Free A Safe Place for Joey by Mary MacCracken

I’d begun my private practice as a learning disability consultant, Frank was one of my first students. Frank was dirt-poor, streetwise, smart as a whip. His father was a mechanic at the garage I used. Frank had been easy to help, mainly because there was nothing really wrong with him. No signs of any learning disability, no serious emotional problems. He’d just fallenthrough the cracks of the huge, inefficient school system in the economically bankrupt city where he lived. Someone had equated poor with dumb and placed him in the lowest track of skills classes. Each year he was passed on to the next grade in the same slow, dull track. But given a chance and a little outside help, Frank was off and running, eager to show what he could do, his parents cheeringhim on.
    “I get it,” he’d shout. “That stupid factoring! Ain’t nothin’ but doin’ times and matchin’ ’em up. Whyn’t they just say so?”
    I coached Frank before the state competency tests and called the school to see how he’d done.
    The next year he was in the second-highest track in the middle school and flourishing.
    Seduced by my thoughts of Frank and how little it had takento help him, I hesitated.
    “Please,” the woman said. “Please just let me talk to you for a few minutes.”
    “Do you live near the Tortonis?” I asked, knowing they lived almost an hour away.
    She nodded. “Two blocks down.”
    “How did you get here?”
    “Bus,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We changed at Grover.”
    A long, cold bus ride, particularly at this hour of day. Thisworn, weary woman must care a great deal about this strange boy or she would never have bothered.
    I unlocked my office door, and they followed me back inside.
    Now she sat silently. The effort of getting them both to my office seemed to have used up all her strength. I walked around the room collecting toys for the boy who sat on the floor by her feet. He was tiny, the size of a four-year-old,although his pale, pointed face seemed older. He turned away when I leaned down to place the cars and trucks and dolls beside him, and hid his face against the couch. I was tempted to stay on the floor myself, but then decided that right now I needed to talk to his mother – if indeed that was who this woman was.
    I pulled a chair beside her and reached for a pad and pencil. “Why don’t youbegin by telling me both your names?”
    “Kroner,” she said. “I’m Blanche Kroner and this is Errol. Well, his name’s really Eric. I just give him the name Errol, like a nickname. You know – like the movie star. Handsome and all.”
    I watched as Eric began to push one of the cars back and forth across the rug, never looking up, his little peaked face serious and intent. Did she really thinkhim handsome?
    Gradually Eric’s story emerged bit by bit. Eric had one older sister, Bella, now fourteen. She had been born on the Kroners’ first anniversary. Mrs. Kroner had vomited every day of her pregnancy with Bella, and after a labor of eighteen hours she’d sworn she’d never have another child. And she hadn’t for eight years, although she said she had “lost two when she was two or threemonths along.”
    The summer after Bella’s seventh birthday, Mrs. Kroner began to feel sick, and when the vomiting started she knew she was pregnant again. She thought about having an abortion, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She counted the days until the baby would be born, not because she wanted it, but to get relief from the pain and exhaustion. Then, to make matters worse,the baby was two weeks late, and when he did finally come he weighed only five pounds – so little and weak he couldn’t even suck right.
    Mrs. Kroner sighed. “I had to get him a bottle with a hole in the nipple so big I could practically pour the milk down him.”
    Unexpectedly, her face lit up, and for a few seconds there was a radiance that eliminated the weariness. “Even so, he was asweet little tyke. The nurses