Jake was still fascinated mostly because she was so fascinated. “So what do you do about it?”
“I don’t know. I mean Mrs. McLaughlin talked about hooking sounds with letters, but we didn’t really get into that much.” She took the brochure back and scanned it as if absorbing it into her soul. “One-in-five. Man, if you could help even half of those…”
He loved seeing her like this. Lit up. Alive.
“And the best part is, these kids are really very smart according to Mrs. McLaughlin. I mean they have this great creative side that just gets buried because they are struggling so much to read. Imagine what you could unleash if you took away that barrier.”
“So are you going back?”
“Well, they’re only open awhile tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday. Your day off.”
“Yeah.” She leaned back, still looking at the brochure. “I just… I don’t know where this is all going, you know? It’s kind of scary. I mean, I don’t know if there is like a major or something to help with these kids, or if you can just show up and they’ll show you what to do.”
Dread traipsed through him. “Are you thinking about going to work there? In the Literacy Center?”
She didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know.” Her gaze came up to his and all he saw was the fear. “That’s like a really big leap. I mean I don’t know what it entails or if I could even do it.”
Jake had to take a long breath to get the words out. Before he did, he slid his hand across the table to cover hers lest she take his words flippantly. The touch jarred something loose in his soul, but he breathed that back. “I think, you need to jump.” He looked right at her, never flinching. “Do what your heart is telling you. Okay? I’ve seen you here, working, but when you talk about this, you get… I don’t know… alive with it or something. I mean coffee is a job. This… this could be your…”
“What? My calling?”
He thought for a minute and nodded. “Something like that. Don’t you think you should at least follow the path as far as it goes? Who knows, maybe it will only be for a while; maybe it won’t be for forever. But it’s not like you have to quit this right now to find out. Go tomorrow. Ask some more questions. Who knows? It might be right, and it might not be.”
“Liz!” Mia called from across the restaurant, and both of their attentions jerked that way.
Suddenly Liz was all-aflutter, adjusting and standing and moving away from him. “Coming!”
When she looked back at him, there was still fear in her eyes.
“Jump, Liz,” he said, wondering how he could be so calm, but he knew this was right for her. “It’s gonna be okay.”
A moment more and she smiled and then nodded. “Thanks.”
When she walked into the Literacy Center at ten in the morning on Saturday, Liz was still hanging onto his words and that look in his eyes— the one that said he would catch her if she walked off the cliff and made a complete fool of herself. It gave her courage, courage to take this step, courage to not turn and run away, courage to explore something she felt totally out of her depth with.
“Well, good morning,” Mrs. McLaughlin said, walking past the door just as Liz entered.
“Oh. Good morning.” It occurred to her that she had no good excuse for being here.
“Back to do some more observing?”
“Do… do you mind?”
“Not at all.” Mrs. McLaughlin started toward her office, papers in hand, without offering for Liz to come with her.
There was no indication of what to do, so Liz followed her, hoping that was right.
“Several of my tutors are here this morning.” In her office, Mrs. McLaughlin stacked the papers with others and came back around the desk. “I think you would be most interested in watching Anne. She’s just starting with Charlie. I think that will give you a feel for what we do.”
“And they won’t… mind?”
“We’ll ask.” With no pretense, Mrs. McLaughlin strode across the room to a large round table with only two people sitting there. On the table between them were little blocks in various colors. “Morning, Charlie.”
“Oh, good morning, Mrs. M,” the man who had to be close to her father’s age said.
“How’s it going?”
“Charlie’s doing great,” the woman Liz presumed to be Anne said. “We’ve gone through four lessons already.”
“Wow. Very good.” Mrs. McLaughlin turned to Liz. “This is Liz Savoy. She is interested in learning what we do here, and I was wondering if you would mind if she sat in on a session?” She looked at Charlie, and after a moment, he shrugged.
“Fine by me.”
“Very good.” Mrs. McLaughlin nodded to Liz to take a seat. “If you need anything, I’ll be around.”
“Th-thank you.” Uncertainty clung to the motion as Liz pulled out a chair and sat down.
With very little hesitation, Anne went back to the lesson. “Okay, we’re going to continue with the nonsense words. Pull down the blocks for the nonsense word ‘nad.’”
“Nad,” Charlie repeated. Then, slowly, after some thought, Charlie pulled a blue block, a red block, and a yellow block down.
“Good.” Anne waved her hand, and Charlie slid the blocks back to the center. “Now ‘mot.’”
“Mot.” Again, he pulled three blocks down.
The kabuki dance was fascinating, but Liz didn’t really understand what they were doing. Over and over, Charlie pulled blocks with no letters down and then pushed them back. After several minutes, the ritual changed just slightly. Anne put three blocks in front of him and then said a word. “Gup.”
He repeated the word. “Gup.”
“Now I’m going to change one sound, and you tell me which sound I change. Gip.”
“Gip.” Charlie reached over and pulled the red block from the center and replaced it with a green one.
“Very good. Awesome!”
“So?” Mrs. McLaughlin asked an hour later when Liz went to find her. Charlie’s lesson had concluded, and although Liz really wanted to join another one, she didn’t think she’d been given the run of the place.
“It’s… wow.” Liz slid into the chair opposite the older woman. “I mean, it’s so hard to believe that a guy Charlie’s age can have so much trouble just pulling words apart like that. I thought the whole, seeing words as a unit thing was just some mumbo-jumbo, but watching it…”
“Charlie’s only been here two days, but he’s making remarkable progress. It won’t be long and he will be reading simple words and then longer words.”
“So how long does it take— to teach someone?”
“Depends on the student. Some pick it up very quickly. Others really struggle with the concept of decoding.”
“How do they make it through school?”
“Many of them don’t. If their dyslexia is not properly diagnosed, people can go for years or even for forever without realizing what’s wrong. Many of them absorb the belief that they are simply dumb or lazy. Teachers often don’t understand what’s going on, and the students don’t have the life experience to know it’s not just them. They can’t explain what’s going on for them in reading because they have no concept that anyone reads any differently than they do. They just think they are really bad at what everyone else can do so easily. When they realize that everyone else is doing it differently, sometimes it’s like someone lifted this huge weight off their shoulders.”
“That is so cool.” Liz leaned back, thinking. “You know, Mrs. McLaughlin, I was talking with a friend the other night, and well, I know it’s probably strange to have someone just walk in off the street…”
“And want to work here?”
Liz’s gaze jumped up to find the woman smiling. “Yeah. I think I might.”
Mrs. McLaughlin nodded. “Most of those who come to work here do so because they have someone in their life that they want to help, someone who has dyslexia. But we get our fair share like you as well. T
hose who cross the street from the education wing of the university to ours and choose to stay.”
That surprised Liz, and she shifted in her seat. “But aren’t they the same thing? Education and over here?”
A small laugh escaped from the older woman. “Liz, there are many things that frustrate me about life and the work I do. That is one of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let’s put it this way. On this side of the street is the education department.” She grabbed a piece of paper and drew two lines. On one side, she wrote Education. “On the other side is us.” On the other, she wrote Research into Dyslexia. “And this street in between might as well be a ten-foot wall.”
“Why?”
Mrs. McLaughlin sighed. “I don’t know really. In education, they teach you to teach in optimal conditions with students who learn best the way they teach. But the way they teach simply does not work for all students.”
“But they could learn.”
“Yes, and perhaps we could do a better job of teaching them. Unfortunately most of our resources are taken up trying to mitigate the issues of students who have been crushed on the rocks of the current standard educational practices.”
“Like Charlie.”
“And many, many others who come in every week.” Mrs. McLaughlin let out a long breath and leaned back, a position which struck Liz as interesting for a woman of her obvious stature and age. “I’ll be honest, I wish there was a way to bridge the gap, to cross that wall, to get them on a grand scale to see what we know, but so far, we’re left to put out brush fire after brush fire.”
Liz considered that, letting her thoughts travel the roads they were going without stopping them. “I was talking to my friend the other night, and I was saying I don’t even know what I would major in if I wanted to go into this field. I mean can I major in dyslexia?”
Mrs. McLaughlin laughed and then pulled forward. “Well, how about we take this a step at a time? Would you be interested in being a tutor for us?”
Panic surged in Liz. Suddenly this was happening very fast. “Oh, I don’t know. A tutor? I’ve only had a couple of reading classes.”
This laugh was hardier than the first. “That’s more than most of our tutors have, and you may find our methods contradict some of what you have learned.”
“Contradict?”
“Well, for example, you probably learned about whole language.”
“Yes. Immersion reading.”
Mrs. McLaughlin nodded. “That works fine for a student who picks up on decoding naturally. For our students it is a one-way ticket to a town called frustration.”
“So phonics then?”
The woman’s smile was sad and spoke of many hard-won lessons. “Later. But if you start with phonics as many do, our students again are lost. You have to go all the way back to phonemes and sounds for these students. Latching one sound to each letter that you say and then that you read.”
“Like Anne was doing with Charlie.”
“Precisely. As a student begins to understand that each sound is represented by a letter, they begin to learn to decode. But you have to remember that the pathways to do this in their brain have not been activated like a person who reads easily. So, not only do they have to learn to decode, they need much more practice at it to become proficient.”
Liz was beginning to grasp the smallest tip of this intriguing new world, and all she wanted was to learn more. However, little things like paying for college and how to shift to this line of study were weighing down her spirit. “Mrs. McLaughlin…”
“I’ll tell you what,” Mrs. McLaughlin said, understanding the unspoken question without it being asked. “We are open from eight to eight on Monday through Friday, and from ten until four on Saturday. Why don’t we just leave this open-ended for now? You come in when it works for you. We can talk at the end of the semester. That’s only a few weeks away. If you are still interested, we can make arrangements come January.”
“That would be awesome. I mean, great. That would be great.” Liz followed Mrs. McLaughlin to her feet, feeling like life was opening up before her. She put her hand across the desk. “Thank you so much.”
“I look forward to seeing you some next week.”
“Yes, Ma’am. You surely will. You surely will.”
Oh, why hadn’t she gotten his number or his address or something, some way to contact him? When Liz left the Literacy Center, she thought through every way she could come up with to let him know, but there was no answer to how to do that. Back at her apartment, she called her mom because she just had to tell someone.
“Hi, Mom. It’s Liz.”
“Lizzie. I’m sorry I didn’t get you called back last week. It’s been crazy around here. How is everything?”
“Fine, Mom. Good.” Liz curled onto the couch.
“Are you feeling better, Honey? You had your dad and I worried to tears.”
“I’m better, Mom. Much better actually.”
“Much better? Why? What’s going on?”
“Well.” Liz let out a long breath. “I think I’m going to change my major.”
“Your major?” Horror sounded in her mother’s voice. “Now? But you’re so close to graduating.”
“No, not like that. It’s kind of still education, I think.”
Her mother sighed. “I thought you liked education. You were going to get that degree and come back here…”
“Now I never said I was coming back, Mom. It was just the least worst option if nothing else panned out. But listen, I’ve been learning about dyslexia, and it’s great. I mean, I went today to the Literacy Center today, and…”
“Dyslexia? That flipping letters thing?”
Liz laughed. “It’s way more than that. I’m even thinking about doing some tutoring there.”
“At the dyslexia center?”
“The Literacy Center. It’s on campus, so it’s really convenient, and they’ll work around my classes...”
“What about the coffee shop?”
Strangely as against the coffee shop as her parents had been when they first heard about it, her mother now sounded like it was Liz’s life-long dream to work there. “I don’t know yet. There are a lot of things to work out.” She put her head back on the couch, wishing her mom could sound even a little excited, just as a knock sounded on the door. Perplexed, she looked over at it. Two-thirty on a Saturday? Who would that be?
Standing, she headed for it.
“Oh, Honey, I was going to tell you,” her mother said, shifting topics with no more effort than that, “we’re going to go to Uncle Joe’s for Thanksgiving. They invited us, and Daddy said yes without telling me.”
At the door, Liz stood on tip-toe and peeked through the little hole. Her heart surged on the sight as on the other side he reached up and knocked again.
“So we won’t be here. I didn’t know if you were planning to come anyway…”
“What? Oh, yeah. I was thinking about it.” But her mind was on everything other than Thanksgiving and her parents’ house. Liz swung the door opened and managed a smile at him.
He looked one second from saying something when he saw she was on the phone.
“So, you don’t mind then?” her mother asked.
Ducking back to the conversation, she fought to remember what they were talking about. “No, Mom. I don’t mind. That’s fine.” She turned back into the room and left him to close the door. “Have a safe trip.”
“Okay, we will. I hate it that you’ll be there all by yourself though.”
“Seriously, don’t worry about it.” Liz turned to find Jake taking his coat off and hanging it on the coat rack. Nice brown pull-over shirt over nice black jeans. Oh, she couldn’t watch this and carry on a logical conversation with her mother. Turning so she could focus on getting through the conversation, she put her hand to the back of her neck. “Listen, Mom. I’ve really got to go.”
He was walking into the living room, right
behind her, and her nerves scattered. The electricity of his presence made the air in the room vibrate.
“I’ll call you next week to check on you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m your mother. I worry.”
“Okay, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”
In ten more words the conversation ended, and Liz clicked off the phone and put her head back. “My mother.”
“That bad?” he asked with slight amusement haunting the edges of the question.
“No. Not really. She’s a mom, worried about her little girl and all of that.” Then she came back to reality, back to the fact that he was now somehow standing in the middle of her living room. “What are you doing here anyway? I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I didn’t either.” He put his hands out to the sides. “But I started walking and here I am. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind? Of course, I don’t mind.” And it was the truth. As weird as that was, life felt so right with him around. Then excitement smashed into her. “Oh! I didn’t tell you.”
Incredulousness crossed his face as it became clear he was concerned for her sanity. “No. I just got here, remember? What have you not told me?”
It was akin to jumping, and Liz was so excited about all of it, she just let herself do what she wanted without letting the rational side of her talk her out of it. She grabbed his hand, feeling how strong and right it felt in hers before dragging him to the couch where she plopped down.
“Wow. Okay. This must be really exciting.” He followed her down, and with her hand still in his, she let out a breath to gather her courage to tell him.
When she looked up, shy came over the excited. “I went today, to the Literacy Center, and it was amazing!” The exhilaration bubbled out of her, and she couldn’t stop it. “I watched one of the tutors with this guy, Charlie, and they were hooking sounds with letters, and he had just started, and then I talked with Mrs. McLaughlin, and she said I could maybe become a tutor in the Spring.”
More Than This: Contemporary Christian Romance Novel Page 15