lot of rhyming and verb–noun juxtaposition. I’ve never been much for poems and stories, so I concentrated on the words’ importance to avoid seeming bored.

When Natasha’s turn came, she dug a piece of paper out of my purse. Most of the poems had been presented from memory, but a few of the teens, especially the storytellers, read from pre-prepared manuscripts. Natasha held her paper up in front of her face and picked up the microphone. Generally, this had been an unnecessary addition, as the circle was small, and most of us could hear the central speaker well.

But Tasha was soft-spoken, unusually so as she began to read.

“Soulful Eyes”

Soulful eyes
Let them say what
they will they know not your heart
Strong arms are a safe haven
from an emotionally troubling world
Your soulful eyes breathe life into me
when I look at you, I see a savior
one that thought more of me than I did of myself
Capture this breath with the wind
and toss it back to me with your carefree smile
Dance with a devil-may-care freedom
It matters not that they do not understand
The world fades into melodic blur when you take my hand
Walk with me down this path
My “person of the forest”

By the time she sat back down beside me on the uncomfortable beanbag chair where William roosted in my lap, her whole body was shaking.

“Are you all right, Natasha?” the psychologist asked.

Some of the students had explained their stories afterward and gotten ideas and coping strategies from the group and its leader. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’ll be fine. I don’t want to talk about it, though.” Tasha leaned into me, and for the first time ever let me wrap an arm around her and rub warmth back into her shoulders. “Thanks for being my friend,” she all but whispered.

“Thank you for being mine.”

William wiggled over into her lap. He had been listening raptly the whole time, rocking gently. Unlike me, he hadn’t needed to force interest in everyone else’s words. I doubted he could have done so. At the end of the session, the psychologist joined us. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked Natasha.

“I’m good. I’m . . .”

The microphone gave a squelch of feedback and the stand crashed. “It is William’s turn next,” a small voice informed us, “and next is now.”

“I’m so sorry.” In the seconds we had been speaking, William had scurried into the center of the ring and captured the mic, which the last speaker had left turned on.

The exiting people stopped and turned around to look at the tiny six-year-old and his cornrows. I was suddenly grateful for Hannah’s braids. Even as oblivious as I could be about appearances, I knew I would have felt even more self-conscious if he had looked in the least bedraggled under so many gazes.

“It’s fine,” the psychologist assured me. “He isn’t hurting a thing.” To William, he offered the same introduction he had given to the other members of the group. “What would you like to share?”

William tapped the microphone against his chin and rocked on the balls of his feet. Finally, he looked straight at me, through me really, and said, “William is home-hungry.” Then he dropped the mic, flopped on his stomach, and bawled.

December came, and with it, the twins’ birthday. Two days before my interview, Sara bounded around the kitchen singing, “It’s my birthday, it’s my birthday, it’s my bi-irthday. Gonna get lots of presents to open for me-e-e.” She tapped her spoon on her cereal bowl when she sat at all, and Natasha nearly tripped over her twice trying to get her own breakfast together.

William joined us in the kitchen late, since his morning ritual always included a rinse in the tub. “It’s my birthday, too, Dummyhead,” he greeted his sister.

His outburst stopped everyone on the spot.

He didn’t ride the bus like Sara did. I drove him. The first school day he was my son, I picked him up at carpool. His teacher, Mr. Bender, met me at the curb. I’d been afraid of trouble, having already spoken with Sara’s principal on the phone over her behaviors. But Mr. Bender had been all smiles and concern. “We loved the Forresters,” he told me. “But we’re so excited for William. He’s talked about your husband nonstop today.”
Really? Sara’s my talker.
“But we’re going to need your help with a couple of things.”
Here it comes, then.
“By the end of last year, he could use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my,’ and I noticed he’s reverted to referring to himself in the third person. He also needs help remembering to use the number fifteen on his way to counting to a hundred.”

“Five-teen!” William announced from the back.

“Fiff-teen” his teacher and I corrected together.

“
Five
-teen,” William insisted. And I could tell from the following laughter that we would be fighting the battle of five-teen for some time to come.

“Anyway, we’ll get all that sorted out. We’ve already seen improvement since the beginning of the term. Our kids are
nothing
if not inconsistent. I wanted to introduce myself and say hello. You have a wonderful little boy.”

It was the most stunning moment of parenting, to hear William referred to as mine, to find out he had spoken positively of Lance, to hear him argue with us about the number five-teen. And now, not four months later here he was using those personal pronouns precisely as Mr. Bender had assured me he could do, and in a perfectly grammatical sentence no less.

“Good job, William!” I praised him.

“But your sister is
not
a dummyhead,” Lance added, joining us after draining William’s tub.

Sara looked hard at her brother, then resumed her tapping song. “It’s
our
birthday, it’s
our
birthday, it’s our biiirth-birthday. Gonna get lots of presents to open for me-e-e.”

A step in the right direction.

We had worked it out; Lance would take after-lunch cupcakes to William’s school; I would do the same for Sara’s. Since he got the more desirable location, I got the more desirable car. Also, I had missed my convertible ride with Natasha on Saturday when William had once again insisted upon attending her poetry slam. The group had adopted him as a sort of mascot, and he got the benefit of a couple of hours spent in the company of those who seemed to understand him whether he used his words correctly or not.

“He’s a poet,” one girl assured me. “Listen to his metaphors, and he makes perfect sense.” Great for those who grasped metaphors intrinsically, I supposed. Not so great for Lance and me.

I was much too smart to bake thirty-five cupcakes for Sara’s class and another fifteen for William’s myself, but Mama was outdoing herself in her efforts to make up for what amounted to her initial shock. She implemented every idea her readers sent in and a few she came up with herself. We had endured all-girl shopping-lunches, received randomly delivered packages, and been bombarded with a barrage of “special-day” cards. The birthday itself had brought bicycles from her and Daddy.

Thus, the box riding in its own seatbelt on the way to school contained nothing from the grocery store or even the local bakery, but forty of Mama’s pink-and-white iced chocolate and yellow dream cupcakes. The ones Lance was porting to William’s school were sports themed.

After I signed in at the office, I had a few minutes to wait with Sara’s teacher before the class came back from lunch. Between the few terse e-mails and several phone calls we had received from her and the principal, I was braced for an unpleasant meeting. “You’re Sara’s new foster mother,” she said.

“We’re adopting her, you know.”

The teacher shrugged. “I’ll tell you something, if you haven’t already figured it out for yourself. That girl is lazy.”

My gut clenched. I wanted to throw a cupcake at the woman. I pictured Sara at the kitchen table the previous Thursday begging, “But I don’t
want
to go to school. The kids are all mean, and Mrs. Grim never lets me have recess.”

“Honey, we’ll talk about this later,” I had told her, herding her out to the bus. “Everybody has to deal with frustrations at work and school.” But the conversation had never come. I regretted that now.

“I’ve
seen
children with autism. I know what it looks like, and she’s not it. I taught her last year. If she hadn’t come to me with the educational diagnosis, I can assure you she would never have been assigned it here. I—”

“You will need to discuss this with my husband and me at Sara’s next IEP meeting. Today, I’m here to
celebrate
her birthday.” Natalie had cued me into the hazards of the Individual Education Planning meetings controlling what accommodations the school would have to make for our daughter. Sara’s IEP bought her extra time on tests, a quiet testing location, away from the classroom, and visits with the district occupational and speech therapists, but little else. As Natalie had ruefully told me, “She’s too high functioning. The system won’t help her like Will.”

In fact, William’s placement at the charter school was a result of his IEP as much as any lottery. He had good grades, but the district had few mainstream classes able to meet his unique needs, and fewer still teachers willing to look deep enough to help him achieve his potential. Perhaps because it was smaller, the charter school was completely onboard with the process of working with him so he could perform to his best.

In contrast, Natalie had warned me, I would have to fight for every little thing Sara required. She had been sorry to see Sara assigned to this teacher a second year in a row, thinking they had left the woman behind in kindergarten. The teacher’s real name was Mrs. Grisby, but she had always been Mrs. Grim in our house. Mrs. Grim had been promoted to first grade along with her students, and she had nearly exactly the same class all over again. Natalie’s efforts to have Sara’s class changed had fallen flat with the principal.

The children returned from lunch before Mrs. Grim could launch another attack. We had exactly ten minutes for this ritual, and I suspected she would hold us rigidly to her schedule. “Everyone sing happy birthday to Sara,” she commanded in a weary voice as they sat down.

The chorus greeting her instruction was halfhearted at best. Sara didn’t notice. She stood beside me beaming, humming her own birthday present song from the morning while the other kids almost chanted through the more traditional version. “Now,” the teacher went on. “Who wants to help her pass out cupcakes?”

Nobody raised a hand.

The knot in my stomach tightened and twisted. In my day, birthday cupcakes were a
big deal.
Surely school hadn’t changed so much that nobody cared about an influx of lesson-delaying sugar. “Never mind,” I chirped. “More fun for Sara and me, right honey?” But Sara’s bright smile faltered.

“I’ll help,” one little girl said. I couldn’t tell if the hesitation I heard in her voice was shyness or something else.

“Thanks!” I called out before she could add “I guess” or anything at all to suggest unwillingness. It was enough. Sara’s lips turned up again, and she began her deliveries.

I don’t know how the trouble started. I asked those who wanted yellow cake to raise their hands and sent Sara and her half-willing assistant to deliver them. Then we moved on to chocolate. The treats had nearly all been distributed when a scuffle erupted at the back of the classroom. I turned in time to see Sara smash a chocolate and a yellow cupcake together, then cream them down the front of a boy’s shirt. “I guess that makes you a floop-de-dooping dummyhead,” she shouted.

“That,” Mrs. Grim’s bellow was almost triumphant, “is exactly what I’m talking about. That kind of attitude is
exactly
what holds you back, young lady. As soon as Mrs. Robinson can get down here from the library, I’m taking you to the principal’s office.”

“But he said I . . .” Sara opened and closed her pink-and-white frosted fingers.

“I don’t care what he said. You do
not
swear in my classroom, and you are not entitled to ruin other people’s clothes.”

“She didn’t swear,” I protested. “She said . . . dummyhead and floop-de-doop. The one is an insult, and the other I’m pretty sure she made up.”

“You should not encourage her behavior.”

“You know what? You’re right. I shouldn’t. Sara, come with me. We’re leaving before someone gets hurt.”

“But he . . .” The smile was gone completely, and Sara was smearing the icing on her face as she swiped away tears.

I tucked the cupcake box under one arm and swept Sara along with the other. Damned if I was giving that woman Mama’s chocolate dreams. “Mrs. Sara’s Mom!” Sara’s assistant was suddenly all afire. She grabbed my elbow on the way past, and I nearly dropped the box. “He said she has
lice
and she smells like poop all the time. But he’s the one who had . . .”

“Right. Got it, sweetie. Thanks, gotta go.” I hauled Sara out the door behind me.

She wailed, “We have to sign out!” She had gotten icing all over both of our shirts by then, and the chocolate dreams were significantly squashed under my arm. I didn’t get her coat, and I skipped signing out on my way past the office. By a tiny margin, I resisted the urge to flip the principal a bird. I wasn’t sure I could un-ruin my daughter’s day, and I wasn’t even sure how to try.