The Tiger's Child

by Torey Hayden

  Jeff suggested that perhaps they had simply fled, from bills or maybe some dodgy loan shark or the like. If we were lucky, he said, perhaps they were still in the city and it would just be a matter of waiting for Sheila to contact me. That, I suspected, was what it was going to boil down to anyway—waiting for Sheila. She knew where I was, and unlike the previous occasions when we’d lost contact, she was now old enough to initiate the process of finding me.

  Anyhow, that was the end of it. Sheila, once more, was gone.

  Part 3

  Chapter 26

  Sheila didn’t contact me. Summer turned to autumn. New children came. New relationships formed. My work went on.

  Then, in October, luck caught up with me. Through a series of flukes, I found out that Mr. Renstad was back in Marysville at the state hospital detox center. I attempted to talk to him by telephone, but was unsuccessful. So, when we had the long Columbus Day weekend, I drove over.

  It was a warm, bright fall afternoon when I arrived at the unit. The poplars and the birches had all turned to brilliant shades of yellow and gold, highlighted by long shafts of autumn sunshine.

  Mr. Renstad didn’t seem all that surprised to see me, nor all that happy, although he went willingly enough with me to the visitors’ area.

  “Why don’t you just leave us alone?” he said, when I asked about Sheila. “You don’t do her any good.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “You stir things up. She was doing okay before you came in. She was settled down nice and we weren’t having no problems.”

  I regarded him.

  “It’s you that’s caused everything. You upset Sheila and I don’t want you around no more. She was settled down nice till you stirred things up.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset Sheila,” I said. “I didn’t realize I had.”

  “You put ideas in her head that don’t belong there. She was happy before you came along.”

  “But the things we talked about were things Sheila wanted to discuss. I think she needs to talk to someone about what’s happened to her.”

  “What’s happened to her? What has happened to her? Nothing she ain’t done for herself. And you put her up to it. Her stealing that little boy. It never would have come to that, if you hadn’t gotten her going. She was fine till you came in.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “So just leave us alone, okay? Keep yourself to yourself. Sheila don’t need your help and I don’t want you seeing her anymore. I got the right. I can stop you.” And with that he rose and walked back into the unit.

  Chastened, I returned to my car. It was only after I was seated behind the steering wheel that anger began to overtake the effect of being reprimanded. Me? My fault? What a stupid man.

  Still, what was undeniable about the outcome of that meeting was that he had no intention of telling me where Sheila was. If anything, he would make certain I didn’t find her, or block my efforts, if I did. Disheartened, I returned home.

  Winter came and the year turned. There were reminders along the way. Alejo’s parents stopped by one afternoon in January to tell me that they had formally adopted Alejo. He was now in a special class for mildly mentally handicapped children and making good progress. On another occasion, my mother sent me a recipe that included tuna fish and mushroom soup. And Chad stopped by my office one frosty February afternoon with his Sheila. He was on a business trip in the city, and his daughter, now six, was enjoying her first solo trip with Dad. Immaculately dressed, bright, friendly and terribly polite, Sheila showed me a small handheld computer game her father had bought for her. The contrast between her childhood and the girl she was named after couldn’t have been more profound.

  I remained hopeful, scanning the mail each evening when I came home for something in Sheila’s handwriting, but it didn’t come. Winter turned into spring and eventually spring into summer.

  We ran the summer program again. It was much less the amateur affair it had been the previous year. We had twenty-four children in three classrooms with three specialist teachers, four aides and rotating on-site psychiatrists. Jeff only came once a week, and while I was there daily, it was in a supervisory capacity, roaming between rooms. The program was excellent, I felt, but it lacked the gung-ho magic of its predecessor.

  In early July, I noted when Sheila’s birthday came. She would be fifteen now. And then the anniversary of her disappearance. I couldn’t help wondering where she was at the moment and what she was doing.

  When the summer school finished, I took a month off and went to Wales. The barren, mist-laden mountains in the north of that small corner of Britain had become a second home to me. I was never quite sure what it was that attracted me there in the first place, but there had never been any doubt about what brought me back. I found an innate rightness in being there amidst the heather and the slate-built stone walls. It was an organic thing, something from within me, and I returned for the peace it always brought when I did so.

  I had a group of good friends among the locals by that summer and we all shared a love for the mountains. Days were spent spanning the rainy moorlands and communing with Wales’s teeming sheep population. Evenings were passed around the coal fires of local pubs, where I could indulge a fondness for draft Guinness and Welsh accents. The city, the clinic and all my former life disappeared like the mountains did when the mist rose up from the sea.

  Like all good vacations, this one ended with my returning so exhausted I could hardly see straight. I staggered down off the plane, caught a taxi into the city and then staggered up the stairs of my apartment building. Setting down my rucksack, I fished out my house keys and opened my door. Or rather, I tried to. The mail, pushed through the mail slot, had fallen to the floor and wedged itself under the door as I pushed it open. Several minutes passed before I successfully extracted enough mail from under it to get into my apartment.

  Once in, I bent to clear up the rest of the mail when my eyes fell upon one letter. Immediately, I recognized Sheila’s handwriting. I ripped it open.

  Dear Torey,

  I don’t quite know how to start, but I think I’m going to kill myself. I got the pills. They’re right here and all that I’ve got left to do is write this letter. I feel so alone, Torey. Nothing seems to work out for me and I’m just so damned tired of trying. This is the only thing to do that makes sense.

  But I wanted to write you this first. I wanted to say thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I know you went the extra mile a couple of times and I’m really honored to think you would. I want you to know I always felt grateful. I’m sorry things just couldn’t work out.

  With love, Sheila

  And across the bottom was a row of Os and Xs, indicating hugs and kisses, as in a very little child’s letter.

  Quickly, I looked for a date, but there was none. I flipped the envelope over to see the postmark, and to my absolute horror, I saw that the letter had been posted two days after I had left for Wales—a full four weeks earlier. Paralyzed with grief, I just stared at it.

  There was an address on the letter, indicating that Sheila was in a group home near a community about an hour’s drive east of the city. But what could I do now? Four weeks had elapsed. How did one handle this? Phone up the group home and ask if Sheila was still alive? Knowing Sheila’s personality, I didn’t think she was the type for gestures. If she said she was going to commit suicide, I had little doubt that was exactly what she would do, and I didn’t know how I would cope with a phone call of this sort.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only chaos to accost me on my return. Another youngster I’d been working with had assaulted a care worker, then run away, and he’d chosen this particular evening of my return to ransack Jeff’s and my office in search of a homemade knife I had taken off him. The immediacy of this problem, combined with the pressure from the authorities to deal with this boy, and my general exhaustion after a twenty-hour return trip from abroad caused me to behave toward Sheila’s
letter in a way that I now feel deep embarrassment about. There I was, with the worst letter I had ever received, and, ashamed as I am to admit it, I did nothing.

  I didn’t forget the letter by any means. It preyed on me, night and day. Small, quiet moments, particularly those deep in the night when I would awaken, were nibbled by that letter. My problem was, I just didn’t quite know how to handle it. I genuinely believed Sheila would do what she threatened, so I didn’t know how or whom to ask to confirm this. Moreover, I was saddened and ashamed to think that she had written me in a moment of desperation and would never know that I had been unable to respond. She would think instead that I, like everyone else, had abandoned her.

  All this provided an unexpected and rather unwelcome opportunity for intense self-examination. I had failed Sheila. That was the bottom line. Moreover, I couldn’t help but feel I was the one who had set her up. I had opened up unimaginable worlds to her when she was six, and, as she had so rightly pointed out to me, I had made her think they could be hers. Young and idealistic at the time, I’d genuinely believed they could be. She was bright, articulate, attractive, charming when she wanted to be and full of grit. I thought I’d given her the passport to a better life. Older and sadly wiser, I now realized nothing was ever as simple as it seemed.

  The months that followed were a difficult, disruptive time in several areas of my life simultaneously. My client list was very full, the children on it a more demanding assortment than usual. I was physically attacked on two different occasions and nearly raped on a third. Worse, more than a fair share of my clients were quite unrewarding to work with, requiring long hours of effort for very little response.

  I was beginning to chafe under the capitalist ethos of the clinic, feeling uncomfortable knowing that I could only treat those children who could afford to pay for my services, not those who needed treatment worse. This caused me to waste precious time trying to secure special funding for some children, who I believed genuinely needed continued therapy, and to feel resentment toward those with mild problems that could have been dealt with easily in the school or home but whose well-off parents insisted on treatment.

  The biggest blow, however, came in midwinter, when Jeff left the clinic in unfortunate circumstances. My colleagues’ sexual behaviors were of little interest to me, as long as they did not impinge on work-related matters or my relationship with the individuals. Deep down, I think I was probably aware that Jeff was gay, although it had never been of any consequence to what we were doing together, and thus never something I’d paid attention to. Sadly, society did. When the board of trustees for the clinic found out about his sexual preferences, they felt it unwise for Jeff to be working one-to-one with young children. Jeff was given the opportunity to go quietly with good references, and feeling he had no alternative, he did. He transferred to a post in California working with alcoholics.

  I was devastated. We had been sharing several cases and had built our treatment methods around the partnership. Jeff left very abruptly, having negotiated with the trustees right up to the end to stay. When they’d refused to budge, he’d stormed out in anger. Consequently, I had not been prepared for his departure and was left to clear up the damage. There was plenty, and I was kept unpleasantly busy.

  The only bright spot in the winter had been the advent of a new boyfriend named Hugh. Allan had long since passed from the scene and I had been doomed to a number of months of the dreaded dating ritual. Then up popped this incredibly handsome man with a wicked sense of humor and a ten-year-old VW with dead bugs painted all over it. We were definitely an example of the old adage of opposites attracting each other, because Hugh and I couldn’t have made a less likely couple. A complete antithesis to Allan and Chad, Hugh was a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps college dropout, who had set himself up in pest extermination at age twenty-one with the money that should have gone for education. He had a shrewd business mind and a genuine passion for crawling through people’s cellars and attics killing small creatures, and after ten years, he owned one of the most successful pest-extermination businesses in the city.

  What had attracted me most was his sense of humor, which was of legendary proportions. For me, in my deadly serious profession, humor was the lifesaver I often grabbed hold of just to stay afloat, so it was easy to love someone who was always capable of appreciating the funny side in life’s unfunnier situations.

  Spring came very slowly that year. It had been a dry, cold winter that lingered uninvited into March, and then the snowstorms finally arrived in April, burying us, paralyzing the city and destroying what few signs of spring there were.

  At the clinic I argued with my colleagues over the fate of the summer program. Dr. Freeman had taken over much of Jeff’s summer-program involvement and, without consulting me, he had applied for and gotten grants to expand us into two locations. We would now be serving forty-eight children, including a group of severely autistic children who were not clients of the clinic. I sensed a money-making scheme behind all of this, which annoyed me mightily, as I’d wanted to keep it confined to children whose progress we could continue to follow, but it didn’t matter much. My position with the program had become almost tangential. In the end, I gave up the fight. It was probably a good enough program, but it was light-years away from what Jeff and I had conceived two summers earlier, so I decided to leave it all to Dr. Freeman.

  May came and with it a new office partner named Jules. He was a dramatic change from Jeff in all respects, from appearance to demeanor. Having switched to child psychiatry after many years as a urologist, he was almost fifty, a short, round dumpling of a man with a few whiffs of white where his hair ought to have been. Unlike Jeff, with his rapier wit and showy confidence, Jules was soft-spoken and gentle as a bunny. I liked him. Indeed, the more I came to know him, the more I enjoyed his company. He was very easy to talk to and was a brilliant lateral thinker, which meant our conversations could go leap-frogging off in all directions. But he wasn’t Jeff. Still missing Jeff enormously, I took a long time to get used to a new face at the other desk.

  Then, one evening in June, I came home to find a thick envelope on the floor with my other mail. Sheila’s handwriting was immediately recognizable. Astonished, I ripped the envelope open. There were thirteen sheets of notebook paper inside. The first one was a very brief letter to me:

  Dear Torey

  I’ve been wanting to write you, but after my last letter I didn’t know how to start. I’m sorry. Anyway I’m still here.

  I’ve sent you these. I wanted to send them to my own mom, but I don’t know where she is, so I’ve sent them to you. I hope you don’t mind.

  Love, Sheila

  Lifting off the letter, I looked at the pages underneath. Each one contained a single, short letter addressed to Sheila’s mother.

  Dear Mom,

  I wish I could see you. I wish I knew what you look like. I tried to get a picture of you, but Dad doesn’t have any and nobody else seems to either. I want to know you. Do you have blond hair like I do? Is it straight? Do you have blue eyes? Every time I go out, I look at the women who go by me. I keep looking for someone who might know me. What do you look like? I think if I could find out, I’d feel better.

  Dear Mom,

  Why did you go? That’s something that’s always bugged me. I mean, how come you wouldn’t take me? Was I that bad a kid? Was I, like, mouthy to you all the time or something? Did I fight with Jimmie? Or did you just get fed up with having two kids?

  Dear Mom,

  Did you go because of Dad? I know about him now, how he can’t stay off the stuff. It makes me angry too. It makes me want to run away. Is that what happened to you? Could you just not stand it?

  Folding the letters and putting them back into their envelope, I regarded my name on the front. Up in the corner was the name of the same group home her earlier letter had come from. Going into the kitchen, I picked up the telephone and dialed Information.

  Chapter 27

  M
r. Renstad’s abrupt departure was, as Jeff had suggested, debt-related. What we didn’t know at the time was that, contrary to his word, he was still using drugs regularly, and it was with some unsavory underworld characters that he had run up his debts. He and Sheila had escaped just ahead of trouble, as they had apparently done so many times before.

  Trouble caught up with him a few months later, though, in the form of the law. He was convicted of a minor drug offense and sent to the state hospital detox center yet again, which is where I had caught up with him. Sheila, meanwhile, had been placed in a children’s group home in the community where he had been arrested.

  Unhappy with this new situation, Sheila had run away. This prompted her placement in a foster home, and when she ran from there, she was transferred to a children’s home in a rural location about an hour’s drive east of the city. This sort of place was known colloquially as a “children’s ranch,” a euphemism for a locked facility. It was from there Sheila’s suicide note to me had come the previous summer and it was from there I had received this most recent group of letters.

  Having located Sheila at last, I rang immediately and spoke with the director of the ranch, a woman named Jane Timmons.

  “From the Sandry Clinic, you say?” she asked in amazement. “Sheila Renstad was treated at the Sandry? Who paid the bills?”

  Annoyed with what seemed an unusually rude question, especially as I was a complete stranger, I explained that my relationship with Sheila went back a good deal further, but I did not elaborate on the fact that it was no longer a professional but a personal one. Thirty seconds on the phone and I could tell here was a lady for whom money and status meant much. That I was from the Sandry, a well-known and expensive private clinic, probably opened more doors than all my professional qualifications put together. If I had said I was only a friend, I would have been lumped with Sheila’s father and probably not given the time of day.