My wife and I are sitting across from Mrs. Johnston, our son Oliver’s kindergarten teacher. It’s three weeks into the school year and already she’s emailed us to set up a meeting. After a few pleasantries, Mrs. Johnston steers the conversation to our son, and I brace myself.
"I am worried about Oliver," Mrs. Johnston says.
My wife Jennifer slips her hand into mine. I want to talk, to be the assertive one, to advocate for my son. But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out.
"We are aware that sometimes Oliver… Well sometimes Oliver tends to be a bit adrift," my wife says.
“Adrift? This morning we were working on our kaleidoscopes, Oliver vanished. Disappeared until after gym class.”
When I picked up Oliver after school, all the kaleidoscopes were on the project take-home table. I knew even before I saw his name scrawled on the side which one was Oliver’s. Compared to the other kids' polite decorating, his kaleidoscope was covered in a chaos of crayon. When I looked through the kaleidoscope I wasn’t sure what to expect. But when I spun the wheel of colors, I was amazed; Oliver had blended the colors in such a manner that as the wheel turned the colors continuously flowed into each other, like streams flowing into a river.
“Yes,” I say. “He had mentioned that.”
“Did he also mention that earlier in the week he disappeared and when he came back he said he was,” Mrs. Johnston shuffles some papers on her desk, and reads from one, “‘running with a herd of elephants?’”
Oliver has mentioned animals before, but this is the first I’m hearing of elephants. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern; squirrels, giraffes, one time a pack of jackalopes, and now elephants. Always animals, but nothing correlates to anything else. Nothing makes sense. Maybe that’s why we haven’t taken action, why we haven’t mentioned any of this to his primary care physician.
“He didn’t mention that,” I say.
“It must be so scary for him,” Mrs. Johnston says.
Jennifer looks at me. Her face is doing that thing, hardening like a walnut, and I can tell she’s going to cry. It never occurred to me that Oliver could be afraid. He’s such a happy, care-free kid. Does running across a prairie with elephants frighten him? I have no idea.
I sit up in my chair, try to muster some anger towards Mrs. Johnston. But I have too much respect for teachers, for their long hours, for what they have to deal with. And I can tell that Mrs. Johnston is a good person, that she really cares for her students. “I don’t think he’s afraid,” I say weakly.
“Well,” Mrs. Johnston says. “On Monday, when we were singing the “What is the Weather?” song, he vanished. When he came back five minutes later, he had dirt smeared across his forehead. Some of the kids thought it was blood.”
“But it wasn’t though, right?” I say.
“No, it wasn’t blood. Thank god. But obviously something needs to be done.”
“We will look into it,” I tell Mrs. Johnston, as I squeeze my wife’s hand.
And we do, that night, while Oliver is safe in his bedroom, sleeping. My wife and I sit on our bed, passing Oliver’s kaleidoscope back and forth, aiming it at the lamp in the corner of our room, gently rotating the wheel, looking into it, trying to discern in the river of colors, an answer.
