“May I ask what exactly Essie’s disability is? I ask because it’s possible it might affect how I need to accommodate her learning —”

 

“You’ll find that out in time,” she said, “if you stick with the job. Suffice it to say that she can’t go to school with other children.”

Essie was a sharp kid. She finished the placement test faster than I expected, and did pretty well in most areas, being a little weak on math, but testing at fourth or fifth grade level in language arts and social studies. When I went over the results with her afterward, she volunteered that since the first teacher her mother hired had left, her mother had been teaching her American history and geography through the lens of their family’s genealogy. Then she started to say something about her great-grandfather again, but caught herself and seemed to remember her mother’s injunction.

“Well,” I said, “it’s good to know your family’s roots. I don’t know mine any farther back than my grandparents. But since you’re way ahead on that, how about we learn some math?”

She nodded eagerly, and I got some worksheets out of the briefcase.

* * *

Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches. During lunch, Patience and I discussed salary and benefits. The salary she was offering was predicated on including room and board — if I kept my apartment in Harperton, I’d be making a bit less than before I was fired, but if I moved in with her and Essie, I’d be able to put away considerably more savings for my eventual move to a more progressive state. The math seemed simple, but I asked a few questions anyway.

“It’s just you and Essie here?”

“Yes, just us now.” I didn’t ask about the implied then. She seemed to hesitate before going on: “My grandfather is... down the road, and calls and drops in at unexpected times. I hope he won’t be a bother.”

After some talk about use of the kitchen, and splitting the chores, I asked, “Can you show me the room or rooms I’d be living in after lunch?”

“Of course.”

When Essie finished eating, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and Patience showed me the rest of the ground floor. Apparently I could have my pick of the unused rooms, a couple of which were already furnished as bedrooms. The house had clearly been built for a lot more than two people to live in. I chose two adjoining rooms with a bathroom between them as my bedroom and office/sitting room, and then broached the other questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in front of Essie.

“May I ask what exactly Essie’s disability is? I ask because it’s possible it might affect how I need to accommodate her learning —”

“You’ll find that out in time,” she said, “if you stick with the job. Suffice it to say that she can’t go to school with other children.”

That was weird and off-putting. Was she ashamed of it, whatever it was? So far I hadn’t seen any signs of disability, either mental or physical, but I wondered if Essie might be slightly neurodivergent, and I wondered in turn if Patience might be ashamed of that. I didn’t want to dig into it when she’d so clearly rebuffed me, though, so I turned to my other question.

“Earlier, you asked me some questions about how and when I figured out I was trans...”

“Oh, yes. Well, I was hoping you knew when you were a child, like Essie, but it’s not a big deal. I’m sure you can still help her if she has questions about... that sort of thing.” She waved one hand helplessly as she finished the sentence.

Ah, thought so. “How long has Essie been living as a girl?” I asked.

“About four months. She... informed me one morning before breakfast. I was surprised, but I figured out what I could and I’ve tried to be accommodating.”

“I’m glad to hear that Essie has such a supportive parent.”

“I would do anything for her.”

I thought uncomfortably about my own parents, and my grandfather, and just nodded. “Well. How about if I give Essie another lesson this afternoon, and then make arrangements to move tomorrow?”

“That sounds good.”

* * *

Our afternoon lesson focused on magnetism. I had a few magnets with their north and south poles labeled in my briefcase, and let Essie mess around with them for a little while before explaining why they worked.

She had fun using one magnet to pick up another, or push it away by waving the same pole near it, for a few minutes. Then she tried something I’d tried when I was a kid, too: she held one magnet upright in her hand, north pole up, and tried to balance another magnet in the air on top of it, north pole down. She failed, of course; the magnet slid off and fell to the table, and she tried again. The upper magnet flipped over and stuck to the lower magnet. Again; it fell off. I was about to tell her it wouldn’t work, that you needed a special setup to do magnetic levitation, but then — she did it.

I sat there staring slack-jawed as she balanced an ordinary school magnet on top of a repelling magnetic field, constantly adjusting the position of her hand as the upper magnet tipped this way or that. “How are you doing that?” I asked. “That’s amazing!”

To my confusion and dismay, she immediately said, “I’m sorry!” and dropped the magnets like they’d burned her. She looked — embarrassed? Why?

“No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “What you did was fantastic. Probably not one person in a million could do that. Could you do it again?”

“I’ll try,” she said diffidently, but though she tried several times, she couldn’t get the magnets to balance again. I heaped praise on her nonetheless; getting that to happen even once was a feat of dexterity anyone could be proud of.

After she’d tired of playing with the magnets, I started the explanation, getting out worksheets with child-appropriate diagrams of magnetic fields and working through them with her. We knocked off for the day around four-thirty, and I said goodbye. “I may see you tomorrow, if I bring the first load of my stuff over then,” I said. “Otherwise Monday.”

“Okay,” she said, and hugged me. “Thank you for teaching me this cool stuff!”

I stiffened for a moment; in the public schools, teachers weren’t supposed to accept hugs. Too much risk of accusations of sexual misconduct. This might be even worse, given that I was going to be alone with Essie for hours every day. But after a moment, I gave in and hugged her back. I had only known her for a few hours, but like her mother, I would do anything for this precious little girl.

* * *

When I got home, I called my friend Kathy, who taught second grade at South Taine Elementary.

“Hey, Jenny, what’s up?”

“I got a job —”

“Wooooooooo!” she cheered.

“I can’t tell you any details because of an NDA,” I said. “The family wants their privacy. But basically I’m going to be full-time tutoring a disabled child.”

“Oh! Do they live nearby?”

“Not too terribly far — I can’t say exactly where they live.”

“I was afraid you’d have to move away to find another job. Good for you.”

We talked a few minutes longer, but I could barely tell her anything about my new job, and I didn’t have any other news to share, so it was mostly her sharing gossip about the other teachers and the PTA at South Taine Elementary. When I told her I was going to move in with the family of the child I was teaching, she offered to help me move, but I said I’d have to check with the family to see if it was okay — that would require telling her the address, and sharing the map Mr. McKay had given me.

How was I going to move, if I couldn’t tell anyone where I was going so they could help? I didn’t have that much stuff, but there was some heavy furniture I wasn’t sure Patience and I could move by ourselves. It wasn’t too late yet, so I called her.

“Hey,” I said. “Just a quick question. Is it okay if I tell a couple of friends where I’m moving to so they can help? I’ve got a few heavy pieces of furniture.”

“No,” she said after a moment of hesitation. “I’ll get Mr. McKay to hire a moving firm for you and have them sign an NDA. Sorry, I should have thought of that sooner. This will probably delay your moving in until Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“No problem, I can commute until then.”

“See you Monday morning, then.”

After that, I gave notice to my landlord that I’d be moving out before the end of the month, and told a few online friends the little I could say about my new job. Then I cooked supper and ate while watching a couple of episodes of The Lathe of Heaven. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call my parents.

It was not a fun conversation. Mom took the opportunity to snipe at me for not going into a more lucrative career, and criticized me for signing the NDA without getting another lawyer to examine it. When she handed the phone to Dad, he didn’t say anything overtly bad, but he said goodbye and hung up after two or three perfunctory questions.

After that, I had to take some deep breaths and count to ten before I called my brother Ethan. Telling him Ethan was much easier than telling Mom and Dad. He teased me about joining the NDA club. “There’s an awesome clubhouse with a hot tub and arcade machines, but nobody’s allowed to tell you where it is.” We had a fun conversation and I hung up feeling much better than I had after talking with Mom and Dad.

* * *

Saturday, I drove to the grocery store and asked if they had any empty boxes they were about to throw out. I came home with a car full of boxes and started packing. Kathy came over Sunday and by the end of the day we had all my miscellaneous small belongings packed, except for the toiletries, clothes, and dishes I’d be using between now and the move.

Monday, I drove to the Oldcroft house and taught Essie for a few hours. She was bleary and sleepy in the morning, saying she hadn’t slept well because of nightmares, so after a short review lesson on geography, I suggested she get a little nap. During lunch, Patience told me she’d gotten a call from Leon McKay; he was arranging the moving company and they would help me move on Tuesday.

After Essie’s nap, we went for a nature walk in the woods, and I taught her some basic ecology and how to identify some plants — she already knew several. We also ran across a lizard, crawling up a tree; Essie caught it and let it run up her arm before letting it go.

* * *

Tuesday, I didn’t go to the Oldcroft house in the morning, since the movers were to come at eleven. Loading up at my apartment went quickly and smoothly, but by the time we got up to the north end of the county, the weather turned bad again, though not quite as bad as it had been the day I interviewed. We had to slow down because of the heavy rain impairing visibility, and when we got the house, I got soaked coming in from my car and the movers got even more soaked going back and forth between the moving truck and the house over and over. After the stuff was all hauled into the house, Patience let them dry off and rest before they rearranged furniture to remove some pieces I didn’t want from the rooms I was taking and put my stuff in there. The previous bed from what would be my bedroom was taken apart and the pieces put into an already-crowded lumber room at the back of the first floor, along with a roll-top desk that looked beautiful but wouldn’t work as well for me as the modern ergonomic computer desk I’d brought. The storm abated about the time they finished that, and after the movers left, I shared a late lunch with Patience and Essie, and taught Essie for a short session in the afternoon.

The first night I spent in the Oldcroft house was not a restful one. It took me over two hours to get to sleep; I attributed it to sleeping in an unfamiliar space, despite being in my own bed, and to the creaking and settling of the old house, which I wasn’t used to. And when I did get to sleep, nightmares came.

I vaguely remember a dream of being chased, and another where I was hiding from something that was looking for me, but the dream I remember most clearly is almost a memory — distorted by the nightmare lens, even worse than it was in real life, but unfortunately all too solidly based on fact. I had just come out to my grandfather, and he was ranting and raving about things I won’t repeat, and telling me to get out of his house and never come back. And all the while the room was getting darker and darker, and a storm was raging outside the windows, and as much as I was afraid of my grandfather, I was afraid of going out in that storm more. And behind him, looking eagerly over his shoulder and occasionally egging him on with a “Yes, yes,” or “Get rid of it,” was another old man, much older if I had to guess from his wrinkles, and indefinably terrifying. At last, cowed into submission, I stumbled away from them and put my hand on the door to go out and brave the storm.

I woke to the sound of a loud creak and for a few moments, half asleep, I was afraid the other old man was walking around upstairs — or worse, coming down the stairs to my bedroom.

Then the door opened with another squeak and Essie stood there, blinking sleepily. “I couldn’t sleep. I keep having bad dreams.”

“Oh, honey,” I said, my heart going out to her. “I’m having bad dreams too. But why didn’t you go to your mother’s room?”

“I knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. She was arguing with Great-Grandpa.”

On the phone at this time of night? I’d gotten the impression he was an obnoxious burden on his descendants and this furthered that impression. I wanted to comfort Essie in her mother’s absence, but it would be wrong to let her sleep in my bed.

“Let’s go sit on the sofa and I’ll read you a story,” I said, getting out of bed. “Do you want to go up to your bedroom or the schoolroom for a book, or pick one of those?” I gestured to my bookshelf, the one with mostly children’s books on it, as I turned on the lamp with my other hand.

She went over to the shelf and pulled out one book, then another, looking at the covers and titles. Then she said, “This one,” and held up Howl’s Moving Castle.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go in the living room.”

“You mean the parlor or the drawing room or —?”

I smiled. “Yes, the parlor.”

I turned on a couple of lamps and we sat down on the sofa — or davenport or love seat; I wasn’t up on all the furniture terminology I’d probably need, living in this house. I read to her until she fell asleep leaning against me. Then I carried her up to her bedroom and laid her in bed, staying with her a moment in case she woke up.

I slept better after that.

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