Read Online When She Was Bad by Tammy Cohen - Free Book Online

we’d already talked about placing her somewhere overseas where no one would know her story, and where the chances of her coming across the details in later life would be minimal. These were pre-internet days when it was still possible to lose oneself and stay lost. Or to lose someone else.
    So there was a lot riding on us, and we wore our responsibilities particularly heavily on our third meeting with Laurie. This time Jana brought her into the medical school together with her own young son, Barney, a year Laurie’s junior. Her older daughter, Lisa, was in class. For the first quarter of an hour we exchanged chit-chat while watching the children play. I was particularly keen to observe the interaction between the two. After all, Laurie had been brought up essentially as an only child. She wasn’t used to sharing. To that end I brought out a simple but brightly coloured building-block game.
    ‘Here’s something you can both play with together while Jana and I talk,’ I said casually, wanting Laurie to feel she was unobserved.
    As Jana, Ed and I discussed the unusually mild fall weather and the heavy traffic on the main highway into town, I watched Laurie from the corner of my eye. She was concentrating on building a tower, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips. Periodically she reached out to pick up a block from the pile in front of her to add to her tower. Barney was watching her intently.
    ‘I play,’ he said, reaching out a chubby hand to pick up a brick.
    Laurie didn’t reply, so intent was she on making sure her tower didn’t fall over. Barney’s bottom lip wobbled.
    ‘I play,’ he repeated and placed his brick heavily on the top of Laurie’s tower, sending the whole lot crashing to the floor.
    While Jana chatted to Ed about the family’s holiday in Vermont the previous summer, I waited, tense, to see how Laurie would react. She got to her feet and took a step towards the little boy. I could sense Jana watching, even while she carried on talking.
    ‘No, Barney!’ Laurie was cross. That much was sure. And yet it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal level of crossness for a child of not yet five. She bent down and started picking up the bricks which were littered across the floor around Barney’s sandalled feet.
    ‘Sowwy.’ He bent down to help her pick them up.
    The three adults let out the breath we’d all been holding.
    ‘She’s amazingly good really,’ Jana whispered as the two youngsters chattered together about how best to rebuild the tower. ‘She’s really patient with him on the whole. More patient even than his own sister. There was only that one incident . . .’
    Ed Kowalsky, who’d seemed distracted – almost bored – up to this point, swung around in his seat as though someone had wound him up like a clockwork toy.
    ‘Incident?’
    Jana glanced over to the small children on the floor. She was more formally dressed today in a midi-length blue dress that swirled around her legs, revealing a tan leather beaded thong around one ankle, and flat sneaker-type shoes, also in faded blue. The sleeveless dress made her brown arms appear endless and I saw how Ed’s eyes, magnified behind his glasses, were drawn to the long slope of her collarbone, smooth as a razor clam.
    ‘Why don’t we call Kristen in to take the children off for a soda,’ he said. ‘Kristen is one of my research students,’ he explained to Jana. ‘Kids just love her.’
    He looked at me, and I realized that when he’d said, ‘Why don’t we’, what he’d meant was why didn’t I. As I went out into the corridor I reminded myself that he was the one who’d given me this opportunity, and it was fair enough for him to ask me to do the things he didn’t want to do himself. But still it rankled. As did the way he was looking at Jana. Let’s get this straight, there was nothing attractive to me about Ed Kowalsky. He was a married older man who just happened to be my departmental