Just Another Kid

by Torey Hayden

  “It’s just the stuff I hadn’t gotten around to on Thursday. I thought I’d better get in and do it.”

  And then, between us, the unasked question. And it stayed unasked. We made small talk. We got the materials out. We prepared the room for the children. I went down for a cup of coffee, stopped by to say hi to the gang in the front office, had a moment’s chat with Frank. Ladbrooke ran some dittoes. But neither one of us volunteered any information on the weekend.

  After school, Carolyn brought us some gerbils for the class. Hers, in her classroom, had a prodigious sex life, resulting in a phenomenal number of offspring, and she was unloading them on everybody. I’d been out of the room when she’d come up with them and returned to find Ladbrooke cooing into a box. Dismayed because Carolyn had not asked me if I wanted them, especially this close to the end of the school year, I huffed off to rummage round in one of the storage rooms to find some kind of cage. At last I located an absolutely filthy one. Running a sink full of soapy water, I attempted to clean it up. Ladbrooke sat at the table with the gerbils, lifting them out of the box, caressing them with her fingertips, pressing furry little heads against her cheek.

  It took me about thirty-five minutes to deguck the stupid cage, by which point I had some choice words for Carolyn. The whole time I worked, Ladbrooke played with the gerbils.

  “You wouldn’t want to take those creatures home with you?” I asked, the sarcasm not too disguised.

  But that sort of wit was wasted on Ladbrooke. Nose to nose with one of the animals, she smiled at it. “No, Tom’d kill me. He doesn’t like little mousy things.”

  I thunked the dripping cage down onto the table. “Well, here. Chuck some of that shredded newspaper in, because I’m as ready for them as I’m ever going to be. Are they both the same sex? Did Carolyn say? They’d better be.”

  Ladbrooke rose up with the one she’d been playing with still in her hand. She picked up the cardboard box containing the other one with her free hand. Apparently sensing a return to captivity, the one she was holding made its break for freedom. Like a little furry pinball, it shot out of Ladbrooke’s hand and across the table. Before she could catch it, it had gone off the end of the table, down onto the floor and was away under the shelves of the library.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Ladbrooke!” I yelled.

  Catching a frantic gerbil in a room with five rows of industrial shelving is no mean feat. Even with two of us, the gerbil persisted in outmaneuvering us. I’d been very annoyed initially. It was late in the day; cleaning the cage had been unpleasant work; and I hadn’t wanted the gerbils in the first place. Having to spend twenty minutes chasing one of the damned things was not my idea of a good time. However, as the two of us scrambled after it, the humor of the situation overcame me. It was like a scene out of the Keystone Kops, and I was soon in hysterics.

  “I’ve got him cornered, Torey,” Lad finally said. She was down at the far end of the last row of shelving. “He’s back under here. Bring the cage.”

  Grabbing the cage, I went down the aisle and knelt beside her. Prone, with her chin on the floor, Ladbrooke reached under the shelving unit.

  “I’ve got him!” she cried triumphantly, grinning, as she pulled the gerbil from under the shelves. I held open the cage door, and in the animal went. With a gasp of exaggerated exhaustion, Ladbrooke flopped back against the wall. “Whew!”

  I sat down, cross-legged, with the gerbil cage in my lap. We’d exerted ourselves in the chase; Ladbrooke’s forehead glistened with perspiration. My heartbeat was still fast. It had all been made worse because we were laughing so hard toward the end.

  Ladbrooke was still smiling. She shook her head. “You’d never know we were grown women,” she said.

  “We’d have caught it in half the time if we hadn’t been laughing like a couple of hyenas.”

  “You started it,” she said.

  “Me? Who let the cussed thing go?”

  “Yeah, but you started laughing, you nitwit. If you hadn’t started, I wouldn’t have.”

  I grinned.

  There came between us a gentle silence. Putting the cage on the floor, I prepared to stand up.

  “What am I going to do without you?” Lad asked. Her tone was affectionate.

  I rose and lifted the cage. “Probably not bust a gut chasing gerbils. You know, I’m half mad at Carolyn. I never said I was going to take any of these. She knew better than to bring them up when I was in the room.”

  There was silence. I held the cage high and peered in at the two animals, busily rearranging the shredded newspaper.

  “I mean it, Torey,” Ladbrooke said, and the tone of her voice had changed. “How am I going to survive without you?”

  I looked down at her.

  “We’ve got nine weeks left. I was counting them over the weekend. There’s only nine weeks till the end of school.”

  The shift in mood was so abrupt it was wrenching.

  “How am I going to survive? How am I going to make it, when you’re gone? That’s only two months.”

  Our physical positions accentuated her words. She’d remained sitting on the floor, her arms around her drawn-up legs. I was standing over her, my pale shadow cast across her face.

  “Things’ll be different in two months,” I said.

  She regarded me, unconvinced.

  “Two months is a fair amount of time for some things, Lad. You’ll feel differently about it than you do now. Besides, I’m not about to leave you in the lurch. I wouldn’t; you know that.”

  “I don’t want to go back to my life the way it was,” she said quietly. “It was okay then because it never had been different. But now I want it to be like this. I’m happy now. In a lot of ways, this has been the hardest year of my whole life, but it’s been the best too. I’m happy.”

  “Good, I’m glad.”

  She looked up again. “I don’t want to end up with these months being the only happy ones ever.”

  “They won’t be.” I reached a hand down to her to encourage her to get up. “Come on, Lad.”

  She remained sitting. “I don’t think you understand what it’s like.”

  Putting the cage on the floor, I sat back down myself.

  She didn’t continue.

  “Was it a hard weekend?” I asked.

  She bit her lower lip and did not look over at me. Slowly, she nodded.

  “Did you drink?”

  “No.”

  “Good job.”

  “I made it. I made it through the entire weekend. But just barely.”

  I smiled. “But you did make it.”

  She still wasn’t looking at me. “All this weekend did was scare me, Torey. All I kept thinking was, if this is what three days is like, what’s it going to be like after June?”

  “You’re still expecting too much of yourself, Lad.”

  “Three days? When can I expect three days of myself?”

  “It’s not the time that’s important. It’s the expectations. You’re expecting three days at home to be like three days in here, and they’re not going to be. It’s going to go in stages, and the first stage is always going to be just getting through, which emotionally, is going to feel like very, very little improvement over not getting through at all. But despite how it feels, it’s a huge step, maybe the biggest step. You’re doing okay, Lad. Don’t keep making these situations into tests. We’ll sort things out by June. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What are you going to do? Stay here? Take me with you? ‘Hi, Ken, don’t mind me. I’m just a little someone Torey’s brought along on the honeymoon.’” She smiled, saying that, her tone more good-natured than antagonistic, but I knew she wasn’t joking.

  “Trust me a bit longer, would you? Let me do the worrying. There’re nine weeks left. Let’s not ruin them panicking over Week Ten.”

  She nodded. “Yes, okay.” She shifted position in preparation to rise. “But I expect that’ll be much easier for you than for me.”

&nbs
p; I had to admit Ladbrooke’s future was occupying my mind as well. The long Easter weekend had brought the issue to the forefront during my discussion with Tim, although for some time I’d been mulling it over. Tim had said the obvious thing to me. If she still needed therapy, she needed a new therapist. That was all there was to it. Ah, I’d replied, if it were only that easy. Was making up my dittoes, baking birthday cakes and having endless, patient conversations with Dirkie over the color of cats, therapy? And if so, should I pack her off to the mental health clinic or to the university to get a special education degree? And was fetching her home at two in the morning or eating her canned spaghetti, therapy? Or was it simply friendship? And what, in fact, had Ladbrooke needed more? Tim had smiled then in a thoughtful way. What was therapy anyway, he’d replied, except professional friendship? This comment caused the two of us to grow philosophical, and we digressed into discussing the kind of world we’d ended up in, where one had to buy caring relationships.

  Still, nine weeks was a fair amount of time. I wasn’t being facile when I’d said that to Ladbrooke. A lot could happen. And the time had already come, I thought, when I could talk her into accepting alternate forms of help, if necessary. But that image of Ladbrooke sitting in my shadow was one to haunt me for a considerable time afterward. I wished I did have the power to make her happy, to keep her happy.

  On Tuesday morning all three of the Irish contingent were in foul moods. Obviously, there had been some sort of scrap going on before they got to school, because they came in irritably silent, and there was much slamming and banging of things into cubbies. I asked Geraldine, and she said it was none of my business. I asked Shemona, and she refused to answer.

  Shemona seemed the most affected. As the morning wore on, she grew weepy and unwilling to leave her chair at the table. She wouldn’t talk to either Ladbrooke or me. When I knelt beside her mid-morning, she cowered away.

  “Are you feeling all right, lovey?” I asked.

  “Tell Miss you’re okay.”

  “Geraldine … I can talk to Shemona by myself, thank you.”

  Shemona’s face dragged down in a grimace of tears.

  “Tell Miss you’re okay, Shemona, or she isn’t going to leave us alone.”

  “Geraldine.”

  “What it is, Miss, if you must know, is her toe. Shemona has a poorly toe.”

  “Oh,” I said with some surprise. “May I have a look at it?”

  Geraldine let out a long, world-weary sigh, implying a very particular type of denseness on my part. “She’s not going to show it to you, Miss. She won’t even show it to Auntie Bet. I’m the only one she shows things to, because I’m her sister.”

  I turned Shemona’s chair so that she was facing me and bent to remove her shoe. “Here, let’s take your shoe off, Shemona. Let’s see what’s the matter.”

  Shemona began to cry in earnest then and shifted quickly around in the chair so that her feet were back under the table again.

  Across from us, Shamie groaned audibly. “I’m bloody sick of this toe,” he said. “Aunt Bet took her to the doctor’s last night, and she wouldn’t show him her toe either. She had a proper, screaming fit right in the doctor’s surgery. And we were supposed to go to McDonald’s afterward for our tea, but we didn’t get to, did we? Because you acted so daft at the doctor’s.”

  “Shemona didn’t want him to see her toe,” Geraldine replied.

  “Why ever not?” Shamie asked. “What did she think he was going to do? Cut it off?”

  “Hey,” I said, and frowned in Shamie’s direction. “That’s not going to help.”

  “Well, I’m getting fed up, having all my fun ruined. She’s getting dafter by the minute, her and Geraldine both. I’ve got it all the time, here and at home too. Twenty-four hours a day of these wee girls’ daftness.”

  “Well, she’s not going to talk to a doctor, is she?” Geraldine retorted. “Shemona never talks in places like that.”

  “She doesn’t talk because you make her not talk. You don’t let her talk. You don’t let anyone talk. No one can get a word in edgewise,” said Shamie.

  “Bloody, stinking liar. Shemona won’t talk at the doctor’s because he’s a man. Shemona doesn’t like men.”

  “And you know why, Geraldine?” Shamie asked, his voice grown loud. He turned abruptly to me. “You know why Shemona doesn’t like men, Miss? Because of Geraldine. Geraldine scares her. She keeps telling Shemona the men are coming. That they’re going to come and burn our house down.”

  This proved too much for Shemona, who bolted off the far side of the chair, knocking it over in her haste. She ran around the corner of the shelving and disappeared in among the aisles of the library. Frantic sobbing filtered through the stacks of journals.

  “There. See what you’ve done?” Geraldine said. “Are you happy now, Shamie?”

  “I didn’t do it, you did.”

  “Stop!” I said in a voice that left no doubt that I meant it. And everyone did, instantly. Even Lad and the other children, some distance from us, froze. The sound of Shemona’s weeping engulfed us.

  Geraldine regarded us with an unreadable expression on her face. She had half risen from her seat, leaning forward on the table, and now she remained in that position, motionless. For a long moment, she glanced from me to Shamie and back to me again, and I didn’t have a clue as to what she was thinking. Then, in a slow and deliberate fashion, she pushed her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose and sat down.

  “I think you and I have some talking to do later,” I said to her, quietly.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you, Miss.”

  Rising, I went to find Shemona.

  Ladbrooke had already gone to her. Crouched at the far end of one of the aisles, her arms protectively up over her head, Shemona was sobbing hysterically.

  “Can you manage things for a while?” I asked Ladbrooke. “I want to take her down to the lounge, if no one’s there. I’ll try to be back before lunch.”

  “Don’t worry if you’re not. We’ll be okay,” Lad replied and returned to the others.

  I struggled to carry Shemona the distance from our room to the teachers’ lounge, two long corridors and a flight of stairs away. As tiger-fierce as ever, she wasn’t going to accept this activity easily. I had to put her down twice to renew my grip. And the entire distance, she screamed like a trapped banshee. Mercifully, the teachers’ lounge was empty, because I don’t know where I would have gone otherwise. It would have been almost a physical impossibility for me to have moved her much farther on my own. Managing to get the door open and pull us inside, I collapsed with her onto the floor and pushed the door shut with my foot. For several minutes thereafter I did nothing other than contain her. She writhed and wriggled, struggled and fought, bit and scratched and kicked. And screamed. I had never come across a small kid with bigger lungs than Shemona had.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, she wore down. She began to choke over her screams, and then gagged. I pushed her forward onto her stomach in case she vomited and then tightened my hold so that she couldn’t move any longer. At last she collapsed forward onto the floor and lay there, cheek pressed against the linoleum. She gasped noisily for breath.

  I let go. Rising up, I dusted myself off, then bent and picked Shemona up. Carrying her to the sofa, I set her down gently and brought over the box of tissues. Shemona shuddered, her body racked with hiccuping spasms from the tears. Her face had gone red and blotchy. Her nose ran. The jerk-and-snuffle aftermath of her explosion lasted nearly as long as the incident itself. Shemona just couldn’t quite get herself back together. I sat, waiting, and watched the hand on the clock jump the minutes. When she was finally quiet beside me, I handed her one last tissue.

  “Here. Take this and blow your nose.”

  She did.

  “Now, lie down. I want to look at your foot.”

  She shook her head.

  “Lie down, Shemona. Here. Put this pillow right there and then you can put your hea
d on it and your feet in my lap. Lie down.”

  “No.”

  “You can put off your auntie and your uncle and the doctor and everyone else by acting like this, but you can’t put me off. You’ve met your match, kiddo. Now lie down.”

  She looked back at me, sizing me up. I couldn’t believe she had any energy left to resist with. I hardly did.

  Finally, she acquiesced. Adjusting the throw pillow on the sofa, she lay down with her head on it and cautiously put her feet into my lap. I began to undo the laces of her jogging shoe. Carefully, I removed her sock.

  She had an ingrown toenail. The swollen skin around the nail was tight and shiny. All the thrashing around we’d done earlier must have been agonizing. Not knowing what the problem was, I’d not removed her shoes as I usually did when one of the children lost control. Now I was glad I hadn’t, because it would have resulted in excruciating pain. Pressing gently around the toenail, I saw pus come up.

  “You stay right where you are for a minute. I’m going to go down to the office and get some antiseptic cream and things for this. I’ll be right back.” I rose.

  “Is it going to hurt?” Shemona asked, her brow puckering.

  I smiled. “It hurts already, doesn’t it? I’m going to try and make it better.”

  When I returned, Shemona was still lying just as I had left her on the couch. She was sucking her thumb.

  Lifting her feet, I sat back down again. I propped a pillow under the infected foot in my lap and began to clean the toe with a piece of gauze. “I’ll try very hard not to hurt, but I need to clean this off. You tell me if I do hurt, and then I’ll try to be more careful. Okay?”

  Intent on not causing any more pain than was absolutely necessary, I worked very, very slowly with gauze and bits of cotton to clean away the pus. We didn’t talk for some time. The thumb sucking became less noisy. Shemona relaxed back against the pillows and turned her head. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that she was surveying the room now. She looked at the worktable, up at the ceiling. Then I clipped a small V in the toenail to relieve the pressure on the sides of the nail. That made her flinch, and she looked back to my face, but she didn’t speak.