The Tiger's Child (26 page)

I was in the midst of a play therapy session with a small, nonverbal four-year-old named Bobby. He was a difficult case, referred to me by one of the other psychiatrists for evaluation, because no one could discern why he didn’t talk; and I did not anticipate being disturbed, as everyone knew I was videotaping the session. Nonetheless, just as I was eliciting some excited babbling from Bobby by blowing soap bubbles, my beeper went off. I tried to ignore it, but when I didn’t respond, it went off again.

Irritated, I rose and went to the phone on the wall in the therapy room and dialed the front office with one hand, while trying to turn off the video camera with the other. Bemused by my antics, Bobby threw his security blanket over the camera to produce a woolly ending to our taping.

“Well, it’s just me who’s beeping you,” said Rosalie, who worked in the front office. “We’ve just gotten a fax in for you and I think you ought to come down and have a look at it.”

“Right now? I’m in therapy,” I said.

“Yeah, Torey, I think you should come right now.”

Bringing Bobby with me, I went down to the office at the front of the building and took the fax from my mail hatch. I read it.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

The world’s not made for some of us, Torey. The little prince found this out. So did Cleopatra and I think I have too. There’s nothing here for me. I’m from some other place. I don’t belong here. The world’s more full of weeping than I can understand.

Thanks for trying. And don’t try to fax me back. I’m doing this from a store and I don’t want an answer.

Love, Sheila

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, when I’d read it.

“Yeah,” Rosalie replied. “When I saw it, I thought you’d better have this quick.”

“I’ve got to get ahold of her.” Scanning the paper, I noticed up at the very top in tiny type the fax-sender information. Grabbing the telephone on Rosalie’s desk, I rang information. The fax number
was identified as coming from northern California, and within moments, I had the telephone number of the store from which Sheila had sent the fax. I phoned immediately.

“Hello, yes, you’ve just sent a fax to me. It would have been sent by a young girl. Sixteen. Is she still there? This is very important. I must talk to her.”

The person who had answered put the telephone on hold and what felt like a hundred years passed, while I waited. Then a click and human sounds followed.

“Hullo?” It was Sheila’s voice.

“S
heila? Sheila, it’s me. It’s Torey.”

There was no response. She was still there. I could hear the soft sound of her breathing carrying across the miles between us.

“Sheil? Are you okay?”

“How did you find me?”

“Listen to me. Are you okay?” I asked again. “Where are you? What is this place I’m calling?”

“It’s the Copyprint store,” she answered. There was a numb quality to her voice. I think I had genuinely startled her by tracing the fax so quickly and she didn’t know quite how to respond.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“No, Sheila, don’t put the phone down. Please? Please?”

“Just leave me alone, okay?” There were tears in her voice. I could hear them in the faint abruptness of her breathing, but she was struggling to keep them subdued.

“No, Sheila. Talk to me. Come on. Stay on the line a bit. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

Silence.

“What’s been happening?”

A sharp intake of air.

“Sheil, don’t hang up on me.”

“I’m not going to,” came the very small voice at the other end.

“Things not been going very well?”

“No.”

“What’s happened?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

“I can’t talk here. Everybody’s listening.”

“Well, I want to talk to you. I do. Can you find another phone? No … wait, don’t hang up. Wait. Let me think of something.”

“I can’t find my mom, Torey,” she said. “I’ve been looking for her and looking for her and I can’t find her.”

“Oh, lovey.”

“Oh fuck, I’m going to cry. Oh, no. I don’t want to cry here. Oh, no.”

“Sheil, I’m going to come and get you.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t do anything, okay? All right? And I’ll come and get you. I’ll bring you home. Can you tell me where you are? Where are you staying?”

Tears thickened her voice again. “I’m not staying anywhere. I’m all by myself.”

“Okay, well, listen, stay where you are. I’ve got the fax number. Let me make some arrangements and I’ll fax them back to you there. But stay there and wait for me. And
don’t do anything.
All right? Promise me?”

She was crying. Whether from anguish or relief, I couldn’t tell, but through her tears she promised she’d stay at the Copyprint place until I faxed back.

The next hour was frantic. She was in a relatively small town in northern California, which wasn’t served by a commercial airport. In fact, it was a good two hours’ drive away from San Francisco, which was the nearest place to have more than one daily flight from my city. And the flight from here to there was two hours. That made four hours from departure the very least I could expect. Then came disaster. We were approaching the Thanksgiving Day weekend; so when I rang the airport to book a seat, I discovered all the economy seats were booked, not only on the next flight out, but also on the one after that. This meant I wouldn’t be able to leave until the middle of the following day at the earliest. This was awful. I felt it was critical that I did go get her, rather than rely on her in her unstable state to make her way back here by herself, especially as she had never flown before and was unfamiliar with the general procedures surrounding air travel. I didn’t trust how she might react if I tried to call in outside help, such as the police or Social Services, from the California community she was in.

Then, right in the midst of my panic, my beeper went off again. “Curse this thing,” I muttered at Jules. Whipping it off, I threw it across the desktop.

Jules regarded it, still beeping, then me. “Don’t you think you should answer it?” he asked.

Wearily, I phoned down to Rosalie, who transferred the caller. “Help, help! I’m dying! Save me, Doctor! Quick! An infusion of cabernet sauvignon and T-bone steak!” the caller cried in a weak voice. “Tonight at six?”

“
Hugh!
Honestly. You
know
you’re not supposed to do this.”

He was totally unrepentant, as he always was, but it sounded so good to hear his voice that I couldn’t be angry. I told him the whole horrible story with Sheila and how I felt it was critical that I got to her as soon as possible, but how impossible that was turning out to be.

Hugh listened thoughtfully. “Book a first-class seat out,” he replied. “They won’t be full.”

I snorted. “I can hardly afford economy, much less first class, Hugh. And I certainly couldn’t bring her back that way. Even if I can find seats, and I can’t. It’s even worse coming back. It’s the run up to Thanksgiving that’s doing it. There’s just nothing there.”

“I’ll pay for it,” he said. “I’ll get you a ticket. Then maybe you can rent a car. You’ll need to rent a car anyway, to get up to her. Then you can just drive home from there. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it, okay?”

Stunned by the generosity of his offer, I didn’t know quite what to say.

“Well, she’s an okay kid,” he replied to my silence. “And after all, what’s a few bucks in life?”

I told Sheila to meet me in the local McDonald’s, as it was about the only place I could think of that would be open late at night, relatively safe for her to wait in and a location I could easily find in a strange town. Hugh financed a first-class ticket to San Francisco for me and I made arrangements to rent a car from there, drive up the coast and pick Sheila up before driving home, a journey of over eight hundred miles.

It never crossed my mind not to do this for Sheila. Always a bit impulsive, I was inclined to get myself into what Hugh termed “grand acts,” but I don’t think I could have comfortably done otherwise. I always felt a sort of intuitive certainty about my part in a given situation, which, although it made me tend to act first and think later, seldom put me on a course of action that I later regretted. Going personally to get Sheila felt right in this instance, so right, in fact, that I never contemplated any alternatives.

It was ten-fifteen when I pulled under the bright-yellow glow of the McDonald’s arches. I could see Sheila through the window, a lone figure hunched over a table. Turning off the ignition, I got out.

She didn’t rise when I came through the door, simply lifted her head and watched me. There was a faint smile on her face, an expression of what I
took to be relief. Coming to the table, I bent down and hugged her to me. She came willingly, clutching the folds of my wool jacket.

Slipping down on the bench opposite, I regarded her. She was filthy, filthy in the old sense of the word, as she had been when she had first come into my class. Her uncombed hair hung in long greasy strands. The dirt was worn in around her fingernails and up the creases of her skin. Her clothes were rumpled and stained. And just as in the old days, she stank.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve had some French fries. I thought I better eat something or they’d kick me out.”

I myself wasn’t hungry. I’d eaten on the plane in a manner quite unlike what I’d been accustomed to and Big Macs were rather an anticlimax, but I went over to the counter and bought one for each of us, along with a large order of fries. I’d had the foresight to bring a thermos flask for coffee to fortify me on the long drive ahead, so I had the girl behind the counter fill that for me, while I got Sheila a milk shake.

Sheila devoured her hamburger and quickly laid into mine, when I said I wasn’t hungry for it. Again I was drawn back across the years to see her as she had been, a desperately hungry six-year-old, using both hands to stuff her school lunch into her mouth. There wasn’t much more finesse tonight and I guessed she hadn’t seen much food in the past few days.

“So, where have you been living?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Wherever I could.”

“What kind of money have you got?”

“At the moment? Eighty-five cents. I started out with twenty-three fifty, after I bought my bus ticket, and I’ve been trying to be careful with it, but …” She smiled apologetically.

And so we chatted, while she ate, as if nothing at all had happened. I found out from her that she had used my telephone that Saturday she was over to get bus schedules and prices. She described how she had managed to scrimp out the money she needed from the allowances given the children at the ranch. It was fascinating hearing all this, because it showed such intricate planning, and even I had not suspected anything. What we didn’t talk about, however, was why she’d done it and what had come of it. Pulling myself back to observe objectively as we spoke, I looked for the signs of suicidal desperation, which I reckoned were still there.

When she had finished, I glanced at my watch. “Well, I suppose we had better be on our way.”

Sheila just sat.

I regarded her.

“I don’t want to go back to the ranch, Torey. If you’ve come all this way to take me back there, you might as well have stayed home, because I’m not going. It’s a dead zone there and I’m finished with it.”

“No. We’ll work something out. Your dad’s got a place in Broadview. He’s settled …”

Sheila still sat.

“Come on, lovey, let’s go.”

She let out a great, long sigh and let her shoulders drop. Then, wearily, she hoisted herself up from the seat and came with me.

Pulling the car out of the McDonald’s, I sped off down the main road and out onto the highway. I love driving, particularly long-distance driving, for the sense of relaxed autonomy it gives me. When I really get going, it’s almost a transcendent experience, giving me the feeling of expanding into a state of unhindered freedom. Having managed to accomplish the most important part of my mission—getting Sheila into the car to come home with me—I was in a superb mood.

Beside me, Sheila sat slumped in her seat. She didn’t say anything for several miles. Initially I thought she was going to go to sleep, because it was obvious she was very tired, but she didn’t. She just sat, elbow on the car door, hand bracing her cheek, eyes on the road ahead.

The road was absolutely empty. Having chosen the most direct route home, I wasn’t on the freeway, but on a minor highway heading due east. At that hour, there was simply no one else driving. In fact, for long stretches there were no lights anywhere, not even from farm buildings.

In the confined space of the car I could perceive Sheila’s pain much more clearly than I’d been able to in the plastic cheerfulness of McDonald’s. It was almost a physical thing. I would have expected to touch it, had I reached out my hand, and for many miles, I didn’t know what would be the best thing
to do. Sit in silence? Encourage her to talk? Or maybe just carry on, as if this were all a perfectly ordinary thing to be speeding through the night eight hundred miles from home, and wait for it all to come out in its natural course.

Sheila took down the hand bracing her cheek and folded her arms across her chest. Blowing the hair out of her face, she turned her head and looked over at me. “How come you did this? Came all this way out and got me?”

“Because I love you. Simple as that.”

She turned from me, looked out the window at the deep darkness and remained so for a long time. When finally she turned back, I could see tears on her cheeks. They glimmered wanly in the pale green glow of the dashboard lights.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked.

She shook her head. Bringing a hand up, she wiped away the tears, but they came again. And again. She grew visibly upset, a sorrowful anger erupting when she couldn’t stanch the tears.

“There are tissues in my handbag,” I said and pointed into the backseat.

“I don’t want this to happen. I don’t
want
to cry.”

“It’s okay, lovey. I don’t mind.”

“I
do
mind,” she retorted. “I don’t
want
to cry. If I let myself start, I’m never going to stop.”

“That’s been the fear for a long time, hasn’t it?”

She nodded and the tears came harder, but she still fought against them. “I’m so fucking angry! I don’t want to give in. I don’t want to cry. It just makes me weak.”

“No, not weak.”

“It’s not fair! Not right.
You
shouldn’t be here. It should have been my mom saying all this to me. Not some teacher.” Lifting her head, she looked over at me. “Excuse the term, Torey, but that’s all you are. Where are the people who are
supposed
to love me?”

I regarded her.

“Where the fuck
are
they? Where’s my mom? Where’s my dad, for that matter? Why’s it always got to be people like you who do these things for me? Why have my parents never taken care of me? Am I that bad?” And the tears overwhelmed her. Falling into noisy, inelegant sobs, she slumped against the shoulder strap of her seat belt and wept.

I didn’t say anything. There come those times when words would seem as if they were a good idea, but in reality they are too paltry for the job.

I remembered another time like this. Drawn back across the years, I was no longer in the nighttime darkness of the car, but in the daytime darkness of the small book closet at school with Sheila, who was weeping in my arms. She’d been a fierce little tiger for so long that they had been the first tears I’d seen her shed, although the school year was almost over. She’d always feared the abyss beneath her tears.