up, I saw she was covered in blood. While the rest of us had been absorbed elsewhere, Tamara had taken the opportunity her privacy afforded her to gouge long lines into the skin along her jaw with a small, sharp stick she had picked up from the mulch put down to cushion falls from the climbing frame. They were not particularly deep cuts, but they bled dramatically.
Then, abruptly, from the group of children with Miriam, frantic screaming started up. Instinct told me it was Violet and I spun around, but it wasn’t. It was Alejo. Seeing Tamara’s blood, he put a hand to either side of his face and screamed and screamed. I ran toward him, but this seemed to make matters worse. Shrieking incoherently, he fled across the grass until he came to one of the other trees and then, like a little monkey, he swarmed right up it and into the branches.
We all stood there, stunned. Even Tamara, Jeff’s handkerchief pressed to her face, gazed up in amazement. Alejo kept climbing until he must have been the better part of fifty feet in the air.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jeff muttered. “What now?”
I glanced around us and then back up in the tree. “Alejo? Are you all right?”
He wasn’t screaming any longer, wasn’t doing anything other than standing on a branch and looking down at us.
“It’s okay. Everything’s fine here. Nothing wrong with Tamara. She just scratched herself. But it’s nothing serious. Why don’t you come on down now?” I called.
“Alejo?” Jeff said. “It’s time to come down.”
He didn’t budge.
“You reckon I can climb up?” I asked Jeff.
“Don’t be stupid, Hayden.”
Miriam was beside us now. She was holding Kayleigh in her arms. “How about the fire department? Do they do these kinds of things?”
I looked around at the others just in time to see Joshua strolling out into the road. “Oh, cripes. Josh? Come here, Josh.” I ran after him. Snagging him by the T-shirt, I hauled him back into the group. It was then I noticed Sheila sitting on the ground. She was unlacing her work boots.
“I can get him,” she said, and before any of us had a chance to protest, Sheila had leaped into the branches and was pulling herself up.
“Oh, God,” Jeff cried, “two of them up there. Why did you let her do that, Hayden?”
“Well, at least we’ve got a doctor on the premises.”
Then silence, as we all watched.
“We’re gonna get sued out of our lives …” I heard Jeff mutter under his breath.
Sheila climbed the tree with no difficulty, shimmying up through the branches as easily as Alejo had done until she reached the one just beneath him. I heard her talking to him, but I couldn’t discern what she was saying.
Minutes went by. All the while I was racking my brains for the best solution, as no doubt Jeff was doing as well. Should we call the fire department? The police? Dr. Rosenthal? Alejo’s parents? Or could we risk just waiting him out? What about the other children? It was only ten forty-five and the program ran for another hour and forty-five minutes. Should Miriam and I take the rest back in and try to pretend everything was normal?
Then, just as I was about to suggest phoning for help, I saw Sheila begin to descend, and within a few moments, Alejo started down behind her. Jeff, Miriam and I all sighed a collective sigh of relief.
“Hey, you’re a hero,” Jeff said to Sheila as we all finally started back to the school. He reached an arm out and slipped it over her shoulder. “You really did great there. I bet you’re proud of yourself.”
Nodding, Sheila ducked to free herself of his touch.
“I hope you are proud of yourself,” I said to Sheila as I drove her down to Fenton Boulevard after lunch. “What you did was very brave.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” She put her hands behind her neck and lifted her hair up off her shoulders. “I didn’t think about it.”
“What did you talk about when you were up there? How did you convince him to come down?” I asked.
“I spoke Spanish to him. I didn’t say anything special, just, like, I knew he was scared and I would help him come down, but I spoke in Spanish.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you spoke Spanish.”
“You don’t know everything about me.”
“No.”
“I mean, like, you have been gone a few years, Torey.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
There was a few moments’ silence, while Sheila, her face turned away from me, watched out the window. Then she added, “All those years in the migrant camp and not learn to speak Spanish? Shit, I would never have had anybody to talk to.”
I didn’t answer. There was a sparky undercurrent to Sheila that showed itself more often than I was comfortable with. Much as she seemed to want to be with me, she also seemed easily irritated with me. Probably just adolescence. I wasn’t particularly gifted with adolescents, so that didn’t help any either. Whatever, I found it mildly upsetting.
Sheila seemed to sense this and came back with a conciliatory tone. “I thought talking in Spanish might make him feel better. Like, more secure. It was just an idea.”
“It was a good one. And did he understand you?”
“I am fluent,” she retorted.
“No, I mean, it will have been a long time since Alejo heard anyone speak Spanish to him, and even then it may have been a dialect.”
“Yeah, he understood me. He came down, didn’t he?”
Silence. I was approaching a major interstate junction on the freeway. There was the omnipresent roadwork and quite a lot of congestion, so for several minutes I concentrated on my driving. Once the traffic eased and I could relax, I listened into the silence.
“You know, Sheila, I get this sort of ongoing feeling that you’re angry with me,” I said.
“Me?” she replied with disbelief.
“If there are things or people I like, you seem to go out of your way to show you dislike them. If I say something, you seem to make a point of proving me wrong. And there’s just this general tone of voice.”
“Shit, you’re just listening to, like, every little thing I say, aren’t you?” she retorted. “And judging it.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Well, you know, I don’t think you’re so great either,” she said. “In that book you wrote, you come off sounding so patient with everything and you’re not, you know.”
I looked over. “What do you mean?”
“You get
