Just Another Kid

by Torey Hayden

  She nodded.

  “Ring Tom first, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to let him know where you are. Then we’ll go get something to eat.”

  “He won’t care where I am.”

  “Just do it, okay?”

  We went to a small, self-service restaurant that specialized in soup and sandwiches. I wanted a place where we could relax and not be hurried, but I was reluctant to go home. After the tumultuous afternoon, I wasn’t up to an evening entirely on my own with Ladbrooke. I needed other people around and the reassurance of normal life.

  The restaurant was ideal: dark, quiet and fairly empty. The booths, while large and comfortable, still afforded me a view of the other patrons and the serving area without infringing on our privacy. Lad took a bowl of soup and a glass of milk, while I wolfed down soup, three sandwiches and dessert to appease an adrenaline-crazed body. Afterward, we relaxed in companionable silence while I had a cup of coffee.

  “You know,” Ladbrooke said after a while, “the thing that hurt me the most about Bobby’s suicide was that I never saw it coming. I never had an inkling. I wasn’t just saying it; we were close. But he never said a word to me about it, never said he was depressed, never said things were going badly for him.”

  “I can imagine it must have been a shock.”

  She nodded. “I kept asking and asking myself why. I still do, sometimes. Why? Everything seemed to be coming together so well for him. He had a job he loved. He was earning a good salary. He had Sarah. So why did he do it?”

  I shook my head.

  “That eats at me, even now, even after—what?—almost six years. It always made the guilt worse to cope with, because I thought it was my fault for not seeing it coming, not preventing it. That, or God forbid, even worse, I mean, what if it was just intended as a gesture, if he’d just needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it? And if I’d gotten there that day when I’d told him I would, then … maybe it would have been enough to … I don’t know. I suppose it’s useless to keep thinking about it.”

  “It’s useless to keep blaming yourself for it.”

  She nodded wearily. “Maybe so. But it’s next to impossible not to. I even dream about it sometimes, about coming just in time … but even in my dreams, I never save him.”

  A small silence came between us.

  “I told you Bobby wasn’t much of a talker. I wonder now if perhaps he didn’t have the same kind of problem with expression as I do. He was better at getting on with people, but he never talked easily. In a way, that was nice, because he was the only person I never felt I had to talk with. But now, of course, I realize he must have had a whole lot more going on inside his head than I ever knew about. The sad thing is, if I didn’t know about it, chances are no one else did either.”

  She sighed. “What I still can’t figure out is why he did it then.” She looked over, glancing in my direction but not directly at me. “You have to sort of understand about our family. We had a really rough childhood, Bobby, Kit and me. Not in the physical sense. Nobody abused us. But emotionally …”

  I nodded.

  “Kit never did manage. He had problems right from the start, both in school and at home. He was taken into care once, when he was about nine, because he got into trouble with the police. Even now he’s not gotten himself together. He’s been in and out of jail and detox centers all his life. But Bobby and me, we always managed to do all right. We kept each other going. We called ourselves the Two Musketeers when we were little. Not too original, I know, but that’s what we were. We used to make these blood pacts with one another—you know, one for all, all for one. We got really serious about it and cut our fingers and all that. I mean, it was silly. He already was my blood brother. But it worked for us. It got us over the rough bits and kept us going. We survived.”

  Ladbrooke grew thoughtful.

  “So I kept asking myself, why did he commit suicide then, when he’d finally made it, when he was finally free? If he was the kind of person to do that sort of thing, why hadn’t he done it earlier when he had all the reasons?”

  “That’s impossible to say.”

  “Bobby’s killing himself completely devastated me. For a long time, for like a year or more, I was absolutely numb. And then everything just fell apart. I lost all faith in myself. To have missed seeing something that catastrophic coming, to have misjudged someone I knew so well and loved so much—how the hell could I possibly trust my judgment on anything else?” She paused. “When I discovered I didn’t know Bobby, I suddenly felt like I didn’t know me any more either.”

  She exhaled a long, slow breath.

  “I spent a lot of time thinking about suicide myself after that. Before, it had never really occurred to me, but then suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. My biggest obstacle was not having the courage to actually do it. I made the plans. God, I made the plans at least a hundred times, and on each occasion, I fully intended to carry them out. But I was always too big a chicken in the end, which, like everything else in my life, left me feeling like shit.”

  A quiet, grim silence wrapped itself around us. Ladbrooke just sat, her thoughts absorbing her. I glanced around. The restaurant had emptied further. There were only about half a dozen people there.

  “Bobby’s doing that destroyed the whole image I’d worked up of us. I’d always thought of us as a couple of real survivors, the kind of people who can always make it, in spite of the odds. I used to get by on that quite a lot. Things’d go wrong, something awful’d happen, and I’d manage to keep going because I had this image of myself as a real survivor. But it was an image I’d built up from childhood, from Bobby and me sticking together through thick and thin, from all the Two Musketeers junk. It wasn’t an image of me; it was an image of us. Both of us, together. Because that’s why we survived. Then, all of a sudden, wham. He didn’t survive. And my world fell apart.

  “I couldn’t believe it. You see, he was always better than I was. He was smarter. He was really well liked; people got on with him. He never drank. I was the one who was constantly screwing up, not him. He was the strong one. And then … and then, I mean, what hope is left after that? What’s the point of trying?”

  “But you are a survivor, Lad,” I said.

  “I don’t know. If you’re drowning and someone saves you, it doesn’t mean you won’t drown the next time you fall in the water.”

  “But I don’t think you will.”

  She shrugged noncommitally.

  “You have survived, Ladbrooke, and that’s been no mean feat, by the sound of it. You’re a great deal stronger than you give yourself credit for.”

  “I wish I felt like it sometimes.”

  Eventually, Lad came home with me, and I made a place for her to sleep on the couch. Beyond that, we were both too worn out to do anything other than collapse in front of the television. Ladbrooke, stretched out on top of the bedding on the couch, fell asleep during the ten o’clock news. I turned off the set and went in to have a long soak in the tub to ease still-tense muscles along my back.

  Tired as I was, I was unable to fall asleep immediately. The events of the day kept replaying themselves. However, my thoughts were haunted mostly by Bobby, whom I’d never seen, not even in a photograph, yet could visualize with heart-wrenching clarity. I wasn’t seeing a twenty-six-year-old suicide victim, but rather a little boy, undoubtedly like so very many of the little boys I’d encountered in my career. He was the small, quiet one in the back of the classroom. He was the kid we forgot at the fairgrounds because we didn’t even realize he was missing. He was the boy who continually came and pressed his face against the window of my classroom door but who always disappeared before I opened it. That was Bobby, the child no one quite managed to notice.

  I visited Geraldine in hospital the following afternoon. Although her injury was not serious, there was some concern about possible nerve damage; thus, the doctors had decided to keep her for a period of observation.


  She was in a room with three other children. When I first came into the room, it took me a moment to recognize her. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and it completely altered the appearance of her face. She looked innocent, an attribute I hadn’t previously associated with Geraldine.

  “Hi, pumpkin,” I said. “How are you?”

  She smiled when she realized it was me. I don’t think she could see very far without her glasses.

  “Here, I’ve brought you something.” I handed her a small package.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it and see.”

  For a few moments she struggled one-handed to open the gift and then looked up. “Could you help me, please?”

  I reached over and held it for her while she undid the wrapping. It was a very small stuffed lion. She smiled at it and cuddled it against her cheek. “Thank you, Miss.”

  “I thought of you, when I saw that,” I said. “Brave as a lion. You were yesterday, you know. With all those men working over you. And going in the ambulance with Mr. Cotton. You were very brave.”

  She squinted slightly, regarding my face. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”

  “No. It was a rather unfortunate thing to have done, but I’m not mad.”

  “Is Ladbrooke coming to see me?”

  “Well, not today, I think. But if you’re still here on Monday, I’m sure she’ll come.”

  “Is she mad at me?”

  “No. You frightened her. I think she was more scared than you were, but she isn’t angry. Neither of us is.”

  Geraldine looked down at the toy lion. She stroked its mane tenderly.

  Sitting in the chair beside the bed, I watched her. I felt a desperate need to talk to her. With sudden, distressing clarity I was having to face the fact that somehow, somewhere along the line, she had slipped away from me.

  “I wish I’d known that you felt so very unhappy yesterday afternoon,” I said quietly. “Perhaps if I’d known, I could have done something to help.”

  Geraldine shrugged slightly. Most of her attention still appeared to be on the lion, which she was petting over and over again.

  I glanced at the other children in the room. They weren’t being noisy or intrusive, but this wasn’t a very private place. Lowering my head, I studied my hands for a moment. Would it be better to wait until another time, until she was well again, until we had more privacy? Or had I lost too many chances already, waiting for a “better time” to come along?

  Geraldine did not look at me.

  “Can you tell me why you did what you did?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Was it Shemona saying she was never going back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can appreciate where that must have hurt you a lot, her saying that. Sometimes things kind of pile up, and something hurtful like that can push us into doing things we ordinarily wouldn’t have done.”

  Geraldine continued to regard the toy lion. “Like I said, Miss, I don’t know.”

  I looked over. “Maybe we can try again. This was an unpleasant thing to happen, but now that it has, it’s probably better to put it behind us and concentrate instead on what we can do to keep you from feeling like you need to do that sort of thing again.”

  She shrugged.

  Silence came between us. Geraldine lifted the lion up to eye level and regarded it a long moment before finally reaching over and setting it on the table beside the bed. She then folded her hands in her lap. When I didn’t speak, she glanced briefly in my direction, catching my eye. She looked down then at the bandage on her left hand.

  “I’m to see a skytrist now,” she said. “Did Auntie Bet tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “His name’s Dr. Morris. I have to see him. It’s not a choice.”

  “I’m sure that will help.”

  Geraldine shrugged. “I don’t know. It’d be better if Auntie Bet used the money to just let me go home. That’d help me more.”

  Of the other children, only Shamie questioned what had happened to Geraldine’s hand. Living with her, he had, of course, much more opportunity to know it was a self-inflicted injury. No doubt the adults in the household had discussed the matter, and perhaps even Geraldine herself had said something. I didn’t know. However, it was clear the episode preyed on him. Finally, during a quiet moment the following week, I called him aside.

  “What’s wrong with her, that she does things like that?” he asked.

  “I think that there’ve been a lot of things in Geraldine’s life that have been hard for her to accept,” I said.

  “But why can’t she? Shemona’s accepted them. I’ve accepted them. Why can’t Geraldine?”

  “All things aren’t the same for all people, Shamie. Geraldine misses Belfast. She misses her home and her family and the way things were before. We need to have a lot of compassion in something like this, because Geraldine has had so much to adjust to. That’s why your aunt and uncle and the people at the hospital have decided that maybe Geraldine needs a little more help getting things straightened out. That’s why she’s going to be seeing Dr. Morris.”

  We were in the chalkboard arm of the room at the small student desk. Shamie sat, sprawled over his chair in a glum, almost recalcitrant pose, as if he were there to be reprimanded. “She’s ruining everything,” he said, his voice disgruntled.

  “How so?”

  “I just want it to be peaceful. But she’s ruining everything. She goes around yelling and screaming all the time. She says how nothing’s ever as good here as it was in Belfast. Nothing makes her happy.”

  I didn’t respond immediately, not knowing how to. I lowered my head and studied my hands while considering what to answer. When I next looked over, I saw tears in Shamie’s eyes.

  “She’s just like my brother Colin,” he said, his voice low.

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, she just is. The way she thinks.” He brought up a hand to wipe his eyes. “She wants things to be the way they aren’t. You know. Not real. She thinks everything’s going to be perfect, just if. If we were back in Belfast. If she was back at Greener Terrace. If. It doesn’t matter how you do it or what you do or who gets hurt, just so you can have what you want. That’s the way she thinks. And that it’ll all be perfect, when whatever it is happens. That’s all that counts.”

  “And your brother thinks that way too?”

  More tears came to his eyes. They clung to his long lashes. He nodded.

  “Is Colin in the IRA?”

  Again Shamie nodded. There was a pause. “Well, he’s in prison now. Him and Brendan both.” Shamie sniffed softly. “My daddy was always shouting at him. There was always shouting in our house. My daddy works with the dad of the fellow who got killed. He knew him. My daddy kept saying to Colin that he was just another man’s son.”

  Shamie straightened up in the chair and leaned forward. “But it never made any difference to Colin. All he cares about is the republic. That’s all he talks about. If Ireland was united tomorrow, I don’t know what Colin would do. Everything he’s ever done has been based on hating the Brits.”

  “And now you feel that Geraldine is the same as Colin?” I asked.

  Shamie nodded. “She is. There’s still yelling. There’s still fighting. I might as well be home. At least my mam was there.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  This brought the first sign of serious tears. He lowered his head and his mouth dragged down into a grimace, but he still did not weep openly. I rose and came to kneel next to him. I put my arm around his shoulders, and he willingly accepted comfort. I held him close for several moments, until the tears abated, then, rather than returning to my chair, I simply sat down on the floor beside him. This put me physically lower than Shamie, and he had a hard time avoiding my eyes.

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t answer.
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br />   “Are you still worried about the Troubles? About something happening to your family?”

  He shook his head. A small silence slipped in, and Shamie regarded his hands in his lap.

  He glanced at me, then back to his hands. He shook his head a second time. “I always thought Colin talked rubbish. I always, always did. It just can’t be right, people killing each other like that. But then … then the Brits arrested Uncle Paddy. And well, then what happened, happened …”

  A long pause followed. And then he said, “What if Colin’s right?”

  I looked at him.

  “If we all took up arms and defied them, and made them reunite us, maybe it would all stop. Maybe Colin’s right. What if he is? What do I do then?”

  Chapter 30

  Five weeks left. In the classroom, final arrangements were getting underway. Mrs. Samuelson was formally hired, and she came over for three days during the first week of May to see the classroom and the things we were doing. And, of course, she met Dirkie, Leslie and Geraldine, all of whom would be staying on with her. She was a pleasant woman in her mid-forties, who fortunately was unencumbered by long hair or cats.

  I pushed Shamie out of the nest. He had been attending his nonacademic classes three times a week for some time, but I finally got him to go to the junior high half days. This time, with lots of encouragement, we were successful. Our classroom, however, felt empty with both him and Shemona gone in the mornings.

  Mariana was confirmed for third grade in a school not too far from her home. Although I did not personally know her classroom teacher, she had come on good recommendation from the resource teacher in that school, whom I knew and respected. So the placement seemed as good as we could hope for. Mariana went over for two half days to acquaint herself with the setup, and I spent an afternoon after school with her new teacher, passing all the pertinent information on to her.

  Shemona was slated for first grade in the Catholic school that her cousins attended. Although there was no chance for her to visit the class while it was in session, Ladbrooke and I took her over in the afternoon after school was out, and we all met several of the sisters who would be involved with Shemona and her new teacher. Shemona was pleased that two of her three cousins who were in the school had had this same teacher, so we felt considerable confidence in the placement.