by Torey Hayden
Jane Timmons told me that Sheila had been at the ranch for just over a year and that for the most part she had been a difficult, uncooperative girl, who mixed poorly and seemed to have few, if any, friends. They had thwarted three different runaway attempts, including one where Sheila had gotten as far as the river and they’d needed to call the police.
I questioned her about the general philosophy of the ranch, and she confirmed for me what I’d already anticipated, that theirs was a program that relied heavily on behavior modification, with the children needing to earn all privileges through a point system. I also asked about Sheila’s prospects for being released from the ranch. Jane explained that Mr. Renstad was due for parole near Christmas, and if social services felt it was appropriate, Sheila would go back to him then.
Because Jane Timmons assumed I was seeing Sheila in a professional capacity, our meeting was not subject to Sheila’s earning sufficient points. Mercifully. As emotionally and intellectually complex as Sheila was, behavior modification was a system doomed to failure with her.
I arrived at the ranch on the Saturday following Sheila’s sixteenth birthday. It was a bright, hot day, following a long dry spell, when I came out. The ranch, a collection of low, modern buildings, squatted along the banks of a dry riverbed. There was not a tree on the property, and the grass had all burned yellow-brown in the summer heat. Only the barbed wire glinted in the sun.
As it was a weekend, Jane Timmons wasn’t there, but I was greeted pleasantly by the young man in charge and then transferred to Holly, one of the counselors, who was responsible for the group of children that included Sheila. She took me back to the girls’ wing, where Sheila was waiting in her room.
It was a genuine secure unit, with an endless number of heavy locked doors and windows sporting that thick glass with the chicken wire embedded in it that never gave you an undistorted image. Sheila’s room was the third to the last on the left. The door, made of pale-colored oak with a small square window and a mortise lock, stood open. Sheila was sitting cross-legged on her bed.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” There was a long moment’s hesitation and then, abruptly, Sheila threw herself into my arms and clung to me tightly. I wrapped my arms around her and held her close.
In the doorway, Holly regarded us. Over Sheila’s head, I looked at her. “Could you leave us for a little while?”
She paused, then nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
Sheila had changed enormously in the interceding two years. She had grown taller, but had lost weight. Too much weight. She looked frail. The wacky clothes had been replaced with nothing more exotic than a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt. The brilliant hair was gone too, as was most of the permanent, and she had grown her bangs out—or mostly out. The result was not a style at all, but an untidy mixture of dark-blond roots, frizzy colored ends, and stray, sticking-out bits, all left to grow far too long without attention.
Sheila examined me as closely as I was examining her. “You’re getting old, you know that?” she said. “You got wrinkles.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“It’s just that I never thought about you with wrinkles.”
“It happens to the best of us,” I said and sat down on her roommate’s bed.
The room was small and Spartan. It was no more than a cubicle, really, about eight by ten feet. There was a window at the far end, two iron beds with rather violent pink bedspreads, and a single desk at the foot of Sheila’s bed. Her roommate, a girl named Angel, had posters of rock stars plastered on the wall above her bed and an assortment of stuffed animals against her pillow. Sheila had nothing.
I gazed around and then back at Sheila, who had settled again, cross-legged, on her bed. She was an immensely attractive girl, in spite of her thinness and her uncared-for appearance, but there was a melancholy about her I had never previously detected.
“So, are you married yet?” she asked.
“Married? Me?” I replied in surprise. “No. Why? Did you think I would be?”
“Yeah. You and Jeff.”
“Jeff and me? Jeff and I were … I mean, not in that way. I was never involved with Jeff. We were just friends. Colleagues, really. Nothing more.”
She tipped her head, her expression skeptical.
“What about you?” I asked. “Do you have any boyfriends?”
She didn’t reply. There was a moment’s pause, just a beat, and she looked back. “So, where’s Jeff at? Is he coming out to see me too?”
“No,” I said, and Sheila’s face fell.
“Oh, I’d hoped he would,” she said sorrowfully. This caught me off-guard, as I had never thought she’d felt anything but antipathy for him.
“He’s in California now,” I said and pondered briefly on whether or not to tell Sheila the whole story about what had happened to him. I decided I should, to make it clear that his departure had been forced upon him.
Sheila listened to the story with rapt attention, her brow furrowing. When I finished, she shook her head slightly. “Gone? He’s gone for good?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, Jeff,” she murmured softly, shaking her head. “The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack. The round world should have shook lions into civil streets, and citizens to their dens.”
Hearing those words, I realized they were a quotation, but I didn’t know from where.
“You don’t recognize that?” Sheila asked. Leaning over the side of her bed, she pulled out a flat under-bed box and tipped up the lid. Reaching in, she lifted out the copy of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra that Jeff had given her for her fourteenth birthday. The cover was dog-eared and taped back together in places. I could see several pages were loose.
An enormous silence suddenly loomed up out of nowhere. Sheila held the book in her lap and regarded the worn cover. I just sat, all the words drained from my mind.
At last she began to speak softly. “I wondered why he gave it to me. I thought, what a stupid gift. I mean, who would want to read Shakespeare? For fun? Some dorky old woman in sturdy black shoes and support hose. Not me, that’s for sure.
“Then I was stuck waiting at the police station one night. I didn’t have anything to pass the time, so I started reading it. It was hard to get into, hard to get used to the language—which is weird to me now, because now when I read it, it seems so easy—but that first night I struggled. And I thought, why on earth did he give this to me?
“Then I got here, and it was, like, being in a desert. If you don’t earn your points, don’t play the game their way, you just sit. It’s the boredom factor, you see, that they control you with.” The smile was more enigmatic this time. “So I started reading it again. And this time I read it right through. And when I finished, I read it again. And again. I bet you I read it ten times straight through in about two days. And I thought, this is so beautiful. This woman is so wonderful. So magnificent. And this man gives everything for her. He gives away the world—quite literally. And yet … like, they don’t even talk nicely to each other about half the time. They’re in love in their minds, but in reality, they’re always disagreeing, arguing, teasing.
“God … When I read this, it makes me … how does one describe it? Expand? No. No, that’s not it.” She paused, pensive. “It’s like I’m in this little attic room—that’s my normal life—and there’s this skylight above me that I can see, but I can never reach. Then, when I read this, something inside me grows. Pushes me up, and for just a moment, I can lift the skylight and see out. Just glimpse the world beyond, know what I mean? But I can glimpse it. For just a moment I can tell there’s something bigger than myself.”
Listening to Sheila, I was deeply moved.
She went on talking, her words tumbling out ever more quickly, as if she feared I’d stop her. All this thought, all these insights struggling to light in a vacuum. I could sense her intellectual desperation.
“The story’s all true, you know,” she was saying. “
I went and checked the facts. The whole course of the Western world was affected by what this couple did. Did you know that? Cleopatra was, like, this really incredible woman. She was very strong. A very powerful queen. And yet she is so human. So silly. So funny. God, Torey, in places this is the funniest thing I have ever read.”
All I could think was what the hell were we doing with this girl locked up in a secure unit? Why was she here and not in some summer-school literature course at a college or studying the ancient history that obviously intrigued her so much? Where were the mentors who should have spotted this girl along the way? My talents didn’t lie here. My knowledge of Shakespeare, like my knowledge of the writings of Julius Caesar, was pedestrian. Where were the English teachers whose hearts should have gladdened at the very idea of a sixteen-year-old besotted with the poetry of Antony and Cleopatra?
Her expression slowly growing sorrowful, Sheila regarded the book in her hands. With one finger, she gently smoothed the Scotch tape back over a ragged edge. “You know, that’s really sad about Jeff. I’d wanted to see him. I’d wanted him to know I liked the book.”
“Maybe I can give you his address, if you’d like to write him,” I suggested.
“I think I’d sort of fallen in love with him,” she said. “I couldn’t tell him that then. Fortunately, I hadn’t read this, because I could never have told him I liked it. I wanted him to think I hated him.” She looked up. “Isn’t that weird? I didn’t. I never did. But I was scared he’d hate me if I didn’t hate him first.” A pause. “Now I wish I’d told the truth.”
We continued to talk for more than two hours that Saturday afternoon. Most of the other children, Sheila’s roommate included, had earned enough points for a trip into town, and after a noisy clatter of activity while they got ready, we were left in peace. This suited both of us.
Sheila, for once, was very open and talkative. I suspect this was the result of so much time spent on her own. Alone and lonely, she was susceptible to my familiar face. Depression played a part in it too. My overall impression of Sheila that afternoon was that she was quite seriously depressed. All the spark had gone right out of her, and with the exception of her relationship with Antony and Cleopatra, she showed interest in very little. As a consequence, I think she was too dispirited to disguise her thoughts as elaborately as in the past.
Feeling concern for her as a continued suicide risk, I felt obliged to bring up the letter she had sent me the previous autumn. “I’m sorry about last fall,” I said, “about not answering your letter.”
“Ah, yes,” Sheila said and looked away. “That letter.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I feel stupid now that I wrote it.”
“No, you shouldn’t feel stupid. Those were very real feelings. It’s my fault. I was gone then. I was in Wales and didn’t even know about it until I got back, which was weeks later. I felt so terrible, Sheil, that you’d written and I couldn’t answer.”
“Let’s just not talk about it, okay?”
I regarded her. She had her head down and was examining something on her fingernail. Sheila had always been a curious mixture of tiger and lamb, fierce and spirited on one hand, frightened and vulnerable on the other. I’d often felt utter exasperation with her when she was being tigerish, but it was also what had attracted me to her. Studying her rounded shoulders, her disheveled hair, I sought the tiger hiding there.
“I get to thinking a lot about my mom,” she said softly. A pause. “That’s your fault, too. Remember that last conversation we had? In the car? When for all that time I had you and her mixed up?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’ve been thinking and thinking … trying to pull the two of you apart, I guess. I don’t know where I got the thing with you. You didn’t abandon me. You were just my teacher. Only doing what teachers do. I was just being stupid, I think. Trying to survive.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
Sheila shrugged. “I dunno. By not thinking about those years. By forgetting them. ‘Cause that’s what I did. I forgot everything. I mean, I remember forgetting. It was a conscious thing. I’d move on to somewhere new, like to a new foster home, or like back with my dad, and I’d think to myself, ‘I’m going to start all over now.’ And then I’d, like, go into my new school and stuff and people would ask me about my life before and I’d just say, ‘I don’t remember about it.’ And really quickly, that’d be true. It’s like I’d get reborn each time and all that went before was in some former life. Almost like it wasn’t me.”
“Did that help you not think of your mother?” I asked.
“Yeah. And not think of you. And not think of Miss McGuire, ’cause I was really happy in her class too. Because I didn’t want to remember being too happy. I didn’t want to think about those times, because I’d cry. Remembering bad things never bothers me. I think, ‘Well, that’s shit.’ And that’s all. But remembering being happy just guts me. So every time I’d do it, I’d just say, ‘No, don’t do that.’ And pretty soon it was gone.”
I looked at her. She raised her head, glanced at me and then looked back at her hands. “Then you came mucking about. You really aren’t one to leave things well enough alone, you know that?” she said. The tone was affectionate and she allowed a faint grin, but I knew there was truth in the words.
“You wish I’d left well enough alone?” I asked.
A long, pensive pause followed, with Sheila picking intently at her thumbnail, then finally she gave a slow shrug. “I dunno. I think my life would have been a lot easier if you had. One way or another, you’ve given me a lot of grief over the years, but …” She looked over at me. “The fact is, my life would have been a lot easier if practically everybody I’ve ever known had stayed out of it—my mother, my father, this place, the foster homes, Social Services. So you’re no exception.”
I smiled. This caused Sheila to smile back. “You don’t mind me saying that about you?” she asked.
“No. It’s probably true.”
A silence came then. Sheila lay back on her bed and folded her hands behind her head. Staring upward, she regarded the ceiling for several moments. I turned to study Angel’s rock posters. Most of them were of artists I’d never heard of.
“I think so much about my mom now,” Sheila said softly. “I mean, about where she is and things. What she’s doing. I don’t even know her, Torey.”
“Putting it down on paper was a good idea, I think,” I said.
“I try to figure out why she did what she did when she left me on that highway. Maybe she didn’t mean to. Maybe it was some sort of accident, like, perhaps the door handle came undone. Maybe I fell out of the car.” Still regarding the ceiling, Sheila’s expression had grown inward. “Maybe if she knew I was all right, that I wanted to see her …”
Not quite sure how to respond, I remained silent. Sheila finally looked over. “I’m not sending you those letters because I think you’re my mom.”
“No, I know that.”
“I’m done thinking that. I just sent them ’cause … well, they’re letters. They only mean something if they’re sent.”
“I understand and I’m glad to get them.”
“Keep them for me, would you?” she asked. “Because someday, I’m going to find her and I’m going to give them to her. I want her to know me, to know how I’ve been feeling all these years. That’s what I’ve decided. When I get out of here, I’m going to find my mother.”
Chapter 28
Dear Mom,
Do you know how unhappy I’ve been? Do you know what kind of life I’ve had? Why did you do this to me? I lay at night thinking about it, trying to figure out why I wasn’t good enough for you, but do you know what it was like, being left behind?
Sheila concerned me greatly. Finding her isolated and depressed, I worried that suicide might easily loom up again as a possible solution. Moreover, her needs didn’t seem to be well recognized by the group-home personnel. Like most such institutions, they were understaffed an
d overstretched. The staff turnover rate, in particular, was atrocious. Most of the care workers were poorly trained part-timers on minimum wage, who came and went on an almost weekly basis, which disallowed relationships of any depth to develop with the children. Among the resident staff, only Jane Timmons and her two deputies were specifically trained to work with disturbed children, and of them, only one had worked at the ranch for more than two years. Jane herself had been there only a little longer than Sheila.
This alone would have been cause for concern in Sheila’s case, because none of the adults had been around her long enough to develop a meaningful relationship with her, but the strict Skinnerian approach used to control the children and bring about changed behavior seemed particularly inappropriate for Sheila. To begin with, it encouraged detached, impersonal contact between staff and children. Moreover, Sheila had the sort of personality that did not find it easy to accept coercion, which was how she interpreted the point system, and she was quick to dig herself in. This led, ipso facto, to prolonged isolation.
Unfortunately, I was not in a good position to do much, as I was not seeing her in a professional capacity. Jane Timmons did not know this and it seemed judicious not to enlighten her, which I didn’t; however, I knew I’d better not overstep too much. Thus I confined myself to announcing my visits to Jane rather than requesting them, so as to ensure I could see Sheila when I wanted. That, and occasionally “conferencing” with Jane. I knew she would expect me, as a professional, to want to hear about Sheila’s life at the ranch, and as I did, I took advantage of the opportunity.
When possible, I came out to see Sheila each Saturday afternoon. It was a fair drive from the city, but quite a pleasant one, and often Hugh and I would make it together. He’d bring his fishing gear along and would disappear off down the river for an hour or two while I talked to Sheila. Thus passed much of the rest of the summer.