Somebody Else’s Kids (21 page)

He was still trying to keep control of things. I shivered. The sweat that had drenched by body earlier was turning cold. Gooseflesh ran along my arms. In back of Tomaso, Claudia had taken hold of Boo. She pulled out a chair and sat down. The noise made Tomaso press the shears into the small space I had earned with my shallow breaths. Lori had begun to weep again. We were falling apart, to put it mildly, and all over a stupid teddy bear.

“Look, I’m sorry, Tomaso. Whatever it is I’ve done to make you feel so bad, I’m sorry.”

“No, you ain’t. It’s your fault.”

“What did I do? Won’t you tell me that at least?”

“You don’t even know?”

“No.”

“
Parece mentira
. You are as stupid as everyone else in this class.”

I nodded.

The tears came again, harder now. He looked down at the scissors. Slowly he turned them in his hand so that they rested on his palm. His tears were falling on them.

I dared not move. His hand was open flat now, and as I breathed, my shirt touched the point of the scissors and made them quiver in his palm. Or perhaps his hand was trembling.

“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” he asked. His voice was very soft and he raised his eyes to me. “Why are you always looking in me?” I saw his hand close around the scissors and lower them. “I wanted to hate you. I wanted to hate you. Why wouldn’t you let me? Why wouldn’t you just let me be alone?”

He did not run. I had expected him to. Instead he took the scissors and with one mighty motion he slammed them to the floor. Then he simply lowered his head, covered his face with his hands and wept.

I was overwhelmed. The question of questions he had asked me. What right did I have to make him care about a world that did not care about him? For every child I saw, for every child I touched, that question was there. And he had not been the first to doubt my wisdom in it. For me the sorrow came in having no answer, in never being quite sure that the pain I gave was any better than the pain I relieved. It was an issue that made the scissors look unimportant.

“Oh Tommy.” I had my own tears then. “Oh Tommy, I am sorry.” I reached out for him and he was in my arms.

We comforted each other. Down on my knees, I held him to me. My residual fear made emotions difficult to control. Sitting on the floor, my back still to the door, I took Tomaso on my lap. He was a great big boy, eleven, and within sight of manhood, but there was no other way for either of us. He clung to my neck and buried his face in my hair. He wept in low, hard, body-racking sobs. I rocked us back and forth against the door and crooned soft things to him, small nonsense words only love knows. My own heart was full of things too deep for tears.

The first half hour in from recess had been endless. The remainder of the time went unaccountably fast. I sat with Tomaso on my lap for almost thirty minutes. Then the pressure of the other children forced me to rise and attempt to reconstruct our class. We all moved and spoke to one another with the abashed gentleness common to the aftermath of great anger.

Most of all I wanted a moment for Lori because I knew how upsetting all this must have been for her, but in the bare fifteen minutes left, I could not carve it out. Instead, we went about the mundane chores a Friday brings: the cleaning up, the putting things away, the making out of next week’s attendance slips.

Tomaso wandered. Like a sightless man in a foreign place, he bumped into things, staggered from point to point as we worked around him. Lori, I noticed, would pause and watch him. I could not read her feelings as she did.

When next I turned, Tomaso was bent over the bear, picking up the stuffing and gently trying to get it back into the body. Meekly he came to me, the bear in his hands.

“Do you think you could fix this?” he asked. He would not raise his head to look at me. “I think maybe it could be sewed up.”

I took the bear from his hands and examined it. “Yes, I think maybe it could.”

“Do you have needle and thread? Could you do it?” A small pause. “Now?”

“I’m not sure I have what I need.”

“Could you look? Please?”

Taking the wounded bear with me, I went over to my desk. Tomaso was behind me. As I searched, Lori approached.

A long, aching silence was between them as they surveyed one another. I would have needed words; they did not. Lori leaned over my desk. “I’ll go to the office and see if they got any thread down there, if you want me to.”

I looked over at her. Not for the first time I envied her for her strength. And for much more. “Okay, Lor, if you would.”

The bell for dismissal rang before Lori returned from the office. Claudia helped me stuff Boo into his boots and then she took him outside to wait for his mother in front of the school. Tomaso remained beside me in the classroom doorway. The maimed bear was pressed to his chest.

When Lori came back, I took the bear from him and went back into the room. Sitting at my desk, I examined the damage more carefully. “I’m not exactly going to be able to make this look like new, Tom.”

“That’s all right.”

I poked at the hole again.

“Tor?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Will you do it now?”

“You have to get out to your bus, Tomaso. And this is going to take me a while. I’ll have it for you on Monday. How about that?”

He watched me without immediately replying. All his defenses were down and I could see directly into his soul. His eyes began to fill again. “Can I stay? I don’t feel much like going home now.”

I considered, then nodded. “Okay. I can give you a ride later.”

“Will you fix it now?”

“All right.”

Lori still stood with us. “Torey?” She touched me lightly on the shoulder as I bent over the bear. “What about me? Can I stay too?”

I looked up.

“I don’t feel like going home either.”

I smiled at her and nodded.

They sat at my feet while I pushed the stuffing back into the bear and sewed it up. The secretary had only navy-colored thread in the office and my clumsy stitches against the brown fur were obvious. But I bent forward, held the bear up close to see and did the best I could.

The quiet around us, the absolute stillness, was lulling. My emotions had been in such high gear that coming down was almost physically painful. It was like when I was small and had played too long in the snow: When I came inside, the warmth of the house against my numbed fingers and toes was an agreeable agony. So it was now as the deep Friday-after-school tranquillity leeched out dregs of earlier feelings.

Lori and Tomaso watched me intently as I worked. Both sat cross-legged on the floor. Their eyes were on the bear. No surgeon ever performed to a more concerned audience.

About fifteen minutes into the sewing I had to take a breather. My fingers were sore from pushing the needle through the tough cloth. My back ached from leaning over it so closely. Sitting back, I stretched to loosen tight muscles.

Those eyes. Both pairs of them. They were so intense, so obvious in their belief that I was going to be able to set things straight again.

I smiled. “You know, you two are just about my favorite kids.”

Lori smiled. Slightly. Enigmatically. Tomaso did not.

“You don’t really care that things don’t always work out so good, do you?” Lori said.

“No, I don’t really care.”

“See, Tomaso?” She looked back at me. “I told him that.”

“Do you love me?” he asked faintly.

I nodded. “Yes. I guess that’s another way of saying it.”

W
hat it was about Lori’s teddy bear that set Tomaso off that Friday afternoon of his birthday I never really knew. Maybe the gift evoked memories of a time when he had been hurt too badly for caring. Perhaps simply Lori’s kindness in selecting such a personal gift was too painful for this boy who had known so little kindness. Maybe it was something deeper, more complicated. I did not know. The bear went home with him that afternoon, blue stitches and all, never to be seen again.

The episode had an effect on Tomaso’s behavior from that day on. It was a subtle effect that was difficult for me to pinpoint, but he changed. Previously, there had never been an explosion that had involved violence toward any person. For all his hostility, I do not believe that Tomaso was basically the type of individual to hurt people. Afterward, he never again threatened me or any of the others. His anger persisted, but from that time on I felt safer with it, and I think he was more secure with me. We both knew now how bad things could get between us and not damage the relationship. The test by fire had come and we had survived it.

I wish, however, I could have known what had changed, how it changed, what it affected. I did not. But that turbulent afternoon was a milestone for Tomaso, and for me. And when I caught myself looking at him in quiet moments, I felt an understanding, a deeper understanding in that unconscious part of my mind which functions without words.

Claudia’s pregnancy continued to bother me. I knew that the chances of her giving birth to a high-risk infant were enormous because of her age and because of the lack of prenatal care in the first months. Worse for me I think, was that I knew the chances of her raising a high-risk child were even greater. I had little experience with birth and infants; I had far too much when it came to knowing about unwanted children raised by immature, troubled parents. What Claudia was providing was new fodder for my room. That hurt me.

All my attempts to talk to her about the future of her child had ended disastrously. She would not believe that her child could grow up anything but fairy-tale perfect. Everything was going to be wonderful after the baby arrived. It was going to be an ideal child: pink, pretty, sweet smelling. It was going to love her tremendously and make her feel like the most important person in the world. None of this in juxtaposition with girlish dreams of being a prom queen in high school, dancing in the ballet or winning a merit scholarship to Stanford seemed incongruous to Claudia. She knew that when the baby came, she would live happily ever after, just like in the story-books. Nothing I said could disabuse her.

That was one side. There was another side Claudia seldom gave words to, although I think it existed far more sharply for her than did her dreams. It spoke loudly to me, too, as during the times I would observe her standing alone on the playground, her back to the brick wall, hands over stomach, as she watched the other children playing. I would hear it even as she talked to me about her fantasies, her words saying one thing, her eyes saying something entirely different. And occasionally she even dared to speak it out loud: how am I ever going to survive?

I was concerned in no small way about Claudia. We had grown closer as the weeks had passed, but I still did not know her. Worse, I did not know enough about what was happening inside her head. No child ever left me feeling as powerless as she did. It was like one of those bad dreams where one tries and tries and tries and never makes any progress. I knew it was only a matter of time before reality and fantasy collided in Claudia, and I feared she would end up trying something none of us would want. With this girl it was all a race against the clock, and as the time passed and the situation did not improve, I knew I needed help. We were going to lose this kid.

I still could get no aid from Claudia’s parents. I called her mother at work one morning. It had been weeks since we had spoken to one another, and I hoped that by talking to her alone I might more easily make her see things my way. We passed small talk back and forth between us for a while before I said to her that I hoped she and her husband had had the chance to reconsider getting mental health counseling for Claudia. They hadn’t. It still seemed unnecessary, the mother said. I mentioned that the more I worked with Claudia, the more convinced I became that she was suffering from depression, at the very least. She escaped into books, into movies, into music, and, when these failed her, into academic work. I told her mother that I was worried that the time would come when a song on the radio might not be enough.

Depressed? Her mother laughed in a congenial way. Just an adolescent phase. She’d been that way herself at twelve. Besides, how could Claudia be depressed? She was just a little kid.

I was left holding the phone and feeling once more like a frustrated character in a nightmare.

In the end I decided I would try to find some resources for Claudia myself. What I was hoping for was a support group of some kind, perhaps a group of other adolescent mothers and a counselor. I wanted a place for her where she could share feelings, find out alternatives, learn future behaviors, and just belong to a group of understanding people who cared. Stupid me, I just assumed such a group existed.

Telephone book in hand, receiver clamped to my ear by one shoulder, I dial the high school guidance department.

“How old is your daughter?” the counselor asks. “She isn’t my daughter. She’s a student of mine. I heard you had some sort of program for pregnant girls.”

“Do you have parental permission for this call?”

“No. I was just trying to find out what was available.”

“I’m sorry. Why don’t you tell the girl’s parents to give me a call? I really don’t think we could divulge confidential information over the phone, could we?”