Beautiful Child (27 page)

After school I was sitting at one of the tables and doing my lesson plans for the next day when Bob stuck his head in through the door. When he saw I was there, he came on in and shut the door behind him. He crossed to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

“Well, I’ve got some good news for you,” he said, but there was a rather resigned note to his voice, as if it were good news with reservations.

“Yes?”

“You’re getting a new aide.”

My eyes went wide.

“I had a long conversation with Julie,” Bob said. “It started out on Wednesday evening. We ran out of time that night and were going to continue it on Thursday, but then the storm came. But the gist of it was that she felt her place in the room had become untenable. She said she’d become very uncomfortable, that you were cold and distant all the time, that the two of you had lost whatever rapport you’d managed before this.”

“I wasn’t ‘cold and distant,’” I replied.

“Well, it felt that way to her.”

The awful thing was, I knew I hadn’t been all that great on Wednesday. I was feeling self-conscious. She was probably right about the rapport being lost. But I felt defensive about being called “cold.” Which probably meant it was true.

“Anyway, she’s feeling more and more uncomfortable about the situation. So, she called me over the weekend. And I’ve been making some calls around to see if I could resolve the problem. And here’s what I’ve come up with. Julie is going to transfer over to Washington Elementary for the rest of this year and take up a place in the preschool program for developmentally delayed. And you’re going to get their aide. Rosa Gutierrez. I don’t know a thing about
her, other than she’s worked for the district a long time, so she must be decent. She’ll do Casey Muldrow in the mornings and be in here in the afternoons, same as Julie did.”

I nodded.

A pause came between us.

“Look, I’m really sorry for this,” I said, and I was. “I’m embarrassed we couldn’t work this out between us. And I’m sorry for all the trouble this has caused you.”

Bob nodded. “Well, it happens.”

I nodded. I felt guilty, as if I’d somehow cheated my way out of a bad spot. And I did feel embarrassed, because it left me with the sense of being somehow socially inadequate. But I also felt very, very relieved.

I
felt quite tired that evening when I came home from work. Due to the disruption to our routine that the storm had caused, the children had been rather unsettled and overexcited all day. It was also harder work without Julie there at all, because most of my resource students came in the afternoon. I’d needed to give up my break to lay out materials, so that I would have enough time with the children. As a consequence, I came home, kicked off my shoes, and opened a bottle of wine.

Stretched out in the recliner, I was about halfway through my second glass of wine while watching a rerun of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
when the phone rang. The first thing I did was look at the clock on the VCR underneath the TV. 6:43. Then I got up and answered it.

Bob. “I’m just ringing you to warn you that the police are going to be calling you,” he said. His voice was tight.

“What’s happened?” I asked in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t say too much. I’m not supposed to, because they want to interview you. But it’s over Venus. I just wanted you to know it’s coming.”

“What’s happened?”

“They’ll talk to you.”

“Can’t you even clue me in a little?”

“No. Just be prepared. It’s nasty.” And he hung up.

I looked at the half-drunk glass of wine still in my other hand. Normally I never drank other than with meals, so why I had done so that evening I didn’t know. It had just sounded good to me. Now I regretted it mightily. I wasn’t tipsy, but I’d taken it on an empty stomach, so I could feel it. Whatever they wanted out of me, I hoped it didn’t involve driving. I put the wine down and went into the kitchen to find something to eat to ameliorate the effect.

I never seemed to have in the refrigerator the food I needed for the moment. I liked to blame this on my rather meager teacher’s salary, but the truth was, I never shopped in a very organized fashion. Consequently, the only “quick” food I could find was a package of sliced pepperoni sausage and a can of pork and beans. I threw these together in a dish and popped it in the microwave just as the phone rang.

It was a police sergeant named Jorgensen. He said they were investigating allegations of child abuse involving
Venus Fox and would like to interview me. They were sending two officers to the house.

I ate my odd little supper and washed it down with the rest of the glass of wine, which didn’t really go with sausage and beans, but what the heck. A rather shocky nervousness had come over me, the same sort one gets when coming unexpectedly across a traffic accident. I knew that if no one was telling me anything, it was done to avoid prejudicing my testimony. And this meant, I knew, that it was serious.

Two officers arrived shortly after seven-thirty in the evening. One was a tall, blond man named Millwall, who was about my age. The other was a female detective who looked to be in her late thirties. She was one of these slim, athletic-looking women, the type who run marathons for fun. Her name was Patterson, but she said I could call her Sam. “Short for Samantha,” she said in a friendly sort of way, which seemed out of character with their otherwise official demeanor.

I suggested we sit down in the living room, but Sam said she needed to record this interview and it would probably work better if they could put the cassette recorder on a table. Consequently, we ended up sitting around the kitchen table, still cluttered with the work I’d brought home, dirty dishes, and the open wine bottle. Embarrassed, I shunted everything off onto the counter.

“We have Venus Fox in the hospital at the moment,” Sam said. “She was taken in early this morning. Now, my understanding is that you had spoken to your principal only last
week saying you suspected child abuse. Can you give me more details about what you said?”

“First,” I interjected, “can you tell me? Is she okay?”

“She came in unconscious.”

There is a real sensation behind that phrase “my blood turned to ice.” Mine did just then. A horrible cold, sinking feeling went right through me. “What happened? Can you tell me that?”

“It appears to be hypothermia, but the hospital is still giving us the details.”

Hypothermia
? I was baffled.

“Anyway, Miss Hayden, I’d appreciate it if you could tell us more.”

“Torey. Call me Torey,” I said, because suddenly that seemed important to say to her. All sorts of ridiculously small things seemed important to me just then. I noticed the open bottle of wine I’d put over on the counter, for instance, and wondered if I should tell them I didn’t normally drink. Because I didn’t. But they wouldn’t know that.

Sam nodded in a sympathetic manner. “It’s difficult, isn’t it? I know dealing with things like this are shocking. But if you could…”

I thought a long moment. Bracing my head with my hands, I tried to bring back to mind all the details of the last weeks that had made me say that to Bob. I was dismayed how, in the circumstances, my mind went blank. All the things that had seemed so important, so suspicious, so oddly out of character for Venus now evaporated. All I
could think of were the minor discrepancies. Or maybe they were all “minor discrepancies” that had just accumulated.

“It was more just a feeling than anything else,” I said. “I didn’t see any bruises or anything like that. No evidence of physical abuse. She isn’t very well cared for. And she tends to wear these long-sleeved shirt things and pants all the time, so it would have been hard to see. And Venus doesn’t talk much. This is one of the reasons she’s in my class. As I’m sure you’re aware, I teach children with behavioral disorders. In Venus’s case, she is in the class because she’s very unresponsive and virtually mute. It’s difficult to know what’s going on with her because she’s extremely withdrawn.”

Sam nodded. “Yes, I’ve been on this case for some time now. We’ve been liaising with Social Services over this family and we’re aware of the behavioral problems with Venus. And the lack of speech. Indeed, all this very difficult behavior. It’s made it almost impossible to monitor anything that is going on with her.”

“But she has been starting to respond,” I said. “Since about February. The major problem for me has been her poor attendance. She misses two or three days a week routinely.”

“And this has been all along?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was out of my class for about eight weeks in the autumn, when she was placed on homebound – where the teacher goes to the child’s home instead of the
child coming to school, and that was a different teacher – but otherwise, yes, she’s had this attendance problem all along. We’ve reported it to Social Services. We’ve had the district truant officer on the case. In fact, I think someone has even reported this to you.”

Sam flipped back through the pages of her notebook. “We probably wouldn’t be notified about something like school attendance,” she replied.

“But I think you were,” I said. “I know we reported it.”

“Yes, but it would have stopped with your district truant officer, wouldn’t it?” Sam asked.

“But my principal reported it beyond the district. I know he talked to Social Services about it because it was so bad, and I know they said they talked to you. They said an officer went out.”

Sam was reading through notes taken earlier in her notebook. “Well, an officer’s been sent out to that home a good number of times. Over all sorts of things. But I don’t see anything noted in connection with the girl’s absences.”

“It
should
have been. We reported it.”

“Yes, well, anyway. So, you were saying about this suspicion that you mentioned to your principal?”

I tried to explain what had made me go to Bob on that last occasion. I told Sam and Officer Millwall how Venus had cried, and this had been unusual for her. I mentioned her peculiar clothing on the one occasion. I tried to explain how, even though she was not communicative, there was something about her behavior that led me to think she
was in distress, that something
was
wrong, but I had to admit it was largely based on just a sense I had rather than concrete evidence.

Sam really hooked into this idea that it was a “sense.” She kept trying to pin me down on it.
What
specifically made me have this feeling this time? This sense that something was amiss with Venus?

“I don’t know,” I said. “Beyond what I’ve told you, beyond those two times when she cried and just acted funny, I don’t know. Just a gut feeling.”

“Intuition?” Officer Millwall interjected.

“Yes, I suppose you could call it intuition.”

“We’ve got to be as precise as possible. As I’m sure you can appreciate,” Sam replied, “intuition isn’t going to get the perpetrator caught.”

I nodded.

“I do know what you mean. I’m not trying to demean what you’re saying, but this is a tricky one,” Sam said. “We’ve got a kid who doesn’t talk, who has serious behavior problems, who now can’t tell us if she wanted to because she came in unconscious. So I’m not questioning whether you’ve got good intuition or not. I’m just saying if someone is responsible, I want to find out who and I want to make sure they never get the chance to do it again. So, as much precision as possible is very important.”

We didn’t talk much longer. There wasn’t a lot more I could say at that point. I kept anecdotal records on the students for my own use, but these were in a notebook at
school. I wasn’t sure there was anything in there that would be helpful to the police, although I’d made quite a few notes on Venus and her behavior through the year. And Bob, of course, had all the evidence for her absences.

Sam and Officer Millwall rose, thanked me for my time and cooperation, and said that no doubt they’d be back in touch. I showed them to the door. We shook hands and they left.

I came away from that meeting shaken by the news of Venus’s hospitalization and vaguely disgruntled. Her absences
had
been reported to the police. At least that’s what I’d been led to believe. If not, who had been deceptive? Bob? Social Services? Or was it less deception than a depressingly common bureaucratic cock-up, where each party involved had passed the buck to the next party and no one ever bothered to check back and find out if things have been carried through? If the absences had been reported, then why did the person in charge of the case not know that?

Unable to get the events out of my mind, I phoned Bob.

We discussed the matter. He told me that from what he’d managed to piece together, Venus had been found unconscious at home and her mother had taken the girl to the hospital emergency room. Bob didn’t seem to know any more than I did what was wrong with her. He too had been told it was hypothermia, but he said he didn’t think hypothermia could keep you unconscious for a long
period of time, not if you were warmed up again, which obviously you would be if you were in the hospital. I said I didn’t know. I wasn’t very well informed about the specifics of hypothermia beyond knowing that it happened when the body temperature dropped too low. We talked about hypothermia in general then, and Bob mentioned it was an odd sort of diagnosis for child abuse. I asked if there was any chance of going to see Venus in the hospital the next day. He didn’t know.

That night I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t get Venus out of my mind. Abused. When had it started? How long had it been going on? I played back incident after incident with her in class, probing all the corners of the events to see if I could apply new meaning to them, now that I had hindsight. All I could come up with was the knowledge we’d failed her. That much was clear. Me, as much as anyone. Could I have seen this coming? I lay awake in the darkness, seeking the answer to that.

News travels fast. In the teachers’ lounge the next day, all the talk was about Venus. Between her violent behavior on the playground and the fact that almost all the teachers at the school had had her siblings at one time or another, everyone felt the situation personally. The rumor machine geared up. One person heard they’d arrested Danny and Teri both and all the children had been taken into care. Another said, no, Wanda was still wandering around. Someone else said she’d heard Venus had stopped breathing and
they’d had to resuscitate her and she was on a ventilator. Several people speculated about physical injuries. The fifth-grade teacher said he’d heard on the radio that there were twenty-two healed fractures. I said I didn’t think this could be Venus’s case. I was pretty sure there were reporting restrictions. The fifth-grade teacher said there wouldn’t be two cases happening at the same time. We weren’t in that violent a town.

The truth was, no one really knew. And none of us could find out. As the tension built up, the atmosphere in the teachers’ lounge was sparky to a point of irritability.

I desperately wanted to keep all this from the children. At some point or another they would need to know something had happened to Venus, but until
we
knew, there seemed little value in sharing it with them. Moreover, this was distressing news, so it would be important to handle it appropriately. I didn’t want them overhearing frightening gossip among the teachers or out on the playground, if at all possible.

In the end, it wasn’t possible. Little Mr. Big Ears came in the form of Billy. Who else?

We had just come in from afternoon recess when he stopped by my desk, where I was putting away the whistle I used when we were playing games.