“Why? Because of being alone? Or the light?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wanted light, I remember that. But mostly just to see what they lived like. A lot of the people weren’t a lot different than us, but I just wanted to see.”
A pause.
“I got in trouble for it. My pa catch me and I’d be whipped red for it.”
Catch. I heard the word in its present-tense form, echoing Sheila’s old childhood speech patterns. We never had found out why she spoke like that and since we had been reunited, she had used remarkably impeccable grammar for an adolescent. It was eerie to lie in the dark and listen to these long-ago words and speech patterns begin to reemerge.
“The police got me once. More than once, I think. People thought I was stealing things, but I wasn’t. I’d just been looking.”
“I can understand,” I said softly. “It must have been lonely, being left on your own so often, when you were such a young child.”
“Yeah,” came the quiet, disembodied voice through the darkness. “It was.”
A long silence followed. I had woken fully up by then and lay staring up. The curtains were heavy to shut out the motel security lights, but the occasional car turning into the parking lot shot a brief spear of light over the top. This threw the stucco ceiling into sudden relief.
“Can I tell you what happened sometimes?” she asked.
“Here? When you were little?”
“Yeah. When we lived in the migrant camp. When I was in your class.”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“I had a mattress on the floor. That’s where I slept. My pa slept on the couch. But he’d go out boozing and when he came home … there were always people with him. Women, usually. And they’d fuck on the couch.”
“Yes, I can remember you telling me once,” I said.
“But sometimes …” She stopped.
I listened into the darkness. She was breathing shallowly, her breaths audible to me in the next bed.
“Well, he was doing drugs. You knew that too, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Smack mostly. And these guys got it for him. There were two. Sometimes he’d come home with them. Sometimes it was one or the other, sometimes both of them, but he never used to have enough money to pay them. I can remember lying there listening to him pleading with them. Begging them to give him the stuff, telling them how he was going to get them money. He’d even cry some of the time; I can remember hearing him.”
I watched the patterns flash black and headlight-yellow across the ceiling.
“Well, this one guy, he used to give it to my dad cheap if … He liked me to lay down with him … He didn’t fuck me or anything; it’s just he liked little girls. Like to feel them over. And if I sucked his cock, my pa got his stuff cheap.”
My blood ran like ice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“How do you say that when you’re six? Besides, it was my life. I was used to it.”
I lay awake long after Sheila fell asleep. Memories came back to me, one after another, of the days in our classroom. Things had been so bad for her. She had been such a deprived, neglected child that there would have been no way of doing everything that had wanted doing, of undoing all the harm. I had known that then and had approached her one small issue at a time, changing what I could. Yet somewhere between then and now I had come to believe I had saved her from the worst. To realize now that even while in my room she had continued to suffer hurt me; that I had never even perceived it hurt me worse. Over and over and over I pondered on what more I should have done.
The next morning, Sheila was back to her usual, rather off-the-wall self. She spent ages in the bathroom doing her hair to emerge looking not a whole lot tidier than when she had arisen from bed, and her outfit, a cute little number involving exceptionally ragged cut-off jeans and a shimmery green top that would have been more at home in a Las Vegas floor show, needed to be seen to be believed.
It was the Fourth of July and our agenda for the day included the picnic with Chad and his family. I was very much looking forward to this. Chad and I had remained on good terms throughout the metamorphosis of our relationship from the physical to the platonic, and in the last few years it had matured into a genuine friendship. We were now in contact frequently, exchanging stimulating letters and lengthy phone calls, but the fact remained that I had never met his wife nor seen his three young daughters. Bringing Sheila with me created the prospect of an even more enjoyable reunion.
We drove over to Chad’s house at three. He lived down a quiet, unpaved lane on the very edge of town. His was a beautiful house, new and huge, with a three-car garage and a tennis court to the side. I must confess to a twinge of remorse, or perhaps it was jealousy, when I saw it, knowing that this could have been mine. Not that I was particularly keen on houses of that sort or wanted that kind of lifestyle, and I didn’t even play tennis, but it was impossible to ignore his level of success.
“Wow,” Sheila murmured as we pulled into the drive and summed the whole matter up in that one word.
Before we were out of the car, Chad was at the door, opening it wide. “Welcome!” he said and children came spilling out around him.
His wife, Lisa, appeared beside him. Of Latino descent, she had the most exquisite eyes, dark and sparkly. She was a lawyer too and I had heard so much about her reputation as a killer in the courtroom that I had been expecting something quite different from what I saw. She was sweetly pretty and quite petite, rather the way one imagines fairytale heroines.
“And here,” Chad was saying, as he pulled a small girl in front of him, “here’s my Sheila.”
His Sheila and my Sheila eyed one another. Like her mother, Chad’s daughter was pretty in a girlish sort of way. Her hair was dark and curled naturally in long, loose ringlets down over her shoulders. She was dressed impeccably in a two-tone green designer-brand outfit that beautifully showed off the rich color of her hair.
“Sheila’s five,” Chad said, lovingly clasping her to his side. She smiled up at him. “And these … girls, come here. Stand still a moment. This is Bridget, who’s four. And this is Maggie. How old are you, Maggie?”
Laboriously, Maggie worked at holding up two fingers.
“That’s right. Clever girl! Maggie’s just had her birthday last Saturday.”
Like their elder sister, both Bridget and Maggie were blessed with dark curly hair and laughing eyes, and both were attractively dressed in practical, but expensive clothes. All three girls were friendly, open children, chatting easily with Sheila and me, inviting us to come around to the backyard and see the picnic table and the box of fireworks.
At the back of the house, we found a large redwood deck ingeniously laid out to include a sandbox near the patio doors and to progress away on one side to a large wooden swing set and climbing frame and on the other to a large, landscaped garden that ended with a fence that overlooked open fields.
“Come see our horses,” Chad’s Sheila called cheerily and ran down the grass ahead of us. “Do you like to ride, Sheila? Do you want a ride on my horse? I’ll take you.”
“Thanks,” Sheila replied, her voice hesitant. “Thanks, but not just now, okay? Maybe later.”
“Well, come down and see them. Mom? Mommy, give us apples.” She came running back up to the deck. She took Sheila’s