She appeared absorbed in a tradescantia hanging in the window beside our table, its long branches stretching down to a point where she could fiddle with them.
After lunch, I offered to drive her the five miles down to Fenton Boulevard, where she could catch a direct bus back to Broadview.
“So, what did you think?” I asked, once we were alone in the car together.
Sheila was silent for several moments. “I don’t like your partner very much. What’s all this crap about regression motivating neuroses and stuff?”
“Jeff’s a Freudian. You’ve got to excuse him that.”
“It’s crap. Why doesn’t he just talk English?” Sheila asked.
“Freud’s ideas have had very wide-ranging applications. While a lot of people don’t agree with all of them anymore, they’ve still done a great deal to help us understand how minds might work. And people like Jeff, who have really studied the theories, seem to make good progress using them.”
Sheila raised her lip in an expression of disgust.
We went a few moments in silence before I looked over again. “So, Jeff excepted, what did you think? Did you like it? Did you enjoy working with Kayleigh?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Why doesn’t she talk?” she asked, her head turned away from me to watch out the window. “And not Jeff’s kind of explanation. Not ’cause she’s got an anal fixation or something.”
“I don’t know why.”
“I told her that when I was her age, I didn’t talk either,” Sheila said.
“Did Kayleigh respond to that?” I asked.
“Dunno. She just kept coloring.” There was a pause. “I wanted to ask you about that other kid. The kid with the Spanish name.”
“Alejo?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s very difficult at school. He fights with the other kids all the time, quite a vicious little boy, and he does very poorly at his work. We’re trying to determine at the clinic whether this is as a result of psychological problems or a mental handicap.”
“Jeff said he’s adopted.”
“Yes. He’s from Colombia.”
“Where are his real parents?” Sheila asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. He was abandoned. The report I read said that someone had found him living in a garbage can and had then taken him to these nuns who ran the orphanage.”
Forehead puckered, Sheila looked over. “Really?”
“Apparently there are a lot of street kids in some of these South American cities. It’s a serious problem in some places.”
“His folks abandoned him in a garbage can?”
“Maybe he was just sheltering in one. I don’t know. The report’s pretty scant and probably about fifth-hand.”
Sheila was pensive a long moment, before turning back. “Did I hear you guys saying that the parents he’s got now were going to send him back to where he came from?”
“I don’t know. There’s some talk of it. They’re an older couple, both professionals, not very used to accommodating children, and he’s been quite a handful.”
“Can they really do that?” Sheila asked. “Just send him back to Colombia, like he was damaged goods or something?”
“I guess.”
Then came silence. Plagued by red lights and roadwork, I wasn’t making very speedy progress toward Fenton Boulevard. Sheila leaned her head against the window and gazed out. She looked tired. Had it been the rigors of the morning? Or had she come tired? The thought suddenly struck me that I was taking the stability of Sheila’s home life for granted. Sneaking a look, I studied her. God, that orange hair!
“I think … well, I guess I can see now what got you attracted to this kind of work,” she said, her voice quiet and rather distant-sounding. “’Cause you hear about these things happening to people, and they are so unfair that they make you feel you just got to do something. That’s my reaction, anyway.” She paused. “Well, that’s one reaction.”
“What’s the other?” I asked.
“I just want to put my hands over my eyes and my fingers in my ears and stop it from getting in. I mean, I already know the world’s bad. I’m not sure I can stand knowing it’s really worse.”
Our first “incident” happened the next morning. The school was across the street from a small park. It wasn’t an elaborate place, but there were swings and a large wooden structure built for climbing and plenty of room for running around. What made it particularly hospitable on a hot summer’s morning were the trees. There were a dozen or more, with enormous trunks and long, overhanging branches. Some particularly forward-thinking person in the parks department had had attractive wooden seating built around three of the trees nearest the play equipment.
We decided to take our juice and cookies outside and let the children play on the swings and climbing frame during their break time. David and Mikey thought this was wonderful and went tearing off at such a rate that Jeff had to run after them and catch them before they went into the street.
Although I had agreed happily when Jeff had suggested that we take the children over to the park at break time, I realized the moment David and Mikey ran off that it was a mistake. We were all too new to each other. But by that time, we were already underway.
Right from the beginning, it was small-scale chaos of the sort that kids adore and grown-ups abhor. Joshua went into a self-stimulated frenzy on the swings. Jessie just stood on the grass, arms out, and spun dizzyingly around and around. David, Mikey and Alejo immediately fell into playing some dreadfully noisy war game that required an enormous amount of tearing around and much shouted large-artillery fire. Violet appeared to get rather turned on by this. I couldn’t tell if she simply wanted to join in and did not have the appropriate social skills to get the boys to include her, or whether she found it all genuinely sexually stimulating. Whichever, she began to indulge in open masturbation, while shouting out cheers and gunfire noises to the boys as they tore by.
Needless to say, our break time was quickly turned into a rowdy, deafening affair. Only Kayleigh and Tamara did not join in. Clinging to Miriam’s hand, Kayleigh watched the other children apprehensively. Tamara, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly frightened by the mayhem, but she withdrew away from all of us. Taking her paper cup of juice and her cookies, she went off into a cubby-hole formed by tires on the underside of the climbing structure.
After fifteen minutes, Jeff and I went to herd everyone back together, while Miriam sat down on one of the benches and tried to keep hold of those we had captured. Sheila proved fairly hopeless. Whether it was the noise or the sudden hyperactivity around her, I don’t know, but she simply froze in the midst of it all and the more I shouted at her to go get one child or another, the more solidly she seemed to be rooted to her spot.
One by one, we rounded them up, until we only had David, Mikey
