Torey Hayden - Somebody Else’s Kids

“Was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name-o,” I sang in shaky a cappella.

“B-I-N-G-O!” Boo shouted, his eyes riveted on Lori. “B-I-N-G-O!”

Twelve choruses of “Bingo.” The tension was still palpable.

With a wet rag I knelt before Lori and sponged the ice-cream mix off her dress and knee socks. From where I was on the floor in front of her I could hear her raspy, fear-strained breathing. Having never been wiped away, tears had dried along her cheeks. Now she was watching me, yet her eyes were vacant. It was like looking into the eyes of a ghost.

I sat back on my heels. We were very close, she and I. In that position I was lower than she and she had to look down on me. For a long, wordless period we gazed at each other. Gently I brought my hands up to touch her cheeks, to encompass her face. “What’s wrong, Lor? Can’t you talk to me?”

“I didn’t mean to. I knowed you tole me not to.” She spoke as one in a dream.

“What happened? Tell me what happened.”

“I know you tole me not to. I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t on purpose. I’m sorry.”

“Lori?”

“You gonna wup me?”

She was not talking to me. I do not know who else she thought was there. This abrupt aberrancy in her behavior scared me so much that my hands shook as I held her face. I could feel the soft, warm skin of her cheeks beneath my fingers and the tightness of her jaw. We were so close her breathing was hot on my face. Yet she continued to stare through me to whomever else it was she saw.

“Don’t wup me, okay? Please? Please, don’t.”

Boo joined us. He came very near, his hands fluttering, making soft slapping sounds against his bare thighs. Every few moments he would reach out to touch Lori, to touch me, but never quite make contact before jerking his hand back.

“Lor, it’s just me. Just Torey. We’re here in school.”

What the hell was going on? When she still did not respond, I rose and lifted her into my arms. On the far side of the room was a small, not quite adult-size rocking chair. I sat down in it with her in my lap. At first she was stiff and I had to physically move her limbs into a reasonable position. Then unexpectedly she relaxed, melting into the form of my arms. I rocked.

Whatever had happened to her I did not know. Nor, as it turned out, would I ever know. A seizure of some bizarre kind? A psychotic episode? A stress reaction? I had no idea. Lori never gave me a clue. But it was one of the most frightening episodes of my career.

Not knowing, I simply rocked and held her close against me. Back and forth. Back and forth. She was large for the chair and for me, her long legs coming nearly to the floor. Boo watched us. Then he came over. On his heels, he rocked too, swaying back and forth to our rhythm. Yet he watched me intently. No tuning out this time; Boo was fully alert. Next, he did something he had never done since joining me. Boo touched me voluntarily. He put his hand on my cheek, explored my lips and my chin, all the time observing me with the rapt scrutiny a scientist gives his new discovery. Then he climbed into the rocker with us.

There we sat, the three of us, one on top of the other in that small rocker. Lori was pressed against my breast. Boo sat mostly on the arm of the rocker, his bare legs across Lori’s. He reached over and took my free arm and pulled it around himself. Gently he leaned forward, his head resting atop Lori’s, under my chin. With one hand he clutched his penis, with the other he tenderly stroked Lori’s cheek. “B-I-N-G-O,” he began to sing in a soft, clear angel voice, “B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o.”

I was struck by the poignant absurdity of the moment, of what someone would have thought who might have ventured in on us, crammed together as we were in that chair. Bare Boo, lost Lori and me. Unexpectedly, it made me think of Joe. I pitied him for what he would never understand.

I needed the parents. I always needed the parents. To fill in all of the missing pieces. To let me know what happened the other eighteen hours of the day. To reassure me that someone else was just as perplexed about this little person as I was.

I had no children of my own. Because of that I knew I did not fully understand the life of a parent, regardless of how much I wished I did. Having four children six hours a day works out mathematically to the same as having one for twenty-four. But mathematics and emotions do not spring from the same well.

For this reason I wanted to catch Boo’s mother. I wanted to talk to her, to find out about life at home with Boo. I needed to know for Boo’s own welfare as I made plans for his program. And I simply wanted her to know I cared.

Each day she brought Boo but would not come inside. If I waited outside for her she always had an excuse to hurry off. If I called her at home, she never could talk. By mid-October it was no secret that Mrs. Franklin was avoiding me.

Parent-teacher conferences occurred the last week in October just before Halloween. The children were excused from school for the last two days. Because of all the resource students, I had a huge number of conferences. I did not worry about squeezing Lori’s father into one of the fifteen-minute conference slots; he and I communicated regularly. But with Mrs. Franklin it was a different matter. If I could get her there at all, I did not want to scare her off by giving her only fifteen minutes to tell about seven and a half years. So I slotted her in the last place on the second day, about 3:00 p.m.

She did come.

A small, delicate-boned black woman, she had wide fear-stricken eyes. I wondered, as she took the chair opposite me at the worktable that afternoon, who else had talked to her about her dream child. And what they had said.

“How’s my boy been doing?” she asked, so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat herself. “I want him to learn to talk. Like other boys. Have you been able to teach him to talk right yet?”

“I think Boothe is doing nicely in here, Mrs. Franklin.” I tried to sound reassuring. “We have a lot to do. Boo and I, but I think we’re working hard on it. I’m glad he’s in my class.”

“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”

“I think perhaps it’s a little premature for that just yet”

“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Her head dropped and she fidgeted in her chair. I feared she might leave.

“I –” I started.

“I don’t want them to take him away,” she interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “I don’t want them to put him in no insane asylum. I don’t want them to take my boy away.”

“I can’t imagine anyone will, Mrs. Franklin.”

“Charles, that’s my husband, he says so sometimes. He says if Boothe Birney don’t learn to talk straight like other boys, they’re going to lock him away in an insane asylum when he grows up and we can’t take care of him no more. Charles, he knows those things. He says Boothe Birney’s sick and they don’t let no sick boys stay with their folks.”

“Boo isn’t sick. He’s just different.”

“Charles says they’re gonna take him away. The doctors, they’ll do it. They told Charles. If Boothe don’t learn to talk straight.”

I found Mrs. Franklin difficult to reason with. She was so frightened.

“They ain’t good places, miss, them insane asylums. I seen one. My mother’s brother, they put him in one once in Arkansas. And I seen it.” She paused and the silence stabbed through me. “There was this big boy there,” she said softly. “A great big boy, ’most nearly a man. With yellow curls. Big curls, like my Boothie has. And he was standing naked in his own piss. Crying. A great big boy. ‘Most nearly a man.” She brought a hand up to stop a tear. “And that boy there, he was some mother’s son.”