Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her. Torey Hayden
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our girls. We just take away privileges. Mostly, when she does those things, I send her outside. Tell her to go yell out there.”
“I see.”
Silence followed. I regarded the parents; they regarded their hands. “So, you feel Jadie’s problems with speech aren’t anything serious?”
Mrs. Ekdahl looked over. “It’s just shyness. Jadie don’t get on real good with outsiders, that’s all. She’s always been that way. Both girls have. Just like their family best, that’s all.”
“Well, the other thing … the way Jadie walks. What are your thoughts on her posture?”
“Oh, that, she can’t help that. She was born that way,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “See, I had this real hard time getting her out when she was born. She was stuck in the wrong way, had her face like this.” She gestured along the front of her abdomen. “So she came wrong. I had to have forty-two stitches in me afterwards, and the doctor said things might not be just right, because she didn’t get enough air. That’s because she was stuck in such a long time.”
“Oh,” I said in surprise. “I hadn’t realized that. Nobody’s mentioned birth trauma to me.”
“We just got to be patient with Jadie,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. She’s little and she’s shy, but that don’t mean there’s anything really the matter with her. She’s good at her work. She always has good report cards, so I think we just got to be patient.”
I went home from the meeting in a state of confusion. This new bit of information fogged over my previous conclusions. Jadie did speak now. She had responded classically to the intervention method I’d developed to treat elective mutism, which lent weight to the evidence that hers was psychological, and surely someone, somewhere, would have noted the likelihood of brain damage in her files if it was felt to be contributory. On the other hand, while she spoke in class now, she still did not speak much spontaneously but rather only when spoken to. Also, there was her bizarre posture to consider. And goodness knows, I’d been victim before of critical information being omitted from files. On thinking the matter through, it seemed reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that Jadie was aphasic, unable to speak because of brain damage.
At the beginning of March, we had a two-day break. I used the time to go up to the city and visit all my old colleagues at the clinic. Of course, I was curious about how everyone had gotten on since I’d left, and I wanted to know about the children I’d been working with, who were all now in therapy with one of my partners; however, there was an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to borrow a video recorder.
I had long been accustomed to using video machines in my classroom. Back in the early seventies when I’d first started teaching, I’d been fortunate enough to be in a school with its own video equipment—a rarity in those days—and even more fortunate in the fact that most of the staff hadn’t learned how to use it, so it sat idle much of the time. Subsequently, I appropriated it bit by bit and made it an integral part of my classroom routine. I found such a recording device invaluable. When I taught, I often became so absorbed in the process that I missed vital clues to a child’s behavior. Now, for the cost of a few reels of videotape, I could go back at the end of the day and observe and evaluate both the children and myself in a way never possible before.
We didn’t have a video camera or even a recorder in Pecking. Gracious and generous as Mr. Tinbergen was, he admitted that school finances did not stretch that far. He wished they did, he said, but it was rather too much of a luxury for a school that size. So back I went to the city over the two-day break to see if I could charm my old director, Dr. Rosenthal, into lending me one of the clinic’s for a couple of weeks. And so I did, returning to Pecking with an elderly reel-to-reel machine and its accompanying camera rattling around on the back seat of my car.
“I know what that is,” Jadie said, when she arrived in the classroom Monday morning.
“You do?” This surprised me, as cassette recorders were rapidly replacing these bulky older machines and even VCRs were still uncommon.
“Yeah. It makes TV pictures.” She hobbled up to the recording deck. “Are you going to put us on TV?”
“Just on this little one here. It’s called a monitor.”
“Will my mom and dad see it?”
“No. It’s just for us. When everybody is here, we’ll turn it on so that everyone can see themselves. And maybe at the end of the week, we can act out a little play and record it. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe one of those plays from your reading book.”
“Is that what you got it for? Us?”
“Well, mostly it’s for me. So I can see what I’m doing when I’m teaching.”
“What d’you mean?”
“See, what I do is turn it on and let it run and don’t pay any attention to it. Then, at the end of the day, I can sit down and look at it and see what we’re doing. I can look at each person carefully and decide if I’m doing the right things to help. This makes me a better teacher.”
“Just you? You look at it all by yourself? Nobody else sees it?”
“Just me, usually.”
Jadie peered into the camera lens and then went back to the deck. “This is how you turn it on, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And here’s how you stop it. You press this button, don’t you?” She bent nearer to the machine. “Rec-ord,” she read.
“Re-cord. That’s the button you press when you want the picture to go onto the tape.”
“Yeah, I know what it means.”
I looked at her. “Have you seen one of these before?”
She nodded. “Bobby Ewing’s got one.”
“Is that a friend of yours?” I asked.
“Yeah. Him and J.R., when they come, they put you on TV.”
“J.R.?” Confused, I searched her face for some explanation. “J.R.? Bobby? You mean like the Ewings on TV? On ‘Dallas’?”
“No, I don’t think he’s on TV. He puts you on TV. So you can be a movie star and make lots of money when you’re big.”
Totally baffled, I said nothing more, but I filed the conversation away. It was the first truly spontaneous conversation I’d thus far had with Jadie, and it made no sense whatsoever to me. This lack of coherence lent credence to the aphasia theory.
Setting the camera up on the wide window ledge, I ran the machine for almost two hours in the morning. This allowed me to catch a good cross section of both tightly organized activities, such as reading, and freer periods, such as art. I switched it off just before lunch and intended to record a bit more after lunch; however, when I returned later and stopped to check the reels, I saw there wasn’t actually enough tape left to make it worthwhile, so I decided to view what I had first and then record in the afternoon another day.
I didn’t get around to viewing the two hours of tape until after school the following day. The room was dark. We’d had a run of wet, heavily overcast days, and all I needed to do was turn off the overhead lights to plunge the schoolroom into gloom. Pulling up one of the small chairs, I flipped the monitor on and sat down, elbows on my knees, chin resting on my folded hands, and watched.
Much of the latter part of the tape was taken up with Jeremiah and me, just before lunch the previous day. We were at the table, and I was helping him with his reading, or at least trying to help. Jeremiah was fairly hopeless at most academic tasks and hid his troubles behind a constant barrage of defiant, distracting remarks.
Leaning forward, I studied the images. I listened carefully to my tone of voice. Did I sound as exasperated as I’d felt at the time? Was I inadvertently provoking him? Was I encouraging resistance?