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

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СКАЧАТЬ He’s up for the same tricks as always.”

      “Where’s Sheila then?”

      “Don’t know. He’s been living over in Broadview for a couple of years now and he was arrested and booked over there. They sent over here just looking for files. I’ve never seen him or anything.”

      “But where’s Sheila?” I murmured, lowering my head.

      Heartbroken at this discovery, I endeavored to find out about Sheila’s fate, but I had few resources at my fingertips. Broadview was still two hundred miles off and was a much bigger city. Finding one small girl was no easy matter. The most I could confirm was that she had been taken into foster care as a direct result of her father’s arrest and imprisonment and was, apparently, still placed. Where, with whom and for how long I could not determine. Rumor had it that she had been repeatedly in and out of foster care from the time they had moved.

      Foster care. Practically the whole time Sheila was in my class, all of us had viewed foster care as a panacea to her problems. If only Sheila were away from the poverty, if only she were in a stable home with loving parents, if only … We hadn’t been able to get her into foster care then simply because the Social Services were so overstretched in Marysville and she did have her natural father. Now she was in foster care and I should have felt glad. The fact was, I didn’t.

      Back home, I sat down and wrote a very long letter to Sheila. I told her about my visit to our old school and our old friends. I mentioned that I knew her life had been disrupted in the last eighteen months and that I knew she was now with foster parents. I said that I hoped all was well and that if there was any way I could help, I would be happy to try. Including my phone number, I said she could call me collect any time, if she wanted. Then I added a photograph from the visit of Sandy and me and an old one I had taken of Sheila on our last-day picnic. Folding everything together, I put them in a large envelope. But where would I send it? In the end, I sent it to her father, in care of the prison, and asked him to forward it to her.

      I never heard whether Sheila received my letter or not, whether she ever knew that I was trying to find her again. There was no answer, and as the months went by, I began to accept there wasn’t going to be one.

      This was difficult for me to come to terms with. It seemed inconceivable to me that she had disappeared from my life. Yet the words of my colleague kept returning to me: you’ve got to love ’em and leave ’em.

      Two years later, a small envelope arrived on my desk. It was addressed not to my home, but rather to the university where I now taught. I recognized Sheila’s loose, scrawly handwriting immediately and tore the envelope open. There was only one sheet of paper inside, a crumpled piece of lined notebook paper. The writing was done in blue felt-tip marker with many of the words watermarked, as if the paper had gotten splattered by rain. Or was it tears?

       To Torey with much Love

       All the rest came

       They tried to make me laugh

       They played their games with me

       Some games for fun and some for keeps

       And then they went away

       Leaving me in the ruins of games

       Not knowing which were for keeps and

       Which were for fun and

       Leaving me alone with the echoes of

       Laughter that was not mine.

       Then you came

       With your funny way of being

       Not quite human

       And you made me cry

       And you didn’t seem to care if I did

       You just said the games are over

       And waited

       Until all my tears turned into

       Joy.

      There was nothing else, no letter, not even a note. As with the days when she had sent me only her homework, Sheila seemed to feel no need for explanations. It was my turn to cry then and so I wept.

Part 2

       Chapter 6

      I can remember the moment precisely when the magic began. I was eight, a not-very-outstanding third grader in Mrs. Webb’s class. I didn’t care much for school. I never had. My world in those days was the broad, swampy creek that ran below our house; that and my beloved pets. School was something that got in the way of my enjoyment of these things.

      On one particular morning, my reading group had been sent back to our desks to do our seatwork, while Mrs. Webb listened to the next group read. On my desk, under my workbook, I had hidden a piece of paper, and instead of doing what I should have been doing, I sneaked the opportunity to write. At home I had a dachshund, which had been a present to me from my mother on my seventh birthday, and I made him the hero of a rather lurid tale involving our old mother cat and a band of marauding, eye-plucking crows. So absorbed did I become in spinning this tale that I failed to notice Mrs. Webb on the move, and what inevitably happens to eight-year-old girls who do not do their reading workbooks happened. Mrs. Webb snatched the story away from me and I had to stay in from recess to do my work.

      The incident itself was minor, the sort of thing to which I was unfortunately rather prone, and as a consequence, I forgot all about it. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was ill and kept out of school for a few days. When I returned, I had to stay after school that afternoon to make up some of the work I had missed. Mrs. Webb apparently took this opportunity to clean out the drawers of her desk. Anyway, when I had finished, she handed over a piece of paper to me. “Here, I think this is yours,” she said. It was the story about my dog and the crows.

      Collecting my coat and belongings to go home, I began to read it as I walked down the school corridor, dark and silent because all the other children had left so long before me. Once at the end of the hall, I pushed open the heavy double doors of the school and then sat down on the concrete steps at the entrance to finish reading.

      That precise moment I remember with such exquisite clarity—the feel of the cold concrete through my skirt, the late-autumn sunshine transposed against the darkness of the school entranceway, the uncanny silence of the empty playground, even the faint anxiety of knowing that I should be on my way home because my grandmother would worry if I was too late. The paper, however, held me spellbound.

      It was all there: my dog, his adventure, the excitement such melodramatic experiences always created in me. I felt just as excited by the story reading it as I had been writing it. Astonished when I realized this, I lowered the paper. I remember lowering the paper, looking over the top of it, seeing someone’s hopscotch game chalked СКАЧАТЬ