I replied.
“You’re kidding. You mean he shits in his pants?” she asked.
I smiled.
“Oh, gross. You didn’t tell me this. I’m not going to have to change him, am I?”
“We’ll see.”
“We won’t see,” she replied. “We shall close our eyes!”
I laughed.
The first child to arrive was Violet. She was a large girl for her age, although not really fat, with pallid skin and pale, crumpled hair. Her clinical diagnosis was childhood schizophrenia, manifested by an obsessional interest in ghosts and vampires. She believed all the people around her were either vampires or the victims of vampires, hence, ghosts, and she had much trouble with invisible ghosts talking to her, teasing her and telling her awful things.
“Shhh,” she said to me, as her mother brought her in. “I saw him in the hallway, the one with the rainbow-colored hair. He had his ghost cat with him.”
“Sheila, could you show Violet where to sit down?” I asked.
“Not going with her!” Violet shrieked. “She’s got fangs!”
Eyes wide, Sheila looked over at me.
“Here, I’ll take her,” said Jeff. She was his client and when she saw a face she recognized, Violet relaxed visibly.
Just then, in whooshed Mikey. Mikey was six, short and stout, and capable of moving at light-speed. This gave him the appearance more of a ball than a boy, rather like the sort used in pinball. Zip! Bang! Whoosh! He careered around the classroom, leaving all of us stunned in his wake. His mother looked only too relieved to be rid of him for the morning.
Next came Kayleigh, my elective mute. In contrast to Violet, Kayleigh was tiny for her age, her small features overpowered by long, thick bangs and a heavy mass of hair. It was in the back of my mind that Kayleigh might be a good child for Sheila to work with individually, as Sheila herself had been electively mute when she had come into my class at six. Moreover, Kayleigh had a sweet, loving nature, which made her easy to like and pleasant to work with. I was keen for Sheila to enjoy the challenge of being with us and longed for her to understand my own attachment to such children; so Kayleigh seemed an ideal choice.
“Sheila, do you suppose you could take Kayleigh over to the table and show her some of our toys?”
Sheila just stared at the girl.
“Kayleigh loves putting puzzles together. Perhaps you could help her do one while we’re waiting for the rest of the children to arrive.”
Uncertainly, Sheila held out her hand. Kayleigh responded with a delighted smile.
Joshua and David arrived together in a car pool driven by Joshua’s father. Of all of our children, Joshua was the most severely handicapped. It was he we had the diapers for. Diagnosed at eighteen months as autistic, Joshua neither spoke nor engaged people in any other way.
David was Joshua’s opposite number. Smily and gregarious, he could worm his way into the coldest heart. And he was such a lady-killer with his big blue eyes and curly blond hair. In truth, I think he was one of the most appealing-looking children I had come across. He was also one of the most disturbed.
Alejo came next. He was a new child at the clinic, having started only at the beginning of April, and he was seeing Dr. Freeman, so I didn’t know him personally. His parents, a wealthy professional couple who had been childless through sixteen years of marriage, had decided to adopt a Third World orphan when it finally became apparent to them that they would not bear a child of their own. On a trip to Colombia, they found Alejo, then age four, in an orphanage run by a group of nuns. Adopted and brought to the United States, he had now been with his current family for almost three years, but he had never really settled into his new suburban surroundings. He was restless and aggressive and, although he had learned English, he spoke only rarely, preferring his fists to do his talking. His school performance had been uniformly poor and there was now a question of whether his deprived early life had caused permanent brain damage. Alejo himself was a small, rather unattractive boy with thick black-rimmed glasses. He had the flat features of the native South American Indians and a thatch of unruly dark hair that fell forward into his face. He appeared shy in the midst of so many strangers and clung tightly to his father’s hand until Jeff came and knelt down beside him.
Behind Alejo came Jessie. A small black girl with her hair meticulously corn-rowed, she, like Joshua, was autistic. She was not as severely afflicted as Joshua and could talk after a fashion. Recognizing this as a school, she ran past us all to the table, sat down in one of the chairs and began drumming loudly with her hands while shouting out the alphabet song.
Last to arrive was Tamara. Of Mediterranean lineage, with long black hair and huge, soulful dark eyes, she reminded me rather uncannily of the opera singer Maria Callas, which gave me trouble the entire eight weeks in keeping her name straight. Now eight, Tamara had been coming to the clinic for over two years, ever since her parents had first noticed the myriad of small cuts along her arms. Despite intensive therapy, Tamara continued her obsession with self-mutilation. Consequently, she arrived that warm summer’s morning wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and jogging-suit bottoms to cover the myriad of sores and scabs on her arms and legs and to discourage her attempts to create more.
So we started. Like all first days, it was a bit chaotic; however, we had planned well to provide an engaging but low-key morning. Thus, there were no disasters.
Sheila befriended Kayleigh, or perhaps it was Kayleigh who befriended her. Whichever, Sheila spent most of the morning with the little girl, helping her with her activities, taking her to the toilet, finding good cookies for her at snack time. As part of my ongoing therapy with Kayleigh, I had insisted she speak to Sheila from the onset, which she did with only a little urging.
This is right, I thought, watching the two of them together at one of the tables, their heads bent over what they were doing. Sheila was talking to her, pausing occasionally to glance over at the child. Seven years earlier, she had been that small girl. There was something deeply rewarding in seeing her come full circle.
Indeed, as I stood there surveying the group, I became aware of how very happy I felt at that particular moment. The morning was going well; the program was off to a good start. The children were challenging but engaging. Jeff was my absolute favorite colleague to work with in the whole world. When we were getting fired up, the two of us could operate as one mind in two bodies, challenging, growing, building upon one another’s ideas so easily that everything felt possible to me. Miriam, whom I had not known previously, was full of energetic initiative and had a far better sense of organization than either Jeff or I. Consequently, all the small things, like finding the paper cups at break time, happened as they should. Best of all, there was Sheila, back in the classroom with me and it was the first day, with all the future stretching ahead of us. I regarded her. It was Sheila there. For the first time since we had been reunited, I felt certain of that.
After the morning ended and all the children had gone home, the four of us went out to lunch. Miriam, who lived locally, suggested a whole-food restaurant down by the lake and so we found ourselves on benches gathered around a wooden plank table in the cool interior of the restaurant.
We
