The Tiger's Child Read online

  “Sheila, could you show Violet where to sit down?” I asked.

  “Not going with her!” Violet shrieked. “She’s got fangs!”

  Eyes wide, Sheila looked over at me.

  “Here, I’ll take her,” said Jeff. She was his client and when she saw a face she recognized, Violet relaxed visibly.

  Just then, in whooshed Mikey. Mikey was six, short and stout, and capable of moving at light-speed. This gave him the appearance more of a ball than a boy, rather like the sort used in pinball. Zip! Bang! Whoosh! He careered around the classroom, leaving all of us stunned in his wake. His mother looked only too relieved to be rid of him for the morning.

  Next came Kayleigh, my elective mute. In contrast to Violet, Kayleigh was tiny for her age, her small features overpowered by long, thick bangs and a heavy mass of hair. It was in the back of my mind that Kayleigh might be a good child for Sheila to work with individually, as Sheila herself had been electively mute when she had come into my class at six. Moreover, Kayleigh had a sweet, loving nature, which made her easy to like and pleasant to work with. I was keen for Sheila to enjoy the challenge of being with us and longed for her to understand my own attachment to such children; so Kayleigh seemed an ideal choice.

  “Sheila, do you suppose you could take Kayleigh over to the table and show her some of our toys?”

  Sheila just stared at the girl.

  “Kayleigh loves putting puzzles together. Perhaps you could help her do one while we’re waiting for the rest of the children to arrive.”

  Uncertainly, Sheila held out her hand. Kayleigh responded with a delighted smile.

  Joshua and David arrived together in a car pool driven by Joshua’s father. Of all of our children, Joshua was the most severely handicapped. It was he we had the diapers for. Diagnosed at eighteen months as autistic, Joshua neither spoke nor engaged people in any other way.

  David was Joshua’s opposite number. Smily and gregarious, he could worm his way into the coldest heart. And he was such a lady-killer with his big blue eyes and curly blond hair. In truth, I think he was one of the most appealing-looking children I had come across. He was also one of the most disturbed.

  Alejo came next. He was a new child at the clinic, having started only at the beginning of April, and he was seeing Dr. Freeman, so I didn’t know him personally. His parents, a wealthy professional couple who had been childless through sixteen years of marriage, had decided to adopt a Third World orphan when it finally became apparent to them that they would not bear a child of their own. On a trip to Colombia, they found Alejo, then age four, in an orphanage run by a group of nuns. Adopted and brought to the United States, he had now been with his current family for almost three years, but he had never really settled into his new suburban surroundings. He was restless and aggressive and, although he had learned English, he spoke only rarely, preferring his fists to do his talking. His school performance had been uniformly poor and there was now a question of whether his deprived early life had caused permanent brain damage. Alejo himself was a small, rather unattractive boy with thick black-rimmed glasses. He had the flat features of the native South American Indians and a thatch of unruly dark hair that fell forward into his face. He appeared shy in the midst of so many strangers and clung tightly to his father’s hand until Jeff came and knelt down beside him.

  Behind Alejo came Jessie. A small black girl with her hair meticulously corn-rowed, she, like Joshua, was autistic. She was not as severely afflicted as Joshua and could talk after a fashion. Recognizing this as a school, she ran past us all to the table, sat down in one of the chairs and began drumming loudly with her hands while shouting out the alphabet song.

  Last to arrive was Tamara. Of Mediterranean lineage, with long black hair and huge, soulful dark eyes, she reminded me rather uncannily of the opera singer Maria Callas, which gave me trouble the entire eight weeks in keeping her name straight. Now eight, Tamara had been coming to the clinic for over two years, ever since her parents had first noticed the myriad of small cuts along her arms. Despite intensive therapy, Tamara continued her obsession with self-mutilation. Consequently, she arrived that warm summer’s morning wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jogging-suit bottoms to cover the myriad of sores and scabs on her arms and legs and to discourage her attempts to create more.

  So we started. Like all first days, it was a bit chaotic; however, we had planned well to provide an engaging but low-key morning. Thus, there were no disasters.

  Sheila befriended Kayleigh, or perhaps it was Kayleigh who befriended her. Whichever, Sheila spent most of the morning with the little girl, helping her with her activities, taking her to the toilet, finding good cookies for her at snack time. As part of my ongoing therapy with Kayleigh, I had insisted she speak to Sheila from the onset, which she did with only a little urging.

  This is right, I thought, watching the two of them together at one of the tables, their heads bent over what they were doing. Sheila was talking to her, pausing occasionally to glance over at the child. Seven years earlier, she had been that small girl. There was something deeply rewarding in seeing her come full circle.

  Indeed, as I stood there surveying the group, I became aware of how very happy I felt at that particular moment. The morning was going well; the program was off to a good start. The children were challenging but engaging. Jeff was my absolute favorite colleague to work with in the whole world. When we were getting fired up, the two of us could operate as one mind in two bodies, challenging, growing, building upon one another’s ideas so easily that everything felt possible to me. Miriam, whom I had not known previously, was full of energetic initiative and had a far better sense of organization than either Jeff or I. Consequently, all the small things, like finding the paper cups at break time, happened as they should. Best of all, there was Sheila, back in the classroom with me and it was the first day, with all the future stretching ahead of us. I regarded her. It was Sheila there. For the first time since we had been reunited, I felt certain of that.

  Chapter 12

  After the morning ended and all the children had gone home, the four of us went out to lunch. Miriam, who lived locally, suggested a whole-food restaurant down by the lake and so we found ourselves on benches gathered around a wooden plank table in the cool interior of the restaurant.

  We discussed the morning’s events, evaluating how the various activities had gone and making plans to adjust them as necessary. Sheila didn’t say much, even when we went over our observations of Kayleigh in the group. She appeared absorbed in a tradescantia hanging in the window beside our table, its long branches stretching down to a point where she could fiddle with them.

  After lunch, I offered to drive her the five miles down to Fenton Boulevard, where she could catch a direct bus back to Broadview.

  “So, what did you think?” I asked, once we were alone in the car together.

  Sheila was silent for several moments. “I don’t like your partner very much. What’s all this crap about regression motivating neuroses and stuff?”

  “Jeff’s a Freudian. You’ve got to excuse him that.”

  “It’s crap. Why doesn’t he just talk English?” Sheila asked.

  “Freud’s ideas have had very wide-ranging applications. While a lot of people don’t agree with all of them anymore, they’ve still done a great deal to help us understand how minds might work. And people like Jeff, who have really studied the theories, seem to make good progress using them.”

  Sheila raised her lip in an expression of disgust.

  We went a few moments in silence before I looked over again. “So, Jeff excepted, what did you think? Did you like it? Did you enjoy working with Kayleigh?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Why doesn’t she talk?” she asked, her head turned away from me to watch out the window. “And not Jeff’s kind of explanation. Not ’cause she’s got an anal fixation or something.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “I told her that when I was her age, I didn’t
talk either,” Sheila said.

  “Did Kayleigh respond to that?” I asked.

  “Dunno. She just kept coloring.” There was a pause. “I wanted to ask you about that other kid. The kid with the Spanish name.”

  “Alejo?”

  “Yeah. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s very difficult at school. He fights with the other kids all the time, quite a vicious little boy, and he does very poorly at his work. We’re trying to determine at the clinic whether this is as a result of psychological problems or a mental handicap.”

  “Jeff said he’s adopted.”

  “Yes. He’s from Colombia.”

  “Where are his real parents?” Sheila asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. He was abandoned. The report I read said that someone had found him living in a garbage can and had then taken him to these nuns who ran the orphanage.”

  Forehead puckered, Sheila looked over. “Really?”

  “Apparently there are a lot of street kids in some of these South American cities. It’s a serious problem in some places.”

  “His folks abandoned him in a garbage can?”

  “Maybe he was just sheltering in one. I don’t know. The report’s pretty scant and probably about fifth-hand.”

  Sheila was pensive a long moment, before turning back. “Did I hear you guys saying that the parents he’s got now were going to send him back to where he came from?”

  “I don’t know. There’s some talk of it. They’re an older couple, both professionals, not very used to accommodating children, and he’s been quite a handful.”

  “Can they really do that?” Sheila asked. “Just send him back to Colombia, like he was damaged goods or something?”

  “I guess.”

  Then came silence. Plagued by red lights and roadwork, I wasn’t making very speedy progress toward Fenton Boulevard. Sheila leaned her head against the window and gazed out. She looked tired. Had it been the rigors of the morning? Or had she come tired? The thought suddenly struck me that I was taking the stability of Sheila’s home life for granted. Sneaking a look, I studied her. God, that orange hair!

  “I think … well, I guess I can see now what got you attracted to this kind of work,” she said, her voice quiet and rather distant-sounding. “’Cause you hear about these things happening to people, and they are so unfair that they make you feel you just got to do something. That’s my reaction, anyway.” She paused. “Well, that’s one reaction.”

  “What’s the other?” I asked.

  “I just want to put my hands over my eyes and my fingers in my ears and stop it from getting in. I mean, I already know the world’s bad. I’m not sure I can stand knowing it’s really worse.”

  Our first “incident” happened the next morning. The school was across the street from a small park. It wasn’t an elaborate place, but there were swings and a large wooden structure built for climbing and plenty of room for running around. What made it particularly hospitable on a hot summer’s morning were the trees. There were a dozen or more, with enormous trunks and long, overhanging branches. Some particularly forward-thinking person in the parks department had had attractive wooden seating built around three of the trees nearest the play equipment.

  We decided to take our juice and cookies outside and let the children play on the swings and climbing frame during their break time. David and Mikey thought this was wonderful and went tearing off at such a rate that Jeff had to run after them and catch them before they went into the street.

  Although I had agreed happily when Jeff had suggested that we take the children over to the park at break time, I realized the moment David and Mikey ran off that it was a mistake. We were all too new to each other. But by that time, we were already underway.

  Right from the beginning, it was small-scale chaos of the sort that kids adore and grown-ups abhor. Joshua went into a self-stimulated frenzy on the swings. Jessie just stood on the grass, arms out, and spun dizzyingly around and around. David, Mikey and Alejo immediately fell into playing some dreadfully noisy war game that required an enormous amount of tearing around and much shouted large-artillery fire. Violet appeared to get rather turned on by this. I couldn’t tell if she simply wanted to join in and did not have the appropriate social skills to get the boys to include her, or whether she found it all genuinely sexually stimulating. Whichever, she began to indulge in open masturbation, while shouting out cheers and gunfire noises to the boys as they tore by.

  Needless to say, our break time was quickly turned into a rowdy, deafening affair. Only Kayleigh and Tamara did not join in. Clinging to Miriam’s hand, Kayleigh watched the other children apprehensively. Tamara, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly frightened by the mayhem, but she withdrew away from all of us. Taking her paper cup of juice and her cookies, she went off into a cubby-hole formed by tires on the underside of the climbing structure.

  After fifteen minutes, Jeff and I went to herd everyone back together, while Miriam sat down on one of the benches and tried to keep hold of those we had captured. Sheila proved fairly hopeless. Whether it was the noise or the sudden hyperactivity around her, I don’t know, but she simply froze in the midst of it all and the more I shouted at her to go get one child or another, the more solidly she seemed to be rooted to her spot.

  One by one, we rounded them up, until we only had David, Mikey and Tamara left. I was chasing David down when I heard Jeff cry out. “Oh, my God!”

  We all stopped then and looked over. He was extracting Tamara from her tires and as she stood up, I saw she was covered in blood. While the rest of us had been absorbed elsewhere, Tamara had taken the opportunity her privacy afforded her to gouge long lines into the skin along her jaw with a small, sharp stick she had picked up from the mulch put down to cushion falls from the climbing frame. They were not particularly deep cuts, but they bled dramatically.

  Then, abruptly, from the group of children with Miriam, frantic screaming started up. Instinct told me it was Violet and I spun around, but it wasn’t. It was Alejo. Seeing Tamara’s blood, he put a hand to either side of his face and screamed and screamed. I ran toward him, but this seemed to make matters worse. Shrieking incoherently, he fled across the grass until he came to one of the other trees and then, like a little monkey, he swarmed right up it and into the branches.

  We all stood there, stunned. Even Tamara, Jeff’s handkerchief pressed to her face, gazed up in amazement. Alejo kept climbing until he must have been the better part of fifty feet in the air.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Jeff muttered. “What now?”

  I glanced around us and then back up in the tree. “Alejo? Are you all right?”

  He wasn’t screaming any longer, wasn’t doing anything other than standing on a branch and looking down at us.

  “It’s okay. Everything’s fine here. Nothing wrong with Tamara. She just scratched herself. But it’s nothing serious. Why don’t you come on down now?” I called.

  “Alejo?” Jeff said. “It’s time to come down.”

  He didn’t budge.

  “You reckon I can climb up?” I asked Jeff.

  “Don’t be stupid, Hayden.”

  Miriam was beside us now. She was holding Kayleigh in her arms. “How about the fire department? Do they do these kinds of things?”

  I looked around at the others just in time to see Joshua strolling out into the road. “Oh, cripes. Josh? Come here, Josh.” I ran after him. Snagging him by the T-shirt, I hauled him back into the group. It was then I noticed Sheila sitting on the ground. She was unlacing her work boots.

  “I can get him,” she said, and before any of us had a chance to protest, Sheila had leaped into the branches and was pulling herself up.

  “Oh, God,” Jeff cried, “two of them up there. Why did you let her do that, Hayden?”

  “Well, at least we’ve got a doctor on the premises.”

  Then silence, as we all watched.

  “We’re gonna get sued out of our
lives …” I heard Jeff mutter under his breath.

  Sheila climbed the tree with no difficulty, shimmying up through the branches as easily as Alejo had done until she reached the one just beneath him. I heard her talking to him, but I couldn’t discern what she was saying.

  Minutes went by. All the while I was racking my brains for the best solution, as no doubt Jeff was doing as well. Should we call the fire department? The police? Dr. Rosenthal? Alejo’s parents? Or could we risk just waiting him out? What about the other children? It was only ten forty-five and the program ran for another hour and forty-five minutes. Should Miriam and I take the rest back in and try to pretend everything was normal?

  Then, just as I was about to suggest phoning for help, I saw Sheila begin to descend, and within a few moments, Alejo started down behind her. Jeff, Miriam and I all sighed a collective sigh of relief.

  “Hey, you’re a hero,” Jeff said to Sheila as we all finally started back to the school. He reached an arm out and slipped it over her shoulder. “You really did great there. I bet you’re proud of yourself.”

  Nodding, Sheila ducked to free herself of his touch.

  “I hope you are proud of yourself,” I said to Sheila as I drove her down to Fenton Boulevard after lunch. “What you did was very brave.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” She put her hands behind her neck and lifted her hair up off her shoulders. “I didn’t think about it.”

  “What did you talk about when you were up there? How did you convince him to come down?” I asked.

  “I spoke Spanish to him. I didn’t say anything special, just, like, I knew he was scared and I would help him come down, but I spoke in Spanish.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you spoke Spanish.”

  “You don’t know everything about me.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, like, you have been gone a few years, Torey.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  There was a few moments’ silence, while Sheila, her face turned away from me, watched out the window. Then she added, “All those years in the migrant camp and not learn to speak Spanish? Shit, I would never have had anybody to talk to.”