Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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fingering through the dirt at our feet.
“Do you miss Northern Ireland?” I asked.
Geraldine did not respond immediately; however, Shemona looked up from where she was squatted. She had a collection of tiny twigs in her hand. I studied her face and wondered if, at five, she knew what Northern Ireland was.
“Shemona misses it,” Geraldine said.
“Do you?” I asked her.
Another pause and then she nodded slowly. “Yes, Miss.”
She pressed close to me. She’d had only one arm linked through mine but now brought up the other. I extracted my hand from my pocket and put my arm around her shoulders, drawing her against me.
“Would you like to go back?”
She nodded without hesitation. “I am going back. Shemona and me both. When we’re bigger. We’re here because we’re just wee girls.”
“It must be very hard for you and Shemona to have lost your mother and your father and have had to come so far from home. Any one of those things would have been very upsetting to cope with, but to cope with all of them at once must be extra hard.”
“Our brother Matthew died too, not just our mam and dad,” Geraldine added.
“Yes. That must have been very hard. You’ve lost a lot. It must make you feel very sad sometimes.”
Silence fell between us. Mariana had a ball and was bouncing it enthusiastically against the brick wall not far from where Geraldine and I were standing. The rhythmic thuds from wall to pavement and back again filled up the silence.
“Now Shemona is youngest,” Geraldine said. “Used to be me, then Shemona, then our Matthew. Now she’s youngest. And I’m the oldest. I’ll always be oldest.” A small pause. “Unless I get killed too. Then Shemona will be an only child.”
The other parents I wanted to see were Mr. Considyne and Dr. Taylor. Leslie was making no noticeable progress whatsoever. Like Shemona, she suffered from my lack of auxiliary help. By the time I had finished diapering her, checking her sugar levels and injecting her with insulin, there was hardly any time left to work with her. What work I did do seemed to have negligible effect.
I wanted to know more about Leslie’s behavior at home. Watching her interactions with her mother in the brief moments I saw them together, I got the impression that Leslie was more responsive to her mother than to me. Did Leslie interact more in general at home? Was she less withdrawn?
The other issue I felt I could no longer live with was Dr. Taylor’s drinking. Just as Carolyn had predicted, Dr. Taylor went through a spell of arriving to pick Leslie up stone drunk more often than not. I was appalled both by the severity of her drinking problem and by everyone else’s complete acceptance of it. I’d encountered alcoholic parents and some pretty spectacular displays of drunkenness over the course of my career, but nothing to equal the grueling, day-in, day-out consistency of Dr. Taylor’s problem. And I had certainly never experienced anything equivalent to the attitudes of the people around me, when I expressed concern. I was treated as if I had the problem, not her.
It became clear to me that Dr. Taylor was the person everyone loved to hate. Her legendary aloofness went beyond the point of rudeness; her hostile arrogance was all the more bitter for its silence. More than a few people openly felt she deserved such a comeuppance. More to the point, however, she gave the impression of being a very dangerous woman. Rich, powerful and antagonistic, no one interfered with her because I suspect no one dared.
I didn’t dare either. I thought about it a lot. I had fantasies about standing up to Dr. Taylor, but when it came right down to looking her straight in the eye and hanging onto Leslie, I never quite managed. On the other hand, I hadn’t given up. Despite failing time and again to keep Leslie from going with her intoxicated mother, I was still prepared each afternoon to try again. I was still taking hold of Leslie’s coat collar. Dr. Taylor and I were still having our daily battle of glares. I think even she knew by that point that, while I might not have the courage of a tiger, I had the tenacity of a terrier.
The meeting was arranged for very late on Friday afternoon, a time I chose because I knew the building would be relatively empty. When Dr. Taylor came to pick Leslie up after school, I reminded her of the meeting. With relief, I noticed that she was sober. But when the time arrived for the meeting, no one came. I sat, waiting, at the table. Neat piles of Leslie’s work and my records lay beside me. I fiddled with them, stacking them and then restacking them, lining them up straight. The clock ticked noisily, and I couldn’t avoid listening to it.
At last the door opened and closed beyond the shelves and, shortly, Tom Considyne’s huge frame appeared around the corner. I rose and extended my hand to him and asked him to sit down. We exchanged a few brief pleasantries before he pulled out one of the child-sized chairs next to me and lowered himself into it in a surprisingly graceful manner.
“I’m afraid my wife isn’t going to be able to make it,” he said. “She isn’t feeling well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’d just talked with her when she came to fetch Leslie at 3:30.”
“It’s her stomach. Incredible problems with it.”
“Oh. I see.” I opened Leslie’s folder and began to take out examples of her work. I laid out other things, charts and graphs mainly, that I’d used to keep track of her progress. I explained my concern, because, as he could see, the progress had been minimal.
Even though Carolyn had filled me in, Tom Considyne startled me by being so friendly and garrulous. Having met him only that once, I had little personal experience to judge him on, but I’d assumed automatically he’d share some of his wife’s distant reserve. Not so. Warm and expansive, he talked, listened, asked questions, gesticulated, joked and laughed heartily. He was also a bit of a flirt, using just enough sexual innuendo in his conversation to keep me slightly uncomfortable.
What surprised me more was the fact that he was uncommonly astute about the methods I was using with Leslie. Obviously, he had encountered them before and he’d paid attention. The methods he was less sure of, he studied in minute detail. It became apparent that he adored Leslie, in spite of her handicaps.
“She loves your class,” he said at one point. He had one of her papers in his hand and smiled tenderly at it. “I take that as the best indicator of your abilities. She’s always so anxious to get here in the mornings. Right out of bed first thing. She has no sense of time, you know. It’s charming in some ways. Up at 3:30, dressing to come to school. She was like that Saturday. I’d told her at bedtime that there’d be no school in the morning, but she forgot. And so there she was, 5:45, in our bedroom, taking the covers off my wife, putting Ladbrooke’s slippers onto her feet to make her get up. Leslie had her clothes on and everything. We had no choice but to take her into bed with us to get her back to sleep.”
This all sounded like considerably more life than I’d ever noticed in Leslie. I couldn’t imagine her dressing herself. I mentioned this to her father.
“She’s not good with strangers. Like her mother in that respect, I’m afraid. A bit shy.”
“It seems like rather more than shyness to me,” I said. “She’s virtually nonexistent some days.” I didn’t mention the fact that I hardly considered myself a stranger to Leslie.
He nodded. “Yes.” A second nod, more resigned. “Yes, she does that at home sometimes too. She’s rather unpredictable.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes she’s okay. Depends. If she’s interested in what you’re doing, if it’s food or something, she can be very responsive. Or if it’s something she knows you don’t want her involved in …” He grinned. “But …” The grin faded to be replaced by a wearier expression. “She’s hard work some days.”
“I can well imagine.”
“It’s just the way she