“Sheila? Sheila, it’s me. It’s Torey.”
There was no response. She was still there. I could hear the soft sound of her breathing carrying across the miles between us.
“Sheil? Are you okay?”
“How did you find me?”
“Listen to me. Are you okay?” I asked again. “Where are you? What is this place I’m calling?”
“It’s the Copyprint store,” she answered. There was a numb quality to her voice. I think I had genuinely startled her by tracing the fax so quickly and she didn’t know quite how to respond.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“No, Sheila, don’t put the phone down. Please? Please?”
“Just leave me alone, okay?” There were tears in her voice. I could hear them in the faint abruptness of her breathing, but she was struggling to keep them subdued.
“No, Sheila. Talk to me. Come on. Stay on the line a bit. Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
Silence.
“What’s been happening?”
A sharp intake of air.
“Sheil, don’t hang up on me.”
“I’m not going to,” came the very small voice at the other end.
“Things not been going very well?”
“No.”
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”
“I can’t talk here. Everybody’s listening.”
“Well, I want to talk to you. I do. Can you find another phone? No … wait, don’t hang up. Wait. Let me think of something.”
“I can’t find my mom, Torey,” she said. “I’ve been looking for her and looking for her and I can’t find her.”
“Oh, lovey.”
“Oh fuck, I’m going to cry. Oh, no. I don’t want to cry here. Oh, no.”
“Sheil, I’m going to come and get you.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t do anything, okay? All right? And I’ll come and get you. I’ll bring you home. Can you tell me where you are? Where are you staying?”
Tears thickened her voice again. “I’m not staying anywhere. I’m all by myself.”
“Okay, well, listen, stay where you are. I’ve got the fax number. Let me make some arrangements and I’ll fax them back to you there. But stay there and wait for me. And don’t do anything. All right? Promise me?”
She was crying. Whether from anguish or relief, I couldn’t tell, but through her tears she promised she’d stay at the Copyprint place until I faxed back.
The next hour was frantic. She was in a relatively small town in northern California, which wasn’t served by a commercial airport. In fact, it was a good two hours’ drive away from San Francisco, which was the nearest place to have more than one daily flight from my city. And the flight from here to there was two hours. That made four hours from departure the very least I could expect. Then came disaster. We were approaching the Thanksgiving Day weekend; so when I rang the airport to book a seat, I discovered all the economy seats were booked, not only on the next flight out, but also on the one after that. This meant I wouldn’t be able to leave until the middle of the following day at the earliest. This was awful. I felt it was critical that I did go get her, rather than rely on her in her unstable state to make her way back here by herself, especially as she had never flown before and was unfamiliar with the general procedures surrounding air travel. I didn’t trust how she might react if I tried to call in outside help, such as the police or Social Services, from the California community she was in.
Then, right in the midst of my panic, my beeper went off again. “Curse this thing,” I muttered at Jules. Whipping it off, I threw it across the desktop.
Jules regarded it, still beeping, then me. “Don’t you think you should answer it?” he asked.
Wearily, I phoned down to Rosalie, who transferred the caller. “Help, help! I’m dying! Save me, Doctor! Quick! An infusion of cabernet sauvignon and T-bone steak!” the caller cried in a weak voice. “Tonight at six?”
“Hugh! Honestly. You know you’re not supposed to do this.”
He was totally unrepentant, as he always was, but it sounded so good to hear his voice that I couldn’t be angry. I told him the whole horrible story with Sheila and how I felt it was critical that I got to her as soon as possible, but how impossible that was turning out to be.
Hugh listened thoughtfully. “Book a first-class seat out,” he replied. “They won’t be full.”
I snorted. “I can hardly afford economy, much less first class, Hugh. And I certainly couldn’t bring her back that way. Even if I can find seats, and I can’t. It’s even worse coming back. It’s the run up to Thanksgiving that’s doing it. There’s just nothing there.”
“I’ll pay for it,” he said. “I’ll get you a ticket. Then maybe you can rent a car. You’ll need to rent a car anyway, to get up to her. Then you can just drive home from there. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it, okay?”
Stunned by the generosity of his offer, I didn’t know quite what to say.
“Well, she’s an okay kid,” he replied to my silence. “And after all, what’s a few bucks in life?”
I told Sheila to meet me in the local McDonald’s, as it was about the only place I could think of that would be open late at night, relatively safe for her to wait in and a location I could easily find in a strange town. Hugh financed a first-class ticket to San Francisco for me and I made arrangements to rent a car from there, drive up the coast and pick Sheila up before driving home, a journey of over eight hundred miles.
It never crossed my mind not to do this for Sheila. Always a bit impulsive, I was inclined to get myself into what Hugh termed “grand acts,” but I don’t think I could have comfortably done otherwise. I always felt a sort of intuitive certainty about my part in a given situation, which, although it made me tend to act first and think later, seldom put me on a course of action that I later regretted. Going personally to get Sheila felt right in this instance, so right, in fact, that I never contemplated any alternatives.
It was ten-fifteen when I pulled under the bright-yellow glow of the McDonald’s arches. I could see Sheila through the window, a lone figure hunched over a table. Turning off the ignition, I got out.
She didn’t rise when I came through the door, simply lifted her head and watched me. There was a faint smile on her face, an expression of what I took to be relief. Coming to the table, I bent down and hugged her to me. She came willingly, clutching the folds of my wool jacket.
Slipping down on the bench opposite, I regarded her. She was filthy, filthy in the old sense of the word, as she had been when she had first come into my class. Her uncombed hair hung in long greasy strands. The dirt was worn in around her fingernails and up the creases of her skin. Her clothes were rumpled and stained. And just as in the old days, she stank.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve had some French fries. I thought I better eat something or they’d kick me out.”
I myself wasn’t hungry. I’d eaten on the plane in a manner quite unlike what I’d been accustomed to and Big Macs were rather an anticlimax, but I went over to the counter and bought one for each of us, along with a large order of fries. I’d had the foresight to bring a thermos flask for coffee to fortify me on the long drive ahead, so I had the girl behind the counter fill that for me, while I got Sheila a milk shake.
Sheila devoured her hamburger and quickly laid into mine, when I said I wasn’t hungry for it. Again I was drawn back across the years to see her as she had been, a desperately hungry six-year-old, using both hands to stuff her school lunch into her mouth. There wasn’t much more finesse tonight and I guessed she hadn’t seen much food in the past few days.
“So, where have you been living?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Wherever I could.”
“What kind of money have you got?”
“At the moment? Eighty-five cents. I started out with twenty-three fifty, after I bought my bus ticket, and I’ve been trying to be careful with it, but …” She smiled apologetically.
And so we chatted, while she ate, as if nothing at all had happened. I found out from her that she had used my telephone that Saturday she was over to get bus schedules and prices. She described how she had managed to scrimp out the money she needed from the allowances given the children at the ranch. It was fascinating hearing all this, because it showed such intricate planning, and even I had not suspected anything. What we didn’t talk about, however, was why she’d done it and what had come of it. Pulling myself back to observe objectively as we spoke, I looked for the signs of suicidal desperation, which I reckoned were still there.
When she had finished, I glanced at my watch. “Well, I suppose we had better be on our way.”
Sheila just sat.
I regarded her.
“I don’t want to go back to the ranch, Torey. If you’ve come all this way to take me back there, you might as well have stayed home, because I’m not going. It’s a dead zone there and I’m finished with it.”
“No. We’ll work something out. Your dad’s got a place in Broadview. He’s settled …”
Sheila still sat.
She let out a great, long sigh and let her shoulders drop. Then, wearily, she hoisted herself up from the seat and came with me.
Pulling the car out of the McDonald’s, I sped off down the main road and out onto the highway. I love driving, particularly long-distance driving, for the sense of relaxed autonomy it gives me. When I really get going, it’s almost a transcendent experience, giving me the feeling of expanding into a state of unhindered freedom. Having managed to accomplish the most important part of my mission—getting Sheila into the car to come home with me—I was in a superb mood.
Beside me, Sheila sat slumped in her seat. She didn’t say anything for several miles. Initially I thought she was going to go to sleep, because it was obvious she was very tired, but she didn’t. She just sat, elbow on the car door, hand bracing her cheek, eyes on the road ahead.
The road was absolutely empty. Having chosen the most direct route home, I wasn’t on the freeway, but on a minor highway heading due east. At that hour, there was simply no one else driving. In fact, for long stretches there were no lights anywhere, not even from farm buildings.
In the confined space of the car I could perceive Sheila’s pain much more clearly than I’d been able to in the plastic cheerfulness of McDonald’s. It was almost a physical thing. I would have expected to touch it, had I reached out my hand, and for many miles, I didn’t know what would be the best thing to do. Sit in silence? Encourage her to talk? Or maybe just carry on, as if this were all a perfectly ordinary thing to be speeding through the night eight hundred miles from home, and wait for it all to come out in its natural course.
Sheila took down the hand bracing her cheek and folded her arms across her chest. Blowing the hair out of her face, she turned her head and looked over at me. “How come you did this? Came all this way out and got me?”
“Because I love you. Simple as that.”
She turned from me, looked out the window at the deep darkness and remained so for a long time. When finally she turned back, I could see tears on her cheeks. They glimmered wanly in the pale green glow of the dashboard lights.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked.
She shook her head. Bringing a hand up, she wiped away the tears, but they came again. And again. She grew visibly upset, a sorrowful anger erupting when she couldn’t stanch the tears.
“There are tissues in my handbag,” I said and pointed into the backseat.
“I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to cry.”
“It’s okay, lovey. I don’t mind.”
“I do mind,” she retorted. “I don’t want to cry. If I let myself start, I’m never going to stop.”
“That’s been the fear for a long time, hasn’t it?”
She nodded and the tears came harder, but she still fought against them. “I’m so fucking angry! I don’t want to give in. I don’t want to cry. It just makes me weak.”
“It’s not fair! Not right. You shouldn’t be here. It should have been my mom saying all this to me. Not some teacher.” Lifting her head, she looked over at me. “Excuse the term, Torey, but that’s all you are. Where are the people who are supposed to love me?”
I regarded her.
“Where the fuck are they? Where’s my mom? Where’s my dad, for that matter? Why’s it always got to be people like you who do these things for me? Why have my parents never taken care of me? Am I that bad?” And the tears overwhelmed her. Falling into noisy, inelegant sobs, she slumped against the shoulder strap of her seat belt and wept.
I didn’t say anything. There come those times when words would seem as if they were a good idea, but in reality they are too paltry for the job.
I remembered another time like this. Drawn back across the years, I was no longer in the nighttime darkness of the car, but in the daytime darkness of the small book closet at school with Sheila, who was weeping in my arms. She’d been a fierce little tiger for so long that they had been the first tears I’d seen her shed, although the school year was almost over. She’d always feared the abyss beneath her tears.
Sheila cried for a very long time. Pulling her legs up and pressing her arms against them, she buried her face and sobbed into the tattered fabric of her jacket. I said nothing, did nothing other than speed us onward through the dark. We were in the mountains by then, the trees coming right down to the road on either side. It had begun to snow, the large, downy flakes falling mesmerizingly before the headlights of the car. The late hour, the darkness, the trees, the snow all combined to create a weird, otherworldly aura. Things no longer felt quite real to me.
At last, the end. She snuffled, hiccuped and struggled to draw breath, but the crying had ceased. Silence followed, a long, deep silence, so crowded with thoughts as to make them nearly palpable.
“I remember that boy,” she said, her voice very, very soft and still faintly embroidered with the aftermath of her tears, “that boy I took into the woods.”
Watching out through the wipers at the snow, I kept very still. Sheila had never spoken of the abduction that had brought her into my class, which had nearly sentenced her to a childhood spent in a mental institution. Of all the things Sheila had told about over the years, that incident had never once even been alluded to.
“I used to watch him in his yard. He had a swing and his mom would take him out and push him in it. I used to watch. He had a plastic riding car shaped like an elephant. He used to get on it and his daddy would push him. I used to watch him. And then … He was out there one day by himself and I said, ‘You want to come along?’ Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly now. But I undid the latch on the gate to his yard and let him out. And I took him in the woods.
“I don’t think I ever intended to hurt him. I had this piece of rope with me, but it was just something I had found down by the railroad tracks. I didn’t bring it specially or anything; I just had it. And I don’t remember wanting to hurt him, not in the beginning anyway. I remember walking, taking him into the woods … I made him pull down his pants. I wanted to see his penis. I remember that. I remember thinking, he’s just like Jimmie. He was just like Jimmie. And I hated him. Torey, I had some thoughts in my mind then that … I mean, I still remember them just like they were yesterday. I remember exactly how I felt looking at that little boy. I just hated him so bad and I thought … You’re going to hate me, when I say this to you, but … I thought, I want to kill him.”
There was a long pause. Sheila lowered her head and regarded her hands in her lap. “I was a wicked little girl. Just like my pa said.”
I didn’t speak.
Sheila looked over. “Do you hate me now?”
“No.”
“Why not? I would have. If it hadn’t been that boy’s lucky day, I would have killed him.”
I had my eyes on the road, but I could see her in my peripheral vision. She continued to regard me. Finally, she looked away. “I’m a murderer.”
“He didn’t die, Sheila.”
“He would have died. It was just luck he didn’t.” She drew in a long breath. “I can never forget this. I’ve never told anybody. I haven’t dared tell anybody, but it just sits in my mind. Every good thing that ever happens gets eaten up by this thing, sitting there. I think: I am so wicked. No wonder things keep happening to me. I deserve them. I’m so bad even my own mother couldn’t stand me.”
“Your mother had nothing to do with it. She left you long before you took that little boy. In fact, if I had to venture any explanation, it’s that it was the other way around. She didn’t leave you because you did such things. You did such things because she left you.”
“So why did she leave me then?”
“Most likely, because she had problems of her own. Because she was a very young girl. She was only fourteen when you were born. Did you know that? Fourteen.”
No reply.
“So, she would have only been eighteen on that night she left. About a year and a half older than you are now. And she had two kids to worry about and a husband in jail.”
Pulling her bottom lip between her teeth, Sheila chewed it.
“I don’t think your mother planned to abandon you, any more than you planned to hurt that little boy. I think she was simply overwhelmed. She was pushed to her limits and could cope with not one thing more, not even a small girl acting up in the backseat. And like most of us when we can fight no longer, she ran away.”
Sheila made a small, derisive sound. “Well, I sure got her blood, huh? Always running away from my problems.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not like her. You’re much stronger. Much better.”
“How can you say that?”
“You might run away when the going gets tough, but the difference is, you come back.”
Sheila considered, then slowly nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so.”