“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not true. They didn’t hurt her. She did it to herself. I believed them and not because I’m stupid. I saw Janie get so mad once that she chewed the flesh off her own finger. Not her fingernail. The actual flesh of her finger. So no, I never once considered that the Bauers had hurt her. I called an emergency meeting with them the next day because the social worker from the hospital had reported the incident. I—”
Ron interrupted me. “I read that report. That social worker seemed pretty convinced that the Bauers were hurting Janie.”
I shook my head. “It didn’t look good. I’ll admit that. She’d only been with them for a little while, and she’d already ended up in the emergency room twice, but I spoke with Dr. Chandler, and their story checked out. They were only doing what she’d instructed them to do.”
“Did they keep going back to Dr. Chandler?”
“They did.”
“Even after she’d suggested a therapy practice that ended up hurting Janie?”
“Yes, they continued seeing Dr. Chandler. Because you want to know the craziest thing about that entire incident?” I didn’t wait for either of them to answer. “It worked. Janie started talking to Hannah again.”
TWENTY-THREE
HANNAH BAUER
Christopher stood holding the trunk open for me so we could set the groceries inside. We were trying to figure out what to grab on the way home to eat for dinner while Janie pulled at his pant leg trying to get his attention. He’d practically dragged her through the parking lot.
“Janie, you have to wait your turn. Christopher and I are talking,” I said without looking at her.
She started whining and switched into baby talk while she tugged on him. I looked at him pointedly just as he was about to say something to her. Dr. Chandler was continually working with him on not allowing Janie to interrupt our conversations. He caught himself.
“Go on—what were you saying?” he asked me.
I rattled off our options again, and he nodded as I spoke, but I was sure he wasn’t registering anything I was saying.
“Sure, let’s just do . . .” He looked down. I followed his gaze. Janie wasn’t there.
My heart stopped.
“Janie!” we screamed at the same time.
We took off running in opposite directions, yelling her name. I rounded a corner and spotted her cutting in between two cars. I sprinted after her and grabbed her arm.
I got down into her face. “You cannot do that. Do you understand me? You can’t run off in a busy parking lot. You could have really gotten hurt.”
She jerked away and looked up at me defiantly. Christopher rushed up behind me. She started crying as soon as she saw him, and he scooped her into his arms. “Sweetie, you can’t do that. It’s dangerous to run across a busy parking lot. You could’ve been hit by a car.”
She batted her eyelashes at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Calling him Daddy was a new thing, and he turned to mush on the spot every time. She had yet to call me Mommy, except that time at Target when she’d yelled that I was hurting her, and I tried to pretend like it didn’t bother me, but of course it did.
He rubbed her back. “It’s okay. Just please don’t do that again.”
“I won’t. I promise, Daddy.”
He had forgotten all about it, but I couldn’t let it go. I replayed the scene all day long. I waited until we were in bed that night to bring it up. I rolled over to face him and said, “You know Janie took off earlier today to get your attention, right?”
He shrugged. “Maybe, but she’s also impulsive. You know how she gets.”
I shook my head even though he couldn’t see it in the dark. “She did it on purpose. You were talking to me and ignoring her. She hates when you ignore her, so she ran across the street so you’d pay attention to her.”
“You give her way too much credit,” he said. He rolled over, his back to me. “Good night. I love you.”
“I love you too,” I said. We were always so cordially polite with each other when we were mad—sickeningly polite, really. Maybe things would be better if we got into one of the feet-stamping, book-throwing kinds of fights other couples had, because this way we just ignored anything emotionally uncomfortable without having to ever deal with it.
We still hadn’t talked about the fact that Janie was speaking to me again. We pretended like the weeks of silence had never happened, and I might have been able to go on pretending if things had gone back to normal, but they hadn’t. It had created a shift in my relationship with Janie, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t know how to fix it either.
I’d tried to talk to Christopher about it, but he didn’t understand my feelings because his relationship with Janie hadn’t been affected by the weeks of silence and the stitches incident. Christopher hadn’t wanted to go back to Dr. Chandler afterward, but I’d insisted. She’d said what we were going through was one of the most common problems couples experienced when they became parents—figuring out how to do it together. Even though I knew what was going on, it didn’t make it any easier.
I was hoping it’d be better when Janie went to school. We had all agreed it was time for her to start. She needed to be around other kids, and I needed to get back to my job. But we had run into a problem when we had started shopping for schools because Janie wasn’t potty trained. We had jumped into a crash course of potty training, and we’d been fighting over it all weekend. We had gotten her one of those cute potty chairs with the music and lights, thinking that it might help, but she still wasn’t having any of it. She crossed her arms and shook her head whenever we asked her to sit on it.
“Why don’t you go together?” Christopher had suggested after we’d spent another three hours trying to get her to go.
“What do you mean?” I had asked.
He’d pointed toward the regular toilet. “Go together. You sit there, and she sits there. Maybe it’ll help.”
I was an intensely private person about everything in the bathroom. We had been married for six years, and Christopher had never seen me pee. I didn’t even like to shower with him. He was the total opposite. He couldn’t care less. I was always yelling at him to shut the bathroom door.
“Are you serious?” I’d asked.
He’d shrugged. “Why not? What’s more effective than watching someone do it?”
“Whatever. Why don’t we try reading her Once upon a Potty again? Where’d you put it?” I had flipped through the other books on the floor.
“You’re not going to do it? You don’t even want to try and see if it will work?” He hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the bathroom door.
“Of course I’m not going to do it. You know me. How could you even ask?”
“I would do anything for her.”
It wasn’t what he’d said. It was how he’d said it, like he’d do anything for her, but I wouldn’t.
“We’re trying to potty train her, Christopher, not give her a kidney.” Normally, he would’ve laughed. Instead he’d said nothing, just turned and walked out of the room.
I reached toward my nightstand and grabbed my phone, quickly tapping out a text to Allison.
We need to talk tomorrow. When are you free?
She’d had lots of problems with Greg after their boys had been born. They’d almost split up. He’d moved out for a while but had eventually moved back in after they’d sorted it out. Allison liked to say that your chances of getting divorced decreased greatly after your kids turned five. Did that mean we had five more years of this, or did we get to take the accelerated course since Janie was so much older than a newborn?
TWENTY-FOUR
CHRISTOPHER BAUER
Exploring Times Preschool buzzed with activity. Kids of different ages moved around the room, gathering materials, washing dishes, counting beads, and checking out what their friends were doing. They were the first school on our list, and so far they’d exceede
d all our expectations. Exploring Times was a true Montessori school—everything child size. Janie had a lot of catching up to do, and we didn’t want her to feel like she was behind the other kids, which was why the Montessori approach was perfect for her. It would allow her to work at her own pace and in her own learning style.
I pointed to a group of kids lying underneath a table, covered in smocks and painting the table above them. “What are they doing?”
The lead teacher, Mrs. Allulo, laughed. “We’ve been studying Michelangelo’s artwork, and they were all fascinated by the Sistine Chapel, so I wanted to give them an opportunity to see how hard it must’ve been for him to paint the ceiling.”
Hannah squeezed my hand excitedly. It’d taken a while, but we’d finally potty trained Janie and had started touring preschools. We’d used a sticker-chart system for the potty training that we’d created during one of our family sessions with Rhonda. We still met with Rhonda once a month for Janie’s follow-up care. At one point, I’d almost given up because Janie hadn’t had any interest in using the toilet and didn’t care when she soiled herself. Then one day, a few weeks ago, something clicked, and she’d been accident-free ever since, even at night.
Potty training was a huge victory in our house and renewed our hope. It rejuvenated us in the same way our parents coming to stay with us had. All the bathroom stuff had brought laughter into parenting for the first time, and it was wonderful—the first glimpse into the fun parts of parenting. Hannah felt it too. There was a new pep in her step, and her old confidence was starting to come back.
“Janie’s not going to be that much older than some of the boys in transitional kindergarten. I would recommend having her finish this year in transitional kindergarten since she’s had no exposure to school, especially because the program runs through the summer. Then you start her in kindergarten in the fall,” Mrs. Allulo explained.
We signed her up to begin the following week. We arranged a special meeting with the director and her teacher to go over her history and background. We’d been on the fence about telling them everything because we wanted people to treat Janie like a normal kid. We didn’t want anyone to pity her or treat her differently, but it was too dangerous not to tell them because of all her issues. She was making small gains every day when it came to feeding, but we were a long way from being able to trust her not to eat inedible objects. Those were the things I worried about, but Hannah’s biggest concern was that Janie had no exposure to other children besides the ones at the park and would be at a huge social loss.
“I’m so nervous for her,” Hannah said on the drive home. “She’s going to be so far behind the other kids. She doesn’t know her ABCs, how to count to ten—very basic things. Every one of the kids in that class is going to know that stuff. They’re going to think either she’s really dumb or we’re terrible parents.” Her face was cinched with worry.
“You know how much she likes to meet new people. She’ll probably be friends with half the class by the end of the day, and it won’t even matter.”
“Are you worried about . . .” She paused, eyeing Janie in the back seat. “You know . . .”
She intentionally didn’t finish the sentence. The longer Janie’s case went without leads, the more we started getting used to living with ambiguity even if it was scary. We didn’t have any choice. Neither of us acknowledged how scared we were to let Janie out of our sight.
I reached over and squeezed her knee while she drove. “She’ll be safe. The doors are locked, and they aren’t going to sign her out with anyone besides us or our parents.”
I was scrolling through golf scores that night when Hannah motioned for me to follow her into Janie’s bedroom. She lay down next to Janie on the floor. “What are you playing with?” she asked.
Janie lifted up the necklace she was working on and proudly displayed her progress. My mom had sent her a wooden bead set last week. We almost hadn’t given it to her because we’d thought it’d be too hard for her, but we’d been wrong. She loved it and spent hours fitting the colorful beads on the string. It was an excellent exercise for her fine motor skills, and she didn’t even know it.
“That is so pretty,” Hannah said. “I really like the pattern you’re using.”
Janie held it up and pointed. “It goes pink, purple, heart.”
“I love it.” Colors had been the easiest thing to learn. She’d picked them up immediately before she’d left the hospital. One of her favorite things to do was go through her crayon bin, picking out different ones and having us read what they were. Hannah laid out a piece of paper next to the beads. “I made something too.”
Janie was immediately drawn to the bright colors. “What’s that?”
“It’s a map.” Hannah pointed as she talked. “This is our house. Then this is the park over here, and this is the grocery store.”
“What’s this?” Janie pointed to the school.
“That’s a school,” Hannah said. “Remember how we explained that a school is a place where kids go to learn?”
Janie nodded.
“When kids get big enough, then they go to school. And guess what?”
Janie’s eyes filled with excitement. “What?”
“You’re big enough to go to school now. This school?” Hannah pointed to the map again. “It’s very close to our house, and it’s the one that you get to go to on Monday.”
The excitement drained from Janie’s face. “What about Daddy?” she said.
I plopped on the floor next to them. “I’ll be at work while you’re at school, but I’m going to be super excited to hear all about it when you get home.”
“So just Mommy?” she asked.
I froze. It was the first time she’d called Hannah Mommy. Hannah tried to keep her composure and not make a big deal out of the moment. I reached over and squeezed her knee, knowing how much it meant to her.
“No, Mommy won’t be there either,” she said. Her voice wavered despite her efforts at control. “School is just for kids and teachers.”
Janie shook her head. “I don’t wanna go to school.”
I planned on going with Hannah to drop Janie off on her first day of school, but I got an emergency call in the middle of the night. There had been a terrible accident on Interstate 10, and I had to rush into surgery. When I finally finished, my phone was filled with Hannah’s texts. It was a play-by-play of their morning:
She’s refusing her breakfast.
I can’t get her to eat anything.
Ugh . . . she’s throwing a fit about her clothes.
This is the outfit she chose. Wtf? Seriously?
We’re out the door. No food.
Just dropped her off. She was kicking and screaming when I left.
I didn’t bother texting. I called her right away, and she answered on the second ring. I could tell she was in the car from the echo in her Bluetooth.
“Sounds like it was a pretty rough morning,” I said.
“I’m on my way to pick her up now.” There was no mistaking the irritation in her voice.
I glanced down at my watch. “It’s only ten thirty. What happened?”
“Mrs. Allulo called because Janie had two accidents and was out of clean clothing. I sent her with an extra set of clothes, but she already pooped in those, too, so I have to come get her. I kept apologizing, and Mrs. Allulo was great about it. She said kids often revert to earlier behavior when they start school and have accidents.”
“I’m sure she’s right,” I said. “Things will get better. It’s just another adjustment period for her.”
But Janie kept soiling herself at school. She stripped off her clothes and ran around the classroom naked. She refused to follow directions and couldn’t be redirected to other activities. At first, Mrs. Allulo was understanding and compassionate. She kept assuring us that it was only a transitional period and Janie would eventually adjust. But then Janie bit another child when he wouldn’t give her the toy she wanted, and Mrs. Allulo
called us in for an emergency meeting.
She folded her hands in front of her on the desk and didn’t waste any time getting down to business. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think Janie is a good fit for Exploring Times.”
“But it hasn’t even been that long. Can’t we give her more time to adjust?” Hannah asked.
Mrs. Allulo’s face, which had previously been so kind and soft, was firm and unrelenting. “Unfortunately, it’s a situation where her behavior problems affect the rest of the class, and I can’t have that.”
“Don’t all behavior problems affect the class?” I asked.
“Yes, but it’s different with Janie. She needs constant one-to-one attention, and we just can’t provide that because it’s not fair to the other kids. And I have to be really honest with you about her toilet issues—it’s a health hazard to have her spreading feces. We stressed how important toilet training was during our interviews.” She looked completely grossed out.
“She’s potty trained. She never has accidents at home,” I said.
Mrs. Allulo looked at me with disbelief. I couldn’t blame her for thinking we were lying. Janie hadn’t made it through a single day at school without an accident. “I’ve put together a list of other schools that you might want to look into.” She handed us a sheet of paper and rose from her desk.
Hannah fumed as we walked to the parking lot and waited until we got in the car until she exploded.
“She did all of that on purpose.” Her face was flushed.
“Who?” I asked. “Mrs. Allulo?”
She rolled her eyes. “No—Janie. She got herself kicked out of school on purpose.”
I shook my head. “Please don’t start.”
She snorted. “Start? C’mon, Christopher. She never wanted to go to school.”
“Yes, but only because it was too much for her too soon. Something always happens when we push her to do things she’s not ready for.”
“No, something always happens when we make her do things that she doesn’t want to do.” Her jaw was set in a straight line.
The Perfect Child Page 13