“Show me how you straighten up. Like you did on the videotape.”
There was still no indication that she was listening to me.
“I know, Jadie.”
Very faintly, she nodded but she still didn’t look up.
Silence.
“All right,” I said and closed my plan book. “That’s okay. The choice is yours.”
Jadie lifted her head. She lifted it right up, so that she was looking at me squarely and not through her eyebrows as usual, but she didn’t straighten up any farther. I saw her face fully so seldom that the blueness of her eyes caught me by surprise. They were so faultlessly blue, the intensity of the color heightened by the dark lashes.
She searched my face. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice oddly plaintive.
“Torey,” I said, not quite sure what she meant.
“Torey?” It was said like a foreign word. “Torey? You’re Torey?”
“Yes.”
“Torey?” she repeated. “But who are you?”
Unable to understand what she wanted to know, I hesitated.
“Who are you?”
“A teacher,” I said, uncertainly. “Someone who helps children.”
For the first time, her eyes left my face. A deeply puzzled expression on her face, she turned and glanced around the room, then down at the jigsaw. “But who are you?” she asked a fourth time.
Bewildered, because I could tell I wasn’t responding in a way that answered her question, I replied, “Who do you think I am?”
Jadie paused a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe you’re God.”
The following afternoon, I was in the cloakroom, sitting at the teacher’s desk, when I heard the snick of the latch on the classroom door. While I could see into the classroom from the desk, the door was out of my line of vision, so I didn’t know who it was.
“Yes? Lucy?” I queried, thinking perhaps she had come to drop off the dittos she’d promised earlier.
No answer.
Rising, I stuck my head around the cloakroom door. There was Jadie. “You like coming in for an after-school visit, don’t you?” I said.
A faint nod.
“I don’t think this can happen every night,” I said. “Sometimes I have work to do outside the room, and I can’t leave you in here alone. And if Mr. Tinbergen gets wind of it and doesn’t like it, then there’ll have to be a stop to it. Yes? You understand? Because he kind of has a rule about children in the building after hours.”
She gave an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and hobbled off to the corner where the animals were kept. Gently raising the top of the rabbit’s cage, she lifted him out and cradled him in her arms. I returned to the cloakroom and went back to work.
Twenty minutes must have passed with Jadie playing quietly in the classroom, and I’d almost forgotten she was there. I couldn’t see her from where I was and she made virtually no noise. Then she appeared in the doorway between the classroom and the cloakroom. In her hand she carried a sheet of paper.
Normally, the cloakroom wasn’t lit. There were two doors in the long, narrow room, the one Jadie was standing in, and another at the far end, which opened into the hallway. Usually, these gave sufficient light for putting away coats and boots. Now, however, because I was working at the desk, I had the far door into the hallway shut and the overhead light on.
Jadie paused in the doorway, and her expression approached astonishment, as she scanned the high, old-fashioned walls, the ledges above the rows of hooks meant for storing lunchboxes and books, the hooks themselves, the benches beneath. Tentatively, she stepped inside.
“You haven’t had a good look at it with the lights on?” I asked.
“Usually, it’s dark in here.”
“That’s because I don’t like to put the light on during the day. We always forget it and that wastes electricity. And there’s no window in here to give natural light, but we usually get enough from the hallway and the classroom.”
“There’s no windows,” Jadie murmured, looking up.
“No.”
Once again she scrutinized the room carefully, then her attention went back to the paper in her hand. “Can I use this?” she asked. “Can I draw on it?”
“Yes, if you want.”
She disappeared back into the classroom but within moments had returned, clutching the paper under her arm and carrying a margarine tub full of crayons. Laying the things down on the linoleum floor of the cloakroom, she knelt beside them and, without further comment to me, she began to draw.
The paper was a large 2 x 3-foot sheet, and Jadie colored virtually all of it black, except for a tiny area down in the right-hand corner. Here were two minute, faceless, bell-shaped figures.
“That looks interesting,” I said, leaning forward across my desk.
Jadie lifted the drawing up and examined it. “It’s me and Amber there,” she said, touching the figures.
“I see.”
Silence followed while both of us studied the picture. I then threw caution to the wind and said what was on my mind, although it probably wasn’t ideal psychological technique. “You know, Jadie, to tell you the truth, those don’t look much like little girls to me. They’re a curious shape.”
“That’s because I just said it was me and Amber. I didn’t say we were little girls. We’re not there. We’re ghosts.”
“Oh. I see. This is you and your sister dressed up like ghosts. Is it at Halloween time?”
“No. We’re not dressed up. We are ghosts.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“Which one is you and which is Amber?”
Laboriously rising from where she had been working, Jadie brought the picture over and laid it on the desk in front of me. Taking a pencil from the holder, she wrote her name under one figure and her sister’s under the other.
“What about your mom and dad? And Sapphire?”
“Don’t got no mom or dad when me and Amber are ghosts. And Sapphire’s too little. She don’t know how to do it.”
“I see.” I leaned forward to examine the picture more carefully. “Just the two of you, then? It sounds like it might be lonely, just two little girls.”
“But like I said, we aren’t little girls. We’re ghosts. Ghosts don’t get lonely. It’s nice being alone, when you’re a ghost. We just float around, go way up high, and look down on people doing things. But they can’t see us, ’cause we’re invisible, so they don’t know we’re doing it.”
I nodded. “That does sound interesting. What kinds of things do you see people doing?”
“Just things. Like going to bed or watching TV. We go and look in all the other people’s houses.”
“I see.”
“I don’t mind when it goes dark, then. Gotta be dark to be a ghost. But if it goes too dark before you get out, you can’t do it. You can’t get out of your body and you get shut in.”
I looked over, perplexed. “What do you mean?”
An expression flickered across Jadie’s