“Have you ever seen your mother again? I mean, since leaving my class?” I asked.
Sheila shook her head.
“Do you know where she is?”
“No,” she replied, her voice quiet.
Silence.
“Do you remember her?”
Again, Sheila did not answer me. Seconds rolled by and became minutes.
I glanced over.
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t.”
“Do you remember Jimmie?”
“Jimmie …? You mean my brother?” A pensive silence. “I think I do. Maybe. I got this image in my mind … of someone with brown hair. It’s a memory, you know, from long ago and when I try to place it … I think perhaps it’s Jimmie.” She looked over. “Why? Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering. Do you miss your mother?”
Sheila’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “What’s there to miss? I don’t know her. I don’t even remember her. How could I miss her?”
“Just wondering,” I replied.
“You wonder a lot.”
We had hit the roadwork section again and traffic had come to a standstill. Self-conscious of what Sheila had said the previous day regarding my attitude toward other drivers, I sat in silence.
“There’s no reason I should miss my mother,” Sheila said quietly. “She was a lousy parent. It’s my dad who’s done everything for me.”
“Well, I was just wondering. It was a big issue for you when we were together last time.”
“I was still a little child then. I suppose it mattered more to me when I was six.”
The next morning, we broke the children down into three small groups. The idea had been initially to let one person be in charge of Jessie and Joshua, who needed the most individual attention, and then to split the other six by age, so that one of us would have Kayleigh, David and Mikey, who were younger, and the other would have Alejo, Tamara and Violet, the older three. However, after Alejo’s extreme reaction to Tamara’s behavior, it seemed unwise to put the two of them together just yet; so we substituted David for her.
I had this group of David, Alejo and Violet and I had decided on doing what I liked to call “guided drawing,” the making of pictures after a short period of visualization. I found this a useful technique for bringing out children’s emotions and it worked well with a small group. So we all sat down at one of the tables. I gave out large sheets of white paper and set in the middle of the table a variety of materials to choose from—thin felt tips, fat felt tips, crayons, colored pencils and plain pencils and pastel chalks.
Sheila came and sat down with us. I had hoped she would help Miriam, who had Joshua and Jessie, as they needed virtually one-to-one attention, but she seemed uncomfortable with these children. Feeling it was better to let her warm up at her own speed, I said nothing and let her take out the chair at the end of the table.
“All right,” I said and looked with enthusiastic anticipation at each of the three children sitting across from me, “know what we’re going to do today? We’re going for a ride in space.”
“Hey, cool!” David said.
“No, put your pen down, David. We don’t need pens yet. Instead, I want everybody to close their eyes. Closed? Alejo? Close your eyes. That’s right.” I closed my own eyes to encourage the others. “Now, here we go: Keep your eyes closed so that you can see the rocket ship. Can you see it? Make a picture of it in your mind. This is your rocket ship, the one that is going to carry you into space. Can everybody see it?” I looked around to see nodding heads.
“Okay, here you go. You’re strapped into your seat in the rocket ship. There go the engines. Feel them rumbling? They shake your seat a little.”
David was very much into the fantasy. I saw his small body shake with the movement of his imaginary spaceship. I noticed, too, Sheila at the end of the table, her elbows braced on the table edge, hands interlaced to shield her eyes from my view. She was participating, I suspected, but didn’t want me to realize she was joining in as another of the children.
“It’s liftoff. Up, up, up you are going. The blue sky is rushing past you. It’s getting paler. See it? Look out your window and see how the earth is falling away and you are zooming into outer space. Ooooh, there you are, out in space.
“Now, you can unfasten your seat belt and walk around, but ooh! What happens?”
“You’re weightless,” Sheila said without a moment’s hesitation.
“That’s right. You’re weightless. You float. What’s it feel like? Do you like it? Where are you going? Look around. What kind of rocket ship are you in? Is it big? Is it small? What colors are there? Is there lots of room to move around in? And where are you going? Where is the rocket ship headed? Look out the window. What do you see? Stars? Planets? Do you see Earth, or are you far away already? Is it crowded with things out there or is it very empty? Are there other spaceships out there? Look around your rocket ship again. Are you alone? Or is there someone traveling with you? Is it someone you like? What are you doing in the rocket ship just now?”
I paused, watching the children, all deep in their fantasy. “Okay, now, when you’re ready, you may open your eyes and then I want you to draw me your spaceship.”
As virtually always happened with this kind of activity, the children aroused from their imaginings excited and reached enthusiastically for the drawing materials.
“I seen Dracula, Torey,” Violet said cheerfully. “And he had this big blob of blood hanging off his teeth.”
“You’re weird,” David replied and reached across her for the felt tips.
As I would soon discover happened every time we asked Violet to create something, she made a cross, as this symbol kept her safe from vampires. On this occasion, she made one large black cross before going on to make several more smaller crosses and around this she dotted small round faces, all with pleasant, fang-toothed smiles.
David was drawing busily. He made a great red-and-white-striped rocket ship with a bright-yellow light shining out of its nose and was now surrounding it with an array of multicolored stars.
Alejo had reached quickly for a felt-tip marker, but once he had it, he paused a long time over the blank paper, then slowly he began to draw. His spaceship was a tiny speck in a huge, black universe.
It was this blackness that eventually got him into trouble. There was such a huge area of paper to cover that it soon became obvious he couldn’t do it with the small black felt tip he was using. Setting it down, he surveyed the available drawing materials before spying a large black marking pen on the far end of the table. Rising, he reached across David to get it. In the process, he accidentally bumped David’s hand.
“You spaz!” David shouted and flung his arm out angrily.
Within a split second, Alejo had him by the shirt. Indeed, it happened so very fast, I didn’t anticipate it and was alarmed to discover Alejo had pulled David off his chair and down to the floor before I had even managed to rise. Grabbing David by the hair, he slammed his head down against the linoleum.
I dashed around the table, but before I could reach him, Alejo was off. In blind panic he ran. The room we had chosen in the school was normally a double classroom and we had picked it for its size. With so few children,