Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden

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       Chapter 2

      Leslie Considyne was a very curious piece of work. When I returned from seeing her mother out, I found her in precisely the spot I’d left her. Taking out a chair from the table, I indicated it to her. She sat. There was nothing mechanical about her movements. In fact, she moved with a surprisingly fluid grace, but she appeared to have no one at home inside her body. The entire morning she acted only when instructed. Otherwise, she remained wherever she was, staring vacantly ahead, and without a muscle ever twitching. She would not look at me or at the other children. Even when I sat directly in front of her and lined her face up with mine, she continued to look ahead, straight through me, as if I were not there. I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. What I couldn’t tell was if it was a conscious effort.

      Although I had been led to believe that Dirkie would be my most disturbed child, Leslie presented a more disconcerting appearance that morning. She was the only one of the three who did not speak and was not toilet trained. She also had brittle diabetes, which necessitated a harrowing round of injections midday. Even this got no reaction from her. The nurse came in, took her aside, injected her, and Leslie never flicked an eyelash. She never even looked down at what the nurse was doing.

      When the children had gone for lunch at 12:15, I sat down at the worktable with the files. Having now met all three children, I looked forward to understanding more what had been written about them.

      There was a quick rap at the classroom door and then it opened. I looked up. Once again, my view was blocked by the shelving, and I could tell that not being able to see the door from the main part of the classroom was going to drive me mad. “Come on in,” I called and waited for someone to appear.

      “Just me. How did it go? Okay?” It was Carolyn, the special education teacher from the class in the basement.

      I nodded. “Pretty good.”

      She grinned. “You want to come to Enrico’s with us? That’s where everybody here goes at noon.”

      “Thanks, but I’ve brought my lunch. I need to catch up on all this stuff before the afternoon. Maybe I’ll join you tomorrow.”

      “Who all have you got?” she asked, coming over and leaning down to look at the names on the files.

      I liked Carolyn. I’d liked her instantly, which was fortunate, since we were the only two teachers in the building. She was about my age, still single and unabashedly concerned about it, easy-going, gregarious and inclined to speak before thinking, which gave her a refreshing naturalness.

      Suddenly Carolyn whistled under her breath. “You got Considyne? Is this the Considyne?”

      “I wouldn’t know. Have you had Leslie too?”

      “Oh God, no. Thank God, no. The kid is absolutely wacko, which is all right, because it makes her fit in with the rest of the family. You live here for any time at all and you’ll know all you need to know about the Considynes. Or rather, Tom Considyne and Dr. Taylor.”

      “Yes, believe it or not, I’ve already had that pointed out to me.”

      Carolyn flipped open Leslie’s file. Pointing to the father’s name, she said, “He’s an artist. Supposed to be famous, although I’ve sure never heard of him anywhere.”

      Then a wicked grin creased Carolyn’s features, and she pulled out a chair and sat down. “You want to hear the gossip about them? It’s pretty hot.” She reached over and helped herself to my potato chips. “She’s supposed to be this absolute genius; anyway that’s what people say. She’s a scientist of some sort. God knows how they met one another. But talk about a father fixation. She’s like twenty-five years younger than he is. Anyway, she was working back East at some university or other and commuting back and forth. They had their own private plane, jetting all over creation and part of Canada. She was even in Moscow once. Then all of a sudden it stopped. She got fired off what she was doing; that’s what I heard said. She has this fairly dramatic drinking problem, as you’ll no doubt discover, and I’m sure that’s what happened to her.

      “So now we’ve got her, and she’s a pretty lively case, believe me. She has all these affairs. She isn’t even discreet about it. I know for a fact that she’s had an affair with Dr. Addison from up at the children’s clinic. It’s got to be humiliating for Mr. Considyne, because everybody knows she’s doing it. I suppose it must be because of the way she looks. I mean, if I looked like that, I’d probably have me a sugar daddy and keep a string on the side too.” Carolyn laughed.

      I regarded my cheese sandwich glumly. This was the kind of thing you liked to hear about people you didn’t really know, not the parents of the children in your schoolroom.

      “Trash with class, that’s what it boils down to,” Carolyn said. She leaned across the table and helped herself to my grapes. “She puts on all these airs. I mean, look at this silly business about Dr. Taylor. She thinks she’s too good to even talk to the rest of us. She’ll never even say hello. And who is she? What would she be if she weren’t Tom Considyne’s little bimbo? He’s the one who’s famous. He’s got all the money. But he’s nice. He’s real friendly, if you run into him down at the Co-op or something. If he’s been introduced to you, he’ll always remember your name. If he’s got any fault, it’s that he’s too casual about things. He tends not to follow through. He drove Rita wild last year. She was Leslie’s first-grade teacher. She was always arranging things with him to try and help Leslie, and he was always promising to do them, but he never did. That, and also he never answers his phone. If their help’s out, you’ll never be able to contact him, short of knocking the door down. He’s got a studio out in back of his house where he does his painting, and last year when Leslie went into a diabetic coma, Rita stood outside his studio knocking on the window, and he never even bothered to turn around and see who it was.”

      “This sounds like a soap opera, Carolyn.”

      “Ooooh, it’s better,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. “It’s real.”

      I grimaced.

      Carolyn smiled knowingly and pulled over the rest of the files to look at them. “You want me to fill you in on these too?”

      “You know about them?” I asked incredulously.

      She laughed. “No. But I’m sure I could think of something.”

      We both dissolved into giggles.

      After Carolyn left, I opened the Considyne file. There was nothing in there that hinted at the steamy stories Carolyn had been telling me. СКАЧАТЬ