Between the Sheets

by Molly O'Keefe

  For a second last night, before he realized she was there to give him hell, before he realized what time it was and that she was in her robe, he’d been happy to see her. Happy for company.

  Ty wasn’t used to being lonely and last night his loneliness had come up out of nowhere, and she’d been, for one second, a welcome surprise.

  And then the whole thing went really wrong.

  “Ms. Monroe teaches art in your son’s class, and Casey drew something that we thought was worth discussing with you.”

  “Where’s the picture?” He glanced over at Shelby.

  “It was an identity project.” She had a piece of white paper flipped over on her lap. “They had to draw three images that would tell me about them without words.”

  “Is that the picture?” He pointed to her lap.

  “Yes.” She put her hands over the paper like she wasn’t going to give it to him yet.

  “You calling in all the parents?” he asked. “Or just the new kid’s?”

  “Normally, we wouldn’t have a meeting over one drawing, but it’s graphic and, frankly, disturbing,” Mr. Root said.

  “He’s a fifth-grade boy. They’re kind of graphic and disturbing by nature, aren’t they?”

  Shelby blinked her big brown eyes at him. Brown eyes and blond hair—you didn’t see that very much. And her eyebrows were dark. Stern. It seemed impossible, but there it was: she had stern eyebrows.

  He held out his hand, and after a moment she put the picture in it. Even before he flipped it, he had a pretty good idea that it was going to be one of three drawings.

  He glanced down. Right. Casey had gone with the cage again.

  “You think Casey’s drawing you a picture of what his life is like?” He focused on Shelby as if Mr. Root weren’t even in the room.

  His grandmother had this cat, a huge, fat black and white cat, who hated everything on the planet but Nana. In fact, Sweetie (a ridiculous joke of a name) sat on top of Nana’s chair and judged everyone as a subspecies.

  Shelby was exactly like Sweetie. He couldn’t tell exactly what she thought when she looked at him, but it wasn’t good.

  “It was an identity exercise.”

  “And you think this is me.” He pointed to the snarling man in the picture. Actually, this one looked more like him than it ever had. Casey had finally got the nose and hair right, which only made this little stunt worse. Because he’d been practicing it. The woman in the picture was Vanessa. Right down to the avarice in her eyes. “And this is his mom, and we put him in a cage and bark and snarl at him?”

  “It’s a violent picture that even if not true needs to be discussed.” Shelby was getting up on some kind of high horse. Her back going even straighter, her full lips going thin and flat.

  Discussed. Right. He rubbed his forehead. They’d been discussing this for months; every time Casey drew one of these pictures in counseling or group therapy, it had to get discussed.

  “I don’t put him in a cage,” he said. “And his mom … his mom isn’t around right now. He does this kind of shit. Sorry—stuff. All the time. It’s either him in a cage, or him sleeping outside because I locked him out, or me forcing him to eat dog food.” Shelby and Mr. Root stared at him with open mouths. “Here. Watch.”

  Ty opened the door and gave Casey a hard look. “You want to come in here and talk to these people?”

  Casey stood, his white tee shirt hanging down to his knees. Ty shut the door behind them and crossed his arms over his chest. Casey studied the floor.

  “Casey.” The one word had enough warning in it that Casey took notice.

  “I made it up,” he finally said. “He doesn’t lock me in a cage or make me eat dog food or anything like that.”

  “Why did you draw the picture?” Shelby asked.

  Casey shrugged. Oh, God, those fucking shrugs. Ty put a heavy hand on Casey’s shoulder, a cut-the-crap gesture. Casey twitched away and sighed. “Because it was a stupid assignment. Because I’m bored. Because … I don’t know. It’s more fun than my real life?”

  “Getting locked up in a cage is more fun than your real life?” Mr. Root asked.

  “No,” Casey muttered.

  “But getting me pulled out of work is,” Ty said, staring hard at his kid. “Being the badass kid sent to the principal’s office on, what … the second week at a new school?… is more fun than actually sitting in class, right?”

  Casey sent him a fleeting smile and Ty wanted to pull out his hair. I know my kid, he thought. I was this kid, with the attitude and the smile and the stupid need to be noticed. To be bad. Because the places we’re from and the people who raised us put more stock in being bad than being smart. It’s better to be tough than to fit in.

  And Ty was trying—with both goddamn hands, with all his strength—to change that.

  “This isn’t funny, Casey,” he said.

  “Casey,” Mr. Root said, “can you please wait outside?”

  Casey shuffled out and Ty shut the door behind him, fighting the urge to slam it.

  “Clearly we’re dealing with a behavior disorder,” Mr. Root said.

  Ty whirled away from the door. “Wait … what? Behavior disorder?”

  “This isn’t the first time he’s been in my office. It’s been once or twice a day every day.”

  “Why is this the first time I’ve heard of it?” he demanded.

  “Because a certain period of settling in is to be expected. And if your son isn’t telling you what’s happening, that, too, is part of the problem.” Mr. Root pulled open a drawer in his desk and pulled out a file an inch thick.

  “This is your son’s file from his school in Memphis. This behavior is nothing new. He was suspended three times last year for fighting, in the fourth grade. He was moved to two different foster homes—”

  “Because one of those homes had ten kids.” Ty’s skin, his blood, everything burned and itched because he knew what was in that file. He knew every detail of how Vanessa had screwed around with this boy’s life, and by not once being mentioned it was clear that he wasn’t around to try to stop it. “And he’s not there anymore. He’s with me. We moved here so he could have a fresh start.”

  Mr. Root crossed his hands over the file and sighed as if this were something he’d known all along. “That’s a laudable idea, Mr. Svenson. But for a true fresh start I think a psychologist should test him—”

  “He’s just a smart-ass kid,” Ty said, “going through some shit. Sorry. Stuff. Why do you have to go slapping labels on him? You barely know him!”

  “Because that’s how we can best help him.” Mr. Root crossed his arms over his chest. “We get him assessed, identified, perhaps medicated—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Ty couldn’t sit for this. He stood up but there was no room to pace. He felt like the kid in the cage in Casey’s picture.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Shelby finally spoke up. “Mrs. Jordal says he’s a very bright kid, a smart aleck but for the most part engaged in the class.”

  “He’s not stupid,” Ty said. “Don’t you have to be smart to be a smart-ass?”

  “Yes. But … there’s something wrong right now, isn’t there, Mr. Svenson?” she asked.

  He nearly laughed. Something wrong? Try everything. Every damn thing.

  “Perhaps if he saw the school counselor?” she asked.

  “We’ve done that.” For three months they did that. A month of weekly counseling meetings. All part of getting custody. Of getting Casey out of the foster system.

  “We can get a state psychologist here to test him,” Mr. Root continued and opened a calendar. “Next month, probably.”

  Ty sat back down, bracing his head in his hands. He didn’t know much, he was totally new at this, but his gut was telling him that what was wrong with Casey wasn’t chemical. It was partly Vanessa’s fault, partly Ty’s fault. Once the kid had something steady in his life, things would get better for Casey. “He doesn’t need testing. H
e doesn’t need medicine. He doesn’t need a label.”

  He needed a swift kick in the pants, but Ty had far too much experience being on the other end of that particular parenting tactic and had no interest in visiting that on his son.

  “Do you have any other ideas?” Mr. Root asked.

  Staring at his shoes, he shook his head. “I kind of hoped that was your job,” he said.

  “You’ve heard my recommendation.”

  He swiveled to look at Shelby. “What about you?”

  “My ideas?”

  “I’m guessing you probably have a few.”

  “I do,” Shelby said. She folded her hands in her lap and lifted her chin. “Casey’s been in counseling before, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes. A lot of it.” He sat back in his chair, his legs out in front of him. He was aware that he was taking up all the space, crowding her into a corner, and he was okay with that. Even took a little vindictive glee in it. “We talked to a very nice overworked woman once a week for months.”

  “You just talked.”

  “Well, I talked. Casey didn’t say a whole lot.”

  “Traditional talk therapy isn’t always effective for kids. They don’t know how to process what they’re feeling, much less tell someone. And if it seems like punishment or something scary, they’re even less likely to talk.”

  Ty remembered those weekly appointments in the Department of Child and Family Services building in West Memphis all too clearly. There had been a grief counseling session for women who had lost babies in the room next door and they could hear the crying through the walls. Casey had stared at the wall, the water-color paintings of boats on their side, as though he could see through it to the weeping women. “The counseling we went to was pretty scary.”

  “I think you should try art therapy.”

  Mr. Root made a throttled laughing sound in his throat, which made Shelby bristle up like a hedgehog.

  “It’s a pretty good tool to get kids to open up. Especially if he’s already done traditional therapy.”

  This was a turn Ty never would have expected. That Shelby Monroe would be going out on a limb for his sake. After last night, he would have guessed that they would be in a standoff for however long they lived across the street from each other.

  But now she was offering him a huge olive branch.

  “Okay. Let’s give it a try.”

  She smiled as if she were relieved, and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t setting out to fuck up his kid, he was trying to make things right. Ashamed, he pulled his legs back toward his chair.

  “The art therapy isn’t run through the school, Mr. Svenson,” Mr. Root said. “It’s not a state program.”

  “So?”

  “So, the costs will come out of pocket. Yours.” Again, Ty had that sense of being judged on one glance, a glance that included his jeans and frayed denim jacket with the shearling collar.

  “That’s fine.” He chewed on the words as they came out.

  “I’ll leave it to you to sort out the particulars.” Mr. Root looked like a man who’d just sucked on a lemon. He stood up, spreading his hands across his desk. “But I can’t keep having your son in my office. Next time he’s going to be suspended.”

  Ty stood up. “You don’t think this will work?”

  “For your sake and for Casey’s, I hope it does.”

  “I’ll handle Casey. He won’t be back in your office.”

  “Good luck with that,” Mr. Root said, and Ty turned back around ready to satisfy the sudden urge to tell this guy exactly where he could shove his smarmy condescension and bullshit medical solutions.

  “Let’s go outside and talk about this,” Shelby said, crowding him toward the door. There was a time in his life when he’d never let himself get herded. There was a time he would have knocked to the ground anyone who tried.

  But he turned, feeling this woman at his back like a grease fire. His skin prickled and stung. Outside the door Casey was slouched in the chair, and it was all Ty could do not to grab him by the scruff of the neck.

  “Let’s go,” he said as he walked past, and he was relieved to hear the slap of Casey’s sneakers on the linoleum behind him.

  He headed past the secretary out toward the sunlit entrance, with the pictures and the trophies and all things bright and innocent—every single thing he wanted for his son and the boy was throwing aside like it all meant nothing.

  Art therapy. It sounded ridiculous even to him. Looking at Casey, at that chip on his shoulder, and knowing all the pain that had been heaped on his back, he couldn’t help but doubt how much drawing was really going to help.

  He turned on Shelby. “You really think this can work?”

  “I think it’s better to exhaust all options before turning to medication.”

  “Who is getting medication?” Casey asked.

  “You,” Ty said.

  “For what?”

  “Behavior disorder.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Casey cried. Ty looked over at Shelby to see if she was still so sure about this art therapy idea, but she was glaring at him.

  “What?” Ty asked, not sure why he was getting the hairy eyeball.

  “No one is putting you on medication,” she told Casey, her eyes far kinder when she looked at his son than when she looked at him. “We just want to help you adjust.”

  She’d stood up for his kid in that office. Against the drugging, labeling principal. Just like she’d stood up for herself last night when he’d been revving that engine.

  He saw her fierceness as something of its own—instead of just something standing in his way. And it was disarming to see her that way. Disorienting.

  “When can you start with him?” Ty asked.

  She blinked at Ty; her mouth opened and then shut. “I’m … I think you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t do the art therapy.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. I’m just the art teacher. Not a therapist.”

  Of course not. Because that would just be too easy. He felt once again the sudden weight of caring for someone else. And not just feeding or clothing him, but making decisions on his behalf. And then worrying if every single decision was wrong or right.

  “What’s going on?” Casey asked.

  “Let’s go, man,” Ty said. “You’re not going back to class. And apparently I need to spend some time on Google.”

  “I can help you find a therapist,” Shelby said, her hand stretched out as if to stop him. She had long fingers. The nails, though, were chewed down to nothing.

  What, he wondered, stressed the implacable Ms. Monroe out so bad she had to gnaw on her fingernails.

  “I have information on plenty of local counselors who might work.”

  “Really?” Well, that was a relief. A big one.

  “Really. Come by the Art Barn tonight after dinner. We can talk then.”

  He felt the back of his neck getting hot, belated embarrassment for the way he’d talked to her last night. “Ms. Monroe—”

  Her smile was a flash and then gone, like a fish underwater, flipping into the sunlight only to retreat to the cool depths. “You can call me Shelby.”

  “Shelby,” he said, tasting her name, the sweet round sounds of it, no hard edges, so unlike the person. “Thank you. Very much.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said without a smile and walked away, deeper into the school.

  He hit the release bar to head out the door, Casey beside him.

  “Do you have a date with Ms. Monroe?” Casey asked.

  “No.”

  “Do I?”

  The hope in his voice, it was ridiculous. What was the deal with this kid? One minute Ty wanted to shake him, the next he wanted to laugh.

  They stopped next to his beautiful Indian, and he unclipped his helmet from the handlebars and handed it to Casey.

  “Come on,” the boy moaned. “Helmets are lame.”

  Ty’s patience was so far pas
t thin that he put the helmet over Casey’s head himself and pressed it down, mashing all that red hair farther into his eyes. “Why didn’t you bring the truck?” Casey moaned.

  “Because I didn’t know I was breaking my son out of school.”

  “This is lame.”

  “Whine one more time, Casey, and I swear to God you can find your own way home.” Ty swung his leg over the bike and slid forward, making room for Casey on the back.

  Casey didn’t say anything, he just got on the bike behind him, but instead of wrapping his hands around Ty’s waist, he held onto the back of his jacket. Ty wanted to tell his son to get a firmer grip, but it was all just a fight with Casey, and he was done for the moment.

  A cold wind blew down the street as Ty took off, turning toward home, and he felt his son behind him like a kite in danger of being blown away.

  Chapter 4

  At home, Shelby parked her car in front of the garage and gave herself a second before going inside. The roses beside the house swaying in the cold January wind looked like skeletons, still covered in the last blooms’ dead heads. They should have been trimmed back, maybe covered in burlap, but she’d never gotten around to it and probably never would. It would be nice to just yank them out so she could stop feeling guilty about them, but she’d just find something else to feel guilty about.

  Like, for instance, not being an art therapist just to make Wyatt Svenson’s life a little easier. She was wholly aware of the power of incremental relief. The small things that, when everything was going to shit, made the difference between surviving a day and giving up. And Ty seemed like a guy in serious survival mode.

  She caught herself chewing on her thumbnail and pulled it out of her mouth.

  Another wind blew up and the roses rattled against the aluminum siding on the garage. They had planted the roses after Dad died, the summer of her freshman year in college. The morning of the funeral, Mom woke her up at dawn and they’d planted the rosebushes—red, pink, and white—in their pajamas.