Harmony (23 page)

It's been a long time since you've worried about getting a call from Tilly's school, so you're not particularly alarmed when you see the school's number pop up on your cell phone screen. You figure it's probably one of the administrators, wanting to set a date for her next IEP.

Instead, it's the head of the middle school, who wants to “give you a heads-up about an incident that happened this afternoon.”

Tilly's class had been on a field trip, or rather, on their way to a field trip; more specifically, they were in a van on the Beltway. Tilly got into a disagreement with a classmate and was reprimanded (unfairly, she believed) by a teacher. She then unbuckled her seat belt and succeeded in opening the door of the moving vehicle.

No one was hurt; a teacher's aide with quick reflexes was able to grab her and wrestle her back into her seat, which gave the driver enough time to pull onto the shoulder. But it was scary for everyone in the car. Tilly will be facing three days' suspension, and the school would like you and Josh to come in to discuss a possible “safety plan” for Tilly, to prevent anything similar from happening in the future.

The thing is, you've been thinking lately that everything's going
okay. Maybe not in a big-picture, larger sense, but in a day-to-day time-to-breathe kind of way. Lately, your weekly phone consults with Scott Bean—you've been doing these for several months, and Josh doesn't even complain about the money you're spending, because he can see they're helping—have been focused more on questions like “How can I get her to start her homework without a battle?” and less on things like “What do I do when she makes sexual jokes about her dad?”

This “incident” isn't something you process all at once. During the phone call, you're more puzzled than anything else, trying to understand the logistics of what happened. Later, when you pick her up, you're angry, and your mind is busy with setting consequences and asking her what she'd been thinking.

At home, after dinner, as you're going about the evening business of loading the dishwasher and supervising homework, you begin to have flashes of the different ways this day might have ended. But it's not until you hug her at bedtime that you begin to shake.

She's not little anymore. She's going to be thirteen on her next birthday; it's an age when plenty of kids are entrusted with the freedom to leave home without a parent, to walk to a friend's house, to take a city bus to school. But again (and again and again), you have to remember that Tilly is not the same as “plenty of kids.”

You and Josh have a fight that night; of course you do. It starts when the two of you are still up in Tilly's room, getting her ready to go to sleep. You're both trying to get at the heart of what happened today, and to ensure that it won't happen again, but your strategies are taking you in different directions. Josh is gently prodding her about her feelings; you're using scare tactics, talking about exactly what happens to a body that goes flying out of a car at fifty-five miles per hour. You know this may not be the best approach, and you can admit that you're freaking out a little, but fuck it. This is important. You simply cannot let this day end without making sure your daughter understands the full impact of what she did today.

Josh is shooting looks at you—quizzical and then borderline aghast—and finally, as your voice gets tight and you're telling Tilly that you couldn't bear to lose her, he shushes you. The two of you have a brief, unsatisfying conversation through gestures and facial expressions, and then you kiss Tilly, pull up her blanket, and storm down the stairs.

He takes a few more minutes; you can't hear what he and Tilly are saying, but you can hear his soft, reassuring tone. By the time he comes back down, you're fuming. You don't really trust yourself; that's part of it. You don't trust your own instincts, especially when it comes to parenting and especially when it comes to Tilly. But he's not the only one who gets to talk. He's not the only one who gets to decide what's okay to say.

“You're an asshole,” you say, with no preliminaries. You're whisper-shouting because you know that Tilly's still awake, and she has sharp ears.

“You know what?” he says. “Fuck you. Just . . . fuck you.”

And that's as insightful as the discussion ever gets. Later, after you've stormed back up the stairs—Josh remains in the living room, where he'll probably fall asleep on the couch—and cried pitifully about a number of far-ranging things that may or may not have any relevance to the current situation, you wonder how it is that the two of you have never learned how to argue like adults, like thoughtful people who care about each other and know they'll come out stronger on the other side. You're the one who started it, this time around. Did you think you were going to get anything useful out of it? Because all you've done tonight is buy yourself an empty bed and an awkward morning still to come.

 • • • 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like either of you managed to get through to Tilly; it's less than a week before the next call. A conflict
with her P.E. teacher this time, and a winding stairway with a steep drop down the middle; she made a move like she was going to climb over the railing.

Everyone—teachers, classroom assistants, counselors—is working hard to make sure she's supervised at all times. But she doesn't have a one-on-one aide, and there are eight other kids in her class, each with his or her own set of issues. You don't have any idea what you're going to do if the school decides that they can't manage her anymore.

There really aren't a lot of other options, once your child has been removed from a special-ed school. Well, there
are
other options, but they're grim. There are places that call themselves “centers” instead of “schools.” There are “residence programs” for children you can't handle at home. There are psychiatric wards. There are real, honest-to-God padded rooms.

And there's homeschooling. The idea fills you with terror, but maybe it shouldn't. It's important work; it's not that different from deciding to stay home with your kids when they were tiny. You've known for a long time that sitting in a classroom might not be the way Tilly learns best, and you'd be able to tailor her studies to incorporate her interests. You could go on field trips: Washington is a city full of midsized “big people,” and you still haven't found time to visit most of them. Jefferson and Lincoln, obviously: both nineteen feet tall, though one is standing and one is sitting, a distinction Tilly takes very seriously. If the marble Lincoln happened to rise up one day, stop slouching in that chair and walk down the steps of his odd neo-Grecian temple, exactly how tall would he be? Well, maybe you and Tilly could figure it out. A math project that meets both her interests and a seventh grade curriculum.

And there are tons of others. There's the new MLK memorial (thirty feet high, emerging in relief from his Stone of Hope) and FDR, oversized but not particularly tall, sitting in his ambiguous
wheelchair-like seat. There's a twelve-foot Einstein, sprawling on a bench down by the mall. And a quick search turns up a few you've never even heard of, like a seventeen-foot-tall statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Lincoln Park.

Tilly might say that it's not fair that it's the presidents and generals, the famous scholars and civic leaders, who get the monuments. But she's also too young to see the way that we're all acting out the same stories, over and over again. We are all, at any given moment, Adam or Eve, Bathsheba or Odysseus or Scarlett O'Hara. The Little Match Girl or someone you read about in the newspaper. Seen from a great distance, it might appear that none of us is ever doing anything new at all.

Imagine if ants made movies. We'd watch one or two of them, out of curiosity, but we'd tire of them quickly, and chances are, we'd miss a lot of the subtlety. We'd have trouble telling the players apart, for one thing, and the stories they told would start to seem like they were all the same. This one dies in the pupal stage, when the workers are forced to flee to avoid a predator. This one breaks off her wings as she prepares to care for her eggs. This one is digging; this one is guarding the nest. But the basic story? They work; they mate; they die. How many of these would we watch before deciding that all ant stories are basically the same?

It's only a matter of weeks before the head of the school calls you into her office and tells you that she's very sorry, that everyone adores Tilly and is going to miss her, but that the school simply can't meet her needs any longer.

You and Josh nod and thank her. It's not unexpected. There's already a list of homeschooling supplies in your Amazon shopping cart. The first thing you do when you get home is make the requisite clicks to place the order.

You don't know how this is going to work, if it's going to be a disaster or the best thing you've ever done. You're torn between seeing yourself as an ant and seeing yourself as a giant.

Imagine if our lives were treated as carefully as the rest of history. Imagine if we were documented as conscientiously, preserved as gently. Each birth at least as important as a naval victory. Each death a national tragedy. There are plenty of ways to remember someone: a park bench, a colossus, an epic poem. Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling.

On Friday morning, Tilly's acting strange, all giddy and secretive. She tries to hold out on telling me what's up, but I'm good at getting stuff out of her, so she gives in pretty quickly.

Finally, she closes the bedroom door and pulls something out of the pocket of her shorts. It's a phone, an iPhone with green shamrocks on it.

“How did you get that?” I whisper. Our dad's the only other one home, and he's in the bathroom, so I don't think there's much chance he'll hear us.

“It's Ms. Frances's,” she says.

“I know, but why do you have it?”

“Last night, after AD Block, I was walking past the office, and I saw a light coming from the window. But not the normal light, just like a little square of light. So I got a little closer, and I saw that it was Ms. Frances, and she was using her phone.”

“Really? How did she get it out of the drawer? It's supposed to be locked.”

“I don't know,” says Tilly. “But I had an idea that she might not
remember to relock it when she left. So I waited until after everyone else was asleep, and I went back to the office to check. And . . . ta-da!”

The toilet flushes. “Shhh,” I say. We stand there listening, until we hear our dad moving around in the kitchen.

“There's more,” Tilly whispers. She's grinning. “I also thought it would be funny if I looked up a whole bunch of porn sites. So that when Ms. Frances gets it back, she'll see all that in the history, and she'll think Scott did it.”

I'm smiling along with her now. I'm half horrified and half impressed.

She takes the phone out of her pocket and opens up Safari. The page that pops up is a Google search for “hot shaved teen pussies.”

“Ew!” I say, jerking my head away. “How did you even think of that?”

She smiles. “I don't know,” she says. “I just did.”

“You've got to get the phone back to the office, though, before Scott or Ms. Frances sees that it's missing.”

“I will.” She stretches and yawns. “I'm really tired today, because I was up almost all night, using the phone. I also logged in to my old email account, to see if Mom and Dad had canceled it, but it still works. I remembered one time when Candy and I were talking about stuff, and she told me what her email address was. So I sent her a picture of Mom and Dad sleeping.”

“Did you delete that?” I ask. This is exactly the kind of detail that always trips her up. “If Ms. Frances finds a picture of Mom and Dad sleeping, she'll know that someone else was using the phone. Because why would Scott take a picture of that?”

“Oh my God,” says Tilly. “I didn't think of that.” She taps away at the screen.

“Girls?” calls my dad. Tilly shoves the phone back into her pocket.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Ten minutes till lunchtime.”

“Okay, thanks,” I call.

I whisper to Tilly, “Are you going to put the phone back before lunch?”

“No,” she says. “Dad will be walking with us. I'll make sure to do it this afternoon.”

And so Ms. Frances's phone comes with us into the woods to play Werewolf.

 • • • 

Today, Scott's using Werewolf to teach us about tracking animals, which I guess could be a useful skill . . . if we ever get lost in the wilderness. He's made fake tracks that look like the paws of different woodland creatures, and he has each of us stomp in the dirt, so we can see what kinds of marks our own shoes make.

“What does this have to do with the game?” Tilly asks.

“Nothing,” says Scott. “Yet.” Then he makes his voice soft and mysterious and chants, “Little feet that run away, what kind of Werewolf is it today?”

The Fincher boy really seems to like that, and he repeats it a couple of times.

“Before we get to the tracking, let's take a look at the exciting items at the Building Store.”

I get up and help him pull the sheet off the table, without being asked. I can still be his right-hand girl. There's all the same stuff as last time; I don't really see anything new.

“Now each of you is going to get a special item to help you build your shelter. But to find it, you each have to pick a trail of tracks and see where they lead you.”

So we each pick a path and put our newfound tracking skills to work. My path leads me about ten feet into the trees, then right up to a big white box. I'm excited to see it's the dog crate. I haven't looked at it too closely before, but I do now. It's made of plastic,
with little windows covered with crisscrossing metal bars. It's going to make an awesome shelter.

I see Tilly following her trail, a little ways off to my right; when she gets to the end, there's a plastic sled waiting. “Cool,” she says. Then she sees what I have and yells, “No fair!”

“Too bad,” I say in my sweetest/meanest sister voice. “The Werewolf wants what the Werewolf wants.”

Tilly stares at me for a minute and then smiles. “I bet you'll look really nice in it,” she says.

“Nice and safe from the Werewolf,” I say. And then we go our separate ways to build our shelters.

 • • • 

Later, I keep watch for adults while Tilly returns the phone to the office. When she comes back, she says, “Guess what? I sent one more thing to Candy before I put it away. A picture of a sweet little puppy dog named Iris.”

I shriek, then cover my mouth, in case anyone's listening. “You did not! I didn't know you even took a picture.”

“I did.” And then she puts on some kind of villain voice and says, “Never underestimate the Older Sister.”

“I never do,” I say. “As long as she doesn't underestimate me first.”

“What does that even mean?” asks Tilly, and soon we're laughing so hard that it doesn't even matter that we have to put signs around our necks and do our chores.

 • • • 

Dinner is normal, and the campfire is normal, and singing the Camp Harmony song is normal. Tilly and I go back to our cabin, and go to sleep just like we always do. But in the morning, an hour or so after the Finchers leave, a police car pulls up and parks in front of the office. And after that, nothing's normal for a very long time.