The Tiger's Child

by Torey Hayden

  “I don’t have to go home right away,” she said, “It’s just an empty house anyway.”

  “I’m always glad for company,” I said, as I unwrapped my sandwiches.

  We spent a moment with our food.

  “What do you usually do in the afternoons when you get home?” I asked.

  Sheila shrugged. “Depends.”

  “Do you get together with friends?”

  She hesitated over her food, then shrugged again. “Not usually.”

  “I don’t hear you mention friends very often,” I said.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t have any, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said a bit testily. “Just I don’t do much with them, that’s all.” She took a bite of her hamburger. “It’s a dorky school I go to. There’s not really anyone there I’d want to be friends with, if you want the truth.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Like I said, depends. I always got the housework, you know. My dad sure wouldn’t do it. If it’s left to my dad, we’d live in a pigsty. And the shopping. And the cooking. Who do you think does our cooking?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s very lucky he’s got a daughter, you know. Somebody to do all this for him. He’d have been stuck, if I was a boy.”

  “How’s it work out? Does he give you the shopping money and you make the decisions about what the meals will be?”

  “I got to get it off him.” She finished her hamburger in two big bites. “I learned that, like, ages ago. I got to get the money off him within minutes or it’s not there to get.”

  I regarded her.

  “Mostly he gives it to me when I ask. He’s getting used to me doing it now, but if he doesn’t, I’m still pretty good at getting it. I tell him I’m going over to the Laundromat and I got to have the pants he’s wearing right away, so would he change? Then he takes his wallet out. Or sometimes I just wait till he’s asleep.”

  “I thought he was done with the alcohol and stuff. I thought all that was in the past.”

  She snorted derisively. “Don’t kid yourself.”

  “He’s still drinking?” I said in dismay. “I thought the baseball team …”

  “People don’t change. Didn’t you know that? Circumstances change, but people never do.”

  Now that Alejo had come out from his hideaway of his own volition, Jeff and I decided to take definitive measures to prevent him from returning there; so we arrived early the next morning and humped the extra tables and chairs down the hall to a room we were not using. This had the added advantage of leaving us with a much larger working space.

  When the taxi arrived, Alejo again showed reluctance to get out, but Sheila climbed in and sat with him a moment before finally coaxing him out with her. For the first time in three weeks he did not have to be dragged into the room, but instead walked in, holding Sheila’s hand.

  “Can I just take him and work with him on my own?” Sheila asked.

  “If you’d like. Do you have something planned?” I replied.

  She shrugged. “All that time I was with him on the floor I was thinking of different things. And I thought maybe he would find it easier than being in a big group.”

  They went to the far end of the room near a small, low bookcase and sat down on the floor. I saw Sheila tip out the canister of Lego bricks in the middle between them and then both bent forward to begin building.

  It was my day to take Joshua and Jessie, our two autistic children, and between them, they were a full load, so I did not get much of a chance to oversee what Sheila and Alejo were doing together. They remained absorbed in the Lego bricks all the way to snack time and the break.

  While they were outside, I took the opportunity to walk over and see what they had been building. It didn’t appear to be much. There were several rectangular forms, looking like half-started houses or the like, and a few long strings of bricks clicked together.

  “Should we let them continue?”

  Startled, I jumped at the unexpected voice and turned to see Jeff. He crossed over to where I was standing. Bending down, he picked up one of the rectangular structures. “I think they’ll go back to this after the break. Do you think we should leave them to it?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I was eavesdropping. It was quite an interesting conversation. They seemed to be building jails with the Lego and putting the little Lego people in it. From the sounds of it, Alejo was putting his mother in jail. He said, ‘She says No! No! No! You do that again and I will lock you in your room. I won’t talk to you for two days. You are a wicked boy to do that and you can’t watch TV.’ And Sheila says, ‘Lock her in the jail. This is the bad moms’ jail. Put her in there and we’ll give her punishment. What shall we do to her?’ And Alejo says, ‘Cut her throat. Make her bleed. Drop bombs on her till she’s dead.’ So that’s what they were doing, dropping hunks of Lego.” Jeff looked over. “It was a little difficult to tell who was leading whom.”

  “So it sounds,” I replied.

  “I think we should let them go on, if they want,” Jeff said. “He’s talking more than I’ve heard yet, but … I want to keep an ear tuned.”

  I felt unnerved by the content of the conversation. As much as I wanted to give Sheila a positive experience here with us, she was an untrained teenager and not a therapist; moreover, she still carried plenty of her own emotional baggage. Was she encouraging Alejo’s play in an effort to imitate Jeff’s and my therapeutic activities? Or was she fulfilling her own needs? Or both?

  We didn’t get a chance to find out. When Miriam and Sheila came back in with the children after break, Alejo quite happily joined the others at the painting table and Sheila retreated to the back to clean up the things from snack time and to polish off the remaining cookies.

  When the morning was over, Sheila came over to me as I was putting things away. “Let’s not go to lunch with them,” she said, as she handed me the materials to put up on the shelf.

  “You don’t feel like it?”

  “Let’s do what we did yesterday and eat in the park. I liked that. It’s so nice and sunny out and then we spend it sitting around in that dingy restaurant,” she replied.

  “The problem is,” I said, “I haven’t brought my lunch today, so I don’t have anything to eat. Moreover, I have an appointment back at the clinic at two, so if I don’t eat promptly, I won’t be able to take you down to Fenton Boulevard before I have to be back.”

  “I don’t care. I can take the bus from here.” She bent down and unlaced one boot. Lifting the boot up, she tipped it and out spilled a five-dollar bill. “If you don’t eat too much, I could buy you something from McDonald’s.”

  “All right. McDonald’s it is, but I’ll buy,” I said. “You can provide the delivery service and go get it when we’re done here.”

  We’d had a messy morning, using finger paints at the table, soft colored chalk on the blackboard and water in the sand tray. In addition, there was the usual debris. Jeff was at the back sink washing out paint pots, while Miriam was sorting through books and putting them back into the bookshelf.

  “Have you told them?” Sheila asked, coming over to where I was wiping down a table.

  “Told them what?” I asked.

  “Well, that we’re not going out to lunch with them,” she replied, a little exasperated.

  “No, but I will. Let’s just finish the cleaning up. We were really mucky in here today.”

  “We can clean up,” she said. “Why don’t you tell Jeff and Miriam they can go now. Then you and me can clean up.” When I didn’t respond immediately, Sheila continued. “This is the only problem with this work. You and I never get to spend any time alone. I thought we would more, but there’s always them around. Sometimes I just want to be with you.”

  I smiled. “Well, go tell them we’ll do the room on our own then.”

  I was hoping that Sheila’s request to be alone with me was an indication that she wanted to talk. The conversation Jeff
had reported earlier between her and Alejo still disconcerted me a little and I was anticipating that she might want to discuss it or at least discuss Alejo with me; but this didn’t seem to be the case. Once there were just the two of us, we continued to clean up the room.

  Taking a set of fresh erasers from the cupboard, Sheila erased all the colored drawings from the chalkboard, while I tacked up the finger paintings on the bulletin board. When I next looked over, she had a box of the colored chalk in her hand and was drawing on the board. I didn’t say anything, but Sheila quickly became aware that I was watching her.

  “The only other problem with this place is that I don’t get to play too,” she said and grinned sheepishly. “I keep wishing, like, I was one of them instead of one of you guys. God, it looks like so much fun, what these kids get to do. Like a dream school.”

  I grinned back.

  “Can I make a picture with these?” she asked hesitantly, holding up the box of chalks. “Like, maybe it could be decorative? For when they come in tomorrow? It’d look better than just a blank blackboard, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

  Sheila threw herself wholeheartedly into making an enormous picture that took up a whole section of the chalkboard in the classroom. This intensity of concentration surprised me; she worked as if it had been bursting to get out of her all along. As I finished my work and the time drew near to go for lunch, I was reluctant to pull her away, as she was so deeply involved in what she was doing.

  “Shall I go for the hamburgers?” I asked.

  “Would you?” she replied in surprise. “God, like, great.”

  When I returned about twenty minutes later, Sheila was putting the finishing touches on the blackboard drawing. It was an intriguing picture: a desert of gold sand stretching the full length of the board with hardly anything above it. There was one lone saguaro-type cactus and a couple of branched, leafless bushes. Below the level of the sand, however, were an incredible number of little burrows filled with snakes, mice, scorpions, rabbits and beetles. And at the very far end was a female backpacker in hiking boots and shorts with a red scarf on her head.

  “Hey, that’s good. I didn’t know you were such an artist,” I said.

  “There’s lots you don’t know about me, Torey.”

  “It’s really good. You have the woman’s expression very realistic. But I especially like all these things down under the sand. Look at the rabbit burrows. A regular warren, with all those individual rooms for the rabbits to go in. And I could never draw a scorpion just out of my imagination.”

  Sheila grinned. “I like doing things that surprise you.”

  I regarded the picture. “She looks lonely, though. This lone hiker with everything hiding from her.”

  “Now, don’t go into your psychologist mode. It’s just a picture.”

  “So,” I said, “you tell me about it then.”

  “It’s just a picture. She’s walking in the desert. It’s the California desert. I’ve seen pictures of it, of bushes like those.”

  California, where Sheila’s mother had fled, I was thinking, but I didn’t say that. “It still looks lonely from the hiker’s perspective.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s a lot of loneliness in deserts. You kind of feel like there’s this big stretch of emptiness ahead of you,” she replied.

  “And everything that’s alive is hiding from you?” I ventured.

  “Well, yeah, that, or …” She turned and looked at me, a knowing smile crossing her lips. “Or everything is hiding just below the surface, waiting to be discovered. Touché? I caught you at it? I can interpret pictures too?”

  I shrugged good-naturedly.

  “You’re dying to get your hands on me, aren’t you? What you really want is for me to say that this person is me and this desert is my life, isn’t it?”

  “Only if it’s true.”

  “Oh, it’s true,” she said. “And you should know it.”

  Chapter 16

  Sheila’s fourteenth birthday came in early July, just before the program broke up for three days over the Fourth of July. I told Jeff, saying that as it was the only birthday to occur over the course of the eight-week program, it would be nice to have a little party. All the time I was teaching I had always made a special effort to have class celebrations, in part because they provided a pleasant change from routine, but mostly because the handicaps, the emotional dysfunction in the families and/or the financial circumstances often prevented these children from experiencing parties elsewhere. Many were the boys and girls in my classes who had never been invited to a single birthday party or been the center of one for themselves. So I baked us a huge chocolate cake and decorated it with Sheila’s name, while Miriam made up an assortment of small party foods. Jeff provided the paper hats and honkers.

  Sheila made no pretense at sophistication when she saw the streamers and balloons, the colorful Pink Panther paper plates and hats, and the cake. Absolutely delighted, she picked up each and every item and inspected it.

  “God, you did this for me? Shit,” she said, trying a hat on. “God, I’ve never had one of these. How does it look? Where’s a mirror? I’ve got to see.” She went over to the corner where the dressing-up clothes were and took up the small hand mirror. “I’ve always wondered what I’d look like with one of these hats on.”

  The children were equally delighted, squealing with enthusiasm when they spied the bright decorations and the array of party foods. Having lived through dozens of classroom parties before, I knew what a recipe for disaster they generally were. Everyone got a little too excited, the noise level was unbearable and nothing of measurable worth got done. However, there was magic in this sort of chaos, to my mind, and I always enjoyed the ferment.

  We started with party games and ended with a feast of goodies, the finale being the cake. All the children were amazed by the number of candles Sheila got and even more amazed that she had the ability to blow them all out. After cutting the cake and passing out a slice to everyone, Jeff said, “Well, now must be the time for presents.”

  I had gotten her a gift certificate from a local department store, so that she could have the leisure of picking what caught her fancy. Miriam, who was an accomplished craftsperson, had made an attractive woven belt. Then Jeff handed her a small package, prettily wrapped. It was obvious from its shape that it was a book. Taking the gift from him, Sheila paused to look at it. The wrapping, a shimmery gold, was quite unlike anything I’d seen before and I found it amazing to think that Jeff would take time with things like wrapping birthday presents.

  Carefully, Sheila prized the sticking tape off. Inside was a paperback copy of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Sheila lifted it up and regarded the cover. At a loss for words, she just stared at it.

  “Torey said you liked Caesar,” Jeff said. “This is set in the same time period.” He regarded Sheila’s face. “Have you read it?”

  Curling her lip in undisguised disbelief, she shook her head. “This is Shakespeare.”

  “Yes, well, don’t hold it against him. Forget who wrote it and just take it home and read it. There’s one of the best stories in the world between those two covers and you’re going to meet a soul mate.”

  Sheila looked up, astonished. “Me? Who?”

  “You read it and find out.”

  En route down to Fenton Boulevard after lunch, Sheila was full of ebullience.

  “Thanks for that, Torey. That was really nice of you and Miriam and Jeff to do all that for me today,” she said.

  “We thought it’d be a bit of good fun. I’m glad you liked it,” I replied.

  She smiled. “That’s what I always hated about having a summer birthday. All the other kids at school got some kind of fuss made, you know, like they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ or something, and I never got anything. And I always wanted it. Just once. You know, just once, so you could stand up and everybody’d think you were special.” She paused. “It’s funny how such a silly t
hing can matter so much when you’re little.”

  I nodded.

  “If you want the actual, honest-to-God truth, this is the first birthday party I’ve ever had.”

  I nodded again. I had suspected as much.

  “Once, when I was in this one foster home … I was eight, I think, and turning nine … they said they were going to let me have a party and she took me out to look at paper plates and junk, but …” Turning her head, she gazed out the window. “I didn’t get it. I did something or another, I don’t remember what now, and she told me I wasn’t going to have anything for my birthday because of it. But, you know, I don’t think she was going to do anything anyway, ’cause she never bought the paper plates. I think she was just winding me up.”

  “That must have been disappointing,” I said.

  “Yeah, but then what’s new?”

  Silence.

  Sheila looked down at the presents in her lap. Pulling out the gift certificate I’d given her, she examined it, then put it back in its envelope. Then she felt the weave of Miriam’s belt. Finally, she began to page through the play Jeff had given her.

  “Why on earth do you suppose he gave me this?” she murmured. “It’s a weird gift.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Have you ever read it?”

  “Yes, long ago. I did a report on it at school once.” I paused, then giggled. “To be truthful, I didn’t read it. I was about your age and my sole goal in life in those days was to figure out how to short-circuit the work and still get the grades. I was a world-class skimmer. I don’t think I actually read a whole book cover to cover until I was about twenty-two.”

  “Torey!” she said, absolutely appalled.

  I turned and grinned.

  “God, and I thought you were so perfect,” Sheila said.

  A pause.

  “So, you don’t know what’s in it either?” she asked.

  “Well, not other than it’s about Antony and Cleopatra. You know who Cleopatra is, don’t you?”