Torey Hayden - The Tiger’s Child - The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her

Sheila loved the park. She had never been there before coming to our room, as it was a long way from the migrant camp; but it was only a few blocks from the school, so I had taken my class over on several occasions. Her father did not come that day, but it was obvious he was making more of an effort with Sheila. She came dressed in a bright-orange cotton sunsuit and excitedly told us how her father had taken her down to the discount store the night before and bought it, especially for her to wear to the picnic. She was so ebullient that day, skipping, dancing, pirouetting in the sunshine, that I still call to mind that bobbing form of sunlit orange every time I smell locust blossoms or see duck ponds.

And then, finally, the end—the last good-bye at the door of the classroom to Anton, the last walk together over to the high school to meet her bus. I had given her the now dog-eared copy of The Little Prince to take with her, a tangible reminder of these last five months, and she clutched it to her as we walked.

Running up the bus steps, she went straight to the back and clambered up on the bench seat to wave to me from the back window. The bus rumbled to life and diesel fumes overpowered the scent of locust blossoms. “Bye,” she was saying, although I couldn’t hear her because of the glass and the noise of the engine. The bus began to pull away and she waved frantically.

“Bye-bye,” I said and lifted my hand to wave too, as the bus turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Then I turned to walk back to my classroom.

When autumn came, I was a thousand miles away from the school, the migrant camp and the locust trees. Settled into graduate school, I was devoting most of my spare time to research. Some years earlier I had become intrigued by psychologically based language problems, elective mutism in particular, where an individual can speak but does not do so for emotional reasons; however, I had had to put this on the back burner while teaching full-time, because there just hadn’t been time to pursue it. Now I was able to devote the kind of attention to the work I wanted. As a consequence, I was still in daily contact with children, but it was of a different kind and quality to what the classroom had given me. This was okay. I had been ready for the change, and thus was finding this new work rewarding.

Chad and I had parted ways over the summer. We’d been together for much of the previous three years and the last year, in particular, we’d grown close. Sheila, in her own way, had brought us closer still. Previously, Chad had only been part of my personal life, a world I tended to keep strictly separate from my life in the classroom, but with Sheila’s hearing in March, he had been drawn into that too. The magic of that night when Chad had taken Sheila and me out for pizza had been powerful and all three of us, I think, got caught up in a dreamy moment of believing we were a family. It’d seemed so right just then—Chad, Sheila and I; however, in the cold, hard light of day, I knew it wasn’t right. Chad was older than I was and had sown his wild oats, but I was still very young. I knew I was not yet ready for the commitments that a closer relationship with Chad would entail. Because commitments were so important to me, I wouldn’t make them lightly. So, seductive as the vision of family life was at that point, I knew I would fail at it if I tried it now. So this, too, lay behind my decision to change tracks and move away from the area. I loved Chad and I didn’t want to break up our relationship, but I didn’t want to intensify it either. Putting distance between us seemed a reasonable solution.

Chad, of course, figured out what I was doing and he wasn’t particularly happy about it. For him the time was right to settle down and get married. If anything, those last eight weeks with Sheila had verified for him that this was what he wanted and he chafed at my uncertainty, angry with me one moment for my immaturity, poignantly vulnerable the next, when he bemoaned the unfairness of the fact that no matter how much a man might be ready to be a father, he couldn’t be one without a woman. I felt awful, as one always does when relationships crumble, but I went ahead with my plans regardless, knowing in my heart even more certainly that this was the right thing to do.

Sheila went into Sandy McGuire’s third-grade class, and for all intents and purposes, she did extremely well. Sandy kept me well informed with letters each month or so. I was gratified to hear that Sheila was settling in, making friends and achieving good academic results, and even more so to hear that she was coming to school cleaner and better fed, which made me hope the home situation was improving.

My only other source of information was Anton, who still lived in the migrant camp himself and occasionally saw Sheila there. Despite my misgivings when Anton had first come to my classroom the previous autumn, he had turned out to be a natural teacher. He had tremendous rapport, particularly with the slower children and with the Spanish-speakers, of whom there were many in our migrant population. As a consequence, he had decided to work on his teacher qualifications at the nearby community college while still continuing as an aide in the school district. He was well informed on how all my former students were doing, and thus, a letter from Anton was a real treat.

I wrote to Sheila, as I had promised her I would do, and Sheila occasionally wrote back. She was, however, only seven, and as with all seven-year-olds, no matter how gifted, letters were clearly a chore. They came erratically and if I had not had Sandy’s letters in the interim, I really wouldn’t have had any idea of what was going on. Indeed, the contents of Sheila’s letters were even more erratic than their number. She was given to sending me her homework for some reason and that was all I sometimes received for months on end.

All went smoothly. Sheila finished her year with Sandy an enthusiastic, if somewhat quirky, student, and was promoted to the fourth grade. I received a school picture of her from Sandy, showing her in a bright-yellow dress, her smile sweet and toothless. She looked well, if not too clean.

Autumn came but Sheila didn’t. I received a puzzled note from Sandy saying that Sheila had been withdrawn from the register. It was Anton who investigated the matter and wrote back to tell me that Sheila and her father had moved to a small city on the far side of the state, some two hundred miles away. They had left in June, just after school had let out, apparently because her father thought he had found a job.

I wrote to the only address I had, her old one, and received no answer. Distressed at the thought that I had actually lost contact with Sheila, I made a few phone calls in an effort to trace her. During the course of these, I discovered that she had apparently gone into foster care at the end of the summer, but it was only a rumor and I couldn’t confirm it. I knew no one in this new city to which she and her father had moved and I was twelve hundred miles away. It proved impossible to find out where she was and how she was doing.

This upset me profoundly. Confiding in an older colleague one afternoon after an abortive effort to trace Sheila, I was reassured that this was better, that I shouldn’t try to hold on to old students. She smiled gently and patted my shoulder. “Never look back. You’ve got to love them and leave them.”

It was three years before I managed to go back to Marysville to visit my old friends. By then Anton was gone. He had completed his two-year course at the community college and won a scholarship to the state university to finish his bachelor’s degree. I visited with Sandy, however, and Whitney, who was now a senior in high school; and I went back to walk through my old classroom, now converted into a resource center.