touching it, one could tell it was strong. There was a window in our classroom door, but there wasn’t in this, nor in the one between the cloakroom and the hall. Jadie turned and put a hand out to feel the door.
Jadie examined the door minutely. She ran her hands over the wood, lingering to feel the grain. She pursued the ornamental molding with her fingers, then came to the knob and lock. These, like the door itself, were old-fashioned, and there was a proper keyhole. All of this, too, Jadie examined carefully, poking her little finger into the keyhole, turning the knob, watching the latch go in and out.
This whole procedure took a full ten minutes, and, throughout, I didn’t say a word. Still at my desk, I simply watched. Jadie didn’t seem particularly interested in my presence. All her attention was focused on the door. Gently, she eased it away from its stop and pushed it closed, shutting the two of us into the cloakroom. Then she turned the knob and opened it slightly. She fingered the latching mechanism.
“Here’s the deadbolt,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. She touched the bolt in its housing inside the latch. Then she shut the door again, tried the knob, opened it, felt the lock, closed it. This she did at least six or seven times before turning abruptly to me. “You got a key for this? Can you lock it?”
I nodded.
Her face brightened. “Give it to me, okay? Lemme lock it shut.”
Fascinated by her behavior, I agreed and dug the key out of my desk drawer. Jadie deftly slipped it into the keyhole and turned it. The deadbolt slid into place with a satisfying thunk. “That’s good,” she murmured in a pleased tone. Removing the key, she tried to open the door but, of course, it didn’t move. Then she unlocked the door, opened it, stuck her head into the classroom, pulled back, and slammed the door shut, relocking it. From there, she scuttled down to the other door, which opened into the hallway.
“Does the key work in this one, too?” she asked me. “Can we lock this one?” But before I could reply, she was already trying the key in the lock. It did fit both doors, and a satisfied smile crossed Jadie’s face as she tugged at the newly locked door. Abruptly, she let go and scuttled back to the other door to try it again. This, still locked, too, refused to budge. “Got to cover this up,” she muttered and came to the desk. Seizing a foil of masking tape, she tore a strip off and placed it carefully over the keyhole. “Key’s in the other one. Can’t see in, but got to cover this one up.” Then, unexpectedly, she veered away from the door. Bent double, she began hurriedly moving around the circumference of the small room, her eyes on the floor.
“Are you looking for something?” I asked.
“Spiders. No spiders,” she muttered. “There’s no spiders in here.”
“No. Mr. Tinbergen has a man who comes around and sprays. He was just here in February. So there’re no spiders.”
Jadie looked up. “No spiders. No windows. Nobody can get in.”
“No.”
She scuttled to the door that led into the classroom and tried it once more to see if it would open. Being locked, it didn’t budge, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, putting one foot against the door frame to give herself more leverage. When the door still failed to move, Jadie did something totally unexpected. She laughed.
I had never heard Jadie laugh. Indeed, I’d never seen more than the occasional faint smile, but now she laughed merrily, the sound filling the cloakroom.
“You certainly do like the fact that the door doesn’t open,” I said.
“It’s locked. I’ve locked us in. No one else can be here. No windows they can see in at. No spiders gonna know. This is good.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“This is good,” she repeated. “I’m safe here.”
“You feel safe.”
What started as a pause grew. Jadie’s eyes had wandered from the doors, the walls, the floor to rest on my face. “You wanna see me stand up?” she asked, her tone almost conspiratorial.
I nodded.
Slowly, a bit stiffly, she straightened her posture until she was upright. Steadying herself with one hand on the wall, she thrust her shoulders back and her stomach out. She smiled at me, an easy, knowing smile.
I smiled back. “Good.”
Turning from me, she reached up and clasped a coat hook in each hand. Bracing her feet against the bench beneath the coat hooks, she arched her body outward, stretching what must have been very tight muscles. Repeatedly, she pulled herself up to the coat hook and then back in an odd kind of chin-up, until at last she audibly sighed with relief. All this time, neither of us spoke.
Jadie climbed down from the bench and, still standing upright, turned her attention to pulling down the cuffs of her cardigan and adjusting her clothes. “I know what that sign means now,” she said quietly, not looking over.
“What sign is that?”
“Over by Ninth Street, there’s a brown church, and it’s got that sign out front. It says ‘Safe with God.’ I kept reading it when we went by, and I never knew what it meant.” She smiled. “But I do now. I’m safe in here, aren’t I? I’m safe with you.”
The next afternoon Jadie appeared again after school. I’d ensconced myself early on in the cloakroom in readiness. The latch on the classroom door snicked and then came the quiet shuffling of Jadie’s feet across the classroom, until she finally appeared in the doorway of the cloakroom. I smiled at her, and there was a hint of a smile in return in Jadie’s eyes, although it never reached her lips. Opening my desk drawer, I took out the key.
“Do you want to lock the doors?” I asked.
This brought the broad, easy grin of a secret shared. She snatched the key from my hand and dashed for the far door to secure it, then back to the door beside my desk. She fastened the bit of masking tape over the keyhole, then pulled again at each of the doors to make sure they were fast. Already standing upright by the time she’d finished these tasks, she paused at the door into the classroom to gently caress the housing of the bolt.
“You like that lock,” I said.
“I’ve locked us in,” she replied.
“We’re safe in here with the doors locked.”
Again, Jadie went through the same calisthenics with the coat hooks to stretch her arm and back muscles. Then, in a totally unexpected flash of movement, she shot off around the cloakroom. Circling the room in a counter-clockwise direction, she ran her right hand along the wall as she went. I was surprised to see how rapidly she could move in the small space. Once, twice, three times she circled the room, all the while feeling the walls, the coat hooks, the benches. Then the large vertical pipe at the far end caught her attention. Putting her arms around it, Jadie hugged it, before wrapping her legs around it, too, as if to shinny up. She didn’t, but she remained like that for three or four minutes.
Confounded, I sat in silence. Was this really the same child I’d had in class only a few hours earlier, the one who sat statuelike and never spoke unless spoken to? Was this Jadie?
These afternoon visits quickly became a routine. Almost every day around 4:15 or 4:30 Jadie would
