Somebody Else’s Kids (35 page)

“Yes, you do, Lor. And so do I. Some things in the world are sad and there’s nothing wrong with crying over them a little. It gets the dirt out of your eyes.”

Tomaso flapped a hand at us impatiently. “Oh, come on, you guys. Let’s sing some more or I’m going to have the dirt out of my eyes too.”

M
ay rose up with great heat. Our room was on the west side of the building and it soon became uncomfortably warm in the afternoons. Since the weather outside was so nice, I took the children a couple of times to do our work in the shade of a hawthorn tree at the far end of the playground.

Claudia and Boo were doing Montessori materials. Lori was apart from us in the garden. Lettuce grew there now and spinach and peas and radishes. She was busy picking bugs out of the leaves of spinach. I lay stretched out on the grass while Tomaso read to me from his reading book. He was doing a skill lesson on distinguishing fact from opinion and was reading aloud all sorts of dreary things about January mean temperatures in St. Petersburg, Florida, and whether or not dogs made the best pets.

I had moved over to be in the warm May sunshine. The weariness of winter oozed out of my bones. Boo seemed like he needed to use the rest room so Claudia took him in. The day was warm for so early in the season, in the seventies and nudging 80, and I had kicked my sandals off and closed my eyes.

“I’ve picked off twelve bugs,” Lori announced.

“What kind are they?” I asked.

“I dunno. Spinach bugs, I guess.”

“Lemme see,” Tomaso said.

“Oh no, you don’t. Finish your reading first,” I kicked him with one toe.

“I just wanted to look at them. Sheesh.”

“Not until I find out if it’s a fact that red is the best color for a bike. Now read.”

“I think it is,” Lori said.

“Gotta be an opinion then,” Tomaso said and nipped his book back open.

“I’ll save the bugs for you, Tommy,” Lori said. “Can I go get a jar to put them in, Torey?”

“Sure. And see what Boo and Claudia are up to. They’ve been gone a long time.”

“Alrighty.” Lori ran off to leave Tom and me alone on the grass with our facts and opinions.

I lay back and closed my eyes again. Tomaso’s voice had that slightly petulant tone of one forced to do something he would sooner not do. He was tapping against the bottom of my bare foot with his shoe, like a telegrapher.

“Torey! Torey, come quick!” Lori ran across the playground toward us. “Help! Something’s happened to Boo.”

I bounded to my feet and took off. Tomaso was right behind. “What’s the matter?” I asked as we all dashed for the doorway.

“I don’t know!” Lori was crying.

Boo and Claudia were in the classroom. Workmen had begun installing insulation in the ceiling of the school during the last week; that had been another major influence for moving my class outside, because the banging and rattling were atrocious. Apparently when they had seen my empty classroom they must have thought it unused because a huge sheet of fiberglass insulation was leaning against the cupboard by the sink. On the side against the cupboard doors was the soft fiberglass itself. On the side facing us was the shiny Mylar covering. Overhead our fluorescent lights were on.

Boo stood before the Mylar, his hands flapping wildly as they did in the old days. His body trembled with an excited frenzy. Back and forth his head moved in a rhythmic, hypnotic manner like a charmed snake. Then I noticed that when not flapping he would grip his bare upper arms and rake his fingernails down them. Long tracks had been scraped in each arm.

Claudia’s face was tight with fear. “I didn’t know what to do. He just started to do that and he screams every time I try to pull him away. It’s like he doesn’t even know me.”

“Boo!” I said sternly. “Boo!”

No response. He was so involved in self-stimulating that my voice alone could not break his concentration. The reality we stood in was gone for Boo. He lived only in his Mylar reflection. I saw him reach up and grab a handful of hair. With a deft yank he pulled it from his head.

I moved to catch hold of his shoulders. That was a mistake. Boo was further gone than I had realized. He shrieked hysterically when I touched him and then he tore off screaming. Tufts of black hair fell in his wake as he continued to rip it from his head. Intermittently, his hands would flap frantically and his head would flop back and forth as if there were no muscles in the neck.

“Boo!” I did not know if I should chase him or not. On one hand I was afraid that if I didn’t he would hurt himself more seriously than just pulling hair. On the other hand I knew he would spook completely when being pursued. Turning, I pulled Lori and Tomaso inside the room from the doorway. For the first time in months I latched the hook and eye.

Boo rampaged, screaming maniacally. Then he started in on his clothes. Off came the shoes, the socks, the pants. But not with the old deft precision. Instead he tore them off. Rrrrrip went the shirt, buttons careening in all directions. He used the same brutal force he had used on his hair. Within seconds he was stripped. Only his training pants remained on; their material was too stretchy to tear. Boo ran in wide, reckless circles beyond our reach.

“Ohhhh,” I heard Lori murmur sadly behind me. She captured my feelings exactly. Some little Pollyannaish dream that Boo was actually getting better sank and died agonizingly inside me. He ran now with more bizarre frenzy than he had ever shown when he first arrived.

Cautiously I walked out into the middle of the room to put myself more directly in his path. He veered to avoid me. The screaming never stopped. To the world beyond our door it must have sounded as if we had an injured wild animal in here.

Abruptly, as he was bolting past the Mylar, he stopped dead. The hands came up to ear level, the fingers fluttered. Once more he began to weave back and forth, enchanted by something none of us could perceive. His crying ceased.

Watching Boo was terrifying. Perhaps the fear came because the change after all these months of improvement was so unceremoniously sudden; the behavior was so alien to anything he had done before. He was a stranger.

I tried easing up on him from behind while he stood transfixed before the glimmering Mylar on the insulation. Boo was not that unaware of his environment. With a bloodcurdling scream, he ran from me in terror, as if I meant to kill him.

The other children stood in a fearful huddle against the door, their eyes wide and full of horror. I had had Tomaso turn off the overhead lights in case they were contributing to Boo’s hysteria as they sometimes did, so now we were in a bright afternoon darkness that at any other time would have seemed natural. But now it only added to the eeriness.

Boo halted across the room near the window. Reaching up to cover his face with his hands, he shrieked, the cry changing pitch to a hoarse moan. Fingernails against his cheeks, he pulled them down into a long scraping motion. Reddened trails were left against his dark skin. Again and again he scratched at his face and cried out as if bees had descended upon him and he was trying to ward them off. Blood trickled through his fingers.

Lori screamed at the sight. I ran toward Boo, but as I got close, he tore off, his hands still over his face, now wildly gouging at his skin and pulling at his hair.

“Boo! Boo, come here.
Please
, come here.”

But I could not win him away from himself.

Tomaso was the first to act. He broke from the others and came out at Boo with both of his arms spread wide like a goose girl herding her flock. Boo, blood running into his eyes and down onto the smooth skin of his chest, lurched away from Tomaso, but I was on the other side. Between Tom and me we were able to squeeze him into a smaller and smaller area. Finally I could reach out and grab Boo’s arm, slippery with blood. I pulled him to me.

We fell into a little heap, Boo and I. I was still unable to squelch the demon in him, and he struggled savagely. One hand raked across my cheek, but I did not know if the blood that came trickling down my chin was his or mine. He bit my arm when I tried to check the bleeding. Finally I crushed him tight against me so that he could no longer move.

We sat. The other children watched us. Both Claudia and Lori were crying. Tomaso’s face was pale and grim.

We sat. Still Boo struggled. Whatever he had been trying to tear out of himself was still unwilling to give up.

We sat.

Boo no longer fought against me, but I could still feel the foreignness in his body, rigid and tense. I did not let go.

The depression settling over me was unspeakable. All these months, all this time given him and he was as crazy as ever. In a moment of mental hopscotch I thought of Albert Einstein’s famous comment about God not playing dice with the universe. I wondered what kind of game God did play. And why I never could quite grasp the rules.

When I finally let go of Boo, he was his normal goofy self. Grinning while I dressed him, he jabbered the sports report. A hundred scores and RBI’s and errors were regurgitated. Then he giggled to himself and gave the weather. Partly cloudy.

We went about our activities the remainder of the afternoon with tremendous care lest too much noise or gaiety shatter the frail atmosphere. Tom and Lori pulled the insulation back into the hallway. We left the lights out. I took Boo down to the girls’ rest room and tried to wash the dried blood from his face and hair. Both of us looked like warriors with the even tracks of his fingernails down our cheeks.

When his mother came to get him in his tattered clothes I tried to explain the best I could what had happened. She left with tears in her eyes.

It was Claudia who was the most upset of all. She wept intermittently throughout the afternoon. To her, what Boo had done was her fault. Over and over she kept telling me things she should have done to have prevented him from falling apart. No amount of reassurance from me helped. In talking to her I came to realize that Claudia in her quiet, earnest way had grown to love Boo deeply. She was more invested in him than I had ever known. That this had happened crushed her.

I allowed Claudia to stay after school to help me with miscellaneous tasks. She had not recovered from her feelings enough that I wanted to send her home. We sat together at the table and made cutouts for the bulletin board.

“Why did he do that?” she asked me. “He was okay when I brought him in. Really. We went in the bathroom and then stopped in here to get my sweater. That’s all.”

I nodded. “It wasn’t anything you did. I don’t know what it was. Maybe just the reflection on the Mylar.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s just the way he is.”

“Is he ever going to be different?”

I shrugged with just one shoulder. “I don’t know. Probably not a lot.”

She gazed at me. The pause was intense. “How can you
stand
it here? I couldn’t. I couldn’t be here all the time and know I never mattered.”

I looked over at her. “I
do
matter. That isn’t the question. I matter to me. And day to day I matter to Boo. We all do. Day to day, is all there is, Claudia. And day to day is all I care about.”

She shook her head. With her fingertips she felt along the smoothness of the tabletop. “Are all your kids like this? Like Boo?”

I was unsure of what she was asking.

“Is something wrong with all of them? Something inside where you can’t see it? Even with Tom and Lori? Are all your kids like that?”

I rubbed my hand across my lips and considered the question.

“They’re crazy, aren’t they?” she said softly. Her tone was not derogatory. “My dad told me once that this was a room for crazy children. Where they put you before you grew up and they had to lock you away. That’s really true, isn’t it?”

“I guess. If that’s what you want to call it. I guess you could.”

“It’s different than I thought it would be. I always thought crazy people were bad. Like Jack the Ripper or Son of Sam. I was scared to even think about them. But that isn’t the way it really is, is it? Boo isn’t bad. Or Tom or Lori.”

“No, they aren’t bad.”

“But they aren’t good either, are they? Or else people wouldn’t be afraid of them.”

“No one is good or bad, Claudia. Those are only words.”

She studied my face, really looked at me, her eyes locking mine. “No one’s really any different, are they? We’re all just pretty much the same.”

We worked together in silence for a long while. Fifteen or twenty minutes passed and neither of us spoke.

“Claudia?”

She looked up.

“Remember a long time ago when I talked to you about your baby? About what you were going to do with it?”

“Yeah.”

“I still worry about it.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t. But I do. I don’t want your baby to end up in here, in this room with me.”

She wrinkled her forehead. “He won’t.”

“That’s what all mothers think. What Boo’s mom thought. Mothers love their children. But sometimes when life gets out of control for big people, the little people get hurt.”

“That won’t happen to me.”