Melissa Beneche

NO SPECIAL NEED

Ms. De Lain’s husband kept her in the bed again when Zoë stopped waking. Held her wrist against the sateen sheets his mother had bought them as a wedding gift, and, when Ms. De Lain told him she felt Zoë needed her, said what she felt was just that, a feeling, a nothing, a fleeting thing. That Zoë, who by then could finally go through the night without shrieking them out of sleep, no longer needed her, and that her mother needed to take the blessed silence for rest.

Ms. De Lain was nearly twenty and hated using “Mrs.” She let his mother feed on that head. She stayed home with Zoë while he diagnosed cars at his father’s auto repair store, which he’d always said was more real than anything her teachers had ever done, who never worked with their hands and made good money and got free time for doing nothing but preaching, but not like real preachers, who fed the soul.

“Just a short tryout,” he’d said as he moved Zoë's crib to the living room. “It won’t hurt her to get some self-reliance.” Theirs was a small, barely furnished apartment, a three-floor walkup with just the one bedroom that shared a wall with the living room. That night Zoë tried to cry that wall down, each hour marked with bursts of screams that shot streams of fire through Ms. De Lain, and when she started to rise in answer, his arm shot out and cuffed her to his body, and she cried along with her baby, but she let him hold her like he hadn’t in months and tried not to feel ashamed of it. At his five-a.m. alarm, she scrambled out of bed and rushed to Zoë, who lay splayed in the crib like a basking sea star, her beagle blanket pooled at her feet, her head turned to the side. Ms. De Lain didn’t kiss her husband goodbye and sat next to the crib for a long moment. Through the thin bars the rhythm of her chest pulsed full then free then full.

When Ms. De Lain got into bed the second night, his hand darted across and pinned her hand to the pillow. She asked him what did he think he was doing and he muttered, Saving you from yourself. Then chuckled and added, Saving you for me. Only their fingers interlaced, and she fell asleep wondering if his strength surpassed hers. The next day she would sleep at Zoë’s feet, Ms. De Lain promised herself as they rolled on the carpet and took turns popping in and out of view. Said it again when the Lamb Chop’s never-ending song lulled her into dropping Zoë’s milk bottle all over her GED guide, then again when she glanced up from cleaning and saw Zoë’s fingers emerge from her mouth clutching something wet, and when later she relaxed into his hand, she remembered only that she promised herself something vague.

Four more nights Zoë resumed her shrieking quest and Ms. De Lain cried in her quiet way for them both and tried to join her. But on the seventh night no sounds traveled through the wall, and in the morning little Zoë was high-stepping in the crib, looking around the living room with a good-natured expression on her face, like she’d stumbled into a strange but pleasant place.

“Victory!” he said, as Ms. De Lain picked her up and kissed her dry cheeks. He rubbed Zoë’s head. Ms. De Lain angled her body out of his reach, and he asked her what in the world was she still mad about on this fine day. She said that she wondered just how long he would have waited for her to stop crying.

“Well, excuse me for being a good husband.” He left, jostling his keys.

It lifted—the tense air that had descended between them when they first rode the bus back from the community clinic with the news of her pregnancy, silence wrapping them in a terrible embrace when what she'd most wanted was to be alone; the silence doubling back to wedge between them when she'd most wanted his assurance.

Now he joked that he was afraid Ms. De Lain was tempted to check on their daughter and put an end to their good fortune. He amen-ed each new night of Zoë’s silence, and Ms. De Lain admitted to the relief of quiet and tried to act as grateful, but this quiet—she never knew if it was truly sleep that stilled Zoë. If she had unwittingly taught their baby to stop needing her altogether. But name what else it could be, she said to herself, in a baby full of just this many months, as she and Zoë worked on her GED questions and waved at dogs pooping on the threadbare lawn and splashed in the bath.

The night before Zoë held four months, Ms. De Lain sensed a change in the silence, akin to a pressure drop in the air that signaled rain, which she had always been able to measure. When she tried to ease herself out, the bedsprings cringed with a harsh sound. His soft hand fluttered onto her wrist with the cool comfort of vapor. So she stayed in the covers, hearing nothing, probing sweetness.

In the early winter morning, street lamps streamed into the apartment and patterned the shadowed walls, and Zoë wasn’t waking. Her head tilted to the side in her preferred posture. Her thumb, as if amid thought, leaned in the open bud of her mouth.

As he showered, Ms. De Lain cupped Zoë’s cheeks. Then she rushed to raise the thermostat higher. She made to lift Zoë out of the cheap crib, which was bothering her daughter in some way, then she stopped herself, afraid any jostling might foster more hurt. She heard a door open in the mist of her fear—a trap. No; she scrambled up sound and yelled for her, but it was her husband that came, all glazed and dripping. She kept raising the thermostat while he called. Then he clutched himself in a still-dark corner of the room while she rubbed Zoë’s undressed hands, her padded feet, her chest. Eventually Ms. De Lain turned and kept her back on him.

The paramedics came, ordered her away from the crib. Their questions centered on When? When? and she found herself babbling as she tried to specify. They rushed away her baby. One stayed back, touched Ms. De Lain’s arm. “It happens,” she said, “but I promise, this won’t happen to you again.” Words that so confounded Ms. De Lain that it seemed to her she had lost language too. 

After the burial, where his mother clutched his hand and walked between them across the cemetery lawn, they twice went to a couples’ grief group. It was held in their old high school cafeteria, his basketball jersey fluttering in the rafters, and attended by eight other couples—entirely too many. All grieved and cried and prayed and said nothing she didn’t already know. Then her husband got started. His face writhed like someone was punching it and he gripped her knee, but when they got home, she made a spot for herself on the living room floor and told him in her prettiest voice not to touch any of Zoë’s things.

“What’s the point of going then? I got no use for all that mess,” she said on the phone to her mentor, Mrs. Hettman.

“If it’s the right thing to do, you should keep doing it,” Mrs. Hettman said. “Always stay the course.”

Mrs. Hettman co-taught Intensive Testing Strategies with Mr. Semento at the high school, and had a habit of telling people to “stay the course,” or “suck it up, buttercup”—depending on the question she heard, Ms. De Lain sometimes thought, and not really on the one asked. Mrs. Hettman, too, led the student ministers at the only Baptist church in the town, where she often told her spiritual daughters she had been a Christian for fifty-seven years. “And you want to know something?” she would say, pointer finger punctuating each word. “I am fifty-seven years old. He’s got my whole life in his hands. You see how good God is?”

“If you need some time, you may stay with us for a while,” Mrs. Hettman said. “Lord knows I can use some help with the grading.” Ms. De Lain hated not working, but she hated most the thought of leaving him the space she had made with Zoë. She listened to Mrs. Hettman’s rant on how Mr. Semento never bothered to read their students’ essays and talked with them about singers with ridiculous names like A Boogie in the Hood instead of doing his job. Ms. De Lain thought, he’s the one working, so let him be the one to leave.

At the second visit, his hand slipped off her leg and rubbed his own. “I really hate saying this. I loved my little girl.” He looked up and spoke to the rafters. “But a part of me feels like it was God’s timing, you know? Like it was her time to go. If he has a purpose for every person, then maybe—then she served hers.” He covered his eyes. “I know that’s bad.” Then: “Is that bad to say? I’m trying to be honest.”

“How do you feel about that, Ms. De Lain?” asked the group leader sitting across from them, a woman with a long, tight braid that skimmed the floor.

The middle of Ms. De Lain’s back was aching. She bent her head and rubbed her back until another person began to speak.

He drove them home crying, and she pulled at her eyelashes next to him. In the stairwell, she called him a sponge and said he was just sucking on everyone else’s honest grief, and he flung it back, saying a sponge like her, who didn’t kill herself at work for their child like he did, couldn’t possibly hurt like he did. They entered their apartment screaming, and the impulse to hurt him filled her. She grabbed his arm and sunk her teeth into the flesh. His arm wrenched, and she felt a block of concrete in her stomach, then more blocks falling on her, and then she was looking up at him, her slash of mouth pulsing around her teeth.

He lurched out the door like he’d been maimed, leaving it open. He left her. She fell back onto the carpet, hurting, but warm and sated. Then the thought twisted in her: He left her. As if she had done wrong. She gazed at Zoë’s stacking cups and the toilet paper tubes she’d been saving to make Minion boxes, all sifting around her—He left—

She fell asleep on the floor. Sometime later she jolted awake and noticed for the first time that Zoë’s crib was gone.

In April, Ms. De Lain found a notice of eviction nudged in the front door. When she read it, she stiffened—it hurt her to read it. She stooped and took up her blanket and one of the books and went into the bedroom, lay down and stretched out her arms, enveloped a world of empty space. Waited to hear a disembodied voice. She grabbed the bedding again and moved back to the living room. A few days after, Mrs. Hettman visited her with two aluminum-wrapped platters. She set them down on the counter and drew out a file folder, holding it between long lacquered fingers.

“I don’t like the thought of you being here on your own,” she said.

“I may not be here for long,” Ms. De Lain said, thinking of the landlord's red block letters.

Mrs. Hettman said, “Well, I’m letting you know that I don’t like it,” in a voice meant to provoke guilt for displeasing her. She used to deploy it with Ms. De Lain’s class, with successful results. Her students had always wanted to please her.

“Mr. Semento is gone too,” she continued, as if picking up an old train of thought. Mrs. Hettman wore her hump-day outfit meant to inspire calm, a flowered blouse with pressed blue calico pants, and her chin-length hair looked redder than ever and held a mirror-like sheen. Mr. Semento had been arrested for the crime of racketeering, she said.

Ms. De Lain wasn’t sure what the crime of racketeering meant, but she found she liked the thrilling sounds of the word, the cackled -a with that sharp -k stabbing from behind, the slinky -teer polishing the end. A shish kebab of a word. Feeling roused, she held it in her mind and savored it.

“The school year will be over soon, and the bishop doesn’t want to lose credibility,” said Mrs. Hettman. She extended the folder. “You’ll be like a long-term sub. You won’t need to get certified or anything, as it’ll only be for these last two months. Think of it as on-the-job training. It’ll be the easiest job in the world.”

Ms. De Lain asked, “Why would they think of me, though?” She thought of her senior year, which she hadn’t finished, and said quickly, “I’m not looking for no handout. I’m not holding out my hands to them.”

“I told them either they hire you or find two new teachers,” Mrs. Hettman said. “Plus, I’ll be right next door, so you won’t be on your own.”

Inside the folder was a form stipulating hours and pay. After glancing briefly at the numbers, Ms. De Lain closed it, then opened it again. Mrs. Hettman began to unwrap one of the containers, seeming ready to stay a long while.

“Work will be good for you,” she added. “You know, faith can’t work without work.”

*

Ms. De Lain told herself that she was no longer a student, she was one of them now, she was a grown woman with a dead baby, but when her old teachers stopped by her door to see if she was getting on all right, she couldn’t find a way to address them, their first names singed her throat. When one would at last come around to expressing how truly sorry they had been to hear of her loss, she would thank them and say she was okay. “It’s not like I can't have another one. I’m still young,” she would say, looking right in their eyes so her meaning was not lost on them, and they always nodded and shuffled back. Then she felt seasoned and capable again.

Never before had she bothered to enter the racketeer’s classroom, which connected with Mrs. Hettman’s. It was too warm and adorned with too many posters of quotes for a senior teacher. It tasted infantile. There was a whiteboard at the front of the room and another one at the back, a wooden stool set before each—as, according to Mrs. Hettman, he couldn’t stand for more than two minutes without needing a seat. But what she couldn’t get over was how impossibly small the room looked. In the free moments between classes, or when the students didn’t call on her to walk them through a question, she would nudge open the connecting door and step into Mrs. Hettman’s room to compare. No, she was not seeing false things—that room looked diminished, too, like it was a breathing person who could shrink with age.

Besides one wall that was covered with essays of high marks, Mrs. Hettman’s walls were bare, since they didn’t pay her enough to splurge on artwork. Ms. De Lain always ate her lunch there. On one of the days, they were joined by her old track coach, who still sported her failproof lace-front ponytail and fingered the ends while they ate. 

“Just how many students did that man end up helping?” asked the coach.

“You mean hurting?” Mrs. Hettman said. “You mean lying? Stealing their future?”

“Yes, that’s what I meant, all that.” The coach waved her hand, and Ms. De Lain caught a musky smell from her. “How many tests?”

“Just two. But they said they didn’t ask him.”

“Well, I’m just happy the boys weren’t kicked out. You know,” said the coach. Ms. Hettman looked up, and her stern face seemed to say, You know I don’t know, and Ms. De Lain was not surprised to learn she could read that look. Beneath the faux ignorance it said: you won’t hear me speak ill of the boss.

The next Thursday, Ms. De Lain’s room was almost empty when she returned from the bathroom, three minutes after the first bell. She pulled open the door the rest of the way so that the poem taped on its face was apparent: “The Rose That Grew from Concrete”—he just had to choose that piece to hang—she rearranged the doorstopper, then stood next to it with her hands buckled against her stomach. She wondered if anyone bothered to read the poem or any of the quotes on his walls. Her eyebrows rose as she took in the students mobbing the hall, rushing up and down like they were being chased, skirting around the steady, sensible ones who walked without showing off in a brisk but calm manner. She glanced back in the classroom and surveyed the disarranged desks, some clustered in one corner and some pushed against the back wall. The broken one had tipped over and was lying on its side next to one of its dislodged legs. The 504 girl—who, although Ms. De Lain found her draggy, had never yet been late—was wedged into one of the clustered desks, sketching something in a notebook. At the moment Ms. De Lain couldn’t think of her name, or she would have asked her—no, told her—to pick up the broken desk. The girl sat hunched over to an extreme degree, as if she cradled laughter or pain; her dark glazed hair curtained her face.

Not for the first time, Ms. De Lain couldn’t keep from thinking that if the girl had been her daughter, no matter special needs, she would’ve had backbone, she would’ve sat up straight and spoken with confidence unlike some of these kids who muttered like fish, she wouldn’t have acted like her life was an apology to the world.

Ms. De Lain glanced at the bird-shaped clock ticking above the whiteboard. Two minutes until the tardy bell. The clock was the first leftover she had noticed when she had taken ownership of the classroom, its bulbous pink-tinged body marked here and there with white and red streaks, and the glittering words “Be a FLAMINGO in a Flock of PIGEONS!” swooped down its long, curved neck. All bright and distracting. No doubt like the racketeer. She had never met him, but thought he had probably found the clock funny and “with the times,” the kind of teacher who tried too hard to be every student's friend. And always a guy teacher too. Ms. De Lain kept promising the bird she would replace it if that was the only thing she changed, but each day that week when the last bell sounded, she could only think to lie on top of the desks and close her eyes in the blessed quiet and breathe slowly in and out until her face stopped trembling.

A tall girl wearing stereo headphones started to stride past her into the classroom. Why did she have to keep telling them the same rules? Ms. De Lain reached out and tapped her jiggling shoulders and said only, “Off,” in a sturdy voice that she felt invited no humor. The girl pulled off her headphones, barely slowing her pace, like she was cushioned within her life’s greatest performance and brooked no interruption.

And as if awaiting her entrance, a rush of students streamed through the door. Ms. De Lain willed any of them to make eye contact and a few glanced in her direction almost by accident; she made a point to hello each angled head and only the players, Robert and JD, responded. Robert with a boisterous “how you doing, Miss,” like he was broadcasting his civility, but Ms. De Lain didn’t mind. She’d found him likeable when she was a student athlete, and she felt he had her back in the classroom. JD gave a flick of his head.

She kicked the doorstopper into the room as Mrs. Hettman next to her started to shut her door. In the silence Mrs. Hettman sighed so that Ms. De Lain would clearly feel her exhaustion. “Only one period to go,” said her old mentor.

Inside, some students had already opened their assigned books. Ms. De Lain methodically took roll, waiting until each called student looked up and acknowledged her in some way before checking off the name. Today she noted that almost half were absent.

She smoothed her new shirt and spoke in a clear, modulated voice with this class, which Mrs. Hettman had said was either the most mellow or the most hyper—“Not that they go crazy,” she said, “It’s just that time of day”—and Ms. De Lain was not going to have a shouting contest with anyone.

She reminded them that they would be taking the state essay portion the following week, to take advantage of the extra reading day, and they need not stay in their assigned seats. This was all written on the whiteboard, but in her two-week occupation Ms. De Lain found that these students who faced a whiteboard every day never read what was on it, so she had to instruct them two and sometimes even three times, two and three too many for high schoolers. These kids were grown.

Claudine, the tall girl, raised her hand. “Can we listen to music while we read?”

“Why would I allow that?” said Ms. De Lain. “You know you’re not supposed to have electronics in class.” She pointed to the laminated rules taped next to Claudine’s head. “Be happy I'm not taking those.”

The girl clutched her thick ear pads and widened her eyes to moons. “It’s not like they’re playing anything. I just like having them on me. And they’re not actually on my ears now, are they?” 

“Just another quick reminder,” she strengthened her voice to sturdy. “Keep your phones and electronics in bags and pockets.” Her eyes swept the room and settled again on the unmannered girl. “If I see them, I take them.”

The girl stared back with her mouth unfastened, then slowly moved the headphones from around her neck and tucked them in her purse.

“Thank you,” Ms. De Lain said to show that she couldn’t be phased by dramatics.

“Then can you play music while we read?” Robert asked.

“No, Robert, because it will disrupt your classmates.” She was hit with a barrage of Naws and Girl, pleases and before she could respond she heard Robert’s voice above the sudden din: “Mr. Semento always played music on his laptop while we worked.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” said Ms. De Lain, “but none of the other classes made the same request.”

“He didn’t play nothing loud. He would put on like soft music?”

“If you can manage with soft music, you can manage without it,” Ms. De Lain said.

“Students are highly adaptable,” Mrs. Hettman had said the first day. “In no time they’ll be used to you.”

*

There was a quick, clinging sensation about waking up and feeling as if she still wore last winter’s eyes, that might have just closed for a moment instead of several months, a rare suffusing warmth that filled her like perfume until she thought of Zoë’s cloying scent, and then she felt she had had too much of it, and would try to wave it away before it closed around her. The universe had no call to bring her that meager grace in her yawning darkness, when she didn’t know anything about Zoë’s new universe, when she didn’t know when she would see her again, what she would look like, what her space looked like, how many others shared with her, or if she slept alone. Was she sleeping well now?

Ms. De Lain sat on one of the stools and thought about not thinking as she watched the students shuffle pages. A gray light was dribbling through the blinds. In reality, in comparison, in spite of times when her tongue felt chopped up and disjointed, this was the easiest job she’d ever hoped to have. She noticed Robert and JD talking quietly in the front, their books closed on their desks, their cell phones on top. She walked up to them and tapped their desks.

“I’m going to have to take those.”

They both watched her with interest, like she was about to pull quarters out of her ears. “We’re not giving you our phones,” Robert said.

“I didn’t write the rules, Robert.”

“I know you didn’t, but I’m still not gonna give you my phone.”

“Robert,” she endeavored to keep her voice low, “you’re not even doing your work.”

He glanced down at the smoking boy on the cover of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and she had a quick, horrible urge to touch his curls. He looked up at her again. “I’m not trying to read that trash,” he said.

She looked at JD scrolling through his phone. She asked them to walk with her into the hallway. She adjusted the stopper so that the door stood just ajar.

“Why’re you trying to act like them?” Robert asked.

She tried to explain the rules in the code of conduct, the contract students signed every year.

“You saying you would read it?”

“I did read it. I had to read it twice, in tenth and eleventh. And first of all, it wasn’t full of thees and thous, so I was happy with it. I thought it was funny. You’ll think so too.” When neither of them said anything, she added, “Look, I don’t want to take your phones or do any of that.”

“I don’t believe you, Miss,” he said. They were both smiling at her.

She tried again. “Look, I don’t want to have to call anyone about this.”

“You act like I don’t know you,”

“And you act like I don’t know you,” she hissed back, thinking of her stance. “You think you’re going to graduate if you can’t read?”

“That book is slave talk.”

JD spoke up. “It’s bullshit.” He stood smiling at her in his thin gym tee, a hand in his pocket, standing as if staking claim to the space beneath his feet. Shaking his head.

“She been rode like the town bike, and now she’s coming in here with that bullshit. Couldn’t even graduate high school.”

From the side of the tracks, he would mock in exaggerated fashion Ms. De Lain’s bobbing head and clumsy, bulldog form. Now he held his fists up as if for a double-bump and, his knees bent, swiveled and swiveled his hips.  

Ms. De Lain shut her eyes. She could sense the fire flowing in her again and clenched her teeth to pat it down.

She opened her eyes and slapped him. She was breathing hard. He laughed and cradled his cheek. “That was kinda uncalled for, Miss De Lain.”

Then all at once she saw a surge of movement, Robert’s fist hitting JD’s shocked face. JD opened his fists and shoved him quick, quick, as if he’d expected the punch, and Robert fell against a row of lockers. She cringed and shut her eyes against the mangled sounds. Then she heard someone yell, “Don’t y’all bring that energy here!” When she opened her eyes, the boys were striding down the hall in opposite directions. Mrs. Hettman was standing in front of her, touching her arms.

“I sent them to the Assistant Principal,” she said. “Those damned boys.”

“Can’t even read for themselves, but love to act like they’re grown,” said Ms. De Lain.

Mrs. Hettman’s face was perfectly masked and unlined. She released her arms and entered Ms. De Lain’s room. She stood outside and watched her drag the broken desk to a corner of the room, walk to the front, address her students, her former schoolmates. She looked around her at the closed classroom doors teeming with learning she couldn’t see and it seemed to her they may as well have been empty. Mrs. Hettman stepped back out. Ms. De Lain watched her finger the cross at her neck, the freckled skin there unclothed. Then she remembered her husband and felt like drawing up another fight.

For a moment they stood and gazed at each other. Ms. De Lain’s hand stung. She hadn’t gotten that much skin, and she felt foolish for missing such an easy mark.

“I should have bit him,” she said.

“What?”

She said, “I should have bit that boy.”

He was gone, they were all gone.

The old teacher kept rubbing her cross. “You know, I always have to compensate for the bad teachers my students had in the past. By the time they get to me, I see this huge gap between what they know and what they’re supposed to know. You’re going through a lot,” Mrs. Hettman added, “but try to remember that you’re above them now.”

Ms. De Lain said nothing. Then she murmured, “Stay the course."

“That was the plan,” Mrs. Hettman said. “I did think this would be your stepping stone. But sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go and let God.”

On the bus she forced her mind to name the duties still left to complete—fill in missing attendance logs for the week, grade their practice assessments, call the parents of her ex-teammates, who just had to show her up. Two months. She had them all spotlighted in her head. She was prepared to work. The bishop could let her stay on.

But when she stumbled off the bus and stood before the apartment building, she thought she might not be capable of the stairs. She set her purse on the bus bench. She gazed up at the windows and saw what was surely hers, it was the only one uncurtained. It showed to all who might have ever glanced up only a featureless room. And she knew that knowledge would root in her bones for the hours until she was back on the school’s clock, and maybe free her for a slit of time, until that bell—and she like a child, flinching every time as if sound was a new beast of stranger, but it was the same, the same—headlined across her skull.

MELISSA BENECHE was raised in Florida and Haiti. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University. “No Special Need” is her first published short story.