After You (11 page)

20

W
e approach Headmistress Calthorp as a united front. Greg and I stand before her, shoulder to shoulder, hiding our thick hangovers. Though we may not feel like it, we are adults, and we will not let this woman turn us into schoolchildren with her icy condescension. Greg and I may be an awkward team in this coparenting thing, but we are a team nonetheless, and no one messes with our Sophie.

“I was surprised to find that you threatened to expel my daughter,” Greg says, and leans into her desk. He is wearing a black pin-striped suit—the white striping a bit thick for my American tastes—a matte gray tie over a crisp shirt, and his hair is combed to the side today, at once boyish and responsible father. I get a glimpse of what he must look like during daylight hours, in that gaping hole of time he spends in the heart of London, drafting multimillion-pound merger agreements. Commanding and authoritative. A man unbroken by loss and betrayal. He still wears his wedding ring, another badge that tips him over the edge from boy into serious man. He is someone to be reckoned with.

“How much have I donated in the past three years to this school? I seem to recall that my checks have been in the five figures. No, excuse me, make that six,” he says.

“Mr. Stafford, Ms. Lerner, please sit down. Would you like some water?” Headmistress Calthorp nods at her assistant to fetch us our drinks. She smiles up at Greg and plays with the pearls around her neck. The effect would be coquettish, if it wasn’t tempered by her cold eyes.

“I don’t have time to stay and chat,” Greg says, his tone brisk. “The student that Sophie was involved in an altercation with said some unforgivable things about my late wife. Not to mention made racist comments about another student. If anything, I believe I would be well within my rights to insist that
he
be expelled.”

“Now, no one is talking about expelling anyone.”

“Really?” I ask. “Maybe I was confused yesterday, then, when you suspended Sophie for two days and insisted on an apology. Oh, yeah, and then threatened to expel her.”

I feel hatred for Headmistress Calthorp—not anger, even, but pure hatred for her lack of imagination, her oversize ego, her desperate need to draw lines. I hate her with such intensity that for a moment I blame her for Lucy’s death. I know she was probably right here in this office when it happened, drawing up a detention or demerit list. But she, this woman stuck in a headband and kilt at the age of sixty, represents why rebellion exists in the first place. Makes sense that Lucy and a woman like this couldn’t coexist on the same planet. Rules never applied to Lucy.

“You see, Mr. Stafford”—Headmistress Calthorp ignores me, as if we are not in the same room. She looks only at Greg—“we have a zero-tolerance policy to violence here, and, as you probably understand, one has a school board to answer to. I was simply following protocol. But of course this can be worked out.”

“Yes, it will be worked out. Immediately.”

“I see,” she says, and grips her pearls a little tighter. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had this exact same conversation yesterday, with Stephen’s mom. Maybe she came in flashing checkbooks and threatening lawsuits, armed with Polaroids of Sophie’s teeth marks in Stephen’s spindly leg.

“I will not force my daughter to apologize, when she doesn’t even understand the circumstances. She was defending her mother—who I needn’t remind you passed away less than a month ago—and her best friend from profanity and racial slurs.”

“I’m not defending the other student’s actions, Mr. Stafford. Clearly, they were very wrong, but surely you can understand that we cannot allow our students to, well, to bite each other.”

“And surely you understand that this is a one-off occasion born out of a messy personal situation and an eight-year-old’s bereavement.”

“But an apology—”

“Enough,” Greg says, his voice harsh, suggesting that any negotiation up until this point has been a mock discussion for Headmistress Calthorp’s benefit, to preserve some modicum of her dignity. But now he’s fed up and can’t believe his dead wife’s adulterous affair has led him here—defending his innocent Sophie in this horrible woman’s office. He should be at work negotiating an indemnity provision, and Sophie should be in class right now memorizing an acronym for KingdomPhylumClassOrderFamilyGenusSpecies. And Lucy should be—he doesn’t know where she should be but certainly no more than a tube stop away. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Sophie will be back in school tomorrow. There will be no formal apologies. I have talked to my daughter, and I can assure you there will be no more incidents either. But if Stephen Devereaux goes as far as to breathe on Sophie, if he says anything to her even slightly resembling the verbal abuse she had to endure yesterday, God help me, there will be hell to pay.”

His eyes flash with the rage I have seen on and off over the last couple of weeks—a high tide of anger and then shallow shame, cyclic and jagged.

“I will immediately withdraw Sophie from school and personally ensure that every one of my colleagues does exactly the same thing with their children. No, I will go one step further. I will single-handedly destroy your endowment. I don’t often have to remind people that I am a very powerful man. Do I make myself clear?”

Greg takes a deep breath and uncurls his hands, so they are no longer fists. He catches my eye, a blink of embarrassment, but I nod at him in encouragement.

I like watching him kick some headmistress ass.

“Absolutely, Mr. Stafford.”

“I realize there are only a few weeks left in the school year. But I very much hope that next year Sophie and Stephen will not be placed in the same classroom. Putting aside the personal differences I have with the Devereaux family, I find it abhorrent that my daughter was exposed to any sort of racist rhetoric. I have not yet spoken to Inderpal’s parents, but I intend to, and I’m sure we can all agree he deserves a personal apology.”

“That’s quite right, Mr. Stafford.”

“Oh, and, Bernadette, I think we’ve known each other long enough.” The demon version of him has retreated, tucked back into the recesses of his gut, and he is once again a charming man-boy. He smiles and then winks. “Please call me Greg.”

21

D
r. Boyd’s office is located at the bottom of Portobello Road, near the end where most tourists don’t bother to venture. They tend to become enthralled with the first few blocks of market stalls, the clothing and fruit and antique chests, and turn away when the air fills with the rich fatty smells from shops twirling kebabs or kielbasa. On Saturdays, when Portobello Market is in full swing, the streets are filled with the pedestrians who flow from the Notting Hill Gate tube stop. During the week, though, without the traders loading and unloading and the heady tension of buying and selling, the place seems almost sleepy. Today, the multicolored stores that often get blocked by the stall umbrellas look almost Caribbean with their bright, alternating pastels. Shop doors are propped open to allow customers to wander in and out. Sometimes, after the school pickup, Sophie and I explore Portobello’s secondhand bookshops, flip through the dusty treasures in the children’s sections, and then stop for a soy hot chocolate at Gail’s bakery on the way home.

Today there is no time for lingering. I am on a mission to get this child to her first therapy session. Surprisingly, she hasn’t asked too many questions about why she is going to a “feelings doctor,” which is the way we’ve described Dr. Boyd to Sophie. As a safe place to go to discuss what’s going on in her head. I guess she’s too young to worry about the silly adult stigmas attached to seeking therapy.

“So I have to go back to school tomorrow?” Sophie asks as we walk up the three flights to the office, which is above a Moroccan restaurant that advertises its daily belly dancers and a five-pound tajine. There’s a coffee shop next door, where I intend to eat a chocolate croissant and read
Hello!
magazine while I wait.

For her big therapy day, Sophie is wearing jeans and her “favorite” T-shirt—long-sleeved, pink, and with a picture of the organs of the human body, all clearly labeled. It is supposed to correspond to the figure underneath, and Sophie proudly shows me where her liver resides. We have decided to Google the liver tonight, since I didn’t know what to tell her when she asked what the thing does. All I know is that I did my own organ significant damage last night with that scotch.

Funny how often she asks me questions to which I don’t know the answers. Who knew there was all this information that parents are supposed to know or, at the very least, pretend to? I feel like I should start reading the encyclopedia, too, just to keep pace.

“Yup. Back to the real world tomorrow. Why? You don’t want to go?” I ask.

“I like hanging out with you all day. You’re more fun than the other kids. All they do is talk about stupid stuff, like their pets. They’re so boring.”

“Come on, Soph, it’s good for you to play with the other kids.”

“I wish I were really old. Like you.”

“Thanks a lot. Guess what?”

“What?”

“I wish I were really young, like you. Eight is, like, the best age.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t remember being eight.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to remember being eight either.”

Dr. Boyd’s office is a kid’s mecca, but Sophie is not a normal kid. She is unswayed by the five-hundred-piece puzzle spread around the floor, the airplane-model kit waiting to be glued together with small hands, the crayons and white sheets of paper spread over short tables with long surfaces, and the pile of stuffed animals in the corner, which looks like it would be fun to dive into, headfirst. Even the bookshelf in the corner—an impressive children’s library—doesn’t move her.

“Hello, Sophie, I’m Dr. Boyd, but you can call me Simon.” He crouches down to eye level to shake her hand in an official job-interview way.

“Hello,” she says in a quiet voice, taking the measure of this Dr. Boyd, whose head is bald and whose hand is more than twice the size of hers. My guess is he’s at least six-six, tall enough that I bet he gets asked at least once a day how tall he is. He’s surprisingly graceful and spry despite all the footage, standing up to meet me after squatting to meet Sophie. The fold and unfold of his body, fluid. A six-six, two-hundred-twenty-pound yogi.

“And you must be Ellie. Nice to meet you,” he says, enveloping my hand with his and then using his other to pat the top, a gesture full of good humor and warmth. “Cool cast. Can I sign?”

“Sure,” I say, and he whisks a Sharpie from his pocket—he’s the kind of guy who walks around with a Sharpie, and probably a Swiss Army knife, too—and puts a SIMON, all in caps, near my elbow. There is something seductive about this man and his big, unringed hands and bonhomie, the creases on his forehead and the crown of his head, but I remind myself that I am married, that he is Sophie’s therapist, and a crush at this juncture—on anyone—would be wholly inappropriate.

He looks like he’s about forty-five and still reads comic books and wears holiday-themed boxer shorts—green four-leaf clovers for Saint Patrick’s Day, reindeer for Christmas.
Stop thinking about this man’s underwear, Ellie
.

“So your dad tells me you’re a big reader, Soph. So am I,” Simon says, casually walking us back toward the bookshelf, trying to engage her interest. Dropping Greg is a smart move; it reminds Sophie of Simon’s legitimacy. She is here only because her father wants her to be. “What are some of your favorites? I hear you like mysteries. Am I right?”

“Yes, but only the ones that aren’t easy to figure out,” she says. “And I kind of like science books too. I have that one at home.” She points to a book on the human body. “I’ve read that a bunch of times, but now I mostly use it for reference. Oh, Auntie Ellie, we should look up the liver before we forget.”

Simon pulls the book off the shelf, tosses it on the table, and pulls out a kid-sized red plastic chair for Sophie.

“Let’s see what we can learn about the liver, but only if we can look up the intestines afterward, because I think they’re really interesting. Did you know your small intestine is seven meters long? So if we stretched yours out, it would probably be about four times the length of this table,” he says.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll show you.” He starts flipping through the book, looking up
I
for
intestine
, and nods at me over her head. I take this as my cue to leave.

“I’ll be back in an hour, Soph. I’ll just be downstairs if you need me,” I say, but she doesn’t even look up. She’s too busy looking at pictures of innards.

When I come back to pick Sophie up, the entire white sheet on the table is filled with drawings. It looks like they each worked from one end to meet in the middle, the left half of the canvas doodled by an adult pretending to be a child—planets, and superheroes, and turkey traces of his hand; the right by a not particularly artistic child—the now usual walled gardens and flowers and stick figures that populate my crowded cast. I wonder what they talked about over crayons and, based on the crumbs dotting the table, cookies too. Did Simon just come out and say it:
So let’s have a chat about your mum being stabbed?
Or did he earn her trust first with play and sweets?

“Hello!” they both say in unison when I walk in, the two of them immediate teammates in Operation Doodle Therapy, relaxed and cheery, as close to playground demeanor as Sophie gets. I feel like I’m intruding and want to leave Sophie behind in his yellow-walled room, let her spend another hour with this man who somehow managed to transform her back into something closely resembling a child.

“Hey, guys,” I say, my expectations raised irrationally by the doodle-filled paper. Is it too much to ask that Simon throw his arms up in the air and pronounce Sophie cured, silly to hope that tonight she’ll sleep straight until morning, without the bad man visiting her dreams, without her drenching the sheets in sweat and urine?

I look at Simon—with his arms like a diorama of the Rockies, a tiny space between his two front teeth, a scar on his left ear, no doubt left behind from a ridiculous earring, and hairless, without even a wisp of an eyebrow—and I can see an entire integrated being, complicated and simple. This guy could save Sophie.

“So we’re on for next week,” he says, his thumb and forefinger poised like guns.

“Okay,” I say.

“Bye, Simon,” Sophie says, smiles at him, and gives her mother’s wave. One hand, one finger at a time. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she’s flirting.