‘Here’s something you can both play with together while Jana and I talk,’ I said casually, wanting Laurie to feel she was unobserved.
As Jana, Ed and I discussed the unusually mild fall weather and the heavy traffic on the main highway into town, I watched Laurie from the corner of my eye. She was concentrating on building a tower, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips. Periodically she reached out to pick up a block from the pile in front of her to add to her tower. Barney was watching her intently.
‘I play,’ he said, reaching out a chubby hand to pick up a brick.
Laurie didn’t reply, so intent was she on making sure her tower didn’t fall over. Barney’s bottom lip wobbled.
‘I play,’ he repeated and placed his brick heavily on the top of Laurie’s tower, sending the whole lot crashing to the floor.
While Jana chatted to Ed about the family’s holiday in Vermont the previous summer, I waited, tense, to see how Laurie would react. She got to her feet and took a step towards the little boy. I could sense Jana watching, even while she carried on talking.
‘No, Barney!’ Laurie was cross. That much was sure. And yet it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal level of crossness for a child of not yet five. She bent down and started picking up the bricks which were littered across the floor around Barney’s sandalled feet.
‘Sowwy.’ He bent down to help her pick them up.
The three adults let out the breath we’d all been holding.
‘She’s amazingly good really,’ Jana whispered as the two youngsters chattered together about how best to rebuild the tower. ‘She’s really patient with him on the whole. More patient even than his own sister. There was only that one incident . . .’
Ed Kowalsky, who’d seemed distracted – almost bored – up to this point, swung around in his seat as though someone had wound him up like a clockwork toy.
‘Incident?’
Jana glanced over to the small children on the floor. She was more formally dressed today in a midi-length blue dress that swirled around her legs, revealing a tan leather beaded thong around one ankle, and flat sneaker-type shoes, also in faded blue. The sleeveless dress made her brown arms appear endless and I saw how Ed’s eyes, magnified behind his glasses, were drawn to the long slope of her collarbone, smooth as a razor clam.
‘Why don’t we call Kristen in to take the children off for a soda,’ he said. ‘Kristen is one of my research students,’ he explained to Jana. ‘Kids just love her.’
He looked at me, and I realized that when he’d said, ‘Why don’t we’, what he’d meant was why didn’t I. As I went out into the corridor I reminded myself that he was the one who’d given me this opportunity, and it was fair enough for him to ask me to do the things he didn’t want to do himself. But still it rankled. As did the way he was looking at Jana. Let’s get this straight, there was nothing attractive to me about Ed Kowalsky. He was a married older man who just happened to be my departmental senior. But I’d got used to a certain level of . . . appraisal. It gave me a slight feeling of power. And it was galling to discover that power was all in my head.
Kristen was a plump girl with a wide, doughy face, who always blinked before talking to you as if trying to expel an unwelcome image that had come unbidden into her head. After she’d led the children off towards the lifts on the way to what was cheeringly called the ‘cafeteria’ on floor one but was actually just three vending machines and a few padded chairs in faded pale blue and orange, Ed depressed the pause button on the cassette player and we leaned in towards Jana, partly to better hear what she was about to say and partly because she was just the kind of person you instinctively want to get closer to.
‘There were two incidents, but they’re nothing really,’ she said now, pulling her long silky ponytail forwards over one shoulder so she could play with the ends. The sun was slanting through the slats of the blinds, striping the planes of her face with golden bands of light.
‘Everything you tell us is useful, Jana,’ said Ed, leaning so far in I thought he would end up with his head on her lap. ‘Every little piece of information helps us build a picture of what’s going on inside Laurie’s head. And that’s the only way we’re going to be able to really help her.’
‘The first incident happened a few days ago. Laurie was playing with Barney and, as I say, normally she’s very good with him but on this day she was tired and a bit out of sorts and he was playing with something she wanted and she gave him a little slap. Not hard, but I guess I rebuked her quite sharply. Anyway, she ran upstairs and by the time I followed her up there, she’d locked herself in the bathroom. I tried to talk to her through the door but she just said she was bad and bad children needed to be locked up. Then it went quiet for a while and when she came out, it was just like none of it had ever happened.’