by Torey Hayden
I think I already knew too. A heavy, jaded feeling descended on me. I dreaded the thought of phoning Ken to tell him of this change in plans. I dreaded the disappointment I knew I was going to feel when I was in my apartment, alone, without the distractions of school. Here, now, it was easier to accept the idea of staying. There, on my own, it would be another matter.
Back in the classroom, I found Ladbrooke at work at the table. She did not look up when I entered, but, rather, continued to write. I took my own work from the top of the filing cabinet and came over to sit down.
“What did Frank say?” she asked, her tone conversational. She still continued to write.
“He has someone. An E.D. specialist from Medicine Bow. Her name’s Muriel Samuelson.”
“Oh.” Ladbrooke was looking at me then, although she hardly lifted her head. Her examination was thorough but brief, and then she returned to what she was doing.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said wearily. “What a lousy predicament.”
Ladbrooke paused, lifting her pencil from the paper. For a long moment she regarded what she’d been writing. I watched her. I could feel the tension still between us, as it had been all day, but I didn’t know what to do to diffuse it. With Ladbrooke, it was sometimes better to carry on and pretend everything was all right than to back her into a corner by confronting her. I let her be and prepared to start the next day’s plans.
Ladbrooke laid down her pencil and pushed back her chair. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, got up and left the room.
Supposing she’d gone to the toilet, I didn’t think much about her leaving. However, when ten minutes or so had elapsed and Ladbrooke still hadn’t returned, I looked around in the direction of the door. Groaning, I got up and went after her.
Can of Coke in her hand, Ladbrooke was leaning against the wall at the far end of the girls’ rest room. She was sipping the pop slowly, the elbow of one arm braced in the hand of the other. When I pushed the door open, she frowned.
“Go away, Torey,” she said, her voice low.
“This is childish, Ladbrooke. If we’ve got a problem, for pity’s sake, let’s talk about it, like two adults.”
“I’d rather be alone for a while. Please, go away.”
“I’m not a lot more in the mood for this than you are, Ladbrooke. It hasn’t been one of my better days either.”
“Then leave me alone.”
Shoving my hand into the pockets of my jeans, I turned and leaned back against one of the sinks. “Is all this over my visa?”
No reply.
“Can’t you appreciate the position I’m in, Lad? Can’t you empathize, even a little bit?”
Her chin was trembling. She drew her lower lip in between her teeth to stop it. Suddenly, she seemed very young to me. She seemed no older than the kids.
“This is a hard profession. You get close to people. You come to love them as a natural part of it, to love them dearly. And it makes it hard.”
“Is that all we are to you? Your profession? Your three hundred bucks a week, or whatever it is? So you can just give up and walk out on us any time you feel like it?”
“No, of course not. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Well, what do you mean then?”
Without warning, I found myself on the verge of tears. The day had been so difficult and the situation so complex. I didn’t know how to defend myself in this kind of argument. It was all proving a bit too much for me. Lowering my head, I studied the fabric of my jeans. Not trusting my voice, I didn’t answer immediately.
Then finally, I shrugged. “I don’t know. The thing is, I do have this other life. And I get lonely for it.”
Ladbrooke set the Coke can down noisily on the tile windowledge.
“What do you want me to say to you?” she replied angrily. “That I’m sorry for you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Or do you want me to admit how much I need you? Is that what you want?” And then her own tears came, and she couldn’t stop them. “Shit,” she muttered bitterly, and turned away.
A sudden, tense silence fell between us.
“You are the only person in the world who’s ever made me feel like maybe I’m worth something,” she said, her voice low. Her back was still to me. “For the first time in as long as I can remember, I actually want to get up in the morning. I have somewhere to go that I, as a human being, matter.” The way she said it, it sounded like a condemnation.
Letting my shoulders drop, I sighed.
Ladbrooke turned back around and glared at me. “I know how these poor kids feel now, being tugged and pulled, their whole world manipulated and nothing they can do about it. You’re damned well mucking about in other people’s lives, Torey. You come in here, all high and mighty, like God, and you muck about. Maybe you don’t love us, but you’ve made us love you. You’ve made us believe you care.”
“I do care! Good grief, Ladbrooke, lay off me.” Try as I had, I couldn’t keep from crying myself. “I do care. That’s the whole bloody problem. Are you so thick you can’t see that?”
My tears bewitched Ladbrooke. She froze, staring at me, studying my face intently, and I felt acutely embarrassed. It was like crying in front of one of the children. Reaching for a paper towel, I dampened it and wiped my face. Neither of us spoke.
I glanced in Ladbrooke’s direction. “I’m probably not going,” I said softly, “I’ll probably wait until the end of the school year. I’ve pretty much said that to Frank already. I was trying to say it to you, if you’d only given me half a chance.”
Snuffly silence.
I took another towel and did a final clean-up job. The cool water felt good. I kept the towel pressed against my eyes for a few moments, then I took it and the other one and threw them into the waste bin.
Turning, I looked over at Ladbrooke. She was still watching me, her own eyes still teary.
I smiled wearily. “God, would you look at us? We’re a couple of proper dames, aren’t we? Just look at us. I’ll bet when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had a falling out, they never ended up bawling in the men’s room like this.”
A hint of a smile touched Ladbrooke’s lips. “They didn’t have men’s rooms in those days. They just peed in the bushes.”
I grinned. “Maybe that’s our problem. No bushes.”
A pause.
Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I ran my fingers through my hair, pulled out the clips, replaced them. I hitched up my jeans, smoothed out my blouse, grimaced at my reflection. Ladbrooke remained leaning against the wall. She too was watching my reflection.
“Look, I’m sorry I upset you,” I said. “None of this was intended to hurt you. I just got caught up in my own personal mess. I didn’t think.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, either.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sorry. If you really do want to go back … I didn’t mean to sound selfish. I’m sorry you’re missing everyone. I do understand, sort of.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I turned from the mirror to leave.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Back to the room. I haven’t got anything prepared yet for tomorrow.”
“Are you angry?”
I smiled then. “No. Just tired. Come on, kiddo, you too. Let’s get back to the room. There’s a ton of work waiting there.”
Chapter 20
The decision to stay was still difficult to make. In explaining to Ken why I was staying an additional four months, I could no longer shift the blame to the British consulate or the vagaries of Frank and the school district. It was my decision. Accustomed to drifting along pleasantly and meeting what came, I found this sudden need to steer a direct course a hard thing to do. However, I knew I had to stay. Ladbrooke’s outrage had some legitimacy. I was mucking about in other people’s lives. My method of intervention relied fairly heavily on personal charisma, and I knew full well it did. Succ
essful as the method could be, this was one of the drawbacks. I was not justified in using it if I intended to walk out in the middle.
The decision not to go home left me depressed for some days afterward, and, like a bad cold, there didn’t seem much to be done about it, other than bear with it. I threw myself into work at school in an effort to distract my thoughts, and that was just as well, because we went into a skid. Everyone’s behavior deteriorated.
I had been trying for some time to arrange an alternate placement for Shamie. It had been apparent almost since his arrival that Shamie did not need a class like mine, yet he’d remained, mostly because I’d had my plate full with other problems. When we came back from Christmas break, I had endeavored to remedy the matter by arranging a part-time placement for him at a nearby junior high school. Shamie was to come into my class in the mornings and then go over at lunchtime to the other school, where he would have three regular classes.
Within a matter of days it became apparent that the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster. Shamie couldn’t cope with the junior high routine of changing classes and teachers. He was frightened by the normal rough-housing and teasing of the other children. The work in the classes was far from what he was used to with me. It wasn’t harder, but it was more formal and impersonal. Plus they used different books, different layouts and different methods of testing. Worst of all, he just didn’t fit in. Although a slow learner, he was a studiously inclined boy, and the relaxed, rather nonacademic attitudes of some of the other students in his classes affected him tremendously. He hated every moment of every afternoon. After two weeks, I gave up. Obviously, something was wrong with the whole plan. Shamie returned full time to my room.
Dirkie went from bad to worse. He’d always been on a considerable amount of very powerful medication to control his more outlandish schizophrenic behaviors, but this now seemed not to be sufficient. Adolescence and the accompanying metabolic changes suddenly upset the delicate balance, and he needed to have his medication adjusted to accommodate this. What seemed in conferences with his consulting psychiatrist and his foster parents a fairly simple procedure turned out to be nightmarish in the classroom. Dirkie became drastically uncontrolled, and we spent a very miserable month indeed.
Geraldine and Shemona didn’t change one way or the other. No matter what I tried, Geraldine kept up her steady stream of petty antisocial acts and her clinginess, while Shemona kept up her silence. I was blatantly aware of the fact that I had no control over either girl, that I had thus far made no impact on either’s behavior.
Leslie was slow going. She did start to talk in her own peculiar fashion. She developed a fetish for letters of the alphabet and would go around the classroom all day long, shouting “M!” “C!” “Y!” at the top of her lungs, until I wanted to throttle her. But she never said anything else. She never said anything that made sense. I was getting her to produce sounds during our sessions, but they were just attenuated grunts. After half an hour of pressing lips together with my fingers to force out the “mmmmmm” sound of “man,” I’d let go, her lips would fall apart, and she’d look at the picture of the man and happily say, “uh.”
Only Mariana seemed on an upward course. Bless her little heart, she plodded along steadily, learning with agonizing slowness to read the first-grade primer. I had wanted to mainstream her, too, into a regular classroom for part of the time, but I couldn’t imagine whose, as Mariana would need to avoid math, reading and spelling to have any chance at success. And that was before I went down to the girls’ rest room just off the lunchroom one day and found Mariana and one of Carolyn’s boys in a toilet stall together. Even I was embarrassed by what they were doing.
Then to cap it all off, we were struck in the latter part of February by a stomach bug. I dreaded stomach bugs in these kinds of classes, because I was always guaranteed a few really disgusting days. And we certainly had them. Shemona got it first and was sick everywhere one afternoon, with no warning whatsoever. Within the next two days, three different children had vomited on me, including Dirkie, who had been sick on me, gone home for a day, come back and been sick on me again.
On Thursday of that week, Ladbrooke came up just before morning recess.
“I’ve got to go home, Torey,” she said.
The moment I saw her, I knew she’d caught the bug too. Her face was the color of cold oatmeal.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. It seems to be just a twenty-four-hour thing.”
“Look, Lad, don’t worry about it. Stay home until you’re well. All right? Now go take care of yourself.” I gave her a pat on the shoulder, then turned and went back to the children.
Ladbrooke didn’t return on Friday. I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t expected her to. The bug was so virulent and her stomach, even under normal circumstances, so touchy, that I’d assumed the combination would prove more than twenty-four hours could cure. However, when Monday came and Ladbrooke still wasn’t there, I was immediately concerned. It was a virulent virus. And she really should have been under the care of a doctor for the kind of gastric problems she had. She’d shown me once where areas of her teeth had been damaged because she’d vomited so frequently over the previous few years that the stomach acid had dissolved parts of her tooth enamel. It had all come about as a result of her alcohol abuse, and for that reason, I knew Ladbrooke was reluctant to get help for it. However …
The moment I thought about her alcoholism, all my other thoughts, all my concerns deadened. Ladbrooke wasn’t still sick. She was on another bender. After five days, it was unlikely that she was still home with a bug. No, she was gone again. Like the last time. Gone. Out. Drunk.
My instant reaction was anger. The clock was edging around toward class time. I stood below it, watching it, and I felt rage. The stupid idiot. This was the last thing in the world her poor, abused stomach needed. It was the last thing she needed. All the heart-tugging misery she was feeling in January, and she could just turn around and let it all happen again so soon? What the hell was the matter with her, anyway?
Uncharacteristically, my anger proved to be long lived. It didn’t pass off as the children arrived and the day started. I was still actively fuming at recess, when I stayed in the room and stapled up worksheets, a job Ladbrooke normally did. The whole time I was preoccupied with all the horrible things I was going to say to Ladbrooke when she finally did manage to limp back. I wasn’t going to have the same kind of patience I’d had in January. What kind of patsy did she take me for?
I was sound asleep Tuesday night when the telephone rang. The noise fit absurdly into my dream, and I didn’t waken immediately. When I did, I was momentarily disoriented. Groping for my alarm clock instead of getting out of bed to answer the phone, I tried to make out the numbers in the dark. I couldn’t, so I turned on the bedside lamp: 2:10.
When I finally picked up the receiver, Ladbrooke was on the other end.
“Do you know what time it is?” I said.
There was a pause. “Were you sleeping?”
“Good grief, Lad, of course I was sleeping.”
Another pause.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Could you come get me?”
“Where are you? What’s going on?”
“I’m in a phone booth.”
“Where?”
“Poplar and Seventh Avenue.”
Consciousness was slowly returning, which didn’t make the conversation less bewildering. “What are you doing there? Are you safe?”
“Yeah, I think so.” A pause. “But I’m cold. And I need somebody to pick me up. I don’t have enough money for a taxi.”
“Okay. Hold on a sec. Let me get a pencil. Now tell me precisely where you’re at so I can find you straightaway. Are you sure you’re safe there? Can you wait till I come?”
I dressed and went down to bring my poor old car to life in the bitterly cold February darkness. There were four or five inches of old, graying snow underfoot, and it squeaked as I walked on
it.
I wasn’t familiar with the part of town Ladbrooke was calling from; however. Lad’s directions were clear, and I found her with no trouble. She was standing inside a dimly lit booth, arms tight around herself. She had no coat on.
For the first time I became genuinely concerned about what was going on. Up to this point, I think I must have been still half-asleep, because I didn’t question it. I was too concerned with finding her. But now that I had, the peculiarity of the circumstances struck me. What the hell was she doing out at two o’clock in the morning, with no coat, no money and no one around? What was she doing in this part of town, bereft of night spots, bereft of everything except industrial complexes and office buildings? A truly horrible thought went through my mind. Was she engaging in prostitution?
I pushed the car door open. “Lad?”
Tentatively, she opened the door on the telephone booth.
“Lad, it’s me. Get in the car.”
“I’m freezing to death,” she said, as she got in on the passenger side. She slammed the door.
“I can very well imagine you are. It’s below zero out there. Where on earth is your coat?”
No answer. Her teeth were chattering. Pushing the heater up as far as it would go, I turned the car around and started off.
“Don’t take me home,” she said.
“Where do you want to go?”
Saying nothing, she clasped her arms tightly around herself to stop the shivering.
“Where do you want to go, Lad?”
“I don’t know.”
I eased my foot off the accelerator and coasted to a stop at the next corner.
Ladbrooke looked over in alarm. “Why are you stopping?”
“Because I don’t know where you want me to take you.”
She studied my face a long moment. “Can I come home with you?”
Not knowing quite what to say to that, I shrugged. “I guess so.”
I set the car in motion again. Ladbrooke was clearly so cold that that was absorbing most of her concentration. I could hear her teeth chattering.