All went smoothly. Sheila finished her year with Sandy an enthusiastic, if somewhat quirky, student, and was promoted to the fourth grade. I received a school picture of her from Sandy, showing her in a bright-yellow dress, her smile sweet and toothless. She looked well, if not too clean.
Autumn came but Sheila didn’t. I received a puzzled note from Sandy saying that Sheila had been withdrawn from the register. It was Anton who investigated the matter and wrote back to tell me that Sheila and her father had moved to a small city on the far side of the state, some two hundred miles away. They had left in June, just after school had let out, apparently because her father thought he had found a job.
I wrote to the only address I had, her old one, and received no answer. Distressed at the thought that I had actually lost contact with Sheila, I made a few phone calls in an effort to trace her. During the course of these, I discovered that she had apparently gone into foster care at the end of the summer, but it was only a rumor and I couldn’t confirm it. I knew no one in this new city to which she and her father had moved and I was twelve hundred miles away. It proved impossible to find out where she was and how she was doing.
This upset me profoundly. Confiding in an older colleague one afternoon after an abortive effort to trace Sheila, I was reassured that this was better, that I shouldn’t try to hold on to old students. She smiled gently and patted my shoulder. “Never look back. You’ve got to love them and leave them.”
It was three years before I managed to go back to Marysville to visit my old friends. By then Anton was gone. He had completed his two-year course at the community college and won a scholarship to the state university to finish his bachelor’s degree. I visited with Sandy, however, and Whitney, who was now a senior in high school; and I went back to walk through my old classroom, now converted into a resource center.
Chad and I had separated amicably and we’d stayed in touch. He was married now to a fellow lawyer named Lisa and she was expecting their first child in a month’s time.
We decided to lunch together and I came up to his law office to meet him. He had been held up in a meeting, so I paced languidly about the reception desk waiting for him. It was then I noticed a paper lying in the outgoing basket. I just caught it with the corner of my eye, but the name pulled me back. It was Sheila’s father’s name. Glancing at the receptionist, I realized I couldn’t really look, but I was desperate to hear what Chad had to say.
“Didn’t you know he’s back in prison?” Chad replied to my query.
“No. When did this happen? You never told me.”
“Well, I couldn’t really, could I?” he said apologetically. “I mean, confidentiality and all. Besides, I assumed you did know.” What he didn’t mention was that we had never exchanged much more than Christmas cards anyway since we’d parted. But still, I felt somehow cheated.
Chad smiled gently. “I’m not handling many legal aid cases these days, so I didn’t know myself until I saw the folder.”
“What’s happened?”
“I can’t really discuss it, Torey.”
“I’m not just anybody, Chad. I was the one who brought him to you in the first place.” I was feeling hurt and heartsick. I knew it was hardly Chad’s fault and I fully understood his need to keep confidence with clients, but the shock made me irritable.
“Well, suffice it to say he’s been wholly predictable. He’s up for the same tricks as always.”
“Where’s Sheila then?”
“Don’t know. He’s been living over in Broadview for a couple of years now and he was arrested and booked over there. They sent over here just looking for files. I’ve never seen him or anything.”
“But where’s Sheila?” I murmured, lowering my head.
Heartbroken at this discovery, I endeavored to find out about Sheila’s fate, but I had few resources at my fingertips. Broadview was still two hundred miles off and was a much bigger city. Finding one small girl was no easy matter. The most I could confirm was that she had been taken into foster care as a direct result of her father’s arrest and imprisonment and was, apparently, still placed. Where, with whom and for how long I could not determine. Rumor had it that she had been repeatedly in and out of foster care from the time they had moved.
Foster care. Practically the whole time Sheila was in my class, all of us had viewed foster care as a panacea to her problems. If only Sheila were away from the poverty, if only she were in a stable home with loving parents, if only … We hadn’t been able to get her into foster care then simply because the Social Services were so overstretched in Marysville and she did have her natural father. Now she was in foster care and I should have felt glad. The fact was, I didn’t.
Back home, I sat down and wrote a very long letter to Sheila. I told her about my visit to our old school and our old friends. I mentioned that I knew her life had been disrupted in the last eighteen months and that I knew she was now with foster parents. I said that I hoped all was well and that if there was any way I could help, I would be happy to try. Including my phone number, I said she could call me collect any time, if she wanted. Then I added a photograph from the visit of Sandy and me and an old one I had taken of Sheila on our last-day picnic. Folding everything together, I put them in a large envelope. But where would I send it? In the end, I sent it to her father, in care of the prison, and asked him to forward it to her.
I never heard whether Sheila received my letter or not, whether she ever knew that I was trying to find her again. There was no answer, and as the months went by, I began to accept there wasn’t going to be one.
This was difficult for me to come to terms with. It seemed inconceivable to me that she had disappeared from my life. Yet the words of my colleague kept returning to me: you’ve got to love ’em and leave ’em.
Two years later, a small envelope arrived on my desk. It was addressed not to my home, but rather to the university where I now taught. I recognized Sheila’s loose, scrawly handwriting immediately and tore the envelope open. There was only one sheet of paper inside, a crumpled piece of lined notebook paper. The writing was done in blue felt-tip marker with many of the words watermarked, as if the paper had gotten splattered by rain. Or was it tears?
To Torey with much Love
All the rest came
They tried to make me laugh
They played their games with me
Some games for fun and some for keeps
And then they went away
Leaving me in the ruins of games
Not knowing which were for keeps and
Which were for fun and
Leaving me alone with the echoes of
Laughter that was not mine.
Then you came
With your funny way of being
Not quite human
And you made me cry
And you didn’t seem to care if I did
You just said the games are over
And waited
Until all my tears turned into
Joy.
There was nothing else, no letter,