by Torey Hayden
“You particularly like that doll, don’t you?” I said.
She nodded. “But I like the one you gave me, too. I like her best, because I pretend that’s you.”
I smiled and came around to stand beside her. “This one looks more like Tashee, doesn’t she?”
Jadie looked up sharply.
“Shall we close the doors?” Without waiting for a response, I went and did it. “So, how was your weekend?” I asked. “How was Amber’s birthday?”
Jadie picked up the dark-haired doll again.
“Did she have a party?” I asked.
“No.”
“What about within the family? Did you do anything special for her at home?”
“Yeah. My mom made a cake. It was yellow and it had candles on it.” A pause, and Jadie wrinkled her nose. “You know what stupid thing Amber wanted on her cake? Sugar daffodils. Daffodils. And this is October, even. But my mom said that was okay for her to want, ’cause it was her birthday.”
“Did she get presents?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind?”
“My mom and dad gave her some clothes, and she got a My Little Pony, too. And my grandma gave her a tapestry kit, only she’s not really big enough to do it. I gave her a Mars bar, but Sapphire didn’t give her anything, ’cause she’s too little to have an allowance.”
“So, Amber turned six on Sunday. She had a cake and presents. Did anything else happen?”
Jadie shook her head.
“She didn’t die, did she?”
Jadie turned the dark-haired doll upside down and watched its long hair fall. She cocked her head a little to see the doll’s face better.
“Amber’s all right,” I said quietly. “She’s turned six and she’s fine.”
“No,” Jadie replied and there was a brittle edge to her voice.
“She is. I saw her myself this morning down in Mrs. Havers’s class.”
“No. They’ll still come. It doesn’t have to be on her birthday. It’s because she’s six now. That’s the number they kill you at. That’s the number Miss Ellie says is for dying. They’re gonna do just like they done with Tashee. I know they will.”
“Who?”
“Them. I keep telling you. Them. Miss Ellie and Bobby and them.”
“But who are they? Where do they come from? How do you get to be with them? Do they take you? Do they come to your house? Are your mom and dad there?”
Jadie looked up, bewildered.
“Do you know?” I asked.
“Usually, I’m asleep in my bed. Miss Ellie comes in and wakes me up. She brings me Coke to drink. For both me and Amber. Sometimes we go out in the living room. Sometimes we go other places.”
“Like where?”
Jadie paused, a confused expression on her face. “I don’t know where.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, Miss Ellie puts a scarf over our faces. It’s at night anyway. I can’t see. But she takes us to this other place and when we get there, we drink more Coke, and sometimes Tashee comes.”
“I thought Tashee was dead.”
“She is, but then she gets alive again, because Miss Ellie puts her bones back together.”
“And your parents? Where are your parents when all this goes on?”
“Asleep?” she asked, uncertainly. “I think maybe they’re in their bedroom asleep. That’s why we always got to be real quiet when Miss Ellie and them come, ’cause I don’t think she wants to wake my mom and dad.”
“But why don’t you wake them? If you don’t like all this, why don’t you just scream when Miss Ellie comes, and that’d wake everybody up.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Miss Ellie’d make them die. She might make me die.” Jadie paused. “You can’t never do anything Miss Ellie don’t want you to. Not ever. ’Cause if Miss Ellie’s spiders ever seen you were doing that, nobody’d be left alive.”
Chapter Seventeen
One of the nicest aspects of working in the Pecking school was everyone’s general acceptance of my children. This was the first place I’d worked where I felt my special education class was genuinely integrated into the life of the regular school. We were included in all the activities and always given genuine and meaningful ways to participate, not simply token ones. Indeed, it was usually taken for granted that we would pull our weight, which was probably the greatest compliment of all, because it made us no longer “special.” As a consequence, our class was given its own part to play in the traditional Halloween activities at the school, which included a costume parade through the halls, followed by an afternoon-long party in the school gym. Each classroom was making its own contributions toward the decorations and party food. The sixth-graders, for instance, had carved pumpkins and were making black cat cupcakes. The fifth-graders designed the paper table-cloths and made spider-web pizzas. My class offered up our finally finished tissue paper pumpkin as a wall decoration and were assigned the job of making enough popcorn balls for the whole school.
The morning of the party, which was a Thursday, didn’t dawn quite as I had expected. For a start, Brucie was absent, which meant his mother didn’t bring in the popcorn popper that she’d promised. So there I was with six pounds of popcorn to be popped and no way to do it. Second, Jeremiah didn’t arrive.
“Ng-ah-ah!” Philip cried excitedly when he came into the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “could you try that again?”
“Ng-ah-AH!” and he gestured wildly. Philip was now receiving intensive speech therapy and being taught sign language in an effort to help him communicate more successfully. Unfortunately, he hadn’t quite got the idea and assumed any gestures would work. His hands and arms flailed frantically.
Just then, Mr. Tinbergen appeared in the doorway. “They’ve put Jeremiah off the bus. He was causing his usual ruckus—you know how Jeremiah gets—and Fred said he’d just had enough. He turned the bus around, took him home, and dumped him off.”
“Oh jeez,” I muttered. “And today, of all days.”
Jeremiah had long-standing problems coping with the half-hour bus ride to school. In years gone by, his excessive behavior had often been dealt with by returning him home, and this response had been moderately successful. I, however, had vetoed it when I’d come, as it seemed self-defeating to me. If anyone needed the structure and stability of the classroom, it was Jeremiah. So we’d been using a strict reinforcement system, whereby he earned tokens for behaving well and lost them for troublesome behavior. On the other hand, I could sympathize with Fred, the bus driver, who commented on occasion that if he actually took a token away every time Jeremiah misbehaved, Jeremiah’s daily token balance would average about minus twenty-seven.
The class seemed empty with just Jadie, Reuben, and Philip, but we didn’t have much choice but to get on with things, so I took them down to the teachers’ lounge with me, where we spent the first ninety minutes of the day making batch after batch of popcorn in a small pot on a hot plate. At recess, I hopped in my car to run out and get Jeremiah.
He knew I was coming, because Mr. Tinbergen had phoned earlier; so there he was, sitting cross-legged in the dust at the top of the track that led back to his house.
“Fucking bus driver,” he said to me as he got into the car. “Fucking bastard. You know why he hates me? ’Cause I’m an Indian kid. ’Cause I got brown skin and he’s got white skin. That’s why he don’t take no care about my feelings.”
“Do you really think that?” I asked.
“Look, what d’you expect? I’m poor. I don’t got nothing good, like you got. My folks don’t got no Lincoln Continental, like this.”
“It’s a Fiat, Jeremiah, not a Lincoln Continental.”
“Well, it looks like a Continental. Can’t blame me for that. I need glasses. My folks so poor they don’t even get my eyes checked.”
The temptation was to mention that he was blaming everyone for his behavior but the culprit, but I didn’t. He knew. I knew. He knew
I knew. Some things are best left unsaid.
Then worse happened. Just as we got inside the classroom, Jeremiah gave a wild scream and fell to the floor, as if in a faint. “Oh no!” he wailed. “I forgot my costume!” And he then did something I’d never seen him do before. He burst into tears.
I think I’d seldom felt so bad for a kid. Helping him off the floor, I walked him over to the table.
“I was gonna win,” he sobbed. “I was gonna be best.” I tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable.
Jadie, sitting across the table from us, continued molding her popcorn balls for several moments and said nothing. Then, slowly, she leaned forward. “I can get him a costume,” she said, her voice soft.
I looked over.
“My aunt came last week from Lower Falls and she brung me and Amber costumes to go trick-or-treating in. But Jeremiah can have mine, if he wants. I’ll give it to him.”
Jeremiah’s face brightened instantly. “Hey, what kind of costume is it? Is it good?”
“But what about you?” I asked. “Will you still have something to wear this afternoon?
She shrugged.
“Hey, man, if this girl wants to let me wear her costume, don’t go making her feel like shit for it,” Jeremiah said. He swiped roughly at his still-wet cheeks. “Man, this girl wants to be a friend.”
“But what about you, Jadie?” I asked again.
“There’s no rule says you gotta wear a costume to the party,” Jadie replied.
“There is to go trick-or-treating, man,” Jeremiah said. “You can’t just go as a kid. They wouldn’t give you no candy.”
Jadie shrugged. “That’s all right. I don’t want to go. Neither me or Amber goes. That’s because Amber don’t like to go out after dark. She gets scared. She even has to sleep with the big light on in her bedroom. So, you see, we just don’t like that kind of stuff. Besides, candy rots your teeth.”
We spent the rest of the morning desperately trying to finish two hundred popcorn balls. About 11:30, I allowed Jadie to run home to get the costume for Jeremiah, and she returned with what I assume was supposed to turn the wearer into a leopard. Hard to know, though. The costume consisted of what appeared to be black-and-yellow-spotted long johns and a mask that could have been anything from a freckled dog to a bear with measles.
Jeremiah had to try it on immediately and to his dismay found it was at least two sizes too big and, moreover, tailless. To remedy the fit, I took large rubber bands and fastened up the arms and legs, then stuffed pillows from the reading area down his front.
“Hey!” he cried with delight. “Looks like I just ate somebody, huh? Grrrarrgh!” And he leaped up on Philip’s back, but the pillows gave him a surprise, bouncing him right back off again. To distract him, I suggested he search through the scrap box to find something to make a tail.
The afternoon quickly fell victim to Halloween mania as shrieking, overexcited scarecrows, hobos, and witches tore up and down the school corridors. My crowd were as bad as the rest. Having buttoned Philip into his bunny costume, buckled Reuben’s pirate’s belt, and restuffed Jeremiah’s stomach, I turned them all loose to run and scream with the others. The only exception to all this excitement was Jadie, who had taken the big tub of crayons and a coloring book and was sitting at my desk in the cloakroom, coloring a picture of horses in a field.
“Are you sure you don’t want to join us?” I asked, as I prepared to capture the boys and get them in line for the parade.
“I’m sure,” Jadie said without looking up.
“You don’t have to go in the parade, you know. You could just stand in the classroom door with me and watch.”
“No.”
So I left her to her coloring.
The corridors of the school reverberated with undiluted joy as the children marched up and down, each class joining as the parade wended by their room. Then, onward to the gym.
Jeremiah won his prize. In fact, all three boys won something, but Philip and Reuben received only badges saying “Join He-Man. Fight Cavities,” which they proudly stuck to their costumes. Jeremiah got not only a badge but also an eraser in the shape of a jack-o’-lantern.
“Lookit this!” he cried. “I got the best tail prize! I got the prize for the best tail in the whole school. He didn’t even know I made it myself. He probably thought it was store-bought. It was that good.”
Raising my head to see across the bobble of heads in the gym, I caught Mr. Tinbergen’s eye. I smiled. He winked.
Once the boys were involved in party games, I asked Lucy to keep an eye on them for a bit and slipped back to the classroom. Jadie was still at my desk, still coloring.
“They’ve started to play games. Don’t you want to come down?”
“No,” she said quietly, most of her attention still on the coloring.
“What’s the matter? What don’t you like about this?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I just don’t like it, that’s all.”
“But why? Usually you like parties. You always enjoy the games we play on people’s birthdays.”
“I don’t like Halloween.”
“Is it the costumes? Do they frighten you?”
“I just don’t like it.”
Grateful to be out of the deafening noise of the gym for a moment, I sat down on the right-hand bench and leaned back against the wall. Fleetingly aware of what an exhausting day it had been and how it wasn’t over yet, I sighed. That made Jadie look up. She didn’t lift her head, only her eyes, but briefly our eyes met. Then she returned to her coloring.
Silence enveloped us. The joy in the gym was audible, but barely, just a pleasant bit of embroidery on the silence. After a long stretch of cold weather, it was warm and sunny outside, and this, combined with the school’s ferocious central heating, made the small room warm and stuffy. I found myself unexpectedly sleepy.
“I could tell you how it happened,” Jadie said, her tone conversational. She didn’t look up.
Pulled back from the brink of closing my eyes, I glanced over.
“If you wanted me to, that is,” she added.
I didn’t know what she was referring to, but I nodded anyway. “Okay.”
“See, it was Halloween that other year. When Tashee was six.”
I nodded again.
“Me and her were both six. I’d been six in December and her birthday was in August. I knew it was important to be six. Miss Ellie kept saying that. She said it meant big things, ’cause me and Tashee were both six. She said everybody was going to be strong that year. She said we were going to get these wishes. Something about sixes and how you could make things come true. I didn’t understand it exactly, but I thought it meant I might get a Barbie house for Christmas. That’s what I wanted, but my mom said it cost too much money. I thought ’cause we were getting lucky out of sixes, I was going to get a Barbie house.”
Jadie paused. Her voice remained soft, her words flowing in a smooth, conversational way quite unlike her usual speech in the classroom. Even alone with me, there was usually much stopping and starting. Now she stopped, pensive, her eyes on the coloring book, as if assessing the picture she’d been working on.
“Then … it must have been September, I guess … I don’t know really, ’cause I didn’t know the months so good then, but …” She paused again, her brow wrinkled, her expression inward, as if concentrating hard. “Tashee and me were laying on the big table. We had our little dolls, and Miss Ellie told J.R. to take them and put them on the table behind us. So he did, and then Miss Ellie and Pam and everybody came around and first they kissed the dolls and then they kissed either me or Tashee, but we couldn’t see which dolls they were kissing, because the dolls were behind us. Tashee started crying, but I didn’t, because I didn’t know what was happening. Then J.R. took the candleholder and he hit Tashee’s doll and its head broke. That’s when I knew Tashee was going to die.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to react. Indeed, I wasn’t even quite sure what sh
e was telling me, because it didn’t make complete sense to me.
“It could have been me,” Jadie said pensively, and for the first time she looked up from her coloring book. “I could have died. I was six. But my doll didn’t get smashed, so I stayed alive.”
“And she did die?” I asked.
Jadie nodded. “Yeah, like I told you.”
I sat, speechless. I felt paralyzed, my feelings numb and unreachable. Nothing in my experience, in my previous work, had equipped me for this.
“When Miss Ellie put the knife in and the blood came out, like I was telling you, she caught it in a cup. We had to drink it. See, that’s where the power of the six was. It was warm. It was … sort of oily tasting. Kind of like if you take a sip of salad oil or something. It sort of slipped on your tongue.”
Chapter Eighteen
I’m not sure how I got through the rest of that day. Emotions never really came back to me. A dull, nauseous feeling was there instead, making my head muzzy and my throat tight. More than once I thought I was in real danger of vomiting.
The kids screaming in the gym were too much to take. I returned tense and irritable and wished they would stay away from me. They wouldn’t, of course, and I got through the remainder of the party with my teeth gritted. Jadie, on the other hand, seemed absurdly calm and bantered cheerfully with Jeremiah when we came back to the room. Lucy saved me. Realizing I wasn’t feeling well, she volunteered to take my children with hers when the going-home bell rang, and she did, seeing them all down to the playground, including Jadie.
After they left, I fell wearily onto one of the benches in the cloakroom. Covering my eyes momentarily with my hands, I rested there a moment, then lowered them. All around me was the quiet familiarity of the school, the sound of the clock, the smell of the floor polish, the distant din of children on the playground; yet it was as if I were in some alien place, unable to move, unsure of what to do next.