A Safe Place for Joey (32 page)

‘Hiya, Hannah.’

There wasn’t any answer, not a twitch of response, but somehow I had the feeling that she’d heard me.

‘Listen,’ I continued, ‘this
isn’t your class. You’re supposed to be with us, in the room down the hall on the other side. We’ve been waiting for you down there.’

Hannah didn’t make a sound, but she turned her head just a fraction of an inch. I went on.

‘Shirley, your teacher last year, didn’t want to leave. She liked our school and she liked teaching you. But her husband was studying to be a doctor and he was
sent to a hospital a long way away – and so she had to stop teaching here to go with him.’

The muscles in my neck were getting tired from dangling my head over the edge of the platform, and I longed to get down and stand beside her, get a closer look, maybe even hold onto her square, solid body and let some of her anger drain out. But Hannah seemed nowhere near ready. I was going to have
to wait.

Suddenly she turned and twisted her neck and body to peer up at me. For an instant she hung outside the wooden bars with her face turned up towards me and then she was gone, out of the jungle gym, out of the door that Ellen had left unlocked when she let me in, and down the hall. I climbed down quickly and followed, Ellen’s door clicked behind me and the bolt slid back in place.

Hannah ran up and down, back and forth in the hall, like a fat mouse in a maze. She was dressed in a woman’s cotton housedress that was tied at the waist with a string. The dress reached to the tops of her heavy brown shoes and she stumbled around, banging against the walls, letting out periodic snarling howls. Once she turned back towards me and I could see that both her face and the front
of her dress were wet – stained with tears, or sweat, or maybe both. She opened the door to our room, more by accident than design. The boys and the Director stood up simultaneously as Hannah crashed in. I was only a step behind and closed the door behind me. We needed a little space, a little time to ourselves.

It was hard to tell who was more frightened, Hannah or the boys. They stared
at each other silently until the Director called out cheerily, ‘Well, Hannah, I see you’ve found your room. Good enough. Now that we’re all set, I’ll get back to work. Phone never stops ringing, a thousand things to do. Have a good day.’

The Director was out the hall door and gone before any of us moved, but just as the door clicked shut Hannah ran towards it. Brian and Rufus had huddled
together in front of the outside door. Jamie whimpered and ran to where I stood by the hall door and buried his head against my legs. Without previous planning, we had formed a barricade to the exits. There was no way out for Hannah. Like it or not, she was with us.

Hannah backtracked and then made one dash for the hall door, and I captured her as she came by. ‘Gotcha. Enough now, okay?’

I said it as much to reassure the boys as to steady Hannah, but while it may have helped them to hear a familiar tone in the room it did nothing for her. She slid out of my arms to the floor, propped herself on her hands and knees inside her long housedress, and with a moaning, keening noise began rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a tormented infant in a crib.

The safety
we had begun to build was gone. Trouble, trauma, violence and fear had invaded our room. I muttered a silent expletive in the direction of the departed Director, but it wasn’t of any use. She was gone; Hannah was here. We’d just have to get through somehow.

I turned to the boys. ‘Hannah’s going to be in our class this year. She feels badly about missing her old teacher and some other things.
It’s going to take a while for us to get used to each other, but it’s going to be okay. We just need a little time. Now let’s get busy. Rufus, Brian, bring your books on over here and let’s see what we’re going to be working on.’

As I spoke there was a dull, heavy thud and I turned back towards Hannah. She was not only rocking, she was banging her head, bringing it down hard against the
black tile floor at the end of each forward thrust. I knew that part of this head hanging was to test us, but part of it was also an attempt to destroy the torments inside her.

I sat down on the floor next to Hannah and pushed my leg beneath her head to cushion the blow. ‘No. In this room you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. And no one hurts you. You can rock if you have to, but no banging.’

She brought her head down again, drove it hard into my thigh – and then, as the noon whistle wailed, suddenly she was still. We sat without speaking. I leaned against the wall with Hannah spread out, drenched in sweat, inert against my leg, while the three boys watched us silently from the other side of our room.

Jamie was the last to leave our room that first day. We were both limp from emotion and heat, and we sat in a chair by the windows watching for his bus. But as soon as his driver arrived and he was safely aboard, I went down to the office, unlocked the file cabinet, and took out Hannah’s folder.

The Director was in the office, a calm oasis in the midst of confused bus
drivers, anxious mothers and tired teachers. She was at her best here, soothing and at the same time encouraging. She had founded the school fifteen years before and had worked harder and harder each year, raising money to keep the doors open, raising standards, coping with the ever-increasing publicity, the long waiting lists of children. Finally, with the death of her husband, the school had
become her life. For years it had existed in rented and borrowed buildings, but now the dream was almost reality: within a few months ground would be broken for a spacious new school building, built to the Director’s specifications. Nothing escaped her, and she nodded to me as I took Hannah’s file back to the quiet of my own room.

I spread the folder out on one of the tables before the open
windows. Small air currents stirred through the room and riffled the edges of the papers. I was eager to read the reports, hoping to discover what had happened to make Hannah so angry, so frightened. She was more like a young animal than a little girl. Why wouldn’t she let anyone near her? Where had the rage and self-destruction come from?

The folder contained a school form filled out by
Mrs Rosnic, a health form from the paediatrician, a report from the principal of the public school Hannah had attended; there were also a joint report by a psychologist and a social worker at a mental health clinic, a final report by another psychologist from the public school, and a half-page year-end report written by Hannah’s teacher from last year. From these I gradually pieced together Hannah’s
history.

She had been born eight years earlier in a hospital in New York City. Her life had been filled with violence from the beginning. She had cried constantly through her first days and nights, eating little at first, finally refusing to eat at all. In desperation, Mrs Rosnic took her back to the hospital where she had been born. They discovered an abdominal obstruction which had caused
food blockage and dehydration. Hannah was operated on and hospitalised for several weeks.

When she returned home she was able to eat and some of the screaming stopped, but she rocked back and forth in her crib, banging her head against the end panel.

Her brother, Carl, three years older, was resentful of the new baby. One day soon after Hannah came home from the hospital, Mrs Rosnic
found Carl by Hannah’s crib, hitting her on the head again and again. In spite of everything, she grew; she walked at thirteen months and completed toilet training at age two. However, Mrs Rosnic continued to bottle-feed her until she was three years old, and although no connection was made, it seemed pertinent to me that Hannah didn’t try to talk until then. Her speech consisted primarily of grunts
and monosyllables that only Mrs Rosnic could understand.

When Hannah was four, her family moved to the run-down industrial city where she still lived. They occupied a two-family house in a derelict section of town. Mrs Rosnic’s father lived downstairs; the Rosnics themselves occupied the second floor.

Hannah’s father had been a strange, brutal man. He must have been tortured by both
emotional and physical ailments. The records showed that he had been in and out of mental institutions over the years, yelling, shouting, beating his children when he was home. Later he was confined to a wheelchair, from which he berated the world and everyone in it. He died in the same bizarre manner in which he had lived. Rising suddenly up out of his wheelchair at his mother’s funeral, he was
stricken with a heart attack and died the next day, two years before Hannah came to our school.

At the time of her husband’s death, Mrs Rosnic was pregnant with a third child. Still in her early thirties, a widow with little money and no training, with an ailing, demanding father, two young children, and another child soon to be born, she became ill herself, overcome by a deep depression.

She turned to her church for help; they put her in touch with a community mental health centre. Here she was interviewed jointly by a psychiatric social worker and a psychologist, who judged her to be of ‘bright normal intellect with a fair insight and judgement, but with a feeling of being unable to cope’.

I got up from the table and began to pace as I read. Who wouldn’t feel ‘unable
to cope’ under similar conditions? The report ambled on, bleak and without compassion. Carl, Hannah’s brother, was summarised and dismissed in two brief sentences as having ‘a childhood adjustment problem with the unusual phobia of fearing the key to an old clock’. Hannah was described as ‘a seven-year-old Caucasian female –’

I put the report down, hating the stilted language. Who could
write that? And why? Was it to impress some invisible audience or was it simply the way psychologists had been taught to write reports? Hannah was a sad, solid, gutsy little girl with blue eyes and red-gold hair. How could they write ‘seven-year-old Caucasian female’? Why did people deal out labels instead of looking at a child? Never mind. Forget the anger. It didn’t help now.

‘– Caucasian
female exhibiting restless behaviour, with unintelligible speech consisting primarily of grunting noises. Judgement and insight extremely poor. Diagnosis: Psychosis. Organic brain disease versus schizophrenia.’

It seemed to me a dangerous, presumptuous diagnosis after one brief interview. I searched the remaining pages for more concrete information. An electroencephalogram had been made,
and since it was within normal limits Hannah was put in a kindergarten class on a trial basis – but this lasted only a short time. Soon she was put on home instruction because of her ‘disruptive behaviour’. The dates in the reports were confusing, but it must have been a hard, bleak period for Mrs Rosnic, for the whole family.

I shook my head. No wonder the teachers in our school rarely
complained. Our troubles, whatever they were, were small compared to the lives of our children and their families.

The late-afternoon sky was dark and the air was filled with the musty smell of rain. At least it would be cooler tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tomorrow would be here very soon and I still had a great deal to do before morning. I turned on the overhead light and skimmed the remaining pages.

Mrs Rosnic’s pregnancy had gone full term and Hannah had been born, a healthy eight-pound girl. Hannah had remained on home instruction until a place was found for her here; then one last psychological work-up was done in the public school. It said that Hannah – an aggressive child with a deep underlying pathology – seemed to be living completely in a world of her own. ‘This child must be
regarded as a threat to other children.’

Lightning streaked across the sky. No one else was left at school and I knew I should hurry.

How could a child ever grow in a place where she was looked upon as a threat? There was only one positive note in the report: The psychologist noted that Hannah’s drawings showed ‘an above-average mentality’.

Well, maybe this was how I’d have to
reach her, through her mind, her intelligence. But how could I get through? She’d fought so many enemies already in her eight years, seen more pain and cruelty than most of us do in a lifetime. Her mind must be sealed behind many layers – she would have needed to build thick walls in order to survive as long as she had.

Outside, the rain pelted hard against the black macadam. I closed my
windows and read the last remaining page. The report from Hannah’s teacher of last year described Hannah as a troubled, sad little girl, unable or unwilling to use eating utensils, given to long crying spells and temper tantrums, her speech a garble of unintelligible slurred consonants – and yet her actions showed an acute awareness of her environment. She had remained difficult and disruptive throughout
the year, but there had been some improvement and rapport gradually developed between teacher and child.

It must have been a cruel blow for Hannah to come back this morning and find her teacher gone, the first semblance of security disrupted. Whatever tiny hope had stayed alive inside her must have crashed into despair.

I put the report on the top shelf of my closet and left by my
own door. I stood on the step just outside and watched the small rivers of rain swirl past; then I took off my shoes and raced up the driveway to the car park in my bare feet. But when I reached my car, I stood still for a minute before getting in. My dress and hair were already soaked and the rain felt cool and clean against my face and arms. I wished that it would cool my head and heart as well.
Hannah would bring enough passion into our room. She would need a teacher who was clear and steady and strong.

What I needed to do, had to do as soon as possible, was set up an appointment with Mrs Rosnic so that we could talk. There were so many complicated factors in Hannah’s history: the operation, the isolation of the hospital, the head blows, the brutal father, the prolonged bottle
feeding. I was as confused as when I started.

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