Ghost Girl: The true story of a child in desperate peril – and a teacher who saved her

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lucy said and smiled. “Alice is top class. She wasn’t trying to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s just that she’s had Jadie for two years, so she knows what Jadie’s like.”

“The whole secret is in being an outsider—an unknown quantity to the child. That and not cosseting the child. You instinctively want to be gentle and supportive with these kids, and that’s generally how the kid gets control. In most cases, you’ll find the elective mute is a master of manipulation.”

Lucy sat down on the tabletop across from my chair. “Yes, I can believe that. Poor June. She was the teacher here before. It was nothing but one big power struggle between her and Jadie. And June tried everything. In the beginning she was really nice, really warm, thinking Jadie was just needing confidence and once she felt secure, she’d speak. Of course she never did. So then June tried star charts, saying Jadie could earn all these privileges, if only she’d say answers to things. Then June got Jadie’s parents to make a tape recording of Jadie at home and tried to prove to Jadie that she knew she could talk. She tried being underhanded, doing things like making Jadie run so that she’d make noise by panting. And this one time …” Lucy paused. “Poor June, she was so thoroughly fed up. This one afternoon, she just said, no, Jadie couldn’t go home until she’d said good-bye and that was that. So there they sat. And gosh, what an ordeal. Jadie did nothing. Just sat there. Picked her nose and that was about it. Poor June was right up the wall, trying to wait her out, but she couldn’t manage it. Five-thirty came and she had to let Jadie go. June had to give in.”

I nodded. “They’re not kids to get into a power struggle with, because they’ve usually had a lot more practice at it than you have. That’s why being a stranger helps, I think. The groundwork for the power struggle hasn’t been laid yet, and if you’re canny and a bit of an actor, you’ve got a chance of making them think the game’s up …” My words trailed off and we fell silent. I lifted my head and looked out across the room to the back window and from there to the playground beyond, white with snow.

Lucy, still on the tabletop, studied her fingernails. I cast a sidelong glance in her direction. She was younger than I was, no more than in her midtwenties, although considerably more formally dressed than was characteristic of our generation. She was pretty in a natural, lively sort of way, although carefully applied makeup gave her more sophistication than beauty. Her dark hair was in a well-cut pageboy. What really caught my eye, however, was the remarkable height of her high heels.

Then I glanced around the room again, surveying the neat organization. “Why did June leave midyear?” I asked. It sounded funny calling her by her first name, when I’d never even met her.

Lucy looked over and her eyes widened. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Well, I didn’t think I should really ask. I felt it would be sort of nosy.”

“Oh, golly. Did they really not say anything to you?”

“No.”

A grimace. Briefly, she searched my face and then dropped her eyes again to her lap. “June committed suicide.”

“Oh.”

An appalled silence followed. What did one say in reply to something like that? Not having known her personally, I found myself filled with morbid curiosity and wasn’t too pleased at having it.

“What on earth did they tell the children?” I ventured at last.

“We couldn’t really beat around the bush. At least not about the fact she had died. But it was awful, believe me. It was right in the Christmas season, and we were in full swing with parties and plays and all the jingle-bell stuff.” Another grimace. “Let me tell you, it was a downer.”

“I can imagine.”

“I don’t know if anybody really knew what happened. She seemed okay. She’d been here about two years, and we all knew her. I’d always thought of her as a friend. She was older and stuff … I mean, we weren’t girlfriends, you know, like you are with people your own age, but …”

Lucy paused and took in a deep breath. Holding it several seconds, she slowly released it. “I guess I did know things weren’t going too well for her. The year had gotten her down. She’d said that a couple of times, but, golly, we all say things like that sometimes. I did feel sorry for her. She’d gotten divorced a few years ago and her kids were gone away to college and she hardly ever saw them. She complained about it sometimes, and I tried to be supportive, you know, listen and stuff, but I just thought it was … well, you know. We all bitch a bit, don’t we? I never thought …” Silence. “I don’t know. Something like this happens close to you and you spend gobs of time mulling it over. It’s made me grow up a lot this year. It’s made me face things I’d sort of ignored before.”

“I’m just glad you’ve told me,” I said. “I could have really put my foot in it.”

“Yeah, we were all feeling sorry for you. They couldn’t get anybody local to take the job. That’s why they were advertising in the big-city newspapers. But you can understand how people around here feel. It’s a small town and …”

“Yes.”

Lucy looked over. “If the kids get a bit wild, don’t worry about it, okay? We all understand. It’s a good school, this one. I mean, I know they look like a bunch of old fogeys down in the lounge.” She chuckled. “Believe me, I was really glad when I met you and saw you were under fifty! But it doesn’t matter. Everyone here’s got good hearts. If the going gets rough, everybody’ll help. Just tell us, okay?”

I smiled and nodded. “Okay.”

Work followed me home that night. As I drove to Falls River, where I was staying in a motel until my apartment in Pecking was available, all I could think about was the school. The news about June Harriman had unsettled me more than I cared to admit, and I kept wondering what it must have been like to stand in that classroom, facing those children and feeling so desperate. When I’d arrived in the morning, all I’d been able to think about was how lucky I’d been to land this job. The small number of children, the beautifully appointed classroom, the bountiful supplies, the supportive principal, and friendly staff had made it seem as close to an ideal teaching position as I’d thus far encountered in my career. Now, abruptly, it felt tainted.

Appreciating more the turmoil the children had been through in the previous month, I decided it would be best to establish clear rules and a definite routine that would leave no doubt about my behavior. Normally, I liked a bit of spontaneity in my day and could tolerate a fair amount of chaos in the process; however, I knew now this was neither the time nor the place to be unpredictable.

I also decided it would be better to make the classroom mine immediately. My first inclination had been to leave things as they were until we’d had a chance to adjust to one another; however, after second thought, it seemed preferable to change everything at once and give more of a sense of starting anew. So on Tuesday afternoon after school, I turned the room upside down. I shifted the bookshelves around, moved all the tables together to form one huge one, pulled down the bulletin board displays. I brought in some large floor pillows and a red carpet remnant to form a specific area for morning discussion and reading. The movable shelves and cupboards I used to divide the room into several smaller areas, making one for art activities, one for construction materials and Lego, one for natural history and science activities, and one for dressing up and housekeeping. Last of all, on my way back to the motel in Falls River that night, I stopped and plundered a pet shop, buying us a flop-eared bunny, three green finches, and a pair of hamsters with a cage that resembled the Paris Métro system.

The weeks that followed were challenging, to say the least. I was very strict and very consistent about what I expected, pulling everyone—but most especially Jeremiah—up short every single time a rule was infringed. By the same token, I tried to make sure there was plenty of fun, too. We did a lot of singing, a lot of art projects, a lot of cooking, and a lot of building of fairly unrecognizable bird-houses and boats. Each morning, I tried to take the children outside for a period separate from recess. Usually, it went under the guise of science—studying seasonal changes or the weather or whatever—but it was mainly a chance for the children to let off steam, to run and scream a little without disturbing the other classes, a spell of good fun to charm the reluctant ones into behaving and reward the cooperative ones. No doubt it would come as a nasty surprise when the time arrived to spend more of the day reading and writing than we were doing at this point, but I didn’t feel we were in any way wasting time or resources in those early weeks. The need to make us a group, to provide collective memories that included me rather than June Harriman, to resurrect the school year from the ashes of what had gone before, all seemed more necessary goals than the completion of a certain number of workbooks. And it was my good fortune to have a principal who agreed.

“Hey, how you doing?”

I didn’t know the woman at the door. She was good-looking in a hearty, worldly sort of way, with big boobs and big hips but a waspish little waist, all appearing slightly disproportionate since she couldn’t have been over five feet tall. Her thick brown hair was tied back with a red scarf into a ponytail.

“All right,” I said and smiled uncertainly.

“Glen tells me you’ve settled in pretty good. Says you’ve cut Jeremiah down to size.”

What was going through my mind as I studied her was that she would have made an archetypal country-western singer. She had about her that powerful aura of hardbitten wisdom, the kind evidenced by women named Lurleen or Loretta, whose men married them at fifteen and then ran off with the waitress from the diner.

“In fact,” she said, “Glen tells me you’ve even managed to get Jadie Ekdahl talking.” Pulling out one of the child-sized chairs, she sat down.

Intensely uncomfortable, I wondered if I should mention that I didn’t know her. Did I? Had I forgotten her face? This was not an unknown happening for me, and I racked my brain to remember who was at my interview.

My predicament suddenly became clear to her, and she gave a broad smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Arkie. Arkie Peterson. The school psychologist.”

The name I recognized immediately, because it appeared as a signature on almost every paper in the children’s files.

“So you’ve got to tell me all about it,” she said, her tone zesty. “All about what you did with Jade. Did Glen tell you that I’d tried with her? Two blessed years, almost. I was coming in here every Thursday, trying to get that kid to talk. So, precisely now, what did you do?”

The affinity between us was instant. Talking with Arkie was like picking up a long-forgotten friendship, and before I realized it, we had whiled away the better part of an hour discussing our mutual interests in psychology, education, and disturbed children.

Arkie had been down all the usual routes with Jadie’s mutism. She’d first encountered Jadie just past her fifth birthday, when it was picked up during a prekindergarten screening program. “I just wanted to gain her confidence,” Arkie said. “Here was this little, wee mite of a thing under all that hair. She looked so scared and vulnerable when I came that first day. I took her down to the nurse’s office, where I usually work when I’m here, and I said to her, ‘Honey, we’re going to be friends. We’re going to come in here and do things together and have a real good time. And it doesn’t matter if you can’t manage talking right away, because we’ll be friends anyhow.’ And I just assumed once she got to know me, once she felt secure enough to trust me, she’d begin talking. I thought she’d want to talk to me. But she didn’t. We played all these shitty little games Thursday after Thursday, ’til I wanted to brain the child.”

From there, Arkie’s relationship with Jadie had deteriorated into the same sort of power struggle June Harriman had experienced later. Indeed, it was Arkie’s frustration that led to Jadie’s placement in this class. “I still don’t know if it was the right move,” she said. “I mean, she’s always done all right academically. She’s a bright enough kid. I think her IQ scores have always been one twelve, one sixteen, somewhere in there, and she’s functioning about there in her schoolwork. So was this the right move? If the mutism was not interfering with her learning, should she get stuck in a special class?”

I gave a faint shrug. “Good question. And hard to answer. Certainly she merited intervention, which lots of times these kids don’t get simply because they don’t cause adults much trouble. However, any kind of voluntary mutism, if it persists over months or years, shows a disturbing need to control.” I looked over. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, is control what? Any ideas?”

“Not really.”

“What’s the family like?”

A shrug. “Pretty average. There’s Mom, Dad, two younger girls. Traditional setup. Mom stays home with the kids. Dad has a job doing something with agricultural machinery. Socioeconomically, they’re definitely in the lower bracket, but they’re by no means poor.”

“What about the psychological makeup of the family?”

A pause. Arkie considered her fingernails. “I don’t think Mom’s too bright. Sort of a go-alonger. You know the type. Anything you tell her, she goes along with. But she’s easy to get on with. Dad’s a bit quirky. Into health food in a big way. Got really het up because we served pork and beans in school lunches. I think he thinks Jadie’s problems are coming from eating too much sugar or additives or something.”

“Elective mutism as an allergy,” I murmured and smiled. “That’s a new one on me.”

“Yeah, a bit silly. But basically, both of them are easy to get along with. I’ve had much worse parents to deal with in my time.”

“Tell me something else,” I said, changing the subject. “Has anyone investigated her posture? Does she have scoliosis?”

“No,” Arkie replied bluntly. “I think it’s just part of her emotional problems. We’ve had the school nurse look at her, and of course her own pediatrician has seen her, but no one’s found anything to explain it. I think she’s just a closed-up kid in all senses of the word.”