by Torey Hayden
It was a police sergeant named Jorgensen. He said they were investigating allegations of child abuse involving Venus Fox and would like to interview me. They were sending two officers to the house.
I ate my odd little supper and washed it down with the rest of the glass of wine, which didn’t really go with sausage and beans, but what the heck. A rather shocky nervousness had come over me, the same sort one gets when coming unexpectedly across a traffic accident. I knew that if no one was telling me anything, it was done to avoid prejudicing my testimony. And this meant, I knew, that it was serious.
Two officers arrived shortly after seven-thirty in the evening. One was a tall, blond man named Millwall, who was about my age. The other was a female detective who looked to be in her late thirties. She was one of these slim, athletic-looking women, the type who run marathons for fun. Her name was Patterson, but she said I could call her Sam. “Short for Samantha,” she said in a friendly sort of way, which seemed out of character with their otherwise official demeanor.
I suggested we sit down in the living room, but Sam said she needed to record this interview and it would probably work better if they could put the cassette recorder on a table. Consequently, we ended up sitting around the kitchen table, still cluttered with the work I’d brought home, dirty dishes, and the open wine bottle. Embarrassed, I shunted everything off onto the counter.
“We have Venus Fox in the hospital at the moment,” Sam said. “She was taken in early this morning. Now, my understanding is that you had spoken to your principal only last week saying you suspected child abuse. Can you give me more details about what you said?”
“First,” I interjected, “can you tell me? Is she okay?”
“She came in unconscious.”
There is a real sensation behind that phrase “my blood turned to ice.” Mine did just then. A horrible cold, sinking feeling went right through me. “What happened? Can you tell me that?”
“It appears to be hypothermia, but the hospital is still giving us the details.”
Hypothermia? I was baffled.
“Anyway, Miss Hayden, I’d appreciate it if you could tell us more.”
“Torey. Call me Torey,” I said, because suddenly that seemed important to say to her. All sorts of ridiculously small things seemed important to me just then. I noticed the open bottle of wine I’d put over on the counter, for instance, and wondered if I should tell them I didn’t normally drink. Because I didn’t. But they wouldn’t know that.
Sam nodded in a sympathetic manner. “It’s difficult, isn’t it? I know dealing with things like this are shocking. But if you could …”
I thought a long moment. Bracing my head with my hands, I tried to bring back to mind all the details of the last weeks that had made me say that to Bob. I was dismayed how, in the circumstances, my mind went blank. All the things that had seemed so important, so suspicious, so oddly out of character for Venus now evaporated. All I could think of were the minor discrepancies. Or maybe they were all “minor discrepancies” that had just accumulated.
“It was more just a feeling than anything else,” I said. “I didn’t see any bruises or anything like that. No evidence of physical abuse. She isn’t very well cared for. And she tends to wear these long-sleeved shirt things and pants all the time, so it would have been hard to see. And Venus doesn’t talk much. This is one of the reasons she’s in my class. As I’m sure you’re aware, I teach children with behavioral disorders. In Venus’s case, she is in the class because she’s very unresponsive and virtually mute. It’s difficult to know what’s going on with her because she’s extremely withdrawn.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, I’ve been on this case for some time now. We’ve been liaising with Social Services over this family and we’re aware of the behavioral problems with Venus. And the lack of speech. Indeed, all this very difficult behavior. It’s made it almost impossible to monitor anything that is going on with her.”
“But she has been starting to respond,” I said. “Since about February. The major problem for me has been her poor attendance. She misses two or three days a week routinely.”
“And this has been all along?”
“Yes,” I said. “She was out of my class for about eight weeks in the autumn, when she was placed on homebound—where the teacher goes to the child’s home instead of the child coming to school, and that was a different teacher—but otherwise, yes, she’s had this attendance problem all along. We’ve reported it to Social Services. We’ve had the district truant officer on the case. In fact, I think someone has even reported this to you.”
Sam flipped back through the pages of her notebook. “We probably wouldn’t be notified about something like school attendance,” she replied.
“But I think you were,” I said. “I know we reported it.”
“Yes, but it would have stopped with your district truant officer, wouldn’t it?” Sam asked.
“But my principal reported it beyond the district. I know he talked to Social Services about it because it was so bad, and I know they said they talked to you. They said an officer went out.”
Sam was reading through notes taken earlier in her notebook. “Well, an officer’s been sent out to that home a good number of times. Over all sorts of things. But I don’t see anything noted in connection with the girl’s absences.”
“It should have been. We reported it.”
“Yes, well, anyway. So, you were saying about this suspicion that you mentioned to your principal?”
I tried to explain what had made me go to Bob on that last occasion. I told Sam and Officer Millwall how Venus had cried, and this had been unusual for her. I mentioned her peculiar clothing on the one occasion. I tried to explain how, even though she was not communicative, there was something about her behavior that led me to think she was in distress, that something was wrong, but I had to admit it was largely based on just a sense I had rather than concrete evidence.
Sam really hooked into this idea that it was a “sense.” She kept trying to pin me down on it. What specifically made me have this feeling this time? This sense that something was amiss with Venus?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Beyond what I’ve told you, beyond those two times when she cried and just acted funny, I don’t know. Just a gut feeling.”
“Intuition?” Officer Millwall interjected.
“Yes, I suppose you could call it intuition.”
“We’ve got to be as precise as possible. As I’m sure you can appreciate,” Sam replied, “intuition isn’t going to get the perpetrator caught.”
I nodded.
“I do know what you mean. I’m not trying to demean what you’re saying, but this is a tricky one,” Sam said. “We’ve got a kid who doesn’t talk, who has serious behavior problems, who now can’t tell us if she wanted to because she came in unconscious. So I’m not questioning whether you’ve got good intuition or not. I’m just saying if someone is responsible, I want to find out who and I want to make sure they never get the chance to do it again. So, as much precision as possible is very important.”
We didn’t talk much longer. There wasn’t a lot more I could say at that point. I kept anecdotal records on the students for my own use, but these were in a notebook at school. I wasn’t sure there was anything in there that would be helpful to the police, although I’d made quite a few notes on Venus and her behavior through the year. And Bob, of course, had all the evidence for her absences.
Sam and Officer Millwall rose, thanked me for my time and cooperation, and said that no doubt they’d be back in touch. I showed them to the door. We shook hands and they left.
I came away from that meeting shaken by the news of Venus’s hospitalization and vaguely disgruntled. Her absences had been reported to the police. At least that’s what I’d been led to believe. If not, who had been deceptive? Bob? Social Services? Or was it less deception than a depressingly common bureaucratic cock-up, where each party involved had passed the buck to the next party and n
o one ever bothered to check back and find out if things have been carried through? If the absences had been reported, then why did the person in charge of the case not know that?
Unable to get the events out of my mind, I phoned Bob.
We discussed the matter. He told me that from what he’d managed to piece together, Venus had been found unconscious at home and her mother had taken the girl to the hospital emergency room. Bob didn’t seem to know any more than I did what was wrong with her. He too had been told it was hypothermia, but he said he didn’t think hypothermia could keep you unconscious for a long period of time, not if you were warmed up again, which obviously you would be if you were in the hospital. I said I didn’t know. I wasn’t very well informed about the specifics of hypothermia beyond knowing that it happened when the body temperature dropped too low. We talked about hypothermia in general then, and Bob mentioned it was an odd sort of diagnosis for child abuse. I asked if there was any chance of going to see Venus in the hospital the next day. He didn’t know.
That night I couldn’t sleep.
I couldn’t get Venus out of my mind. Abused. When had it started? How long had it been going on? I played back incident after incident with her in class, probing all the corners of the events to see if I could apply new meaning to them, now that I had hindsight. All I could come up with was the knowledge we’d failed her. That much was clear. Me, as much as anyone. Could I have seen this coming? I lay awake in the darkness, seeking the answer to that.
News travels fast. In the teachers’ lounge the next day, all the talk was about Venus. Between her violent behavior on the playground and the fact that almost all the teachers at the school had had her siblings at one time or another, everyone felt the situation personally. The rumor machine geared up. One person heard they’d arrested Danny and Teri both and all the children had been taken into care. Another said, no, Wanda was still wandering around. Someone else said she’d heard Venus had stopped breathing and they’d had to resuscitate her and she was on a ventilator. Several people speculated about physical injuries. The fifth-grade teacher said he’d heard on the radio that there were twenty-two healed fractures. I said I didn’t think this could be Venus’s case. I was pretty sure there were reporting restrictions. The fifth-grade teacher said there wouldn’t be two cases happening at the same time. We weren’t in that violent a town.
The truth was, no one really knew. And none of us could find out. As the tension built up, the atmosphere in the teachers’ lounge was sparky to a point of irritability.
I desperately wanted to keep all this from the children. At some point or another they would need to know something had happened to Venus, but until we knew, there seemed little value in sharing it with them. Moreover, this was distressing news, so it would be important to handle it appropriately. I didn’t want them overhearing frightening gossip among the teachers or out on the playground, if at all possible.
In the end, it wasn’t possible. Little Mr. Big Ears came in the form of Billy. Who else?
We had just come in from afternoon recess when he stopped by my desk, where I was putting away the whistle I used when we were playing games.
“What are people talking about?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m hearing people talk. Like you guys. Like all the teachers. Like some of the big kids. What’s happened?”
Jesse had wandered up. “What’s happening about what?” he asked.
“What have you heard, Billy?” I asked him, because I thought this would give me a better handle on what to tell him.
Billy’s forehead wrinkled. “Did somebody get killed?”
“No,” I said.
“Was it Venus?” he asked, as if he had not heard my answer.
“No.”
“Somebody said Venus got killed. They said she got run over by a car and both her legs got cut off.”
“No,” I said. “You’re hearing gossip. That isn’t true at all.”
“That’s what Devon said,” he replied. “You know Devon? That kid who’s in Mr. Jamieson’s fifth grade? He’s a friend of Venus’s brother, Frenchie, and I thought that’s what he said. I thought that’s what I heard him say to this other kid when they were talking about it.”
“No, that’s not true at all.”
“Is Venus dead?” Jesse asked, his voice softening with awe.
“No, Jesse. Come here. Let’s sit down. We’ll talk about it.”
The conversation went right over the twins’ head. Very quickly it became apparent that they did not have the comprehension to understand what Jesse, Billy, and I were talking about. They were curious when I said something had happened to Venus and she was in the hospital, but within moments of my telling them that, their attention was distracted onto something else and they grew restless. So I gave them puzzles to work on while Billy, Jesse, and I explored the matter more deeply.
I explained to the boys that I didn’t know very much myself and that probably none of us did, including Venus’s brother’s friend, Devon.
“How come?” Jesse asked.
“Because no one has told us more,” I said gently.
“How come?” he asked.
“Because … they haven’t, that’s all. Because none of us knows Venus’s family personally and none of us works at the hospital and those are the usual ways of finding these things out.”
“Yeah, but Devon knows Frenchie and so he knows them personally,” Billy said.
“But what he’s said is wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Mr. Christianson and I have talked with the police and they told us she is in the hospital. So I know what Devon says is not true. But beyond that, I don’t know either,” I said. “We have to wait until the hospital can give out information, and at the moment they can’t.”
“How come?” Jesse asked.
“Because at the moment it’s private.”
“Why?” Jesse asked.
I smiled at him. “Because at the moment they don’t know what caused Venus’s injuries and so they’re looking into it and until they know more, they don’t want to say more.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Billy asked. “Is it the police? Because Devon said Venus’s brother said the police came to their house.”
“Yes, the police went to their house.”
“Why?” Jesse asked. “Did somebody break into her house?” His expression grew worried. “Did she get hurt by a burglar?”
“No, it wasn’t a burglar to my knowledge,” I said. “I don’t think they’re quite certain how Venus was hurt. And when someone gets hurt and people don’t know quite how it happened, the police usually come to help find out.”
“Somebody bad came to our house once,” Jesse said, and I could hear the fear in his voice. “They hit my grandma on the head and stole her money and she had to go to the hospital. Now my grandma has got bars on her windows downstairs, because that’s how they got in.”
“We got a gun,” Billy replied. “That’s how we keep safe. If a burglar came to our house, we’d shoot him dead. Your grandma ought to get a gun.”
“She says guns aren’t good for people to have unless they’re policemen or something. She says if we had a gun, more than likely we’d shoot one of us. That’s what happens mostly to people who got guns.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Billy said.
“My grandma says.”
Billy shrugged.
There was a pause.
Billy turned his head and looked over toward the window. A moment or two passed with his attention absorbed there. Jesse was twitching badly. His shoulders jerked up around his ears and his head twisted.
“I wonder what it would be like if someone in our class died,” Billy said, still not turning from the window. “It’d feel weird.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Jesse replied.
“Kids aren’t supposed to die,” Billy said.
A pause.
“I didn’t like her very well. She was stupid. First, she used to attack me all the time. Like, she just went psycho if you looked at her wrong,” Billy said. “Then she was just weird. She never talked. She just sat there and stared at me. But not liking someone isn’t the same as wanting them dead.”
“Kids get dead for all sorts of reasons,” Jesse added. “Lots of kids do die, you know. They get run over by cars. I knew this kid once who got hit by a car and he died. He was getting off the school bus. His brother was in my class when I was in kindergarten.”
“Wow,” Billy said, impressed.
Jesse gave a self-deprecating little shrug. “Well, I didn’t actually know him. But I knew his brother.”
“Wow. Weird.”
“And some kids get shot by guns. Like my grandma says,” Jesse said.
“And you can get drownded,” Billy added. “I heard about kids getting drownded.”
“Or you could get sick. Like cancer or something,” Jesse said.
“Or electrocuted. I heard once on the TV where some kid got electrocuted on the railroad line. ’Cause he was playing where he shouldn’t.”
“There’s lots of ways you can get dead,” Jesse said.
“Wow. Weird.”
Both boys were thoughtful for a long moment, and then Billy looked over at me. “What happens to you when you die?”
I smiled gently. “I wish I knew, Billy, but I don’t.”
“You should. You’re a teacher,” he replied. There wasn’t the note of teasing in his voice I’d expected. He looked at me earnestly.
“Sadly, just because I’m a teacher doesn’t mean I have the answers to everything. I don’t. No one does,” I replied.
“But you could look it up … ,” he said, his tone rising toward the end of the phrase hopefully. “Isn’t there someplace special where teachers can look stuff up?”
I smiled again. “No. Just the same places you use.”
“There should be. Should be, like, this giant answer book. That’s got all the answers in the world in it.” He grinned.
“We go to heaven,” Jesse said. “If you take Jesus for your savior.”
“But you got to be good too.”