# Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all

Torey Hayden

A dramatic and remarkable narrative of an extraordinary teacher's determination, from the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers ‘The Tiger's Child’ and ‘One Child’.Torey Hayden faced six emotionally troubled kids no other teacher could handle – three recent arrivals from battle-torn Northern Ireland, badly traumatised by the horrors of war; an eleven-year-old boy, who only knew life inside an institution; an excitable girl, aggressive and sexually precocious at the age of eight; and seven-year-old Leslie, perhaps the most hopeless of all, unresponsive and unable to speak. But Torey's most daunting challenge turns out to be Leslie's mother, a stunning young doctor who soon discovers that she needs Torey's love and help just as much as the children.‘Just Another Kid’ is a beautiful illustration of nurturing concern, not only for a few emotionally disturbed children, but for one woman facing a personal battle.

## Torey Hayden. Just Another Kid


## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Epilogue

Exclusive sample chapter

Torey Hayden

Copyright

About the Publisher

## Chapter 1

It was a hodgepodge setup, that classroom, not unlike the rest of my life at the time. The room was huge, a cavernous old turn-of-the-century affair with a twelve-foot-high ceiling and magnificent large windows that looked out on absolutely nothing worth seeing: a brick wall and the chimney stack of the heating plant next door. A hefty chunk of the room had been partitioned off with gray steel industrial shelving units, used to store the school district’s staff library. The L-shaped area that was left, was mine. Windows ran the length of the wide, long arm of the L, where the chairs and worktable were; the narrow, shorter arm of the L contained the chalkboard on one wall and the door at the far end. It was an adequate amount of space; I had taught in considerably more cramped conditions, but it was a quirky arrangement. The blackboard was useless because it couldn’t be seen from the work area. And short of standing like a sentry at the junction of the two arms of the L, I could not monitor the door. Most eccentric, however, was the district’s decision to combine a classroom for disturbed children with a staff library.

This was to be the first official self-contained classroom in the district for E.D.—emotionally disturbed—children since the mainstreaming law had come into existence back in the seventies. I was called a consultant resource person in my job description; the children were termed behaviorally disordered; and the classroom was known, on paper, only as The Center, but we’d come full circle. For me, walking back into the schoolroom that late August morning, having been gone from teaching almost six years, had provoked a sense of intense déjà vu. It seemed simultaneously as if I had been away forever and yet had never left at all.

I hadn’t meant to be teaching again. I’d been abroad for almost two years, working full time as a writer, and I intended to return to my life in Wales, to my stone cottage, my dog and my Scottish fiancé. But family matters had brought me home, and then I’d gotten embroiled in the interminable red tape involved with gaining a permanent British visa. Every conceivable problem cropped up, from lost bank records to closed consulates, and one month’s wait stretched out to three and then four, with no clear prospect of the visa’s arrival. Disconcerted and annoyed, I traveled among friends and family.

A friend of a friend rang me one afternoon. I’d never met her, but she’d heard of me, she said. And she’d heard about my problem. They had a problem of their own, it seemed, and she was wondering if maybe we couldn’t help one another out. One of their senior special education teachers had been taken unexpectedly and seriously ill. There were only ten days left before the beginning of the new school year, and they had no immediate recourse to another special education teacher. Would I be interested in some substitute teaching?

No, I’d said immediately. I was waiting for this stupid visa. If it came through, I wanted to be able to leave instantly. But the woman wasn’t easily put off. Think about it, she said. If my visa did come through early, I could leave. They could find another substitute, if necessary. But otherwise, it would be a good way to spend my time. Just think about it, she urged.

Still I’d said no, but by the time the Director of Special Education contacted me, I had mellowed to the idea. Okay, I said. Why not?

Sitting there amid the paraphernalia accumulated for the start of another school year, I stared out the window at the smokestack, dull and gray in the summer sunshine. I was coming to the nettling conclusion that I wasn’t a very well directed sort of person. I didn’t have a career so much as a series of collisions with interesting opportunities. After ages away from teaching, an abortive Ph.D. attempt, several years in private research, a spell as a clinical psychologist, and time abroad spent writing, here I was again, sitting at a table converted by clutter into my teacher’s desk. I enjoyed such unpredictability and diversity; indeed, I thrived on it. But I was also growing increasingly sensitive to how capricious my lifestyle actually was.

A knock on the door brought me sharply out of my thoughts.

“Torey?” a voice called. I couldn’t see who it was from where I was sitting, so I rose. A secretary from the front office had her head around the door. “One of your kids has arrived,” she said. “The parents are in the front office.”

The old building was no longer used as a school, but rather it housed the district administration offices, most of which were on the ground floor. I had the entire upper floor to myself as the rest of the rooms were used only for storage. In fact, there were only two functional classrooms in the whole building, mine and that of the full-day program for educable retarded preschoolers two floors below, in the basement. So the halls were hauntingly quiet on this first day of school.

I followed the secretary down to the large main office, alive with clacking typewriters and cluttering word processors. A man and a woman were standing in front of the chest-high barrier that served as a reception desk. They would have been a remarkable-looking couple in any circumstance. The man must have been at least seven feet tall, because I, at almost five feet ten inches, did not even reach his shoulder. But in spite of his size, he was soft and delicate looking, with gray hair in loose, tousled curls, like a child’s. He appeared to be in his late fifties, and although not particularly handsome, he was attractive in the way aging men are, an attractiveness born more of confidence than anything physical.

The woman, who looked to be only in her thirties at the most, was startlingly beautiful. Indeed, I had never seen anyone up close who looked like she did. She was tall and angular, with chiseled cheekbones and a Kirk Douglas cleft in her chin. Her eyes were pale green, genuinely green, like cat’s eyes, only lighter, and quite prominent, giving her an intense, almost arrogant appearance. Her hair was a dark, tawny blond and very, very long. Although straight, it was thick and unruly, flowing about her like a lion’s mane. Hers was an elegant, assured kind of beauty, the sort one doesn’t usually find outside fashion magazines, and it seemed rather out of place in real life, but it had an arresting effect on me.

“Good morning,” I said and extended my hand. “I’m Torey Hayden.”

The man reached forward and gave my hand a quick, damp shake. The woman didn’t move. She was very casually dressed and made up, but there was nothing casual about her demeanor at all. Every muscle was taut. It made her beauty more impressive. She bristled with beauty, keeping it drawn up around her like a cloak.

Silence followed. I didn’t have a clue as to who these two were.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said. “Mrs. Adams, who was supposed to be teaching this class, has gone very unexpectedly into hospital. I’m her replacement, and I just took this job a few days ago. I’ve got to admit—”

“We can’t get her out of the car,” the woman blurted.

“Oh.”

The man was glancing around, as if not paying particular attention. The woman regarded me intently. While her expression was not precisely hostile, neither was it very friendly. She studied me with the kind of unabashed scrutiny not usually tolerated among adults.

“Let’s just leave it for today,” the man said, still gazing off. Languidly, he looked down at me. “Perhaps she’ll feel more like it tomorrow.”

Without any warning, the woman’s eyes filled with tears. She blushed brilliantly, and all the muscles tightened along her jaw. “No,” she said through gritted teeth. Then she turned abruptly and bolted out of the office.

The man shifted his feet uneasily, and I half expected him to take off too, but he didn’t. “My wife’s a bit upset about this,” he said softly.

“So I see.”

A pause. The man looked down at me. He had blue, watery eyes. “I think we should just leave it.”

“Why don’t I come down and help? I’m quite used to this sort of thing. It’s pretty normal. New teacher, new room, all that.”

He shook his head. “No, let’s just leave it. I’ll bring her in tomorrow.” And he turned and left before I could say more.

I gazed in stunned disbelief at the empty doorway. Turning, I saw the three secretaries watching me. We all burst out laughing, for lack of a better reaction.

“Can you believe that?” I asked. “I don’t even know who they were.”

“The Considynes,” replied one of the secretaries. “They’re our answer to Dallas.”

My second student arrived shortly after I returned to the room. Mariana Gilchrist. With her was her mother, a young woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Her hair was cut short and greased into thin, wet-looking spikes that stood up all over her head. Her eye makeup, a combination of heavy liner and pearly shadow, made her look like Cleopatra. By contrast, Mariana, in a red tartan jumper over a frilly white blouse, seemed sweetly old-fashioned.

“Am I the first kid here?” she asked. “Oh, goody. I get everything first. I get to pick everything I want first.” She pulled away from her mother.

“You behave yourself in here,” Mrs. Gilchrist said. “You got to behave. This here lady’ll make you. You can’t go effing around in here like in that other class.”

“Where’s my place?” Mariana was asking. She was at the far end of the room already. “Where’s my place going to be?”

“I’m going now,” her mother said.

“Are these toys for us kids?” Mariana had opened the cupboard under the sink and was hauling everything out.

“Good-bye. I’m going now. I’m leaving you in this here place.”

The girl never looked up.

Mariana was eight and came with the kind of profile that was almost a cliché in this sort of classroom: borderline IQ, short attention span, overaggressive. She also had a history of precocious sexual behavior. Her entire short career at school had been spent in one special setting or another, and she had achieved virtually nothing. After three years, she could neither read nor write and could understand only the most basic math.

“Where’s the other kids at?” Mariana asked suddenly. She rose, leaving a litter of puzzles, games and art materials behind her on the floor. “Who else is going to be in here? Will there be any girls?”

“Yes, one. There’re only going to be three of you in here to start with, although I expect we will have others join us as we go along.”

“What’s the other girl’s name? Is she eight too?”

“She’s seven, and her name is Leslie.”

“How soon’s she going to be eight? When’s her birthday?”

“Next spring.”

“Well, we’ll probably be best friends anyway, even if she is a bit young for me.” Mariana took up a pencil and tried to drill a little hole into the Formica tabletop.

The door banged, and my third student entered.

I was well prepared for Dirkie. They had all told me about Dirkie. He was eleven and had spent virtually all his life in institutions. He had had an early childhood history too horrible to bear thinking about, a litany of abandonments, abuse and bizarre family acts. Then had come a long spell in the state mental hospital. Eighteen months earlier, a husband-and-wife team of psychologists had met Dirkie while they were working at the state hospital. They had fallen in love with him, with his curiously lovable ways, and had decided to become his foster parents in an attempt to give him some chance at a normal family life. Dirkie’s problems, however, were rather more than love alone could conquer. He was diagnosed as having childhood schizophrenia and had a very poor prognosis for improvement. As a consequence of his truly amazing assortment of peculiar behaviors, he had not managed to survive the previous school year in a regular classroom and had ended up being taught at home.

Both Dirkie’s foster parents came with him that morning, dragging Dirkie between them. He struggled and screamed. “No! No! No! Don’t make me go in there! No! Help!” he yelled, nonstop.

I held the door open. Once inside, he broke free and bolted across the room. “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” he squealed with sudden glee, and leaped up on top of the table. Mariana’s eyes grew wide with surprise.

“Come down from there, please, Dirkie,” his foster mother said in a soft, patient tone. “Tables aren’t for standing on, remember. Come down now.”

“Hoo-hoo-hoo!” He was down from the table and under it.

I smiled at his foster parents. I felt an instant empathetic fondness for them. “I think we’ll be all right.”

The woman smiled back, and I saw her relief. I couldn’t tell if it came from my confidence that we really would be all right or if it was the prospect of being free of Dirkie for six hours.

After his parents left, Dirkie remained under the table and hooted like a demented monkey.

“That kid’s crazy,” Mariana said seriously. “Did you know that? Did you know that kid was going to be crazy?”

I nodded.

“The other one’s not going to be crazy too, is she? The girl, I mean. The girl’s not going to be crazy too? She’s going to be my best friend.”

“I haven’t met her yet, so I don’t know. But she’s not going to have Dirkie’s problems, if that’s what you mean. Everyone’s different.”

“Dirkie? Dirkie? Gad, what a stupid name. No wonder he’s crazy. Hey, Turkey-Dirkie, how you doing under there?”

“Mariana …”

“Dirkie-Turkey. Dirkie-Turkey.” Then suddenly she stopped short. She dropped down on her hands and knees to see Dirkie better through the tangle of chairs. “Gad. Look what he’s doing. Teacher. He’s rubbing hisself. Look, he’s humping. He’s humping that chair leg.” She leaped to her feet.

I moved forward to take the chairs away and then reached down for Dirkie. “Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” he squealed with excitement.

“Come on, Dirkie. Come out from under there. Here, take my hand. Let’s sit up in a chair. I’ve got some interesting things in store for us today.”

Rising, I dragged Dirkie out.

“Mariana!” I cried in surprise. “What are you doing?”

She had her jumper hiked up around her waist and was removing her underpants.

“Put everything back on this instant and pull your dress down. Now!”

“Ooooooh!” Dirkie said. Excitement brightened his eyes, and he slid off the chair like butter melting into a pan. The chair beside me began to convulse as he masturbated against it.

Beyond the shelving, the door to the classroom unexpectedly opened and shut, and before I could extract Dirkie from under the table again, Mrs. Considyne appeared with her hand clenched around the back of her daughter’s neck.

“Good morning again,” I said and smiled. I was acutely aware of Mariana, just beyond me, her underpants not yet up. Dirkie hooted maniacally.

Mrs. Considyne pushed her daughter forward. Her fingertips were white from the pressure of her grip on the child’s neck.

“Hello, Leslie,” I said. “I’m so glad you could make it after all. We were just preparing to start.”

Leslie did not look at me but rather through me. Her expression was completely vacant.

“Here, come here. I’ll show you where your cubby is. You can put your lunch box in there.” I laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently eased her away from her mother’s grasp.

Mariana materialized, fully dressed, at my side. “Hello, you,” she said to Leslie. “I’m the other girl in this here class. You want to be my best friend? You want to sit with me?”

Leslie screwed up her face and slapped her hands over her ears.

“Oh, shit,” Mariana muttered. “She’s crazy, just like him.”

I returned to Mrs. Considyne, who was looking fairly horrified. “I’m sure Leslie will be all right. Things are always a little hectic the first few days of a new year.”

She said nothing, but rather looked past me, over my shoulder toward the children.

“I do appreciate your having gone to the trouble to bring her in, Mrs. Considyne. I realize there were problems, but it is probably a good idea that she comes on this first day.”

She nodded. Looking down, she opened what I had assumed was her handbag. Instead, it was sort of a little medical kit full of bottles and cups. “Here are Leslie’s things. The testers and the insulin and all that. I’ve put extra candy in, in case of shock. You do know what you’re doing?” she asked, glancing up.

I hoped she meant regarding Leslie’s diabetes. I nodded. “I’ve been shown. But Mrs. Whicker, the school nurse, is coming in to give the injections for a few weeks.”

I put the bag on one of the upper shelves of the library to keep it out of the children’s reach and then moved around Mrs. Considyne in an effort to encourage her to leave. Turning, she came with me.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, as we reached the door, “I’m not Considyne. My husband’s Considyne. My name’s Taylor.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Ms. Taylor.”

She shook her head. “Not Mzzz. I’m Dr. Taylor.”

I felt myself blushing. “Oh. Okay. I’m sorry.”

Dirkie sidled up. Standing beside me, he gazed up at Dr. Taylor for a long moment. “My,” he said in a very solemn voice, “what big tits you got.”

## Chapter 2

Leslie Considyne was a very curious piece of work. When I returned from seeing her mother out, I found her in precisely the spot I’d left her. Taking out a chair from the table, I indicated it to her. She sat. There was nothing mechanical about her movements. In fact, she moved with a surprisingly fluid grace, but she appeared to have no one at home inside her body. The entire morning she acted only when instructed. Otherwise, she remained wherever she was, staring vacantly ahead, and without a muscle ever twitching. She would not look at me or at the other children. Even when I sat directly in front of her and lined her face up with mine, she continued to look ahead, straight through me, as if I were not there. I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. What I couldn’t tell was if it was a conscious effort.

Although I had been led to believe that Dirkie would be my most disturbed child, Leslie presented a more disconcerting appearance that morning. She was the only one of the three who did not speak and was not toilet trained. She also had brittle diabetes, which necessitated a harrowing round of injections midday. Even this got no reaction from her. The nurse came in, took her aside, injected her, and Leslie never flicked an eyelash. She never even looked down at what the nurse was doing.

When the children had gone for lunch at 12:15, I sat down at the worktable with the files. Having now met all three children, I looked forward to understanding more what had been written about them.

There was a quick rap at the classroom door and then it opened. I looked up. Once again, my view was blocked by the shelving, and I could tell that not being able to see the door from the main part of the classroom was going to drive me mad. “Come on in,” I called and waited for someone to appear.

“Just me. How did it go? Okay?” It was Carolyn, the special education teacher from the class in the basement.

I nodded. “Pretty good.”

She grinned. “You want to come to Enrico’s with us? That’s where everybody here goes at noon.”

“Thanks, but I’ve brought my lunch. I need to catch up on all this stuff before the afternoon. Maybe I’ll join you tomorrow.”

“Who all have you got?” she asked, coming over and leaning down to look at the names on the files.

I liked Carolyn. I’d liked her instantly, which was fortunate, since we were the only two teachers in the building. She was about my age, still single and unabashedly concerned about it, easy-going, gregarious and inclined to speak before thinking, which gave her a refreshing naturalness.

Suddenly Carolyn whistled under her breath. “You got Considyne? Is this the Considyne?”

“I wouldn’t know. Have you had Leslie too?”

“Oh God, no. Thank God, no. The kid is absolutely wacko, which is all right, because it makes her fit in with the rest of the family. You live here for any time at all and you’ll know all you need to know about the Considynes. Or rather, Tom Considyne and Dr. Taylor.”

“Yes, believe it or not, I’ve already had that pointed out to me.”

Carolyn flipped open Leslie’s file. Pointing to the father’s name, she said, “He’s an artist. Supposed to be famous, although I’ve sure never heard of him anywhere.”

Then a wicked grin creased Carolyn’s features, and she pulled out a chair and sat down. “You want to hear the gossip about them? It’s pretty hot.” She reached over and helped herself to my potato chips. “She’s supposed to be this absolute genius; anyway that’s what people say. She’s a scientist of some sort. God knows how they met one another. But talk about a father fixation. She’s like twenty-five years younger than he is. Anyway, she was working back East at some university or other and commuting back and forth. They had their own private plane, jetting all over creation and part of Canada. She was even in Moscow once. Then all of a sudden it stopped. She got fired off what she was doing; that’s what I heard said. She has this fairly dramatic drinking problem, as you’ll no doubt discover, and I’m sure that’s what happened to her.

“So now we’ve got her, and she’s a pretty lively case, believe me. She has all these affairs. She isn’t even discreet about it. I know for a fact that she’s had an affair with Dr. Addison from up at the children’s clinic. It’s got to be humiliating for Mr. Considyne, because everybody knows she’s doing it. I suppose it must be because of the way she looks. I mean, if I looked like that, I’d probably have me a sugar daddy and keep a string on the side too.” Carolyn laughed.

I regarded my cheese sandwich glumly. This was the kind of thing you liked to hear about people you didn’t really know, not the parents of the children in your schoolroom.

“Trash with class, that’s what it boils down to,” Carolyn said. She leaned across the table and helped herself to my grapes. “She puts on all these airs. I mean, look at this silly business about Dr. Taylor. She thinks she’s too good to even talk to the rest of us. She’ll never even say hello. And who is she? What would she be if she weren’t Tom Considyne’s little bimbo? He’s the one who’s famous. He’s got all the money. But he’s nice. He’s real friendly, if you run into him down at the Co-op or something. If he’s been introduced to you, he’ll always remember your name. If he’s got any fault, it’s that he’s too casual about things. He tends not to follow through. He drove Rita wild last year. She was Leslie’s first-grade teacher. She was always arranging things with him to try and help Leslie, and he was always promising to do them, but he never did. That, and also he never answers his phone. If their help’s out, you’ll never be able to contact him, short of knocking the door down. He’s got a studio out in back of his house where he does his painting, and last year when Leslie went into a diabetic coma, Rita stood outside his studio knocking on the window, and he never even bothered to turn around and see who it was.”

“This sounds like a soap opera, Carolyn.”

“Ooooh, it’s better,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. “It’s real.”

I grimaced.

Carolyn smiled knowingly and pulled over the rest of the files to look at them. “You want me to fill you in on these too?”

“You know about them?” I asked incredulously.

She laughed. “No. But I’m sure I could think of something.”

We both dissolved into giggles.

After Carolyn left, I opened the Considyne file. There was nothing in there that hinted at the steamy stories Carolyn had been telling me. Dr. Taylor was a physicist. Mr. Considyne was listed simply as a painter. The first time I’d read it, I’d thought it meant house-painter. The only thing to have caught my eye initially was Dr. Taylor’s first name: Ladbrooke. The peculiarity of it had not struck me so much as idle curiosity over what, in intimate moments, one would call someone with such a formal name.

There was a fairly extensive sheaf of papers on Leslie and her disturbance. As in so many cases of severe handicaps of this nature, there was little certainty about exactly what her problem was and what had caused it. Apparently her birth and early infancy had been normal. She was a full-term baby and, while placid and not particularly responsive, she’d been easy to care for. Her progress past the usual milestones had been slow, but within normal limits. Then, somewhere around two and a half, she had begun to deteriorate. What little vocabulary she did have disappeared. What progress she’d made in terms of toilet training and self-care was lost. A futile round of doctors and psychiatrists started soon after Leslie was three. Autism, one report said. Mental retardation, said another. Childhood schizophrenia, said a third. No one seemed to know for sure, but everyone was willing to guess.

Amazingly, to my way of thinking, Leslie had had no special treatment program and, indeed, was kept in a regular classroom for two years. She had, in fact, spent more time in the classroom than had Mariana. There were a few acerbic jottings from Rita Ashworth, Leslie’s previous teacher, about the challenges this presented, and I got the impression that in the end, Leslie had been left pretty much to her own devices.

There was nothing written anywhere to suggest how Leslie’s parents had come to terms with their daughter’s handicap nor anything about what the home situation was like. There was a brief mention of two older stepchildren and how the younger of them, a teenaged girl, had a poor relationship with Leslie, but there was nothing else.

The first week passed. The three children were very different from one another, and I did nothing more than scuttle among them those first days, trying to keep order. Both Leslie and Dirkie could have done with a teacher apiece. Dirkie was fairly advanced in comparison to many other schizophrenic children I’d encountered. He was toilet trained, could express himself quite well, could follow simple instructions, and even had mastered a fair number of academic skills, although at a level way below what would have been expected for his chronological age. However, he still needed virtual one-to-one teaching to stay on task.

Dirkie’s worst problems came from an assortment of obsessions with things that were very commonly encountered, such as cats, hair, old men and women, fire engines and door hinges. Discharging the excitement generated by the obsessions took the better part of most days. First, an obsession would come to mind—perhaps he’d see a picture or hear a sound, and that would start him off. Then he’d become excited, then agitated, then frenzied, needing desperately to fulfill elaborate rituals before he could free his mind and think of something else. I became able to discern when one of the obsessions was overtaking Dirkie, because he would begin to talk in an odd voice. He spoke in a weird manner most of the time, with his voice deep and gravelly, like a child imitating its father, although Dirkie did have a normal speaking voice, rarely used. However, when one of his obsessions overtook him, Dirkie’s voice grew deeper and became urgent sounding, taking on a tone that made him sound permanently appalled. Then, as the excitement increased, he’d lose control and be unable to form words. He hooted instead. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. No other sound, just that. And he’d begin to clap. Physical excitement took over from there, and he could no longer sit still. On his feet, he’d adopt a mincing, disjointed sort of locomotion, like a marionette with a very bad operator, and usually, he’d end up under the table, where he’d sit, clapping and hooting, and frequently, masturbating frantically on the table leg. Then calm would return.

Sometimes I could successfully interrupt the hoot-and-clap syndrome early enough to quell the frenzy and reorient Dirkie to the task at hand. More often, I couldn’t. And if he’d gone beyond a certain point, he needed to continue, because otherwise, he exploded, screaming and yelling, kicking and slapping, tearing papers from the bulletin boards, magazines from the shelves, overturning chairs, ripping his clothes and banging himself against walls and furniture. But even without such cataclysmic conclusions, Dirkie’s obsessions ruled us.

“Do you have a cat?” he asked me on the first day.

“Yes,” I answered, not realizing what I had started.

His eyes grew shiny with excitement. “What kind is it?”

“Just a cat. Tabby and white.”

But that wasn’t enough information. “How tall is it? How long is its tail?”

Thinking to put him off, I explained it wasn’t even my cat, but rather a cat on loan from my grandparents to keep me company. So I didn’t know the beast too intimately. But this didn’t put Dirkie off. Indeed, the novelty of the arrangement intrigued him, and he questioned me endlessly. “What color eyes does your cat have? When’s his birthday? How long did your grandparents have him before you got him? Here,” he demanded and gave me a piece of paper. “Draw a picture of your cat.” When I demurred, he panicked. “Draw it! Draw it! Draw your cat! Draw your cat in his basket. Draw your cat in the bathtub. Draw your cat eating food,” he screamed, his voice becoming louder with each demand. So I began to draw, and immediately, Dirkie quieted. “That’s your cat. You’re drawing your cat. You’re drawing your cat sitting up.” But when I finished, he thrust another sheet of paper under my nose. “Draw your cat lying down.” The room was soon a veritable gallery of my rather undistinguished cat drawings.

Our whole relationship began to revolve around my cat. Every time Dirkie saw me, he had to query me exhaustively about my cat. This conversation could be repeated twenty or thirty times over the course of the day. All I had to do was go out of Dirkie’s range of vision and return and he’d need to have a cat conversation with me. And if it wasn’t my cat, it was other cats. Did Mrs. Renton, the secretary, have a cat? Was it a big, yellow tomcat? Did it weigh seven pounds? Did it eat from a green bowl? A white bowl? I felt ridiculous asking Mrs. Renton what color bowl she fed her cat from, but I did ask. It was either that or make it up.

Equally absorbing to Dirkie but with considerably less scope for conversation was the length of my hair. I had quite long hair, well past my shoulders, and this fascinated Dirkie. “You have long hair,” he would say. “I like your hair. Are you going to cut it?”

“No,” I’d reply.

“Don’t cut your hair. Leave your hair long. I like it long. I like long hair.”

This would be quickly followed by: “I need to touch your hair.”

He was, I quickly discovered, much better off not touching my hair. On the occasions he did, it only fueled his excitement, and he’d run off in a full hooting session. He also tended to grab and pull very hard instead of simply touching.

But the conversation over long hair was repeated, if anything, more often than our cat conversation. Or perhaps it just seemed like it, since there were not many dimensions of my hair to talk about. Again and again he asked me about it. One morning I counted him asking me about my long hair fourteen times during one hour. By the end of the first day, I was tying my hair back. By Friday, I was ready to shave it all off.

Leslie proved to be only slightly less of a challenge than Dirkie, and in some ways, she was more. Being untrained, she left me with the distasteful task of wrestling wet diapers off her several times a day, made less pleasant by the need to root around in them with a dipstick to check her sugar levels. Changing her presented other problems. Either I had to leave the other two alone in the classroom while I rushed Leslie down the hall to the girls’ rest room, or else I had to retire discreetly to the depths of the steel shelving and hope there weren’t going to be any nasty surprises. Taking Dirkie and Mariana to the rest room with me was out of the question. Seeing Leslie undressed and my cleaning her proved too much stimulation for Dirkie. He would masturbate frenetically against the sink or toilet-stall doors and use incredibly descriptive language. This, in turn, would get Mariana going. Sexuality and sexual matters were very much a part of both children’s disturbances, and I couldn’t allow Leslie to be exploited in this way. But it made the logistics of changing her difficult to cope with.

In the classroom, Leslie did nothing. If I told her to sit, she sat. But if I didn’t, she would remain stranded wherever I had left her. She did nothing without being physically oriented to it and told to do it, but once started, she would continue a task until physically stopped. For example, if I gave her crayons and paper and asked her to draw, she would begin making marks on the paper and continue until the entire page was covered and still continue coloring over this.

She was the most withdrawn child I had encountered. I had the impression some days of not only mental absence, but almost of physical absence as well, as if she weren’t really there at all, as if I were in the company of a hologram.

On the other hand, admittedly, Leslie was no trouble in other ways. If left to her own devices, she got up to no mischief. She got up to nothing whatsoever, other than a little self-stimulation. She didn’t speak. She gave no indication of being able to, although her file stated that she had spoken, when younger. She made no noises whatsoever except when she cried, which wasn’t often.

In my opinion, Leslie needed very intensive work, the kind of one-to-one stimulation that was next to impossible within the constraints of my classroom. I had to leave her far too often quietly “disappeared.” I compensated by using every spare opportunity to make physical contact, to hold her, to touch her, to cuddle her and keep her close. Even then, Leslie seemed to be not much more than a body with no child in it, but holding her was the only way I could reassure myself that she really existed.

Poor Mariana was in lousy company. Regardless of her own problems, compared to Dirkie and Leslie, she was a world ahead. Glumly accepting that she was going to have no best friend in this class, she took her folder of work each morning and sat alone at the far end of the table. She was just as hopeless at academics as everyone had said and could have used a whole lot more of my time, but her difficulties were neither serious enough nor dramatic enough to compete with those of the other two. I was grateful for Mariana’s presence, however, from a purely selfish point of view. She was someone with whom I could have an occasional sane conversation. And I tried to reserve her some special, uninterrupted time, but with Leslie and Dirkie, that was a challenge. They couldn’t be ignored, and Mariana was capable of understanding that sometimes I did have to ignore her. So she soldiered on without complaint.

I knew what I needed—an aide. Desperately. During most of my years as a teacher in special education, I’d worked with children at the severe end of the emotional-disturbance spectrum and had had some kind of assistance in the classroom. Even with my smallest classes, there had been an extra pair of hands. It made all the difference in the world. Someone to change Leslie or watch the others while I did, someone to oversee while I gave a child individual instruction, someone to provide feedback, to laugh with, to chew over the day’s events, to compare bruises on the shins with—that was what I needed.

I discussed the matter with Carolyn. We had joined the local health club and started going down to the spa most evenings after work for a swim and a sauna, or a soak in the whirlpool. I quizzed her during those relaxed evenings. She had one full-time trained aide and two volunteers, who appeared regularly. Being so new to the community, I didn’t have the resources necessary to locate volunteers. Where had she found hers? Did she know of anyone else who might be interested? Did she have any alternate ideas?

I also went to talk to Frank Cotton, the Director of Special Education. I got to know Frank much better than I had any previous director, which was the one advantage of having a classroom in the administration building. I saw him daily. He was one of the gang, taking his coffee breaks in the teachers’ lounge with us, eating lunch with us at Enrico’s, and this quickly put us on a genuine first-name basis, the way it is with friends.

“I’m beginning to think it’s me,” I said. We were in his office, a long, narrow room converted from a storage closet, chosen because it abutted the main office, a former classroom. “I’ve got only three kids, for crying out loud, but it’s just not coming together as a class.” I explained my feelings of constantly shuttling between Dirkie and Leslie and getting nothing else accomplished.

Frank leaned back in his chair. He smiled gently. “You’re feeling out of practice.”

I nodded and grinned. “Yes, I guess it is a bit of that. But I keep thinking, we’re going to make a cohesive group out of this lot yet. I was always so good at that in the old days. I could make a group out of any sort of rabble. But it’s not happening this time.”

“It’s early yet,” Frank said.

“It still should be giving some sign of happening.”

Frank continued to lean back. He fingered his lip. “Not enough kids.”

“Quite enough kids, thank you.”

“No, I mean it. Not enough to make a group of. You’ve always had bigger classes before, haven’t you?”

I nodded. “But not much. I had only four when I was teaching at the state hospital, and we made a hell of a group there.” I smiled in what I hoped was a very disarming way. “What I need, Frank, is an aide.”

“Wish I could afford one for you.”

I knew I couldn’t have one, even before I’d said it, but it felt good to put it in words, to say it to someone in charge. “Any volunteers that you know of?”

He shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. You should ask Carolyn. She seems to keep a secret supply.”

“I’ve tried Carolyn already. No luck.”

We continued to talk. Frank slowly diverted the conversation away from my aide business and on to other things. When a natural pause came into the conversation, he leaned forward. I sensed a change of topic. Clasping his hands together, Frank pressed them pensively against his lips a moment and stared at the orderly stacks of papers on his desk. His eyes rose to meet mine.

“That earlier conversation …” He paused, looked away, looked back. “It’s going to make what I have to say now a little harder.”

I wondered suddenly if I had done something wrong.

Frank smiled. “It’s nothing major. It’s just that … well, how can I say it? You’re getting two more children next week.”

“Two?”

“Yes. Sisters. Five and eight. They’re from Northern Ireland.”

“Oh.”

“Their family’s been embroiled in the trouble going on over there, and now the girls have come to live with relatives to get them out of all that, to give them a new start, that sort of thing. They’ve been up at Washington Elementary since school started, but it isn’t working out. They’re not integrating.”

“I see.”

“The younger one isn’t talking at all, so I thought of you immediately. With your experience in elective mutism, your room seemed the ideal place for them.”

I think I was too stunned to talk. Here I’d come in to complain about being unable to cope with the children I had, and I was ending up with two more.

If Frank sensed my benumbed state, he was ignoring it. “Like I said earlier, I think you need more kids to get organized. Three’s not a group. At least those three aren’t. Besides, it’ll be better for Mariana Gilchrist.” He smiled cheerfully. “This way, you can get the momentum going.”

I didn’t doubt that.

## Chapter 3

I remember, as a girl, hearing a newscast about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and asking my grandfather to explain the issue to me. When he had, it offended my child’s sensibilities. A war between the Catholics and the Protestants? How could that be? I’d asked him. They wouldn’t even be able to tell themselves apart.

They would and they could and they did. My few years in Wales, another Celtic country still chafing hundreds of years after English conquest, had given me more insight into the issue, into its remarkable complexity, into its lack of resolution. But more than anything, my time there had made me well aware that I still had no understanding of the matter. I remained an American, born and raised in a young country created from immigrant diversity. I had no resources upon which to call when it came to comprehending four-hundred-year-old memories of invaders and usurpers. I had no eye for seeing the differences that they saw among themselves and even less for appreciating their need to see them. As a result, I came back from Wales with nothing more than the knowledge that I didn’t know. The only thing I did have a strong conviction about was the violence—too prevalent and too senseless. It destroyed my sympathies for both causes.

As a consequence, perhaps I was a particularly inappropriate choice of teacher for these two girls. Our community had a strong Irish connection and was openly pro-IRA. The story of the girls preceded them. Long before I ever met them, I heard about them in the grocery store and the gas station, their history being passed on word-of-mouth, like an epic saga. I came to recognize the sad expression and the sorrowful tone of voice that accompanied the telling; the children were made minor celebrities by their suffering.

According to the stories, the girls’ father had been an active IRA man. About eighteen months previously, he was arrested by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in a big sweep-up operation and accused of participating in some very serious acts, including murder. However, he was released shortly afterward. Rumor sprang up that he was, in fact, an informer, although no concrete evidence was presented to substantiate this. Soon, he and his family were being harassed, although no one yet seemed to know who was doing what. Was it the IRA getting back at their own? One of the splinter groups? Or was it the paramilitary wing of one of the Protestant groups exploiting the advantage of having an IRA man identified? Whatever, one night a petrol bomb was thrown through the letter slot in the front door. The house caught fire, and while the father managed to rescue his two daughters, his wife and young son died in the blaze. Within three weeks of the fire, the man was found hanged in his brother’s garage, a suicide. The girls were shunted back and forth among relatives in the large, extended family until finally, in midsummer, they were granted American visas to come and live here with their father’s sister and her husband.

After all this presage, actually meeting Geraldine and Shemona McCulley the Monday morning they arrived in my class was a bit of a disappointment. They were something out of a myth by that time, and I think I was expecting them to look the part. They didn’t. They were two very ordinary little girls with moon-shaped, freckled faces and blue-gray eyes. Shemona, poignantly named after what her mother had believed to be a peace settlement in Israel, but which turned out to be a town victimized by the same kind of terrorism as Belfast, was the younger child. She had longish, rumpled-looking blond hair and grubby knees. Geraldine wore glasses with ghastly pink plastic frames that gave her the look of a fifties housewife. Her dark hair was cut in a short, blunt style that we used to call a Dutch bob when I was little.

Frank and the girls’ aunt brought them in early, before the other children had arrived. The sisters entered meekly, the younger one clutching a well-worn stuffed monkey in one hand and her aunt’s coattail in the other. Mrs. Lonrho indicated the chairs at the table, and both girls sat down grimly, still in their coats, hands folded in their laps. Mrs. Lonrho knelt beside Shemona. She pushed the child’s hair back from her eyes in a gentle gesture. “You be good here, okay? You do as the lady says. She’s here to help you.” Then she rose. She turned to me. “They’re good girls.”

Alone with them, I suggested they take off their coats and then showed them where their hooks were, and their cubbies. Back at the table, they sat side by side. I took out a chair opposite them. I’d made up folders for them to work from. Geraldine reached over and took first her own folder and examined it, and then Shemona’s. The younger girl just sat, the stuffed monkey clutched against her, and did nothing.

“We work a little differently in here than in most classes,” I said. “Everyone is in a different place, so each person has to be responsible for doing the work in her own folder. I come around and help you with it throughout the day, but sometimes I need to be with another child, and then you have to work on your own. Sometimes you’ll get stuck when I’m with someone else, and I won’t be able to come right away to help you. If that happens, you need to skip that part and go on to do something else until I’m free.”

Geraldine nodded. “I can do these,” she said and pointed to one of the papers. “I can do this work.” She glanced briefly at her sister’s folder. “And Shemona says she can do hers too.”

Shemona sat, immobile. She gazed at me steadily, her eyes, like her face, veiled with an unreadable expression.

Mariana was delighted. “This here girl’s going to be my best friend,” she said almost immediately upon entering the room and seeing Shemona and Geraldine. She hauled her chair up next to Geraldine’s. “You want to be my best friend? You want a Life Saver? And then you give me something nice and we’ll be best friends. Okay? You wanna do that?”

Geraldine’s face brightened at the sight of the candy and she accepted it eagerly, popping it into her mouth. Then she looked expectantly for more. “Shemona wants one,” she said.

Mariana looked up.

“Give Shemona a sweetie.”

“You’re going to be my best friend. Not her. She’s too little.”

With a suddenness none of us had anticipated, Geraldine snatched the roll of Life Savers from Mariana’s hands. She deftly popped a candy out and handed it to her sister.

Mariana burst into tears. “They’re mine! My mommy bought them for me.”

“Hey,” I said and reached down to take the Life Savers from Geraldine. “None of this, please.”

At that, Geraldine burst into tears as well.

Dirkie arrived at that point. “Who are they?” he asked, his voice going gravelly with excitement.

“Sit down, Dirkie. These are our two new girls. Remember, I told you last Friday that we’d be having some new children today. Now please sit down.”

Geraldine snuffled.

Mariana still bawled. “They’re mine, Teacher.”

“All right. Here.” I gave her back the roll of candy. “Now, what’s the rule regarding bringing in candy?”

Mariana said nothing.

“You’ve got to share,” Dirkie said with great feeling. He was cottoning on to the presence of the candy.

“That’s right. You have to share. Now, if you gave Geraldine a piece, it’s only fair that you give Shemona one. And Dirkie. Then put them away, unless you want to share them all out.”

Mariana began to cry again. “That’s not fair. My mommy bought them for me.”

“I can appreciate how you feel. You like your candy and you want to keep it. But it also isn’t fair to give a piece just to Geraldine. Geraldine was right to be concerned about her sister, although perhaps she needn’t have snatched the candy in quite that way.”

Mariana begrudgingly handed out a Life Saver to Dirkie and then returned to her seat to count how many were left. She squirreled the rest of them away in the pocket of her jumper. “What are you gonna give me now?” she asked Geraldine.

Geraldine shrugged. “Haven’t anything.”

Glumly, Mariana kicked the leg of the table. “Some best friend you’ve turned out to be.”

Dirkie was mesmerized by the two girls. He spent much of the morning simply watching them. Then after lunch he took to circling the table, and it occurred to me what was so fascinating to him: It was Shemona’s hair. Leslie’s hair was longer and even Mariana’s hair was quite long, and as I had never noticed Dirkie showing interest in either of them, I had assumed he was only preoccupied with adult hair. So I was a bit surprised and certainly dismayed to discover he was attracted to Shemona’s. The only thing I could reckon was that Shemona, like me, was blond, while both Mariana and Leslie were dark. This lent a new dimension to Dirkie’s obsession. Whatever was behind it, he could not leave Shemona’s hair alone. Around and around and around the table he went, his body slightly crouched, his muscles tense with excitement. When he would get in back of her, he’d pause, quivering. If either Shemona or Geraldine turned to look at him, he would jump and then begin circling again. “Hoo-hoo-hoo,” he was whispering under his breath.

“Dirkie, sit down,” I said. I was holding Leslie on my lap and trying to work with her, so it was inconvenient to have to keep getting up to reseat him. And his circling was nerve-racking.

Dirkie moved off, but within moments he was back, once again circling like a hyena with its quarry.

“Miss,” Geraldine said, “Shemona doesn’t like this. This boy is bothering her.” “Miss” was the only thing Geraldine would call me.

“Dirkie,” I said, “sit down. Now sit. You’ve got plenty of work in your folder, so please come here, sit down and get busy.”

I pulled his folder closer to where I was sitting, and when he came over, I sat him next to me. Geraldine, farther down and across the table from us, raised her head to watch us.

“You’re a girl,” Dirkie said to her, his voice low.

“So?”

“She’s a girl too,” he said, indicating Shemona.

Geraldine rolled her eyes in an expression of incredulity and went back to her work.

“And she’s a girl and she’s a girl,” Dirkie continued, pointing to Mariana and Leslie. “And you’re a girl!” he said to me. “You know what that means?”

“Girls’ pussies,” Mariana supplied. She giggled.

Geraldine looked scandalized.

“Girls, girls, girls!” Dirkie said excitedly.

“Dirkie, time to settle down. Here, let’s get on with your work.” I took a paper from his folder.

He studied Shemona, bent over her work. “And that girl,” he said pointedly, “that girl there, that girl with the yellow hair, with the long yellow hair, she’s a girl. She’s got a girl’s pisser, that girl with the long yellow hair.”

“Dirkie, I mean it, settle down.”

The excitement proved too much for him, and Dirkie was up once more, mincing around the table to Shemona.

“Mii-iissss!” squealed Geraldine in exasperation. “We’re trying to work. Make that boy stop.”

Putting Leslie off my lap, I rose and went to catch Dirkie. Taking him by the shoulder, I physically returned him to his chair and pushed him into it.

“That girl has long yellow hair. You have long hair. You have long yellow hair too. Are you going to cut your long yellow hair?”

“No, Dirkie.”

“That girl, is she going to cut her hair? Is that girl going to cut her long yellow hair?”

“She might,” Geraldine said waspishly.

“No, Dirkie, she isn’t going to cut her hair either. Now come on. Here’s today’s math. Let’s see if you can get it finished before recess. I’ll help you get started.”

But he couldn’t reorient. “Hey, girl,” he said, “girl with the long yellow hair, do you have a cat?”

Geraldine came over to me toward the end of the afternoon. “Shemona doesn’t like that boy, Miss.”

“Yes, he can be annoying, that’s for certain. But if Shemona doesn’t like him, all she needs to do is tell him to go away. And he will. He doesn’t mean any harm.”

Geraldine frowned.

“What about you? I asked. “What do you think of him?”

“Shemona thinks he’s silly. So do I.”

I was grateful to see that particular day done. While nothing major happened, it had been hard work. I’d been nervous about these two girls with all their tragic fame, and it had left me on edge. The others were unsettled by the change. Dirkie, especially, had remained impossible all day long, and I was ready to skewer him by the last hour. In an effort to hasten the end, I agreed to let everyone out on the playground five minutes early to wait for their rides. It was a clear, sharp September day, and I knew the tensions would evaporate more quickly in the brisk air.

Mariana’s and Dirkie’s buses came. Then Shemona and Geraldine’s aunt arrived to collect them. That left just Leslie, holding my hand.

“Where’s your mama?” I asked. “It’s not like her to be late.” I scanned the length of the street for Dr. Taylor’s dark blue Mercedes. Normally, she was extremely punctual, waiting at the wheel of the car when I brought the children down. She even occasionally came up to the classroom to get Leslie, if I ran a minute or two late.

We waited for a few moments longer, and then I took Leslie around the corner of the building to the playground and pushed her on the swing. She adored swinging. It was the single activity to evoke any kind of genuine response from her. She would close her eyes and let her head fall back, her long, dark hair fanning out behind her. While swinging, Leslie came the closest I had seen her come to smiling.

No doubt Leslie would have been happy to stay on the swing until dark, but I had a special ed. meeting at 4:45 in a nearby school, so my time wasn’t totally my own. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes slipped by, and still no Dr. Taylor. By four o’clock, I decided things had gone on long enough. I let the swing come to a stop and took Leslie inside to the office, where I telephoned the Considynes’ home.

No answer. I wasn’t sure what to do. Could I leave Leslie down here? Should I take her to her house myself and trust someone would be there by then? Or should I just keep waiting? I dialed the Considynes’ number once more and let the phone ring and ring.

Upstairs in the classroom again, I got Leslie settled with some toys while I sat down at the table and looked over my notes for the meeting. As 4:20 approached, tension returned. The Considynes lived at the opposite end of town from where I was going; if I left with Leslie now, I wouldn’t get back in time for the start of the meeting. And what if no one was there? What then?

Where the hell had Dr. Taylor gotten to? I went out in the hallway and down to the end, where I could see the street in front of the building from the stairwell window. I searched up and down the tree-lined road for some sign of the Mercedes. This was definitely atypical of her. I had previously been impressed with her Colditz-style precision. Leslie appeared and disappeared each day at exactly the right moment. She was always clean, neat and supplied with all the necessary accoutrements, which was no mean feat, considering the number of disposable diapers, needles, syringes, blood-sugar tapes and such that Leslie required. Dr. Taylor never troubled me with any discussion over things. Leslie and her paraphernalia were brought and collected without my ever exchanging so much as a “hello” with Dr. Taylor. It was formal, but efficient. So this unexpected lateness concerned me.

Leslie trailed into the hallway after me.

“Come here, sweetheart,” I said, and extended an arm. “I’m not sure where your mama’s gotten to, but I know she’ll come. You’ll get home all right.” I hugged her against me.

In desperation, I took Leslie down to Carolyn’s room. She was due at the same meeting I was and so was just preparing to leave. I explained what was happening and asked if she’d pass on the information. I’d try to get over as soon as I could.

I was also worried about Leslie’s diabetes. She had a very strict regimen of snacks and meals, and I knew she was going to need to eat soon to keep her insulin level in line. Carolyn provided some crackers and milk left over from her pupil’s snack time.

“Are you coming to the spa tonight?”

I nodded.

“If you don’t make it to the meeting,” she said, “I’ll see you there. You can tell me all about this.” And she gave me a demonic grin.

Back I went to the office and tried the Considynes’ number. Still no answer. Was Mr. Considyne home and not answering? Or was no one there at all?

I returned to the classroom. Leaning against the radiator, I stared out the window. The door opened behind me, and my heart rose in anticipation. I turned to get Leslie’s coat. But before I could, the footsteps disappeared into the library. Two voices muttered quietly to one another, the sound filtering indistinctly out to Leslie and me. I looked at her; she looked at me. I think she was disappointed too.

Pulling a chair out from the table, I sat down. Leslie, standing beside me, moved to get onto my lap. I closed my arms around her.

“Don’t worry, lovey. Your mama wouldn’t forget about a lovely girl like you. I’m sure it’s probably just some little thing that’s held her up. We just need to be patient.”

Leslie relaxed against me. She was a snuggly child and burrowed in against my breasts. Her hair smelled of herbal shampoo. I rested my cheek against it.

The people using the library left, and all went quiet again. Five o’clock came and then 5:15. I decided I would wait until 5:30 and then ring Frank. I listened to each minute being ticked noisily away by the clock over the blackboard, and they all seemed to last forever. I gazed at the clouds in the sky beyond the window as they turned pink with the approaching sunset. Silent and motionless, Leslie remained in my lap.

Then, slam, bang went the classroom door and there was Dr. Taylor. I glanced at my watch. It was 5:25, nearly two hours since school had ended.

“I’m late,” she said and that was all the explanation she offered. She had stopped at the corner of the shelving units and came no closer. Holding out her hand toward Leslie, she gave a slight jerk of her head. Leslie responded immediately, sliding off my lap and running to her mother.

What I noticed was that Dr. Taylor looked wonderful. She always dressed casually, but in a very fashionable way, the way I would have liked to dress if I’d had the money and the fashion sense. This afternoon it was all wool and denim and leather boots. Her complexion was ruddy, as if she had been out a while in the brisk autumn air, and it suited her. She had very fair skin, and normally she looked unhealthy to me. Momentarily mesmerized by her appearance, I forgot my irritation. But as I rose and came abreast of her, while she was bent, doing up the buttons of Leslie’s coat, I realized abruptly that her ruddy glow was not due to health.

Dr. Taylor was drunk.

I was too shocked to react immediately. I just stood there, watching her fumble with the buttons, as the dark, oaky smell of whiskey wafted around us. The arrival of an inebriated parent wasn’t a wholly novel experience for me, but this had been so unexpected that I was speechless.

Without so much as an acknowledgment of my presence, she finished the buttons, stood, turned and ushered Leslie toward the door.

“Dr. Taylor?”

She was at the door but paused to look back at me.

I didn’t know quite what to say next, and the pause grew overlong. She turned away again and went on out.

“Dr. Taylor, are you alone?”

She was into the hallway.

“Wait,” I said and went after her. “Dr. Taylor? Wait a minute.”

No response.

She was a tall woman with a long stride, and I had to skip to get in front of her. “Dr. Taylor, stop.”

“What do you want?”

“Are you driving?”

She pushed around me.

I quickly reached for Leslie’s free hand. Both of them came to an abrupt halt. Leslie whimpered.

“I could drive you home,” I said.

“No. Thank you,” she replied and reached down, deftly disengaging my fingers from Leslie’s hand. The smell of whiskey as she leaned forward was strong enough to make me step back.

She shoved Leslie ahead of her and approached the stairwell.

“Dr. Taylor, please.”

No response.

I could negotiate the stairs faster. Stepping forward, I grabbed hold of the collar of Leslie’s coat.

This brought a ferocious glare from Dr. Taylor. She was still a step above me, so she towered over me physically. In fact, she felt about eight feet tall at that precise moment. I moved a little to the side.

“I don’t need your help, thank you,” she said through gritted teeth. Her tone left nothing to the imagination.

I kept hold of Leslie’s coat. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to be driving.”

Her eyes widened into an expression of utter incredulity. It made me feel small, to be stared at like that, as if I’d said something so dumb as to beggar belief. But I kept my fingers around Leslie’s collar.

“Leslie is my responsibility at this point,” I said. “And I don’t think I’d feel comfortable if she went with you.”

Dr. Taylor said nothing but continued to fix me with that stare. She really was a remarkably beautiful woman. It was unsettling to me, because I couldn’t keep from noticing it, even at a moment like this, when she made obvious the old adage about beauty being only skin deep. But ignoring her appearance was like trying to ignore a drastic deformity.

And she wasn’t giving in. She had eyes like a reptile’s. They didn’t blink.

“Please, let’s be sensible about this,” I said.

“Let go.”

“Please? Come on now, Dr. Taylor. Be reasonable.”

“I said, let go.”

“Let me drive Leslie then. You go as you want, but let me take Leslie.”

“Can’t you hear me?” she asked.

“Come on now.”

“Let go,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Please?”

Her eyes narrowed, and in a very calculated manner, she reached her hand toward mine. Ruefully, I uncurled my fingers from Leslie’s coat collar and let go before Dr. Taylor’s hand touched me.

The moment I did, Dr. Taylor and her daughter disappeared down the stairwell and were gone.

Carolyn laughed. She threw back her head and really howled. We were the only two in the whirlpool, but I slid down into the water until it was up around my neck so that the people over by the swimming pool couldn’t see me.

“It’s not that funny, Carolyn.”

“She really laid it on you, didn’t she? Well, it serves you right. It does, Torey,” she said and leaned forward. “You think because you’re new here, you’re classless. You think you can mess with small-town politics.”

“I wasn’t messing with politics. The woman was stone drunk.”

Carolyn closed her eyes and relaxed back against the side of the whirlpool. “You’re better off leaving her alone. They’re different from us.”

“Oh, that’s silly, Carolyn. What rubbish.” I pulled myself up out of the deeper water and sat back beside her on the bench.

Carolyn remained in her relaxed pose. “It’s not. They’re rich. They’ve got a different kind of lifestyle than the rest of us. Different kinds of friends.” She opened her eyes and looked over. “You know what happened to Carly Johnston, you know, the girl who runs the gallery on Rosten Street? She got invited out to one of Tom Considyne’s big bashes a couple of years ago. It was a Christmas party, I think. Anyway, you know what they gave for party favors?”

I shook my head.

“Coke. Cocaine. Half a gram of coke.”

I said nothing.

“I’m not kidding, Tor.”

“I didn’t think you were, but she wasn’t high, Carolyn. She was drunk. Plain old booze, like you buy over the counter in the supermarket. And I’m not thinking of busting into her jet-set lifestyle. I’m thinking of Leslie.” Carolyn didn’t respond. She closed her eyes again and stretched out to let the whirlpool jets run against her arms.

Brooding, I remained upright on the bench. I looked over. “Did Dr. Taylor come to the school drunk like this last year?”

“Yeah,” Carolyn said without opening her eyes. “I didn’t see much of her. My room was on the far side of the building, and Leslie was in Rita Ashworth’s room. But she was drunk quite a lot. She drove Rita bonkers more than a few times with it. She’d be sober for ages and then come in absolutely blotto two or three times a week for a while. Rita never knew what to expect. It was worst in midwinter. It got to be a joke among us. You know how you get about things like that.”

“Didn’t anybody do anything about it?” I asked.

“Like what, precisely?” Carolyn half-opened her eyes and looked over at me.

“I don’t know. But she’s got to be doing herself a fair amount of harm. She’s young. What age is she? Thirty? Thirty-five?”

“I mean really, Torey, who cares? She isn’t exactly the poor-and-dying of Calcutta, is she? She’s such an arrogant so-and-so. She couldn’t give a fuck about you or me, if you’ll forgive my French. So I’m not about to play Mother Teresa for her benefit. Nobody is.”

I didn’t respond.

Carolyn looked over. “Has she ever said more than two words to you?”

“No. Not really.”

“See what I mean? Besides, we’re schoolteachers, not social workers. Or psychiatrists, which is what I suspect the woman really needs.”

“I’m thinking of Leslie.”

“Leslie seems pretty unbothered. Lots of kids have alcoholic parents, Tor. I did myself. You survive.”

Sighing, I leaned back and stared up at the open girders supporting the ceiling.

“Don’t sound so defeated. She’s not going to cause any trouble. She’s one of those drunks who really doesn’t do much more than just get snockered. When I said she drove Rita wild, I didn’t mean to say she was trouble. She wasn’t. Half the time I didn’t even realize she was drunk. Just leave her alone. That was what Rita did in the end, and it worked out best all around. She wants no truck with us mortal folk anyhow. If you don’t talk to her, you can be plenty sure she’ll never talk to you.”

“Still seems to me like she should have help.”

Carolyn rose up out of the whirlpool. “To be honest with you, Tor, I really couldn’t care less. I mean, what has she got to drown her sorrows over anyway? She’s beautiful. She’s rich. She’s smart. She has a fantastic husband. She has the whole formula for happiness and look what she does with it. Parents of most of the kids in my room, what have they got? Welfare. Prison terms. No education. No money. No chance. No hope. Nothing. And she’s got it all and goes around making a real horse’s behind out of herself. No sirree. Don’t look here for sympathy.”