I could really take it much longer. But talk about saints, Guy never said he’d had enough, that we could maybe hand this wild animal back to the city. Never.
Dickens was our big breakthrough, Charles Dickens, may God care for him forever through all eternity. When we got started on Dickens, Lily didn’t want to stop! I started on A Christmas Carol, and she loved it so much she made me read it three times. The next one was, I think, The Old Curiosity Shop. But the miracle, what I call the miracle, happened near the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. She crawled into my lap! This was a girl who couldn’t bear to be touched when she first came into our lives, not unless she was wrapped in a blanket first, and then there was a fifty-fifty chance she would crap in the blanket. Never said a word, just squiggled in between me and the book and plunked herself down on my lap. God bless you, Mr. Dickens, that’s all I can say. See? It still makes me cry. Because, you know, everything good flowed from that one thing she did, that willingness to be close, that consent.
From that, she learned to read. I’d say I taught Lily to read, but really she taught herself. With Dickens! Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay, they taught Lily how to read. We’d already taught her the alphabet, and she had memorized those ten children’s books we’d read over and over, so it was just a matter of making the connection between the letters and the words. I almost have to say that little girl memorized A Tale of Two Cities, because that was her method, all right. I said the words, and she looked at them, and then she said the words, and that’s how she learned to read.
And did she read! Like a wolf! Those books, down they went! Social Services had been keeping in touch, of course—we had a weekly visit from Adele Spelvin, Willy’s social worker—and one day Adele Spelvin says to us that in her opinion Lily was ready to start going to school, which was a big moment for us, and a big decision, because it really felt like losing her, you know? You send a child to school, you give her to all these other people.
She still had emotional problems, too. That should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow. You have to think hard about sending a kid to school if you can’t be certain she won’t lose it and decide to wipe her feces all over the walls of the girls’ room or slam some boy’s head onto the playground because he upset her in some way. Actually, she was pretty well over the bodily fluids phase, and she really was learning to manage her anger, but she still felt everything everywhere, and she was still wounded and she walked around in a blur of pain. . . . But she was coping!
So I said, Okay, we’ll send her to Grace and Favor, which is the grade school right here in Sundown, but you people better know that there will be days when this child will simply not be able to come to your school. There will be days when she will show up but won’t be able to come out of the cloakroom, and you will have to bring her home. She may cry a lot, for no reason you can see. Well, let me tell you, I said, this little girl has plenty to cry about, and if you’d gone through what she went through, you’d be living in a rubber room and wearing a straitjacket.
Everybody listened because I made them listen, Mr. Underhill, and off to school my girl went—oh, so terrified that day, and the next, and the next. After a long while she got used to the idea of walking down to Grace and Favor all on her lonesome. And by reports, because I insisted on reports, she got on well—after a while, I mean—with the other children, although to her they were just children, you see, not people she could make friends with and be comfortable around. I’m not sure she ever understood what a friend was supposed to be, and how to act toward one. None of her classmates ever came back here with her. The whole situation was a tremendous success, I can say that. We never expected her to bring friends home.