Just Another Kid (17 page)

“But continuing to blame Ladbrooke isn’t very productive.”

“But a lot of Leslie’s problems
are
emotional. Right?”

“But what I’m saying is that continuing—”

“
Right?
”

“Well, yes, okay. A lot of Leslie’s problems are purely emotional. But what I am saying is that it’s pointless to waste precious time allocating blame for things that happened years ago when what we need to do is
solve
the problems.”

“But I’m right,” he said firmly. “You’ve said so yourself. You’re a professional in the field and you’ve agreed with me that Leslie’s problems are purely emotional. Ladbrooke’s destroyed Leslie.”

I sat back and shut my mouth. I was getting a far better idea of what Ladbrooke had to put up with in attempting to argue with Tom. As inarticulate as she was, I could imagine it must be hell.

Several seconds passed in absolute silence, and I let the silence collect around me, as I waited for some indication that he was easing off. At last he took a deep breath and relaxed back into the cushions of the couch.

“It’s a waste of everybody’s time to dig up the past and pick through it like a pile of old bones,” I said. “Whatever’s caused Leslie’s problems, she’s got them. We can’t roll the clock back and make her a baby again. And whatever’s caused Ladbrooke’s problems, she’s got hers too. The only crucial thing, the only thing that matters is that both of them manage to improve. Neither one seems to be living a decent life at the moment.”

“It’s because of Ladbrooke that Leslie has her problems,” Tom said. “Ladbrooke needs to see that it’s because she’s the way she is that all the rest of us are living in such hell. Ladbrooke is the most self-centered person I’ve ever come across. She thinks nobody has problems but her. And if you try to talk to her, if you try to help her, what does she do? Scream at you. Slam doors in your face. Drink herself puking sick.
You
try and do something with her. You try and tell her she needs to change.”

“This all seems a bit heavy on Ladbrooke.”

“But it’s true. If any of the rest of us is going to get better, Ladbrooke has to change. I can hardly make my kids treat her better if she’s going to go around acting like a boozed-up harpy all the time. I can hardly improve our relationship if she’s out fucking every pair of trousers in town.”

I sighed.

“It’s true. Right? How can we change if she doesn’t? Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, but—”

“But don’t you agree? We can’t change unless Ladbrooke does.”

I wasn’t going to get into this again, so I said nothing. He waited a long time, watching my face intently. I could tell I was irritating him by not answering.

“What kind of qualifications do you have?” he asked suddenly. “Are you a doctor of some kind? Are you a certified psychologist? Here you are, making psychological assessments of people, interfering in people’s lives, like it’s your born right. This seems a pretty far stretch from teaching to me. I mean, you are a teacher, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a teacher.”

“Aren’t you overstepping yourself a bit here?”

I shrugged. “Well, for what it’s worth, I am certified. I am legally qualified. But that’s not the reason I’m sitting here. I’m here because I’m the one who’s been conned into all of this. Your wife picked me, not the other way around. It’s my life she’s decided to share for eight hours a day.”

Silence came again. He rose to renew his drink. Then coming back, he leaned over and peered into my coffee cup. Without asking, he took it from me and refilled it.

“Have you considered getting a divorce?” I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately. He’d returned to the couch, where he sat regarding his drink. The glass, filled with ice, had become wet with condensation. Reaching for the paint-stained rag he’d been wiping his hands with earlier, he began to carefully wipe the glass. Then finally, he shook his head.

“No. No, I’ve been through all that before. It doesn’t solve much. Besides, I wouldn’t do it because of Leslie. I’ve lost my other two kids. If you don’t live with them, you lose them. You lose all the little moments. I wouldn’t ever want that to happen with Leslie. Especially not Leslie.”

“I’d think a judge would be quite lenient toward you. If Ladbrooke’s been as incompetent as you say, it doesn’t seem as if she’d necessarily win custody.”

No response. He continued to regard his drink.

“A lot of that’s changed in the past few years. Fathers get custody quite frequently. Regardless of the mother’s competency.”

He shook his head. “No, Ladbrooke’s put up a hell of a fight. She wouldn’t let me do it.”

“Ladbrooke doesn’t seem a vindictive person to me.”

“No, she’s not, I suppose. But she loves Leslie. Whatever else I might say about her, I know she loves Leslie. She may be a lousy mother, but her heart works.”

“Yes, but fathers still do get custody.”

Again he shook his head. “No, you see, there’s more to it than that. Leslie isn’t my child.”

“Oh.”

Tom Considyne rose and went to turn on a small table lamp near me. The night had come completely, and darkness was pressing in around us. I sighed, wishing there was some way I could gracefully leave. I was tired and hungry and wanted to go home.

He looked tired too. I wondered idly if, now that Ladbrooke was gone, he was having to get up in the night with Leslie. But studying his features, I could tell it was a deeper tiredness. It had worn lines into his face.

Bastard that he was, I still found myself having a sort of grudging admiration for Tom Considyne. He had a lot to cope with. I knew I probably couldn’t live with Ladbrooke. She was indeed on her good behavior with me, and I knew it. We had our difficult moments, but I was very aware of her efforts to mind herself. But day in, day out with Lad, intense and troubled as she was, would be grueling. That Tom Considyne persisted and that he managed to want to keep the marriage going, impressed me.

“So,” he said after a lengthy silence, “what’s Ladbrooke doing when she’s in with you? Is it therapy?”

I shook my head. “No. She’s just helping with the children. I needed an aide and she volunteered. It’s all fairly straightforward.”

“Honestly, I
am
amazed,” he said and shook his head. “I cannot picture Ladbrooke reading little books about kitties and bunnies and wiping a lot of retarded kids’ snotty noses.”

I smiled slightly. “It’s not exactly like that.”

“Well, you know what I mean. I can’t picture it.”

Silence again. Tom Considyne got up for his fourth drink. Clink went the ice cubes. He was adding them in a very careful fashion, peering into the glass intently, as if it mattered that there be just so many.

“How did you and Ladbrooke meet?” I asked.

He shrugged. “In pretty much the usual way.” He came back to the couch and sat down. “I was out with friends. I was living in New York at the time, and we were cruising the bars, just to see what was going on. We were down in Greenwich Village. And there she was.”

Then he smiled and the smile grew inward. Pensive, he was no longer looking in my direction. “Here I was in this bar. And I looked over and there she was. And believe me, you couldn’t miss her. She was young—what—twenty-three? You know, fresh face and all that. The way girls are at that age. And God, the way she looked. She looked wild. Untamed. She looked like a lioness. With all that hair, that coloring. The way she moved. You ever watch Ladbrooke move? Her muscles, under her skin up here particularly,” he said, gesturing to his shoulder area. “She moves in a very feline way. I see Ladbrooke and, every time, that still comes to mind. Only now I think of her being a lioness trapped in human form, not the other way around, because being human certainly doesn’t come naturally to Ladbrooke.”

He shrugged, smiled slightly. “Anyway, there I was in that bar and I saw her and I remember telling my friend, the guy I was with, I remember saying, see that girl over there? She should be free somewhere. In the wild. She didn’t belong in a place like that, in a bar in New York City. I also remember telling him I was going to have her. If ever there was love at first sight, it was then, with Ladbrooke.”

He looked at me and laughed. “You’re thinking what an old fool, aren’t you? Old fools fall hardest, believe me.” He laughed again. “Anyway, I got up and went over and talked to her for a while. I should have been forewarned, because she was drunk then. But sweet drunk, you know, the way girls get. And I talked to her. Or, rather, I didn’t really. There was this other girl with her, and I talked to her most of the time. Like I said, I should have been forewarned. But this other girl kept saying what a whiz kid Ladbrooke was, how she was doing this Ph.D. in physics. I was bowled over. Brains as well as beauty, I mean, what a combination. And Ladbrooke was all embarrassed, you know, really cute about it. I just kept looking at her and thinking, I’ve
got
to have her. So I did.”

There was a pause, and he looked at me. He smiled faintly again and then looked away. His attention turned to the massive painting. He studied it a long time. “I appreciate physical beauty. More than most people do, I think. I must have it around me. I could never love a plain woman, no matter how wonderful she might be in other ways. I need total perfection.”

He continued to regard the painting.

“Ladbrooke’s beautiful. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. So I married her, simple as that. I wanted to be able to touch her, to smell her, to watch the way she moves. I wanted to wake up each morning, knowing she was mine, to have her forever to look at any time I chose.”

He grew quiet. Dropping his head, he looked down at his hands. “It probably doesn’t seem like much of a marriage to you. I know it doesn’t to a lot of people. I know we have more than our share of problems. But I love Ladbrooke. In spite of everything. I mean, if you had a Rembrandt, you wouldn’t want to sell it just because it clashed with your wallpaper.”

F
riday morning, and there was Lad at eight o’clock. She looked terrible. Under normal conditions, she had pale skin, but now it had gone virtually translucent, giving her an unhealthy bluish cast. There were dark circles under her eyes. She’d lost a noticeable amount of weight.

“Hi,” she said uncertainly from the corner of the shelves.

I was at the table and looked up. “Hi.”

“Do you want me back?”

“Of course I do. Come on in.” I pushed the chair across from me out with my foot. “I’ll show you what we’ve been doing.”

I didn’t ask any questions. For the moment, it seemed best just to get on with things as usual, which proved no small challenge as the day progressed because Ladbrooke was in even worse shape that she looked. Her stomach was terrible. She got sick immediately after lunch and then several times thereafter through the afternoon. And she remained slightly out-of-sync with all the activities, being ill prepared and feeling too unwell to improvise. Thank God for the children, who were charmingly open about their pleasure in having her back. For them, she kept going.

Both of us, however, were relieved when the end of the school day came. It had been hard work, keeping a cheerful face on things, and toward the end, she was out of the room being sick more often than she was in.

I took the children down to meet their rides. When I came back up, I found Ladbrooke settled at the table with a glass of water, a packet of mints and her notebook. She was paging through my plan book, reviewing what we’d been doing since the resumption of school after vacation.

“Do you want to go home early?” I asked.

“No.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” I got up and went over to find the children’s folders in order to correct their work. Bringing them back to the table, I sat down again, uncapped my felt-tipped pen and prepared to work. I glanced over at her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home?” I asked. “You’re looking miserable. If you want to go, Lad, I don’t mind.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to go home.”

I suddenly realized she was very near to tears. Not wanting to make her cry, I opened Shamie’s folder and searched through it for his current work. Then I settled down to read it through.

I corrected the papers in all the folders, put them back and returned the folders to the top of the filing cabinet. Then I took the plan book and began the next day’s plans. Throughout the entire time, Ladbrooke did no more than sit across from me. She ate the mints, one by one, keeping her arms folded on the table when she wasn’t taking a mint out of the packet. Beyond that, she just sat.

The clock edged around to four, to 4:15.

Finished with the plans, I got out construction paper and brought it back to the table to make an example of the next day’s art project.

“You must hate me,” she said at last. She had been silent so long that I had become thoroughly absorbed in my folding and cutting. Her voice startled me slightly.

I looked over. “No. Of course I don’t, Lad.”

“You don’t have to be nice to me, you know. You don’t have to pretend to like me.”

Frowning, I regarded her. “What kind of talk is this? I’d take it as an insult, kiddo, if I thought you really believed I’ve been pretending all this time. There’s no pretending involved. I like you. Plain and simple.”

She twiddled a piece of paper off the mint packet.

“You’re really feeling down, aren’t you?” I said.

She nodded slowly. Lower lip caught between her teeth, she kept her head bowed and nodded again.

“Why? Because of this … whatever it was, this binge?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just everything. I’m down about everything.”

“Don’t worry about what I think, if that’s what’s troubling you. Like I said back in November, if there’s slips, there’s slips. I’m not going to fall apart over it. Don’t you either. Let’s just pick up the pieces and try again.”

She nodded faintly.

“Is that what’s bothering you?”

She shrugged.

Silence once more. I looked down at my work. I stared at the silly-looking spider I was making. It stood, provocatively faceless, on seven little pleated legs.

“What caused the problem?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

I began to make the spider’s eighth leg, folding it carefully into accordion pleats.

She shrugged once more. “I was so happy. That last day. It went so well. I thought the feeling was going to last me the whole two weeks.”

“That day did go well. It was fun.”

She nodded. A small pause followed, but then she shook her head. “I hate Christmas.”

“Why’s that?” I asked without looking up.

One more shrug. “I don’t know.”

I lifted the spider body up and attempted to attach the eighth leg. Silence intruded, and it grew very, very long. Minutes passed. I turned the spider over to see if it would stand up. With seven legs, it did. With eight, it didn’t. The legs splayed and the body fell flat against the table. I picked it up, twiddled it, tried again. Once again, flat on the tabletop it went. Lifting it, I pinched in the legs, held it the other way around, and then, on impulse, made it dance along the table. Looking over to Ladbrooke to see if it got any sort of smile, I made the spider dance again. I grinned.

Ladbrooke was watching what I was doing intently, but she never reacted.

Leaving the spider lying on its back with its incompetent legs waving in the air, I started to make a second one.

“Can I tell you something?” Ladbrooke asked softly.

“Yes, of course.”

But nothing came. She took in a deep breath and exhaled it, making the hairs around her face flutter.

“I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to say. Now I’ve got you anticipating something and I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

She stared at the tabletop.

I snipped construction paper into long strips.

“My mom …” She stopped again. “My mom … my mom had … problems, I guess you’d say. She drank. My mom drank. She was an alcoholic.”

Another pause. Ladbrooke was sitting with her hands on either side of her forehead, fingers intertwined through her loose hair. I could see her fingertips with their badly bitten nails turning white as she pressed them against her head. She still stared at the tabletop.

“There was this one Christmas. I was seven. I remember it really well. I got into a fight with my brother on Christmas Eve. I have two brothers. Well, I had two brothers. One of them’s dead now. Anyway …” She fell silent again.

I had paused in what I was doing and was reluctant to restart lest I frighten her out of her story.

“Anyway my brother Bobby and me, we got into this stupid fight over which of us got to turn the Christmas tree lights on. It was Christmas Eve. Did I say that?” A sudden pause. She looked over without really raising her head. “I’m boring you, aren’t I? I’m telling you too much junk you don’t want to know. I’m terrible at telling about things.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m being boring.”

“You’re not, Ladbrooke.”

Silence.

She rooted into the packet of mints and took one out. She regarded it and then offered it over. I accepted it. She then took out another one for herself. Several seconds of silent mint sucking followed.

“Well, anyway, my mom and my stepfather and a lot of people were there that night. They’d been drinking, and everybody was pretty far gone. My mom got really volatile when she drank, so you had to be careful what you said, because she always took it the wrong way. And you had to be careful what you did. Anyway, my brother and I got to fighting. So my mom said, that’s it. If you’re going to fight, there’s no Christmas for you. And she sent us off to bed. I wasn’t too worried about it, but when we got up the next morning, there was nothing. I mean,
nothing
. The tree was taken down. Our presents were gone. Everything. There weren’t even any pine needles left on the floor. Even my little brother, who was two, even his presents were gone. And Bobby said, ‘Where’s Santa Claus?’ He was only five then and he still believed. He’d written his letter and everything that year. He couldn’t figure out what had happened. And my mother said, Santa doesn’t like you any more. He doesn’t like bad boys and girls, and you were bad last night, so he’s come and taken everything away with him, back to the North Pole. And my brother started crying. But me, I knew better. I knew she’d done it. And I said, ‘Where’s Kitson’s things?’ Kitson was my little brother. I said, ‘It’s not fair of Santa to take Kit’s things too. He wasn’t even awake when Bobby and I got in trouble.’ And I said, ‘Where’s the present I bought Bobby?’ Because I’d gone out and spent all the money I had on buying my brother one of those Matchbox cars, and I’d wrapped it myself in this gold and red paper and put it under the tree. I said Santa had no right to take away my present to Bobby. I said Santa hadn’t done it anyway. I said she’d done it. And she whalloped me right across the mouth. My mother very seldom hit us kids, but boy, when she did, you knew she’d done it. And then she took me out and made me sit on the back step. She sat me out there, like I was a dog.”

Ladbrooke paused. Bringing one hand down, she ran her fingers along the edge of the table. Back and forth, back and forth, with hypnotic slowness.

“The weird thing, the thing I remember most clearly about that Christmas wasn’t that we didn’t get toys or such. It was sitting out on the back step. From where I was sitting, I could see across our backyard to the houses on the other side of the alley. It was the middle of the day, so everyone had their curtains open, but it was wintertime and overcast, so they had their lights on, and I could see right into their houses. I could see Christmas trees and I could see moms going back and forth in the kitchens, making Christmas dinner. I could see the little kid who lived right in back of us come out in his backyard to play. He was maybe two or three, and he’d gotten one of those riding toys a kid sits on and pushes with his feet. It was a little car. And he got on it and rode back and forth for hours. It was a marvelous present for him. He loved it. So I watched him and the others until it got dark and my mom let me in again.”

Silence.

“I can see where that might put you off the idea of Christmas.”

Ladbrooke shrugged slightly. “It hasn’t really. That’s the weird part. If anything, it’s made me want Christmas more. I keep sitting out there year after year, still waiting to be let in. Every Christmas, I think, this one’s going to work out. This one’s going to be as nice as all those Christmases in other people’s houses. But I keep finding myself back outside on the step. It’s sort of an annual nightmare.”

I nodded.

Another long silence came then, and Ladbrooke fell deep in thought. Not wanting to shatter the moment, I sat very quietly, regarding my half-constructed spider. Lifting my eyes, I looked beyond her to the window. It had begun to snow.

“My mom really had a lot of trouble with drinking,” Ladbrooke said quietly. “She was always thinking these crazy things. I remember once when I was about five, she got really mad at me. I was in the bathroom by the sink—I remember that—but what exactly I was doing in there, I don’t recall. Anyway, she came in and she was really, really angry. She had this funny idea that I was trying to come on to my stepfather. It was a persistent thing with her. I didn’t even know what she was talking about. I mean, I did. She didn’t leave much to the imagination. But I didn’t know why she thought I was doing it.”

Ladbrooke paused. As I watched her, I could picture what she must have looked like as a little girl. I remembered seeing a photograph of Brooke Shields as a small child, and I could imagine Ladbrooke’s having the same kind of infantile sexuality about her, although that was hardly the type of thing to threaten an adult woman.

“Anyway, there I was in the bathroom, and she came in, absolutely furious with me. I had long hair at the time, and it was loose. Usually, I had it in two braids, but it wasn’t that day. And she grabbed me by my hair, grabbed me so hard she lifted me off the floor. She told me to look at myself in the mirror, to look at my kind of face. She said the Devil’d have me, the way I looked. And she took the scissors and cut my hair. Not just short, but right off. I had about half an inch of hair when she got done.”

I looked down at the table. “She did all this because she thought you were making sexual advances toward your stepfather?”

“I guess so. And because she was drunk.”

“Was there anything going on with your stepfather? Did he ever make advances toward you?”

“No. I was five, for God’s sake.”

“Well, it does happen. And it’s not the little one’s fault, no matter how much sexual provocation adults might read into it.”

“No. Not with my stepdad. He was really good to me. I wished he had lasted longer in the family. He was better to me than any of the others. Sometimes, he’d come in, after my mom had had one of her do’s, and he’d take me on his lap and just hold me. It was nice, like. He’d tell me not to mind my mother, that she was just that way and I’d have to forgive her. But everything he did was innocent.”