Just Another Kid (9 page)

“It was just one of those things,” I said.

“I’m sure you must hate me.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t even know you.”

Her chin quivered.

“I must say, however, that I do think you need to get some help with your drinking. This kind of situation isn’t doing anybody any good.”

Bringing a hand up, she covered her eyes a moment, pressing against them in an effort to keep the tears back. “Some days I want to kill myself,” she said.

Unexpectedly, I found myself feeling intense compassion for the woman. Her distress was suddenly so powerful that it filled the air around us. I could have touched it with my fingers. My feelings were intensified, as I watched her struggle so desperately to keep the tears back. After all the humiliating things she had already done, this rather minor loss of control seemed to be the one troubling her most. In an odd way, that moved me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I don’t mean just here, now. In general. Is there something I can do to help?”

Again she shook her head.

Bringing her hands down, she snuffled back unfallen tears. She groped in her coat pocket for a tissue.

“I’m sure things must be hard for you,” I said quietly. “From all I’ve heard about living with Leslie, you’re under a lot of pressure. Coping must be very difficult in such circumstances.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Perhaps I could help you with Leslie,” I said. “If you want, I think I could probably make it a little easier for you.”

She shook her head.

“You don’t want that?”

“It’s not Leslie, it’s me. I just wish I could kill myself.”

Concerned, I regarded her.

“I can’t sleep. I lie in bed and think about how I’m going to do it. I make lists in my head.”

“Lists?”

She shrugged slightly. “Of the people to call. You know, the lawyers and such, the things you’ve got to arrange.”

I didn’t know quite what to say.

“I lie there and think about those things,” she said. Her voice was very soft, almost apologetic. “I’m scared to death of screwing it up. Tom’d never forgive me.”

“I see.”

“I think about it all. And then I go downstairs and I think, I’ll just have one drink to give me courage to do it. But one drink isn’t enough. I’m still too chicken.”

Her facial muscles tensed; the tears reappeared but still did not fall. “And then Tom comes downstairs and he looks at the clock. It’s maybe like 6:30 in the morning. And he says, ‘What a disgusting bitch you’ve turned out to be.’”

I
collected Leslie and drove her and her mother home. I was reluctant to let Dr. Taylor drive as I had no idea how much alcohol was still in her system, and I was even more reluctant to leave her to her own devices. The journey was fairly long and took place in virtual silence. The change in location from the classroom to the car had broken the last of our intimacy. I could feel her defenses being put back into place, and I became a stranger again.

At last, I pulled into the long drive and came to a stop in front of the Considynes’ house. It was a magnificent affair, sprawling in all directions, set in a literal forest of trees. But there was little sign of life. Dr. Taylor fumbled at the side of the car door, trying to find the handle to open it.

My mind had been racing during the trip over in an effort to come up with something to say. “Dr. Taylor?”

She did not answer, did not turn toward me, but she paused in her efforts to get out.

“Can I help you in some way?”

No response.

“I know this afternoon has been a pretty dreadful experience and I imagine you never want to see my face again, but I mean it. Is there something I can do?”

“Like what?”

I smiled apologetically. “I’m not sure. Could we perhaps just talk again?”

She nodded very slightly. The car door opened. “Thank you for everything,” she said, her voice barely audible. Then she got out. She opened the back door for Leslie, and I watched as they walked up the drive to the house.

Dr. Taylor didn’t take up my offer to talk. In fact, over the next few days she seemed to studiously avoid me. Tom Considyne brought and picked up Leslie, and I didn’t see Dr. Taylor at all for the rest of the week.

Initially, I was disconcerted. I didn’t know how seriously to take her talk of suicide, but I didn’t necessarily think it should be ignored. On the other hand, I was unsure what I, personally, could do. At the time, it had seemed most important simply to get her to return, because until she was willing to do that, any offer of help from anyone would go unheeded. But if she did return, I didn’t know precisely what I intended to do about her situation. I did make the effort to collect a few brochures on AA and other locally available programs for alcohol treatment, but beyond that, I hadn’t done anything.

However, as time passed, the sense of urgency in the situation diminished. The immediacy of that horrific afternoon in the classroom receded, and ordinary day-to-day life with the children began to take precedence again.

My expectations of Shamie, Shemona and Geraldine were different from what reality was proving to be. I’d never dealt directly with children who had been on intimate terms with serious political strife or guerrilla warfare. It all seemed such a horrendous thing to me that I’d assumed it would somehow permeate every fiber of their beings. I had expected them to exude the tensions of Northern Ireland like breath, so that we would never be free of it. Indeed, I suppose I was as naïve as all those who had spoken to me of the girls before their arrival, because I expected their sad saga to overwhelm the children themselves. In fact, it didn’t. They were, for the most part, very ordinary children, filled with very ordinary concerns. Certainly all three had suffered as a result of their previous circumstances, but they had suffered in the way all children suffer—in bewildered silence. Only their accents and their occasionally strange-sounding phrases reminded us of their foreign origins. Geraldine, alone, brought Belfast directly into conversations. She was undeniably homesick and couldn’t keep from comparing her life here with her life there, but they were commonplace comparisons, of foods or different ways of doing things. They were the kinds of comparisons any homesick child would make. Belfast could have been Buffalo.

As the weeks passed and I grew more familiar with the children as individuals, I found their behavior very, very similar to that of severely abused children. They had that same quiet wariness about them, that same faint air of lost innocence, but they accepted their lives as normal and never raged against what had been stolen from them. Only on brief, incidental occasions did I glimpse the gray, gaunt specter of the abuser.

Geraldine, I discovered, was quite unwilling to mix with the other children on the playground. She stayed completely clear of Carolyn’s kids, which I could understand to a degree, as their ages and handicaps made them fairly unsuited to an eight-year-old’s activities, but she also refused to play with Mariana or Dirkie. Indeed, she didn’t even play alone. Instead, she spent the entire time standing with me or with Carolyn, depending who was on duty, and because she did, so did Shemona. The only way to get the girls to join in was to join in myself.

Geraldine was making a general nuisance of herself one morning when we were out. She was swinging on my arms, hanging on my clothes, stepping on my shoes. Then she was in back of me, arms around my waist, face buried into my down jacket.

“Look over there,” I said. “Joyce has gotten a game going. Why don’t you take Shemona over and see if you can play too?”

“Don’t want to,” Geraldine breathed into my jacket.

“It looks like fun.”

“They’re all babies. I don’t want to play a baby game.”

“Mariana’s over there. It looks like they’re playing Duck, Duck, Goose. If you were there, Mariana would probably choose you.”

Geraldine hugged me tighter. “Shemona wouldn’t like it, would you, Shemona?”

Shemona, standing beside us, looked up but gave no response.

I reached an arm around to disengage Geraldine’s bear hug. “Would it help if I went over there too?”

“Don’t want to, Miss.”

“Why not?”

“Just don’t want to.”

Shemona sat down on the asphalt and began to play with the Velcro fastening on her shoe. Over and over, she undid it and did it up again with an irritating rip. Geraldine pushed her hands into her pockets and stood beside me.

“Are you afraid of the other children?” I asked quietly.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Geraldine replied, just as quietly.

Then silence. We watched the other children playing. Everyone was over there, including Shamie, and the game was growing exuberant.

“Do you know what they did to me once?” Geraldine said, her voice soft.

“What’s that?” I said, not knowing who or what she was talking about, but, noting the faraway tone of her voice, not wanting to ask.

“They put me in a dustbin.”

She drew nearer to me. I extended my arm to pull her in.

“I was up on the High Street. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Mammy didn’t let us go there by ourselves, but I had some money and I wanted to buy some sweeties at the newsagent’s. But when I saw their school uniforms, I knew I shouldn’t go in there, so I turned around and crossed the street and went down between the houses. But those boys saw me and they started to chase me.”

I looked down at her.

“I was running as hard as I could, but they were bigger than me, and they caught me. This one boy held me down and took my money. Then he and the others picked me up and put me in a dustbin. They sat on it and wouldn’t let me out.”

I pulled her close against me. “None of the children here would do a thing like that, Geraldine.”

She didn’t respond immediately, but Shemona rose to her feet and moved closer to us.

“I don’t know,” Geraldine said softly. “I’ve never gone to school with Prods before.”

On the following Monday, Tom Considyne again brought Leslie to school. Then, in the afternoon when I took the children down to their rides, there was Dr. Taylor’s familiar dark blue Mercedes. She got out of the car when Leslie and I approached, but she remained on the street side of it.

“Hello,” I said, and smiled politely. Bending down, I opened the rear door and helped Leslie in. I fastened her safety belt.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come in again last week,” Dr. Taylor said, as I straightened up and shut the car door.

“That’s all right.”

“I meant to.”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

There came a small moment’s hesitation. She had her eyes averted. Feeling uncomfortable in the situation, I stepped back and prepared to return to the building.

“’Bye, Leslie,” I said, leaning down to wave to her. “See you tomorrow.” I looked over at her mother. “Good-bye, Dr. Taylor.”

“No, wait,” she said.

Opening the car door, she retrieved something off the seat. “I’m no good at talking about things,” she said in a weary voice. “That’s why I didn’t come in. This is all I could think of.” And she slid a green-covered spiral notebook across the roof of the car toward me. I had to move quickly to keep it from sailing off onto the ground.

She said no more. Getting into the car, she shut the door, started the engine and drove away.

I flipped through the notebook. It was a diary.

Going back upstairs, I returned to the classroom and sat down at the table. The notebook was completely filled in, from one edge of the page to the other, with no margins, each page, front and back. Virtually every line was covered in small, tight, very precise handwriting. The diary spanned a period of several months during the previous year. From glancing at its last page, I assumed it must continue on in another notebook.

Consuela’s gone to her mother’s for the weekend. I make Leslie supper. She throws it on the floor because I forgot to put on her red bib first. While I am trying to scrape it up, Leslie has a b.m. and it gets all over the kitchen chair. Tom comes in and yells at me because I haven’t gotten her to the toilet. He says I should know by now when she is going to go. He gets angry because the creamed corn has gotten all over the new carpet and the cat is licking it up. I say, if you don’t like it, you can help. But he slams the door and goes to the studio. He doesn’t come in for supper, so I have to give Leslie her bath and put her to bed alone. She hates this and does not go to sleep until 12:30 a.m
.

“What’s that?”

Startled, I jumped and slammed the notebook shut. Carolyn was standing behind me. I’d been so engrossed, I hadn’t heard her come in.

Carolyn craned her neck, curiosity brightening her expression. “What’s that?”

“Just something someone gave me to read.”

Carolyn grinned wickedly. “Must be interesting.”

I grinned back. “It is.”

“Is it dirty?”

“Not so far.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Couldn’t say.”

She eyed me a moment to see if I’d give in and tell her, but when she realized it was unlikely, she shrugged. “Anyway, I came to find out if you wanted to go to that do over at Jefferson. It’s Madge’s thirty-umpteenth birthday, and the girls in the office got her a cake.”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve got a ton of work to do.”

“Goodness,” Carolyn replied. “That thing
must
be interesting.”

I reopened the notebook after Carolyn had gone.

The house reeks of urine. There is no way to keep up with all the wet clothes and carpets and furniture. I’m sure the man from the carpet cleaners thinks we’re a bunch of deviants out here, because he’s cleaned so much pee off our things. But Tom keeps insisting it’s wrong to put Leslie in diapers because, he says, she can’t pull the diapers down fast enough and it makes her frustrated. I tell him
Leslie’s constant messes frustrate me. I tell him he can clean the shit off things for a while. He tells me if I were more vigilant, I’d get her to the toilet when she needs it. He tells me if I’d been a good mother, we’d never have been in this spot to begin with
.

It’s Tom’s turn to take Kirsten and TJ. I don’t know how I am going to put up with Kirsten and TJ, as well as Leslie, for two whole weeks. Kirsten calls Leslie “Queero Baby” all evening. I go in the bathroom and find that Leslie has opened the childproof lock on the cupboard again. This from a kid who can’t master the tapes on disposable diapers. She has spread Kirsten’s moisturizer all over the mirror and then drawn through it with Kirsten’s eyeliner. Everything is in chaos. Kirsten is livid. She is going out with Sam-the-Bam this evening and now maintains Leslie has wrecked her life. I tell Kirsten she can use my makeup. She looks through it and then knocks the whole works on the floor. Oooh, it’s an accident, she says. I get angry and then Tom comes to see what’s going on and gets angry at me. He says I am as bad as the kids, that I am stupid for always letting Kirsten upset me. She is only fifteen, for God’s sake, and I am thirty-two and ought to know better. I start to cry. I don’t mean to, but the bathroom is such a mess and everything is everywhere and half of it is broken and Leslie is covered head to toe and will need her hair washed. And all I wanted was to go to bed early. Kirsten is smiling. I tell Tom he is doing just what Kirsten wants by taking sides against me. Tom says I am doing just what Kirsten wants by getting so upset. The way it seems, we all do just what Kirsten wants
.
When I finally go to bed, there is a little note folded in between the sheets. It has been written in eyeliner pencil and says, “Cry baby cry/Punch you in the eye/Tie you to the bedpost/Leave you there to die.”

I’ve got the pills. 271. That should be enough. I get a bottle of scotch and sit down with them. I divide them into groups of five. I think I can swallow five at a time. But then I stop and put the bottle back. I get to thinking about something I read once about how a lot of people vomit pills back up if they use alcohol, so I decide to use water. My stomach’s so shot anyway. Some days I throw up just brushing my teeth. Garson comes in. He jumps on the desk and walks over the pills. He wants to be petted and is very insistent. He rubs against my cheek and jumps back up when I put him down. His purr is very loud and urgent. He
must
be petted. I tell him what a nuisance he is and throw him on the floor. But he keeps getting back up. He keeps purring and trying to get cuddled. I start to cry. I think. What will happen to Garson? Tom’ll have him put to sleep if I am gone, and this makes me hate Garson. I hate him because I love him. It makes me cry harder. I end up getting the bottle of scotch back out. I feel like a real turd. And stupid Garson has knocked the fucking pills everywhere
.