by Torey Hayden
There was such a mess that I never made it outside at all. I could hear Jeff’s voice filtering through the open window, as he supervised a game of Sharks and Mermaids, and it evoked far-off memories of my own childhood. The warm, dry summer heat, the light falling in across the floor, patterned by the cottonwood trees outside the window, the sound of children’s voices all combined to lend a moment’s transcendence to the mundane tasks I was doing.
A good half hour passed before the kids came back inside and we resumed normal activities. As everyone was getting settled, I surveyed the classroom. “Where’re Sheila and Alejo?”
“I was just going to ask you the same thing,” Jeff replied.
I looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I’d assumed they were in here helping you during the break. I thought maybe you’d sent them down to the janitor’s room to get something.”
“What? They weren’t outside with you?”
Jeff shook his head.
“Miriam?” I called. “Have you seen Sheila and Alejo? Weren’t they with you outside?”
Surprise crossed Miriam’s face. “I thought they were with you.”
The meaning of that expression of one’s blood running like ice came home to me just then, as a physical sensation of cold flowing down through my body suffused me.
“When did you last see her?” Jeff asked me.
“Ages ago. She took Alejo down to the toilets. I was in here all along and I just assumed …”
I tried to quell the sense of rising panic I felt, as I went out into the hallway and down to the rest rooms. Bursting into the girls’, I slammed open the doors to the stalls and looked around the corner where the trash bins were kept. Then I went next door to the boys’ and did the same. Nothing and no one.
Back in the classroom, Jeff and I huddled in the back by the sink, discussing what to do next, while Miriam attempted to keep the children occupied.
“What’s happened? Where could they have gone?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on. Sheila was fine when she came in this morning.”
“Is she a runner?” Jeff asked.
“No. I don’t think so,” I replied. “Well, I don’t know. She wasn’t when she was six.”
“That’s a long time ago,” he said acridly.
“But why would she go? She wasn’t unhappy, not that I could see. She was delightful this morning, in very good humor.”
“Yeah,” said Jeff blackly. “The way suicides are, once they’ve made their minds up.”
Silence then, as we regarded one another.
“But why’s she taken Alejo?” he asked. “There’s the dangerous question.”
The moment Jeff voiced it, I knew the answer. “She was worried about Alejo, about the possibility that his parents might send him back to South America.”
“Oh, God. So she’s done a bunk with him, you think?” Jeff asked.
A pause.
“Why didn’t you tell me this was a possibility, Hayden? We should have been alerted that she was capable of this.”
“I didn’t think it was a possibility, no more than I would think it was a possibility that you would take one of the kids and go,” I hissed back in an angry whisper.
“Well, you seem convinced enough of the reason now. You had no trouble coming up with that; so you must have known there was the possibility she might act on it.”
“I didn’t. Would I act on it? Would you act on it? We were both upset by the Banks-Smiths’ reaction the other night; why not us? Why should I have suspected Sheila?” I cried.
Jeff looked at me darkly.
For all the times I had found Jeff able to keep his humor in adversity, on this occasion he couldn’t. He was genuinely angry with me, acting as if I had kept great secrets from him about Sheila’s mental stability. Because I hadn’t, because this was coming as a big surprise to me too, I felt hurt and angry, as well. This did nothing to help our situation, because for the first fifteen minutes of the crisis, neither of us was thinking straight.
Jeff was right in saying that I was convinced that Sheila had run away with Alejo. While it had never occurred to me beforehand that Sheila might try such a thing, once it had happened, everything fell clearly into place for me. She was desperate, and desperate measures were called for. The first logical step was to search the school thoroughly; so once Jeff and I had gotten over the initial stages of accusing one another, we helped settle Miriam on her own with the kids and then divided up the school building between us.
I went methodically through every room, cupboard and storage area that we had a key for and some that we didn’t. My hope was that even if Sheila was serious about taking Alejo away, she would try hiding in the school until we were all gone, so I tried to leave no area unchecked. When nothing turned up, I rejoined Jeff and we went outside to scour the playground and the park area across the road. Nervously, I kept checking my watch. I dreaded the moment when the minibuses and taxi arrived to take the children home, because we would then have to acknowledge to the driver who transported Alejo that we had no Alejo to transport. Jeff had settled down, but he was still prickly. Consequently, I kept my feelings to myself.
Unfortunately, search as we did, there was no trace of them. Twelve-thirty came and Miriam brought the children out front. When we saw the taxi pull in to take Alejo home, we had to acknowledge defeat. I explained nothing to the driver, just said that Alejo wouldn’t be coming with him, which he accepted grumpily as an annoying last-minute change to his routine. Meanwhile, Jeff went inside to do the unwelcome task of phoning Dr. Rosenthal and Alejo’s parents.
Miriam, who had other commitments after lunch, went home, leaving Jeff and me alone, regarding one another.
“Oh, God,” Jeff muttered. “Why did it have to end like this? We were doing so well. This has been such a super experience. Why did it have to end like this?”
Dr. Rosenthal was next on the scene. When his gigantic frame appeared in the classroom door, the seriousness of the situation really came home to me. He had never visited our site. He’d followed the program closely, because Jeff and I had to submit weekly reports, and he had sat in on several parent conferences, but otherwise, this had been our project. Seeing him here now gave me a sudden sense of a stern parent come to sort out his children’s mischief. Jeff and I were so much younger than anyone else at the clinic, so much less experienced that, in contrast to the other psychiatrists’ suit-and-tie formality, we’d always seemed like kids. I’d gotten a bit of a kick out of it on other occasions, but now, seeing this tall man in his elegant dark suit and graying hair, all I could think of was what a stupid little twit I was.
He crossed the classroom to where Jeff and I were at the table and lowered himself into one of the small schoolroom chairs. “Did you know this girl was a risk?” he asked me.
Normally I’m quite cool under pressure, but just then I wasn’t. It was past lunchtime and I was hungry. I was worried and I was worn down by the guilty suspicion that this might all be my fault. Dr. Rosenthal’s question, although straightforwardly put, sounded all too much like those last ninety minutes of Jeff’s questioning. Consequently, I started to cry.
This unsettled Jeff, who squirmed and turned away, but with surprising gentleness, Dr. Rosenthal rose and came around to my side of the table. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come right.”
I’m glad he thought so.
Alejo’s father arrived at one-thirty. “What’s this? What’s going on? Who is this girl?” he asked. Like Jeff, his worry took the form of anger. He waved a fist threateningly at us. “Why weren’t you watching?”
Dr. Rosenthal relieved Jeff and me of the necessity of explaining. “I understand you’re contemplating returning Alejo to Colombia,” he said to Mr. Banks-Smith.
This comment caught him completely off guard. He looked blankly at Dr. Rosenthal.
“Yes?” Dr. Rosenthal persisted.
“Well …” Mr. Banks-Smith foundered a moment, glancing back and forth among the three of us. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“The girl who has gone off with Alejo, she’s formed a very close attachment to him. She was worried he might be returned to the orphanage.”
Mr. Banks-Smith dropped his eyes to the floor.
“I don’t think Alejo is in any danger,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “From my staff’s experience of her, she’s a sensible, streetwise girl. So what I think we need to do is respond to this in a calm, rational manner. It’s a very unfortunate thing to have happened, but I’m sure it will turn out all right.”
I could have kissed Dr. Rosenthal just then, so grateful was I for his supportive approach. For the first time since it had started, I began to feel perhaps things weren’t so bad.
There was one last thorough search of the school and its environs. Dr. Rosenthal contacted the school caretaker, who supplied keys to the areas of the school that we had not been able to get into; consequently, we were able to search every nook and cranny. Unfortunately, there was not a single clue as to their disappearance.
At four, we transferred back to the clinic. Dr. Banks-Smith met us there. Dr. Rosenthal had managed to dispel Mr. Banks-Smith’s anger so successfully that he had become a supportive member of the search team at the school. Now his wife joined in the conversation in the conference room, giving us helpful suggestions on Alejo’s anticipated behavior in this situation. Sheila’s father had been contacted at his work and we all awaited his arrival.
Dr. Rosenthal came over to me as we milled about in the clinic corridor with our coffee cups while waiting for Mr. Renstad. “Come in my office a moment, please,” he said.
In contrast to the bright lights and nervous bustle in the area around the conference room, Dr. Rosenthal’s unlit office was dim and silent. As director, he commanded the biggest office, a room of late-Victorian elegance with a mahogany fireplace and corniced ceilings. There was a thick carpet on the floor and wonderfully squishy leather chairs—womb chairs, Jeff called them, for their propensity to envelop the sitter in comforting softness—as well as the obligatory psychiatrist’s couch.
“Tell me more about this girl,” Dr. Rosenthal asked me. “What’s her background?”
“She’s a former student of mine,” I said. I’d already given a brief summary of Sheila’s relationship to me in the conference room, but now I went into detail. I told him of her deprived background and her history of abandonment and abuse.
Nodding, Dr. Rosenthal reached across his desk and turned on a cassette recorder that was sitting on the window ledge. Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 began. He cocked his head and listened to it. The somber first notes of the allegro sounded foreboding to me.
“It’s quite understandable, isn’t it?” Dr. Rosenthal said at last. “Here’s a child who was, herself, abandoned by her mother. She identifies with the boy, who was abandoned in Colombia. He’s been rescued, but now he’s about to be abandoned again.”
I nodded.
He looked over at me. “It says a great deal for her, really. She’s a good girl at heart.”
“I think … if I’m reading my experiences lately with Sheila right … that there may be even deeper identification. You see, Sheila and I … well, I’ve gotten mixed up in the abandonment issue. I think she sees me in the same role as Alejo’s parents, that I helped lift her out of her former life by bringing her into my classroom, accustoming her to a more stable environment, more reliable adult relationships, and then, when the school year ended …”
There was a deep silence. The music, which should have filled it, emphasized it.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “It’s hard for me to come to terms with the fact that what I thought of as such a good experience she’s interpreted as abandonment … She doesn’t even remember being abandoned by her mother, but she remembers my doing it. And now this.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Rosenthal and he said no more. Leaning back in his chair, he looked up at the patterned design on the ceiling. The music washed over us.
Sheila’s father was in the conference room when I came out of Dr. Rosenthal’s office. He had been called over from work and was wearing filthy jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. His metal-toed boots clicked against the legs of his chair and the conference table. The moment I saw him, I knew having him present was a mistake. His scruffy appearance was off-putting, but worse was his mouth. I’d tried to downplay the more lurid aspects of Sheila’s childhood, feeling that the things she had done when she was five or six were hardly to be held against her at fourteen. Without anchoring it to this early time, Mr. Renstad readily acknowledged that Sheila had been in trouble with the police. I challenged him and he admitted that, no, she hadn’t been in trouble since being in my class, almost a decade earlier, but then he added that she had caused serious problems in her last foster home, because she’d kept running away, and had eventually been sent to a secure children’s home. By the time he finished talking, the Banks-Smiths were wild-eyed and they insisted the police be called in.
At six forty-five, two police officers arrived. One was a big, burly fellow named Durante, the other a woman with short blond hair and a steel glint in her eye named Metherson. Still sitting around the conference table in the clinic were Dr. Rosenthal, Sheila’s father, the Banks-Smiths and Jeff and I, and once again, Jeff and I recounted our tale. I was numb by then, my emotions having run on high for too long, so I just related it as it had happened and did not try to give meaning to any particular aspect. Afterward, Officer Durante stayed in the conference room with the others, while Officer Metherson, Jeff and I went into our office to review Alejo’s file and discuss the summer program in more depth. We returned to the conference room to discover someone had ordered sandwiches from the deli on Nineteenth Street. Neither Jeff nor I had had lunch, so we fell upon them like dogs.
Time ground down, nearly to a halt. The police officers had come and then left, but we all remained, not knowing quite what else to do. In contrast to the hectic urgency of the afternoon and early evening, there was nothing left but to wait. And eat. Another order was sent out to the deli and someone popped across the street to the doughnut shop and brought in a dozen doughnuts. Dr. Rosenthal made fresh coffee and Jeff raided the pop machine. After not eating for the whole course of the working day, I easily overate while sitting there with nothing else to do. This only contributed to the murky, depressed sense of lethargy I felt.
On my way back from the rest room about 9 p.m., I met Mr. Renstad loitering around the front door of the clinic. He wanted to go home; I suspect he had wanted to go home from practically the moment he had arrived, but by now there was an urgency to his restlessness.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said wearily. “Don’t help none staying in this place. She’s not going to come here.”
I nodded.
“We just got to wait her out, that’s all. That’s all you can do with Sheila.”
“How often has this happened before?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Often enough.”
“Where does she go?”
He shrugged again. “She don’t tell me and I don’t ask. She’s got her mother in her. Does what she wants, when she wants, how she wants, and I just sit home hoping it don’t cause trouble.”
“She hasn’t been in trouble with the police recently, has she?” I asked, almost dreading his answer.
He shook his head. “No.”
There was a small silence between us. I glanced out through the double doors at the summer twilight. “Could you tell me a little about these occasions when Sheila was in foster care? It’s something she hasn’t talked much to me about. How many has she been in?”
Mr. Renstad puffed out his cheeks and expelled the breath. “Quite a few. I don’t know. Ten, maybe?”
“Ten?” I said in surprise. I had thought it’d been three or four. “On what occasions? When you were … away?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah.” He nodded. “Them times I was in Marysville. And I was down at the state hospital. Down twice, getting dried out. You know.” He gave an embarrassed smile.
“But it was ten times in, what? Six, seven years?”
“She just didn’t settle. She was okay the first time. She was, like, eight, maybe, when she went in the first foster home. And they seemed real good. They used to bring her down to see me. That’s when I was in Marysville and they used to bring her down every month for a while, then all of a sudden, it stopped. Turns out he was fucking her, the old man. Showing this real good face to me and then fucking my kid at night.”
I searched his face.
“She didn’t say nothing about it, but she ran away from there. Actually, she never has said, but the guy got done for fucking the next kid they put in with him, so I reckon that’s what he was doing to my kid too.”
Oh, God, I was thinking, did this never stop?
“He made a runner out of her, that guy. She never run before that, but now anytime you get mad at her, she goes. And just like a hare she is. They keep putting her in different places, but nothing stops her. Got her mother’s blood, I tell them. If she wants to go, she’s gone, and no one the likes of who’s in there,” he said, gesturing toward the conference room, “is going to find her.”
Chapter 23
Nothing came of all our waiting, and at last we had to give up and go home, leaving the affair to the police. Once home, I couldn’t sleep. Around and around in my head went all the aspects of my relationship with Sheila. It had been too easy to think that what I had done with her at six had been enough, that I had made a difference. Now sleepless in the gloom of night, it became too easy to think I had made no difference at all.
The next day was Saturday. I didn’t go back into the clinic, as there was little we could do from there anyway, but I remained close at hand for the phone. Allan came over for a little while, but he had come with the intention of our going upstate for the afternoon to nose around in the small antique and secondhand places that dotted the sleepy rural communities of the corn belt. When I explained what had happened, he was astonished and remarked several times about never having known anyone before who got herself involved in such things as I seemed to get into. Although sympathetic, he was a bit disconcerted. I also suspect that he didn’t want to spend such a bright summer Saturday afternoon in the city. As a consequence, Allan soon left and I spent the rest of the day on my own.