reassuring smile. “What seems right. You’ll know when the time comes.”
The time didn’t come. Alejo stayed under the tables for the remainder of the morning.
During the drive down to the bus station on Fenton Boulevard, Sheila was lost in pensive silence. “What was the point of that exercise with the rocket ship?” she asked after a long while in thought.
“To help the children experience themselves, I suppose. That’s what creativity is all about, basically.”
“So it was just an exercise in creativity?”
“In expression. Most of the children in this group find it difficult to express their inner feelings, and I’ve found these kinds of activities often provide a good way to start.”
Again Sheila fell silent. We went for five or six minutes without speaking.
“Torey?”
“Yes?”
“I remember you doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“In our class. I remember you taking us on one of those imaginary trips. We went under the sea.” Her face suddenly lit up. “We were all sitting in a circle on the floor. On my knees. I was on my knees. You showed us these pictures of tropical fish in this magazine, and then you told us to close our eyes and we were going under the water. Under the sea to see the fish. And I remember all these fish swimming around, yellow-striped and turquoise, all colors.” Sheila was smiling.
I smiled back and nodded.
“Suddenly, I can remember that. Really clearly. Like it just happened. I can see us sitting there in that circle on the floor. I can see the blackboard behind you.”
“Yes, we did it quite a lot. It was a favorite activity with almost everyone.”
She smiled broadly. “And now I remember it. I can really remember.”
Apparently Alejo felt we were too dangerous a group to deal with, because when he arrived the next morning, he wouldn’t get out of the taxi. Jeff went out and tried to talk him into coming into the school, but Alejo was having none of it. He cowered in the small floor space of the backseat. Jeff, who was not accustomed to his clients so vehemently not wanting to see him, was inclined to let Alejo go home again. He felt Alejo needed more time to work through this matter and would only make positive therapeutic progress if allowed to move at his own speed. I disagreed, feeling that if Alejo left now, he would never come back. Sensing that any possible future of staying with his adoptive family hinged on his learning more appropriate behaviors over the course of the summer, I doubted we could afford that kind of therapeutic luxury. So, despite Jeff’s misgivings and Alejo’s loud protests, I extracted him from the back of the taxi and carried him in.
He was a really vicious little boy. Most children, when I had to deal with them physically, fought back in a reasonably predictable, “fair” way and I was able to hold them and move them without hurting either one of us. I got the odd knock on the shins, but that was about all. Not so with Alejo. When he fought, it was with fierce, no-holds-barred desperation, biting, scratching and squirming so violently that I found it almost impossible to hang on to him.
Both Jeff and Miriam tried to help me move the boy up the steps and into the school, but, if anything, Alejo struggled more as each additional pair of hands took hold of him. In the end, I asked them to let go and just make sure the exits were guarded, in case I accidentally let go of him before we got into the classroom.
Once we reached the classroom doorway, I did release Alejo and he bolted off to the same far corner that had succored him the day before. Dropping down, he slid back behind the stacked chairs and tables and under the teacher’s desk.
“Oh, good,” muttered Jeff and turned to me. “You’re the expert in these kinds of things. Now what?”
What came back to me was my own first encounter with a seriously disturbed child. I was eighteen at the time and a volunteer in a preschool program. There had been a small girl there who, day after day, spent the whole time hiding behind the piano. The director of the program, a marvelous, innovative individual who was to serve as my mentor for several years afterward, had set me the same kind of task. I was to go spend time with this little girl and get her to come out. He didn’t tell me how to do it or what to do, just that this was my task and that he had faith in me. He said, whatever I chose to do, it would make the child’s life better than it was at the moment. Whether or not he realized that the months that followed would change my life forever, I never knew, but my entire career in special education could be traced straight back to that one small girl.
What had affected me indelibly in this encounter had been the director’s faith that I, a rather awkward and self-conscious teenager, had the ability to think for myself, to discern what needed to be done and to do it. Looking at Sheila, I thought how much I wanted to give her that same gift.
“You go with him,” I said to her.
She looked disconcerted. “And do what?”
“He must be terribly frightened. Talk to him. If he wants to come out, great, but otherwise, just use your judgment.”
For a long moment, Sheila regarded me, her expression flickering between puzzlement and uncertainty, then she glanced over at Alejo behind his barricade.
“Remember how you felt when you first came to my class?” I asked. “Talk to him as if he were you, then.”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “So I don’t think I can do that.”
“I’m sure you can.”
Going down on her stomach so that she could see under the tangle of chair and table legs, she spoke softly to him in Spanish throughout the morning. Not fluent myself in the language, I could not understand most of what she was saying, but her voice grew gentle and encouraging.
Alejo didn’t come out. Safe behind his barricade of metal legs, he kept himself curled up and resisted Sheila’s charms. Indeed, I don’t believe he even talked to her that first day. Sheila, however, proved just as persistent. She got up a couple of times and came and joined me, working with the children I had that morning, but she always went back to sit on the floor beside Alejo’s den. I was impressed with her concentration. It was the first time, I think, we had managed to fully engage her.
For the following two weeks, Alejo continued to take refuge among the table legs. Each morning he would arrive, be carried in from the taxi, shoot across the room and under the tables to lurk until extracted again at lunchtime to go home. Jeff and I discussed the merits of hanging on to him when we got him inside the door of the classroom and not allowing him to get into his hideaway, but in the end felt it was perhaps better that he be allowed this form of security. So each day went the same.
Sheila accepted the ongoing challenge of trying to charm Alejo out. For several days she lay on her stomach on the floor and talked to him, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English. She was surprisingly good at keeping up these one-sided conversations. I had never perceived Sheila as particularly garrulous and would not have expected her to tackle the situation in such a manner, but she did, maintaining
