Somebody Else’s Kids (11 page)

Not until much later did I get wise. Dan Marshall had come into the room one day and was strolling among the kids. He leaned over Tomaso to see what he was doing.

“Hoo-ee, you got halitosis,” Tomaso said.

Dan straightened up abruptly, his face turning red.

“You know what that is, mister? That’s bad breath.”

From then on I was suspicious. Tomaso, however, did not give up easily. Once he’d figured out that I no longer fell for the bad-breath trick, he had to become more creative.

We were all together at the worktable making Thanksgiving decorations one afternoon. Tomaso was sitting next to me. He sat back and put his scissors down. Slowly he took several deep, evaluative snorts of air. Then he turned to me. “You know what you need, Torey?”

“What’s that?”

“Feminine hygiene spray.”

Never a dull moment with Tomaso. If it was a gross or outrageous act, he had thought it up along with twelve variations. A favorite involved sticking his finger down his throat. Although he never actually made himself vomit, it always produced this horrific retching sound. By instinct I would jump. Every damn time. And then there was the nose-picking. Tomaso never had much to pick from his own nose. Boo, however, turned out to be a gold mine for this activity. I would turn around and there he would be, bent over with one hand on top of Boo’s head, the other drilling up Boo’s nose. “Boy, Torey, look at this!” he would holler and stretch a long booger out. “Sure is a good thing I’m cleaning Boo’s nose out for him, huh?” And when I would come screaming, Tomaso always would look at me innocently. “Sure lucky you got me, huh?”

Yeah. Sure lucky all right.

The funny thing was that as November wore on, I did begin to think I was lucky. I grew to love the kid. Love him with that potent, irrational sort of love that some kids brought out in me, a love with no clear reason, yet so strong. I loved Tomaso’s scandalous approach to life, his outrageous ability to hang on in a world that had been anything but kind to him, and indeed even to extract a few laughs from it. I would sit in class and watch him some days, watch his scrawny body hunched up under the vinyl jacket he refused to remove, his dark, dancing eyes so full of fear. In the beginning I had thought only anger lived there, but I had grown to know fear was really the master and anger only the slave. Perhaps because of that most of all, I loved him. He was such a scrappy little fellow. Even fear could not dominate him completely. For all his problems, Tomaso was not a quitter.

D
ecember came. A rowdy month full of snowstorms and Christmas carols and all our undisguised dreams. Lori, I think, still believed in Santa Claus. Or at least she wanted to. Tomaso, in an uncharacteristic show of sensitivity, did not fall into hysterics at the thought. And Boo, of course, gave us no clue at all as to his thought. Or as to whether he even had any.

“I went to see Santa Claus last night,” Lori told us as we sat around the table making paper chains to decorate the room. “My dad took me and Libby up to the shopping center and I seen Santa Claus there and my dad let me go talk to him.”

I saw Tomaso look over at her without raising his head from his work. Then his eyes came to me. There was a silent question shared between us.

“Did Libby go talk to him too?” I asked.

“No.” Lori was not watching me. She was struggling mightily to get her chains to stick together with our dried-out library paste. She paused a moment and sat back, surveying the mess on the worktable. “I asked him to bring me this here doll I seen on TV once. You know what it does, Torey?”

“No, what?”

“Do you, Tomaso?”

“How the hell should I know? Do you think I play with dolls or something?”

“Well, anyway,” she leaned back over her chain and took another strip of construction paper to add to it, “this doll drinks and wets, but that’s not the good part. Guess what is?”

“
Madre Maria
, Lori, would you get to the point of your story?” Tomaso snapped. “You always go on and on and on.”

Lori ruffled her chain indignantly. “Well, anyhow, she eats. She really does; I’ve seen it. You get this special food that comes in packages and the baby eats it all by herself. Just like real. And she chews it and everything. No kidding. So I asked Santa to bring me one. And if I get it. I’ll bring and show you guys.”

Tomaso was watching her. Boo sitting next to him began to spin scissors on the tabletop. Reaching over to stop the noise, Tomaso still did not take his eyes from Lori. “Lor, do you believe in Santa Claus?” he asked. His voice was quiet and without emotion, yet there was a crusty tenderness about it which kept the question from coming out derisively.

Lori looked up. “Yeah.” A note of challenge in her reply.

No answer.

“Well, there really
is
a Santa Claus,” Lori said. Still the defensive edge to her voice. “I even seen him last night, so there, Tomaso.”

Tomaso nodded and looked down at his work. I loved the kid. All that armor plating and yet he never did come off quite as hardboiled as I think he wished in his heart he were.

“Santa Claus is real, isn’t he, Torey?” Lori asked.

I dreaded getting drawn into the conversation. This was one of those topics I had not really come to terms with myself. I had a harder time talking about Santa Claus than I ever did about sex. There were no facts to fall back on with Santa Claus. Just so very many meanings. Especially, it seemed, for my kids. A good man who brought you anything you wanted was a dream to be cherished, no matter how impractical. Yet every situation was different. One child needed to believe in the reality of Santa Claus because he also shared reality with a mother who beat him with a board and burned all his toys. Another needed to believe in the spirit of Santa Claus because all her life things had only been taken from her, never given. And a third needed no part in any sort of fantasy because for her as yet, there was no reality whatsoever. Thus Santa Claus brought me only worry. Such a complicated issue.

Lori, I think, needed a Santa Claus. She was stripped daily of all the millions of little dignities that failure alone can grab away. She needed to know that there were those who did not judge a person’s value by the direction her letters faced. She needed the bigger-than-life splendor of the Christmas dream. Nothing less would compensate for Lori’s deficiencies.

Tomaso too must have felt as I did. He rescued me from my floundering silence. “I believe in Santa Claus too. Lor,” he said.

“You do?” she said in surprise.

“Yeah, I do.”

“My sister don’t. She laughs at me. But I tell her he’s real. I know he is.”

Tomaso nodded. He was involved in his work again, not looking at either of us. “A lot of things are real but we just don’t know it.”

“Libby says if there’s a Santa Claus, where’s he at? She says the one in the shopping center, he isn’t real. He’s just some man dressed up in a red suit. And so’s the Santa downtown at the Bon Marché. He’s just dressed up too.” Lori shoved away the chains in front of her with an angry push. “I know that. Why does she keep telling me? Like I’m some baby. I know they’re just dumb old men.” Her eyes to me now, huge and resentful. “But there is too a Santa Claus, just the same.”

I nodded.

“But Libby, she says, well, if there’s a real Santa Claus, how come you never see him? She says nobody even lives up at the North Pole. There’s just a bunch of ice up there. And Eskimos. And none of them are Santa Claus. Our folks, that’s who gets us the presents. And Santa Claus is just for babies to believe in. Libby says.”

“But there’s lot of things you can’t see and people believe in them just the same,” Tomaso said. “I never seen Jesus but I believe in him. And Mary. Every night when I say my prayers, I know Jesus and Mary are listening to me, but I ain’t never seen either one of them. And I don’t know where Heaven is, I never seen that.” Tomaso leaned an elbow on the table and thoughtfully braced his chin while he watched Lori working. “But I know Mary and Jesus and Heaven are real. Even grown-ups know that. I think maybe Santa Claus is the same sort of thing. You know, a kind of spirit.”

Lori looked at me. “Is he right?”

“I guess that might be a way of looking at it,” I said.

“And,” Tomaso continued, “I think he gives people good feelings inside and makes them love other people and want to get them presents. He doesn’t really come down and do it himself, he makes us do it for him. Sort of like Frankenstein and his monster.”

“Then how come all of them men dress up in the stores?” Lori asked. “How come they want to trick you?”

“I don’t think they want to trick you, Lor,” I said. “I think they do it because it usually makes people feel good. It makes them happy to see a Santa Claus.”

“Libby doesn’t believe in him at all.”

“Libby’s stupid,” Tomaso said flatly.

“She doesn’t quite understand yet, Lor,” I added. “Sometimes when we find out that things are not just the way we wished they were, we get upset and then we won’t have anything to do with them for a while. But feelings change if we give them a chance. I imagine it’ll be that way with Libby. She doesn’t want to believe in Santa Claus because he isn’t really a nice old man in a red suit, but pretty soon when she’s older, she’ll see the real Santa Claus is much nicer. She’ll believe then.”

Lori paused. “Is it okay to believe in that guy at the shopping center? I mean, is it okay to go tell him what you want, even if he isn’t for real?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I imagine it’s all right. Don’t you, Tom?”

He nodded. “Yes, I think it’s okay too. The real Santa, he won’t mind.”

And then there were those who knew very little about Santa Claus.

During the second week of December I had the kids outside for recess. It was a sunny day that Wednesday, brilliant in a way only winter days seem to be. Perhaps I should not have let them go out. It was still cold and a thin glaze of ice from the last thaw polished the concrete playground, the swings and the monkey bars. I told the kids to stay on the grass and off the slippery equipment, and because the day was such a jewel among the winter’s damp, dark weeks, I let them run.

Lori and Boo were galloping around while Tomaso and I leaned against the wall of the building in the sunshine and talked. Tomaso was telling me about a television show he especially liked, about the actor who starred in it, how he was considering writing that actor a letter to see if he would write back. I was engrossed enough in the conversation not to be watching Boo and Lori as closely as I should have. They managed to get over onto the playground equipment without my noticing.

A piercing scream cut the air.

Boo. I looked up in time to see him fall from the monkey bars in that stop-frame clarity of accidents. The scream had been Lori’s. Boo made no sound at all.

“Boo!” I shrieked as I ran. Tomaso ran behind me. “Boo! Boo!” I touched his face. He lay crumpled in an awkward lump. Very, very cautiously I moved his head back. Blood oozed out the right side of his mouth.

Lori was crying. Tomaso hovered nervously behind me. “Why isn’t he moving? Is he dead?” At this Lori howled even louder.

“For pity’s sake, Tomaso, of course he isn’t dead. How can you say that?”

“Maybe we ought to pray,” Tomaso suggested and sank to his knees beside me.

“Tomaso!”
I cried in exasperation. “Go get some help, would you? For pete’s sake, get up. Go get somebody.”

He was a bundle of flighty nerves, springing to his feet but not knowing what to do next. I pointed to the door and he took off.

Boo stirred. I had him half-cradled in my arms, half in the sand under the monkey bars. I could feel no broken bones. My worry was of a concussion. Boo opened his eyes, blinked vacuously. Then the pain registered and he began to moan.

Dan Marshall and a whole covey of office staff came running out the door behind Tomaso. Dan dropped down beside me and probed Boo with steady hands while I held him. Boo was crying softly now. Blood spilled over his lips.

“Did you see him fall?”

I nodded. “I didn’t see him hit anything but the ground.”

Gently Dan pried Boo’s mouth open. Blood poured over his hand. “It’s his tongue. Look.”

About an inch back from the tip, Boo’s tongue was deeply gashed. In back of us Lori let out a new wail.

“We’re going to have to get him stitched up,” Dan said. And to one of the aides behind us, “Mary, call his mother to meet us at the hospital.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

“What about my other kids?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about us, Torey,” Tomaso said. “We can be good. Me and Lori, we’ll be okay.”

Dan drove while I held Boo in my lap. At first he cried but after a while even that stopped. I had a bowl under his chin to catch the blood or in case he vomited up what he had swallowed. Boo flapped his hands frantically against my legs and tried to rock but the bowl and my body in such a small space did not permit such movement. For the time being he would have to be satisfied with me for comfort.

Mrs. Franklin met us in the hospital parking lot. Dan had Boo now, carrying him flapping and squawking into the emergency exit. Blood stained both our clothes.