Day 23

When we eventually left the school Tim made it his job to keep his eyes on Jessica, at least until her foster parents could be found. He made sure she stayed close and cared for her as best he could. When things began moving again and life started on its path to normalcy the two of them went to the government and requested that Jessica be placed in his care. After various levels of red tape and miscommunications they were eventually given the green light, with the condition that if Jessica’s parents were found, the government felt that there was foul play involved, or if Jessica herself wanted to be somewhere else then she would be taken from Tim and given to another foster home or placed in an orphanage. Beyond that Tim has gone to great lengths to find whatever paper trail he could that would tie the two of them together, if he was able to do that then there would be proof of their blood line and, therefore, the likelihood of the government separating the two of them would be decreased. So far he’d been able to find a few leads, but short of DNA testing it looked like he was going to remain a foster parent for the rest of his life. Which, admittedly, seemed to be fine with him, but I think he’d like to know for sure before he dies.

Before he began parenting full officially he worked extra hard to get the school running once again and, mainly because of his efforts, this school was one of the first to open after the storm. I guess open is a relative term in many cases, some schools opened only when the libraries were stocked with books that weren’t have ruined or with a full staff if someone passed away during the storm or left shortly after. This school didn’t wait for those things, at the instance of the districts parents the doors opened within a week after the storm ended. And, with continued support from the community, Tim managed to get the entire school open and working like it had been in less than a month. A stocked library, working computers, plumbing, everything was ready for the children and the teachers to return to their regularly scheduled classroom day.

And, while he still works for the janitorial staff here at school, it’s clear that he doesn’t do so with the same enthusiasm that he once had. While before he worked after school and nights, with the occasional afternoon shift of day sprinkled in he has mostly requested days so he can be back at the house when Jessica returned home. Don’t get me wrong, he works very hard when he is here, but he doesn’t spent the extra hours making sure everything in the entire building is working correctly.

Jessica, though still a little young to fully understand how close she’d come to freezing in the school, likes to tell her friends that she skated on the gym floor of her grade school. She tells the story a lot it seems. Though a great deal of it is the fun stuff, like skating on the gym floor, as she grows older I hear more and more about the serious things that happened as well. Her most recent addition seems to be when I showed up, it no longer is about ‘the strange guy who appeared in a policeman’s arms’ but has changed to ‘and there was this guy who showed up have frozen by the blizzard being supported by a cop. He almost died.’ It’s not exactly the most flattering rendition of the tale, but I guess she says it like it was and that’s about all I can ask.

The situation with her parents seems to bother her sometimes and Tim comes in to talk to me when I’m in the classroom eating lunch sometimes. “That girl, she’s been askin’ questions ‘bout her family agin’, her real family mind you. I tink she’s basically decided her foster folks perished in tha’ blizzard. Either way, I never know what to tell her.”

“Tell her what the truth is. I’m sure she’ll appreciate that more than avoiding the topic or, even worse, lying to her.”

Tim would nod at that, tell me he’d think about it, and come back a few weeks later with the same complaint. We’ve been doing it for some time now without moving forward. Though I knew he really wants to help he doesn’t seem to trust his instincts or the advice people give him. I can’t but think he’s scared that his answer will change Jessica in some way that confirming her beliefs about her foster parents might make her resentful towards him. It might happen, I’ve seen it before. Heck, I’ve done it and seen it done to me, but I don’t think Jessica would react the same way. When she comes and visits her father and sits down in my classroom to talk it seems like she’s struggling to understand it and just wants someone else’s opinion. She’s asked me, but I guess I’ve taken Mrs. Snowburn and Claire’s admonishings to heart and have asked her to talk with people more suited than I am. It wasn’t until her college years, after she’d moved out of house to live on a campus, that she really pushed me for information though. I guess it was a transition in her life and she wanted some closure to move on permanently. “You’re just like my father.” She laughed when I said it the first time.

“Unlike your father I’ve been told not to teach you things in my past.” She looked at me, waiting for an explanation. “Do you remember when I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe with you during the storm?” She nodded. “Do you remember that you asked me a question?”

“I think I asked you why people lied. Is that right?” I nodded. “And you gave me an answer, though I’m not one hundred percent sure what you said or what you meant.”

I chuckled and leaned forward onto my desk. “That’s actually for the best probably. You’d caught my off guard with the question and I have to admit, while it might have sounded good to me at the time it’s defiantly not what I would say today. Especially not to kids as old as you were.” I paused to think about the next words. “In the middle of my explanation Mrs. Snowburn walked in and told me, under no uncertain terms, that I should teach you anything. Or, really, tell you anything that I shouldn’t be talking about. Claire later informed me of the very same thing and I’ve kept my mouth shut ever since. Sure, you’re old enough that I could probably get away with telling you things and I’ve certainly gained the knowledge of what to say when, something that I didn’t have then, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell you anything like I would be able to if I hadn’t been told off by those two women.” Though she was in her college years by that time and still had a heck of a lot of growing up to do I think she understood that there will simply be things that I, and other people, simply can’t say for whatever reason. As she stood up to leave I walked her to the door. “Hey, do you remember when you had that fit and wanted your parents and everyone simply couldn’t do anything to settle you?”

She thought about it for a bit and, when she remembered, a huge grin spread across her face. “Yeah! You go me quiet when you said you had a secret, then Dan pushed me over and I cried myself to sleep or something. I don’t think you ever told me what that secret was.”

“Well, there’s a reason for that. I never really had a secret to tell you, I simply wanted you to be quiet so you wouldn’t cause a headache.” She let loose on loud laugh that caught a passing teacher’s attention. “Well, I didn’t have one then, but I do now.” I sat her down on a chair in the room and sat across from her. She grew silent as she waited for me to tell her my secret. As I sat her down and looked into her expectant eyes I thought about all the tings I knew that she didn’t. I thought about Sean and his affairs and the few interactions I’d had with Jessica. Most of all I thought about Tim and his relationship to her. Even though I just told her that I wasn’t going to say anything about her real family I still debated in my head about whether or not I wanted to tell her that Tim is her biological grandfather. I knew that it should be Tim’s decision if he ever decides to tell her. “Do you know why Tim took you under his care after the storm?” She shook her head. “We can both assume that you foster parents died in the storm, which meant that you were once again without a family. He’d seen the present you had from the party you’d been at a few weeks before, the head band with-“

“-with all the fake hair stuff that made my hair look dirty blond or light brown or something. Yeah, I remember that.”

“Yeah, well, he’d seen all the things you had before the storm and knew that, if your foster parents were really dead, that you’d be sent who knows where. He didn’t’ want that because he knew it would be hard on you. So he adopted you himself and took care of you.

“He told me once that the reason he worked so hard for the school was because he wanted to the children to grow up in the best facilities they could. I guess he didn’t want you to leave these facilities and all of your friends and everything simply because of a situation that was outside of your control. So he took you in and took care of you, I guess that’s why he worked at the school less and less. I’m not really sure he understood what it meant to raise a child right without the help of someone else.” It wasn’t precisely a lie and I’ve never felt bad about saying it. And, while I never came outright to say that there is more to Tim than he lets on, I came close as I could by implying that he’d raised a child before. I don’t if she caught onto the hint or not.

Before she left I told her to keep searching for her biological family and that she may just find something. She seemed grateful, but overall I felt that she was a bit dissatisfied with my secret. I’ve seen her since that point, and she’s asked me if there was anything else I could tell her or if I could look something up for her on my free time. I’ve done everything I could to help her but, at the same time, not implicate Tim without his consent. Then one day she stopped, she still came by on occasion and I’d still see her skating with Coach Z, though it’s become more Jessica skating and Coach Z watching these days. She never asks me about her family however. I asked Tim about it, but he didn’t confirm or deny anything. He simply said that she had learned what she needed to and that was all he could ask. I don’t know what that means, other than that Jessica has found closure and that closure hasn’t destroyed Tim’s new life. I guess I can live with that.