by Torey Hayden
Not a word out of her.
I regarded her. “Do you want to come in? Is that it?”
Still she gazed at me, her head cocked to overcome her hunched-over position.
“I am working hard,” I murmured. “If you come in, you’ll need to play very quietly.”
Without so much as a nod, she slipped around me and into the classroom.
Scuttling over to the cabinet containing jigsaw puzzles, Jadie took one out and hobbled back across the room with it. Putting it down opposite me at the table, she slumped into a chair, then dumped the puzzle out and began assembling it. Furtively, I watched her. She’d changed from school and was now wearing a ratty-looking pink sweatshirt and a worn pair of corduroy pants. Her long dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. Studying her hair, I wondered if it was possible to get a brush through it. Probably not.
Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed in complete silence while I finished my plans. Jadie worked diligently on the jigsaw. She was good at them and had done this one several times before, but it was a large one with nearly a hundred pieces, so it kept her busy. I found myself watching her more and more. Try as I did, I couldn’t keep my mind on my work. What kept intruding were thoughts of that video.
“Sit up more, would you?” I murmured, my voice barely audible.
Jadie paused, her hand, holding a puzzle piece, halted midmotion.
“Show me how you do it.”
Maybe it wasn’t my voice that had made her pause. Maybe she had merely been trying to locate where the puzzle piece went. Anyway, she found it and fitted it in. Then she reached for another piece and continued on, as if I had never spoken.
“Show me how you straighten up. Like you did on the videotape.”
There was still no indication that she was listening to me.
“I know, Jadie.”
Very faintly, she nodded but she still didn’t look up.
Silence.
“All right,” I said and closed my plan book. “That’s okay. The choice is yours.”
Jadie lifted her head. She lifted it right up, so that she was looking at me squarely and not through her eyebrows as usual, but she didn’t straighten up any farther. I saw her face fully so seldom that the blueness of her eyes caught me by surprise. They were so faultlessly blue, the intensity of the color heightened by the dark lashes.
She searched my face. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice oddly plaintive.
“Torey,” I said, not quite sure what she meant.
“Torey?” It was said like a foreign word. “Torey? You’re Torey?”
“Yes.”
“Torey?” she repeated. “But who are you?”
Unable to understand what she wanted to know, I hesitated.
“Who are you?”
“A teacher,” I said, uncertainly. “Someone who helps children.”
For the first time, her eyes left my face. A deeply puzzled expression on her face, she turned and glanced around the room, then down at the jigsaw. “But who are you?” she asked a fourth time.
Bewildered, because I could tell I wasn’t responding in a way that answered her question, I replied, “Who do you think I am?”
Jadie paused a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe you’re God.”
The following afternoon, I was in the cloakroom, sitting at the teacher’s desk, when I heard the snick of the latch on the classroom door. While I could see into the classroom from the desk, the door was out of my line of vision, so I didn’t know who it was.
“Yes? Lucy?” I queried, thinking perhaps she had come to drop off the dittos she’d promised earlier.
No answer.
Rising, I stuck my head around the cloakroom door. There was Jadie. “You like coming in for an after-school visit, don’t you?” I said.
A faint nod.
“I don’t think this can happen every night,” I said. “Sometimes I have work to do outside the room, and I can’t leave you in here alone. And if Mr. Tinbergen gets wind of it and doesn’t like it, then there’ll have to be a stop to it. Yes? You understand? Because he kind of has a rule about children in the building after hours.”
She gave an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and hobbled off to the corner where the animals were kept. Gently raising the top of the rabbit’s cage, she lifted him out and cradled him in her arms. I returned to the cloakroom and went back to work.
Twenty minutes must have passed with Jadie playing quietly in the classroom, and I’d almost forgotten she was there. I couldn’t see her from where I was and she made virtually no noise. Then she appeared in the doorway between the classroom and the cloakroom. In her hand she carried a sheet of paper.
Normally, the cloakroom wasn’t lit. There were two doors in the long, narrow room, the one Jadie was standing in, and another at the far end, which opened into the hallway. Usually, these gave sufficient light for putting away coats and boots. Now, however, because I was working at the desk, I had the far door into the hallway shut and the overhead light on.
Jadie paused in the doorway, and her expression approached astonishment, as she scanned the high, old-fashioned walls, the ledges above the rows of hooks meant for storing lunchboxes and books, the hooks themselves, the benches beneath. Tentatively, she stepped inside.
“You haven’t had a good look at it with the lights on?” I asked.
“Usually, it’s dark in here.”
“That’s because I don’t like to put the light on during the day. We always forget it and that wastes electricity. And there’s no window in here to give natural light, but we usually get enough from the hallway and the classroom.”
“There’s no windows,” Jadie murmured, looking up.
“No.”
Once again she scrutinized the room carefully, then her attention went back to the paper in her hand. “Can I use this?” she asked. “Can I draw on it?”
“Yes, if you want.”
She disappeared back into the classroom but within moments had returned, clutching the paper under her arm and carrying a margarine tub full of crayons. Laying the things down on the linoleum floor of the cloakroom, she knelt beside them and, without further comment to me, she began to draw.
The paper was a large 2 x 3-foot sheet, and Jadie colored virtually all of it black, except for a tiny area down in the right-hand corner. Here were two minute, faceless, bell-shaped figures.
“That looks interesting,” I said, leaning forward across my desk.
Jadie lifted the drawing up and examined it. “It’s me and Amber there,” she said, touching the figures.
“I see.”
Silence followed while both of us studied the picture. I then threw caution to the wind and said what was on my mind, although it probably wasn’t ideal psychological technique. “You know, Jadie, to tell you the truth, those don’t look much like little girls to me. They’re a curious shape.”
“That’s because I just said it was me and Amber. I didn’t say we were little girls. We’re not there. We’re ghosts.”
“Oh. I see. This is you and your sister dressed up like ghosts. Is it at Halloween time?”
“No. We’re not dressed up. We are ghosts.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“Which one is you and which is Amber?”
Laboriously rising from where she had been working, Jadie brought the picture over and laid it on the desk in front of me. Taking a pencil from the holder, she wrote her name under one figure and her sister’s under the other.
“What about your mom and dad? And Sapphire?”
“Don’t got no mom or dad when me and Amber are ghosts. And Sapphire’s too little. She don’t know how to do it.”
“I see.” I leaned forward to examine the picture more carefully. “Just the two of you, then? It sounds like it might be lonely, just two little girls.”
“But like I said, we aren’t little girls. We’re ghosts. Ghosts don’t get lonely. It’s nice being alone, when you’re a ghost. We just
float around, go way up high, and look down on people doing things. But they can’t see us, ’cause we’re invisible, so they don’t know we’re doing it.”
I nodded. “That does sound interesting. What kinds of things do you see people doing?”
“Just things. Like going to bed or watching TV. We go and look in all the other people’s houses.”
“I see.”
“I don’t mind when it goes dark, then. Gotta be dark to be a ghost. But if it goes too dark before you get out, you can’t do it. You can’t get out of your body and you get shut in.”
I looked over, perplexed. “What do you mean?”
An expression flickered across Jadie’s face that I couldn’t identify—alarm? concern?—I wasn’t sure. She turned her head away sharply and didn’t answer.
“What’s the matter? Does it frighten you to talk about this?”
A pause. “Well, really I shouldn’t be telling you.”
“Why?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Why?”
“’Cause what goes on inside your head is private.” She looked over. “That’s right, isn’t it? You shouldn’t know private things.”
I shrugged faintly and gave a half smile. “Sometimes it doesn’t hurt.” I tried to keep the tone conversational. “Besides, I’m interested. How do you get to be a ghost? Could I do it? Would you be able to teach me?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, her voice dubious, then she hesitated, her gaze fixed on the drawing. “Well, you sort of make yourself go quiet. Real still. Like you’re dead. Then, when you got all of you that way, you just sort of slip out of your body and go away.” Another pause and she frowned at the picture. “But I don’t know if a grown-up could do it.”
“Is it easy for you?” I asked.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“How do you come back into your body afterwards?”
Jadie didn’t answer.
“You don’t know?”
She shook her head. “I just wake up in the morning and I’m back.”
“A dream?”
Jadie frowned. “No. I didn’t say that. It’s not just a dream. It’s something I can really do. It’s just that I try to stay out, but I always fall asleep.”
“It sounds as if you don’t really want to come back.”
“Well, see, if you’re a ghost when the sun comes up, then you stay a ghost forever. That’s what Tashee says. You won’t ever get back into your body after that, because if the sun comes up on it with no person in it, it dies.”
“Oh.”
“So I always try to stay awake. I drink Coke. There’s always Coke to drink, but then I get sleepy. I fall asleep then and that makes me go back into my body. So when I wake up in the morning, I’m always still here.”
“And you would rather have stayed a ghost?”
Jadie nodded.
The conversation seemed to peter out then. We both stared at the picture, as silence enveloped us.
“I like this drawing,” I said at last. “Do you suppose I could have it?”
Jadie looked over. “What would you do with it?”
“Just keep it. Maybe put it up on the wall. It’s a good picture. Maybe the others would like to see it.”
“No,” Jadie replied, alarm in her voice. “I don’t want anybody else to see it.”
“No? Why not?”
“’Cause I told you. ’Cause it’s private what goes on inside you. Besides, if you put it on the wall, spiders might walk on it. Spiders might see. Then the policemen would come.”
She completely lost me on that one. “Policemen?” I said in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”
“They’d take me away for lying. They’d put me in jail. I might die. Sometimes policemen kill you with their guns, if they think you’re trying to get away. And if they got you in the jail, sometimes they kill you in a chair.”
Seeing that she was becoming agitated, I quickly changed tack. “So Tashee knows about being a ghost, too?”
Jadie nodded. “Yeah. Tashee’s the one who taught me and Amber how to do it.”
“That was clever of her.”
Jadie nodded again. “Tashee knows lots and lots of stuff.”
“Sounds like Tashee’s very special to you.”
For the first time, a slight hint of a smile touched Jadie’s lips. “Yeah, she’s my best friend. I like her better than anybody.”
“Is she in school here? She’s not in Mrs. McLaren’s class, is she? Is she a third-grader?”
Jadie looked at me, her expression bemused. “Well, of course not,” she said, her tone implying that I’d asked a very silly question indeed. “That’s why me and Amber turn into ghosts.”
“What do you mean?”
“So’s we can go visit Tashee. Tashee can’t come here. She’s been dead more than a year now.”
Chapter Six
I was disappointed when Jadie did not show up after school the next afternoon. Her appearance had been an intrusion initially, but after two visits, I was curious about her and looked forward to seeing her again in the undisturbed quiet of the late afternoon. Once the children were gone and I’d done what I needed to outside the classroom, I brought my work out to the table in the classroom, thinking this would make me more accessible than the cloakroom had done. However, Jadie went home at the end of the school day, as usual, and did not come back again. On two or three occasions, I thought I’d heard her outside in the hall, but whenever I went to the door, no one was there.
It wasn’t until well into the next week that Jadie again appeared after hours. It was quite late in the day—after 4:30—and I’d finished all my work, had made a tour through the teachers’ lounge, and was now back at my desk in the cloakroom, paging through a teaching magazine. Click went the latch on the classroom door, then no sound.
“Yes?” I called.
Jadie appeared in the doorway. She’d been home and changed and was now wearing a horrible home-made jog-suit with rickrack stitched unevenly around the neck and sleeves.
“Hello,” I said, and smiled.
Jadie stepped just inside the cloakroom. Twisting her head, she surveyed the small room very thoroughly. Above the coat hooks were the shelves, and above the shelf on the right ran two heating pipes. They were about three inches each in diameter and entered the room through the far end wall to run parallel about two feet above the shelf for the entire length of the room before disappearing out through the wall behind the desk. In fact, the room was well supplied with pipes, because there was also a large plumbing pipe about eight inches in diameter that rose vertically through the floor in the corner near the far door and disappeared through the ceiling. All these things Jadie surveyed carefully. Then she turned her head and looked at the door, which was open between the cloakroom and the classroom. This was a heavy, old-fashioned door made of solid wood. Even without touching it, one could tell it was strong. There was a window in our classroom door, but there wasn’t in this, nor in the one between the cloakroom and the hall. Jadie turned and put a hand out to feel the door.
Jadie examined the door minutely. She ran her hands over the wood, lingering to feel the grain. She pursued the ornamental molding with her fingers, then came to the knob and lock. These, like the door itself, were old-fashioned, and there was a proper keyhole. All of this, too, Jadie examined carefully, poking her little finger into the keyhole, turning the knob, watching the latch go in and out.
This whole procedure took a full ten minutes, and, throughout, I didn’t say a word. Still at my desk, I simply watched. Jadie didn’t seem particularly interested in my presence. All her attention was focused on the door. Gently, she eased it away from its stop and pushed it closed, shutting the two of us into the cloakroom. Then she turned the knob and opened it slightly. She fingered the latching mechanism.
“Here’s the deadbolt,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. She touched the bolt in its housing inside the latch. Then she shut the door again, t
ried the knob, opened it, felt the lock, closed it. This she did at least six or seven times before turning abruptly to me. “You got a key for this? Can you lock it?”
I nodded.
Her face brightened. “Give it to me, okay? Lemme lock it shut.”
Fascinated by her behavior, I agreed and dug the key out of my desk drawer. Jadie deftly slipped it into the keyhole and turned it. The deadbolt slid into place with a satisfying thunk. “That’s good,” she murmured in a pleased tone. Removing the key, she tried to open the door but, of course, it didn’t move. Then she unlocked the door, opened it, stuck her head into the classroom, pulled back, and slammed the door shut, relocking it. From there, she scuttled down to the other door, which opened into the hallway.
“Does the key work in this one, too?” she asked me. “Can we lock this one?” But before I could reply, she was already trying the key in the lock. It did fit both doors, and a satisfied smile crossed Jadie’s face as she tugged at the newly locked door. Abruptly, she let go and scuttled back to the other door to try it again. This, still locked, too, refused to budge. “Got to cover this up,” she muttered and came to the desk. Seizing a foil of masking tape, she tore a strip off and placed it carefully over the keyhole. “Key’s in the other one. Can’t see in, but got to cover this one up.” Then, unexpectedly, she veered away from the door. Bent double, she began hurriedly moving around the circumference of the small room, her eyes on the floor.
“Are you looking for something?” I asked.
“Spiders. No spiders,” she muttered. “There’s no spiders in here.”
“No. Mr. Tinbergen has a man who comes around and sprays. He was just here in February. So there’re no spiders.”
Jadie looked up. “No spiders. No windows. Nobody can get in.”
“No.”
She scuttled to the door that led into the classroom and tried it once more to see if it would open. Being locked, it didn’t budge, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, putting one foot against the door frame to give herself more leverage. When the door still failed to move, Jadie did something totally unexpected. She laughed.
I had never heard Jadie laugh. Indeed, I’d never seen more than the occasional faint smile, but now she laughed merrily, the sound filling the cloakroom.