Somebody Else's Kids (24 page)

“Lori. Loooori. Lori-Lori-Lori,” I said. It became a little song toward the end. Rather tuneless, but a gentle little song. Comforting. “Lori. Lori-girl, where are you? Lori-Lori-Lori.”

I began to sing to her. Sang as I watched the clock, the minutes slipping by. Sang to the tune of whatever came into my head. Nursery rhymes, television commercials, hymns, folk songs. Sang them with her name and whatever other words fit. All the time I rocked myself back and forth to soothe my own fears.

A small sound came from under the cabinet.

“Lori, Lori, Lori’s coming out,” I sang to the tune of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”

A shuffling. Her head appeared. The small space under the cabinet was forcing her to come out on her belly, like a snake crawling. I kept singing. She slithered out, and without even rising up from her stomach, she pushed herself forward until she could lay her head in my lap. With a tremendous sigh, she sank down again and closed her eyes.

I sang. She was still on her stomach, her head on my crossed legs, her hands clutching the cloth of my jeans. All her hair was damp, whether from urine or vomit or sweat, I did not know. She looked like some newly hatched creature emerged from an egg. Gently I took the washcloth, now long gone cold, and wiped her face. Still I continued singing, my voice sounding foreign and far-off to my ears.

When I finally ran out of tunes and my throat went dry, a total silence dropped down on us, but for all its vastness it was not uncomfortable. I stroked her hair, the soft skin of her face.

The clock read nearly four. I wondered when Mr. Sjokheim was coming, what I would say to him when he did. Lori never moved from her position on the floor with her head in my lap. Her eyes were still closed, her fingers white from gripping my knees.

“How you doing, Lor?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

No answer.

I reached down and lifted her up. She fell heavily against me as I cradled her in my arms. A powerful feeling swept over me, maternal, instinctual, raw. It clutched at the deep, most secret parts of me with a savage, almost sexual force. The sensation was too primitive to be called an emotion and it overwhelmed me with a desire to protect her.

“I wet my pants,” she whispered into my shirt.

“It doesn’t matter, love.”

Outside, March rain had turned to snow. The room was dim. Lori began to cry, almost noiselessly.

“Hush, hush, baby,” I put my face down until I could feel her warm, wet skin against my cheek. “I love you, Lor, and we’re going to get out of this. You’ll see. I won’t ever let anything happen that we can’t handle. I won’t ever let there be such a time.”

And still she cried.

I
was completely beyond any feelings by the time I reached my car in the parking lot that evening. Absolutely every ounce of energy was used up. Snow continued to fall, really more of a solid rain now than snow, leaving a slush on the roads. Although it was not even five yet, late winter dusk had combined with the storm clouds to make it almost as dark as night. The trauma of the day had drained me, but, as so often happened after a rough day, I was filled with a crawly restlessness. Going home to a dark house, supper from a can and the boob tube just would not do it for me tonight. Instead, I turned the car down a side street and headed for the highway.

I loved to drive. The faint vibration under my fingers as I held the steering wheel was an intoxicant. Out on the highway I went through all the turns and twists, dips and rises of the hilly farm country near town. There was little traffic on this inclement evening. The cold air had settled into the valleys, and when I climbed higher, I left the snow behind to drive in a misty spring rain. About eight miles out of town I turned off onto a gravel road that led toward the mountains. Rolling down the windows on both sides of the car, I let the cool night air pour in around me.

There were no thoughts in my mind as I drove. Only the misty cold made an impression. That and the dark road ahead. The heaviness of the afternoon dissipated into the rain, and I was left with a giddy, almost lighthearted calmness. Still I drove.

At almost 7:30 I looked at my watch for the first time since leaving school. I had gone clear up the road into the mountains, swerving around narrow, gravelly curves pockmarked with mudholes from the rain, and down the other side into a small town about 60 miles away, 74, if one took the highway on the flatlands. On the way through town, I pulled into a drive-in. I still was not hungry, but my head hurt from not eating. After reading over a weather-beaten menu painted on the wall, I settled on a hot fudge sundae, a true extravagance since it cost as much as a hamburger and fries would have. In a burst of sheer, self-indulgent reverie, I sat on a small, white, paint-peeled picnic table in the cold rain and savored every bite.

Still I did not think of the day. I was even aware of not thinking about it, viewing the entire thing in an abstract way, as if it had happened to someone else. I climbed back in my car and drove home.

“Where the hell have you been?” Joe was standing silhouetted in the doorway between the garage and the kitchen. His hands were on his hips.

“Driving.”

“Driving? What the fuck? Do you know what night this is? Where the hell is your head?”

“Jocco, calm down, would you?”

“Calm down? You know what night this is? This is Carol and Jerry’s anniversary. We were supposed to be at their house two hours ago.”

Oh geez. I slammed the door to the car and came on in the house. Apologetically I smiled. “Oh well.”

“Oh well?”

“Cripes, Joe, do you have to repeat everything I say?”

“Oh well? Is that all you have to say for yourself, oh well? Honestly Torey, Carol fixed a whole goddamned dinner for us. And here you are off on some toot. For four and a half fucking hours. Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

“Holy Toledo, Jocco, will you lay off me?
Jesus!”

We were arguing in the kitchen, still, I had not even taken off my coat. Joe stomped into the living room and I followed.

“If you want to know the truth, I had a hell of a day. My whole class is falling apart. One of my kids went right off the deep end. I should have seen it coming but I didn’t and I feel like hell. I had to get out. You wouldn’t have wanted me at any party anyhow.”

“Oh get off your God trip for once. You’re not so goddamn important at that job.”

I glared at him.

Joe’s eyes narrowed and he regarded me for a long moment. “You know what your problem is? You live in dreams. You live your entire life in the world of could-be instead of the world that is. That sounds pretty for some fucking poster but it makes piss-poor living in real life.”

“Somebody’s got to live that way, Joe.”

“Sure. And maybe it’s you. But I for one do not want to spend the rest of my days with a hopeless bunch of crazy people. Maybe you do. Maybe you want to wallow away your entire life like that, but I don’t.” He went to the coat closet and grabbed up his coat. He yanked it on. “I just hope your dreams are enough to keep you warm because nothing else is going to, the way you live. Your muse is going to be all the company you’ll get.”

And then he was gone.

Standing in the middle of the living room floor, I simply stared at the closed door. I felt nothing other than my beating heart. We had had arguments before, plenty of them. But this one was different.

This one, I knew, was the last.

L
ori was not in school the next day. I think I had known she would not be. Still some little place inside me had held hope that all of this had been no more than a bad dream. But 12:40 arrived and Lori didn’t.

The children were subdued. Boo was totally perplexed by Lori’s absence. He kept rising from his chair and going to the door to look out. When he could see nothing in the corridor, he would walk around the room searching, his small, dark face wrinkled in confusion.

“Now what letter is this? What letter is this?” he would call over and over as he wandered. For the first time it occurred to me that phrase may have been a code for Lori. Such irony. Even Boo had Lori confused with reading.

Tomaso was frightened. “Where is she? What happened to her? Why isn’t she here?” he asked constantly. Nothing I said satisfied him. Nor would he leave me alone in other ways. He wanted to be physically close, sitting on my side of the table, standing next to me at recess, remaining within a few feet of me all afternoon.

Only Claudia seemed to maintain any sort of normalcy. Indeed, she became my support. Without my request she managed Boo when Tomaso demanded too much time. She collected work folders, passed them out, picked them up, checked Tomaso’s math.

After recess, after we had completed a modicum of routine work, I suggested we all go sit in the reading corner and I would read aloud for a while. We had been deep into
The Wind in the Willows
over the past week anyhow, and I thought a few extra chapters might take our minds off things.

As we sat down, Tomaso took the pillow Lori normally used and pushed it over to the side. Boo suddenly sprang to his feet. “Ah! Ah! Ah!” he shrieked at Tomaso. Then snatching the pillow up he ran to the door. “Ah-ah-ah!” he cried and pounded on the glass. “What letter is this? What letter is this? Ah! Ah! Aaaaaaaaah!” He turned back to us. There were tears on his cheeks, the first I ever recalled seeing. “Hello, little boy,” he said in a high falsetto. “Hello, little boy. You’re a nice boy, Boo. You’re a nice boy anyway.”

“Are you worried about Lori, Boo?” I asked. I tried to reassure him that she was okay, but he took no notice of my words.

Next Boo ran across the room to his cubby. Out flew a basket of counting beads. Down fell the box of disposable diapers. He scattered bits and pieces of various learning materials as he dug through the contents. Then up it came, in one hand held high over his head, the little booklet of pictures Lori had made him for Valentine’s Day. Boo ran back to the table with it.

He was very much alert, no longer floating in inner space as usual, leaving us with just the shell of a little boy. Tears still flowed down his face, although there was no other indication he was crying. Flattening the booklet out on the tabletop with slow, precise motions, he turned the pages.

“Doggie,” he said determinedly. He looked up at us. Leaving the table he came over to me in the reading corner and grabbed my arm. Yanking me after him, he returned to the book. He held my arm by the wrist and thunked it against the picture. “Doggie. Doggie. What letter is this?” he asked in the lilting, stylized manner that always characterized that phrase.

The page turned. “Kitty. What letter is this? Kitty.” He looked up at me. Then back at the booklet. Every page he went through in the same fashion.

All of this for Lori? I did not know. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the stress had provided enough pressure to trigger some synapse in his brain. There was no way of telling. Even after six months I did not understand Boo well enough to know.

Claudia and Tomaso sat spellbound. Neither said a thing. When he failed to communicate with me, Boo went over to Claudia. I thought he was going to drag her over too, but as he reached for her arm, he stopped midway. He looked at her, stared, as if it were the first time he was really seeing her. Straightening up, he put his hands out and touched her hair on either side of her face, lightly, as a hairdresser might do. His forehead was furrowed as he studied her. Again he touched her face, her hair. “What letter is this?” he asked.

Then he turned and came back to me at the table. Taking up the booklet he paged through it, dropped it, leaned forward on the tabletop, both hands flat, and gazed from one to the other of us. A real little boy was in there behind those eyes; he was seeing us. Desperately, I wished I knew what he wanted.

Boo looked around the room. Slowly, as if the decision had taken much thought, he walked over to the rocking chair. Reaching out, he set it in motion. Then before I knew what he was doing, he removed all his clothes. I was startled. Months had passed since he had done that. Still, there was a difference this time. No silly laughter, no running. He just stood and slipped the clothes off. When he was totally undressed, he climbed in the chair and began to rock. “What’s he doing?” Claudia whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“B-I-N-G-O,” he sang in a clear, light voice. “B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o.”

“Ooh, this is eerie,” Claudia said. She took hold of my arm. “This is like ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

Boo looked over at us. When he saw me he smiled. A very soft, angelic smile, as if he had come a long distance and was genuinely glad to see me. He lifted one hand and waved slightly. “B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o.”

I honestly did not know what to do.

Then Boo solved the matter for me. Although he was singing still, he raised one hand up and fluttered it at the overhead light. The song died away on his lips; he became absorbed in the motion of his hand. I had waited too long. Boo was no longer with us.

Lori did not come the next day either. I had tried to call her father the previous night but there was no answer. Dan Marshall had also tried. None of us on the staff spoke of Lori. Edna and I would run into one another in the hall or the office or the lounge and up would come a façade of pleasure at seeing the other. Talk would go on about seasons and Easter and all manner of nonsense. No talk of Lori. Dan was not much better. He and I spoke of her every time we met, but it was passed between us lightly as one does the weather, idle conversation. I do not know what we were all waiting for. Answers, I guess.