Somebody Else's Kids (13 page)

“All right.”

“Tom, how are you coming?”

He looked up. “How come you always call me that?”

“What?”

“Tom. My name’s not Tom; it’s Tomaso. And you don’t even say it right. It’s To-MAH-so.”

“I thought that’s what I was saying.”

“No, you weren’t. You were saying it wrong. And calling me Tom. My name isn’t Tom.”

“I did that without thinking I just do sometimes. I seem to shorten names.”

“Yeah, like she calls me Lor all the time instead of Lori. Unless she’s mad at me. Then she calls me Lori.”

I had not noticed that fact.

“Well, I don’t like it, so stop. Tom’s an American name. I’m Spanish. So don’t do it anymore.”

“Okay, I’ll try not to,” I said.

“You better not do it. I don’t like you calling me some white honky name.” That sharp edge of anger was in his voice again.

Lori and I continued to discuss the hyacinth bulbs and the planting process as I helped Boo with his. He hrooped softly to himself, his sounds slurred by his oversize tongue. Yet through the normalcy of our chatter I could keenly sense Tomaso’s rage rekindling. I watched him carefully, if not with my eyes then with my mind, because I could feel another explosion imminent.

Boo reached over to get another spoon and accidentally tipped over a milk carton of potting soil.

“Watch out, you little fucker. I’ll kick your goddamn brains in if you do that again.”

“Tomaso,” I said in a voice he could not mistake.

“Shut up.”

His anger was making him clumsy. He could not get the dirt around the bulb in his carton. In one vast movement he knocked the container away. “I don’t want to do this! What a stupid thing to have to do. It’s your fault it won’t turn out. My father would have known how to make it come out right.”

I looked at him. “Your father really makes you angry, doesn’t he?”

A stupid statement. A statement that belonged in a psychiatrist’s office or a textbook on how not to screw up your kids. It did not belong in my classroom. That it was most likely correct made it no less inappropriate.

Tomaso froze when I said that. His eyes were wide and horror-struck. Immediately I knew I had said too much. I saw the tears form. Tomaso brought his hands up and clamped them over his ears. The explosion I thought surely I had precipitated did not materialize. Instead he fell over on his side as if in agonizing pain and squeezed his eyes shut. “Goddamnit,” he wailed, “why is it always so noisy in here? It hurts my ears. It’s killing me! I can hear the blood running in my ears. Make it stop!”

Then before I had time to react, he bolted up, ran across the room, undid the latch and left.

The three of us sat paralyzed. For several moments none of us flexed a muscle in the utter, motionless silence. Then Lori turned to me. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure I know.”

Boo looked at us, his green eyes round and fathomless. “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” he said. I felt the same way.

I could not find Tomaso. Leaving Lori and Boo with one of the office aides, I went in search. I could not find him anywhere. Panic that he had left the building rose as bile in my throat. For some unclear reason I did not believe he would, yet I could not figure him. Up the hall, down the corridor, around the corner until I had searched all the places in the H-shaped building that I could think of. I did not call out to him. If he were hiding I would not expect him to answer. Moreover, there seemed some jungle law of dignity that made me unwilling to alert outsiders to our plight.

Again I went through the building, through the unlocked book closets, through the storage rooms off the gymnasium. I walked outside the building and checked through the cars in the parking lot. I made a fast trip through the nearby neighborhood. I wondered if Tomaso would be able to find his way home from here. He came several miles by bus, all through city streets. With his jungle instinct for survival I figured he could. Still he would be scared. I knew that too. Back inside the school I went and searched one more time. A dead weight had formed in my stomach from the worry, the thought of having to call his foster parents and tell them he had run away.

Then he was there. I do not think I would have seen him if he had not stirred. I was in the back of the gym up on the heavily curtained stage where all the old school desks and play props were kept. Tomaso was among them on the floor, underneath an old table. As I was walking through I heard the rustling in the darkness and looked. There he lay, tears still streaming over his cheeks, face smudged with untold years of backstage dirt. His nose ran onto one hand.

The small place was illuminated by what must have been no more than a 40-watt bulb. Even with it on I could barely see him. I had to get down on my hands and knees and press my face to the floor. “Hi,” I said.

He looked at me with great black eyes and said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Tom – Tomaso. I shouldn’t have talked like that to you. I was saying things that I shouldn’t have said.” I could hardly make him out in the gloom. “Will you come back to class?”

He shook his head.

I lay down on my stomach in order to see him better. He was perhaps six feet away from me, back under the table and through a tangle of old, unused student desks. A few of the desks were those ancient wrought-iron ones that were bolted to the floor at one time. How Tomaso had gotten back into that spot I did not know.

We stared at one another. I felt keenly isolated from him. That moment’s carelessness back in the classroom had brought us here in the dark, flat on the floor, looking very much together, in truth being very much apart.

“I’m sorry, Tomaso. I really, really am. What more can I say to you?”

“Just go away.”

“People make mistakes, Tomaso. I’m sure not exempt. I’m sorry I upset you and I know I was wrong.”

“Shit. Don’t you ever shut up? All you do is talk, talk, talk. Jesus Christ. Don’t you ever listen?”

There. That put me in my place. It hurt, and I shut up. We watched each other in the dusty darkness.

The minutes ticked by. What time was it getting to be? I could hear my watch but I did not dare look at it; he would misinterpret that. I worried how Boo and Lori were doing with the aide. Still we lay motionless on the floor.

Tomaso stirred and wiped his face with a hand. His tears made no noise. I looked at him through a forest of desk legs. He looked back. Somewhere in that long, slow quiet the gulf between us began to diminish.

Outside came the shuffle of kids in the corridor. Oh geez, it couldn’t be time to go home already. What was I going to do? I shifted my weight slightly.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered. I almost did not hear it.

“I won’t.” My voice too had become a whisper without my thinking about it.

More silence. More waiting. There was no doubt in my mind now that it was the end of the school day. The hallways had swelled with cheery going-home noises. I was paralyzed by the fear that someone might inadvertently come in upon us and disturb our strange sharing. It was a needless worry. I had had to go through the building three times before I thought to come in here. Apparently it was a place only Tomaso thought of.

Then came the stillness. All the children had left. Lori would be home by now, she lived so near the school. Boo’s mother would have come. I missed not having said goodbye to them.

We waited. My breasts were sore from lying facedown on the hardwood floor so long. My nose tickled from the dust.

“I want to kill myself,” Tomaso said, his voice still just a whisper.

“You do?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

“I hate it here.”

“Here? Is school so bad?”

“No, not here, stupid.
Here
. This world.”

“Oh.”

“I know how, too. I planned it. I’m gonna take some pills. And I got some. My foster dad takes these blue pills for something, high blood pressure, I think. Anyway, I been sneaking off his pills one at a time for a long time now. I just about got enough. I’m going in my room and take them and tie a pillow over my face to make sure. I want to die.”

I looked at him, all ten years of him huddled on the floor beneath that table.

“I don’t want to live anymore. I just don’t. I don’t. It’s too hard.”

There were no words from me. What could I say? What words were there that I could give him?

I slid forward on my belly until I was as close to him as I could get, which was not very close. I put my hand through the legs of the desks and still my reach must have been two feet short. “Tomaso, can you touch my hand?”

A pause. I could see his still tear-bright eyes glistening.

“Tomaso, can you reach me?”

“I think so.”

“Take my hand.”

A rustle. The creak of an unwilling desk as he pushed against it. Then I felt his hand in mine. It was cold and wet.

“Hang on to me, Tomaso. Don’t let go.”

And so we lay like that, twisted around the cast-off seats, our faces smudged with dirt. Minutes passed. I could feel my heart beating against the floor.

“My father’s dead,” Tomaso whispered.

“I know.”

“I want to be dead too. I want to be with my father. I want to get away from here.”

“Hang on to my hand, Tomaso.”

“It’s too hard here. Living’s too hard.”

I did not speak.

“My foster dad hates me. My foster mother, she hates me too. They don’t care if I live or die. I’m nobody’s kid. Everybody hates me.”

“Lori doesn’t.”

“Huh?”

“I said Lori doesn’t hate you.”

“Pph. Who cares? She’s just some little kid. A baby.”

“Yes. But she’s somebody.”

“Yeah.” A pause. The pause extended into a silence. “I don’t hate her either.”

“I know you don’t,” I said.

“You can’t hate Lori. Even if you want to.”

“No, I guess you can’t.”

Another long pause. I let out a breath of air. Tomaso’s hand tightened around mine.

“Do you hate me, Torey?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No.” I smiled at him. Softly. Sadly. Again I felt the inadequacy of words. What could I tell him that he would believe?

We continued staring at one another, like survivors of a disaster, our hands still clasped to keep us together. Abruptly my own emotions welled up. I thought I would cry myself. What I was doing was so hard and I did not feel equal to it.

“No, Tomaso, I don’t hate you. I don’t know how to tell you so you’ll believe that. You know, you’re making me cry because I just don’t know what to say but I want you to believe me.”

No answer.

“You … you’re a special guy to me. And I love you for it. That’s the truth.” It was so hard to say.

He did not respond. All he did was watch me. Tears, renewed, rolled down the side of his face and onto the floor.

“Come out here, Tomaso. Come here, would you?”

He shook his head.

“Please?”

Again he shook his head.

“I need you, Tomaso. Come here so I can put my arms around you.”

He came. In a way which was neither slow nor fast, neither silent nor noisy. There he was standing over me after crawling out over the desks. I was still on my knees on the floor and he towered above me. For a moment neither of us moved. His face was still wet, his hair rumpled. Then he bent and hugged my neck. Because he never came down to my level I had to hug his legs.

“You won’t tell them I was crying, will you?” he asked at last, his face still in my hair.

“No.”

“You won’t tell Lori?”

“No.”

“I didn’t mean to cry. I’m too big. A man doesn’t cry.”

“That’s okay. We all need to sometimes. Even men.”

He stepped back and broke the embrace. He gazed down at me. Then very gently he knelt and put his hands on either side of my face as if I were a little child to be comforted. His slight smile was enigmatic. “You can call me Tom, if you want.”

C
hristmastime. There were carols from every store, bell tower and elevator. Snow was half a foot deep. Candles flowered in windows; a rainbow of lights twinkled around door lintels. Cheeriness came from strangers and friends alike.

All the fun of the season gave me enormous pleasure and not until January did I ever realize how glad I was to get back to ordinariness. The kids and I did all the usual Christmas things. We bought a tree from an eighty-year-old man who still cut his own and hawked them from a corner of the shopping center parking lot. Choosing the biggest, fattest, bushiest tree we could find, I stuffed it into the hatch of my tiny car and the four of us rode back to school with pine needles and the intoxicating green smell of the forest. We strung popcorn and cranberries until our fingers were stained red; we sang Christmas carols until I, at least, was hoarse; we baked gingerbread cookies while Tomaso regaled us with his own version of
The Gingerbread Man
. The magic of the season wrapped itself around us. For a brief time we shared sheer, undiluted joy. Then came Christmas break, ten days of vacation.