Somebody Else’s Kids. Torey Hayden
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impossible. The final blow came when she suffered a grand mal seizure in class one day.
Mr. Sjokheim took his daughter to the doctor. From there they were referred to university facilities on the far side of the state. Lori was admitted to the university hospital and given a complete neurological workup. When X-rays revealed the fracture line and later the brain lesions, a search was instigated through the adoption agency for old medical records. The abuse incident and the surgery to remove bone fragments and repair the skull came to light.
The doctors were hesitant to give pat answers. The epilepsy, which had probably been going on in the form of petit mal seizure for years, was undoubtedly a result of the abuse damage. The small unnoticed seizures alone could have accounted for much of Lori’s school failure. But as to her other problems, in the areas of symbolic language, there was no way of knowing. Too little about the operations of the brain was understood, and there were too many other possibilities. She was the younger twin, had been born prematurely; perhaps there might have been a birth injury or a congenital defect. Who could tell? Yet that evil crack running so squarely over the lesions on an otherwise normal-appearing brain gave mute testimony to what even the leading neurologist on Lori’s team admitted believing the answer to be.
Following the hospitalization and testing, Lori was placed on anti-convulsant medication and sent home. The seizures were controlled but back in kindergarten the struggle with learning continued. Lori left in June to go on to first grade, able to jabber off the alphabet and count up to 1000 but not even recognizing the letters of her name.
Still there remained a little encouragement from the doctors that she might improve. She was so young when the injury occurred that her brain might be capable of learning new pathways to circumvent the damaged area. If it was going to occur, it would most likely happen before she entered adolescence.
Mr. Sjokheim expressed relief that Lori had been moved half-days from the first grade. She needed more specialized support and he had seen the pressure building when she could not meet Edna’s demands.
He spoke to me about Lori’s actions and reactions over the past weeks. Then he paused, pinched the bridge of his nose and wearily shook his head. “I worry so much about her,” he said. “Not about the reading really. I figure if that’s meant to happen, it will. But …” He stared at the tabletop. “But sometimes I wake up at night … and before I can get back to sleep, well, she creeps into my head. I think about her. I think about all the little things she does to convince herself that this much failure does not matter to her. And I think how it does matter.” He looked up at me. His eyes were a soft, nondescript hazel color. “It’s worst at night for me. When I’m alone and I get to thinking about her. There’s no way to distract myself then. And you know … you know, it sounds stupid to say, but sometimes it makes me cry. I actually get tears in my eyes.”
I watched him as he spoke and thought about what it must be like to be Lori. That was difficult. I had always been a good student who had never had to try. I could not imagine what it must be like to be seven and to have known failure half my life, to get up every morning and come spend six hours in a place where try as I might, I could never really succeed. And by law Lori had at least seven more years ahead of her of this torture, as many years left as she had lived. Men murdered and received shorter prison terms than that. All Lori had done was to be born into the wrong family.
Once long ago when I was a very little girl I told my mother that when I grew up I was going to be a witch and marry a dinosaur. At four that seemed a marvelous plan. I adored playing witch in the backyard with my friends and I was passionately interested in dinosaurs. There could be no better life than one in which I could do what I loved doing and live with one I found immensely fascinating.
I haven’t changed a lot in that respect. Somewhere deep inside there is still a small four-year-old looking for her dinosaur. And there was no denying that the single hardest task as my career progressed had become synchronizing life with the kids with the remainder of my life outside school.
The task did not seem to be getting any easier. I know I did not help things much. I loved my work profoundly. It stretched me to the very limits of my being. The time spent within the walls of my classroom had formed fully my views of life and death, of love and hate, of justice, reality and the unrestrained brutal beauty of the human spirit. It had given me my understanding of the meaning of existence. And in the end it had put me at ease with myself. I had become the sort of person who got home Fridays and waited anxiously for Mondays. The kids were my fix, the experience a spiritual orgasm.
That kind of intensity was hard to compete with. I tried to step back from it and appreciate the slower, less rabid hours I spent outside school but I knew my appetite for the extreme, both mentally and emotionally, made me a complicated companion.
Joe and I had been seeing each other for almost a year. The old adage had been true in our case: opposites attract. He was a research chemist at the hospital. He worked only with things. Indeed, he loved things: cars that handled well, old rifles, good wine and clothes. Joe was the only man I had ever dated who actually owned a tuxedo. And perhaps because things so seldom needed talking to, Joe was never a talker. He was not a quiet type; he just never wasted words beyond the concrete. He could not comprehend their practicality in some areas. Why talk about things if one could not change them? Why discuss things that have no answers?
Fun for Joe was getting dressed up and going out to eat, going to a party, going dancing. Just plain going out.
And there I was with my wardrobe of three pairs of Levi’s and a military jacket left over from student protest days. When I came home from work I wanted to stay home, to cook a good meal, to talk. I sorted my life out with words. I built my dreams with them.
We made an unlikely pair. But whatever our differences, we seemed to get around them. We fought incessantly. And we made up incessantly, too, which made most of the fighting worthwhile. I loved Joe. He was French, which I found exotic. He was handsome: tall, rugged-looking with wind-blown hair, like those men in perfume advertisements. I don’t think I had ever dated such a handsome man and I knew that fed my vanity some. Yet there were better reasons too. He had a good sense of humor. He was romantic, remembering all the little things I was just as likely to dispense with. And perhaps most of all he stretched me in a way different from my work; he kept me oriented toward normalcy and adulthood. He could usually keep my Peter Pan tendencies under control. It was a good, if not always easy, relationship.
As September rolled into October and an Indian summer stretched out warm and lazy across the farmlands, Joe and I were seeing more of each other, but increasingly he began to complain about my work. I was not leaving it at school, he said, which was true enough, I suppose. I had Boo and Lori to think about now and I wanted to share it. I wanted Joe to see Boo’s eerie otherworldliness and Lori’s tenderness because they were so beautiful to me. On more practical levels, I wanted to bounce ideas off someone. I needed to explore those regions of the children’s behavior that I could not comprehend. My best thinking was always done aloud.
All this talk of crazy people depressed him, Joe replied. I ought to put it away at night. Why did I always insist on bringing it home? I sat by quietly when he said that to me and I was filled with sadness. It was then I knew that Joe would never be my dinosaur.
I had meant to fix supper. Joe was coming over. We had not made plans because the night before when we had discussed it, Joe had wanted to see the newest Coppola movie and I had wanted to fix something on the barbecue. Like so many other times when we ended up unable to agree on anything, Joe just said he would be over.
When I came home from school in the evening there was a letter in the mailbox from an old friend who was teaching disturbed children in another state. She related how her kids had made ice-cream one day in class. Instead of using the big, cumbersome ice-cream maker with all its messy rock salt and ice and impossible turning, she had used empty frozen-juice cans inside coffee cans. The children each had their own individual ice-cream makers. The ice-cream set up in less than ten minutes.
My mind