Just Another Kid (5 page)

Even though Carolyn had filled me in, Tom Considyne startled me by being so friendly and garrulous. Having met him only that once, I had little personal experience to judge him on, but I’d assumed automatically he’d share some of his wife’s distant reserve. Not so. Warm and expansive, he talked, listened, asked questions, gesticulated, joked and laughed heartily. He was also a bit of a flirt, using just enough sexual innuendo in his conversation to keep me slightly uncomfortable.

What surprised me more was the fact that he was uncommonly astute about the methods I was using with Leslie. Obviously, he had encountered them before and he’d paid attention. The methods he was less sure of, he studied in minute detail. It became apparent that he adored Leslie, in spite of her handicaps.

“She loves your class,” he said at one point. He had one of her papers in his hand and smiled tenderly at it. “I take that as the best indicator of your abilities. She’s always so anxious to get here in the mornings. Right out of bed first thing. She has no sense of time, you know. It’s charming in some ways. Up at 3:30, dressing to come to school. She was like that Saturday. I’d told her at bedtime that there’d be no school in the morning, but she forgot. And so there she was, 5:45, in our bedroom, taking the covers off my wife, putting Ladbrooke’s slippers onto her feet to make her get up. Leslie had her clothes on and everything. We had no choice but to take her into bed with us to get her back to sleep.”

This all sounded like considerably more life than I’d ever noticed in Leslie. I couldn’t imagine her dressing herself. I mentioned this to her father.

“She’s not good with strangers. Like her mother in that respect, I’m afraid. A bit shy.”

“It seems like rather more than shyness to me,” I said. “She’s virtually nonexistent some days.” I didn’t mention the fact that I hardly considered myself a stranger to Leslie.

He nodded. “Yes.” A second nod, more resigned. “Yes, she does that at home sometimes too. She’s rather unpredictable.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes she’s okay. Depends. If she’s interested in what you’re doing, if it’s food or something, she can be very responsive. Or if it’s something she knows you don’t want her involved in …” He grinned. “But …” The grin faded to be replaced by a wearier expression. “She’s hard work some days.”

“I can well imagine.”

“It’s just the way she is, though. I don’t fight it anymore. We used to, you know. Christ almighty, we went to every professional in the book for a while. We turned ourselves inside out for them, but nothing worked.” Then he shrugged. “No more. We’ve come to accept the situation. That’s been the only way to handle it. Leslie’s just different.”

“Does your wife accept it as well?”

He went silent, rubbing the stubble on his chin in a pensive manner. Then he nodded slowly. “I think so. My wife doesn’t have the kind of patience Leslie needs. Ladbrooke’s a very—what would you say?—a very mental person. And Leslie, well, you don’t really think about Leslie. You
feel
Leslie. Leslie
is
. You do Leslie by instinct. My wife has a hard time with that kind of thing. She finds Leslie difficult to cope with some days. I guess we both do, occasionally.” He smiled gently at me. “Saying that I can accept Leslie for what she is doesn’t mean that I always find her easy to live with.”

I nodded and relaxed back into my chair. “Are there any areas where Leslie’s particularly hard to cope with?”

He thought a moment. “I think we get into the most trouble at night. Leslie doesn’t seem to need much sleep. It’s incredible, really. She can go to bed at eleven and then be up at three and never go back again. Other times, she goes to bed easily enough but wakes up every hour or two, right through the night. You get up six or seven times with her. And this has been going on for years now. You can’t really believe what it’s like until you live with it. Nothing works. We even tried drugs at one point, but unless you knocked her right out twenty-four hours a day, she still woke up.”

“Does she stay in her bedroom when she wakes up?”

“No, not really. I must admit, I can’t come to terms with the thought of locking a child in somewhere. That appalls me every time someone suggests it. Leslie seems to need this chance to go through the house when there’re no other distractions. She needs the security of checking in all the drawers and cupboards and seeing everything is still there. I think that helps her define her life in some way.”

“What do you mean exactly, when you say ‘checking in all the drawers and cupboards’?”

“Well, when she gets up at night, she likes to open the cupboards and dressers and things. She goes in the kitchen and the bathroom mainly and takes things out. You know, just to check they’re all there.”

Astonished by the thought, I pursued it. “You mean Leslie gets up in the middle of the night and goes around taking everything out of the cupboards?”

“Oh, she’s very careful. She’s not destructive; she almost never breaks anything. She just takes things out and leaves them.”

I was trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a house with a child doing that sort of thing nightly. I had visions of my own apartment, of waking in the morning to find the contents of my cupboards and drawers removed.

Mr. Considyne seemed unaware of the curiosity value of such behavior. “About the only problem we have with her is over smearing things. She does love to rub things around, you know, like jam or ketchup or toothpaste. Anything spreadable. Sometimes I take her out to the studio and let her use my paints.” He paused. A smile crossed his lips, and he chuckled. “Boy, did she make a beaut of a mess a couple of weeks ago. She got up and no one heard her. The next morning we went downstairs to the kitchen and found she’d opened the freezer and taken every single item out and laid it on the floor. She’d taken the lids off the ice cream, and it was spread all over the tiles. God, you never saw anything like it.”

There was an oddly indulgent tone in his voice. I think I would have been a bit more appalled to lose the contents of my freezer in that manner.

“What does your wife think of all this?” I asked.

“Oh, it was her fault. She didn’t remember to lock the freezer.”

“No, I mean, in general. Doesn’t she mind that Leslie does this kind of thing?”

He shrugged. “Ladbrooke gets impatient with the mess sometimes. But like I said, Ladbrooke isn’t the world’s most patient person. She has no real understanding of kids. I try to explain to her that Leslie needs this. I think it’s expression for Leslie. Besides, Ladbrooke has household help. She doesn’t need to worry about the mess. I wouldn’t stick her with that.”

“I see.”

There was a small silence. Mr. Considyne looked down at his hands and then over in my direction without looking directly at me. He smiled sheepishly. “I’m rambling on, aren’t I? You’ll have to forgive me. I don’t get a chance to talk about Leslie very much. Most people don’t understand really, do they? Most people aren’t very interested.”

“That’s all right. I’m definitely interested. This gives me a much clearer picture.”

“God, I love that child,” he said. “It’s hard to explain to people. All they see are her defects. But if I had to admit it, I’d say I love her more than my two normal kids. She’s so pure. So untainted. She just feels and does. There’s no inhibition. No fucking intellect. Just purity. A completely natural person.” Then he paused and shook his head. “But that’s not to say she’s not a challenge some days.”

“I don’t think most people realize what living with a child like Leslie entails,” I said.

“No,” he replied in a very heartfelt way.

A small silence came. I could hear the wind pick up beyond the window. I’d opened it slightly after school to let in a little fresh air, and now the silence was filled with a greedy, sucking sound.

“Do you have help specifically for Leslie?”

“We have Consuela. She’s not really just for Leslie. She’s a cook and housekeeper, in fact, but she spends a lot of time with Leslie.”

I nodded.

“Consuela’s been with us forever. I don’t know what we’d do without her. She makes the difference between sanity and insanity around our place more often than I’d care to admit. I’m afraid Ladbrooke isn’t exactly what you’d call domesticated. We’d all fall apart without Consuela. And she has the patience of Job with Leslie, with all of us.”

“Does she sleep in Leslie’s room?”

“No. No, she has her own rooms at the other end of the house.”

“Who gets up with Leslie then, when she does all this waking?”

“We do. My wife and I.”

“And this is every single night?”

He nodded.

I scribbled a note of this on the upper edge of Leslie’s file.

“I suppose, if I’m honest, I have to admit Ladbrooke does most of the getting up. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Most nights I never hear her.”

Another small silence intruded. Mr. Considyne reached out to finger one of the papers on the table.

“When did your wife give up her work?” I asked.

“Quite a while back now. Three and a half years, maybe.”

“What made her decide to stop?”

“Her project ended. She’s a physicist, you know, and she was doing some experimental work with some other people at Princeton University. But they needed to meet quite often, and she found commuting too much, especially with Leslie to think about. And their funding kept giving them trouble. It always had. When the new administration came in in Washington, she knew they weren’t ever going to get any increase in their grant. It was going to have to end sooner or later; so, she just wound up her involvement in things.”

I studied his features as he spoke. All along I was thinking how different his version of his wife’s circumstances was from Carolyn’s. I wondered who was right. Or if either was.

“And she’s not worked since?”

“No. Leslie started getting very bad about that time. My wife has a full-time job with her alone.” Then, as if to amend the way that sounded, he added, “Anyhow, it wouldn’t be feasible for her to go back to work. Isn’t much call for someone in her profession in a place like this, is there?”

I shook my head.

“Was Leslie planned?” I asked.

He smiled in a very knowing way. “Oh no. Not at all, believe me.”

I nodded.

“That’s not to say she isn’t loved. Or wanted.”

“No, I know.”

He smiled, his features creasing into a tender expression. “You could say Leslie’s been one of life’s unexpected pleasures.”

Silence came, and this time it stayed. Neither of us spoke. I glanced at my watch. Mr. Considyne, appearing comfortably draped over the small chair, gave no indication of preparing to leave. I was wishing he would. If he went now, I’d have an excuse to say nothing more. But he just sat, unperturbed by the silence.

My stomach knotted. The tightness started around my navel and worked its way upward, tensing muscles all along my trunk. I thought absurdly of the image of being squeezed by a python.

“I’m finding it sort of hard to say what I’m going to have to say next,” I murmured.

He looked over. “What’s that?”

The python was up to my neck. “It’s regarding your wife.”

“You mean the fact that my wife’s an alcoholic?” he asked, his voice as casual as it had been all along. He remained in his relaxed pose, but his eyes had left my face and gone to gaze on the steel shelving and the posters I’d stuck up on them in an effort to disguise their presence. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“It’s no secret, love. Wish that it were, but it’s not, least of all to my wife and me.”

“Has anyone encouraged her to join AA or something like that? Has anyone talked to her seriously about her problem?”

A derisive smile came to his face. He laughed slightly. “You obviously don’t know my wife.”

“No, I don’t. That may be one of my problems.”

Still the sneer. He was looking back at me now, and I could feel the mood changing almost imperceptibly. The pleasant camaraderie we’d shared was slipping away.

“There are a lot of good programs around these days. I’m sure if she’s not interested in AA, there’s still something suitable available. There are plenty of alternatives. I’d be quite glad to find the information for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and there was a patronizing tone to his voice. “It’s sweet of you to be concerned, but I doubt Ladbrooke would be interested. She’s not a joiner. She’s really not into that kind of thing at all.”

He was still looking over at me. His eyes were very watery, giving him a look of permanent tearfulness, but the expression in them had hardened and they had become veiled in much the way I’d seen Shemona’s do. He turned away finally, scratched his head, then shrugged wearily.

“Look,” he said, his tone gentler, “it
is
sweet of you to be concerned. I’m sure you mean well. But we’re used to it. The way I see it, you’ve just got to accept certain things about people. I wish Ladbrooke didn’t drink. I wish, if she did, she wouldn’t feel obliged to make such a public ass out of herself in the process. I wish she could just pull herself together, once and for all. But it’s like with Leslie. You’ve got to accept people for what they are, not what you wish they’d be.”