LITMIR.BIZ

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the place to be unpredictable.

      I also decided it would be better to make the classroom mine immediately. My first inclination had been to leave things as they were until we’d had a chance to adjust to one another; however, after second thought, it seemed preferable to change everything at once and give more of a sense of starting anew. So on Tuesday afternoon after school, I turned the room upside down. I shifted the bookshelves around, moved all the tables together to form one huge one, pulled down the bulletin board displays. I brought in some large floor pillows and a red carpet remnant to form a specific area for morning discussion and reading. The movable shelves and cupboards I used to divide the room into several smaller areas, making one for art activities, one for construction materials and Lego, one for natural history and science activities, and one for dressing up and housekeeping. Last of all, on my way back to the motel in Falls River that night, I stopped and plundered a pet shop, buying us a flop-eared bunny, three green finches, and a pair of hamsters with a cage that resembled the Paris Métro system.

      The weeks that followed were challenging, to say the least. I was very strict and very consistent about what I expected, pulling everyone—but most especially Jeremiah—up short every single time a rule was infringed. By the same token, I tried to make sure there was plenty of fun, too. We did a lot of singing, a lot of art projects, a lot of cooking, and a lot of building of fairly unrecognizable bird-houses and boats. Each morning, I tried to take the children outside for a period separate from recess. Usually, it went under the guise of science—studying seasonal changes or the weather or whatever—but it was mainly a chance for the children to let off steam, to run and scream a little without disturbing the other classes, a spell of good fun to charm the reluctant ones into behaving and reward the cooperative ones. No doubt it would come as a nasty surprise when the time arrived to spend more of the day reading and writing than we were doing at this point, but I didn’t feel we were in any way wasting time or resources in those early weeks. The need to make us a group, to provide collective memories that included me rather than June Harriman, to resurrect the school year from the ashes of what had gone before, all seemed more necessary goals than the completion of a certain number of workbooks. And it was my good fortune to have a principal who agreed.

      “Hey, how you doing?”

      I didn’t know the woman at the door. She was good-looking in a hearty, worldly sort of way, with big boobs and big hips but a waspish little waist, all appearing slightly disproportionate since she couldn’t have been over five feet tall. Her thick brown hair was tied back with a red scarf into a ponytail.

      “All right,” I said and smiled uncertainly.

      “Glen tells me you’ve settled in pretty good. Says you’ve cut Jeremiah down to size.”

      What was going through my mind as I studied her was that she would have made an archetypal country-western singer. She had about her that powerful aura of hardbitten wisdom, the kind evidenced by women named Lurleen or Loretta, whose men married them at fifteen and then ran off with the waitress from the diner.

      “In fact,” she said, “Glen tells me you’ve even managed to get Jadie Ekdahl talking.” Pulling out one of the child-sized chairs, she sat down.

      Intensely uncomfortable, I wondered if I should mention that I didn’t know her. Did I? Had I forgotten her face? This was not an unknown happening for me, and I racked my brain to remember who was at my interview.

      My predicament suddenly became clear to her, and she gave a broad smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Arkie. Arkie Peterson. The school psychologist.”

      The name I recognized immediately, because it appeared as a signature on almost every paper in the children’s files.

      “So you’ve got to tell me all about it,” she said, her tone zesty. “All about what you did with Jade. Did Glen tell you that I’d tried with her? Two blessed years, almost. I was coming in here every Thursday, trying to get that kid to talk. So, precisely now, what did you do?”

      The affinity between us was instant. Talking with Arkie was like picking up a long-forgotten friendship, and before I realized it, we had whiled away the better part of an hour discussing our mutual interests in psychology, education, and disturbed children.

      Arkie had been down all the usual routes with Jadie’s mutism. She’d first encountered Jadie just past her fifth birthday, when it was picked up during a prekindergarten screening program. “I just wanted to gain her confidence,” Arkie said. “Here was this little, wee mite of a thing under all that hair. She looked so scared and vulnerable when I came that first day. I took her down to the nurse’s office, where I usually work when I’m here, and I said to her, ‘Honey, we’re going to be friends. We’re going to come in here and do things together and have a real good time. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t manage talking right away, because we’ll be friends anyhow.’ And I just assumed once she got to know me, once she felt secure enough to trust me, she’d begin talking. I thought she’d want to talk to me. But she didn’t. We played all these shitty little games Thursday after Thursday, ’til I wanted to brain the child.”

      From there, Arkie’s relationship with Jadie had deteriorated into the same sort of power struggle June Harriman had experienced later. Indeed, it was Arkie’s frustration that led to Jadie’s placement in this class. “I still don’t know if it was the right move,” she said. “I mean, she’s always done all right academically. She’s a bright enough kid. I think her IQ scores have always been one twelve, one sixteen, somewhere in there, and she’s functioning about there in her schoolwork. So was this the right move? If the mutism was not interfering with her learning, should she get stuck in a special class?”

      I gave a faint shrug. “Good question. And hard to answer. Certainly she merited intervention, which lots of times these kids don’t get simply because they don’t cause adults much trouble. However, any kind of voluntary mutism, if it persists over months or years, shows a disturbing need to control.” I looked over. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, is control what? Any ideas?”

      “Not really.”

      “What’s the family like?”

      A shrug. “Pretty average. There’s Mom, Dad, two younger girls. Traditional setup. Mom stays home with the kids. Dad has a job doing something with agricultural machinery. Socioeconomically, they’re definitely in the lower bracket, but they’re by no means poor.”

      “What about the psychological makeup of the family?”

      A pause. Arkie considered her fingernails. “I don’t think Mom’s too bright. Sort of a go-alonger. You know the type. Anything you tell her, she goes along with. But she’s easy to get on with. Dad’s a bit quirky. Into health food in a big way. Got really het up because we served pork and beans in school lunches. I think he thinks Jadie’s problems are coming from eating too much sugar or additives or something.”

      “Elective mutism as an allergy,” I murmured and smiled. “That’s a new one on me.”

      “Yeah, a bit silly. But basically, both of them are easy to get along with. I’ve had much worse parents to deal with in my time.”

      “Tell me something else,” I said, changing the subject. “Has anyone investigated her posture? Does she have scoliosis?”

      “No,” Arkie replied bluntly. “I think it’s just part of her emotional problems. We’ve had the school nurse look at her, and of course her own pediatrician has seen her, but no one’s found anything to explain it. I think she’s just a closed-up kid in all senses of the word.”

      The majority of the time, Jadie walked nearly doubled over. She kept her arms up under her, tucked against her chest, her hands dangling limply unless she carried something. While she kept her head up sufficiently to see, she would have to keep it at an awkward angle to see much, so most of the time she peered through her eyebrows and the tangled dark hair hanging over her forehead. This made looking Jadie in the eye an almost impossible task. The bent-over posture took its toll on her gait, too, and she moved about the classroom in a mincing hobble.

      This

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