Lost, Almost Page 3
Mrs. Hayes’s office had two rooms, a waiting room with a big square table where kids could sit in a group, and a smaller inner room with her desk and two big, soft armchairs. She’d been sitting with me in the outer room, periodically asking me questions as though phrasing things slightly differently might pierce the wall I had put up, then letting me be silent a while before asking another one. Did I dislike him? Had I wanted to hurt him? Did I understand that I had, in fact, hurt him? Did I understand that hurting people was wrong? Did I ever want to hurt myself? How did I feel now?
She led my parents to the inner room. She had a little machine that she switched on that blocked out some of the sound, but if I sat very very still and tried not to make any noise with my breathing, I could make out some of their words.
“A more thorough evaluation,” Mrs. Hayes said. Then, a moment later, “The disciplinary process.”
“She’s never done anything like this,” I heard my mother say. She was upset, her voice high and tight; it carried better than my father’s or Mrs. Hayes’s.
“Permanent record,” said my father’s voice. I thought about the boy, taken away in an ambulance. It had seemed to me that he was going to be all right; he’d sat up, before they led me away, and looked around. I tried to think about what it would mean if he was not okay, what would happen to him, and that it would be my fault, but I couldn’t imagine it. Everyone had always been okay.
The three adults came out of the small office. “I thought we could all talk for a few minutes,” said Mrs. Hayes. I said nothing. She tipped her head and looked at me. “Katie? Is that all right with you?” I didn’t want to do it but it didn’t seem that it was up to me, despite the fact that she was asking, so I nodded.
“And what about Mr. Franks? She asked. “Is it okay if he comes too?” I nodded again. Mrs. Hayes disappeared into the back room again to call the principal. My parents took the chairs on either side of me at the table. They were not full-sized chairs, and my parents looked funny sitting in them. I wanted to laugh at them, with their knees up high, but I knew that I should not, that it would make things worse for me. Finally, my mother softened a little; she reached out and ran her hand over my hair, then sighed. I wanted to tell them both that I hadn’t meant it, that I was sorry. I wanted it to be just the three of us, like the meeting we’d had at home about the rules for the oven and the stove after I had set off the smoke alarms trying to make grilled cheese sandwiches for my brother and me one night when my parents had worked later than they’d planned, but they kept their eyes trained straight ahead, above me.
“Is there anything else you want to tell us about what you did?” Mrs. Hayes asked when everyone had taken a seat at the table.
“No,” I said softly.
“We feel,” said Mr. Franks, “that this would be better dealt with as a treatment issue, rather than a disciplinary matter. So if you’ll agree—” he was talking to my parents now, not to me—“we can arrange for an evaluation and recommendation, and if you’ll cooperate with the treatment plan, we will work with the doctor to get her back to class as soon as everyone agrees it is safe. We will consider it a medical absence.” He turned to me. “That is, being out sick,” he said. “No record, nothing in the file, just like if you’d had pneumonia. Can we all agree to that?” I tried to understand what he was saying, but he was talking so fast, and not to me.
“Am I going away?” I said quietly.
“I have in mind a doctor we know here in the district,” Mrs. Hayes said. “And we will just see what he thinks.”
My parents had not looked directly at me since they’d arrived, but now they both did. I could feel their questions: Had I really done it? Was there something I wasn’t saying? Had I gone crazy? Was I really their daughter? Yes, I wanted to tell them, it’s me, it’s me.
“The alternative?” my father asked.
“It’s an automatic one-week suspension for a first offense,” Mr. Franks said. “It goes in any record we transmit, to the high school, to any other school you’d transfer to. And either way, we can’t stop the boy’s parents pursuing it. But that loses a lot of its force if you treat it this way.” He took a breath. “In my opinion,” he added.
My parents looked at each other. My father gave a tiny nod, and then my mother did too, as though by limiting the incline of their heads to just a few degrees they would make it invisible to me.
“All right, then,” my mother said.
“All right, Katie?” said Mrs. Hayes.
“I’m not crazy,” I said.
“We didn’t say that, sweetheart,” said Mrs. Hayes. “Don’t worry. The doctor will just talk to you, and ask you some questions. He’ll help you feel better. It will be just fine.”
“We’ll take you,” said my mother. She touched my hair again, this time for a little longer. “You’ll be all right,” she said, though she did not sound convinced. All of this must have been far beyond their experience, any kind of misbehavior, any suggestion that something was wrong in the mind.
I expected them to punish me, but they did not. My father dropped my mother and me at the house, then went out to the store. He came back with a frozen pizza and two pints of ice cream. He was putting them away when the school bus stopped outside our house and my little brother climbed off.
“Why’s Katie home?” he said when he came in.
“She came home sick today,” my father said, and my brother accepted that without question.
My appointment with the school-sanctioned psychiatrist was at eleven the next morning. His office was two exits up the interstate, in a nondescript building that could have been anything. Only my mother went with me; my father went to work.
There is not a lot to say about the appointment itself. The psychiatrist was tall and thin and wore a green turtleneck sweater, and he made my mother wait in the waiting room even though she very much wanted to come in with me. He already knew what had happened, and he asked me a lot of questions, some of the same ones I’d been asked the day before but mostly new, different ones, which I tried to answer truthfully. I kept looking at the clock on the desk, thinking about school, about where I would have been at each of the moments. I would much rather have been in school; I had the distinct feeling that I was missing things that could be important, that even in the one afternoon and one morning I had missed so far, I was falling behind.
We talked for almost half an hour, and then the psychiatrist sent me out into the waiting room and my mother went in. Here, there was a thick, heavy door between the office and the waiting room, and the two couches were on the other side of the room, so I couldn’t hear a thing.
“What did he say to you?” I asked when we left the office and stood blinking in the sunlight in the parking lot. There was a frozen yogurt store a few doors down and the smell of the cones baking was heavy in the air.
“Let’s talk about it later,” my mother said, “when your father is home.”
“I’m not crazy,” I said. “I want to go back to school.”
“Nobody said you were crazy,” my mother said. She unlocked the car and we got in and drove home. I couldn’t tell if I was in trouble, or if they were genuinely worried, if they thought something was terribly wrong. Now I wonder if perhaps they were simply overwhelmed, paralyzed by the unfamiliarity of a contingency they had never accounted for in all their endless planning of our lives. My mother appeared neither angry nor worried. I wondered if the boy was all right. I hadn’t heard any news but I didn’t want to ask, thinking they would take it as a sign of something, that I cared too much, or didn’t care enough. Everything I did or said had become a potential symptom.
I didn’t have to wait long; my father was there when we pulled into the driveway. My parents went straight into their bedroom and closed the door. I stood in the kitchen. It was twelve thirty-five; lunch period would be over, and sixth period would have just started. English. We were reading stories that had come from The Odyssey, but it wasn’t The Odyssey itself; w
e’d been assigned a thin book with an orange cover called The Children’s Homer, which I found vaguely offensive. Still, I didn’t want to fall behind. I had just started down the hall toward my bedroom to see what I had in the way of books—they hadn’t given me a chance to collect my things, and had sent only what was already in my backpack, in the classroom where we’d left them before recess—when my parents emerged.
“Well, Katherine,” said my father. “You understand, don’t you, that we’ve got to cooperate with the treatment from the doctor you saw today? That it’s the only way to avoid suspension from school and an entry on your permanent record?”
I nodded.
“The doctor told me,” said my mother, “and I just told your father, that there’s a place he’d like you to go, a different school from the one where you go now.”
“For good?” I said.
“Not for good,” she said. “Maybe just for the rest of the year.”
“I’ll get behind,” I said. “I’ll miss school.”
“It’s all right,” my father said. “It’s still school. It’s just a different school.”
“There will be other kids there who are confused about things,” my mother said. “Kids who have had problems like the one you had yesterday. They know how to help.” They were switching off, leaving no space between their comments into which I could have inserted an objection, a question, a sob.
“You might actually like it,” my father said. “Some of the kids will be very smart, just like you.”
“And then when that’s done you’ll come back to school here, just like before,” my mother said, “and it will be like none of this ever happened.” I might have asked them what the place was called, where it was, at least, but it seemed to me like something that was not actually going to happen. It wasn’t real. None of this was real.
“We can talk about it more tonight,” said my father.
“We’ve got to make some calls,” my mother said. “And I have to go to the lab, at least for a little while.”
“You can have lunch with your grandparents,” my father said. “You can spend the afternoon there, and tomorrow morning, we can see what you’ll need for the new school. They said you can start on Monday.” I had never been to my grandfather’s house by myself; we had always gone together, the whole family, or at the very least, my brother and me. I didn’t know what I was going to do if he was angry, and I had no one.
In the car on the way to my grandparents’ house, I wondered if anyone at school was going to miss me. There was Tillie Baker, who always sat next to me because our names were together in the alphabet. She would notice, at least, but I wouldn’t have called her a friend. I don’t know if I would have called anyone there a friend.
I realize now that what must have seemed like eagerness on my parents’ part to get rid of me was probably something more like relief at the idea that this problem—of course it was a problem, their daughter having thrown a rock at another child’s head—could be handed off to a set of professionals, who could provide a cure, with no permanent damage, and no need on their part to engage in an extended conversation about feelings. But it felt, at the time, like two of the only three people in the world (I would have counted my brother as the third) who actually cared about me were washing their hands of me, and it was this, more than the prospect of going away or falling behind, that pierced me.
My grandfather was not home when we arrived; he had gone to the lab for a meeting. My grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of dog-eared books and a carafe of coffee. I had always liked her well enough. She was the only grandmother I’d ever had, my mother’s parents both having died before I was born. I was barely in the door when my parents took off.
“Would you like to talk?” my grandmother asked me. I shook my head.
“About something else, I mean?”
“I’m already behind on homework,” I said.
“Did your school send it over, then? Last night?”
“No,” I said. “I just know where we were.”
“I see,” she said. “Here, sit. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve never had any.” She stood—she was a tall woman—and retrieved a chipped white mug from a cupboard.
“I’ll call them if you like,” she said, pouring a steaming cup from her carafe. “I’ll go over and collect whatever you’re missing when your grandfather gets home. What do you say to that?”
“We’ll probably start in a different place at the new school,” I said.
“Well, in the mean time,” she said. “Nothing like a little hard work to take your mind off your troubles.” I thanked her and took a sip of the coffee. It tasted about how it smelled. The bitterness was unpleasant, but I liked it. “He won’t be long,” she said. My grandfather was mostly retired, though he still ended up at the lab several times a week, whether because they needed him or because he couldn’t stay away, I never really knew.
“Okay,” I said.
“Is there anything else you need for now?” I realized that I wasn’t sure what, or how much, my parents had told them about what had happened, about what was planned.
“The boy,” I said. “Is he okay?”
“I can try to find that out, too,” she said, “when I get your school things. But from what I understand, he is going to be perfectly all right.” I took another sip of coffee. I held it in my mouth for a minute before I swallowed. When I looked up again, my grandmother was reading, her elbow propped on the table, her forehead resting on her fist. I reached over and took the next book from her stack. It was a biography of General Eisenhower.
Adam, my grandfather, was severe, short on patience, and hated to be interrupted or to have plans disturbed. We always called him Adam—never “grandpa” or anything other than his actual name. He arrived twenty minutes later.
“Well, well,” he said.
“I thought I’d go over to the school and get her books,” my grandmother said. “A little old-fashioned work cure.” Adam nodded. I imagined reaching out as she stood, grabbing her arm to keep her here to protect me, but she was gone. We were alone.
“I hear they’re sending you to a hospital,” Adam said.
“Is it a hospital?” I asked. “They said a school.”
“It’s a hospital,” he said. “Whatever else they want to call it.” I suppose I had known this, or at least suspected it, but the other words had lulled me. I had felt oddly foggy these last twenty-four hours and I was suddenly terrified that if I stayed home anymore, if I went to this school, this hospital, I was going to stay that way.
“Adam,” I said, “I don’t want to go.”
“No,” he said, “I suppose you don’t.” He paused. He pulled out a chair. “I understand there was a choice?” he said. “Hospital or suspension from school?” I nodded. “Your choice?” he asked.
“No,” I said, my voice barely coming out. “I don’t want to go. Please, Adam, can I just stay here?” The dullness of the last day was wearing off and panic was setting in.
“Tell me this,” he said. His blue eyes were locked on me. He had fixed me in his stare before, but it had always been terrifying; now I felt I was the object of his true attention. “You threw a rock and it hit a boy on the playground in the back of the head. Is that right?” I nodded. “And it didn’t seem, to anyone who was there, like it was an accident.”
“Not really,” I said.
“And the teachers and your parents and the school counselor and the so-called doctor have all said that you won’t give any reason why you did that. You didn’t hate him, he wasn’t mean to you, you weren’t afraid of him, nothing like that.”
“No,” I said.
“Well, Katherine,” he said, “they’re sending you away because they can’t make any sense of this, and that’s what they do with children who don’t make any sense. They have no explanation, so they can’t feel sure it won’t happen again tomorrow, and if it did, they
would be in a huge amount of trouble. They think there must be some kind of cause, because it’s not just pure entropy that causes an otherwise kind and obviously intelligent fifth-grade girl to throw a rock at a classmate’s head. If I were to formulate a hypothesis, Katherine, it would be that you had a reason, some kind of reason anyway, even if it wasn’t a very good one, that you haven’t told any of the people who’ve asked, and so that is what has gotten you on the next bus to Maclean.”
“What’s Maclean?” I asked.
“Never mind. If you’ve got even a shred of that reason hiding in that head of yours under all that long hair, and you want to turn this situation around, I’d suggest that you tell me what it is without delay, and we’ll see if we can get this thing straightened out.”
“I just thought,” I said, “just right then when I was standing there and the sun was off to the side and I felt the rock and how heavy it was, I thought I could get the angle just right, the arc, with the force and the gravity, and there was this wind, and I—” I wanted to keep going, to finish my explanation, but tears had welled and my nose had stuffed up and I had run out of voice.
“Spit it out,” he said.
“Just right when I threw it,” I said, “I wasn’t even thinking that it was a person standing there. I just calculated it, in my head, I mean, and as soon as I did I let go and, and, I just forgot.”
“Bingo,” he said. “I knew it.”
“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” I said. “Grandmother said she heard he’s going to be all right, and I—”
“If you hadn’t understood all the forces, you would have missed,” he said. “It was a poor choice of target.”
“I know,” I said.
His mouth twitched. “Would it be accurate to say that you’ve just told me more than you’ve told anyone else about what happened yesterday?”