Elizabeth Finds Her Way Out: A Very Short Story

Acrylic, ink, charcoal, watercolour and paper.

 

Learning Curves

In school, there was always one kid in who hid their book in their desk and read it when they thought the teacher wouldn’t notice. Were you that kid?

It was the same kid who sat on the stairs at parties in high school, face in book, while the party went on around them. Were you that kid?

When everyone else went to the gravel pit for the grad celebration, this kid went to the library for a one-last-time visit with the librarian. Were you that kid?

I was that kid.

And so was my husband.

So when we had kids who were readers, well, of course they were readers. They couldn’t possibly be anything else. Right?

And then we had Toby.

In kindergarten, the teacher complained that Toby did not know his alphabet, could we please work on this at home?

He and I spent every afternoon working on letters. I showed him the letter ‘e’. We played ‘e’ games, draw pictures featuring ‘e’, brainstorm words starting with the letter ‘e’. At the end of this, I swept everything off the table and showed him a card with the letter ‘e’ on it.

“Mommy’s so silly,” I said. (He agreed; he’s always very agreeable). “I forget this letter’s name. What is it?”

And he looked at me and said, “I don’t know!” as if he had never seen it before.

In Grade 1 he was placed in a special reading group, and in Grade 2 he was chosen for Empower. Empower^TM Reading is a series of evidence-based reading intervention programs that were developed by Dr. Maureen W. Lovett and her team at The Hospital for Sick Children. In Empower, Toby and five other kids met with the learning resource teacher every day. We began to see some improvement. At the end of his Grade 2 year, he was reading at a pre-kindergarten level.

On the first day of Grade 3, Toby went to both the school principal and the LRT: “I want to be an engineer,” he told them. “But I need more help with my reading. Please can I take Empower again. It really helps.”

Empower is only offered to a student for one year, but the LRT was so impressed with Toby’s self-advocacy that she spoke to Sick Kids and received permission for him to continue with the programme.

At the same time, the wonderful Dr. Betty Johnson at the Dundas Optometry Clinic diagnosed Toby with dyslexia.

I’m not proud to say that my first reaction on hearing my son was dyslexic was feeling profound sorrow. As a lifelong lover of books and reading, it broke my heart that Toby would never know the joy that I knew, that his father and siblings knew.

Ridiculous, of course. Anyone who knows this kid knows that he is joy incarnate. But still. By the end of Grade 3 he had pulled himself to a pre-grade 1 reading level. He was so proud of himself. He had every right to be.

In Grade 4 he came home in tears and told me he was stupid.

Everyone in his class was reading chapter books. He was struggling through ‘Amelia Bedelia’. He loved zombies and aliens. He was tired of ‘baby books’.

We tried Geronimo Stilton, but the busy pages were too much. We tried middle-grade graphic novels, but the vocabulary level was too high. Graphic novels for younger readers were too ‘babyish’, all-ages comic books didn’t work because the print was inaccessible – too close together, too crowded.

Then a librarian friend suggested we try HiLo books. These are books with a low vocabulary level (grade 1-2), but with a story meant for an older reader.

I’d never heard of them before.

I went to the internet and there they were: HiLo books! Wonderful!

Wonderful, that was, if the reader was really keen on sweet romance.

My 8-year-old was not going to have anything to do with any kissing, thank you very much.

Where were the zombies?

Where were the aliens?

Where was the sci fi?

I nearly threw my computer across the room. Why is there never anything for boys?

Then I had a thought.

I’m a writer.

I write sci fi.

And so I got to work.

jessicaveter.com

And The Kitchen Sink

12/12 Short Stories in 2017

2/12

word count: 1200 words

prompt: a conversation with your spouse

 

 Part 1 can be found here.

She was sitting on the counter, feet in the sink.

“You okay?” he asked.

The water gushing from the faucet steamed, fogging the window. Outside, winter had taken a last, desperate hold on the valley.

“Did you hear me at all?”

She watched him from the shelter of her hair. He leaned against the door frame, crossed then uncrossed his arms. He was trying hard not to be angry. “He’s fine. I just finished talking to him.” A pause. “You want to go see him? Straighten things out between you?”

“No, not right now.”

“Okay. Fine.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, then continued the upwards motion and ran his fingers through his hair, left it sticking straight up. ‘Engineer hair’, the boys called it. ‘Show some respect’, he’d growl at them, and they’d collapse into laughter.

She adjusted the water. It wasn’t hot enough. It was never hot enough. She’d asked him to raise the temperature on the water heater, but it was as high as it would go. He worried about the boys scalding themselves, she knew he did, but he never said a word about it.

God, he was a good man.

Why had she had to choose a good man?

“I was thinking to take them out for a bit. Robbie needs shoes, you know. Maybe if you had some time alone? Maybe that would help?”

She pulled the hair back from her face so she could see him clearly. He looked tired. No wonder. “I don’t think so,” she said. He blinked at her and she realised she’d not said it out loud. That was happening more and more these days, as if her mouth had entered into a kind of collusion with her heart. Let him think it’s going to get better, her heart said. Her head knew better.

“What can I do?” he said. He held his empty hands towards her. She had always loved his hands, the boxy shape of the palm, the long, sensitive fingers. But no matter that she loved them, they remained empty, and nothing was all he had to offer.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said, and this time she managed to speak in a way he could hear. His face closed and his hands dropped. “We knew that this would happen,” she said.

“We knew this might happen,” he corrected her. “And it’s been so long, I thought.”

She nodded. “I did, too.” She glanced into the sink. The water wasn’t helping. The skin from her lower calves to her toes had gone bright red from the heat. She was afraid to rub at it, afraid it would spread further. Maybe if she wore gloves? Did they even have any gloves? She’d have to add them to the grocery list.

Still leaning in the doorway, her husband grasped at straws. “Maybe this isn’t it, not really,” he said. “Maybe it’s just a phase, you know?”

“I don’t think so.” She dipped her hand into the sink. Her nerves, confused, screamed at her that the water was too cold before admitting their mistake. Hot! Hot! She held her hand there, biting her lip from the pain.

“Maybe a doctor?” he said. “Someone different? Someone you like?”

She touched her left ankle. She couldn’t really feel it, not exactly. Her sense of touch was overwhelmed by the scalding. It was better this way. She couldn’t feel the change, either. If she closed her eyes, it was almost as if it wasn’t happening at all.

“Tell me what I can do.” She did close her eyes, then. He thought it was to shut him out. He couldn’t see what she was doing in the sink. Her bent figure blocked her left arm and hand from view. “Listen, Maybe I.” And he took a step into the room.

“No!” Her eyes had flown open and her right arm was extended, hand out, to stop him. “I said not to come in here. I meant it.”

“Sorry,” he said, backing away. He was crying. She could hear it in his voice.

“This was always a possibility,” she said, attention back to the sink and whatever she was doing in there. “You knew it from the beginning. I never held anything back. You knew.”

“Yes.”

“And we had a good long time together, longer than most. But this is happening now, and there’s no doctor going to stop it.”

“But.”

“No. No ‘but’. ‘But’ isn’t going to do either of us any good.” She frowned into the sink, twisted, took a wooden spoon from the drawer under her, went to work again.

“The boys.”

She stilled. Her hair had fallen over her face again. She pushed it back behind one ear. “They adore you,” she said. “You’re a wonderful father. They’re lucky to have you.”

“They’re lucky to have you, too.”

“You’ll explain it to them. They’ll be fine.”

“Explain? Are you kidding me? Explain how?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“No! You think of something! This is your thing! You explain it! …what are you doing?”

She grinned at him unexpectedly. “I think I got it,” she said, and pulled something, dripping, out of the sink. She turned it this way and that. “I wasn’t expecting anything like this,” she said conversationally. She tossed it into the other sink. It landed with a splat and steamed there, quietly.

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

She considered this. “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to explain. I don’t think so?”

She inspected her work. “There’s still some here.”

He expelled air in a puff. “So.” He kicked at the baseboard. “How long, do you think?”

“No idea.”

“What do you mean, ‘no idea’? Surely you know. Surely, you’ve got some kind of inkling. Some kind of time frame?”

“It’s not like I’ve done this before.”

“I know, but Cameron’s turning seven next week. We’ve got a birthday party planned. Will you even be there? Should we cancel?”

“Of course I’ll be there. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What?” he spluttered. “Don’t be ridiculous? Are you freaking kidding me? My wife is sitting in the sink, coming apart, literally, at the seams! And you’re telling me not to be ridiculous?”

“Calm down.”

“I don’t feel like calming down! I feel like shouting!”

“The boys will hear you.” She was giving him her full attention. About bloody time.

“So?”

“This is how you want them to find out?”

“They’re going to find out some way or another.” He smacked the wall.

“Don’t.”

“Oh, yeah, we could do it your way. Say nothing. That’s a brilliant idea.”

“Paul.”

“Don’t give them a chance to spend time with you.”

“Paul.”

“Or say goodbye.”

She frowned. “Who says it’s going to be goodbye?” That stopped him. “It doesn’t need to be goodbye. Does it?”

He shook his head. “Are you kidding me? Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he turned, walked away.

She sighed, and peered back into the sink. They’d said this wouldn’t be easy. She’d been warned that Paul probably wouldn’t come around.

At least the heat seemed to be working. She retrieved the wooden spoon. She was going to need a bigger sink.