this?” I asked again, intensifying my voice abruptly, not making it sound angry, not even louder, just intense. And unavoidable. I tapped the picture smartly with the eraser end of the pencil I was holding.
“A girl,” she whispered.
“Pardon?”
“A girl,” she murmured in a hoarse half whisper.
“I see. What’s her name?”
Silence.
“What do you call her?”
“Tashee.” Still the hoarse whisper.
“Tashee? That’s an interesting name. Is she a friend of yours?”
Jadie nodded.
“What’s Tashee doing in this picture?”
“Standing in front of her grandma’s house.”
“Oh, so this is her grandma’s house. It’s pretty, all blue and white like that. Especially the door. You’ve made a beautiful door. And how old is Tashee?”
“Six.”
“Same age as you, then?”
“No, I’m eight. I was seven, but I just had my birthday at Christmastime.”
“I see. Do you and Tashee play together sometimes?”
“No.”
“Have you been to her grandma’s house with her?”
A pause. Jadie regarded the picture. “I don’t know her grandma. She just talked about her sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Jadie touched the figure on the paper with one finger and some of the yellow paint smeared. Lifting her finger, she examined it. “I should have made her hair black.”
“Tashee doesn’t have yellow hair?”
Jadie shook her head. “No. Her hair was black, like Jeremiah’s. Black and straight. I think maybe she was an Indian, but I don’t know for sure.”
“I see.” Then I smiled at her. “I like this picture a lot. Maybe we can put it on the back counter to dry. Then I think maybe we’d better get outside to join the others, don’t you?”
Jadie bent to put the lids back on the paints. I glanced over to see what Reuben was up to. Curled in a fetal position among the cushions, he lay, eyes closed, and gently stroked the skin alongside his temples. “Reuben? Reub, come on. Time to go outside.”
“You didn’t? Holy cow. Holy Toledo. Glen? Glen, did you hear this? She’s been here six hours and she’s got Jadie Ekdahl talking. You hired Wonder Woman.”
Mortally embarrassed, I ducked my head to hide my blazing cheeks. “Just coincidence, really … This was my research specialty …”
The speaker was Alice Havers, fiftyish maybe, small, trim, neatly turned out. She taught kindergarten and had coped with Jadie through two years of school. “So how’d you do it? What’s the secret? What do we do now?”
Lifting my head, I glanced around at the others in the teachers’ lounge. They were all there, from Mr. Tinbergen to Mr. O’Banyon, and they were all watching me. I smiled sheepishly and looked back at my hands. What would be best, I explained mostly to my fingernails, would be to treat Jadie as if she’d always spoken. No big fuss. No lavish praise. I explained how a lot of these children, in my experience, seemed to stay silent more from fear of the amount of attention they’d provoke when they started to talk again than anything else, and so it took a lot of work to gain the courage to try. And others seemed to feel they’d been defeated and somehow lost face by being persuaded to talk again. So it was very important to minimize the attention. After all, it wasn’t the act of speaking that should get the attention, it’s what people said that was important.
There, I thought, I’d said it. Given my lecture. Not even managed to make friends yet; in fact, I didn’t even know everyone’s name, and I’d already made a brilliant impression—Wonder Woman and wiseacre. It was too much for a first day. At the first available moment, I smiled politely, grabbed my coffee cup, and retreated to my room.
About twenty minutes later, Lucy McLaren appeared. “How’re you settling in?”
I rolled my eyes. “I felt like a real dolt down there in the lounge. I wasn’t trying to show off with Jadie, but that’s what it came off sounding like.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lucy said and smiled. “Alice is top class. She wasn’t trying to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that she’s had Jadie for two years, so she knows what Jadie’s like.”
“The whole secret is in being an outsider—an unknown quantity to the child. That and not cosseting the child. You instinctively want to be gentle and supportive with these kids, and that’s generally how the kid gets control. In most cases, you’ll find the elective mute is a master of manipulation.”
Lucy sat down on the tabletop across from my chair. “Yes, I can believe that. Poor June. She was the teacher here before. It was nothing but one big power struggle between her and Jadie. And June tried everything. In the beginning she was really nice, really warm, thinking Jadie was just needing confidence and once she felt secure, she’d speak. Of course she never did. So then June tried star charts, saying Jadie could earn all these privileges, if only she’d say answers to things. Then June got Jadie’s parents to make a tape recording of Jadie at home and tried to prove to Jadie that she knew she could talk. She tried being underhanded, doing things like making Jadie run so that she’d make noise by panting. And this one time …” Lucy paused. “Poor June, she was so thoroughly fed up. This one afternoon, she just said, no, Jadie couldn’t go home until she’d said good-bye and that was that. So there they sat. And gosh, what an ordeal. Jadie did nothing. Just sat there. Picked her nose and that was about it. Poor June was right up the wall, trying to wait her out, but she couldn’t manage it. Five-thirty came and she had to let Jadie go. June had to give in.”
I nodded. “They’re not kids to get into a power struggle with, because they’ve usually had a lot more practice at it than you have. That’s why being a stranger helps, I think. The groundwork for the power struggle hasn’t been laid yet, and if you’re canny and a bit of an actor, you’ve got a chance of making them think the game’s up …” My words trailed off and we fell silent. I lifted my head and looked out across the room to the back window and from there to the playground beyond, white with snow.
Lucy, still on the tabletop, studied her fingernails. I cast a sidelong glance in her direction. She was younger than I was, no more than in her midtwenties, although considerably more formally dressed than was characteristic of our generation. She was pretty in a natural, lively sort of way, although carefully applied makeup gave her more sophistication than beauty. Her dark hair was in a well-cut pageboy. What really caught my eye, however, was the remarkable height of her high heels.
Then
