Chapter One, Part 2

Dumping Billy
by Olivia Goldsmith

(Page 2 of 3)

Brian looked up at her and nodded. His face registered a cautious relief. The dreadful burdens of childhood secrets always touched Kate. Though she was a long-lapsed Catholic, she still remembered the power and release of the confessional. She had to serve this child well. "What are you wishing for?" she asked, her voice as gentle as she could make it.

Brian began to cry. His face, usually so pale, flushed deep rose. Speaking through his tears, he said, "I thought if I just said 'Mommy, come back' a million times that she would be back." He sobbed and put his face against Kate's skirt. "But it isn't working. I think I've said it two million times."

Kate's eyes filled with tears. She took a deep breath. She could feel the heat of Brian's face through the thin fabric of her skirt. The hell with professional detachment. She scooped Brian into her arms and carried him over to one of the chairs. The boy nestled against her. After a time he stopped crying, but his silent neediness was even sadder. They sat for a few moments, but Kate knew their session was nearly completed, and she had to speak. "Oh, Brian, I am so sorry," she told him. "But magic doesn't work. I wish it did. The doctors did everything they could to help your mommy. They couldn't fix her, and magic can't fix that. It's not your fault that the doctors couldn't save her." She paused. "And it's not your fault your mommy can't come back." Kate sighed. Breaking children's hearts, even to help them, had not been part of her job description. "But she can't, and your magic can't work."

Brian suddenly pushed against her, wriggling his way out of her embrace. He stood up and looked at her angrily. "Why not?" he demanded. "Why can't my magic work?" He glared at Kate for another moment, then pushed her hard and barreled out of the room, nearly knocking over the dollhouse. The office door crashed and rebounded open. From down the hall, she heard a voice—Elliot Winston's—try to stop Brian. "Shut up, you stinky dick!" Brian shouted. Kate winced and listened to the little boy's footsteps recede.

A moment later, Elliot stuck his head around Kate's door. "Another satisfied customer?" he asked, his eyebrows raised nearly to his receding hairline. "Perhaps you should have stuck with French."

Kate had majored in French as an undergrad. For a while, she had even considered continuing her language studies in graduate school. She had never regretted not doing so, because her work with the children was so satisfying, but occasionally, particularly at moments like this, Elliot—one of the math teachers and her best friend—teased her about her choice.

"As I recall, the German for 'stinky dick' would be riechende Steine. What would you say in French?"

"I would say you are very annoying," Kate told him. "That's good enough. And I would also say that Brian and I are making some progress. He expressed some of his true feelings today."

"Well, he managed to express his feelings about me and my genital odor. Congratulations on your progress." Elliot stepped into the room and sat beside the dollhouse in an overstuffed chair—the only piece of adult-size furniture in Kate's office aside from her own desk and chair. Elliot was dark-haired, average in height, slightly overaverage in weight, and possessed of a much higher than average IQ. As usual, he was wearing wrinkled chinos, a baggy T-shirt, and a clashing open-necked shirt on top. Putting his feet up on the toy box, he opened his lunch sack.

Kate sighed. She and Elliot usually had lunch together. But today Elliot had had the dreaded cafeteria duty and was just now, at nearly two-thirty, getting a chance to eat. She delighted in his company, but she was melancholy from her session with Brian. Elliot, fresh from the horror of the lunchroom, was blithely unaware of her mood as he pulled out several items and tore into a sandwich that smelled suspiciously like corned beef.

"Brian's in Sharon's class, isn't he?" Elliot asked too casually.

Kate nodded. "Poor kid. His mother dies, and his teacher is the Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side." She had to smile. Neither she nor Elliot had much use for Sharon Kaplan, a truly lazy teacher and a deeply annoying woman.

"So aside from a recently deceased mom, what's bugging Brian?" Elliot asked.

Kate felt too fragile for their usual badinage. "You have mustard on your chin," she told him, but as Elliot reached up to wipe it away, the glob fell onto his shirt.

"Oops," he said, and dabbed ineffectually at his shirtfront with one of the hard paper towels from the school's bathrooms. The yellow splotch looked particularly hideous against the green of his shirt. Watching him eat, Kate often thought, was a spectator sport.

"He believes that magic can bring his mother back," she said, sighing wistfully.

"See? See what I mean? They're all obsessed with witches and wizards. Damn that Harry Potter!" Elliot said, and took another huge bite of the sandwich. "So what's your prescription?" he asked, forcing the words out while chewing his food.

"I want him to give up the magic and get in touch with his anger and pain," Kate answered.

"Oy vey!" Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could manage. "When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?"

"Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won't work, and he mustn't think it's his fault when it fails." She shook her head. "You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary, and become chief actuarial at any pension fund. You're telling me to encourage magic?"

Elliot shrugged. "Haven't you ever had magical things happen?"

Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had once told her, "The unexamined life is the only one worth living." He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. "If you think you're going to start an argument today," she warned him, "you're out of your mind." Then, to annoy him—as well as for his own good—she added, "I didn't think corned beef was good for your cholesterol."

Copyright © 2004 by Olivia Goldsmith All rights reserved.

About the Author

OLIVIA GOLDSMITH, novelist and journalist, was the bestselling author of The First Wives Club, Flavor of the Month, The Bestseller, The Switch, Young Wives, Pen Pals, Bad Boy, and, most recently, Insiders. Her articles appeared in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, InStyle, and the Observer, among other publications.