Just Another Kid (30 page)

Several seconds’ silence followed before she glanced up at me briefly, an unreadable expression in her eyes. Then once again she looked down at the space between us.

“I’ve never touched another woman,” she said. Ladbrooke spoke with such quiet awe that it made her sound as if she’d just tried to rape me. She glanced back at my face and caught my surprise. This appeared to disconcert her, and she moved away from me.

“I’ve never liked women to touch me,” she said, her voice still quiet.

I regarded her.

“I’ve never liked women.”

I didn’t reply.

“I’ve never liked being a woman,” she said softly. “When I was pregnant with Leslie, I prayed she’d be a boy. I never wanted a girl. I think maybe if she’d been a boy I could have coped better. I think I might have known more what to do with her, if only she’d been a boy.”

I continued to watch her.

She turned away. Laying the streamer on the table, she walked around and to the window. Putting her hands deep into her pockets, she leaned forward and gazed out. A silence grew up between us. Taking out a chair at the table, I sat down. I pulled over the half-wound streamer and started doing it myself.

She was nervous as well. She shifted restlessly back and forth, from foot to foot. All the while she kept her back to me.

“Have I ever talked about my mom?” she asked at last.

“Not much.”

“She died a couple of years ago. When I was thirty-one.”

“Oh.”

“We were a small family—just my mom, my two brothers and me. She kept marrying and divorcing, so there were fathers occasionally, but not usually. They never lasted. Usually, there were just the four of us.”

I finished the streamer and taped the end. Then I surveyed the table, still cluttered with the aftermath of the birthday party. Rumpled napkins, dirty paper plates, empty cups were everywhere.

“And then she died. Cancer of the stomach. I remember my younger brother, Kitson, calling me and telling me. He’d been with her at the end. I can remember hanging up the phone afterward. I hung it up and thought to myself, well, that’s that. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel bad, really. I guess if anything, I felt relief, because at last all the hassles were over.”

She turned around and looked at me then. Hands still deep in the pockets of her jeans, she leaned back against the radiator and studied my face.

“I did feel bad, after it sank in, but mainly for myself, because suddenly I felt old. Mortal, you know? There was no generation above me any longer, no one standing between me and death. But as for my mother herself, I must confess, I felt absolutely nothing.”

Ladbrooke paused then, her expression growing introspective. She looked down in the direction of her shoes. “I suppose I must have loved her once, but I don’t remember when. By the time she’d died, I’d long since stopped. I hadn’t seen her in years. All we ever had in common was my father’s last name.”

Silence washed in around us. I was wondering what had brought up this powerful bit of memory, whether it had been such a minor thing as bumping against my arm, or if it was more directly connected with Ladbrooke’s uneasy feelings about Shemona and Leslie. Or both.

Once again she studied me in that very thorough, unabashed way she had. As always, I found myself having to look away, unable to maintain such long eye contact.

“You know, you’re actually the only other woman I’ve ever known. I’ve never had any women friends, not even any girlfriends when I was younger. We didn’t invite kids home, Bobby, Kit and me. You never knew what my mother was going to be up to, so it was just safer not to. Consequently, I never really had friends. I had my brothers, but that was about it.

“And you’re so different from my mom. It’s not at all like I expected it to be. It’s so different. I’ve never been close to a woman before.

“I was never close to my mother. My brothers were closer, but I never was. She never touched me. She never put her arms around me. She said women didn’t do that kind of thing with each other. She said it turned her stomach to think of kissing another woman on the lips. I can remember once trying to kiss her like that. I was maybe ten or something, and she was absolutely disgusted by it. She didn’t like to kiss me. She didn’t like having to touch me.”

Lad shifted feet. She shifted again, then boosted herself up to sit on the radiator. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, chin in hands. Her gaze scanned the room for several seconds, regarding the table, the shelving, the kids’ work on the bulletin board. The very soft, rhythmic thud of her jogging shoes swinging against the side of the radiator filled the silence.

“When I was younger, when I was in my early twenties, I used to think about it constantly. I had this professor in my senior year at college. I didn’t know her or anything; I never saw her outside class or her office, but I really liked her. She helped me a lot getting into graduate school, and I really liked her. And I remember wanting to touch her. It scared the hell out of me, because I thought I must be a lesbian or something. And I wanted her to touch me. You know, just touch me. You know, put her hands on me. And it scared me shitless.”

Ladbrooke paused. Lowering her hands, she regarded them. “I used to try and picture my mother taking care of me when I was a baby. You know, picking me up, holding me, playing with me. I mean, she must have done it. I was just a baby and there was no one else there. But I always wondered if she did it like I remember her doing with Kitson, if she held me like that. Or if it was different because I was a girl.”

She was sitting on her hands. “It was probably like me with Leslie. Tom is right, you know. About the way I treated Leslie. He isn’t exaggerating. I’ve been a terrible mother. Because, you see, I couldn’t hold her. I really couldn’t. And I couldn’t bear the thought of nursing her, of having her touch my breasts. I took care of her and stuff. Of course I did. I mean, you have no choice with a baby. But thank God for Tom, for what he did for her, because I just couldn’t make myself hold her. I couldn’t just pick her up to hold her. I had to put her down, to get her away from me, even if it made her cry.”

A
pril. The long Easter weekend occurred only a few days into the month. I had an old friend from my days in Minnesota coming for the three-day break, and I was anticipating his arrival enthusiastically. We’d been colleagues in Minneapolis. He’d worked as one of my research assistants on my elective-mutism project, and we’d shared almost three years together on the front line. It had been a good, wildly workaholic period in my life, when all I’d lived for were the kids and the research. Tim had been a major part of the fond memories I had of those years.

The school day had just ended when Tim arrived. It was Thursday afternoon before Good Friday, and after taking the children down to their rides, I’d gone into the teachers’ lounge to run off some material for the following week on the ditto machine. When I returned to the second floor, there was Tim, standing in the hallway outside the classroom. I whooped joyfully when I saw him, and he responded with a booming hello, his deep, masculine voice echoing loudly in the empty hall. Then he caught me up in a bear hug that lifted me right off the floor.

“You’re early,” I said, when he put me down.

“Yeah. The traffic was all right. I wanted to come up and see your room. Hoped to see your kids.”

“Sorry, they’re all gone. They get out at 3:30.” His eyebrows twitched with sly interest. “Who’s she?” He jerked his head toward the classroom door. “The Valkyrie.”

I grinned. “My aide.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “How do you get them? Where do you find people that look like that? You’re always going around with a horde of tall, blond women behind you.”

I laughed. When I’d worked in Minnesota, I’d had another research assistant, who, if anything, was taller and blonder than Lad. She, like Tim, had been with me several years. Cindy and I had been christened “the Amazons” by one of the more roguish male psychiatrists in the department, and the nickname had dogged us the rest of our time together.

“I hardly had a horde, Tim. You’re thinking of Cindy, aren’t you? She makes one. Lad makes two. That’s not what I’d call a horde.”

He grinned. “I only wish
I
had your knack. That’s horde enough for me.”

“She’s married, Tim. Forget it.”

Opening the classroom door, we went in. I introduced Tim to Ladbrooke, who was working at the table. They’d already met, because he’d come into the classroom while I was downstairs, and she’d aimed him in the direction of the teachers’ lounge, but he was quite happy for a formal introduction.

I sat down at the table to staple the dittoes together, as I needed to have them ready before I could leave. Tim meandered around the room, looking at the children’s work on display and asking about them. Lad, I noticed, didn’t go back to work. She’d been designing some math worksheets for Shamie and now just sat with the pencil and ditto master lying in front of her. Finally, she shuffled them all together.

“I think I’ll go now,” she said.

“Don’t feel like you have to leave, Ladbrooke,” I replied, surprised. “Tim’s just a friend.”

Ladbrooke rose from the chair. “No. I need to get home. I’ve got tons to do.”

I looked up at her. I hadn’t meant the day to end like this. Not having anticipated Tim’s arrival in the classroom, I’d left things between Lad and me until the end. I needed to talk to her to make arrangements for the long weekend. We were still getting together every Sunday, and this was going to be the first major disruption to that routine since the February binge. She’d stayed dry since then, so I wanted to make definite plans to get her through the three-day break. I’d had no intention of letting her get away without settling this matter.

She put her things away in the filing cabinet and went to get her jacket. Tim was aware something was going on; he glanced back and forth between us. Finally, I got up.

“If you’ll excuse us a minute,” I said to him, and went out into the hallway with Ladbrooke. I shut the door firmly behind us. “Look, what do you want to do about this weekend?” I asked her.

She had a reserved expression on her face. There was distance between us. I’d noticed that on other occasions when I’d had friends stop by the classroom. “I can make it okay this weekend,” she said.

“Let’s get together.”

“Sunday’s Leslie’s birthday. Tom’s mother’ll be down.”

“Well, Saturday then.”

She shook her head. “No, let’s just leave it. I want to try it on my own. I’ll be okay.”

“You’re not going to interrupt anything, Lad. We can go out if you don’t want to come over with Tim there.”

“It’s just three days, Torey. I can manage. Don’t make me feel like I can’t.”

Silence came between us, and we regarded one another for a long moment. Then Ladbrooke zipped her jacket and turned. “Anyway, I’ll see you.”

I reached out and caught hold of her arm. “If there’s any sort of problem at all, call me, Ladbrooke.” Her muscles tensed under my grip, but I didn’t let go. “I mean it. This is platonic between me and Tim. If you call me, you won’t be interrupting anything.”

She nodded but remained poised to go.

I kept my hold a moment longer, wanting to tell her not to do anything stupid, not to ruin all these weeks of hard work, but I held my tongue. It wouldn’t sound as if I had much faith in her, if I said that. So I let go and just said good-bye.

When I came back into the room, Tim looked over, his expression questioning. That’s always been his most striking characteristic: He never missed a thing.

I shrugged. “It’s a little different this time. She isn’t Cindy. She’s one of the kids.”

It was a great weekend. I hadn’t seen Tim in almost three years, but back together, it was almost as if we had never been apart. We spent the entire three days reminiscing like a couple of little old grannies, reconstructing and reliving the years we’d spent sharing a cramped, windowless office that had still borne the scars of its former life as a shock-treatment room.

Ladbrooke never rang. Except for talking about her situation with Tim during a conversation on Sunday afternoon, I hadn’t thought about her throughout the long weekend. And even when Tim and I had been discussing her, it had been in a detached, professional manner, the way one does when sharing case notes with a colleague. I hadn’t had time to think of Ladbrooke herself at all, until Monday morning, when it occurred to me as I was standing in front of the mirror and brushing my hair that I hadn’t heard from her. The thought was accompanied by a sinking feeling. I just knew I wasn’t going to see her when I got to school.

But I was wrong, because there she was, looking particularly well scrubbed with her long hair pulled back into a ponytail and her sleeves rolled up. From the extent to which she had her work spread around her at the table, she’d clearly been in for some time before my 7:30 arrival.

“You look busy,” I said, and took off my jacket to hang it on the hook.

“It’s just the stuff I hadn’t gotten around to on Thursday. I thought I’d better get in and do it.”

And then, between us, the unasked question. And it stayed unasked. We made small talk. We got the materials out. We prepared the room for the children. I went down for a cup of coffee, stopped by to say hi to the gang in the front office, had a moment’s chat with Frank. Ladbrooke ran some dittoes. But neither one of us volunteered any information on the weekend.

After school, Carolyn brought us some gerbils for the class. Hers, in her classroom, had a prodigious sex life, resulting in a phenomenal number of offspring, and she was unloading them on everybody. I’d been out of the room when she’d come up with them and returned to find Ladbrooke cooing into a box. Dismayed because Carolyn had not asked me if I wanted them, especially this close to the end of the school year, I huffed off to rummage round in one of the storage rooms to find some kind of cage. At last I located an absolutely filthy one. Running a sink full of soapy water, I attempted to clean it up. Ladbrooke sat at the table with the gerbils, lifting them out of the box, caressing them with her fingertips, pressing furry little heads against her cheek.

It took me about thirty-five minutes to deguck the stupid cage, by which point I had some choice words for Carolyn. The whole time I worked, Ladbrooke played with the gerbils.

“You wouldn’t want to take those creatures home with you?” I asked, the sarcasm not too disguised.

But that sort of wit was wasted on Ladbrooke. Nose to nose with one of the animals, she smiled at it. “No, Tom’d kill me. He doesn’t like little mousy things.”

I thunked the dripping cage down onto the table. “Well, here. Chuck some of that shredded newspaper in, because I’m as ready for them as I’m ever going to be. Are they both the same sex? Did Carolyn say? They’d better be.”

Ladbrooke rose up with the one she’d been playing with still in her hand. She picked up the cardboard box containing the other one with her free hand. Apparently sensing a return to captivity, the one she was holding made its break for freedom. Like a little furry pinball, it shot out of Ladbrooke’s hand and across the table. Before she could catch it, it had gone off the end of the table, down onto the floor and was away under the shelves of the library.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Ladbrooke!” I yelled.

Catching a frantic gerbil in a room with five rows of industrial shelving is no mean feat. Even with two of us, the gerbil persisted in outmaneuvering us. I’d been very annoyed initially. It was late in the day; cleaning the cage had been unpleasant work; and I hadn’t wanted the gerbils in the first place. Having to spend twenty minutes chasing one of the damned things was not my idea of a good time. However, as the two of us scrambled after it, the humor of the situation overcame me. It was like a scene out of the Keystone Kops, and I was soon in hysterics.

“I’ve got him cornered, Torey,” Lad finally said. She was down at the far end of the last row of shelving. “He’s back under here. Bring the cage.”

Grabbing the cage, I went down the aisle and knelt beside her. Prone, with her chin on the floor, Ladbrooke reached under the shelving unit.

“I’ve got him!” she cried triumphantly, grinning, as she pulled the gerbil from under the shelves. I held open the cage door, and in the animal went. With a gasp of exaggerated exhaustion, Ladbrooke flopped back against the wall. “Whew!”

I sat down, cross-legged, with the gerbil cage in my lap. We’d exerted ourselves in the chase; Ladbrooke’s forehead glistened with perspiration. My heartbeat was still fast. It had all been made worse because we were laughing so hard toward the end.

Ladbrooke was still smiling. She shook her head. “You’d never know we were grown women,” she said.

“We’d have caught it in half the time if we hadn’t been laughing like a couple of hyenas.”

“You started it,” she said.

“Me? Who let the cussed thing go?”

“Yeah, but you started laughing, you nitwit. If you hadn’t started, I wouldn’t have.”

I grinned.

There came between us a gentle silence. Putting the cage on the floor, I prepared to stand up.

“What am I going to do without you?” Lad asked. Her tone was affectionate.

I rose and lifted the cage. “Probably not bust a gut chasing gerbils. You know, I’m half mad at Carolyn. I never said I was going to take any of these. She knew better than to bring them up when I was in the room.”

There was silence. I held the cage high and peered in at the two animals, busily rearranging the shredded newspaper.

“I mean it, Torey,” Ladbrooke said, and the tone of her voice had changed. “How am I going to survive without you?”

I looked down at her.

“We’ve got nine weeks left. I was counting them over the weekend. There’s only nine weeks till the end of school.”

The shift in mood was so abrupt it was wrenching.

“How am I going to survive? How am I going to make it, when you’re gone? That’s only two months.”

Our physical positions accentuated her words. She’d remained sitting on the floor, her arms around her drawn-up legs. I was standing over her, my pale shadow cast across her face.

“Things’ll be different in two months,” I said.

She regarded me, unconvinced.

“Two months is a fair amount of time for some things, Lad. You’ll feel differently about it than you do now. Besides, I’m not about to leave you in the lurch. I wouldn’t; you know that.”

“I don’t want to go back to my life the way it was,” she said quietly. “It was okay then because it never had been different. But now I want it to be like this. I’m happy now. In a lot of ways, this has been the hardest year of my whole life, but it’s been the best too. I’m happy.”

“Good, I’m glad.”

She looked up again. “I don’t want to end up with these months being the only happy ones ever.”

“They won’t be.” I reached a hand down to her to encourage her to get up. “Come on, Lad.”

She remained sitting. “I don’t think you understand what it’s like.”

Putting the cage on the floor, I sat back down myself.

She didn’t continue.

“Was it a hard weekend?” I asked.

She bit her lower lip and did not look over at me. Slowly, she nodded.

“Did you drink?”