Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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it. Leslie’s just different.”
“Does your wife accept it as well?”
He went silent, rubbing the stubble on his chin in a pensive manner. Then he nodded slowly. “I think so. My wife doesn’t have the kind of patience Leslie needs. Ladbrooke’s a very—what would you say?—a very mental person. And Leslie, well, you don’t really think about Leslie. You feel Leslie. Leslie is. You do Leslie by instinct. My wife has a hard time with that kind of thing. She finds Leslie difficult to cope with some days. I guess we both do, occasionally.” He smiled gently at me. “Saying that I can accept Leslie for what she is doesn’t mean that I always find her easy to live with.”
I nodded and relaxed back into my chair. “Are there any areas where Leslie’s particularly hard to cope with?”
He thought a moment. “I think we get into the most trouble at night. Leslie doesn’t seem to need much sleep. It’s incredible, really. She can go to bed at eleven and then be up at three and never go back again. Other times, she goes to bed easily enough but wakes up every hour or two, right through the night. You get up six or seven times with her. And this has been going on for years now. You can’t really believe what it’s like until you live with it. Nothing works. We even tried drugs at one point, but unless you knocked her right out twenty-four hours a day, she still woke up.”
“Does she stay in her bedroom when she wakes up?”
“No, not really. I must admit, I can’t come to terms with the thought of locking a child in somewhere. That appalls me every time someone suggests it. Leslie seems to need this chance to go through the house when there’re no other distractions. She needs the security of checking in all the drawers and cupboards and seeing everything is still there. I think that helps her define her life in some way.”
“What do you mean exactly, when you say ‘checking in all the drawers and cupboards’?”
“Well, when she gets up at night, she likes to open the cupboards and dressers and things. She goes in the kitchen and the bathroom mainly and takes things out. You know, just to check they’re all there.”
Astonished by the thought, I pursued it. “You mean Leslie gets up in the middle of the night and goes around taking everything out of the cupboards?”
“Oh, she’s very careful. She’s not destructive; she almost never breaks anything. She just takes things out and leaves them.”
I was trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a house with a child doing that sort of thing nightly. I had visions of my own apartment, of waking in the morning to find the contents of my cupboards and drawers removed.
Mr. Considyne seemed unaware of the curiosity value of such behavior. “About the only problem we have with her is over smearing things. She does love to rub things around, you know, like jam or ketchup or toothpaste. Anything spreadable. Sometimes I take her out to the studio and let her use my paints.” He paused. A smile crossed his lips, and he chuckled. “Boy, did she make a beaut of a mess a couple of weeks ago. She got up and no one heard her. The next morning we went downstairs to the kitchen and found she’d opened the freezer and taken every single item out and laid it on the floor. She’d taken the lids off the ice cream, and it was spread all over the tiles. God, you never saw anything like it.”
There was an oddly indulgent tone in his voice. I think I would have been a bit more appalled to lose the contents of my freezer in that manner.
“What does your wife think of all this?” I asked.
“Oh, it was her fault. She didn’t remember to lock the freezer.”
“No, I mean, in general. Doesn’t she mind that Leslie does this kind of thing?”
He shrugged. “Ladbrooke gets impatient with the mess sometimes. But like I said, Ladbrooke isn’t the world’s most patient person. She has no real understanding of kids. I try to explain to her that Leslie needs this. I think it’s expression for Leslie. Besides, Ladbrooke has household help. She doesn’t need to worry about the mess. I wouldn’t stick her with that.”
“I see.”
There was a small silence. Mr. Considyne looked down at his hands and then over in my direction without looking directly at me. He smiled sheepishly. “I’m rambling on, aren’t I? You’ll have to forgive me. I don’t get a chance to talk about Leslie very much. Most people don’t understand really, do they? Most people aren’t very interested.”
“That’s all right. I’m definitely interested. This gives me a much clearer picture.”
“God, I love that child,” he said. “It’s hard to explain to people. All they see are her defects. But if I had to admit it, I’d say I love her more than my two normal kids. She’s so pure. So untainted. She just feels and does. There’s no inhibition. No fucking intellect. Just purity. A completely natural person.” Then he paused and shook his head. “But that’s not to say she’s not a challenge some days.”
“I don’t think most people realize what living with a child like Leslie entails,” I said.
“No,” he replied in a very heartfelt way.
A small silence came. I could hear the wind pick up beyond the window. I’d opened it slightly after school to let in a little fresh air, and now the silence was filled with a greedy, sucking sound.
“Do you have help specifically for Leslie?”
“We have Consuela. She’s not really just for Leslie. She’s a cook and housekeeper, in fact, but she spends a lot of time with Leslie.”
I nodded.
“Consuela’s been with us forever. I don’t know what we’d do without her. She makes the difference between sanity and insanity around our place more often than I’d care to admit. I’m afraid Ladbrooke isn’t exactly what you’d call domesticated. We’d all fall apart without Consuela. And she has the patience of Job with Leslie, with all of us.”
“Does she sleep in Leslie’s room?”
“No. No, she has her own rooms at the other end of the house.”
“Who gets up with Leslie then, when she does all this waking?”
“We do. My wife and I.”
“And this is every single night?”
He nodded.
I scribbled a note of this on the upper edge of Leslie’s file.
“I suppose, if I’m honest, I have to admit Ladbrooke does most of the getting up. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. Most nights I never hear her.”
Another small silence intruded. Mr. Considyne reached out to finger one of the papers on the table.
“When did your wife give up her work?” I asked.
“Quite a while back now. Three and a half years, maybe.”
“What made her decide to stop?”
“Her project ended. She’s a physicist, you know, and she was doing some experimental work with some other people at Princeton University. But they needed to meet quite often, and she found commuting too much, especially with Leslie to think about. And their funding kept giving them trouble. It always had. When the new administration came in in Washington, she knew they weren’t ever going to get any increase in their grant. It was going to have to end sooner or later; so, she just wound up her involvement in things.”
I studied his features as he spoke. All along I was thinking how different his version of his wife’s circumstances was from Carolyn’s. I wondered who was right. Or if either was.
“And she’s not worked since?”
“No. Leslie started getting very bad about that time. My wife has a full-time job with her alone.” Then, as if to amend the way that sounded, he added, “Anyhow, it wouldn’t be feasible for