Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her

Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her Torey Hayden A stunning and poignant account of an extraordinary teacher's determination from the author of the #1 Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child.Jadie never spoke, never laughed, never cried. She spent every waking hour locked in her own private world of shadows. But nothing in Torey Hayden's experience had prepared her for the nightmare Jadie revealed to her when finally persuaded to break her self-imposed silence. It was a story too painful, too horrific for Hayden's professional colleagues to acknowledge.But Torey Hayden could not close her ears… or her heart. A little girl was trapped in a living hell of unspeakable memories. And it would take every ounce of courage, compassion, and love that one remarkable teacher possessed to rid the "Ghost Girl" of the malevolent spirits that haunted her. Copyright (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) HarperElement An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.thorsonselement.com (http://www.thorsonselement.com) and HarperElement are trademarks of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd First published in the US by Little, Brown and Company, Inc. 1991 This edition HarperElement 2006 © Torey Hayden 1991 Torey Hayden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780007218646 Ebook Edition © 2012 ISBN: 9780007370825 Version 2015-02-03 HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Dedication (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) The names of people in this book have been changed for reasons of privacy. Contents Cover (#u4ac73dbc-7ed4-54d9-bfd9-03a0a72a0bbf) Title Page (#u4a4e75c2-ae46-5220-a070-a6e7918fa0de) Copyright (#uc5df578c-cf5b-5b6c-a71b-33f9b76d326a) Dedication (#u9a5bc511-1b73-588e-be4d-37eebaed2c4b) Chapter One (#u212a7ede-5886-5782-bea2-923a713ca413) Chapter Two (#u56af2a62-bbc6-580b-963b-a3685af71975) Chapter Three (#uf746dfc2-3821-52ea-984e-cffca91c269e) Chapter Four (#u13252e03-bc8d-51ec-9a88-78707c29b09d) Chapter Five (#u2ff95c77-6cd1-5501-9896-115fb9742c6c) Chapter Six (#uebf9eb2d-9d2e-5d24-9e19-c16254cb066e) Chapter Seven (#u1013fa92-02d3-5d6a-9731-c5dcff011911) Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Exclusive sample chapter (#litres_trial_promo) Torey Hayden (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter One (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) There were 152 miles between the city and Falls River and from there another 23 miles to Pecking. All of it was prairie, wide flat, and open, interrupted only by the interstate. There were towns along the way, of course, although “town” was a rather grand description for most of them. The names, however, were always hopeful: Harmony, New Marseilles, Valhalla. I’d alloted myself two and a half hours to cover the distance, setting off in the early morning darkness with an egg salad sandwhich and a thermos of coffee. Given no nasty surprises in the January weather, I anticipated reaching Pecking by eight. For much of the way mine was the only car on the road. In and around Falls River there was the bustle of rush hour traffic, but otherwise, nothing disturbed the white emptiness of the plains for mile after mile. A faint breeze eddied powderlike snow across the highway, making the tracks of my tires disappear in a white sky. A litter of sundogs scampered in an arc around it. Passing through one small town, I peered down the main street. The time-and-temperature sign read ?38°. I was born and bred in the Montana Rockies, and my heart had remained in wide, wild places. Despite the enjoyable stimulation of city living, I found the confinement, the dirt, and especially the noise, oppressive. Consequently, what absorbed me most as I drove across the snow-covered prairie that January morning was not thoughts of the new life which lay ahead but rather a simple sense of unbridled freedom. I’d escaped from the city. I was alone with all that silent space around me, and the sense of deliverance it gave me verged on the ecstatic. I don’t believe I actually thought about where I was going at all. Fact was, it probably wasn’t so much a case of not thinking as daring not to think. After nearly three years as a research coordinator and therapist at the Sandry Clinic, I’d thrown it all over in one wholly impulsive moment. Opening the Sunday newspaper one weekend before Christmas, I’d seen an advertisement for a special education teacher to fill a midyear vacancy in a class for the behaviorally disordered. A perfectly straightforward ad. Straightforward enough response, too. I saw it and I wanted it. The strange part was that I hadn’t been looking for a new job at the time. I hadn’t even been thinking of looking. My time at the Sandry had been thoroughly enjoyable and professionally fulfilling. Staffed by seven psychiatrists and a handful of specialized psychologists like myself, the clinic was small, private, and pleasantly situated. I’d been taken on mainly for research expertise and for my experience in treating children with language-related psychological problems. In the years that followed, I’d often worked very hard and certainly there’d been a fair share of ups and downs, but the challenges had been worth it. I really did think I was happy there. Nothing available on a conscious level had clued me in to any desire to chuck the large, airy therapy room full of toys, the genial group of colleagues, and the stimulating research for another chance to gird my loins in denim and crawl around on some dusty classroom floor for the kind of money that would have paid traveling expenses at the clinic. But the Siren called and without a backward glance, I responded. Like so many other little communities I’d passed through on my drive from the city, Pecking was in a state of sleepy decay. The wide, tree-lined streets testified to a time before the railroad had pulled out, before the interstate had passed it by, but now it stood, a wan ghost of small-town America, its A&W root beer stand still there but abandoned, its “Drink Coca-Cola” girl still gamely smiling from her faded mural on the side wall of the savings-and-loan building. The downtown district was virtually gone, all the big stores having moved to the shopping mall in Falls River. There was still a bank and a drugstore, a couple of caf?s, a real estate agent, and a gas station on Main Street, and around the corner on First Street, a ranch store that sold saddles, boots, and hats, but there was no shopping district. What was available in Pecking had relocated far out on the southern fringe in an effort to tempt drivers from the interstate. A “shopping center” had been built there a few years before, and it consisted of a supermarket, another drugstore, and a parking lot so spacious it could no doubt have accommodated every car within five miles of Pecking and then some. The school was on a side street two blocks over from Main. Built in 1898, it had once been the Pecking high school. The beautifully carved wooden plaque attesting to this status still hung above the door, although the word “High” had long since been puttied in. I didn’t know how many schools there must have been in Pecking during its heyday, but this was all that was left now. An enormous monstrosity built from local sandstone, it housed grades K to six and the only special education classroom in the district. “Good morning!” came a cheerful voice as I ascended the broad stone steps. One of the double doors swung open for me, and there stood Glen Tinbergen, the principal. “Getting settled in?” “Just about,” I replied and stamped snow from my feet. “But I don’t get the keys to the apartment until Friday, so I’ve come down from the city this morning.” “Good gracious. All the way from the city this morning?” He was a tall man, and thin, wearing a gray suit. I guessed him to be in his midforties, although he had one of those soft, mild faces that could be any age. His smile was welcoming. “Well, I do hope you get settled in all right. Hope you find Pecking just what you want. We’re so glad to have you.” We started down the hallway. “I’ll introduce you to the staff at lunchtime, but for now, I’m sure you’re anxious to get to your room. It’s all ready for you.” My new classroom was on the second floor, last room on the left. I hadn’t seen it previously. They’d been in an understandable hurry to fill the vacancy, and I was too far away to manage anything more than the interviews and an afternoon’s apartment hunting; so I was braced for the worst, knowing only too well the penchant principals had for sticking their special classes into libraries, ex-closets, or other unaccommodating places. What a pleasant surprise when I discovered myself in a spacious corner room with large windows running along two adjacent walls to give a panoramic view of the snowy schoolyard and the ancient elms bordering it. The room had been laid out carefully in an orderly but welcoming fashion, and my heart warmed to my predecessor. I knew nothing about her nor why she had left so unexpectedly, just before the Christmas holidays, and I hadn’t felt I should pry, since no one offered any information; however, judging from the friendly look of the room, I was sure I would have liked her. Adjacent to the room was an old-fashioned cloakroom with lines of coat hooks running down opposite walls and long, narrow benches beneath for sitting on to remove boots and such. The teacher’s desk had been pushed in at one end of the cloakroom, and this idea impressed me. I’d never known what to do with a desk I could rarely sit at, and this seemed a nice solution to keeping it out of the way, yet accessible. Pulling open one of the bottom drawers, I dropped my sack lunch into it. “Of course, you can change things to suit your taste,” Mr. Tinbergen said as I removed my jacket and hung it on one of the hooks. “We’ve kept everything the way Mrs. Harriman had it, just for the kids’ sakes. And for the substitutes’. Three whole weeks of ’em. The kids. God bless ’em, have had a lot to put up with. Been hard on them. How many substitutes have there been? Eight? Nine? I’ve lost count—too many, that’s for sure. So I’ve tried to keep things familiar. But it’s your room now. If you want to change things around, feel free.” Mr. Tinbergen had migrated back into the main classroom and was pushing chairs in around the several small tables dotted around the room to make a tidier arrangement. “Do you want me to stay? To introduce you to the kids?” I didn’t, to be honest. What I really wanted was some time to myself to go through the files again, to look at what the children had been doing, to acquaint myself with the nooks and crannies of the classroom and generally suss out my little queendom. However, not knowing him, I didn’t think I’d better say that, so I smiled, nodded, and said it would be very nice, if he wanted to stay. There were only four children in this class, making it the smallest I’d ever had outside an institution. Given this, the beautifully appointed classroom, the friendly principal, and the chance to live away from the city, I congratulated myself. Impulsive as the decision had been, it was a good move. At quarter of nine, the first child arrived, tugged into the classroom by his mother. Reuben was a beautiful kid. At nine he was tall and slim, with an exquisitely well-formed body. His hair was dark and glossy, cut in a Dutch-boy style, which gave him a quaint, not-quite-real appearance, rather as if he were an actor preparing for a period part. His eyes, large and dark, looked everywhere but at me. The diagnosis in the file said autism, and it took only a few minutes with him to realize it was accurate. Reuben functioned well, however, within the confines of his handicap. He could speak, use the toilet, and perform a number of academic feats with considerable skill. Only child of a middle-aged professional couple, Reuben had had many advantages and a great deal of time spent in an effort to assuage the effects of the autism. He’d been to California, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina to participate in programs designed to modify the more difficult behaviors. At home he had two “nannies” employed specifically to see that Reuben got through his daily exercises and programming, had his vitamins, and was otherwise encouraged to follow various professional recommendations to ameliorate his handicap. And he had swimming lessons and piano lessons, not only for the experiences they provided but also to give Reuben a chance to mix with ordinary children. Despite both working in Falls River, his parents had specifically chosen to build their new home on a twenty-acre tract outside Pecking in the belief that a rural environment with its more varied seasons, clear-cut cycles, and numerous hands-on experiences would be better for Reuben than life in town. And it was they, Mr. Tinbergen pointed out, who had sought to have a special education program available locally for their son. Previously, all special education students had been bussed into Falls River, but Dr. and Mrs. Adams had been persistent and were influential enough in their own right to have seen the formation of this small class four years earlier. Unspoken but unmistakable was Mr. Tinbergen’s intimation that we all had to kowtow a bit to the Adamses, as without them, none of this would have been. After getting Reuben settled with a toy at one of the tables, I turned to see a small face peering through the window of the classroom door. “Hello,” I said. “Is this your room?” The door cracked open to reveal a small girl with thin, matchstick legs and pinched features dwarfed further by what could only be described as a Pre-Raphaelite hair style—a great wodge of dark, curly hair parted unevenly down the middle and descending over her back in a sheet. She was attractive in a pale, overwhelmed sort of way. I knew immediately who this was—Jade Ekdahl-simply because she was the only girl in the class. What had caught my eye immediately in reading Jade’s file was the fact that she was an elective mute. Although reportedly she talked at home, at school she had never uttered a word to anyone. Indeed, not only did she not talk, she also did not laugh, cry, cough, burp, hiccup or even sniffle, which, tales had it, left snot to drip inelegantly down from her nose into her lap. She had been retained an extra year in kindergarten in hopes that time might help her overcome her speaking difficulties, but nothing had changed. She’d been promoted on to first grade, where she seemed competent enough at her schoolwork, but she was dismally isolated. Still not speaking at the end of that year and by now almost eight, she was moved down the hall to this room. The reason that Jade’s case had caught my eye was that for the better part of the previous ten years, from college right through my work at the Sandry Clinic, my special research interest had been elective mutism. Fascinated by this disturbance, in which an individual is physically and intellectually capable of speaking normally but refuses to do so for psychological reasons, I had worked with these children extensively. Now I found it quirky that on finally deciding to end all that, who should turn up in my class but another elective mute. You’re blessed with them, Mr. Tinbergen had remarked when I pointed out this coincidence. I’d replied something along the lines of not so much being blessed with them as haunted by them. “Good morning, Jadie,” Mr. Tinbergen said. “Come on in. This is your new teacher. Your real teacher, not just another substitute.” Jadie—as everyone called her—glanced up at me briefly and then scuttled by to hang up her coat in the cloakroom. What I noticed immediately was her posture, quite unlike anything I’d previously encountered while treating elective mutes. Hunched over almost double, she had her arms crossed and tucked up under her, as if she were clutching an unwieldy load of books. I made a mental note to inquire about scoliosis. The two final pupils arrived by bus and so came into the classroom together. Six-year-old Philip was a small skinny black kid with a horsey-looking face. His hair was cut very short and his two front teeth stuck out, emphasizing the equine likeness. Born in Chicago to a mother addicted to hard drugs, Philip had had a very unpromising start to life. He’d been premature, addicted himself, and had failed to thrive throughout much of his first year of life. As he passed through a series of foster homes during the times his mother felt unable to cope with him, his development had been slow, erratic, and often unreported so that when, at age three, he was finally taken permanently from his mother’s care, no one had any realistic idea what Philip was capable of. When he was five, he was placed in a long-term foster home with a local couple who had taken several other “hard-to-place” children and were raising them successfully. Without a doubt, the newfound warmth and stability were good for Philip, but he had made dishearteningly little progress. Although he grunted and gestured, he still had virtually no speech. He urinated in the toilet but would only open his bowels when wearing a special diaper, which had resulted in horrific bouts of constipation and frequently soiled pants. And he had made almost no academic progress in two years at school. A class for mildly mentally handicapped children probably would have been a more appropriate placement for his educational needs; however, Philip’s behavior made him unwelcome. Racked with fears, he was withdrawn and unwilling to approach new situations, and when frustrated, he responded with panicky violence. The final student was Jeremiah, eight. A native American of Sioux descent, he was the oldest of five children in a family eking out a living doing God-knows-what on a five-acre tract of land littered with rusting car bodies and old stoves. Jeremiah was a fighter. His pugnacious behavior was so extreme, his mouth so foul that the parents in his previous school had banded together to keep him from returning, even with resource help. So he’d ended up here in a last-ditch attempt to save him from custodial detention. I had an irrational love for this sort of kid, for the loud, feisty, streetwise ones who never knew quite how to quit, and the moment I saw him with his black hair stuck straight up, as if it had never seen a comb, and his cocky little rooster strut, I knew I’d found another one. “Well, children,” Mr. Tinbergen said cheerfully, when everyone had arrived, “guess what? This is your new teacher. Your new teacher. Not just another substitute, but your own teacher. Miss Hayden. Miss Torey Hayden. And she says you may call her Torey. That’s what her other boys and girls have called her. So let’s say hello to Torey.” All four children stared at me. No one spoke. “Well, come on, now. Let’s make Torey feel welcome. Reuben? Can you say good morning?” “Good morning,” Reuben echoed in a singsong falsetto. “Philip?” Philip grunted and hid his head in his arms. “Jeremiah?” His grunt was not much more intelligible than Philip’s. “And Jadie says hello, too, don’t you, Jadie?” Then Mr. Tinbergen turned to me. “Welcome to P.S. 168. Welcome to our school.” I smiled self-consciously. “And now, I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’re anxious to get on with things.” With that, Mr. Tinbergen finally went out the door. Pressing it gently shut behind him, I turned back to the class, to the four of them sitting around the table. “Well,” I said, “good morning. Good morning to you, Philip. And to you, Reuben. And to you, Jeremiah. And good morning to you. Jade—Jadie? Is that what you like people to call you?” “She don’t talk, so you might as well not make a point of it,” Jeremiah said. “I can still talk to her,” I replied. “Oh Jesus,” Jeremiah replied and rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to be one of them teachers, are you? Not one of them always wanting her own way.” “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “Is that what you’re worried about?” he mimicked perfectly. “Oh Jesus, you guys, listen to her. Listen to that boogy old broad.” I grinned. Back in the saddle again. Chapter Two (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) That first morning was hell. No use pretending otherwise. Jeremiah was a nightmare. Every time my back was turned, he bolted out the door. He never went far, usually didn’t even leave the building, but since he knew the building, whereas I didn’t, he had no trouble eluding me. If I left him to his own devices and refused to chase him, he dashed up and down the corridors, banging on the other classroom doors. On one occasion, he got into the office and messed up all the internal mail. On another, he pulled off toilet paper and blocked all the toilets in both the boys’ and the girls’ rest rooms. And one time when I did chase after him, he got back into the classroom when I was out looking for him and locked me out. This was all before 11:30. In contrast, Philip huddled in his chair and whimpered, cringing away from me every time I approached. When I tried to encourage him to join in the singing or listen to a story, he clamped his hands over his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and rocked the chair frantically back and forth. Reuben was in a frenzy most of the time. Up, out of his chair, he sailed around the room, deftly touching the wall with his fingertips as he moved and all the while making a soft, whirring sound. Then he’d stop, momentarily mesmerized by a dangling pull on the roller blind or some other odd object, but before I could corral him and try to reorient him, he would shoot off again. And toilet trained he may have been, but twice he whipped down his pants and peed into the trash can beside the bookshelf. In the middle of all this was Jadie, carrying on as if she were in a completely normal classroom. Without being instructed to do so, she ferreted out her workbooks for math and reading, sat down and completed a few pages, returned them to be corrected, found a spelling sheet on the shelf, did that, handed it into the basket on the teacher’s desk, then sought out a cassette, put it into the recorder, and slipped the earphones on. Occasionally, she would glance in my direction as I struggled with the boys, but otherwise she seemed impervious to my presence. I felt immense relief when the lunch bell rang. Jeremiah, whom I’d just recaptured, heard it, too, and was out the door and down the hall before I could catch him. The second-grade teacher, whose room was next door to mine, was already out in the hallway lining up her children when I bolted by after Jeremiah. She smiled warmly and put her hand out. “I’ll catch him on the way down,” she said. “Thanks,” I replied in a heartfelt tone. I must have looked as overwhelmed as I was feeling, because she smiled again in the same warm, sympathetic way. “Want me to take your others with mine? I’m going down to the lunchroom anyway.” “That’d be really great.” Going back into the classroom, I was dismayed to discover that now Jadie, too, had disappeared. I returned to the hall with Philip and Reuben. “Oh, she goes home for lunch. She lives just across the street, so she doesn’t eat here,” the teacher replied when I explained that I’d lost another one. She abruptly extended her hand. “By the way, I’m Lucy McLaren. Welcome aboard.” I hung out my tongue in an expression of exhaustion. “I usually do better than this. Even on first days. But they’ve got the advantage at the moment. They know the ropes and I don’t.” “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing all right. You’ve already lasted longer than a couple of the substitutes. There was one that left after about half an hour.” And she laughed. Back in the empty classroom, I threw myself down into one of the small chairs with the idea of catching my breath a moment before going down for the grand entrance into the teachers’ lounge, an experience almost on a par with facing a new class. Five minutes’ relaxation, I thought, and then I’d get my lunch and go down. Abruptly, a scuffling rattle came from the cloakroom. Relaxed almost to a point of sleepiness in the silent classroom, I was badly startled by the noise. Jerking upright in the chair, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. Jadie appeared in the cloakroom doorway. “You’re still here? I thought you’d gone home for lunch.” Because of her hunched posture, Jadie had to tilt her head back at a difficult angle and peer through her eyebrows to see me, but look at me she did, her gaze steady and intent. I, too, studied her. Her hair was very dark, almost black, as were her brows and lashes. Her eyes, in contrast, were a clear, pure blue. With her scruffy homemade clothes and tangled mass of hair, she wasn’t exactly pretty, but there was a knowing, almost come-hither kind of expression in her eyes that lent her a certain beauty. “You want to know something?” I asked. No response. No step nearer, no blink, not even a breath that I could see. “Come over here.” I patted the chair next to mine at the table. Laboriously, she hobbled across the classroom. Her eyes remained on me but her expression was unreadable. She didn’t sit down. “You know what I did before I came here?” No response. “I worked in a special clinic up in the city and you know what? I worked with boys and girls just like you, who had a hard time talking.” Jadie’s eyes searched my face. “Isn’t that amazing, that first I was there and now I’m here with you? Boys and girls just like you. It was my own special job, helping them.” Her eyes narrowed. “Did you know there were others like you? Who found it impossible to talk at school?” A long pause and then very, very faintly, she shook her head. I sat back and smiled. “There are. Not very many, which is why it’s a bit of a coincidence, your being in this class, but I’ve known a lot of them. And it was my own special job, helping them be able to talk again.” The pupils of Jadie’s eyes dilated, and for the first time she let slip the expressionless mask. A look of incredulity crossed her features. Lowering my head like an ostrich in need of chiropractic help, I stuck my neck out and peered upward into her face to see her fully. I smiled. “You don’t quite believe me, do you? Did you think you were all alone in feeling like you do? Did you think nobody knew about these things?” No response. “It’s scary, isn’t it, being all alone, not being able to tell anyone how you feel.” Again, the very faint nod. Again, I smiled. “Aren’t we lucky that you and I are going to be together? I’ve helped all those other children. Now I’m here to help you.” Her eyes grew watery, and for a brief moment, I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. Instead, she clutched her unbuttoned coat closed, turned tail, and ran, shutting the classroom door firmly behind her. Over the lunch hour I set up the painting easel and mixed several pots of tempera paints. Within minutes of getting back into the classroom, Jeremiah discovered the paints and busied himself stirring the colors together. I separated him and the paints and then went off to catch Reuben, only to come back moments later and find Jeremiah painting lunchboxes. This distressed Philip immensely, as his Superman lunchbox was now a pale shade of mud brown; so I sent Jeremiah back to the sink with the lunchbox to wash it before the paint dried. The potential for mess created by combining Jeremiah, a sinkful of water, and a paint-covered lunchbox was not something I had fully appreciated until that moment, and by two o’clock I was making the acquaintance of Mr. O’Banyon, the janitor, and his mop bucket. Compared to the morning, however, this was an improvement. After three weeks of substitutes, it was only fair to expect the children to be disrupted and disruptive. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy coming in midyear and trying to recreate order. I’d appreciated that fact when I accepted the job. Jadie, Philip, and Jeremiah, however, seemed to take one more new face in their stride. Reuben couldn’t. Nothing I did all day long managed to orient him to any meaningful activity. Most of the time he was up, dashing in broad circles around the classroom. When finally persuaded to sit down, he constantly rocked and flicked his eyelashes with his fingers. Philip made an effort to join in during the afternoon. He liked the easel and paints and enthusiastically slopped bright blobs of color over piece after piece of paper. “Red?” I’d say encouragingly. “Orange?” This made him grunt something back in reply, although goodness knows what. “That’s baby painting,” Jeremiah said, as he passed the easel. “Man, boog, that’s not even a picture. Want me to show you how to paint something real?” He snatched the paintbrush out of Philip’s hand. Picking up the container of black paint, he dipped the brush in and began to draw a long, black line over Philip’s blodges of color. Indignant at this interference, Philip howled. “Jeremiah,” I cried, abandoning Reuben to halt what I feared would turn into real trouble. “That’s Philip’s painting. Now give him back his brush. You’ve already had your turn.” “Jesus, lady, I’m just going to help the little booger. Look at this, it ain’t even a picture. And you sure ain’t teaching him how to do it right.” Philip had begun to dance in frustration, trying to grasp the brush from Jeremiah’s hand. Jeremiah, both bigger and more agile, kept it just out of reach. Black paint dripped everywhere. “Give it back,” I demanded. “Want me to teach you how to make Mr. T?” Jeremiah offered suddenly. “You ought to like that. He’s a black guy, just like you, only he’s a big booger. You gonna be a big booger someday? Yeah? I bet you are.” He put his free arm around Philip’s shoulder in buddy-buddy fashion. “But you know something I can never figure out about you black people?” Jeremiah continued, as Philip, charmed by his attention, wrapped an arm around Jeremiah’s waist. “I can never figure out how come the blackness just sort of wears off your hands. How come that happens? Look much better to me, man, if you was black all over.” And with unexpected swiftness, he began painting Philip’s palm black and then continued right on up his shirt sleeve. Philip howled again. I separated the two boys, sending Jeremiah off to the “quiet chair” I’d placed just outside the cloakroom door and explaining he needed to sit there until he could keep his act together. Jeremiah was not enthusiastic about this imposition on his freedom and got up immediately, shouting and swearing, I physically replaced him and was then obliged to stand over him for the fifteen minutes or so it took him to settle down. Even then, he muttered crossly under his breath, “Man, lady, you’re gonna regret this.” Jadie might as well have been a ghost. No one spoke to her, looked at her, or even acknowledged her presence in the room. And this attitude was mutual. Jadie went about her business with absorption, but she gave no indication that there was anyone else in the room besides herself. When it was Jadie’s turn at the easel, she painted an elaborate picture of a white house with a blue roof. Beside it grew a lollipop-shaped tree and in front was a peculiarly shaped figure, rather like a bell with legs coming from it. It had yellow hair flowing down the sides, so I took it to be a person, probably a girl. The painting was small, covering only the bottom third of the paper. She made a strip of blue sky at the top and added a shining sun. This left the middle largely blank. “I like that,” I said, when she’d stepped back to view it. “You’ve used a lot of colors. Who’s this?” I pointed to the figure. “Man, lady, don’t you take no hint?” Jeremiah shouted. “She don’t talk. You been told that already. So don’t go hassling folks about what’s wrong with them. How’d you like it, if people kept getting at you for being so dumb? You can’t help that, can you?” “Thank you for your thoughts, Jeremiah, but I’m talking to Jadie just now.” At that moment the recess bell rang. Jeremiah shot out the door and Philip scampered after him, leaving me with Reuben and Jadie. I realized I should have been hustling out the door after them, either to catch Jeremiah and bring him back for a more appropriate exit or at least to supervise his departure, but I didn’t. I stood a moment longer to see if anyone would reappear in the doorway or if any horrible noises would signal disaster. When nothing happened, I glanced over at Reuben, self-stimulating happily in the far corner, and then back to Jadie. Pointing directly to the figure on the painting, I asked again, “Who’s this person?” Silence. “Who’s this?” Still silence. I knew I had to work quickly now to keep the silence from growing potent. My research had yielded a highly successful method of treating the most salient symptom of the elective mutism syndrome—the refusal to speak—and it was both simple and efficient. All that was needed was for someone unknown to the child to come in, set up expectations immediately that the child would speak, and then provide an unavoidable opportunity to do so. Consequently, as a new teacher, I was in an ideal position to get Jadie to speak, but I had to do so right away before we’d established a relationship that included her silence. I also knew that to provide the “unavoidable opportunity,” I had to be persistent, clinging like a terrier to my question, and not let the inevitable wall of silence deter me. “Who’s in this picture?” Silence. “Tell me what figure we have here.” Silence. “What person is this?” Still silence. I could see her muscles tense. Her hands began to tremble. “Who’s this?” I asked again, intensifying my voice abruptly, not making it sound angry, not even louder, just intense. And unavoidable. I tapped the picture smartly with the eraser end of the pencil I was holding. “A girl,” she whispered. “Pardon?” “A girl,” she murmured in a hoarse half whisper. “I see. What’s her name?” Silence. “What do you call her?” “Tashee.” Still the hoarse whisper. “Tashee? That’s an interesting name. Is she a friend of yours?” Jadie nodded. “What’s Tashee doing in this picture?” “Standing in front of her grandma’s house.” “Oh, so this is her grandma’s house. It’s pretty, all blue and white like that. Especially the door. You’ve made a beautiful door. And how old is Tashee?” “Six.” “Same age as you, then?” “No, I’m eight. I was seven, but I just had my birthday at Christmastime.” “I see. Do you and Tashee play together sometimes?” “No.” “Have you been to her grandma’s house with her?” A pause. Jadie regarded the picture. “I don’t know her grandma. She just talked about her sometimes.” “Oh.” Jadie touched the figure on the paper with one finger and some of the yellow paint smeared. Lifting her finger, she examined it. “I should have made her hair black.” “Tashee doesn’t have yellow hair?” Jadie shook her head. “No. Her hair was black, like Jeremiah’s. Black and straight. I think maybe she was an Indian, but I don’t know for sure.” “I see.” Then I smiled at her. “I like this picture a lot. Maybe we can put it on the back counter to dry. Then I think maybe we’d better get outside to join the others, don’t you?” Jadie bent to put the lids back on the paints. I glanced over to see what Reuben was up to. Curled in a fetal position among the cushions, he lay, eyes closed, and gently stroked the skin alongside his temples. “Reuben? Reub, come on. Time to go outside.” Chapter Three (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) “You didn’t? Holy cow. Holy Toledo. Glen? Glen, did you hear this? She’s been here six hours and she’s got Jadie Ekdahl talking. You hired Wonder Woman.” Mortally embarrassed, I ducked my head to hide my blazing cheeks. “Just coincidence, really … This was my research specialty …” The speaker was Alice Havers, fiftyish maybe, small, trim, neatly turned out. She taught kindergarten and had coped with Jadie through two years of school. “So how’d you do it? What’s the secret? What do we do now?” Lifting my head, I glanced around at the others in the teachers’ lounge. They were all there, from Mr. Tinbergen to Mr. O’Banyon, and they were all watching me. I smiled sheepishly and looked back at my hands. What would be best, I explained mostly to my fingernails, would be to treat Jadie as if she’d always spoken. No big fuss. No lavish praise. I explained how a lot of these children, in my experience, seemed to stay silent more from fear of the amount of attention they’d provoke when they started to talk again than anything else, and so it took a lot of work to gain the courage to try. And others seemed to feel they’d been defeated and somehow lost face by being persuaded to talk again. So it was very important to minimize the attention. After all, it wasn’t the act of speaking that should get the attention, it’s what people said that was important. There, I thought, I’d said it. Given my lecture. Not even managed to make friends yet; in fact, I didn’t even know everyone’s name, and I’d already made a brilliant impression—Wonder Woman and wiseacre. It was too much for a first day. At the first available moment, I smiled politely, grabbed my coffee cup, and retreated to my room. About twenty minutes later, Lucy McLaren appeared. “How’re you settling in?” I rolled my eyes. “I felt like a real dolt down there in the lounge. I wasn’t trying to show off with Jadie, but that’s what it came off sounding like.” “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lucy said and smiled. “Alice is top class. She wasn’t trying to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that she’s had Jadie for two years, so she knows what Jadie’s like.” “The whole secret is in being an outsider—an unknown quantity to the child. That and not cosseting the child. You instinctively want to be gentle and supportive with these kids, and that’s generally how the kid gets control. In most cases, you’ll find the elective mute is a master of manipulation.” Lucy sat down on the tabletop across from my chair. “Yes, I can believe that. Poor June. She was the teacher here before. It was nothing but one big power struggle between her and Jadie. And June tried everything. In the beginning she was really nice, really warm, thinking Jadie was just needing confidence and once she felt secure, she’d speak. Of course she never did. So then June tried star charts, saying Jadie could earn all these privileges, if only she’d say answers to things. Then June got Jadie’s parents to make a tape recording of Jadie at home and tried to prove to Jadie that she knew she could talk. She tried being underhanded, doing things like making Jadie run so that she’d make noise by panting. And this one time …” Lucy paused. “Poor June, she was so thoroughly fed up. This one afternoon, she just said, no, Jadie couldn’t go home until she’d said good-bye and that was that. So there they sat. And gosh, what an ordeal. Jadie did nothing. Just sat there. Picked her nose and that was about it. Poor June was right up the wall, trying to wait her out, but she couldn’t manage it. Five-thirty came and she had to let Jadie go. June had to give in.” I nodded. “They’re not kids to get into a power struggle with, because they’ve usually had a lot more practice at it than you have. That’s why being a stranger helps, I think. The groundwork for the power struggle hasn’t been laid yet, and if you’re canny and a bit of an actor, you’ve got a chance of making them think the game’s up …” My words trailed off and we fell silent. I lifted my head and looked out across the room to the back window and from there to the playground beyond, white with snow. Lucy, still on the tabletop, studied her fingernails. I cast a sidelong glance in her direction. She was younger than I was, no more than in her midtwenties, although considerably more formally dressed than was characteristic of our generation. She was pretty in a natural, lively sort of way, although carefully applied makeup gave her more sophistication than beauty. Her dark hair was in a well-cut pageboy. What really caught my eye, however, was the remarkable height of her high heels. Then I glanced around the room again, surveying the neat organization. “Why did June leave midyear?” I asked. It sounded funny calling her by her first name, when I’d never even met her. Lucy looked over and her eyes widened. “Didn’t they tell you?” “Well, I didn’t think I should really ask. I felt it would be sort of nosy.” “Oh, golly. Did they really not say anything to you?” “No.” A grimace. Briefly, she searched my face and then dropped her eyes again to her lap. “June committed suicide.” “Oh.” An appalled silence followed. What did one say in reply to something like that? Not having known her personally, I found myself filled with morbid curiosity and wasn’t too pleased at having it. “What on earth did they tell the children?” I ventured at last. “We couldn’t really beat around the bush. At least not about the fact she had died. But it was awful, believe me. It was right in the Christmas season, and we were in full swing with parties and plays and all the jingle-bell stuff.” Another grimace. “Let me tell you, it was a downer.” “I can imagine.” “I don’t know if anybody really knew what happened. She seemed okay. She’d been here about two years, and we all knew her. I’d always thought of her as a friend. She was older and stuff … I mean, we weren’t girlfriends, you know, like you are with people your own age, but …” Lucy paused and took in a deep breath. Holding it several seconds, she slowly released it. “I guess I did know things weren’t going too well for her. The year had gotten her down. She’d said that a couple of times, but, golly, we all say things like that sometimes. I did feel sorry for her. She’d gotten divorced a few years ago and her kids were gone away to college and she hardly ever saw them. She complained about it sometimes, and I tried to be supportive, you know, listen and stuff, but I just thought it was … well, you know. We all bitch a bit, don’t we? I never thought …” Silence. “I don’t know. Something like this happens close to you and you spend gobs of time mulling it over. It’s made me grow up a lot this year. It’s made me face things I’d sort of ignored before.” “I’m just glad you’ve told me,” I said. “I could have really put my foot in it.” “Yeah, we were all feeling sorry for you. They couldn’t get anybody local to take the job. That’s why they were advertising in the big-city newspapers. But you can understand how people around here feel. It’s a small town and …” “Yes.” Lucy looked over. “If the kids get a bit wild, don’t worry about it, okay? We all understand. It’s a good school, this one. I mean, I know they look like a bunch of old fogeys down in the lounge.” She chuckled. “Believe me, I was really glad when I met you and saw you were under fifty! But it doesn’t matter. Everyone here’s got good hearts. If the going gets rough, everybody’ll help. Just tell us, okay?” I smiled and nodded. “Okay.” Work followed me home that night. As I drove to Falls River, where I was staying in a motel until my apartment in Pecking was available, all I could think about was the school. The news about June Harriman had unsettled me more than I cared to admit, and I kept wondering what it must have been like to stand in that classroom, facing those children and feeling so desperate. When I’d arrived in the morning, all I’d been able to think about was how lucky I’d been to land this job. The small number of children, the beautifully appointed classroom, the bountiful supplies, the supportive principal, and friendly staff had made it seem as close to an ideal teaching position as I’d thus far encountered in my career. Now, abruptly, it felt tainted. Appreciating more the turmoil the children had been through in the previous month, I decided it would be best to establish clear rules and a definite routine that would leave no doubt about my behavior. Normally, I liked a bit of spontaneity in my day and could tolerate a fair amount of chaos in the process; however, I knew now this was neither the time nor the place to be unpredictable. I also decided it would be better to make the classroom mine immediately. My first inclination had been to leave things as they were until we’d had a chance to adjust to one another; however, after second thought, it seemed preferable to change everything at once and give more of a sense of starting anew. So on Tuesday afternoon after school, I turned the room upside down. I shifted the bookshelves around, moved all the tables together to form one huge one, pulled down the bulletin board displays. I brought in some large floor pillows and a red carpet remnant to form a specific area for morning discussion and reading. The movable shelves and cupboards I used to divide the room into several smaller areas, making one for art activities, one for construction materials and Lego, one for natural history and science activities, and one for dressing up and housekeeping. Last of all, on my way back to the motel in Falls River that night, I stopped and plundered a pet shop, buying us a flop-eared bunny, three green finches, and a pair of hamsters with a cage that resembled the Paris M?tro system. The weeks that followed were challenging, to say the least. I was very strict and very consistent about what I expected, pulling everyone—but most especially Jeremiah—up short every single time a rule was infringed. By the same token, I tried to make sure there was plenty of fun, too. We did a lot of singing, a lot of art projects, a lot of cooking, and a lot of building of fairly unrecognizable bird-houses and boats. Each morning, I tried to take the children outside for a period separate from recess. Usually, it went under the guise of science—studying seasonal changes or the weather or whatever—but it was mainly a chance for the children to let off steam, to run and scream a little without disturbing the other classes, a spell of good fun to charm the reluctant ones into behaving and reward the cooperative ones. No doubt it would come as a nasty surprise when the time arrived to spend more of the day reading and writing than we were doing at this point, but I didn’t feel we were in any way wasting time or resources in those early weeks. The need to make us a group, to provide collective memories that included me rather than June Harriman, to resurrect the school year from the ashes of what had gone before, all seemed more necessary goals than the completion of a certain number of workbooks. And it was my good fortune to have a principal who agreed. “Hey, how you doing?” I didn’t know the woman at the door. She was good-looking in a hearty, worldly sort of way, with big boobs and big hips but a waspish little waist, all appearing slightly disproportionate since she couldn’t have been over five feet tall. Her thick brown hair was tied back with a red scarf into a ponytail. “All right,” I said and smiled uncertainly. “Glen tells me you’ve settled in pretty good. Says you’ve cut Jeremiah down to size.” What was going through my mind as I studied her was that she would have made an archetypal country-western singer. She had about her that powerful aura of hardbitten wisdom, the kind evidenced by women named Lurleen or Loretta, whose men married them at fifteen and then ran off with the waitress from the diner. “In fact,” she said, “Glen tells me you’ve even managed to get Jadie Ekdahl talking.” Pulling out one of the child-sized chairs, she sat down. Intensely uncomfortable, I wondered if I should mention that I didn’t know her. Did I? Had I forgotten her face? This was not an unknown happening for me, and I racked my brain to remember who was at my interview. My predicament suddenly became clear to her, and she gave a broad smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Arkie. Arkie Peterson. The school psychologist.” The name I recognized immediately, because it appeared as a signature on almost every paper in the children’s files. “So you’ve got to tell me all about it,” she said, her tone zesty. “All about what you did with Jade. Did Glen tell you that I’d tried with her? Two blessed years, almost. I was coming in here every Thursday, trying to get that kid to talk. So, precisely now, what did you do?” The affinity between us was instant. Talking with Arkie was like picking up a long-forgotten friendship, and before I realized it, we had whiled away the better part of an hour discussing our mutual interests in psychology, education, and disturbed children. Arkie had been down all the usual routes with Jadie’s mutism. She’d first encountered Jadie just past her fifth birthday, when it was picked up during a prekindergarten screening program. “I just wanted to gain her confidence,” Arkie said. “Here was this little, wee mite of a thing under all that hair. She looked so scared and vulnerable when I came that first day. I took her down to the nurse’s office, where I usually work when I’m here, and I said to her, ‘Honey, we’re going to be friends. We’re going to come in here and do things together and have a real good time. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t manage talking right away, because we’ll be friends anyhow.’ And I just assumed once she got to know me, once she felt secure enough to trust me, she’d begin talking. I thought she’d want to talk to me. But she didn’t. We played all these shitty little games Thursday after Thursday, ’til I wanted to brain the child.” From there, Arkie’s relationship with Jadie had deteriorated into the same sort of power struggle June Harriman had experienced later. Indeed, it was Arkie’s frustration that led to Jadie’s placement in this class. “I still don’t know if it was the right move,” she said. “I mean, she’s always done all right academically. She’s a bright enough kid. I think her IQ scores have always been one twelve, one sixteen, somewhere in there, and she’s functioning about there in her schoolwork. So was this the right move? If the mutism was not interfering with her learning, should she get stuck in a special class?” I gave a faint shrug. “Good question. And hard to answer. Certainly she merited intervention, which lots of times these kids don’t get simply because they don’t cause adults much trouble. However, any kind of voluntary mutism, if it persists over months or years, shows a disturbing need to control.” I looked over. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, is control what? Any ideas?” “Not really.” “What’s the family like?” A shrug. “Pretty average. There’s Mom, Dad, two younger girls. Traditional setup. Mom stays home with the kids. Dad has a job doing something with agricultural machinery. Socioeconomically, they’re definitely in the lower bracket, but they’re by no means poor.” “What about the psychological makeup of the family?” A pause. Arkie considered her fingernails. “I don’t think Mom’s too bright. Sort of a go-alonger. You know the type. Anything you tell her, she goes along with. But she’s easy to get on with. Dad’s a bit quirky. Into health food in a big way. Got really het up because we served pork and beans in school lunches. I think he thinks Jadie’s problems are coming from eating too much sugar or additives or something.” “Elective mutism as an allergy,” I murmured and smiled. “That’s a new one on me.” “Yeah, a bit silly. But basically, both of them are easy to get along with. I’ve had much worse parents to deal with in my time.” “Tell me something else,” I said, changing the subject. “Has anyone investigated her posture? Does she have scoliosis?” “No,” Arkie replied bluntly. “I think it’s just part of her emotional problems. We’ve had the school nurse look at her, and of course her own pediatrician has seen her, but no one’s found anything to explain it. I think she’s just a closed-up kid in all senses of the word.” The majority of the time, Jadie walked nearly doubled over. She kept her arms up under her, tucked against her chest, her hands dangling limply unless she carried something. While she kept her head up sufficiently to see, she would have to keep it at an awkward angle to see much, so most of the time she peered through her eyebrows and the tangled dark hair hanging over her forehead. This made looking Jadie in the eye an almost impossible task. The bent-over posture took its toll on her gait, too, and she moved about the classroom in a mincing hobble. This physical behavior perplexed me. While it was not uncommon for the children in my elective mutism research to exhibit a tendency to keep their limbs close in and otherwise take on an inhibited posture, none had even faintly approached Jadie’s florid display. Despite Arkie’s assurance that Jadie had been properly examined by doctors and the problem seemed to be purely psychological, I remained skeptical, because, plain and simple, Jadie looked deformed. One morning not long after Arkie and I had talked, I found myself watching Jadie as she went about her work. “Jadie?” I called. “Come over here, please.” Turning from the bookshelf, Jadie hobbled over. I turned her around to face away from me and asked her to bend over and touch her ankles. This she cautiously did and, lifting her shirt, I studied the outline of her shoulders to reassure myself there was no evidence of scoliosis. Then I asked her to stand and turn around to face me. Doing so, she tilted her head to one side to see me better. Very gently, I put one hand on her collar bone and the other in the middle of her back. “Let’s see you stand up a little straighter.” Carefully, I urged her upright. I felt very unsure of myself in doing this and the uncertainty must have come through my hands, because I quickly met resistance. Reluctant to push harder in case I might do damage, I stopped and lowered my hands. “These muscles here,” I said, indicating her lower back, “can you relax them?” Gently, I massaged along her spine with my fingertips, but it was like touching clothed stone. The more I touched her, the tenser she became. At last I dropped my hand. “Does it hurt you when I push like that?” “I don’t want to.” “But does it hurt?” “No.” “So, will you show me that you can stand up straight?” She shook her head. “If I take my hands right away and don’t touch you, can you straighten up?” “No.” “Why? Does it hurt?” “No.” “Well, why then?” “Because I need to bend over.” “Why?” “Because I need to.” “But why?” “To keep my insides from falling out.” Chapter Four (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) The following week, I made an appointment to see Jadie’s parents, and since they lived so near the school, I offered to come over to their house to see them. They readily accepted, as their youngest daughter, Sapphire, was only a few months old. The house was small and in the style of those built between the wars. Everything about it was ramshackle. Paint peeled from the window frames. The latticework around the front porch was broken. Large patches of grass in the front yard were worn away, leaving a battered tricycle mired in the mud. But when Mr. Ekdahl opened the door to greet me, I was led into a large room, warm and neat. They were a wholly undistinguished-looking couple. Jadie’s mother was small and drab, with mousy hair and badly chapped hands. She’d made a clear effort to appear attractive, apparent in the eye makeup and styled hair, but they had an aging effect. I knew she was probably near my age, but she had the aura of an older generation. Jadie’s father had pale Scandinavian features. Thin almost to the point of gauntness, he looked worn out, like the winter-beaten buffalo grass slowly disintegrating in the prairie wind. Jadie’s five-year-old sister, Amber, was there, too, and I was struck by the fact that this was one of those odd cases where the children were much more attractive than one would have been led to believe, seeing the parents. Amber was quite unlike Jadie in some ways. Her hair was fair and much less curly than Jadie’s, making her look more rumpled than ratty. Although her eyes were blue, they were a cloudy gray-blue, not the pure color Jadie’s were, but Amber, too, had the long, dark lashes, giving her the same look of infant sensuality. She remained in the room with us, a naked doll in her arms, and watched me guardedly. Jadie, however, made herself scarce. I heard the familiar sound of her shuffle in an adjacent room, and Mrs. Ekdahl said something about her minding the baby. Whatever, Jadie never even appeared to say hi. Jadie’s parents were clearly ill at ease with me. They got me seated in a big chair, a cup of coffee in my hand, and then they just stared. I explained a bit about who I was and talked about my own background and my work with children like Jadie, in hopes this would break the ice some. I said how glad I was to have her in my class, how gentle and cooperative she was, and what good academic work she was doing. They sat together on a long brown vinyl couch, which had decorative stitching in the shape of a horse’s head on the back, and said nothing. After ten minutes of this, it occurred to me that whatever else might be contributing to Jadie’s problems, a certain amount might simply be a familial trait. I endeavored to make conversation and ended up talking to myself, as no one else ever spoke. Mother, father, and daughter all sat motionless and mute, managing not even so much as a nod in my direction. Finally, I gave up and fell silent myself. Nothing happened. For three or four minutes, we all just sat. “You can make that chair go back,” Mrs. Ekdahl finally said. “Pardon?” I asked. “That chair, that one you’re sitting in. It’s a recliner. If you want to get yourself more comfortable, you just lean back some more and it lays out real nice.” “Oh. Thank you. I’m quite comfortable now, though.” “Do you want some more coffee?” “No, thank you. I’m fine.” “You sure? No trouble. We got the pot on and it makes ten cups. We only just been drinking it, so there’s plenty more.” There was pathos in all of this, and it left me feeling more uncomfortable and out of place than ever. “I’m fine,” I said, “but thanks. What I want to talk about … Jadie …” They looked at me. “What do you think about Jadie’s problems with speaking at school?” “Nothing,” the mother replied, her voice soft. “Nothing?” “Don’t see it’s a problem. Leastways, it isn’t one for us. She talks fine at home. Sometimes she won’t shut up.” “Oh? Can you tell me about such times?” “She gets silly,” the father offered. “In what way?” He shrugged. “Just silly. Jumping around. Her and Amber.” He smiled at the younger girl, who ducked her head. “Does Jadie talk then?” “Yeah, all the time. Shouts. Says silly things.” “What do you do then?” I asked. “Tell her to stop. Tell her you don’t go jumping on the couch, ’cause she’s going to rip it. She’s already ripped it here, see?” He pointed to a place patched with what looked like duct tape. “And tell her to stop talking dirty,” Mrs. Ekdahl added. “She does, sometimes. Shouts these filthy words and then Amber hears them.” From my experience with Jadie in the classroom, I was finding all this very difficult to imagine. “She picks them words up at school. From the big boys on the playground. And then, if she really wants to get you mad, she says ’em, ’cause she knows we don’t talk like that in this house,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “And does she usually stop when you tell her to?” I asked. “Sometimes,” Mr. Ekdahl said. “Sometimes not.” “What do you do then? Do you spank her?” “No,” he replied indignantly. “I don’t think it’s right for a parent to hit their little children. We don’t spank our girls. We just take away privileges. Mostly, when she does those things, I send her outside. Tell her to go yell out there.” “I see.” Silence followed. I regarded the parents; they regarded their hands. “So, you feel Jadie’s problems with speech aren’t anything serious?” Mrs. Ekdahl looked over. “It’s just shyness. Jadie don’t get on real good with outsiders, that’s all. She’s always been that way. Both girls have. Just like their family best, that’s all.” “Well, the other thing … the way Jadie walks. What are your thoughts on her posture?” “Oh, that, she can’t help that. She was born that way,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “See, I had this real hard time getting her out when she was born. She was stuck in the wrong way, had her face like this.” She gestured along the front of her abdomen. “So she came wrong. I had to have forty-two stitches in me afterwards, and the doctor said things might not be just right, because she didn’t get enough air. That’s because she was stuck in such a long time.” “Oh,” I said in surprise. “I hadn’t realized that. Nobody’s mentioned birth trauma to me.” “We just got to be patient with Jadie,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. She’s little and she’s shy, but that don’t mean there’s anything really the matter with her. She’s good at her work. She always has good report cards, so I think we just got to be patient.” I went home from the meeting in a state of confusion. This new bit of information fogged over my previous conclusions. Jadie did speak now. She had responded classically to the intervention method I’d developed to treat elective mutism, which lent weight to the evidence that hers was psychological, and surely someone, somewhere, would have noted the likelihood of brain damage in her files if it was felt to be contributory. On the other hand, while she spoke in class now, she still did not speak much spontaneously but rather only when spoken to. Also, there was her bizarre posture to consider. And goodness knows, I’d been victim before of critical information being omitted from files. On thinking the matter through, it seemed reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that Jadie was aphasic, unable to speak because of brain damage. At the beginning of March, we had a two-day break. I used the time to go up to the city and visit all my old colleagues at the clinic. Of course, I was curious about how everyone had gotten on since I’d left, and I wanted to know about the children I’d been working with, who were all now in therapy with one of my partners; however, there was an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to borrow a video recorder. I had long been accustomed to using video machines in my classroom. Back in the early seventies when I’d first started teaching, I’d been fortunate enough to be in a school with its own video equipment—a rarity in those days—and even more fortunate in the fact that most of the staff hadn’t learned how to use it, so it sat idle much of the time. Subsequently, I appropriated it bit by bit and made it an integral part of my classroom routine. I found such a recording device invaluable. When I taught, I often became so absorbed in the process that I missed vital clues to a child’s behavior. Now, for the cost of a few reels of videotape, I could go back at the end of the day and observe and evaluate both the children and myself in a way never possible before. We didn’t have a video camera or even a recorder in Pecking. Gracious and generous as Mr. Tinbergen was, he admitted that school finances did not stretch that far. He wished they did, he said, but it was rather too much of a luxury for a school that size. So back I went to the city over the two-day break to see if I could charm my old director, Dr. Rosenthal, into lending me one of the clinic’s for a couple of weeks. And so I did, returning to Pecking with an elderly reel-to-reel machine and its accompanying camera rattling around on the back seat of my car. “I know what that is,” Jadie said, when she arrived in the classroom Monday morning. “You do?” This surprised me, as cassette recorders were rapidly replacing these bulky older machines and even VCRs were still uncommon. “Yeah. It makes TV pictures.” She hobbled up to the recording deck. “Are you going to put us on TV?” “Just on this little one here. It’s called a monitor.” “Will my mom and dad see it?” “No. It’s just for us. When everybody is here, we’ll turn it on so that everyone can see themselves. And maybe at the end of the week, we can act out a little play and record it. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe one of those plays from your reading book.” “Is that what you got it for? Us?” “Well, mostly it’s for me. So I can see what I’m doing when I’m teaching.” “What d’you mean?” “See, what I do is turn it on and let it run and don’t pay any attention to it. Then, at the end of the day, I can sit down and look at it and see what we’re doing. I can look at each person carefully and decide if I’m doing the right things to help. This makes me a better teacher.” “Just you? You look at it all by yourself? Nobody else sees it?” “Just me, usually.” Jadie peered into the camera lens and then went back to the deck. “This is how you turn it on, isn’t it?” “Yes.” “And here’s how you stop it. You press this button, don’t you?” She bent nearer to the machine. “Rec-ord,” she read. “Re-cord. That’s the button you press when you want the picture to go onto the tape.” “Yeah, I know what it means.” I looked at her. “Have you seen one of these before?” She nodded. “Bobby Ewing’s got one.” “Is that a friend of yours?” I asked. “Yeah. Him and J.R., when they come, they put you on TV.” “J.R.?” Confused, I searched her face for some explanation. “J.R.? Bobby? You mean like the Ewings on TV? On ‘Dallas’?” “No, I don’t think he’s on TV. He puts you on TV. So you can be a movie star and make lots of money when you’re big.” Totally baffled, I said nothing more, but I filed the conversation away. It was the first truly spontaneous conversation I’d thus far had with Jadie, and it made no sense whatsoever to me. This lack of coherence lent credence to the aphasia theory. Setting the camera up on the wide window ledge, I ran the machine for almost two hours in the morning. This allowed me to catch a good cross section of both tightly organized activities, such as reading, and freer periods, such as art. I switched it off just before lunch and intended to record a bit more after lunch; however, when I returned later and stopped to check the reels, I saw there wasn’t actually enough tape left to make it worthwhile, so I decided to view what I had first and then record in the afternoon another day. I didn’t get around to viewing the two hours of tape until after school the following day. The room was dark. We’d had a run of wet, heavily overcast days, and all I needed to do was turn off the overhead lights to plunge the schoolroom into gloom. Pulling up one of the small chairs, I flipped the monitor on and sat down, elbows on my knees, chin resting on my folded hands, and watched. Much of the latter part of the tape was taken up with Jeremiah and me, just before lunch the previous day. We were at the table, and I was helping him with his reading, or at least trying to help. Jeremiah was fairly hopeless at most academic tasks and hid his troubles behind a constant barrage of defiant, distracting remarks. Leaning forward, I studied the images. I listened carefully to my tone of voice. Did I sound as exasperated as I’d felt at the time? Was I inadvertently provoking him? Was I encouraging resistance? I looked at Jeremiah, slumped over the table, refusing to work. I heard myself saying that he seemed angry and unwilling to do his folder. Sometimes, I said, when people are afraid of being wrong, they get so worried about doing the work that they can’t do it at all. Sometimes what comes out is anger, because it’s frustrating, because something’s got to come out, and because feeling angry isn’t as scary as feeling afraid. Studying the images of Jeremiah and myself, listening to myself as I posed these comments, I cringed. This was probably an appropriate place to make the connection between Jeremiah’s constant anger and the fear I suspected it was covering, but the way I said it … It made me sound as if I knew, when there was no way of knowing such things. Then came the sound of the lunch bell ringing and Jeremiah shot off-screen. Then came the view of me rising to turn off the machine. The screen went blank. I stood up to go turn the lights back on, but before I could move more than a pace or two from my chair, a picture came back on the screen. I halted midstep. The picture was of very poor quality, gray and grainy from too little light. Studying the screen, I assumed it must simply have been something previously recorded on the tape. Wondering if it was done at the clinic, I tried to make out the features of the room. Then I startled. This was our room, at a slightly different angle. The camera must have been bumped. The machine must have been running when the overhead lights were off. But how? When? I distinctly remembered turning it off before going to lunch. In fact, my looming form approaching the camera was recorded. “OOOOOOoooooooooooo,” came a small, disembodied voice off-screen. Other noises—the shuffling of feet, the movement of chairs—accompanied it. Confused and eerily discomforted, I sat back down in the chair and tried to make sense of it all. “OOOOooooooooo-oo-oooooooo.” Jadie materialized only inches from the camera. “OOoooooooo,” she continued to croon in a small, high-pitched voice. Weaving back and forth, first so close to the camera that only her mouth was visible and then swinging so far back as to almost disappear into the gray gloom, she kept at the noise for two or three minutes. Jadie paused and for a second or two simply faced the camera. Then, turning, she took two pencils off an adjacent table. Pressing one lengthways against her upper lip and the other in the same fashion against the lower, she turned her lips outward to create a grotesquely exaggerated mouth. She was breathing out a sound toward the camera as she did so, sort of an “ucka ucka ucka” noise. The weirdness of it overwhelmed me, pinning me to my seat. She was only barely visible, her voice almost disembodied. As she backed away from the camera, her mass of dark hair eventually merged into the gloom around her, leaving only her face palely discernible. She halted there and was momentarily silent. Then the image began to approach the camera again. A whispering started up and at first I couldn’t make out the words. She was too far away from the microphone and speaking too softly. Then she came nearer. “Help me,” she was saying, almost sighing. “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me …” Coming nearer and nearer until all that was visible on the screen was a mouth forming the same words over and over again. “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me …” Then the monitor went blank. Only then, when the screen turned to snow, and white noise buzzed in my ears, did I realize that throughout the whole eerie episode, Jadie had been standing upright. Chapter Five (#u838ae08c-3a5e-589e-849f-db21b916c2d3) I must have watched that short segment of videotape a dozen times while trying to puzzle out its meaning. It was now obvious to me that Jadie must have slipped back into the classroom after I’d gone down for lunch with the others, and that was why the lights were not on; also why, when I’d returned from lunch, I’d found insufficient tape to record during the afternoon, although at the time I had never put two and two together. But what was the point of it all? Had she wanted me to see this? Was it a direct message to me? Or had she simply been playing around with the recorder with no thoughts as to whether someone might view it? And what about her posture? There was no mistaking the fact that on the tape she was standing normally. Had she intended me to know she could stand upright, or had I fortuitously dropped onto secret information? Unsure of these matters, I chose the patient approach. I didn’t mention the tape, not the next day nor any of the days following, although we continued to use the recorder, and, as I had promised, I taped the children performing a little play from one of their reading books, which we all viewed “on TV.” My hope was that if it had been a deliberate message, my silence would smoke her out. She’d either hint at it or else leave me another message. Neither happened. As often does happen in this kind of environment, a more pressing crisis came along to scupper the subtle moment, however thought provoking. In this instance, Philip suffered a grand mal seizure in class. It was the first seizure he’d had in several years, but the whole following week was frantic, as one seizure followed another, until at last he was admitted to the hospital in Falls River. The experience proved deeply disturbing to the other children, particularly Jeremiah, who was convinced Philip would die with each seizure and often stirred the others into panic with his terror. All my time and energy was taken up trying to keep us on an even keel. More than two weeks later, I was sitting alone after school at the table in the classroom, finishing my plans for the next day, when I was overcome with the sensation of being watched. I looked up, around, but saw nothing. Back I went to my work, but the sensation, powerful and unshakable, persisted. I glanced up at the clock. It was 4:15, so all the children were long gone and most of the other teachers would be down in the teachers’ lounge. At last, I rose and went to the door to look out in the hallway. There stood Jadie. “Hello,” I said. She gazed up at me. “This isn’t really the right time for being inside. It’s okay to come over and play on the swings after school, but I’m not at all sure Mr. Tinbergen would want children walking around inside the building. He might get cross.” She continued to gaze up. “Do you need something?” No response. I glanced down the corridor. It was no joke about Mr. Tinbergen. I knew he didn’t like children in the building outside school hours. “This is my time to work on plans,” I said. “I’m quite busy. If you need something, I’ll try to help, but otherwise, I think you should go back outside.” Not a word out of her. I regarded her. “Do you want to come in? Is that it?” Still she gazed at me, her head cocked to overcome her hunched-over position. “I am working hard,” I murmured. “If you come in, you’ll need to play very quietly.” Without so much as a nod, she slipped around me and into the classroom. Scuttling over to the cabinet containing jigsaw puzzles, Jadie took one out and hobbled back across the room with it. Putting it down opposite me at the table, she slumped into a chair, then dumped the puzzle out and began assembling it. Furtively, I watched her. She’d changed from school and was now wearing a ratty-looking pink sweatshirt and a worn pair of corduroy pants. Her long dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. Studying her hair, I wondered if it was possible to get a brush through it. Probably not. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes passed in complete silence while I finished my plans. Jadie worked diligently on the jigsaw. She was good at them and had done this one several times before, but it was a large one with nearly a hundred pieces, so it kept her busy. I found myself watching her more and more. Try as I did, I couldn’t keep my mind on my work. What kept intruding were thoughts of that video. “Sit up more, would you?” I murmured, my voice barely audible. Jadie paused, her hand, holding a puzzle piece, halted midmotion. “Show me how you do it.” Maybe it wasn’t my voice that had made her pause. Maybe she had merely been trying to locate where the puzzle piece went. Anyway, she found it and fitted it in. Then she reached for another piece and continued on, as if I had never spoken. “Show me how you straighten up. Like you did on the videotape.” There was still no indication that she was listening to me. “I know, Jadie.” Very faintly, she nodded but she still didn’t look up. Silence. “All right,” I said and closed my plan book. “That’s okay. The choice is yours.” Jadie lifted her head. She lifted it right up, so that she was looking at me squarely and not through her eyebrows as usual, but she didn’t straighten up any farther. I saw her face fully so seldom that the blueness of her eyes caught me by surprise. They were so faultlessly blue, the intensity of the color heightened by the dark lashes. She searched my face. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice oddly plaintive. “Torey,” I said, not quite sure what she meant. “Torey?” It was said like a foreign word. “Torey? You’re Torey?” “Yes.” “Torey?” she repeated. “But who are you?” Unable to understand what she wanted to know, I hesitated. “Who are you?” “A teacher,” I said, uncertainly. “Someone who helps children.” For the first time, her eyes left my face. A deeply puzzled expression on her face, she turned and glanced around the room, then down at the jigsaw. “But who are you?” she asked a fourth time. Bewildered, because I could tell I wasn’t responding in a way that answered her question, I replied, “Who do you think I am?” Jadie paused a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe you’re God.” The following afternoon, I was in the cloakroom, sitting at the teacher’s desk, when I heard the snick of the latch on the classroom door. While I could see into the classroom from the desk, the door was out of my line of vision, so I didn’t know who it was. “Yes? Lucy?” I queried, thinking perhaps she had come to drop off the dittos she’d promised earlier. No answer. Rising, I stuck my head around the cloakroom door. There was Jadie. “You like coming in for an after-school visit, don’t you?” I said. A faint nod. “I don’t think this can happen every night,” I said. “Sometimes I have work to do outside the room, and I can’t leave you in here alone. And if Mr. Tinbergen gets wind of it and doesn’t like it, then there’ll have to be a stop to it. Yes? You understand? Because he kind of has a rule about children in the building after hours.” She gave an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and hobbled off to the corner where the animals were kept. Gently raising the top of the rabbit’s cage, she lifted him out and cradled him in her arms. I returned to the cloakroom and went back to work. Twenty minutes must have passed with Jadie playing quietly in the classroom, and I’d almost forgotten she was there. I couldn’t see her from where I was and she made virtually no noise. Then she appeared in the doorway between the classroom and the cloakroom. In her hand she carried a sheet of paper. Normally, the cloakroom wasn’t lit. There were two doors in the long, narrow room, the one Jadie was standing in, and another at the far end, which opened into the hallway. Usually, these gave sufficient light for putting away coats and boots. Now, however, because I was working at the desk, I had the far door into the hallway shut and the overhead light on. Jadie paused in the doorway, and her expression approached astonishment, as she scanned the high, old-fashioned walls, the ledges above the rows of hooks meant for storing lunchboxes and books, the hooks themselves, the benches beneath. Tentatively, she stepped inside. “You haven’t had a good look at it with the lights on?” I asked. “Usually, it’s dark in here.” “That’s because I don’t like to put the light on during the day. We always forget it and that wastes electricity. And there’s no window in here to give natural light, but we usually get enough from the hallway and the classroom.” “There’s no windows,” Jadie murmured, looking up. “No.” Once again she scrutinized the room carefully, then her attention went back to the paper in her hand. “Can I use this?” she asked. “Can I draw on it?” “Yes, if you want.” She disappeared back into the classroom but within moments had returned, clutching the paper under her arm and carrying a margarine tub full of crayons. Laying the things down on the linoleum floor of the cloakroom, she knelt beside them and, without further comment to me, she began to draw. The paper was a large 2 x 3-foot sheet, and Jadie colored virtually all of it black, except for a tiny area down in the right-hand corner. Here were two minute, faceless, bell-shaped figures. “That looks interesting,” I said, leaning forward across my desk. Jadie lifted the drawing up and examined it. “It’s me and Amber there,” she said, touching the figures. “I see.” Silence followed while both of us studied the picture. I then threw caution to the wind and said what was on my mind, although it probably wasn’t ideal psychological technique. “You know, Jadie, to tell you the truth, those don’t look much like little girls to me. They’re a curious shape.” “That’s because I just said it was me and Amber. I didn’t say we were little girls. We’re not there. We’re ghosts.” “Oh. I see. This is you and your sister dressed up like ghosts. Is it at Halloween time?” “No. We’re not dressed up. We are ghosts.” “Oh.” Silence. “Which one is you and which is Amber?” Laboriously rising from where she had been working, Jadie brought the picture over and laid it on the desk in front of me. Taking a pencil from the holder, she wrote her name under one figure and her sister’s under the other. “What about your mom and dad? And Sapphire?” “Don’t got no mom or dad when me and Amber are ghosts. And Sapphire’s too little. She don’t know how to do it.” “I see.” I leaned forward to examine the picture more carefully. “Just the two of you, then? It sounds like it might be lonely, just two little girls.” “But like I said, we aren’t little girls. We’re ghosts. Ghosts don’t get lonely. It’s nice being alone, when you’re a ghost. We just float around, go way up high, and look down on people doing things. But they can’t see us, ’cause we’re invisible, so they don’t know we’re doing it.” I nodded. “That does sound interesting. What kinds of things do you see people doing?” “Just things. Like going to bed or watching TV. We go and look in all the other people’s houses.” “I see.” “I don’t mind when it goes dark, then. Gotta be dark to be a ghost. But if it goes too dark before you get out, you can’t do it. You can’t get out of your body and you get shut in.” I looked over, perplexed. “What do you mean?” An expression flickered across Jadie’s face that I couldn’t identify—alarm? concern?—I wasn’t sure. She turned her head away sharply and didn’t answer. “What’s the matter? Does it frighten you to talk about this?” A pause. “Well, really I shouldn’t be telling you.” “Why?” “I’m not supposed to.” “Why?” “’Cause what goes on inside your head is private.” She looked over. “That’s right, isn’t it? You shouldn’t know private things.” I shrugged faintly and gave a half smile. “Sometimes it doesn’t hurt.” I tried to keep the tone conversational. “Besides, I’m interested. How do you get to be a ghost? Could I do it? Would you be able to teach me?” “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice dubious, then she hesitated, her gaze fixed on the drawing. “Well, you sort of make yourself go quiet. Real still. Like you’re dead. Then, when you got all of you that way, you just sort of slip out of your body and go away.” Another pause and she frowned at the picture. “But I don’t know if a grown-up could do it.” “Is it easy for you?” I asked. “Yeah, kind of.” “How do you come back into your body afterwards?” Jadie didn’t answer. “You don’t know?” She shook her head. “I just wake up in the morning and I’m back.” “A dream?” Jadie frowned. “No. I didn’t say that. It’s not just a dream. It’s something I can really do. It’s just that I try to stay out, but I always fall asleep.” “It sounds as if you don’t really want to come back.” “Well, see, if you’re a ghost when the sun comes up, then you stay a ghost forever. That’s what Tashee says. You won’t ever get back into your body after that, because if the sun comes up on it with no person in it, it dies.” “Oh.” “So I always try to stay awake. I drink Coke. There’s always Coke to drink, but then I get sleepy. I fall asleep then and that makes me go back into my body. So when I wake up in the morning, I’m always still here.” “And you would rather have stayed a ghost?” Jadie nodded. The conversation seemed to peter out then. We both stared at the picture, as silence enveloped us. “I like this drawing,” I said at last. “Do you suppose I could have it?” Jadie looked over. “What would you do with it?” “Just keep it. Maybe put it up on the wall. It’s a good picture. Maybe the others would like to see it.” “No,” Jadie replied, alarm in her voice. “I don’t want anybody else to see it.” “No? Why not?” “’Cause I told you. ’Cause it’s private what goes on inside you. Besides, if you put it on the wall, spiders might walk on it. Spiders might see. Then the policemen would come.” She completely lost me on that one. “Policemen?” I said in bewilderment. “What do you mean?” “They’d take me away for lying. They’d put me in jail. I might die. Sometimes policemen kill you with their guns, if they think you’re trying to get away. And if they got you in the jail, sometimes they kill you in a chair.” Seeing that she was becoming agitated, I quickly changed tack. “So Tashee knows about being a ghost, too?” Jadie nodded. “Yeah. Tashee’s the one who taught me and Amber how to do it.” “That was clever of her.” Jadie nodded again. “Tashee knows lots and lots of stuff.” “Sounds like Tashee’s very special to you.” For the first time, a slight hint of a smile touched Jadie’s lips. “Yeah, she’s my best friend. I like her better than anybody.” “Is she in school here? She’s not in Mrs. McLaren’s class, is she? Is she a third-grader?” Jadie looked at me, her expression bemused. “Well, of course not,” she said, her tone implying that I’d asked a very silly question indeed. “That’s why me and Amber turn into ghosts.” “What do you mean?” “So’s we can go visit Tashee. Tashee can’t come here. She’s been dead more than a year now.” Chapter Six (#ulink_b4724fa7-7105-54c1-afb1-c0bb3689ea2e) I was disappointed when Jadie did not show up after school the next afternoon. Her appearance had been an intrusion initially, but after two visits, I was curious about her and looked forward to seeing her again in the undisturbed quiet of the late afternoon. Once the children were gone and I’d done what I needed to outside the classroom, I brought my work out to the table in the classroom, thinking this would make me more accessible than the cloakroom had done. However, Jadie went home at the end of the school day, as usual, and did not come back again. On two or three occasions, I thought I’d heard her outside in the hall, but whenever I went to the door, no one was there. It wasn’t until well into the next week that Jadie again appeared after hours. It was quite late in the day—after 4:30—and I’d finished all my work, had made a tour through the teachers’ lounge, and was now back at my desk in the cloakroom, paging through a teaching magazine. Click went the latch on the classroom door, then no sound. “Yes?” I called. Jadie appeared in the doorway. She’d been home and changed and was now wearing a horrible home-made jog-suit with rickrack stitched unevenly around the neck and sleeves. “Hello,” I said, and smiled. Jadie stepped just inside the cloakroom. Twisting her head, she surveyed the small room very thoroughly. Above the coat hooks were the shelves, and above the shelf on the right ran two heating pipes. They were about three inches each in diameter and entered the room through the far end wall to run parallel about two feet above the shelf for the entire length of the room before disappearing out through the wall behind the desk. In fact, the room was well supplied with pipes, because there was also a large plumbing pipe about eight inches in diameter that rose vertically through the floor in the corner near the far door and disappeared through the ceiling. All these things Jadie surveyed carefully. Then she turned her head and looked at the door, which was open between the cloakroom and the classroom. This was a heavy, old-fashioned door made of solid wood. Even without touching it, one could tell it was strong. There was a window in our classroom door, but there wasn’t in this, nor in the one between the cloakroom and the hall. Jadie turned and put a hand out to feel the door. Jadie examined the door minutely. She ran her hands over the wood, lingering to feel the grain. She pursued the ornamental molding with her fingers, then came to the knob and lock. These, like the door itself, were old-fashioned, and there was a proper keyhole. All of this, too, Jadie examined carefully, poking her little finger into the keyhole, turning the knob, watching the latch go in and out. This whole procedure took a full ten minutes, and, throughout, I didn’t say a word. Still at my desk, I simply watched. Jadie didn’t seem particularly interested in my presence. All her attention was focused on the door. Gently, she eased it away from its stop and pushed it closed, shutting the two of us into the cloakroom. Then she turned the knob and opened it slightly. She fingered the latching mechanism. “Here’s the deadbolt,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. She touched the bolt in its housing inside the latch. Then she shut the door again, tried the knob, opened it, felt the lock, closed it. This she did at least six or seven times before turning abruptly to me. “You got a key for this? Can you lock it?” I nodded. Her face brightened. “Give it to me, okay? Lemme lock it shut.” Fascinated by her behavior, I agreed and dug the key out of my desk drawer. Jadie deftly slipped it into the keyhole and turned it. The deadbolt slid into place with a satisfying thunk. “That’s good,” she murmured in a pleased tone. Removing the key, she tried to open the door but, of course, it didn’t move. Then she unlocked the door, opened it, stuck her head into the classroom, pulled back, and slammed the door shut, relocking it. From there, she scuttled down to the other door, which opened into the hallway. “Does the key work in this one, too?” she asked me. “Can we lock this one?” But before I could reply, she was already trying the key in the lock. It did fit both doors, and a satisfied smile crossed Jadie’s face as she tugged at the newly locked door. Abruptly, she let go and scuttled back to the other door to try it again. This, still locked, too, refused to budge. “Got to cover this up,” she muttered and came to the desk. Seizing a foil of masking tape, she tore a strip off and placed it carefully over the keyhole. “Key’s in the other one. Can’t see in, but got to cover this one up.” Then, unexpectedly, she veered away from the door. Bent double, she began hurriedly moving around the circumference of the small room, her eyes on the floor. “Are you looking for something?” I asked. “Spiders. No spiders,” she muttered. “There’s no spiders in here.” “No. Mr. Tinbergen has a man who comes around and sprays. He was just here in February. So there’re no spiders.” Jadie looked up. “No spiders. No windows. Nobody can get in.” “No.” She scuttled to the door that led into the classroom and tried it once more to see if it would open. Being locked, it didn’t budge, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, putting one foot against the door frame to give herself more leverage. When the door still failed to move, Jadie did something totally unexpected. She laughed. I had never heard Jadie laugh. Indeed, I’d never seen more than the occasional faint smile, but now she laughed merrily, the sound filling the cloakroom. “You certainly do like the fact that the door doesn’t open,” I said. “It’s locked. I’ve locked us in. No one else can be here. No windows they can see in at. No spiders gonna know. This is good.” “Yes,” I agreed. “This is good,” she repeated. “I’m safe here.” “You feel safe.” What started as a pause grew. Jadie’s eyes had wandered from the doors, the walls, the floor to rest on my face. “You wanna see me stand up?” she asked, her tone almost conspiratorial. I nodded. Slowly, a bit stiffly, she straightened her posture until she was upright. Steadying herself with one hand on the wall, she thrust her shoulders back and her stomach out. She smiled at me, an easy, knowing smile. I smiled back. “Good.” Turning from me, she reached up and clasped a coat hook in each hand. Bracing her feet against the bench beneath the coat hooks, she arched her body outward, stretching what must have been very tight muscles. Repeatedly, she pulled herself up to the coat hook and then back in an odd kind of chin-up, until at last she audibly sighed with relief. All this time, neither of us spoke. Jadie climbed down from the bench and, still standing upright, turned her attention to pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan and adjusting her clothes. “I know what that sign means now,” she said quietly, not looking over. “What sign is that?” “Over by Ninth Street, there’s a brown church, and it’s got that sign out front. It says ‘Safe with God.’ I kept reading it when we went by, and I never knew what it meant.” She smiled. “But I do now. I’m safe in here, aren’t I? I’m safe with you.” The next afternoon Jadie appeared again after school. I’d ensconced myself early on in the cloakroom in readiness. The latch on the classroom door snicked and then came the quiet shuffling of Jadie’s feet across the classroom, until she finally appeared in the doorway of the cloakroom. I smiled at her, and there was a hint of a smile in return in Jadie’s eyes, although it never reached her lips. Opening my desk drawer, I took out the key. “Do you want to lock the doors?” I asked. This brought the broad, easy grin of a secret shared. She snatched the key from my hand and dashed for the far door to secure it, then back to the door beside my desk. She fastened the bit of masking tape over the keyhole, then pulled again at each of the doors to make sure they were fast. Already standing upright by the time she’d finished these tasks, she paused at the door into the classroom to gently caress the housing of the bolt. “You like that lock,” I said. “I’ve locked us in,” she replied. “We’re safe in here with the doors locked.” Again, Jadie went through the same calisthenics with the coat hooks to stretch her arm and back muscles. Then, in a totally unexpected flash of movement, she shot off around the cloakroom. Circling the room in a counter-clockwise direction, she ran her right hand along the wall as she went. I was surprised to see how rapidly she could move in the small space. Once, twice, three times she circled the room, all the while feeling the walls, the coat hooks, the benches. Then the large vertical pipe at the far end caught her attention. Putting her arms around it, Jadie hugged it, before wrapping her legs around it, too, as if to shinny up. She didn’t, but she remained like that for three or four minutes. Confounded, I sat in silence. Was this really the same child I’d had in class only a few hours earlier, the one who sat statuelike and never spoke unless spoken to? Was this Jadie? These afternoon visits quickly became a routine. Almost every day around 4:15 or 4:30 Jadie would appear, lock herself in with me, stand upright, and begin the circular jaunt around the room. There was seldom any variation in what she did, and, indeed, I seemed fairly superfluous to things. All her attention appeared focused on physical movement, relentlessly going around and around in the tiny room. After some twenty minutes of this frantic action, she’d stop, say she needed to go home, unlock all the doors again, and in the process fold back into the hunched crab of a girl we were used to. More than two weeks passed. Then there was a sudden variation in the theme. After arriving and locking the doors one afternoon, Jadie straightened up. I was expecting her coat hook calisthenics, when, abruptly, she screamed. It was a playful scream, a high-pitched, ear-splitting girlish squeal, and the small room resounded with it. Jadie spun around, a grin from ear to ear, and screamed again. And again. And again. I sat, deafened. Jadie danced, head thrown back, arms out. Around and around in a circle she went and she continued screaming. This must have gone on for five minutes or more before a knock came on the cloakroom door that led out into the hallway. “Torey?” It was Lucy’s voice, sounding alarmed. “Is everything all right in there?” She turned the doorknob, but, of course, being locked, the door did not open. Jadie, who had frozen at the sound of Lucy’s voice, let out an audible sigh when the door remained fast. “Yes, we’re okay,” I replied. “You sure? Do you need a hand with anything?” “No, it’s okay, Luce.” Muffled sounds came from beyond the door. “Well, all right,” Lucy said uncertainly. “If you’re sure.” Then she departed. Jadie remained stock-still until she was certain there was no one outside the door. Then she turned her head to look at me, and covering her mouth with her hand, she giggled. “She heard my voice,” she whispered. “Yes, she did, didn’t she?” “She heard me scream.” “And you’re still safe, aren’t you?” I said. Jadie bolted off across the room. Making three or four circles of it within seconds, she ran her fingers lightly along the walls and jumped with nimble feet up onto the benches and down again. On the third time around, she veered off unexpectedly and approached the vertical pipe. As so many times before, Jadie wrapped her arms and legs around it in a tight hug, but after clinging to it a few moments, this time she actually did shinny up. Before I realized what was happening, Jadie had reached the two smaller pipes traversing the room along one side and was out onto them, like a gymnast kneeling on parallel bars. Alarmed because she was a good six feet off the floor, I rose from my chair. “Jade, those pipes weren’t made for climbing on.” She laughed heartily. “I’m not sure they can take your weight, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself, so come down now.” She made no effort to get down off the pipes. Grabbing the desk chair, I maneuvered it over and prepared to climb up to get her. This prompted a swift response. Jadie scurried out of range, still laughing, then, clutching one pipe, she let herself down off it backward, swung a moment or two in midair, and then finally dropped the last couple of feet to the floor. In the classroom it was as if none of this had ever happened. Jadie’s days continued to be spent in nearly total silence, her body hunched over, her head down, her arms pulled up. I had to repeatedly quash the feeling that somehow I was making up those after-school visits, that I was the one with hallucinations. Indeed, during one bleak moment, I wondered if perhaps this hadn’t been June Harriman’s experience with Jadie, too. For the most part, I disciplined myself away from contemplating June Harriman too much. Not knowing her personal circumstances, but sharing her class, it was too easy to extrapolate from what we had in common to form opinions that might be wildly inaccurate and equally destructive. However, as I glanced across the classroom at Jadie, contorted in her chair, it struck me that perhaps this was why June Harriman had committed suicide—driven to believe that somehow she was the crazy one. It was just a one-off thought, but it was dagger sharp. An ideal script for a horror film. On Friday of that week, I decided to attempt collage making with the children. Coming in with a large collection of old magazines and a box containing a huge assortment of riffraff—everything from feathers and chunks of sponge to bottle caps and uncooked pasta—I tried to explain the elusive nature of a work of art. We had been studying a loosely constructed unit on emotions, and I hoped to relate their collages to this, saying that when everyone was finished, we’d talk as a group about their work, about what feelings the collages generated in the people looking at them, and what feelings had gone into making them. The boys dived into the box with lively abandon and set to work immediately. Reuben loved the pieces of fabric, particularly the bits of silk and velvet. Picking each one up tenderly from the box, he stroked them against his upper lip and flapped his hands in excitement. Philip, in the chair next to Reuben’s, had a Montgomery Ward catalogue out and was enthusiastically cutting out pictures of toys and pasting them down. “What have we here?” I asked, pulling a chair up and sitting down beside him. “Haaahhh,” Philip breathed. His whole vocabulary consisted of heavily breathed syllables, most of which were unintelligible to me. “Toys?” I inquired. He gestured wildly. “That’s his Christmas stocking,” Jeremiah said from across the table. “That’s what he’s trying to tell you. Ain’t it, Phil? Him and me are making up pictures of what we want in our Christmas stockings.” I thought it best not to point out to Jeremiah that this was the twenty-ninth of March. “And Jadie, too,” Jeremiah said, expansively gesturing to include them all. “Jadie and me and Philip are doing that for our collage. What Santa’s gonna bring us.” Jeremiah was pasting down pictures of Jaguars and gold bullion bars. Fact was, Jadie was doing nothing. She sat humped over in her chair, her chin almost on the tabletop. She stared morosely at the blank piece of paper in front of her. “Having a hard time getting started?” I asked. No response. “You know, of course, you don’t have to do a Christmas stocking. That was Jeremiah’s idea. If he’d like to fill his paper with a collage of things he’d like to find in his Christmas stocking, that’s lovely, but you can choose to do something else. You can make your collage any way you want it.” Silence. “An important thing with art is not to spend too much time thinking about it. Just look in the box and see what catches your attention.” A pause. I regarded her. “You know how we’ve been talking about emotions lately? About that place way down inside you where your feelings are? Look down there and find out what you’re feeling. Right now. See if you can make a collage of what you find.” I went back to the boys and left Jadie alone with her blank piece of paper. She usually did very well with tasks that were rigidly laid out, such as her academic work, but she always seemed to have trouble with ambiguous projects. Consequently, I didn’t want to be tempted into structuring the activity too much for her. When I looked over a while later, Jadie had begun to work. Taking up one of the magazines, she started cutting out pictures. I watched a moment, trying to discern a relationship among the pictures, but I couldn’t. Jeremiah had nearly finished his collage and was beginning to grow restless. He leaned over Jadie’s shoulder. “What you doing?” Jadie didn’t respond. She just kept cutting out. Then, after acquiring about two dozen pictures, she shoved the magazines away. Laying the pictures in front of her, she took up her scissors again and started carefully snipping the pictures into small bits. “Man, lady, look at her. She’s crazy, all right. Look what that girlie’s doing,” Jeremiah shouted. I shot him a black look. “You’re crazy,” he said to Jadie, then flopped into his chair and sighed dramatically. “I suppose we got to sit here waiting ’til she gets done now. She fucks around all the first part, when she shoulda been working, and now we got to wait. Hey, girlie, how come you’re always so slow? How come you never do stuff when the rest of us do? You just sit around like a retard.” Ignoring him totally, Jadie continued with her cutting. I realized my initial plan to talk about the collages as a group was going to have to be jettisoned, as, if we waited much longer, the boys’ behavior would deteriorate to a point of no return. Indeed, in the moment it took me to contemplate this, Jeremiah scooped up Reuben’s collage and sent it sailing through the air. “Hey, boog!” he shouted at Reuben, “Say ‘fuck.’” “Say fuck,” Reuben echoed. “Say ‘fuck,’ Reuben. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck it to you.” I jammed a record onto the record player and began a rousing chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” to drown Jeremiah out. Catching Philip, I pulled him comically through the motions. We sang several verses in quick succession, all with lively, exaggerated actions to expend a bit of energy. Then, when the song came to an end, I picked up the book I’d been reading aloud to them and sat down on the carpet in the reading corner to start a new chapter. I read until the recess bell sounded. Throughout all this, Jadie remained working at the table. When the bell rang, Jeremiah bolted past her on his way to the cloakroom. “Hey, lady, look what she’s doing,” he cried and whipped up her paper before Jadie could stop him. He turned it for me to see. The relationship among the disparate pictures became obvious now—they all contained a lot of red. Snipping them into small pieces, she’d stuck the pieces on, mosaic-style, to form a large circle around a black cross made out of yarn. That’s all the picture was: a quartered circle. “Hey, this is good, man!” Jeremiah cried. “You ain’t so stupid, if you don’t want to be.” “It is interesting, Jadie,” I said. “Interesting? Man, it’s grrrrr-eat!” Jeremiah shouted with Tony-the-Tiger ferocity. “You know what this is, lady? A bull’s-eye! Raa-aa-aaaTTT!” He tossed the paper into the air and machine gunned it with his finger. Jadie just sat. Bending down, I retrieved the collage from the floor and laid it back on the table, while Jeremiah pounced on Reuben and rode piggyback into the cloakroom. “You’ll have to tell us about it,” I said cheerfully. “The mosaic was a very clever idea.” Cupping her hands over her mouth, Jadie muttered something. “Pardon?” She hunched farther over and muttered again. “I’m afraid I can’t hear you, lovey.” I bent down very close to her. “What did you say?” “Throw it away.” “You want me to throw your collage away? After you’ve done so much work on it?” She nodded tensely, all her muscles rigid. “Is there a reason?” No response. “Something Jeremiah said? Did his taking it and playing with it upset you?” Faintly, she shook her head. “I think it’s interesting. I’d like to keep it. We don’t have to put it up, if you don’t want, but let’s not throw it away just yet. Okay?” Tears came to her eyes. “Throw it away.” “Why?” “X marks the spot.” Chapter Seven (#ulink_b03746b9-bda9-5ea6-a070-cf647b79480c) Over the years, I had acquired a large box of dolls and doll clothes. The dolls were of a type known as “Sasha” dolls, boy and girl dolls, appearing to be of middle-childhood age, with beige, nonethnic-colored skin, thick, combable hair, and wistful, rather enigmatic faces. I had six of them, two boys and four girls, plus two Sasha baby dolls. One year when I’d had a particularly boring summer job, I had filled the extra hours making doll clothes, and there was now an extensive wardrobe of shirts, pants, dresses, overalls, jackets, pajamas, underclothes, and anything else they could want for. A friend had caught the spirit and knitted small sweaters, hats, and mittens for them and even bootees for the babies. In addition, I’d collected small bits and pieces over the years to enhance play, such as appropriately sized dishes, bedclothing, stuffed animals, and a few tiny toys and books. These had always been particularly successful toys, both in former classrooms and in therapeutic settings; so when all my things finally arrived at my apartment in Pecking and I came across the dolls while unpacking, I looked forward to bringing them into school. Unfortunately, cultural influences had arrived considerably ahead of me. “Dolls?” Jeremiah cried out in an utterly appalled voice. “You don’t expect me to play with a bunch of dolls, do you? Those are girls’ toys!” He jerked his hands back from the box, as if he’d contaminated them. “See here? Look. There are boy dolls in here, too. And good things to do with them. See here? See this little football? These boys could be getting ready for a football game. Maybe we could look in the scrap box and see if there is something to make a football helmet out of.” “Man, lady, if you think I’m going to play with dolls, you got another think coming. Come on, Phil. Come on, Reub, get away from them boogy dolls.” “You don’t have to play with them. Nobody has to play with anything in here, do they, Jeremiah? By the same token, there’s no need to make people feel bad for enjoying something interesting. One doesn’t need to think of them as dolls. They’re just … representations of people.” “They’re dolls.” It would have been easier at the beginning of the year. In all my previous classes, the dolls had simply been there from the start, and, like any other item in the room, they could be picked up, played with, and put down again without anyone paying too much attention; as a consequence, many of my boys had enjoyed them. Bringing them in like this, however, called too much attention to what they intrinsically were. Enticingly as I had set the dolls out on the back bookshelf, no one went near them. After school that day, Jadie arrived, as she now commonly did. She hobbled into the cloakroom, slammed the door, took the key from me, locked it, then pressed the little tab of masking tape over the keyhole. Afterward, she went and locked the other door. Immediately becoming upright, she gave a little scream. This over, she darted off around the room, circling it quickly, lithely. This done, she stopped. She scanned the room, then came to stand beside my desk. Silence followed. I always had my plan book out during this time, not only because it was my planning time but also because it allowed me to focus on something other than Jadie, and this gave these little get-togethers a less intense timbre. “You know what?” she said softly. “What’s that?” “There’s nothing for me to do in here.” “You’re feeling a bit bored?” She nodded. “What do you suppose we might do about it?” I asked, hoping this might lead to expansion beyond the locked doors of the cloakroom. “It’d be nice if those dolls were in here.” “If you want to play with those dolls, that’s okay,” I replied. “But they’re out there.” “You could go get them. The box with the clothes in it is on the bookshelf. You could put the dolls you wanted into that and bring them in here.” Jadie studied me. I could tell she wanted me to go get the dolls for her, but when she didn’t speak, I went back to my work. Jadie continued to stand, her expression morose. “If you open the door, you’ll be able to get the dolls,” I said, not looking up. “It isn’t very far from the door to the bookshelf. You can bring them back in here and close the door again.” Jadie turned her head and looked at the door. Not only would she have to leave the safety of the cloakroom to do this, but to carry the box of dolls back, she needed to remain upright. Unlike her speech, which had generalized quickly to include the others in the classroom, her posture seemed unchanged outside the privacy of the cloakroom. Sighing sadly, she slumped down on one of the benches. “Do you want some help?” I asked. She nodded. “You know, if you explain to me what you want, then I am much more likely to help. I can’t read your mind. You need to tell me when you want help.” Still silence. I rose from my chair. “I’ll open the door.” Getting the key from the other door, I peeled back the masking tape and unlocked it. Jadie shrank back. “Come on,” I said, extending my hand. “We’ll go together. You get which dolls you want, and I’ll carry the box of clothes.” Jadie accepted this. Taking my hand, she crept behind me into the classroom, where I gathered up most of the big dolls and put them into her arms. Jadie, not quite bent double by this time but definitely slumped, scurried back into the cloakroom ahead of me. As I closed the door and relocked it, she relaxed visibly, but not quite trusting me, she had to get up and check that the door was well and truly locked and then return the key to block the other keyhole. The trauma of having had to go out into the classroom to get the dolls clearly overwhelmed Jadie. Still hunched over, she sank down onto the bench adjacent to the doll box and peered in at the collection of hard-won dolls, but she seemed unable to summon up enough strength to take them out and play with them. For five minutes or more, she just sat, all the usual liveliness she brought with her into the cloakroom momentarily gone. Then, at last, she reached in and started to take the dolls out. One by one, she lined them up on the bench. When she had finished, she sat back a little and observed them. “These dolls are pretty,” she said softly. “Yes, they are nice. I think so, too.” “Where’d you get them at?” “I bought them. Not all of them at once, but one at a time, over the years.” “How come? You’re too big to play with dolls.” “I bought them for the children I work with.” Jadie paused, reaching a finger out to gingerly touch the hair on one of the dolls. “Are them the boys and girls you were telling me about that one time? The ones like me that don’t talk?” “Yes.” “Did you really work with those kids?” “Yes.” She looked over. “Really? You’re not just making that up?” “Yes, I really did work with girls and boys like you before. I worked at helping them start talking again and at getting over the kinds of problems that made them stop in the first place. That was my special interest, you see. It’s called ‘research.’ That’s when you want to learn more about something people don’t know much about already. And I was very interested in children who found it hard to talk in certain places. I wanted to know what was wrong, and I wanted to find ways to make things better for them, so that was my research.” “And did you find out about them?” Jadie asked, her attention going back to the dolls. “I think so, yes.” A pause came and it lingered. Jadie was still not playing with the dolls, not even touching them. She just sat, gazing at them. “Them other kids,” she started slowly, “they really didn’t talk? Like me?” “Yes, just like you.” “But then you made it better for them? Did you? And then did they talk? They talked to you then? They told you things?” “Yes.” She looked up at me. “They told you things?” I nodded. “And you believed them?” “Well, I always try to listen to what people tell me.” “And then you tried to make it better for them?” “Well, I did try.” Silence then. Jadie reached over and picked up one of the Sasha dolls. It had thick, waist-length black hair, which she gently smoothed down. “Can I change this doll’s clothes?” “Yes, of course. You may dress any of them any way you want. They’re meant for playing.” Again she caressed its long hair and gazed into its face. Then, bending over the box, Jadie sorted through the clothes, taking out a complete outfit consisting of undershirt and underpants, shirt, overalls, sweater, mittens, coat, shoes, socks, and woolly hat. I went back to work on my plans but stole occasional glimpses of her. She remained tenser than usual. Her shoulders remained hunched, her limbs drawn in close. Even with the doors locked, she didn’t seem much more relaxed than she generally was in the classroom, but she was very intent on what she was doing. So intent, in fact, that it didn’t have the aura of play about it. With immense care, Jadie removed the clothes that had been on the doll. When it was totally undressed, she gazed at it, running her fingers lightly over the smooth contours of its body. She examined the joints, now rather loosely strung after years of play, and poked her finger into the sockets. She felt the faintly indented belly button. She looked for genitals. Then, with the same tenderness she’d shown undressing the doll, she began to gently ease on the new clothes, starting with the socks and underwear. She worked very slowly, however, and inevitably I had to acknowledge the time. “We’ve got only a few minutes left, Jadie. It’s almost five o’clock.” “Don’t say that,” she replied, not looking up. “There’ll be enough time to finish putting the clothes on, but then we need to go. Mr. O’Banyon will want to lock up.” “Don’t say that.” A bit tetchier in tone. “You’re not quite ready to go yet, are you?” “I got no time to play today.” “Yes, well, perhaps tomorrow. We can leave the things as they are. I don’t think the boys’ll mind if we keep the dolls in here. Then you can pick up where you left off, if you come in tomorrow afternoon.” Unexpectedly, I saw her lower lip tremble. She clutched the doll tightly between her hands. “You’re really feeling bad about having to leave. I can see that.” “I need to finish what I’m doing. I need more time!” Then, abruptly, Jadie burst into tears. Leaping up from the bench, she clutched the doll to her chest. “I need to make a place for her! I can’t go now. I need a place for her to be safe!” And with that, Jadie bolted off to the far side of the cloakroom and pressed herself face first into the corner. Startled by the tears, as I’d never seen Jadie cry before, I rose from my chair. Still clutching the doll tightly, she darted away from me when I approached. “There’s no place for her to hide,” she wailed, frantically turning her head from side to side in search of concealment. “This is a dumb room. A dumb, stupid room. Where’s she going to hide in a dumb, stupid place like this? There’s no place, and I gotta find a place now, before I go!” “Jadie, sweetheart—” “You don’t understand!” “Maybe I do,” I said, keeping my voice soft and reassuring. “And there are still a few minutes left. If you need to do something with the doll and it’ll only take a few minutes, I’m sure there’s time.” A moment or two longer she watched me through teary eyes, then slowly she began to relax. I smiled. “Come on, lovey. Finish what you want to do.” Jadie slowly approached me. “I need to make a place for her,” she said softly, her cheeks still wet. “I want her to be warm and cozy.” Jadie glanced up at me, her expression almost one of embarrassment. “See, that’s why I put these clothes on her. ’Cause she’s always cold. And I was always telling her I’d get some warm clothes for her.” “Yes.” “But now I need a place for her.” “How can I help?” I asked. “What kind of place do you have in mind?” Jadie scanned the room. “That’s just it. There isn’t any place in here. It’s bare. And I don’t have time to make one for her before I got to go home.” The tremor of tears was in her voice again. “You want some place to put the doll?” “A warm place. But it’s got to be safe. She’s got to hide.” I cast around the room. Jadie was right about there not being many hiding places in here. Then I glanced at the box of doll clothes. “What about in there?” I pointed. “Maybe you could make a good place down in the midst of the doll clothes for her.” Standing silently beside me, Jadie considered the box a moment and then bent over it and felt into the thickness of clothes. She nodded. I collected the other dolls and put them into the lid of the box, which was separate, while Jadie knelt and made a hole among the doll clothes. Tenderly, she laid the black-haired doll in and covered her all up, except for her face. “There you are,” she whispered. “All nice and warm.” Rising, she contemplated the doll in the box; then, with great care, she began picking up the other dolls and placing them gently over the top, leaving the dark-haired doll’s face hardly visible. “She can breathe like that,” Jadie explained, as she arranged the other dolls. “I’ve left an air hole for her. But when anybody comes in here and sees this, they’re not going to know she’s there. They’ll think it’s just an old box of toys.” An anxious glance in my direction. “Won’t they?” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/torey-hayden/ghost-girl-the-true-story-of-a-child-in-desperate-peril-and-a/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.