Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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What a pair Shemona and Geraldine made. They were two halves of a whole, rather than two separate children. Shemona was truly mute, spending every day in total silence. She had one of the most closed, unreadable faces I had ever come across in a child. It was as if someone had stuck up one-way mirrors behind her eyes, because, while Shemona constantly watched me, I could never see anything in return. And she did watch me. Even when I turned to look directly at her, she never averted her eyes. She simply continued to study my face. At those moments it was hard to remember she was a five-year-old. There was no innocence about her.
Geraldine, however, was clingy, noisy and infantile. From the beginning, she insisted on being physically close to me whenever possible. If I sat down, there she was, climbing on my lap, hanging over my shoulder, fondling my hair and my face. If I was standing, she would come up and move very close to me. Everything I owned was a target for kisses and caresses: my hair, my hands, my belt, whatever she could reach. On one occasion, she actually kissed my shoe before I realized what she was doing. Being a physically oriented person myself, I was surprised to find how irritated I became with all this attention. I liked being touched, but Geraldine was another experience altogether. She treated my body as if it belonged to her.
On their own, their individual problems would have been enough to merit psychological intervention. However, it was the relationship between the two girls that made them both fascinating and maddening for me. Geraldine did everything but pee for Shemona. Whatever whim Shemona might have, be it for a pencil or a paper or a glass of water, Geraldine was off getting it for her without Shemona’s ever giving an indication that I could perceive. At recess, Geraldine did up Shemona’s coat with motherly care; she wrapped the muffler around her sister’s neck, pulled the hat down over her ears. At lunch, Geraldine cut her sister’s food, carefully leaving a bite on the fork when she’d finished. I seldom saw her more than three feet away from Shemona at any given time. She guarded Shemona; she attended Shemona; she spoke for Shemona. No one could have found a more effective bodyguard than Geraldine.
Shemona seemed fairly dispassionate about all these ministrations. She accepted them more than appealed for them, and I got the feeling that it was Shemona, not Geraldine, who was the dominant member of the team. Shemona behaved like a little queen. Geraldine was the toady.
The most noticeable problem, of course, was Shemona’s muteness. I puzzled over what to do about it. During the seventies, I’d done an extensive amount of research with children who refused to speak, a psychological disorder called elective mutism. If Shemona had been any one of the legion number of elective mutes I had encountered during those years, I probably would have leapt right in with both feet, the way I always had. But here, now, I hesitated. Without an aide, I was unable to work with her in the uninterrupted one-to-one mode I was accustomed to. More specifically, I couldn’t get her separated from Geraldine, and I knew full well that with the two girls together, I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting her to speak. So the first weeks slipped by, and I accomplished nothing.
After the girls had been with me about three weeks, I asked Mr. and Mrs. Lonrho to come in and see me after school. To work more effectively with the sisters, I felt I needed to know more about their lives at home.
Mrs. Lonrho seemed relieved at the chance to talk about Shemona and Geraldine. She and her husband had four children of their own as well, all near in age to the two sisters, so they had expected no trouble in taking these, her brother’s daughters.
“I’d met them in Belfast,” Mrs. Lonrho said. “I’ve tried to get back there every couple of years or so. Most of my family’s still there, and I want my kids to know their roots.”
“Did the girls seem okay to you when you last saw them in Belfast?” I asked.
She nodded. “They were just kids, like any kids.”
“Shemona was always the quieter,” Mr. Lonrho added. He spoke with a broad western drawl. His wife, I noticed, was incorporating his accent. She still had the burring lilt of Northern Ireland in her words, but the vowel sounds were growing broad and flat.
Again Mrs. Lonhro nodded. “Yes, she was. She was always a self-possessed little thing. Independent, you know? She must have been about three or three and a half when we last saw her. She’d made herself a little house out of a blanket over a chair. Spent hours in there on her own. You never had to entertain Shemona. I remember thinking what a good quality that was for a child to have, because our four were a bunch of hooligans. Forever whining, wanting to do something, getting into trouble doing it.”
“And Geraldine?” I asked.
“She was at school during the day, so we didn’t see as much of her. But she enjoyed playing with our lot in the evenings.”
“I don’t remember much about her, to be honest,” Mr. Lonrho said. “She was the sort of kid to blend in with the wallpaper.”
“That was the thing,” his wife said, “they were just ordinary kids. When all this other happened and we found the girls were on their own, it seemed only natural to take them. We didn’t think two thoughts about it. You expect there to be some upset, but we assumed they’d adjust. Get them here, give them plenty of love, and they’d come out of it. We never expected it to be like this.”
“Are they getting any outside help? Any psychological help?” I asked.
Mrs. Lonrho frowned. “They were. We had Shemona to see a guy over at the clinic. But she wouldn’t talk. Eight weeks and she did nothing but sit there. And for their prices, well, I’m afraid she’s going to have to do her sitting at home.”
“Has Shemona been mute all this time?”
“Not a single word,” Mr. Lonrho replied.
“I don’t know when she started this,” his wife added. “It’s been going on a while now. The girls were with my sister Cath before coming here and Shemona wasn’t talking there. And that was about a year ago. We didn’t think anything much about it when Cath mentioned it. We just thought it was a kid’s thing and she’d stop being so silly once she and Geraldine got settled.”
“Does Shemona talk to Geraldine?”
Mrs. Lonrho shrugged. “I think she has to, but I’ve never heard her.”
“We’ve tried everything we can think of,” Mr. Lonrho said. “We’ve tried the psychologist. We’ve tried his ideas. We’ve tried the other school’s ideas. We’ve talked to our priest. We’ve talked with Bet’s sisters. I thought separating the girls would make a difference. Bet didn’t agree with me. She thinks they need each other. Anyway, one weekend I took Geraldine down to see my mother, and it was hell. She screamed the entire time. And Shemona still never talked.”
“How is it you decided to take Geraldine and Shemona?” I asked. “Surely you still have quite a lot of family in Belfast.”
“My sister Cath’s the only one who could take them. And most of hers are already grown and gone. And she’s got a job to think of and everything. Things just weren’t working out. And we didn’t want them in a foster home. They’d been in a foster home part of the time as it was. We just wanted to give them a fighting chance.”
A small silence sprang up unexpectedly. Both of them had grown thoughtful. I was jotting notes, and when I looked up and saw them, I was unwilling to intrude on their thinking.
Then Mrs. Lonrho raised her head. “Shemona cries at night,” she said softly. “It’s the only time I hear her. Usually she does it after Geraldine is asleep, but if I go in to her, she falls silent. I put the light on and I see her lying there, her face all red and puffed up. I change the pillowcase. Sometimes I even have to change the pillow, it’s so wet, but if I try to touch her, she moves away. She hates to be touched. She pulls away and faces the wall. You know, I ache to hold her then. She’s so little. But I don’t dare. You can tell by looking at her face that you’d better keep your distance.”
The following morning when we were outside on the playground at recess, Geraldine and Shemona