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Show traveling, I had no cash, no credit cards, and I was panic stricken. They did not offer to put me up for the night, and I did not ask. I panicked. I had to get out, away from the grinning man, the cool detached manner of the supervising teacher, the foreign taste of a Casablanca or Calcutta. My one chance to get away from the horror I smelled in the air. I raced to the plane, asking them to arrange for me to visit Patty later on. I felt tears, and was surprised. And from the plane window, I imagined the car on its journey back to an unknown land, and I knew how it would feel to be Patty. I didn't know where I had left her- I couldn't see it or smell it or touch on feelings of the people working with her. A large black void had swallowed her up and I felt the wall crash down between us. A time-out wall, not of our own making. A wall that screamed that none of this had ever happened. We were in time-out forever, and I felt myself saying, "I don't care about you I I don't care'." My lips were mouthing the words and my hands imagined the signs. Even without the wall, would I have gone the whole way with her? Would I have been willing? I will never know now. And I knew she was crying. Spring lifted the cloud from us all. It was pleasent having only three children and two months to a freedom I had never had before, a "summer vacation." We planned units and field trips that would never have been possible when Patty was with us. The other three children visibly relaxed. They had never understood her demands on our time, her strange violence and the tension it produced. My aides were actually joyous for the first time in months, and I felt the nightmares drain from me and fold back into the dark from which Patty had come. The request for my visit did not come until May. It was not cleared until the first of June, and then school was out. I was relieved that I did not have to visit until the next fall. I forgot about it, took some writing courses, went camping, went home for awhile. Even then, I knew in the back of my mind Patty lurked like a great dark shape of emotions I could not trust. I was writing a story for Patty and for all the others without advocates. Someone had to hear it, and it was thebnly way I had. -21- |
