Mark just sat there. “Anyway, isn’t Bible study against the law?”
Yes, she thought. It was a test. “It is not against the law to teach the Bible,” Brenda said, making a Herculean effort to keep her voice calm. “I can teach anything I want to at home as long as I also teach you the basic skills. So there’s no point in contacting the ACLU just yet.” She walked him to his new station, and plastered that smile back on. “Now open your Bibles.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong yet,” he argued. “Why do I have to read the Bible? It’s like you’re expecting me to mess up!”
The test was getting harder. Her smile fell off again. “What do you mean, you haven’t done anything wrong? This is not a punishment.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “My mother only makes us memorize Scripture when we’re in trouble.”
Brenda wilted. She would have to talk to Cathy about this. “Well, that’s not the case, not here. We do it every day. It’s part of our curriculum. Today we’re going to be studying King Cyrus and how God used him to bring the Israelites back from Babylon.”
“King who?” he asked, looking thoroughly frustrated.
She almost felt sorry for him. “Just read the passage I wrote on the board.”
“Board?” he asked. “What board?”
“The dry erase board on the door, Mark.” She tried not to let him get to her, and went to the front of the room. “Kids, I want you to read the passage that I wrote on the board. Then look in your concordances and find other places where Cyrus was mentioned. And I’ll give you a hint what we’re looking for. There’s a very important prophecy that was given hundreds of years before King Cyrus was around, that told in advance that God was going to use him in this way.”
Her kids got to work quickly, anxious to be the first to find the prophecy, but Mark stared at her as if she had asked him to detonate a nuclear bomb. “Mark, do you know how to use a concordance?”
“I don’t even know what that is!”
She pulled out the concordance at his table. “Here it is. You can look up any word, and it will tell you where in the Bible that word appears. Let’s look up Cyrus. The first one is in Second Chronicles.”
He looked as if he was in genuine pain. “Where is Second Chronicles?”
As irritation rose inside her, she realized that she was taking the wrong approach. Before she could expect stellar work from him, she was going to have to help him catch up.
She thought that over for a moment and looked around at her children. How could she keep them progressing and still help Mark? If she went back to the beginning, to the books of the Bible and the creation itself, it wouldn’t hurt her children. They could always use review. It might teach them responsibility to have them help Mark memorize the books. She could always assign Daniel more advanced word studies, and Leah and Rachel could do a study on all the other biblical references about the creation. Even Joseph could dig a little deeper than he had before. But Mark had to start at the beginning.
“You know, let’s just forget about Cyrus,” she said to the kids. “Turn to Genesis 1. We’re going to start back over with the creation.”
“But we’ve already done that,” Joseph protested gently.
“It never hurts to start over,” she said in a bright voice. “It’d be nice to be able to dig a little deeper.”
“You’re only doing this for me, aren’t you?” Mark asked. Her children turned to look at him.
“Of course not. I want all of the kids to know the Bible. I just thought it’d be nice if we could start over. Since we last studied Genesis, I’ve learned some new things.”
“You think I don’t know anything about the Bible,” Mark said. “You think I’m some kind of heathen, don’t you?”
“Of course I don’t,” she said. “But your mother asked me to teach you for a reason, and I think the number-one thing we should learn is the Bible. To me, that’s first in importance. In the morning we study the Old Testament, then we do history and English and then math and science. And then in the afternoon we do New Testament.”
“So when do we have electives?” he asked.
“Oh, we work art and music in throughout the day,” she said, “but we concentrate on academics.”
He looked as if he was going to cry. “This is a nightmare!”
“Mark, it’s not a nightmare. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see. My kids love learning this way.”
“But you’re starting completely over with the Bible just because of me, and everybody already knows this stuff. Even Joseph. It’s humiliating.”
“So, they’ll help you, they’ll challenge you.”
“I don’t like to be challenged,” he said. “That’s just a nice word for slave driving.”
She was getting her first headache in weeks. “Mark, open the Bible to Genesis 1.”
She knew he hadn’t brought a pencil with him, so she dug through a box for one, then found him a notebook. She hoped tomorrow he would come more prepared, but she blamed herself that he hadn’t. Cathy had been so busy with the clothing drive and her work at the clinic that she knew school supplies hadn’t really crossed Cathy’s mind. Besides that, she had probably assumed he would bring his backpack. She’d have to set Cathy straight on that tomorrow.
Meanwhile, she was determined to teach Mark something before she sent him home for the day.
CHAPTER Thirty-Six
The parking lot of Breezewood Development Center was the last place on earth that Tory wanted to be. She sat in her car staring at the front door, trying to get the courage to go in alone. She had asked Brenda to go with her, but it was her first day to resume homeschooling, so she’d had to stay home. She hadn’t mentioned it to Barry, for she knew this was the last place he would ever want to go.
She got out of the car, straightened her dress, and looked cautiously at the building, feeling a lot like a little kid on her first day of kindergarten. The mystery of what lay beyond the doors was almost more than she could bear. She needed someone to hold her hand and cross the pavement beside her. That was Barry’s job. The bitter thought brought tears to her eyes. But Barry wasn’t here, so she was forced to walk in alone. She wondered how much more of this journey she would walk alone.
As she walked in, the sounds that came from the classrooms were much like those from any other school. She heard laughter and chattering, teachers talking in calm, gentle voices, music playing. She found the office, and was surprised to see two adults with Down’s Syndrome working behind the counter.
“May I help you?” one of them asked her in a slurred voice.
“Yes.” She cleared her throat and tried to hide her shaking hands. “I was wondering if you let people observe the classes.”
Without answering, the clerk disappeared into an office, and after a moment, a woman came out of the back room. “Hi. Can I help you?”
Tory cleared her throat. “Yes…uh…I was wondering… Do you let people…parents…observe the classes?”
“Yes, of course. Do you have a special needs child?”
Tory patted her stomach, and the corners of her mouth trembled. “I’m carrying one. Down’s Syndrome. I just wanted to see.”
The woman seemed to understand completely, and her face filled with compassion. “You’re very welcome to come and observe any of the classrooms here.” She handed the stack of papers she held to the girl who had initially helped Tory. “Honey, would you punch holes in those pages for me so I can put them in my binder?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said, and hurried away to do her task.
The woman came around the counter. “I’m Phyllis Martin. I’m the director here.”
“Tory Sullivan,” she said. As they shook hands, she knew the woman could feel her trembling. “I’m…a little nervous.”
“Parents often are, until they see that there’s nothing to be nervous about.”
As they walked out into the corridor, Tory glanced back at the girl punching holes in the
pages. “You have paid staff who have Down’s Syndrome?”
“Sure,” she said. “We try to help the kids get jobs as they get old enough to graduate. Some of the best ones we keep for ourselves. We get real attached to these kids. When are you expecting?”
Tory hadn’t thought much about her due date. It seemed so far away. She had a lifetime of problems to solve before then. “Next May.”
“When did you find out?”
She shrugged. “About a month ago.”
The woman reached a classroom and paused, and Tory looked through the window. The children seemed about five years old, and were walking around in a circle with grins on their faces as the teacher played a game with them.
“They’re all different, you know,” the woman said. “Children with Down’s Syndrome have different degrees of difficulty. Most of them can walk at this age, but their muscle tone is very weak, so we take them early, even as infants, and do physical therapy to help them develop. As they get older, we help them with their speech. Some of them learn to speak very clearly.”
The woman opened the door. Tory stepped back. “Oh, no, I don’t want to go in. I don’t want to disturb anybody”
“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” Phyllis said. “Come on. You can come in and watch as long as you want, and then if you want to go to an older or younger class, you’re welcome to do that. You might especially be interested in our classes for mothers and infants.”
“Mothers?” Tory asked. “Mothers are involved?”
“Sure. We help them learn how to stimulate their children so that they can develop to their utmost potential. By the time they get to this class, most of the children are able to learn games and songs and follow some instructions. We’ve educated most of the parents right along with them.”
One of the teacher’s aides came to the door, and Phyllis quietly introduced Tory. Slowly, Tory followed the aide into the room. The teacher started a tape of children singing, and the kids held hands and walked around in a circle. They sang with sounds that bore little resemblance to the song, but the smiles on some of their faces made up for it. Tory took a seat at the back of the class and watched with awe as the woman gently worked with the children.
“Tell you what,” Phyllis whispered. “I’ll come back in about twenty minutes. We have a mom and baby class starting about then and you can come in and watch.”
Tory watched, astounded, fighting the urge to burst into tears at the sight of the class full of children with so many disabilities. But there was hope here, she realized. This was not an ugly, dismal place. It was uplifting and encouraging, and every child was made to feel special.
Three of the children were in wheelchairs. Half of them wore glasses. Some had braces on their legs. But they all smiled and giggled like any other children. And they could color and clap their hands and play ring-around-the-rosie.
Later, she felt much more hopeful as she followed Phyllis up the hall to the class of moms and babies. “This class is for babies as young as you want to bring them, on up to about three years old,” the woman said. “Then we start working with the children in groups without the parents.”
Tory’s face grew serious again as she stepped into the room. Awestruck, she looked around at all the mothers talking like old friends, holding their babies on their hips, or holding their hands and trying to walk with them across the floor. They had become a community of people with problems, a circle of friends bound by common struggles.
Phyllis introduced her, and several of the mothers expressed compassion for what Tory was going through. Three of them exchanged phone numbers with her.
But what struck her the most was not the camaraderie of the women who had made the same choice that she was making, but the beauty in the babies themselves. There was nothing ugly or hideous about them, as she had expected. She began to wonder what her own baby would look like, whether she would have Brittany’s hair color or Spencer’s, her eyes or Barry’s. Would she let Tory put bows and barrettes in her hair? Would she smile a lot? Would she need glasses?
When she finally left the school and headed to the mother’s day out program to pick up Spencer, she was feeling much better about her baby’s plight. She made her run by Brittany’s school to pick her up, then as the kids napped, she went through the box of maternity clothes that Barry had brought down from the attic weeks ago, before they’d known their baby wasn’t perfect.
Her heart lifted at the sight of the clothes she had worn during her last two pregnancies. She decided to wash them all and iron them so that they would be ready to wear when it was time. For the first time since she’d learned about the Down’s Syndrome, she was able to think of this child without the fearful weight of dread crushing down on her.
CHAPTER Thirty-Seven
Noon came in the nick of time, just when Brenda felt she was about to lose Mark altogether. She gathered all the kids into the kitchen and enlisted them in helping make lunch. She had chosen tacos, one of her family’s favorites, which Daniel declared were much better than the tacos they’d been eating at school. They added a chair to their dinner table for Mark. David came in and washed up, and shared the lunch hour with them.
The kids all had their chores for cleanup after the meal, and she gave Mark the task of wiping the table. Since it had already been cleared off, she doubted that would be too much of a drain for him. But when she saw him wandering from the room, she checked his work. Crumbled meat and spilt sauce still dotted the table.
“Mark, you didn’t finish your job,” she said. “It was just a little job. Please come back and do it.”
He shot her a look as if she had wounded him. “I thought this was supposed to be just like school. We don’t have to wipe our own tables at school.”
“It’s not a lot to ask,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Come on, Mark. Everybody else is doing their job.”
Angry, he jerked up the wet rag and began scrubbing the table, knocking the crumbs onto the floor. “Is that why you want us here?” he muttered. “So you can get us to do your work for you?”
She tried to remember that he had helped raise money for Joseph’s heart, that he had come to the hospital with his mom and waited all night, as nervous and worried as the rest of them. She reminded herself that he could be a sweet kid when he wasn’t in one of his moods, that he was going through puberty just like her own son, and didn’t yet know where he fit into this world.
But she wasn’t going to let him get away with disrespect, any more than she allowed her own children. “Mark, if you don’t do what I say, you’re not going to get the privileges that everybody else gets.”
“My mom’s paying you,” he said. “You have to give me the same privileges.”
“She’s not paying me to baby you, Mark. She’s paying me to teach you, and part of what I’m trying to teach you is responsibility.”
“I’m not responsible for your kitchen table.”
She couldn’t believe she was embroiled in this argument in front of her children. All four of them turned and watched her with wide eyes and open mouths. Though her own kids were not perfect, none of them had ever defied her this blatantly.
“You know, Mark, you’re right. My kitchen table is not your responsibility. So I tell you what. Why don’t you go out to the workshop with Mr. David and get in the elective that you’ve been so concerned about?”
“Elective?” he asked. “What elective?”
“Carpentry,” she said. She shot David a look. He was gaping at her as if to say, “Why me?”
“David, you must have a job that Mark can do out there.”
He shot Mark a skeptical look. “I can think of something for him to do.”
“Am I being punished?” he demanded.
Over his head, David grinned and mouthed, “Am I?”
She tried not to grin. “Mark, the word disciple means ‘to teach,’ and that’s what I do here when I homeschool. I try to disciple my kids. I teach them. But there’s anothe
r word that comes from that. The word discipline, and discipline is not punishment. It’s an action also designed to teach. I’m trying to teach you something today.”
“What?” he asked defiantly.
“I’m trying to teach you that if you don’t live up to your responsibilities as I give them to you, just like all the other kids in this house have to do, then you won’t get the privileges that they get.”
“What privilege are they going to get, anyway?” he asked. “The privilege to read some boring chapter on history?”
“Right now they get to go outside and play for a little while, or they can stay in and play on the computer, or they can read. They don’t have to do schoolwork for a little while after lunch. You, on the other hand, will be out in the workshop listening to the buzz saw and sanding furniture.”
He rolled his eyes and leaned back hard against the wall. David wiped his hands. “Come on, kiddo,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“This is not fair,” Mark whined. “My mother is not paying for me to come here and work.”
“Well, if you want me to talk to your mother about this, Mark, I’ll be glad to do it right now.” She headed for the phone.
Mark stopped her. “No! I don’t want her to be bothered at work. She’s already in a bad enough mood when she comes home every day. I’ll just go.”
Mark took off out of the house and headed to the workshop as David shot her a grin that said, “I’ll get you back.”
Brenda stood at the door and let out a huge sigh. It was no wonder Cathy spent so much time yelling. In the space of a few hours, Brenda was close to resorting to it herself.
Later, when free time was over, Brenda invited Mark back into the house, confident that his attitude had changed since he’d spent the past hour sanding.
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