Somebody Else’s Kids (26 page)

“Is that what really happened?” I asked.

“Cross my heart and hope to die! You can ask anybody. Ask Nancy Shannon or Mary Ann Marks or anybody. Ask Robby Johnson even. He’s a Cub Scout and he never lies to anybody. You just ask him and he’ll tell you!”

Libby’s eyes were ablaze. Her small mouth was set. “I hate her. And someday I’m going to spit right in her face. I mean it, I will.”

Ah, here was a good hater, if I had ever seen one. The disgust was vivid in her dark eyes.

“Lori isn’t stupid,” she said. “She’s just as smart as anybody. She just can’t read ’cause she got hurt once.”

I nodded. “I know.”

Libby sat back and the intensity of the conversation relaxed a little. “Lori isn’t ever coming back. I don’t think she should have to.”

“Well, I differ from you there. I think she has to. But we need to change things for her.”

“Yeah. I think somebody ought to run over Mrs. Thorsen with a car.”

I regarded this child. What things hate does. And at such an early age.

We talked a little longer but the conversation was less vigorous. Eventually Libby fell back into monosyllables. The hands of the clock had moved around to almost 4:30, and I wanted to go home. The lesson plans were still unfinished so I opened the plan book and bent over them. Libby watched.

“I need to finish these,” I explained. “I haven’t a lot more time to talk.”

“That’s okay.” She made no effort to move.

“Won’t your father be worried when you’re gone so long?”

“No. My dad ain’t home yet. And I told the baby-sitter I was going to my ballet lesson.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I got my leotard on under this, see?” She unbuckled her overalls to show me.

“Well, I don’t mean to make you feel unwelcome, but it’s getting kind of late for me and I need to get my work done before I can go home.”

She smiled. “That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

I went ahead with what I was doing. Libby sat quietly and watched me.

At 4:45 I closed the plan book and carried it over to my desk. I hesitated before turning. “It’s time to go home, Libby.”

Still she sat. Her back was to me; she had a hand up twisting her hair. No effort to get up.

“Libby?”

She turned.

“It’s time to go, honey.”

She continued to sit there. Continued to stare, to twist her hair. Her brow was slightly creased as if I had spoken to her in a foreign language and she did not quite understand what I had said. She tilted her head, a characteristic I was coming to know in her, and the dark hair fell sideways. I went to the closet to get my jacket.

“Teacher?”

“Yes?”

“Is she always going to be like this?”

“What do you mean, Libby?” Carrying my jacket, I came back to the table. For the first time I was aware of how young she looked.

“Is Lori always going to be this way?”

She was such a storybook child. The dark, straight Dutch-bobbed hair, the big ribbon on one side, blue denim overalls over a plaid shirt (and leotards). In the beginning the eerie long-ago quality had put me off. Now as I looked at her I was afraid I would never be able to look at her fully enough to remember her. She was too transient. Like a dream. Or a memory.

“I mean,” Libby started and then stopped. I think I heard tears behind her voice, although I could tell this was a girl mostly without tears. She cleared her throat. “I mean, Lori really is bad. Badder than I think sometimes people know. She just can’t do anything. Even baby books with just letters in them, like I could read two whole years ago. Lori can’t even do that. And she can’t really write her own name. She can’t even tie her shoes. She really, really is bad.”

My heart ached for her, the abruptness of it making my breath catch. This is too much to worry about, I thought, when you aren’t even eight.

Putting my jacket on the table, I again sat down with her. Libby dropped her head. She examined her hands. In the stark classroom light I could see her trembling slightly. Then she looked at me. “
Is
Lori retarded, Teacher?”

What a hard question that must have been to ask after risking so much to defend Lori. Yet apparently even Libby was suspicious that that might be the truth.

I was momentarily without words. When I did not answer immediately, Libby rose from her seat. Her face was anxious. Perhaps she took my silence for an affirmation of her own fears. I was afraid she was going to run.

“Libby, don’t go. Sit down with me, love.” I reached a hand out to her.

Libby stayed in her spot half a step beyond my fingers. “But
is
she. Teacher?”

I shook my head. “No, she isn’t.” I rose to get hold of her as she stood trembling and to bring her back. With an arm around her shoulder, I sat down again in the small chair. “I think you know her problems. Probably better than all the rest of us because the two of you have been together all along. She has brain damage. That isn’t retardation. That’s a kind of sore on her brain that makes it hard for her to learn the way you and I do. But from what I’ve read, the doctors say that maybe someday she will read. Maybe not ever so well as you do, but as she gets older and her brain learns new ways of doing things, maybe she will, some.”

Libby’s shoulders sagged. She leaned very slightly against me so that I could feel the merest shadow of her weight. Bringing a hand up, she rubbed her nose. She acknowledged nothing that I said.

“But Lori isn’t retarded, Lib. You’re the very rightest person to defend her on that account. Because there’s nothing wrong with Lori’s mind. Look how good she is at other things. Like math. When she doesn’t need to write it down, she’s a whiz. And more important, a lot more important, look how good Lori is with people. We have a little boy in here who can’t even talk at all and Lori’s very special with him. She understands people better than almost anyone I’ve ever met. She reads hearts like you and I read books, and Libby, that’s far better than anything they teach in school.”

A long and heavy silence. Libby was taking in deep, slow breaths. With my arm around her, I had her as close as I dared.

“How come it happened to her? How come there’s nothing wrong with me?”

“No one knows those things, love. All we do is guess.”

“My dad said her head was broke. He said it showed in the pictures they took.”

I nodded. “I heard that too.”

Libby’s head was still down, her eyes narrowed as if she were studying something on the floor. Light as a breath, her hand came up to my shoulder. Even as it rested there, I could hardly feel it. “I know how it happened.” Her voice was soft and flat. “My father, my real father, he used to hit Lori a lot. My mother hit us too. But my father, he had this stick thing. He did it when we were bad.” A pause. “And I guess we were bad a lot. He hit Lori more than me though. Sometimes he hit her so much she’d just lay there and wouldn’t even cry anymore. No matter how much I’d shake her.”

Libby took down her hand. She ran her fingers along the skin of her other arm. “Once my father broke my arm. My mother wrapped it up with a pillowcase but it hurt so much I cried. And I couldn’t stop. So she had to take me to the doctor. My father told me I better never tell how it got broke. I better tell them I fell down the stairs. And we didn’t even have any stairs at our house. But he told me that. So I did it. And once he tied me to my bed too.” She sighed wearily and shook her head. “I was so scared then.”

Libby looked at me. “You know what? I still sometimes dream about my old home and wake up scared. Sometimes I’m even crying. I’m always afraid maybe they might find where I live and come and take me back.” She chewed her lower lip. “Sometimes in the daytime I sort of miss them. You know, I sort of draw these little pictures about them. But not at night. When I get out of those dreams I can’t ever go back to sleep the whole rest of the night. It gives me a bad headache and makes me sick to my stomach. Daddy has to come in and sit with me.” She paused. “I don’t know if Lori remembers that. She never tells me.”

“You know, don’t you, that that would never happen,” I said. “Your daddy would never let anybody take you away from him. He loves you. You’re his little girls now and he wouldn’t let you go. No matter what you did or anything else. That would never happen. And you tell Lori that.”

She nodded. “I know that. Sometimes I know it … But sometimes, well, you sort of forget.”

Her eyes were on my face then, her beautiful long-ago eyes. “I bet my father did it,” she said. “I bet it was him that wrecked Lori so she can’t read or anything.”

“We don’t know those things. We’ll never know.”

“I do,” she said with no emotion. “And when I’m big, I’m going to find him. I’m going to get a big knife and I’m going to find him and I’m going to stab him right in the belly. I’m going to kill him. I will. You just see. I’m going to kill him for what he done to Lori. And me. And there won’t be anybody who’s going to stop me either.”

Nothing I could say to that. Seven years old and the cycle of destruction and abuse had already been passed on to her. And the hate.

We sat in silence. Then Libby looked up at the clock. “I gotta go. My ballet lesson got over at five o’clock. I’m going to get in trouble for being gone so long.”

“May I give you a ride home?”

She shook her head and moved away. “I like to walk.”

“All right.” I pulled on my jacket. Libby headed for the door. “Lib?”

She paused and turned.

“Bye.”

She gave an odd jerk of her shoulders, almost a shrug, and a tightness across her lips I could hardly call a smile. “Good-bye.”

T
he house was dark and cold when I got home.

Every night some small spirit in me kindled that Joe would be there waiting when I arrived. Every night the house was empty.

A week now for him too. He had left and there had been no more. No phone calls, no notes, no nothing. He had not even come back to get his records. I knew the night it happened that was going to be the way it was. I think I always knew it would end that way. Yet something within me kept hope. I did not take down the pictures. I did not package up the records to send. I did not pull the bolt lock to prevent entry with a key. Just in case.

I congratulated myself on handling his leaving well. No crying. No depression. No desperate, humiliating calls. He had walked out. It was over. Just as I knew all along it would be. I complimented myself on remaining rational and dignified, on understanding and accepting it.

But I knew I hadn’t. I could not lock out the emptiness he had left in his wake. I did not know what to do with myself. The deal at school had so absorbed me that I was eating, sleeping and dreaming Lori Sjokheim. With no way at home to diffuse my thoughts, I walked around haunted. Nothing could reduce the nagging restlessness.

Also, I discovered, Joe had completely taken care of my social life. I had not realized that until now, as I sat night after night alone. Certainly I had never been a social butterfly. My world had always been confined to a small circle of friends and my colleagues at work. But since I started dating Joe, even those few close friends had either drifted away or were his. I was left stranded.

Billie rescued me over the weekend when she invited me to dinner Saturday night. For survival lessons, she told me. “Oh, just like me when I was divorced,” she said with a flap of one hand. Her voice still carried the low burr of South Carolina. “Never knew they were all his friends until then. Never want just a woman on her own.”

“Well, it’s not that exactly. It’s … well, I don’t know. I guess we just never had any friends collectively. Just acquaintances and places Joe liked to go to have a good time.”

Another flap of her hand as she threw meat into the pot for stew. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Men! Who needs ’em?”

Well, for one person, me.

It was a very hard time, I had to admit that, even without the outward trappings of distress. I needed someone in my life on a daily basis. Joe had been right about one thing: My muse was not warm enough in itself. I needed people too much. This, of course, raised the age-old question my family always kept fresh for me: Why not marry? Why not indeed. I picked up a pillow off the couch and threw it with all my might at the wall. And why didn’t the rest of life have easy answers?

What were we going to do with Lori? Libby’s account of what had happened in Edna’s room was not far from what I had guessed. I knew Edna well enough. And I knew Lori.

Edna would not admit defeat. She saw nothing amiss in her behavior, and unfortunately there was little anyone could do about it. She was an old, tenured battle horse. The bureaucracy of the school system would be on her side all down the line, if for no other reason than that she was in her last year of teaching, and by the time the officials got geared up, she’d be through. Thus, to challenge her on the inhumanity of her treatment of Lori and undoubtedly of other children in the class would be quixotic.

I did discuss the matter once or twice with her as diplomatically as I could, but they were futile discussions. I always ended up feeling worse afterward than when I started them.