Torey Hayden - Somebody Else’s Kids

Her fear was so intense and perhaps so warranted that I could not easily calm her. We talked a long time. She had come at three and now the October dusk was settling. Outside the partly open window behind me, the wind blew, startling up brown, fallen leaves and carrying them high as the roof. Autumn freshness pressed through the opening to dispel the heavy, humid weight of emotion. As twilight came, the brilliance of the fall foliage in the schoolyard muted to a rosy brown. And still we talked. Back and forth, quietly. I pushed us off into tangential conversation because it was still too scary to speak the truth. I learned of her favorite hobby, quilting, of how she had won a ribbon at an Arkansas state fair, of how her grandmother had left her a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Lone Star quilt made in a slave cabin. In turn I told her of my haunted love for far-off Wales, my homesickness for a country not my own. At last the conversation turned back to her son.

Boo had been an unplanned and initially unwanted child. His parents were not married. That Mr. Franklin was white and she black had been a major issue with their families and in the small Southern community where they had lived. She and Charles eloped and finally fled north to our community in an attempt to build a better life together. Charles’s family had ceased all communication with their son. Mrs. Franklin had never seen her mother since the day she had left eight years before; her father had since died. However, her siblings had all resumed a positive relationship with her.

During the early months of Boo’s life, he had seemed normal to the Franklins. He had been an inordinately placid baby but their pediatrician had told them not to worry. Boo was a little slow to learn to sit up and to walk but he still did so within normal limits. He never did crawl. During those first years he even learned to say a few words. Doggie. Bye-bye. Cracker. A few nursery rhymes. Yet never once did he say mama or daddy. Then at about eighteen months of age, the changes first began. He started to cry incessantly. No one could comfort him. He rocked in his crib at night and banged his head against the wall. Lights, reflections, his own fingers began to hold more fascination than the people around him. He ceased talking.

The Franklins never knew how wrong things really were until Boo was over three. Up until then they were still taking him to the same pediatrician, who continued to reassure them it was all “just a stage.” Boo was a slow developer. He would outgrow it. Then at three, prior to the birth of his sister, Boo was enrolled in nursery school. There someone recognized the earmarks of autism.

The years between the first diagnosis and Boo’s arrival in my class had been ones of heartache and financial devastation while the Franklins searched for a miracle cure. Selling their small house and possessions, they left with Boo and a newborn baby for California where they had heard of a special school for children like Boo. After nine long months of no improvement, the school gave up. Back home they came, this time armed with vitamins. Then off to Pennsylvania to a school for the brain-damaged that programmed children so that they might reexperience the womb, birth, growth. Back home again, broke. Three years had passed. Mr. Franklin had worked at twelve different jobs, often three at a time to meet family expenses and keep them together. The marriage, the emotions, the finances all were sapped. Boo still showed no improvement. Indeed, now more than ever he perplexed them. At every new school it had been a new label, a new method, a new diagnosis of why they failed. And the same old blame. For all that effort the Franklins did not know any more now about their dream child than they had known in the beginning. Exhausted and discouraged, they had come home for the last time and enrolled Boo in the public school system. That had been the year before.

Poked and prodded and racked, the marriage which had gotten started on such shaky ground still survived. Neither of the Franklins was well educated; neither knew how to cope with the problems this boy had given them. When things got bad, Mrs. Franklin said wearily, it was hard not to blame someone for this child. Especially when everyone else was willing to blame too. Yet … yet, they loved him. To be sure.

I think I hated these stories worst of all. Worse than the ones of brutal abuse, worse than the ones of neglect and suffering. I loathed these stories where there were no answers. Innocent people in innocent circumstances, where little more had happened than the day-to-day agonies of being human, and a child like Boo was produced. My sense of fair play was always badly bruised when I heard such tales, as I did all too frequently. What sense was there to it? Why such suffering given to those I could not see as deserving it? It always left me feeling angry and impotent against a world I did not understand.

“It’s so hard,” Mrs. Franklin said as she stared down at the shiny tabletop. “My sister has a little boy just four months younger than Boothie. She always writes me about what Merlin is doing. He’s in second grade. He got picked to sing in the children’s choir at church.” She looked at me. “And all I want is for Boothe to call me mama.”

Halloween came on a Friday. In the time left to us between the parent conferences and the holiday. Boo, Lori and I made dozens of construction-paper decorations, carved a pumpkin, mulled cider and hung honeycomb-bellied bats that I had purchased at the five-and-dime. Traditionally at our school, children attended regularly scheduled classes in the morning. In the afternoon they returned to school wearing their Halloween costumes and each room had a party. Lori and I had discussed the matter throughout October. She wanted to wear a costume too. I thought perhaps she would have more fun if she stayed in her other classroom for the party rather than with Boo and me. After talking it over with Edna, we agreed Lori would spend the afternoon there.

The other matter of great importance to Lori was her costume. In the two days before Halloween, she considered and discarded dozens of ideas.

“I could be Supergirl. My friend Tammy’s gonna be Supergirl. Do you think I could be Supergirl too?” Suddenly she blushed and a silly smile came over her face. “You know what?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I could be Wonder Woman. You know why?” She cast a sidelong glance at Boo to see if he was listening, then leaned close to whisper. “’Cause I got on Wonder Woman underwear. Here, see.” She pulled up her dress to show me. “See, I got Wonder Woman underpants, and here, I got a Wonder Woman T-shirt. See, they’re made out of that slippery cloth. Feel it. My daddy says it’s sexy.” She giggled.

“I don’t think you can wear just your underwear to school for Halloween, Lor.”

“No, I guess not. Hmm.” She was thoughtful for a moment.

And so the discussion went on both days. Finally Lori decided to be a witch. Not as exciting as running around in your Wonder Woman underwear I suppose, but I was so thankful that this long, hard decision had been made that I patiently bore through the recital of all the costume parts Halloween morning.

“My daddy helped me make a dress,” she told me while stopping by on her way to recess. “It’s real long and black and I got this shawl thing to wear over it. And long black hair. My daddy dyed a mop last night for me. With Rit dye. That you buy at the supermarket. So I’m going to have long black hair and a big pointed hat. And guess what else?”

“What, pray tell?”

She exploded with giggles. “I’m gonna have warts!”

“You aren’t!”

“I am! I boughted this stuff at the store last night. It makes you fake warts. And I boughted it with my own money, even.” A hand slipped over her mouth as she laughed devilishly. “And guess what else besides that?”