The Tiger's Child

by Torey Hayden

  “Things can only bother you if they exist. And they can only exist if you let them.”

  Silence came then. I was drawn back abruptly across the years to a dark school closet where I had retreated with Sheila after she had gotten into serious mischief in another teacher’s room. That teacher had sent her to the principal, who gave her “swats,” the form of corporal punishment acceptable in my school at the time.

  Distressed to have lost control of the situation myself and have a child who I already knew was physically abused at home, then experienced swats at school, I had withdrawn with her into the only private place I could find to try and sort the matter out. Sheila, however, had seemed to take the whole experience in her stride. Indeed, she pointed out with some pride how she had not cried at all when the principal struck her.

  “Don’t you feel like it?” I had asked in amazement. She was six and I was twenty-four and I felt like it.

  “Ain’t nobody can hurt me that ways,” she’d replied matter-of-factly. “They don’t know I hurt if I don’t cry. So, they can’t hurt me.”

  Seven years later and I realized Sheila was still operating under a variant of that theory.

  We had only two full weeks of the summer program to run. Both Jeff and I were immensely pleased with how it had turned out. There had been hiccups, to be sure, and plenty of things we would do differently the next time around, but in general, it had worked well.

  One obvious advantage to providing a program of this nature for our clients was the opportunity to work with them in such a natural milieu. Some of the children, among them Kayleigh and Mikey, had responded well to the group situation and the supportive setting and were well on their way to putting their problems behind them.

  Equally useful were the diagnostic advantages of such a setting. A few of the children had been with the clinic for some time without any marked sign of progress. Being with them for three hours a day, five days a week, in such varied circumstances allowed Jeff and me to assess their problems much more accurately than had been possible in the confines of the clinic and its psychiatric hour.

  Tamara was a good example of such a child. She had first come to the clinic when she was six on referral from her family doctor. He had treated sores on her forearms, which refused to heal, despite all his efforts. His suspicions that Tamara was inflicting the injuries herself and then preventing the wounds from healing were soon confirmed.

  Initially, Tamara had seen one of the other psychiatrists at the clinic, but after eighteen months of therapy, she was referred to Jeff in hopes that she might progress faster with a male therapist. Jeff had been seeing her weekly in play therapy for a further ten months and felt he was still no nearer to helping Tamara control her destructive urges.

  The summer program showed us a complex, deeply unhappy little girl, who had difficulty relating to just about everyone, young and old alike. There probably was an element of depression in Tamara’s behavior, just as her copious files said, but then depression is a fairly natural reaction to sensing no one likes you. Unable to get the attention she needed through more traditional means, Tamara had discovered that injuries received a lot of notice. Over the course of the program, we saw her draw blood on several different occasions when things didn’t go her way. Jeff, armed with these insights, was now working with Tamara to help her improve her interpersonal skills and felt at last that they were moving forward in therapy.

  Alejo was another child who had been included for diagnostic purposes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t enjoying such a happy ending. Increasingly, Jeff and I were having to acknowledge that the majority of his problems stemmed less from emotional trauma than from low intelligence and, most likely, brain damage. There was no doubt that his traumatic early years had had an effect on him, and this showed itself in his abrupt, sometimes violent, responses to actions around him; however, many of his more trenchant behaviors were simply the result of a boy mentally incapable of coping with the usual demands of school and home. This had become particularly apparent in the ebb and flow of daily activities in the program and Jeff and I were making preparations to discuss the matter with his parents.

  I was dreading telling Sheila this, even more than Alejo’s parents. Of all the children, Alejo alone was special to her. There had been a natural affinity between them, right from the beginning, and we had encouraged it. Now I regretted having involved her so closely, because I knew Sheila would find the final verdict on Alejo unacceptable.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to tell Sheila. Instead, she overheard Jeff talking to me at the end of one session when we were cleaning up.

  “What do you mean, he’s got a low IQ? You mean he’s retarded?” Sheila asked, coming back to where we were standing.

  “Jeff did the official workup last week,” I replied.

  “Last week? When I was gone? You just waited till I was gone, didn’t you?” she retorted.

  Jeff turned away, unwilling to get drawn into an argument with her.

  “He’s not got a low IQ. He’s perfectly normal,” she said.

  Miriam, who was coming back to us with the boxes of crayons and marking pens, said, “He’s still a lovely boy.”

  “He’s not retarded. That’s not why he’s not talking. You think he’s not talking for that reason, don’t you? But it isn’t that. He talks to me.”

  “He talks to us too, Sheila,” I said. “But he doesn’t say much and why he doesn’t say much is because some of the areas of his brain aren’t working quite like they should. It’s called aphasia.”

  “I don’t care what it’s called,” she snapped back. “He hasn’t got it. He’s perfectly normal. He just doesn’t talk to you. He talks to me just fine. He talks in Spanish. So how do you expect him to tell you things when you don’t even speak the same language as him?”

  Jeff tapped my shoulder. “This isn’t worth getting into, Hayden,” he murmured quietly.

  “Yeah, sure, you’d say that,” Sheila said to him. “It’s not you they’re calling stupid.” Throwing down the rag she’d been wiping the tables with, she stomped off.

  “You can’t let that happen to Alejo,” Sheila said to me in the car afterward. The anger had gone from her voice, to be replaced by urgent concern.

  “No, it’s a very difficult situation.”

  “But you realize what they’re going to do, don’t you?” she said. “Send him back to Colombia.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. His parents have discussed a lot of different alternatives and that’s just one of them.”

  “You mustn’t let it happen.”

  There was silence between us then. I focused my attention on getting us out onto the freeway.

  “You don’t want it to happen, do you?” she inquired.

  “No, of course I don’t.”

  “So, Torey—”

  “It isn’t my choice, kiddo. He’s a lovely boy, but he is brain-damaged, of limited intelligence and emotionally disturbed. That’s a lot to cope with. I can encourage his parents to keep him and I certainly will do so. Both Jeff and I will, but we can’t force them.”

  “But what if they want to send him back to Colombia?” she cried. “What if they put him in the orphanage again?”

  “Sheila, I haven’t got much control over this situation. In fact, he isn’t even my client, or Jeff’s. So, technically, we have no control. I do desperately hope they don’t send him back. It would hurt him and I think it’s wrong, morally; but I can’t make them do anything they don’t want to do. Nor stop them from doing anything they do want to do. They are legally Alejo’s parents.”

  Sheila sputtered in angry frustration. “Look what’s happened to him! He’s been found living in some garbage can and brought here and people have been giving him nice toys and food and TV and everything. And now what are they going to do? Put him back in the garbage can. And you’re going to just sit there and let it happen?”

  “We’re not going to ‘just sit,’” I said. “We’re goin
g to try to keep that from happening. We’re going to try to help Alejo change his behavior. We’ll try to find an acceptable alternative for his parents.”

  “And what if you fail?” Sheila asked.

  “I’ll feel terribly sad.”

  “That’s it? You’ll feel sad?”

  “That’s all I can do,” I said.

  Folding her arms across her chest, she turned her head away from me. “You’re shitholes,” she muttered. “You and your kind. You really are fucking shitholes.”

  Chapter 21

  My personal life was in a state of flux that summer. I tended toward a pattern of exclusive, long-term relationships that often lasted several years, and was, at the time, “between men,” as one close girlfriend so succinctly put it. I had actually been “between” for several months by that point and getting fairly fed up with it.

  Synchronizing my life at work with my personal life had always been difficult for me. Although I’d mellowed from earlier years, when the intensity with which I’d thrown myself into classroom life left little room for other activities, I still loved my work profoundly. I still felt a thrill of anticipation on Sunday for the approaching Monday and I still found it nearly impossible to exclude the kids I was working with entirely from my thoughts. I didn’t dwell on them, but they were simply there, turning over in the back of my mind. This made me a challenging companion, I knew, and it took a secure, tolerant man to cope. At the time, such men seemed rather thin on the ground.

  To complicate matters, I preferred men from outside my profession. It kept me from talking shop twenty-four hours a day, as I was inclined to do with colleagues. And it kept rivalry at bay. I had a fiercely competitive streak, which served me well with the children, because it kept me determined to win even when the odds were not at all in my favor; however, it was lethal to personal relationships. I also enjoyed the slightly schizophrenic experience of maintaining separate lives because it allowed me to develop interests and talents that might otherwise seem mutually exclusive.

  The newest contender was Allan. The downtown area of the city had been subjected to redevelopment a few years earlier and many of the old buildings had been rescued from decay and now formed part of a rather elite shopping district. Allan owned a small bookstore tucked into a tiny side street in the midst of this redeveloped area.

  I had first met him when I was pursuing an obscure book of Greek plays. Intrigued, he had invited me into the back room to show me his classical collection, which was one of the better come-on lines I had heard. From there we went on to a series of rather nice dinners in restaurants quite unlike the greasy spoons I usually patronized.

  Allan was, in a word, civilized. He enjoyed the opera, discussed literary novels in the enthusiastically casual way of one who had not only read them, but actually enjoyed them, and he could pick amazingly good red wines. His apartment was in an old, restored town house not far from the city center, and it was immaculately furnished with Indian rugs and antique furniture. He even had a tablecloth on his table, which indicated real class to someone like me, who seldom had enough of the clutter off the table to find the surface.

  I knew right from the beginning that Allan and I were not soul mates, the way Chad and I had been. Allan was finicky, which got on my nerves. I was unpredictable or, as he termed it, “uneven,” and that got on his. But there was still much to be said for the relationship, not the least the fact that I had met no one else.

  Certainly Allan met the qualifications as far as being outside my profession went. Deep quests into the nether regions of human behavior might as well have been space probes into other galaxies from his point of view. Trying to talk with him about my kids was impossible. But this was all right. I had Jeff to talk to if I wanted to mull something over about work, and when I was outside it, I was perfectly happy discussing Greek poets or Australian Shiraz.

  That Friday night, Allan and I had a picnic planned. This was no rude affair with Allan. He had European-style picnics, complete with wicker picnic basket, red-checked cloth to lay on the ground and real plates and glassware. This called for something rather grander than Kentucky Fried Chicken and barbecue beans, so I had spent Thursday roasting eggplants and fiddling with pâtés, while Allan sought out French baguettes and the right wine.

  Friday night after work, I came home to put the final touches on the food. We were going to a local beauty spot on the lake that bordered the eastern side of the city. This required serious mosquito protection, so Allan was in the back room trying to get my insect lamp to work.

  A knock at the door. Thinking it was the paper boy coming to collect his money, I slipped the check between my teeth and wiped my greasy hands before pulling open the door.

  Sheila.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully.

  “Hi. What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I tried to look your address up in the phone book, but you aren’t listed yet, so I called for Directory Inquiries,” she replied. “Can I come in?”

  “They’re not supposed to give out addresses,” I replied.

  “No, I know it, but if you act like you already got the address, say, like, ‘Is that the Hayden on Maple Avenue?’ they always say, no, and give you the right address. Or at least part of it. Then you hang up, try again to get someone else and then use that part to get the rest. It always works.” She looked past me. “Can I come in?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but came on in anyway. Smiling, she looked around at the walls of my apartment. “Wow, this is neat. I like the way you’ve done this.” She flopped down in a chair. “I came over ’cause I thought maybe we could talk.”

  I didn’t want to make her feel unwelcome, but her visit was totally unexpected. It left me momentarily floundering.

  “You’re always trying to talk to me in the car when you take me down to Fenton Boulevard and I hate that,” Sheila said. “It’s too short. I know the ride’s going to end and I never can get my thoughts organized fast enough. I didn’t have anything to do tonight, so I thought I’d come over here and we can talk.”

  Was this manipulative? I wondered. Did she know that I would normally give over what I was doing to allow her to talk?

  Just then, Allan appeared from the back. “Torey? Oh …” he said, seeing Sheila.

  “Oh,” said Sheila in return.

  “I had plans tonight,” I said gently.

  “Oh. I see.” A long pause followed as she regarded Allan. “Is he the one you’re fucking now?” She said it casually, as if she expected it to be normal conversation.

  “Sheila, I think you’ll need to go,” I said. “I’m sorry you came all this way. I wish you’d let me know first.”

  Her expression hardened. I know that look, I thought. Flashing back across the years came the face of six-year-old Sheila, thwarted, angry, bent on revenge. So much about her had changed, but with that expression she became instantly recognizable.

  “You know, he isn’t as good-looking as Chad,” she said to me, her voice still pleasantly conversational. She glanced at Allan. “That was her last fuck. Well, probably not her last. I don’t know how many others have been in between.”

  “Sheila.” I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the door. “I’ll see you on Monday.” I got her through the door and shut it.

  “Maybe you will, maybe you won’t,” she muttered.

  As I turned from the door, I saw Allan’s face, pasty-white with shock. “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “Who was she?”

  “It’s too difficult to explain.”

  Sheila was back on Monday with no indication that anything had happened. She joined in with the children in a helpful manner and chatted pleasantly with Miriam at break time. I was aware of being on my guard with her, expecting I’m not quite sure what from her, but it never materialized. Sheila behaved as any other teenaged helper might be expected to.

  In the car down to Fenton Boulevard, I said nothing. If she wasn’t comfortable
with this as a time for talking, then I’d abide with that. There could be other times.

  Her arms folded across her chest, Sheila sat in silence for a mile or two. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught her glancing at me occasionally. I leaned forward and turned on the radio.

  Sheila gave a huge sigh. “Oh, God, now she’s sulking,” she muttered under her breath.

  “I’m not sulking,” I said. “The other night you said you didn’t want to talk during this ride, because it was so short.”

  “I didn’t mean not talk at all. You practically haven’t said a word since we got in the car.”

  I studied the cars on the freeway before me.

  Sheila was watching me. When I didn’t respond, she let her shoulders drop. She sighed. “Tor?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, I mean when this summer-school thing is over. What will I be? I mean, what am I now? I’m not your student, really, am I? I’m not a client. At least I don’t think I am. But you wouldn’t treat a friend like you treat me.”

  That caught my attention. I looked over at her. “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Torey. We’re not friends. I don’t know what you want to call it, but it isn’t friendship.” A pause. “And now this program is just about over. Are you going to leave me again?”

  “No. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be at the clinic.”

  She made a frustrated little clicking noise. “You are, like, so dense sometimes,” she muttered. “I don’t care where you’re working, Torey. The thing is, I’m not going to be there, am I? What’s going to happen to me?”

  “What do you want to happen to you?” I asked.

  Arms still folded across her chest, Sheila turned her head away from me and gazed out the window. Several moments passed in pensive silence. “We’re going to run out of time,” she whispered. “We’re one point eight miles from the bus station. Shit.”

  Turning my car into the parking lot of a large discount store, I pulled over to the far side and turned off the engine. “There are other buses. If you miss the usual one, you can get a later one.”