Torey Hayden - Beautiful Child - The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her

“Here, come here. I want you to do something with me.”

Venus continued to watch me but didn’t move.

I returned to her table. “Come with me, please. We’re going to work together.” Putting a hand under her elbow, I brought her to her feet. Hand on her shoulder, I directed her to the far end of the room. “You sit there.” I indicated a chair.

Venus stood.

I put a hand on her head and pressed down. She sat. Pulling out the chair across the table from her, I sat down and lifted over a tub of crayons and a piece of paper.

“I’m going to tell you something very special,” I said. “A secret. Do you like secrets?”

She stared at me blankly.

I put on my most “special secret” voice and leaned toward her. “I wasn’t always a teacher. Know what I did? I worked with children who had a hard time speaking at school. Just like you!” Admittedly, this wasn’t such an exciting secret, but I tried to make it sound like something very special. “My job was to help them be able to talk again anytime they wanted.” I grinned. “What do you think about that? Would you like to start talking again?”

Venus kept her eyes on my face, her gaze never wavering, but it was a remarkably hooded gaze. I had no clue whatsoever as to what she might be thinking. Or even if she was thinking.

“It’s very important to speak in our room. Talking is the way we let others know how we are feeling. Talking is how we let other people know what we are thinking, because they can’t see inside our heads to find out. They won’t know otherwise. We have to tell them. That’s how people understand each other. It’s how we resolve problems and get help when we need it and that makes us feel happier. So it’s important to learn how to use words.”

Venus never took her eyes from mine. She almost didn’t blink.

“I know it’s hard to start talking when you’ve been used to being silent. It feels different. It feels scary. That’s okay. It’s okay to feel scared in here. It’s okay to feel uncertain.”

If she was uncertain, Venus didn’t let on. She stared uninhibitedly into my face.

I lifted up a piece of paper. “I’d like you to make a picture for me. Draw me a house.”

No movement.

We sat, staring at each other.

“Here, shall I get you started? I’ll draw the ground.” I took up a green crayon and drew a line across the bottom of the paper, then I turned the paper back in her direction and pushed the tub of crayons over. “There. Now, can you draw a house?”

Venus didn’t look down. Gently I reached across and reoriented her head so that she would have to look at the paper. I pointed to it.

Nothing.

Surely she did know what a house was. She was seven. She had sat through kindergarten twice. But maybe she was developmentally delayed, like her sister. Maybe expecting her to draw a house was expecting too much.

“Here. Take a crayon in your hand.” I had to rise up, come around the table, grab hold of her arm, bring her hand up, insert the crayon, and lay it on the table. She kept hold of the crayon, but her hand flopped back down on the table like a lifeless fish.

Picking up a different crayon, I made a mark on the paper. “Can you make a line like that?” I asked. “There. Right beside where I drew my line.”

I regarded her. Maybe she wasn’t right-handed. I’d not seen her pick up anything, so I’d just assumed. But maybe she was left-handed. I reached over and put the crayon in the other hand. She didn’t grip it very well, so I got up, came around the table, took her left hand, repositioned it better and lay it back on the table. I returned to my seat. Trying to sound terribly jolly, I said, “ I’m left handed,” in the excited tone of voice one would normally reserve for comments like “I’m a millionaire.”

No. She wasn’t going to cooperate. She just sat, staring at me again, her dark eyes hooded and unreadable.

“Well, this isn’t working, is it?” I said cheerfully and whipped the piece of paper away. “Let’s try something else.”

I went and got a children’s book. Putting my chair alongside hers, I sat down and opened the book. “Let’s have a look at this.”

She stared at me.

It was a picture dictionary and the page I opened to was full of colorful illustrations of small animals driving cars and doing different sorts of jobs. “Let’s look at these pictures. See? They’re all in a bus. And what are they? What kind of animals are they? Mice, aren’t they? And there’s a police car, and look, one of the policemen is a lion. What kind of animal is the other policeman?”

She stared up at me.

“Here, look down here.” I physically tipped her head so that she’d look at the page. “What’s this other animal? What kind of animal is he?”

No response.

“What is he?”

No response.

“What is he?”

No response. Absolutely nothing. She just sat, motionless.

“Right here.” I tapped the picture. “What kind of animal is that?”

I persisted for several minutes longer, rapidly rephrasing the question but keeping at it, not letting enough silence leak in to make it seem like silence, taking up the rhythm of both sides of the conversation myself, all with just one question: what animal is that?

Bang! I brought my hand down flat on the table to make a loud, sudden noise. It was a crude technique but often a very effective one. I hoped it would startle her over the initial hurdle, as it did with many children, but in Venus’s case, I was also interested just to see if it got any reaction out of her. I hoped to see her jump or, at the very least, blink.

Venus simply raised her head and looked at me.

“Can you hear that?” I asked. “When I bang my hand like that on the table,” I said and banged it suddenly on the tabletop again, “can you hear it?”

“I sure can!” Billy shouted from the other side of the classroom. “You trying to scare the shit out of us over here?”

Venus just sat, unblinking.

Leaning forward, I pulled the book back in front of me and started to page through it. “Yes, well, let’s try something else. Let’s see if we can find a story. Shall I read a story to you?”

Eyes on my face, she just stared. No nod. No shake of the head. Nothing. There was very little to denote the kid was anything more than a waxwork accidentally abandoned in the classroom.

“Yes, well, I have an even better idea. What about recess?”

She didn’t react to that either.

“All right,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee in the teachers’ lounge, “joke’s over. What’s wrong with Venus Fox?” I looked pointedly at Bob.

Bob took a sip from his mug. “That’s what you’re here to tell me, I believe.”

“So far I’m still working on whether she’s alive or not.”

“Oh, she’s alive all right,” Bob replied.

A moment’s silence intruded. Julie was making herself a cup of tea over by the sink, and she turned to look at us when the conversation paused.

“My first impression is that she’s deaf,” I said.

Bob took another swallow of his coffee.

“Has anyone had her tested?” I asked. “Because it would be a shame to put a kid in my kind of class, if she’s actually hearing impaired. I don’t sign well at all.”

“She was sent to an ENT specialist at the hospital last year,” Bob replied. “Apparently they had such a hard time testing her that they ended up giving her an ABR.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Auditory brainstem response,” Julie answered.

“It’s a test that tells whether the brain is registering any sound. The test measures the brain’s response to sound stimulation, so you can determine if someone is hearing, even if they aren’t verbal.”