Free The Tiger's Child by Torey Hayden

it.”
    I probably would have, had she ever said it meant that much to her, but she never did.
    “And that parking garage,” she said. “Remember that? With all those little cars that’d go down the ramps and those little people who didn’t even look like people. They were just plastic pegs with faces, really. Remember how I used to steal them? I was so desperate to have them. I used to line them up on the floor beside where I slept, this whole line of them—the guy in the black top hat, the guy in the cowboy hat, the Indian chief—do you remember me taking them?”
    Over the years there had been so many toys in so many classrooms. I remembered garage sets and riding horses, but they could have been any of a dozen such I had had.
    “You never got mad at me for it,” she said, turning to look at me. She smiled. “I kept stealing them and stealing them and you never got angry with me.”
    In the hurly-burly of that class, truth was, I probably hadn’t even noticed she was doing it.
    “That’s what seems so weird to me about this book, Torey. You make out like we’re always fighting. Like, in it you seem to be getting mad at me about every other page. I don’t remember you ever doing that.”
    I looked at her in surprise.
    Then she wrinkled her nose and grinned conspiratorially. “Are you just spicing it up, like? So they’ll want to publish it?”
    My jaw dropped.
    “I mean, I don’t mind at all. It’s a terribly good story. And, like, it’s brilliant, thinking of myself as a character in a book.”
    “But, Sheila, we did fight. We fought all the time. When you came into my class, you—”
    Again she turned to look out of the window. Silence ensued and it lasted several moments.
    “What exactly do you recall?” I asked at last.
    “Like I said …” And then she didn’t say. She was still gazing out of the window and the words just seemed to fade away. A minute or more passed.
    “We did fight,” I said softly. “Everybody fights, whatever the relationship, however good it might be. It wouldn’t be a relationship otherwise, because two separate people are coming together. Friction is a natural part of that.”
    No response.
    “Besides,” I said and grinned, “I was a teacher. What would you expect?”
    “Yeah, well,” she said, “I don’t really remember.”
    I couldn’t come to terms with the fact Sheila had forgotten so much. Driving home on the freeway that evening, I turned it over and over in my mind. How could she forget Anton and Whitney? How could the whole experience be reduced to nothing more than a fond recollection of colorful plastic toys? This hurt me. It had been such a significant experience for me that I had assumed it had been at least as significant for her. In fact, I had assumed it was probably more significant. Without me, that class, those five months, Sheila most likely would now be on the back ward of some state hospital. Ihad made a difference. At least that’s what I’d been telling myself. My cheeks began to burn hot, even in the privacy of my car, as I realized the gross arrogance of my assumption. I was further humbled by the insight that those five months might well now mean more to me than to her.
    She had been only a very young child. Was I being unrealistic in expecting her to remember much? At the time she had been so exquisitely articulate that it had given her the gloss of a maturity even then I knew she didn’t really have, but I had been accustomed to associating verbal ability with good memory.
    As I sped through the darkness, I tried to recollect being six myself. I could bring to mind the names of some of the children in my first-grade class, but mostly it was incidents I could recall. There were a lot of small snippets: a moment lining up for recess, a classmate vomiting into the trash can, a fight over the swings, a feeling of pride because I drew good trees. They weren’t very complete recollections, but if I tried, I could identify the