Somebody Else’s Kids by Torey Hayden

Author:Torey Hayden [Hayden, Torey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007370856
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

The first half hour in from recess had been endless. The remainder of the time went unaccountably fast. I sat with Tomaso on my lap for almost thirty minutes. Then the pressure of the other children forced me to rise and attempt to reconstruct our class. We all moved and spoke to one another with the abashed gentleness common to the aftermath of great anger.

Most of all I wanted a moment for Lori because I knew how upsetting all this must have been for her, but in the bare fifteen minutes left, I could not carve it out. Instead, we went about the mundane chores a Friday brings: the cleaning up, the putting things away, the making out of next week’s attendance slips.

Tomaso wandered. Like a sightless man in a foreign place, he bumped into things, staggered from point to point as we worked around him. Lori, I noticed, would pause and watch him. I could not read her feelings as she did.

When next I turned, Tomaso was bent over the bear, picking up the stuffing and gently trying to get it back into the body. Meekly he came to me, the bear in his hands.

“Do you think you could fix this?” he asked. He would not raise his head to look at me. “I think maybe it could be sewed up.”

I took the bear from his hands and examined it. “Yes, I think maybe it could.”

“Do you have needle and thread? Could you do it?” A small pause. “Now?”

“I’m not sure I have what I need.”

“Could you look? Please?”

Taking the wounded bear with me, I went over to my desk. Tomaso was behind me. As I searched, Lori approached.

A long, aching silence was between them as they surveyed one another. I would have needed words; they did not. Lori leaned over my desk. “I’ll go to the office and see if they got any thread down there, if you want me to.”

I looked over at her. Not for the first time I envied her for her strength. And for much more. “Okay, Lor, if you would.”

The bell for dismissal rang before Lori returned from the office. Claudia helped me stuff Boo into his boots and then she took him outside to wait for his mother in front of the school. Tomaso remained beside me in the classroom doorway. The maimed bear was pressed to his chest.

When Lori came back, I took the bear from him and went back into the room. Sitting at my desk, I examined the damage more carefully. “I’m not exactly going to be able to make this look like new, Tom.”

“That’s all right.”

I poked at the hole again.

“Tor?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Will you do it now?”

“You have to get out to your bus, Tomaso. And this is going to take me a while. I’ll have it for you on Monday. How about that?”

He watched me without immediately replying. All his defenses were down and I could see directly into his soul. His eyes began to fill again. “Can I stay? I don’t feel much like going home now.

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