The Tiger's Child (14 page)

In turn, I got drawn into this too. Mortified by Sheila’s rude behavior, I first tried making excuses, then tried tugging her off to the privacy of the bathroom for a quick word. She was having no quick words. She was having no words at all.

“Why are you so angry?” I hissed.

“You’re the one who’s angry,” she replied in a sensible sort of voice.

“You’ve been angry with me the whole frigging time we’ve been back together. You act like everything is my fault.”

“Well, isn’t it?” she replied.

How we managed through the last hour at Chad’s I don’t know. I
was
angry. As far as I was concerned, the evening had been totally ruined. Here was my first time of meeting Chad’s wife and his daughters, my first time face-to-face with Chad in many years, and what a jolly affair this had turned out to be. I felt like dumping Sheila off at the nearest bus station and buying her a one-way ticket back to Broadview.

The silence during the ten-minute ride back to the motel was lethal. Sheila was gloating, or at
least that’s what it felt like from my perspective. Having stirred all of us up into a lather, she appeared calm and detached, if not even a bit superior. I got the distinct sense that she thought she was above all this. With each passing minute, my feelings grew fiercer.

“Well, this evening was a write-off,” I said crossly, as we got out of the car at the motel. Fumbling with the keys, I unlocked our room.

“You are really a control freak, you know that?” Sheila said. “God, you have got to be in charge of everything.”

“I do not.”

“You think you own my life. You think you created me. You think I’m just a character in your book.”

“I do not!” I retorted.

“You do. I didn’t say I wanted to go there tonight. You’re the one who arranged it and you didn’t ask my opinion of it. Why should I want to go over there? I don’t even know those people.”

“You
do.
That’s Chad, for God’s sake.”

Sheila shrugged insolently. “I don’t know him. Could have been anybody and his stupid kids there, as far as I knew.”

“That was
Chad.
Who kept you out of the state hospital. Who stood up for you when nobody else would. All he did—”

She cut me off with one fierce downward movement of her arm, like a sword stroke. “And I’m supposed to be so grateful, aren’t I?” Her voice rose. “That’s what you want. I’m supposed to be so
goddamned, fucking grateful to all of you guys for what you did for me. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you want.”

“No.”

“It
is.
Don’t go fucking me around, Torey. That’s what you want. To make yourself into such a good guy. That’s the only reason you came back.”

“It’s not!” I cried.

Seeing her face, I realized a monster had been unleashed. Her face went from pink to red to a deeper scarlet, the veins becoming prominent at her temples. Her eyes dilated and her lips drew back against her teeth. Warning bells went off somewhere far back in my mind, alerting me to my own physical safety.

“You think you made my life better, do you?” she yelled, her voice growing louder with each word. “You think you
fixed
things? You didn’t. You made them worse. A million, million, million times worse than they ever were before!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said.

“
No
!” she cried passionately, “you whoa. You’re the one who can’t stop meddling. You leave my life alone!”

I regarded her.

“You set me up, Torey. You took me in that room and you let me play with all those toys and read all those books and you just made me feel like a million dollars, and then what did you do? Did you stay? Did you take care of me once you got me?” Her mouth drew down to where I thought she was going to cry and there was one very long,
shuddery intake of breath. “You set me up, knowing all along you were going to leave.”

“I didn’t mean—” I started.

“You
did
! You meant every goddamned thing you did with me, Torey. I never knew how fucking awful my life was until then, and then you came along and suddenly there’s this whole other world. And you
meant
that. You controlled the whole thing. You created me out of shit and made me think I smelled like flowers.”

“Sheila, listen to—”

“You made me believe you loved me.”

“I
did
love you, Sheila. I still do.”

“Oh, shit, don’t give me that. How could you? You left me.”

“Sheila—”

“You had so much power, Torey. I loved you such a terribly lot,
so much.
And what did you do? You pushed me out that door and left me.”

“Sheila,
please.
”

“But you’re never the fuck going to do it again!” she cried, and before I realized what was happening, she had opened the door to the motel room and was gone.

I
stood, shell-shocked, for only a moment or two before running to the door to see where she was. In that short time, she had disappeared into the night.

“Sheila? Sheila, where are you?” I called.

A door down the way opened. “Could you keep it down out there?” someone shouted.

Gripped with real fear, I closed the motel door and went back inside. What now? I looked around the room. Her meager possessions lay strewn around her bed. What should I do? Would she come back of her own accord? Should I go looking for her? Or leave well enough alone? I felt paralyzed with helplessness.

Sitting down on my bed, I tried to pull my thoughts together. Where would she be likely to go? The migrant camp came first to mind, but
surely not. Surely she would have more sense than to go there, alone, in the middle of the night. And why? Would there still be anyone there she’d know? I doubted it. She had given no indication of still having connections with anyone in Marysville.

Where else? The only places I could think of were those where we had spent time together and I couldn’t imagine, given the circumstances, that she would go to any of them. Most likely, she would head for the town center, simply because shopping areas were the places many teenagers escaped to when distressed. Obviously, little was likely to be open so late at night, especially in a community the size of Marysville, but it was Fourth of July night … Worried, I gathered up my car keys and set out to search for Sheila.

Around and around and around I drove, the streets becoming increasingly familiar again, until old, long-forgotten journeys through Marysville started coming back to me. It was a very still place that late at night. There were a few cars “turning the point” down on Main Street, but otherwise, mine was the only vehicle for blocks, sometimes miles, at a time.

I went downtown three or four times and found no sign of her. From there, I followed the main road leading out to the shopping district that had grown up around the mall. I circled the whole town, using the highway to connect outgoing roads, and finally went out to the migrant camp.

There, unlike the rest of Marysville, people were up and moving around. Indeed, it was lively in
certain parts, making me suspect that, as in the old days, not all the residents spent their days in hard labor. There were numerous drugged or drunken men lying about in one area on the lower end and I found myself feeling very ill at ease. Unwilling to roll my window down, I didn’t stop and ask anyone if they had seen a girl of Sheila’s description.

All my fond recollections of Marysville came crashing down to dust in those early hours spent driving around the town. I hated it by the end and only wanted to reach the highway and head home; however, worry kept me at the ceaseless midnight circling.

At long last, about two in the morning, I saw Sheila. She was in quite an unexpected area of town, walking along one of the larger arterial roads out in the residential part not far from our old school. It was only by chance I happened to be coming that way, as I had had an idea of a different part of downtown to search and was taking a shortcut to get there. I pulled the car up along the curb and rolled the window down.

“Look, I’m sorry. Can we go back to the motel and sort things out?”

Her eyes were wide and dark in the dim illumination of the streetlight, which gave her a wild, almost animalistic appearance. I sensed she was very frightened and not likely to be predictable.

“I am sorry,” I said in my most contrite voice. “Come on, please? Come back with me.”

She shook her head. “No. Go away. I don’t need you.”

“Please?”

She regarded me.

“Well, look, let’s go get a hamburger or something, if you don’t want to go back to the motel. Okay?”

Sheila hesitated, which encouraged me to keep on.

“We could go over to Lenny’s. They’re open all night. Come on. Please?”

Much to my relief, she opened the passenger door and got in. Indeed, she almost fell in, giving away just how very tired she was. I glanced over at her with her yellow hair and her silly clothes, crumpled in exhaustion. God, how hard it is to be fourteen.

Once in the restaurant, Sheila tucked hungrily into a whole plate of food, while I nursed a cup of coffee and a stale doughnut, but she didn’t talk. I didn’t press her. We were both too tired for that.

Afterward, she came back to the motel with me without any protest. Once in the room, she sat down on her bed and began to pull off her heavy work boots. “I’m not staying,” she said quietly. “Tomorrow comes and I’m getting out of here.”

“Yes, I think I’m ready to as well.”

“No, Torey. That’s not what I mean,” she said, looking up. “I’m not going with you. I’m not going to sit in a car for four hours with you. I’m going home on my own.”

I regarded her.

“And you can’t stop me,” she added to my unspoken words.

“No, I won’t stop you. If that’s what you want, I’ll take you down to the bus station tomorrow and we’ll get you a ticket. And you can take the first one out.”

“
I’ll
get me a ticket,” she said.

“No, Sheila, I’m quite happy to get it. Save your money.”

“No, I said,
I’ll
get it, Torey. You don’t own me, so don’t try.”

Wearily, I nodded. “Fine. Do it that way.”

Once in bed with the lights out, I lay staring into the darkness. What had gone wrong? What had happened between last night, when we had seemed so close, and tonight, when we felt worlds apart? As if she were reading my thoughts, Sheila spoke.

“You left me. Don’t you know how much that hurt me?” Her voice was soft, almost inaudible even in the nighttime silence.

“I didn’t want to, Sheila.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because it was simply the way things were. I was a teacher. My end came in June when school finished and there was nothing I could do about that …”

“It wasn’t right, what you did,” she said so softly. A long pause followed. “You left me behind.”

“I’m sorry. I truly am.”

“And it wasn’t just that. You took it all with you when you went—the sun, the moon, the stars. Everything. What right did you have to give it to me, when you just took it all away again?”

Sheila did not return to the summer-school program on Monday, when we resumed after the Fourth of July break. I had neither seen nor heard from her since putting her on the bus in Marysville. Although I longed to phone, if for no other reason than to reassure myself she had made it home all right, I knew instinctively that I had to stay away.

Jeff, ever keen to perceive my moods, cornered me back in our office after lunch. “Okay, so what’s going on?” he asked. “Where’d the Orangutan hie off to?”

I gave him a brief synopsis of what had happened on our visit to Marysville.

“Ooh,” he replied, as if touching a bruise. There was a pause while he put away a medical journal that had lain open on his desk for the better part of the last week, then he looked over. “I can see where she’s coming from, though. She’s already been abandoned by one mother. Then you come along, provide all the attention and nurturing she was so desperate for. Then
you
disappear. At six it’s going to be difficult for her to discern that what you’ve done is any different from what her mother did.”

“Yes, I know that, but it
was
different. I was her teacher.”

“Okay, so you were her teacher,” he said. “But what was on your curriculum, Hayden? Math? Reading? Or was it love? Confidence? Self-esteem?”

“What should I have done with her?” I asked. “Left her alone? Seen this incredible kid in this even more incredible situation and done nothing?”

Leaning back in his desk chair, Jeff pursed his lips.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have done it?” I asked.

“Are you?”

Turning away, I sighed. “That’s a pointless question, actually. I can’t turn back time and change anything. The real question is: what do I do now?”

Balancing a paper clip on his thumbnail, Jeff aimed and then flicked it into the pencil holder on his desk. “You do what all of us do in this business: pray that in the end you’ve helped more than you’ve hurt.”

Sheila remained absent from the program for the rest of the week and also the following Monday. Late Monday afternoon, when I was in my office at the clinic, there was a soft knock on my closed door.

“Yes? Come in.”

Sheila gently pushed the door open. “Can I talk to you?”

I nodded.

“Is Jeff here? I want to talk privately. I don’t want him walking in,” she said.

“No, he won’t. He’s over at the hospital and won’t be back tonight,” I replied.

Sheila closed the door behind her and came across to Jeff’s desk. Pulling the chair out, she sat down. She looked around. “So this is your office, huh?”

“Yup.” I had been marking a file and returned to finish it off.

She studied Jeff’s bulletin board. “You guys sure are alike. Look, you got your junk arranged just like his junk. You even got the identical same Pink Panther things. ‘This is where Jeff lives it up’ this one says. ‘This is where Torey lives it up.’ Where’d you get them?”

“Jeff got them,” I replied.

“Do you love him?” Sheila asked, rocking herself idly back and forth in the desk chair.

“I
like
him. A great deal. But if you mean romantic love, no. I’ve got somebody else.”

“Oh? Who? I haven’t seen you with anybody.”

I looked over. “Surely you haven’t come all the way up here from Broadview to talk to me about my love life.”

“Yeah, well, I was just trying to get your attention,” she said. “You’ve hardly looked up since I walked in. The whole time you’ve had your stupid nose stuck in that thing you’re writing.”

Closing the file, I laid it up in the basket and turned in my chair toward her. “I’m all yours.”

“Gosh, look. You got my poem up there. You never told me you put my poem on the wall.”

“I wasn’t hearing from you very much then,” I said. “I didn’t have your address.”

“Yeah, I was in the children’s home then, when I wrote that.”

Her tone was light and breezy, her attitude, as she lazily rotated the chair, relaxed. One would never have known anything had happened between us. It would have taken her forty-five minutes on the bus to get up here from Broadview, plus a good
ten-minute walk from the nearest bus stop, so this was hardly a casual visit. Yet Sheila was giving nothing away.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

“Well, it’s almost five o’clock. I thought maybe you would like to go out for Italian with me or something. It doesn’t have to be pizza. We could go for spaghetti. Or something else, if you want.”

I grinned.

“Or you could take me over to your house. I’ve never been to your place. I got to thinking that if we stopped at the supermarket first, I could get things and make you supper. I make this really good thing with tuna fish and a can of mushroom soup.”

“I’d loved to,” I said, “but unfortunately, I’ve already got plans for this evening.”

Her face fell. “Is it with this guy?”

I nodded.

There was an enormous silence.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I really would have loved to, it’s just I didn’t know in time. Maybe we can some other night.”

Head down so that the yellow hair fell forward, obscuring her features, she sighed heavily. “I’m
trying
to say sorry to you,” she muttered. A pause. “And I wanted to come over to your house.”