Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her

“Oh, she goes home for lunch. She lives just across the street, so she doesn’t eat here,” the teacher replied when I explained that I’d lost another one. She abruptly extended her hand. “By the way, I’m Lucy McLaren. Welcome aboard.”

I hung out my tongue in an expression of exhaustion. “I usually do better than this. Even on first days. But they’ve got the advantage at the moment. They know the ropes and I don’t.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re doing all right. You’ve already lasted longer than a couple of the substitutes. There was one that left after about half an hour.” And she laughed.

Back in the empty classroom, I threw myself down into one of the small chairs with the idea of catching my breath a moment before going down for the grand entrance into the teachers’ lounge, an experience almost on a par with facing a new class. Five minutes’ relaxation, I thought, and then I’d get my lunch and go down.

Abruptly, a scuffling rattle came from the cloakroom. Relaxed almost to a point of sleepiness in the silent classroom, I was badly startled by the noise. Jerking upright in the chair, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat.

Jadie appeared in the cloakroom doorway.

“You’re still here? I thought you’d gone home for lunch.”

Because of her hunched posture, Jadie had to tilt her head back at a difficult angle and peer through her eyebrows to see me, but look at me she did, her gaze steady and intent.

I, too, studied her. Her hair was very dark, almost black, as were her brows and lashes. Her eyes, in contrast, were a clear, pure blue. With her scruffy homemade clothes and tangled mass of hair, she wasn’t exactly pretty, but there was a knowing, almost come-hither kind of expression in her eyes that lent her a certain beauty.

“You want to know something?” I asked.

No response. No step nearer, no blink, not even a breath that I could see.

“Come over here.” I patted the chair next to mine at the table.

Laboriously, she hobbled across the classroom. Her eyes remained on me but her expression was unreadable. She didn’t sit down.

“You know what I did before I came here?”

No response.

“I worked in a special clinic up in the city and you know what? I worked with boys and girls just like you, who had a hard time talking.”

Jadie’s eyes searched my face.

“Isn’t that amazing, that first I was there and now I’m here with you? Boys and girls just like you. It was my own special job, helping them.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Did you know there were others like you? Who found it impossible to talk at school?”

A long pause and then very, very faintly, she shook her head.

I sat back and smiled. “There are. Not very many, which is why it’s a bit of a coincidence, your being in this class, but I’ve known a lot of them. And it was my own special job, helping them be able to talk again.”

The pupils of Jadie’s eyes dilated, and for the first time she let slip the expressionless mask. A look of incredulity crossed her features.

Lowering my head like an ostrich in need of chiropractic help, I stuck my neck out and peered upward into her face to see her fully. I smiled. “You don’t quite believe me, do you? Did you think you were all alone in feeling like you do? Did you think nobody knew about these things?”

No response.

“It’s scary, isn’t it, being all alone, not being able to tell anyone how you feel.”

Again, the very faint nod.

Again, I smiled. “Aren’t we lucky that you and I are going to be together? I’ve helped all those other children. Now I’m here to help you.”

Her eyes grew watery, and for a brief moment, I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. Instead, she clutched her unbuttoned coat closed, turned tail, and ran, shutting the classroom door firmly behind her.

Over the lunch hour I set up the painting easel and mixed several pots of tempera paints. Within minutes of getting back into the classroom, Jeremiah discovered the paints and busied himself stirring the colors together. I separated him and the paints and then went off to catch Reuben, only to come back moments later and find Jeremiah painting lunchboxes. This distressed Philip immensely, as his Superman lunchbox was now a pale shade of mud brown; so I sent Jeremiah back to the sink with the lunchbox to wash it before the paint dried. The potential for mess created by combining Jeremiah, a sinkful of water, and a paint-covered lunchbox was not something I had fully appreciated until that moment, and by two o’clock I was making the acquaintance of Mr. O’Banyon, the janitor, and his mop bucket. Compared to the morning, however, this was an improvement.

After three weeks of substitutes, it was only fair to expect the children to be disrupted and disruptive. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy coming in midyear and trying to recreate order. I’d appreciated that fact when I accepted the job. Jadie, Philip, and Jeremiah, however, seemed to take one more new face in their stride. Reuben couldn’t. Nothing I did all day long managed to orient him to any meaningful activity. Most of the time he was up, dashing in broad circles around the classroom. When finally persuaded to sit down, he constantly rocked and flicked his eyelashes with his fingers.

Philip made an effort to join in during the afternoon. He liked the easel and paints and enthusiastically slopped bright blobs of color over piece after piece of paper. “Red?” I’d say encouragingly. “Orange?” This made him grunt something back in reply, although goodness knows what.

“That’s baby painting,” Jeremiah said, as he passed the easel. “Man, boog, that’s not even a picture. Want me to show you how to paint something real?” He snatched the paintbrush out of Philip’s hand. Picking up the container of black paint, he dipped the brush in and began to draw a long, black line over Philip’s blodges of color. Indignant at this interference, Philip howled.

“Jeremiah,” I cried, abandoning Reuben to halt what I feared would turn into real trouble. “That’s Philip’s painting. Now give him back his brush. You’ve already had your turn.”

“Jesus, lady, I’m just going to help the little booger. Look at this, it ain’t even a picture. And you sure ain’t teaching him how to do it right.”

Philip had begun to dance in frustration, trying to grasp the brush from Jeremiah’s hand. Jeremiah, both bigger and more agile, kept it just out of reach. Black paint dripped everywhere.

“Give it back,” I demanded.

“Want me to teach you how to make Mr. T?” Jeremiah offered suddenly. “You ought to like that. He’s a black guy, just like you, only he’s a big booger. You gonna be a big booger someday? Yeah? I bet you are.” He put his free arm around Philip’s shoulder in buddy-buddy fashion. “But you know something I can never figure out about you black people?” Jeremiah continued, as Philip, charmed by his attention, wrapped an arm around Jeremiah’s waist. “I can never figure out how come the blackness just sort of wears off your hands. How come that happens? Look much better to me, man, if you was black all over.” And with unexpected swiftness, he began painting Philip’s palm black and then continued right on up his shirt sleeve.

Philip howled again. I separated the two boys, sending Jeremiah off to the “quiet chair” I’d placed just outside the cloakroom door and explaining he needed to sit there until he could keep his act together.

Jeremiah was not enthusiastic about this imposition on his freedom and got up immediately, shouting and swearing, I physically replaced him and was then obliged to stand over him for the fifteen minutes or so it took him to settle down. Even then, he muttered crossly under his breath, “Man, lady, you’re gonna regret this.”

Jadie might as well have been a ghost. No one spoke to her, looked at her, or even acknowledged her presence in the room. And this attitude was mutual. Jadie went about her business with absorption, but she gave no indication that there was anyone else in the room besides herself.

When it was Jadie’s turn at the easel, she painted an elaborate picture of a white house with a blue roof. Beside it grew a lollipop-shaped tree and in front was a peculiarly shaped figure, rather like a bell with legs coming from it. It had yellow hair flowing down the sides, so I took it to be a person, probably a girl. The painting was small, covering only the bottom third of the paper. She made a strip of blue sky at the top and added a shining sun. This left the middle largely blank.

“I like that,” I said, when she’d stepped back to view it. “You’ve used a lot of colors. Who’s this?” I pointed to the figure.

“Man, lady, don’t you take no hint?” Jeremiah shouted. “She don’t talk. You been told that already. So don’t go hassling folks about what’s wrong with them. How’d you like it, if people kept getting at you for being so dumb? You can’t help that, can you?”

“Thank you for your thoughts, Jeremiah, but I’m talking to Jadie just now.”

At that moment the recess bell rang. Jeremiah shot out the door and Philip scampered after him, leaving me with Reuben and Jadie. I realized I should have been hustling out the door after them, either to catch Jeremiah and bring him back for a more appropriate exit or at least to supervise his departure, but I didn’t. I stood a moment longer to see if anyone would reappear in the doorway or if any horrible noises would signal disaster. When nothing happened, I glanced over at Reuben, self-stimulating happily in the far corner, and then back to Jadie. Pointing directly to the figure on the painting, I asked again, “Who’s this person?”

Silence.

“Who’s this?”

Still silence.

I knew I had to work quickly now to keep the silence from growing potent. My research had yielded a highly successful method of treating the most salient symptom of the elective mutism syndrome—the refusal to speak—and it was both simple and efficient. All that was needed was for someone unknown to the child to come in, set up expectations immediately that the child would speak, and then provide an unavoidable opportunity to do so. Consequently, as a new teacher, I was in an ideal position to get Jadie to speak, but I had to do so right away before we’d established a relationship that included her silence. I also knew that to provide the “unavoidable opportunity,” I had to be persistent, clinging like a terrier to my question, and not let the inevitable wall of silence deter me.

“Who’s in this picture?” Silence. “Tell me what figure we have here.” Silence. “What person is this?”

Still silence. I could see her muscles tense. Her hands began to tremble.

“Who’s this?” I asked again, intensifying my voice abruptly, not making it sound angry, not even louder, just intense. And unavoidable. I tapped the picture smartly with the eraser end of the pencil I was holding.

“A girl,” she whispered.

“Pardon?”

“A girl,” she murmured in a hoarse half whisper.

“I see. What’s her name?”

Silence.

“What do you call her?”

“Tashee.” Still the hoarse whisper.

“Tashee? That’s an interesting name. Is she a friend of yours?”

Jadie nodded.

“What’s Tashee doing in this picture?”

“Standing in front of her grandma’s house.”

“Oh, so this is her grandma’s house. It’s pretty, all blue and white like that. Especially the door. You’ve made a beautiful door. And how old is Tashee?”

“Six.”

“Same age as you, then?”

“No, I’m eight. I was seven, but I just had my birthday at Christmastime.”

“I see. Do you and Tashee play together sometimes?”

“No.”

“Have you been to her grandma’s house with her?”

A pause. Jadie regarded the picture. “I don’t know her grandma. She just talked about her sometimes.”

“Oh.”

Jadie touched the figure on the paper with one finger and some of the yellow paint smeared. Lifting her finger, she examined it. “I should have made her hair black.”

“Tashee doesn’t have yellow hair?”

Jadie shook her head. “No. Her hair was black, like Jeremiah’s. Black and straight. I think maybe she was an Indian, but I don’t know for sure.”

“I see.” Then I smiled at her. “I like this picture a lot. Maybe we can put it on the back counter to dry. Then I think maybe we’d better get outside to join the others, don’t you?”

Jadie bent to put the lids back on the paints. I glanced over to see what Reuben was up to. Curled in a fetal position among the cushions, he lay, eyes closed, and gently stroked the skin alongside his temples. “Reuben? Reub, come on. Time to go outside.”

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