by Torey Hayden
Cocking her head, Jadie met my eyes. “Yeah,” she said hesitantly. “You know about it?” There was a note of relief in her voice. “You know? You saw it on your TV, too?”
Chapter Fifteen
On Wednesday afternoons, I allowed the children an hour of “free time” after recess to pursue whatever activities they might choose. For Brucie, this usually meant lying on the floor on his beloved blanket and mouthing objects. For Philip and Reuben, it was a chance to play at the sand table or with water in the sink, two activities both boys enjoyed tremendously and got spiritedly messy with. Jeremiah and Jadie, however, tended to have wider-ranging tastes. Sometimes they played, sometimes they drew or colored or read, sometimes they continued on with an interesting project brought over from another lesson. And Jeremiah, who had an unaccountable tidy streak, occasionally spent the time cleaning out my cupboards for me.
This particular afternoon, Jadie couldn’t settle at any activity. Up and down from her chair, she wandered around the classroom, absently touching the books on the shelf, the fish tank, the stacked work folders. In front of the bulletin board, she paused and studied the schoolwork pinned there. She gazed at the posters on the wall. At last she came to the shelves where I kept the art materials. She passed them by initially, then pulled herself back. There were several squeeze bottles of premixed tempera paints standing in a row. These she considered, then fingered. “Do you mind if I paint?” she asked at last, lifting up one of the bottles.
“No. The big sheets of painting paper are up there on top of the cabinet.” And I returned to what I was doing at the table.
Jadie busied herself setting up the easel, tacking on a sheet of paper, slipping on a paint shirt, and then filling one of the foam egg cartons we used as palettes with an assortment of colors. Picking up a paintbrush, she paused in front of the paper. When I next glanced up several minutes later, she was still standing in front of the blank paper.
A few moments later, Jadie, still clutching the paintbrush, came over to me. “Can I take my stuff in the cloakroom?” she asked softly.
“All of it? The easel and everything?”
She nodded.
“I suppose so. But could you manage without locking the door?”
“Can I lock the other one? Not this one into here, but the one into the hallway?”
I nodded.
Arduously, Jadie dragged the easel into the cloakroom, then came back to carry the paints, brushes, palette, and newspapers for the floor.
Needing to get a correcting pen from my desk, I went into the cloakroom just as Jadie was preparing to put her first strokes on the paper, and what I noticed immediately was that she was standing nearly erect. Startled by my noise, however, she jerked and hunched over.
“It’s only me,” I said and picked up my pen.
“Close the door when you go out, okay?” she asked. “And make everybody knock before they come in. Okay? If I don’t lock it, make everybody knock.”
We left Jadie on her own for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, during which time it was obvious that she was enjoying what she was doing. Several times she’d come out for additional materials, more paint, bigger brushes.
At last I went into the cloakroom to warn her about the impending bell. The small area was in artistic chaos. Bottles of paint were strewn about on the benches. Mucky, disintegrating paper cups were on the floor and an assortment of brushes, all covered in paint, lay everywhere.
“May I have a look?” I asked.
She nodded, so I came around in back of her.
It was a painting of a huge, black-striped cat, so enormous that it nearly filled the paper. Its head, outsized for the rest of its body, was turned outward, its eyes wide and white-rimmed with round, yellow pupils. Its ears were tall ovals, and a dense brush of whiskers stuck out from either side of the two dots representing its nose. The mouth, however, was its most prominent feature. Gigantic, it took up fully half of the cat’s face in a red, rather malevolent grin, which bared six broad, rectangular teeth. Indeed, given the size of the cat’s head in the picture, the red grin covered almost a quarter of the entire paper. There was no mistaking the amount of sheer aggression in the cat, so tightly confined on its page.
“That’s Jenny,” Jadie said. “Do you remember Jenny? She was my cat for a little time.”
“It’s beautiful. I really like this painting.”
“She looks like a tiger, don’t she?” Jadie said.
“Yes.”
Then Jadie picked up a cup containing orange paint. Without warning, she began to paint heavy bars downward across the whole picture.
Stunned by the sudden action, I couldn’t help expressing my dismay. “What did you do that for?”
“It wasn’t safe, leaving it like that. Tigers are dangerous. She might have gotten out and killed somebody.”
In an odd way, the bars looked more fierce than the cat had. What, I wondered, did they represent? Had the cat been symbolic of the frightening world around her and the suddenly applied bars an effort at safety? Or was the cat representative of her own internal aggressive feelings and the bars her struggle to keep them in?
“Did you mean to put those bars on when you started?” I asked.
Jadie burst unexpectedly into tears. “It’s ruined,” she wailed and reached to tear it from the easel.
“Hey ho, don’t do that. It’s still good.” I caught her hand.
“It’s ruined. I wanted just the tiger! I didn’t mean to do that and now it’s ruined.”
“No, it’s not. The tiger’s still there, underneath. We’ll get rid of the bars.” Reaching forward, I scraped much of the orange paint of one bar off with my finger. “We’ll need to let it dry some. If we try to do too much now, while it’s wet, it’ll just smear; but when it’s dry, I’ll show you how we can take the other colors and go right over that orange. We’ll just paint the bars out.”
Jadie calmed slightly.
“If you want a tiger, we can make it a tiger again. We’re in charge here, not the paint.”
“It’s not a tiger, really,” she murmured softly. “It’s Jenny.”
I hugged her gently against me.
“It’s Jenny’s ghost. She’s a tiger ghost. When she was alive, she looked like a cat on the outside, but really, she was a tiger. Most people didn’t know that, but I did. I could see in her and I could see she was strong. And so, when she died and became a ghost, it was a tiger ghost.”
“I see.”
Jadie remained cuddled against me. “That’s the real Jenny. Because, see, your body don’t count. It dies. Don’t matter what happens to it, ’cause in the end, it falls off your bones, but the ghost part of you stays alive. The only time you’re real’s when you’re a ghost.”
When Thursday arrived, Philip came roaring in, full of excitement. His natural mother, now living in Chicago, had sent him a little plastic ornament, the kind with a scene inside a water-filled dome casing, which, when shaken, produced falling snow. Although we were still a week from Halloween, it contained a small ill-painted Christmas scene of Santa Claus being pulled in his sleigh by two reindeer.
Philip was over the moon with this treasure. Again and again, he enthusiastically shook it to see the snow fall and then pushed it within inches of my eyes for me to see.
“S-now,” I said with deliberate emphasis. I caught hold of his hand that held the ornament and turned it near his own face. “You say it. Lips like this. S-now.”
“Ng-gow,” Philip intoned, then tore away to shove the ornament into the other children’s faces for their admiration.
“I got one of them at home,” Jeremiah said, when he saw it. “Here, gimme it, Phil.”
Philip wouldn’t let go, and this resulted in both boys falling to the ground, limbs flailing.
“Hey, you two, cut it out,” I cried, leaping to the rescue of the ornament before it broke in the mêlée. “Jeremiah, stop it.”
Reluctantly, Jeremiah pulled himself away from Ph
ilip, giving Philip one last kick as he rose. “Selfish booger. You don’t half know how to be a pig, you boog. I wasn’t going to hurt your crappy thing anyway.”
“You wait to be given something that belongs to someone else,” I replied. “You don’t snatch. And you certainly don’t attack. Clear?”
“Well, mine’s better than his anyway,” Jeremiah muttered. “Mine’s from Disneyland, and it’s got a castle in it. Mine don’t come from no nigger dime-store and gots a stupid baby picture inside it like that one does.”
“Time for morning discussion,” I said, physically turning Jeremiah in an effort to reorient him. “You go get the discussion box.”
“Baby Santa Claus,” Jeremiah continued muttering. “Hey, you boog, that’s just right for you. Santy Claus. Bet you still believe in goody-goody Santy Claus coming down your fucking chimney. Don’t you, little boog, little piss-in-your-pants boogy baby.”
“Jeremiah.”
Philip, feeling safe in my presence, wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to lord it over Jeremiah. Holding up the ornament to his eyes, he waltzed over toward Jeremiah’s place with exaggerated movements, which, of course, had the desired effect. Jeremiah went red with rage and shot out of his seat. Philip darted behind me for protection.
“I think we’ve had quite enough of your little item here, Phil,” and I took it from his hands. “Everyone’s seen it and admired it, and now we need to get on with school.”
“Ng-oh!” Philip cried in dismay. “Mh-ine.”
“Yes, it’s yours, but for now I’m going to set it up here on top of the work cabinet. You may have it back when it’s time to go home, but for now it’s safer here.”
Philip howled indignantly for a few moments but gave in when he realized he stood no chance of getting it back. He then snuffled his way over to join us for morning discussion.
At going-home time, however, Philip’s ornament was nowhere to be found. When the bell rang, I reached up to get it for him and found nothing there but empty space. Pulling a chair over, I climbed up to see, but the top of the work cabinet was bare.
Philip was inconsolable. “Mh-ine! Mh-ine!” he wailed, dancing first around the base of the cabinet and then around me, his hands upstretched.
I looked everywhere, trying to sound jolly as I did so, but it was becoming obvious that this was no accidental disappearance. Jeremiah was the likely culprit, and I felt like braining him at just that moment, but as I had no hard evidence, I knew I wasn’t justified in accusing him. To make matters worse, the buses had already arrived, and I couldn’t hold any kind of interrogation, so I apologized profusely to Philip, promising to turn the room on end after he’d left, and said we’d take the matter up in the morning. After that, Philip, still sobbing, was bundled onto the bus.
Once the children were gone, I did make a full-scale search. I pulled out the cabinet to see behind it. I got down on all fours to peer under. Taking the broom, I swept the crevices around the bookshelves and behind the radiator. Nothing turned up, other than two rubber bands, a scrap of paper, and half a dozen dust bunnies. Heart sinking at the realization that it must have been stolen, I pushed the furniture back into place. Morosely, I headed down to the teachers’ lounge for a bit of cheering up before doing my lesson plans.
I stayed in the lounge much longer than I’d intended to, which was the primary reason for seldom going down there after school. It was too easy to sink gratefully into a comfortable chair and have an umpteenth cup of coffee, and once I’d succumbed, it was too hard to pull myself out again and get back to work. Consequently, I knew, as I went back to my room, that I hadn’t left myself enough time to do my plans here and would have to take them home with me, something I loathed, as then I would have no respite from school.
Going down the hallway to my room, I noticed the door between the hall and cloakroom was closed, which it hadn’t been when I’d left. Pausing outside it, I listened. The soft, undulating murmur of Jadie’s voice filtered through the door “… and then she got into the sleigh and it went way, way up in the sky. ‘We’re flying!’ cried Tashee. ‘Are you going to fight them with me?’ ‘Yes,’ said Tashee. ‘Me and Jadie and Amber are going to do it.’ And so they ran and got in the sleigh. And it was snowing. Snowing hard. Snowing, snowing, snowing. And they flew up. Up, up …”
Going into the classroom, I slammed the door noisily behind me to make my presence known. The door between the cloakroom and the classroom was also closed. Crossing the room, I paused outside. “Jadie?”
No response.
I tried the doorknob, but it was locked. “Jadie, could you let me in, please?”
No response.
“Unlock this door, please.” Teacher’s voice.
No sound, no movement, nothing from beyond the door.
“This is going to have to stop happening, or I simply can’t let you use that room. Now, I’m going to count to three, and then I want that door opened. Hear me? Here I go. One …”
A soft shuffling and I could hear her approach the door. It still didn’t open.
“Two …”
The key turned in the lock and the door slowly opened.
“Now, may I please have Philip’s ornament?” I asked matter-of-factly and held out my hand.
“I don’t got it.”
“If you give it to me now, we can put it back on the cabinet and the boys won’t need to be any the wiser about it.”
“I don’t got it.”
Dismayed, I regarded her.
“How come you don’t believe me? You said you would, but you never do. You’re like everyone else.”
Putting my hand on her shoulder, I turned her around and propelled her back into the cloakroom. Closing the door behind me, I turned the key in the lock. “Well, if you don’t have it, then you won’t mind if I look,” I said and reached for her coat pockets.
“Stop it. Don’t.” She broke my grasp. Darting around me, she ran smack into the unyielding door. I caught her again, and it only took a moment to feel the ornament inside her pocket. Even then, however, Jadie refused to relinquish it. Shouting passionately at me, she pulled herself out of my grasp and ran for the door, where the key remained in the lock.
Sprinting after her, I caught her arm. Jadie whirled around sharply in an effort to break my hold again, which she managed to do; however, the violence of the motion also knocked the ornament from her pocket. It fell out onto the linoleum floor, bounced, and then shattered. Plastic shards flew, water splashed out across the floor.
Both Jadie and I froze a moment, the horror of what had happened too intense. “Oh dear,” I said at last, lacking any other words.
Jadie burst into sobs. Falling down to her knees, she began to collect the bits, crushing them to her chest.
“Here, let me help you,” I said and knelt beside her.
“No!” she screamed and gave my shoulder a mighty push. “No. You did it. It happened because of you.”
“I’m sorry. Of course I didn’t want it to break.”
“It’s your fault. You made me break it. You’re awful. You’re horrible. I want to kill you.”
I rocked back on my heels.
“I want you dead!”
“I can see I’ve made you very angry,” I said. “You feel like killing me.”
“Yes!” she shrieked in rage, leaping back, the shards of the ornament clutched against her.
“That’s all right. Your feelings aren’t actions. That’s why it’s all right to have them, even to say them, because feelings alone don’t make things happen. You can stand up straight and let them out. Feelings and wishes don’t kill.”
Jadie paused in her tirade, a startled expression on her face, and then she looked down at her body, perfectly erect. A moment later, she burst into angry tears again.
Fury overtook her. With a strength of emotion I’d never witnessed in her before, she screamed and ran back and forth from one end of the room to the other, growing more frenetic with each lap. Comin
g to the doors, she’d pound futilely against them, turn and run to the other.
Certainly I had not intended to create this degree of trauma and was more than a little frightened by the fact that I had. My first impulse was to turn the key, open the door, and let her go, as if she were a frenzied butterfly caught against a window. In seeing the depth of the emotion, however, I realized I ought to finish what I had started, so I waited for her to wear herself out.
At last Jadie crumpled to the floor beside the door that led into the hallway. The broken ornament had remained in her hand throughout all of this, and now she clutched it once again to her chest, bending over it protectively, her long hair falling forward to curtain her face off from me. Like that she sat and wept heavily for several minutes. Then weariness overtook her. The sobs ceased. Lifting her head slightly, she wiped her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her coat.
“I think maybe that did you good,” I said quietly. “I think you needed to get some of that out of you.”
Jadie looked at me.
“Come over here and sit with me,” I said and patted the bench beside me.
She hesitated, then finally rose and approached me.
Retrieving the box of tissues from my desk, I took a handful out and reached forward to dry Jadie’s eyes. Jadie watched my face.
“Tashee’s right,” she murmured.
“About what?”
“You are stronger. You must be God.”
“You want me to be God, don’t you?”
Slowly opening her hands, she looked down at the shattered remains of Philip’s ornament. “Yes, I do,” she said softly.
“Why is that?”
“’Cause then what they say wouldn’t be true.”
“What who says?”
“Them. What they say.”
I wanted to probe further but felt perhaps our newly won equilibrium was still too fragile.
“Sometimes I want to die, like Tashee done. I think that must be better. Then, other times …” She fell silent. Fingering through the remains of the ornament, she picked out the cheap little plastic Santa in his sleigh. “Other times, I don’t want to die. I just want it to stop. I want me and Amber to … I don’t know. I just want us …” She fell silent.