Then came silence. Plagued by red lights and roadwork, I wasn’t making very speedy progress toward Fenton Boulevard. Sheila leaned her head against the window and gazed out. She looked tired. Had it been the rigors of the morning? Or had she come tired? The thought suddenly struck me that I was taking the stability of Sheila’s home life for granted. Sneaking a look, I studied her. God, that orange hair!
“I think … well, I guess I can see now what got you attracted to this kind of work,” she said, her voice quiet and rather distant-sounding. “’Cause you hear about these things happening to people, and they are so unfair that they make you feel you just got to do something. That’s my reaction, anyway.” She paused. “Well, that’s one reaction.”
“What’s the other?” I asked.
“I just want to put my hands over my eyes and my fingers in my ears and stop it from getting in. I mean, I already know the world’s bad. I’m not sure I can stand knowing it’s really worse.”
Our first “incident” happened the next morning. The school was across the street from a small park. It wasn’t an elaborate place, but there were swings and a large wooden structure built for climbing and plenty of room for running around. What made it particularly hospitable on a hot summer’s morning were the trees. There were a dozen or more, with enormous trunks and long, overhanging branches. Some particularly forward-thinking person in the parks department had had attractive wooden seating built around three of the trees nearest the play equipment.
We decided to take our juice and cookies outside and let the children play on the swings and climbing frame during their break time. David and Mikey thought this was wonderful and went tearing off at such a rate that Jeff had to run after them and catch them before they went into the street.
Although I had agreed happily when Jeff had suggested that we take the children over to the park at break time, I realized the moment David and Mikey ran off that it was a mistake. We were all too new to each other. But by that time, we were already underway.
Right from the beginning, it was small-scale chaos of the sort that kids adore and grown-ups abhor. Joshua went into a self-stimulated frenzy on the swings. Jessie just stood on the grass, arms out, and spun dizzyingly around and around. David, Mikey and Alejo immediately fell into playing some dreadfully noisy war game that required an enormous amount of tearing around and much shouted large-artillery fire. Violet appeared to get rather turned on by this. I couldn’t tell if she simply wanted to join in and did not have the appropriate social skills to get the boys to include her, or whether she found it all genuinely sexually stimulating. Whichever, she began to indulge in open masturbation, while shouting out cheers and gunfire noises to the boys as they tore by.
Needless to say, our break time was quickly turned into a rowdy, deafening affair. Only Kayleigh and Tamara did not join in. Clinging to Miriam’s hand, Kayleigh watched the other children apprehensively. Tamara, on the other hand, didn’t seem particularly frightened by the mayhem, but she withdrew away from all of us. Taking her paper cup of juice and her cookies, she went off into a cubby-hole formed by tires on the underside of the climbing structure.
After fifteen minutes, Jeff and I went to herd everyone back together, while Miriam sat down on one of the benches and tried to keep hold of those we had captured. Sheila proved fairly hopeless. Whether it was the noise or the sudden hyperactivity around her, I don’t know, but she simply froze in the midst of it all and the more I shouted at her to go get one child or another, the more solidly she seemed to be rooted to her spot.
One by one, we rounded them up, until we only had David, Mikey and Tamara left. I was chasing David down when I heard Jeff cry out. “Oh, my God!”
We all stopped then and looked over. He was extracting Tamara from her tires and as she stood up, I saw she was covered in blood. While the rest of us had been absorbed elsewhere, Tamara had taken the opportunity her privacy afforded her to gouge long lines into the skin along her jaw with a small, sharp stick she had picked up from the mulch put down to cushion falls from the climbing frame. They were not particularly deep cuts, but they bled dramatically.
Then, abruptly, from the group of children with Miriam, frantic screaming started up. Instinct told me it was Violet and I spun around, but it wasn’t. It was Alejo. Seeing Tamara’s blood, he put a hand to either side of his face and screamed and screamed. I ran toward him, but this seemed to make matters worse. Shrieking incoherently, he fled across the grass until he came to one of the other trees and then, like a little monkey, he swarmed right up it and into the branches.
We all stood there, stunned. Even Tamara, Jeff’s handkerchief pressed to her face, gazed up in amazement. Alejo kept climbing until he must have been the better part of fifty feet in the air.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jeff muttered. “What now?”
I glanced around us and then back up in the tree. “Alejo? Are you all right?”
He wasn’t screaming any longer, wasn’t doing anything other than standing on a branch and looking down at us.
“It’s okay. Everything’s fine here. Nothing wrong with Tamara. She just scratched herself. But it’s nothing serious. Why don’t you come on down now?” I called.
“Alejo?” Jeff said. “It’s time to come down.”
He didn’t budge.
“You reckon I can climb up?” I asked Jeff.
“Don’t be stupid, Hayden.”
Miriam was beside us now. She was holding Kayleigh in her arms. “How about the fire department? Do they do these kinds of things?”
I looked around at the others just in time to see Joshua strolling out into the road. “Oh, cripes. Josh? Come here, Josh.” I ran after him. Snagging him by the T-shirt, I hauled him back into the group. It was then I noticed Sheila sitting on the ground. She was unlacing her work boots.
“I can get him,” she said, and before any of us had a chance to protest, Sheila had leaped into the branches and was pulling herself up.
“Oh, God,” Jeff cried, “two of them up there. Why did you let her do that, Hayden?”
“Well, at least we’ve got a doctor on the premises.”
Then silence, as we all watched.
“We’re gonna get sued out of our lives …” I heard Jeff mutter under his breath.
Sheila climbed the tree with no difficulty, shimmying up through the branches as easily as Alejo had done until she reached the one just beneath him. I heard her talking to him, but I couldn’t discern what she was saying.
Minutes went by. All the while I was racking my brains for the best solution, as no doubt Jeff was doing as well. Should we call the fire department? The police? Dr. Rosenthal? Alejo’s parents? Or could we risk just waiting him out? What about the other children? It was only ten forty-five and the program ran for another hour and forty-five minutes. Should Miriam and I take the rest back in and try to pretend everything was normal?
Then, just as I was about to suggest phoning for help, I saw Sheila begin to descend, and within a few moments, Alejo started down behind her. Jeff, Miriam and I all sighed a collective sigh of relief.
“Hey, you’re a hero,” Jeff said to Sheila as we all finally started back to the school. He reached an arm out and slipped it over her shoulder. “You really did great there. I bet you’re proud of yourself.”
Nodding, Sheila ducked to free herself of his touch.
“I hope you are proud of yourself,” I said to Sheila as I drove her down to Fenton Boulevard after lunch. “What you did was very brave.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” She put her hands behind her neck and lifted her hair up off her shoulders. “I didn’t think about it.”
“What did you talk about when you were up there? How did you convince him to come down?” I asked.