“That’s what seems so weird to me about this book, Torey. You make out like we’re always fighting. Like, in it you seem to be getting mad at me about every other page. I don’t remember you ever doing that.”
I looked at her in surprise.
Then she wrinkled her nose and grinned conspiratorially. “Are you just spicing it up, like? So they’ll want to publish it?”
My jaw dropped.
“I mean, I don’t mind at all. It’s a terribly good story. And, like, it’s brilliant, thinking of myself as a character in a book.”
“But, Sheila, we did fight. We fought all the time. When you came into my class, you—”
Again she turned to look out of the window. Silence ensued and it lasted several moments.
“What exactly do you recall?” I asked at last.
“Like I said …” And then she didn’t say. She was still gazing out of the window and the words just seemed to fade away. A minute or more passed.
“We did fight,” I said softly. “Everybody fights, whatever the relationship, however good it might be. It wouldn’t be a relationship otherwise, because two separate people are coming together. Friction is a natural part of that.”
No response.
“Besides,” I said and grinned, “I was a teacher. What would you expect?”
“Yeah, well,” she said, “I don’t really remember.”
I couldn’t come to terms with the fact Sheila had forgotten so much. Driving home on the freeway that evening, I turned it over and over in my mind. How could she forget Anton and Whitney? How could the whole experience be reduced to nothing more than a fond recollection of colorful plastic toys? This hurt me. It had been such a significant experience for me that I had assumed it had been at least as significant for her. In fact, I had assumed it was probably more significant. Without me, that class, those five months, Sheila most likely would now be on the back ward of some state hospital. I had made a difference. At least that’s what I’d been telling myself. My cheeks began to burn hot, even in the privacy of my car, as I realized the gross arrogance of my assumption. I was further humbled by the insight that those five months might well now mean more to me than to her.
She had been only a very young child. Was I being unrealistic in expecting her to remember much? At the time she had been so exquisitely articulate that it had given her the gloss of a maturity even then I knew she didn’t really have, but I had been accustomed to associating verbal ability with good memory.
As I sped through the darkness, I tried to recollect being six myself. I could bring to mind the names of some of the children in my first-grade class, but mostly it was incidents I could recall. There were a lot of small snippets: a moment lining up for recess, a classmate vomiting into the trash can, a fight over the swings, a feeling of pride because I drew good trees. They weren’t very complete recollections, but if I tried, I could identify the locations and the names and appearance of the individuals involved. Still, they were nothing akin to the clarity of my memories as an adult. I was probably being unrealistic in expecting her to remember more.
Yet, it nagged at me. Sheila wasn’t just any child, but a highly gifted girl who had blown the top right off almost every IQ test the school psychologist had given her that year. Sheila’s prodigious memory had been among the most notable of many outstanding characteristics. She had used it like a crystal ball for gazing in, as she spoke to us all so poignantly, so eloquently of love and hate and rejection.
Love and hate and rejection. It couldn’t be all arrogance on my part to expect that she should be remembering more. Her amnesia seemed so uncharacteristic, but still, it was not hard to imagine what might be causing it. Although I didn’t know any specifics about what had happened since Sheila had left my room, I knew these hadn’t been easy years in between. She had been in and out of foster homes, had moved to different schools and coped with her father’s instability. If these years only half mirrored the nightmare she had been living when she’d come into my class, they would have given her ample reason for forgetting. She’d been such a brave little fighter that I didn’t like to think she had finally buckled under the strain, but in the back of my mind, that’s what I was beginning to accept. Yet … why had she so thoroughly forgotten our class? The one bright spot, the one haven where she had been loved and regarded so well? Why had she forgotten us?
At home, I rummaged through the things I had accumulated from the class, which I had used to write the book, looking for things to take with me on my next visit to see Sheila. The vast majority of the materials were just school papers and anecdotal records, neither very useful for the purpose. What I really wanted to share were the videotapes, but this was in the era of the old reel-to-reel videotapes and the only machine I had for playing them on was at the clinic; so those would have to wait for the time when Sheila came in to visit me. In the end, I resorted to going through my picture album.
I had surprisingly few photographs of that year. There was the class picture, all of us lined up against the blue curtain on the school stage, looking like felons in a group mug shot. The camera had caught Sheila full on, washing out her pale features. She wouldn’t smile on demand in those days, so she had just a blank stare. Unfortunately, several others in the class had been equally uncooperative and many of them were consequently rendered unrecognizable.
In total, I had only three other photographs of Sheila and these included the individual school picture, taken at the same time as the group photo. I had kept this one, as her father had declined to buy it. It was the only one I’d ever had of her smiling. Normally, she’d simply refused to smile for cameras, but on this occasion, the photographer had tricked her into it while trying to get her to grab his pen. Taken only a short time after she had arrived in our classroom, it caught her full grubby glory and I adored it.
The other two photographs I had taken myself. One was to commemorate the first time I’d really gotten her cleaned up and she sat in deep solemnity on the school steps, hands clasped upon her knees. Her hair was combed smooth and put into pigtails; her clothes were washed; her face was cleaned; and the truth was, it didn’t look like Sheila at all. She was not nearly so engaging as the filthy character in the school photograph. The other picture I had taken on the last day of school when the class had gone down to the park for our end-of-school picnic. I had taken several photographs that day, but unfortunately, Sheila was in only one of them. She was standing beside the duck pond with two of the other little girls in the class. Both of them were neat and clean and beaming cheerfully, but Sheila, in the middle, stared back at the camera with a guarded, almost suspicious gaze. Despite the new orange sunsuit her father had bought for the occasion, she had come to school very scruffy that day, her long hair uncombed, her face unwashed, and she stood in stark contrast to her two classmates. There was a compelling aspect to the photograph, however. It was the wariness of her expression, which made her seem fierce and yet surprisingly vulnerable.
I decided in the end to take that photograph, as well as the others taken on that day, which showed the other children, Anton and Whitney.
The following Saturday, Sheila and I went to watch her father’s baseball team play. They were an inauspicious-looking group, those boys. Grubby ten- and eleven-year-olds dressed in mismatched uniforms, they were almost all minority kids from a mixture of backgrounds, united, I suspect, only by their poverty. But they were noisy and cheerful in the way of all children, and they greeted Sheila’s father like a returning champion when he ran out onto the baseball diamond.
From all I could gather, Mr. Renstad appeared to be doing well. He was enormously proud of the small duplex where they lived. It wasn’t large; it wasn’t in a particularly good part of town, and he didn’t own it, of course; but he