by Torey Hayden
Finally, the small square of wood came free. Geraldine still did not lift her arm, but one of the medics did. Another scooped up Geraldine herself. Frank had departed earlier to call the Lonrhos. He was going to accompany Geraldine in the ambulance to the hospital and wanted her family there at the other end.
I went upstairs and out the front door of the building to the ambulance with Geraldine and the medics. It wasn’t until we actually reached the vehicle and the men started bringing out the stretcher that Geraldine showed any real sign of life.
“Miss,” she cried out suddenly. “Don’t let them take me, Miss. Miss! Miss!”
The ambulance men laid her gently onto the stretcher, and I bent down to reassure her. She clutched at me with her uninjured hand.
“You’re going to be okay, lovey. Mr. Cotton’s going to come in the ambulance with you and ride along to the hospital. And your Aunt Bet will be there at the other end. Everything’s going to be all right. They’ll take good care of you.”
“No! Don’t leave me, Miss! Please, don’t let them take me!”
I hugged her. I clutched her upper torso, pulled her against me and hugged her. I kissed her face. Frank was there then and he gently unlocked Geraldine’s fingers from my shirt. The medics lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, and Frank climbed in beside it. Geraldine made no further sound.
Frantic about the other children, I returned as fast as I could to Carolyn’s room. Carolyn still wasn’t in there and neither was Lad. Poor Joyce, and Katy from the office, had tried to create some kind of order. There were games and toys out, and when I arrived, Joyce was trying to get the children to sing along to a record, but about half of them were up, moving aimlessly about the room. Of mine, only Shemona was actually singing. Shamie and Mariana sat glumly at a far table. Leslie was on the floor, her expression entirely blank. Dirkie was squeezed under the small sand-tray table.
“Come on, you lot,” I said from the doorway. My children rose and came over. “Thanks, Joyce. Thanks, Katy.”
Joyce nodded wearily.
“What’s happened to Geraldine?” Shamie asked when we were in the hallway.
“She’s been hurt. She was in where she shouldn’t have been, playing with the carpenters’ tools, and she’s hurt herself. Mr. Cotton called an ambulance, and they’ve taken her to the hospital. I don’t think it’s very serious. I think she’ll be okay again quite soon, but we’ll have to wait to hear more.”
“What did she do?”
“She hurt her hand.”
Upstairs, I opened the door and turned on the lights. Glancing up at the clock above the chalkboard, I was shocked to see the time. I hadn’t realized just how slowly the men had been working to free Geraldine. There were only about twenty minutes left until the end of the school day. That was much too short a time even to get a decent discussion going. Casting around for something to calm the children down and allow me the opportunity to talk to them each individually, I suggested they take a big box containing the crayons and felt-tipped pens down, and we would make pictures.
“What of, Miss?” Shemona asked.
“Anything you want, sweetheart. What do you feel like drawing?”
“Can I make a picture of my brother?” she asked. “Of him before they took him to the hospital?”
I nodded.
About halfway through the remaining time, I heard the classroom door open. I rose from my chair and went around the corner to see who it was. Carolyn stood just inside the door. When I appeared, she beckoned me over, pulling me into the hallway, out of the children’s hearing. Her expression was distraught.
“You need to go in with Ladbrooke,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“In the bathroom. She’s really upset.”
“I can’t just now. I’ve got the kids.”
“She’s sick to her stomach, Torey. She’s throwing up in there.”
“I’m sure she’s okay. She has the world’s touchiest stomach, and you just sort of have to ignore it. I’m sure she’s going to be all right.”
Carolyn shook her head. “You need to go in there and do something.”
“Carolyn, I can’t. I’ve got the kids. And the kids come first. You go in there and stay with her if you think she needs somebody now. I’ll be in as soon as I can. It won’t be that long.”
From the expression on Carolyn’s face, I think she was speaking as much from her own need as Ladbrooke’s. Lowering my head, I took a deep breath and held it a moment before expelling it slowly. We were suddenly coming apart at the seams, all of us, Carolyn and myself included. I took a second deep breath.
A look of helplessness crossed Carolyn’s features, and she let her shoulders drop. “This is awful,” she said softly, then there was a brief moment’s silence before she turned and left.
Back inside the classroom, the children were all sitting silently, watching for my return.
“Who was that?” Shamie asked.
“Miss Berry.”
“Where’s Ladbrooke?”
“She isn’t feeling very well at the moment,”
His gaze narrowed. “What’s going on anyway? Why’s everyone acting so funny?”
“Everybody’s just a little upset by Geraldine’s injury. It caught us unawares. We weren’t expecting her to get hurt and, because we care about her, it’s upset us all.”
“Is she dead?”
“No. No, of course not.” I smiled reassuringly at him. “No, don’t worry, love. Like I said, she isn’t even badly hurt. It just startled us, that’s all. But she’ll be quite fine again soon, I’m sure.”
There was a moment’s silence. Shemona had continued to color throughout most of Shamie’s conversation with me but at that point she put down her crayon and looked up. “I’ve seen a dead person before, Miss,” she said. “Outside our church after Mass. He was laying on the pavement. He had blood coming out of his head. Right there. He was dead. And I saw him.”
Shamie nodded. “So did I.”
As soon as I had taken the children to their rides, I returned to the building. Sprinting up the stairs two at a time, I headed for the second-floor girls’ rest room.
Ladbrooke was still inside one of the toilet stalls at the far end. The door to the stall was open, and she was sitting on the floor with her head back against the beige metal panel separating that toilet from the next one along. She had that horrible grayish cast to her skin that I’d previously associated with excessive drinking but now realized was probably more a result of the vomiting. She had clearly been crying, although by the time I came in, she was dry-eyed. She looked up when I approached. Her eyes had a dull, jaded look. Crossing her arms over her drawn-up knees, she lowered her forehead onto them.
I knelt down in the doorway of the toilet stall. Her hair had fallen forward, so I reached a hand out and gently put it behind her shoulder.
“What a day this has been,” I said softly.
Ladbrooke didn’t respond.
“That must have been dreadful for you, finding Geraldine like that. This is the wretched part of this work, the part they never tell you about in the job description.”
Still no response.
I sat down on the tile floor, crossing my legs Indian-style and resting my elbows on them. The day was certainly taking its toll on me too.
Lad turned her head. Still resting it on her crossed arms, she turned just enough to look at me. I smiled, a rather inept response for the moment at hand.
“It was like seeing Jesus, nailed to the Cross,” she said, her voice hoarse. Then she gazed past me to the metal door of the toilet stall.
“What exactly happened?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find her.”
“She’d just left the playground?”
Ladbrooke nodded slightly. “I went to see where she was. I thought maybe she’d gone to the toilet, but I wasn’t sure, so I went to check. But I couldn’t find her. So I started to look. And then …” She sat back, although she ke
pt her legs drawn up. “I looked through the door to that room as I was going by. I just glanced in, not expecting to see her there, because, see, I thought she might have gone to the auditorium. The kids do that once in a while if you don’t watch them. So I just happened to glance in, and there she was. I saw what she was doing. It stunned me so much, I just went tearing in to stop her. I didn’t think about anything else, like going back to get Carolyn, which is probably what I should have done. I just ran in and jerked the hammer out of her hand. And held on. I was afraid to let go, Torey. I was afraid she’d do something worse to herself if I didn’t hold onto her. I didn’t know what else to do. But then I was trapped there with her. The door had shut behind me. I just went in without thinking about propping the door open. And nobody could hear me. I yelled for help. I yelled for Carolyn, for Joyce, for you. For somebody to come help me. But nobody seemed to hear, because nobody came.”
“Oh, lovey,” I said.
She swallowed. There were tears in her eyes. “I wanted to stop her, Torey, but I didn’t know what to do.”
“You did okay, Lad. You did what you could.”
I could hear her rapid breathing.
“I hope you’re not feeling this was your fault, what Geraldine did,” I said. “It wasn’t. It’s Geraldine’s own problems coming to a head, and I suspect it’s been coming for a long time now.”
“I should have stopped her,” Ladbrooke said, her voice low. “If only I’d been a few minutes earlier … I mean, I did notice that she was gone from the playground. I thought it was just the toilet, so I didn’t do anything at first, but she didn’t have permission.”
“No, don’t think like that. It’s only destructive at this point.”
“But I wasn’t doing anything out there. It wasn’t as if I’d been busy. I was just leaning against the wall. It was sunny and …”
“Ladbrooke, don’t. It wasn’t your fault. How many thousands of times do we let the children go off the playground to use the toilets or get a drink or whatever? She could have done this, whether she had permission to go in the building or not. You can’t hawk over them every minute. That’d be more destructive in the end than this was. You did okay, Lad. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done any better if it had been me down there instead. It was just one of those dreadful things.”
Silence came. Ladbrooke brought her thumb up to chew the nail but didn’t. Instead, she rested the tip of it in her mouth, the way Shemona did when she tried to stop herself from sucking it. The silence grew deep and introspective.
“Can I tell you about something?” Ladbrooke asked after several minutes’ silence. Her eyes remained unfocused, her expression distant.
“Yes, of course.”
“You know, my brother Bobby …” and then she stopped.
Silence.
“What about him?” I asked.
She looked over at me, searched my face a moment and then looked away. Still she didn’t immediately respond.
“Bobby and I were close. We were only eighteen months apart. Less, actually, because my birthday’s July 21st and his is New Year’s Day.”
I nodded.
She looked at me. “I get the feeling sometimes that you don’t think I’ve ever been close to anyone. That I’m not very good at close relationships.” She paused. “Maybe I’m not in some ways. Maybe you’re right. But I was close to Bobby. I loved Bobby.
“See, I think it was growing up in our family that did it. You had to be close. What’s that adage? Comrades in adversity, or something. That was us. He was the only other person in the world who understood what it was like.”
She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back against the metal divider.
“Anyway, Bobby had an apartment near Asbury Park. That’s in New Jersey, down on the shore. And I was at Princeton on the project. I used to go over there all the time to see him. His apartment was really near the beach and we used to go down there all the time, walking, looking for things. You know, sort of beachcombing. It was just something we liked to do.
“Bobby was never a talker. Nobody in my family was. But he was easy to be with. I could just be myself and not worry. I came over once or twice a week, just to get away from Princeton. To get away from Tom sometimes too. I hid out with Bobby quite a lot.
“He had plenty else going on. He was an electronics engineer, and he was doing okay. He was into research too. And he had a girlfriend. Her name was Sarah. I’d met her a few times. I don’t think they were really serious. Just enjoying themselves.”
Ladbrooke fell silent then. There was a moment’s expectancy, as if she was still mid-thought, but then it passed, and a more complete silence came down around us.
I regarded her, trying to discern why she’d stopped talking.
She shifted position, pushing her hair back behind her shoulders.
“What next?” I asked.
“I went over this one time,” she said, her voice soft. Pulling her knees up, she hugged them. “It was September. A really clear day, you know, the kind you get in the fall. I was late. I’d said I’d be there by four, but then we had this meeting and I stayed longer than I’d meant to. Nothing special, but it made me late. And then the traffic was bad because it was a Friday. Still, I didn’t think anything about it. I hadn’t bothered to call him or anything. You see, usually I’m very punctual, but Bobby never was. He was terrible. He’d be, like, half an hour late somewhere, and that’d be early for him. No sense of time at all. So he wasn’t the kind to say anything if I was late. Usually, he never noticed.
“Anyhow, I got there about 5:30, I guess. I parked the car and went on up to his apartment. But when I got there, the door was locked. Now, this really surprised me because, normally, Bobby never locked the door if he knew I was coming. I had a key, but he usually left it open for me. His car was in the garage, so I’d assumed he was in. I couldn’t figure out why he’d locked his door.”
She paused.
“What I thought, see … was that he probably had Sarah in there. I thought they were in there, you know, making love or something, and he’d locked the door to keep me from barging in on them. So I decided to ring the bell. I rang and rang and rang. But no answer. So I thought he must have stepped out for a minute. There was a cash-and-carry down on the corner, so maybe he’d gone there. And I let myself in. All the lights were on. There had been a record on the stereo, but it was finished playing …”
She was silent a few moments, all her muscles rigid.
“It’s funny, you know, the way your mind works. The things you remember from an event. It’s always the little things, isn’t it? Little, tiny, unimportant things. Like I remember looking at the record on the stereo. It was Bach. Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze.’ And then I went out to the refrigerator to get something to drink. I was really thirsty and wanted something like a Coke, but all there was in there were a bunch of cans of that horrid cheap stuff that comes in flavors. You know, like black cherry and strawberry …”
“Lad, what happened?”
“I mean, what I remember is that, that stupid assortment of soft drinks in the refrigerator. Feeling really irritated that Bobby could never get in anything decent that I liked …”
She glanced over very quickly and our eyes met in that split second. She looked away. A long, intense silence followed. Her eyes filled with tears. They welled up, shimmered briefly on her lashes and then slowly trickled down over her cheeks.
“What had happened?” I asked.
“He’d killed himself. I went in to use the bathroom, and there he was. Hanging in the shower. And he’d left a little note on a piece of paper, lying on the edge of the bathtub. It said …” Her voice broke. “It said, ‘Sorry, Laddy.’ And that was all.”
Forehead on her drawn-up knees, she began to cry.
“He’d only been dead about an hour. That’s what the coroner said. If I’d only not been late that day … Why hadn’t I at least bothered to call? Why did I stand outside the d
oor all that time instead of bothering to get my key out? Why did I go stick my head inside the goddamned refrigerator first?”
“Oh, Lad, I am so sorry.”
Ladbrooke looked over at me. Her jaw was tight in an effort to control the tears, so momentarily she could not speak. She looked down, then back over again.
“Hold me, okay?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible. “Would you?”
And I did. In the dingy confines of the toilet stall, I reached over and pulled her against me and held on as tightly as I could.
Chapter 29
It took us a considerable amount of time to get out of the girls’ rest room and back into the classroom, and even then, we were both in a sorry state. My discomfort, however, was inconsequential compared with Ladbrooke’s. She sat at the table, drinking water out of my coffee mug and looking as if she had just survived a war. It was almost 5:30, but I didn’t have any of the necessary preparation work done for the next day, so I took a couple of aspirin and then sat down with my plan book to get on with things. Folding her arms on the tabletop, Lad lay her head down on them and closed her eyes. She remained like that throughout the time it took me to do the plans.
Finally, I rose from the table and went to put my work away. “I need to get something to eat,” I said, as I slid the plan book back into the filing drawer.
Ladbrooke straightened up. She rubbed her face and her eyes. “Don’t leave me alone just yet, okay?” She didn’t look up. “This has been a bit too much for me today. I don’t think I’m going to cope with it, not without having a drink.”
“Do you want to come with me? I’ve got to get something to eat, because my head is killing me. Do you want to come too?”