“You don’t know everything about me.”
“No.”
“I mean, like, you have been gone a few years, Torey.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
There was a few moments’ silence, while Sheila, her face turned away from me, watched out the window. Then she added, “All those years in the migrant camp and not learn to speak Spanish? Shit, I would never have had anybody to talk to.”
I didn’t answer. There was a sparky undercurrent to Sheila that showed itself more often than I was comfortable with. Much as she seemed to want to be with me, she also seemed easily irritated with me. Probably just adolescence. I wasn’t particularly gifted with adolescents, so that didn’t help any either. Whatever, I found it mildly upsetting.
Sheila seemed to sense this and came back with a conciliatory tone. “I thought talking in Spanish might make him feel better. Like, more secure. It was just an idea.”
“It was a good one. And did he understand you?”
“I am fluent,” she retorted.
“No, I mean, it will have been a long time since Alejo heard anyone speak Spanish to him, and even then it may have been a dialect.”
“Yeah, he understood me. He came down, didn’t he?”
Silence. I was approaching a major interstate junction on the freeway. There was the omnipresent roadwork and quite a lot of congestion, so for several minutes I concentrated on my driving. Once the traffic eased and I could relax, I listened into the silence.
“You know, Sheila, I get this sort of ongoing feeling that you’re angry with me,” I said.
“Me?” she replied with disbelief.
“If there are things or people I like, you seem to go out of your way to show you dislike them. If I say something, you seem to make a point of proving me wrong. And there’s just this general tone of voice.”
“Shit, you’re just listening to, like, every little thing I say, aren’t you?” she retorted. “And judging it.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Well, you know, I don’t think you’re so great either,” she said. “In that book you wrote, you come off sounding so patient with everything and you’re not, you know.”
I looked over. “What do you mean?”
“You get angry with everything. Like, you swear at all these drivers.”
“I’m not swearing.”
“You might as well be,” Sheila said. “It’s like ‘Come on, lady!’ ‘Hurry up and get out there, mister,’ every second sentence, Torey. And, like, you got mad at me when I tried to get in the car and had hold of the door handle so you couldn’t unlock it.”
“I didn’t get mad at you.”
“You did! You said, ‘Let it go’ in a really bitchy tone of voice. Not like you talk in your book at all. In there, you’re so patient and kind. You wait forever in your book and never say a cross word, but now I can see how you really are and you get mad every other second.”
“Not every other second, I’m sure.”
“Seems like it to me,” she replied.
“I’m human, Sheila. I get irritated sometimes. And irritable.”
“That’s not like you are in One Child.”
“No, maybe not. That’s a character in a book. People are too complex to be portrayed in their entirety on paper. And, in some parts, too boring.”
Sheila snorted. “So you’re saying it’s not you.”
“That character is the essence of me, but it isn’t me, no. I’m me. Here. Now.”
Sheila snorted again. “Hot shit.”
From dropping Sheila off at the bus station on Fenton Boulevard, I returned to the clinic. The conversation in the car had upset me, confirming as it did what intuition had already told me. She was angry with me. Why? Because I was annoyingly human, when she had expected the character from a book? I couldn’t imagine that would provoke the strength of feeling I was sensing from her.
On the wall above my desk in the office, I’d hung the poem she had written me when she was twelve. Sitting down in my chair, I looked up at it.
… Then you came
With your funny way of being
Not quite human …
Whatever she wanted from me, it was different from what she was getting.
Jeff opened the door and entered our small shared office. He was returning from a therapy session and had obviously had a close encounter with his client, because his hair was mussed and there was blue tempera paint on one cheek.
“You look like I feel,” I said.
He set his notepad down on his desk. “I am never going into infant psychiatry, I can tell you that,” he muttered none too good-naturedly. “Rosenthal can have that field entirely to himself. I am restricting myself to those who do not need finger paints.”
“I don’t think I’m going to go in for adolescents,” I replied.
Jeff raised an eyebrow. “Who’s getting to you? Your little orangutan?”
I nodded and told him about the conversation in the car.
Although I had filled Jeff in about Sheila’s past in general terms, such as the fact that she had been a student of mine, I had never gone into any great detail, including never having told him she was the subject of my book. Book publication being the lengthy process it is, One Child was not due for release for several more months; and being a little leery of how my venture into popular nonfiction would be received in professional circles, I had never talked much about it to any of my colleagues. Now I found myself not only explaining Sheila’s darker past but also our complex relationship.
“Hoo,” Jeff said when I paused. “You do land yourself in some tortured situations, Hayden.”
“So, what are your thoughts?” I asked. “What have I done wrong with this girl? I’ve stirred something up unintentionally.”
He smiled gently. “You know what I think the real problem is here? You and Sheila both have a dose of the same disease. All she remembers is this wonderful teacher who never got mad at her and now she’s upset to discover just how ordinary and human you are; but, you know, Hayden, you’re doing the very same thing. What’s coloring your behavior toward her now is the fact that what you remember, too, is not Sheila as a real child, but rather the six-year-old character in a book.”
“I do not.”
“We all do,” Jeff replied. “That’s all memory is, our interpretation of what we’ve experienced. The only difference here is that most of us never get the book written.”
“How much do you remember about your mother?” I asked Sheila the next afternoon, as I was driving her to the bus station.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I asked. How much do you remember about her?”
Sheila didn’t answer. Turning her head away, she looked out the window.
I listened into the silence, trying to discern what her emotions were. It had been a fairly good morning. After the drama of