Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cadence was not at all confident that she was doing the right thing.
As she drove to Isabelle’s school in the middle of the day, she almost turned around twice and cancelled the meeting she had arranged with Izzy’s teacher.
After all, if her daughter’s struggles were social, she knew that having her mother show up and make it obvious to the entire class that something was afoot wouldn’t help at all.
And it wasn’t that she didn’t respect her friends’ opinions on the matter. In most cases, she agreed that sometimes you just had to give kids time and space to figure things out.
But her ‘mom senses’ were tingling. Some instinct was telling her that she needed to act, rather than wait to see how everything played out.
Still. She was feeling rather anxious about it. Her fingers tapped restlessly on the steering wheel as she parked in the visitors’ lot.
The school secretary was a middle-aged woman who seemed to remember the names of every child and parent who had ever come through the front doors of the school.
“Mrs. Meadows,” she greeted warmly, her glasses perched on the end of her nose, the beaded chain that stopped them from getting lost looped loosely around her neck.
She had a quintessential school secretary sort of look in a way that felt extremely soothing to Cadence.
It reminded her of a simpler time, when she was a kid and could trust the adults around her to solve her problems on her behalf.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Cadence greeted the older woman. “I’m here to observe Izzy’s class. I spoke with her teacher about making an appointment…”
Mrs. Fitzgerald was clicking through her computer with confident, competent movements.
“Ah, yup,” she said after a few seconds. “I see that here. Yeah, Mr. Hartley is expecting you. Do you know where to find the classroom?”
“I do,” Cadence confirmed with a smile. “Thank you.”
“Of course!” the woman answered cheerfully. “Have a great day.”
Cadence crossed her fingers. She really hoped that today would be great, that she would finally get some answers about what was going on with her daughter.
She was only part of the way down the hallway that contained the second and third grade classrooms when someone called her name.
“Cadence, hi!”
She turned around to see the school nurse, Mary, approaching her.
Cadence and Mary had become friendly when they were both volunteering at one of the beach cleanups that Tyler regularly conducted on the weekends.
This one had been designed to get more kids involved in eco-conservation, and so the school nurse had come out to be part of the chaperone group.
The children had ultimately proven entirely rapt by Tyler’s explanation, and so the rest of the adults had been free to hang about in the shade of a quickly erected tent. The two women had hit it off.
“Hey, Mary, how are you?” Cadence asked. She could tell that the smile that was flitting across her face was weak at best, although not because she was sorry to see her friend.
But Mary, a trained nurse who had a decade’s experience telling both when children were sick and trying to hide it and healthy and trying to fake it, caught the worry in Cadence’s eyes immediately.
“Oh, no,” she said, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
Cadence felt her shoulders slump.
“It’s Izzy,” she admitted. “She’s been having trouble at school lately. Not anything disciplinary. It’s just that she keeps bringing home tests that are a lot lower than her average scores in those subjects.”
“Tests, plural,” Mary echoed musingly. “So more than just an off day.”
“Yeah,” Cadence said, nodding. “And Tyler and I asked her about it. We were careful to make sure she knew that we weren’t upset with her, and really, we aren’t! We’re just concerned.”
“And she denied that anything was going on?” Mary clarified.
“Completely denied it,” Cadence confirmed.
“She wasn’t super convincing about it, but we didn’t want to accuse her of lying.
We were worried that would make her feel like we were hounding her, and that would make her even more secretive.
So, her teacher said that I could come observe, see if I can figure anything out by watching her in her classroom. ”
Mary nodded approvingly. “That’s a really good idea,” she said. “Actually, do you mind if I come with you? Maybe my nursing expertise will come in handy. I don’t know. But I do see a lot of kids come through my office, so I’m pretty well acquainted with the usual issues.”
“Oh, would you?” Cadence asked, feeling relieved. “That would be a huge help. It at least would help me feel as though I’m not making a mountain out of a molehill, if it turns out that she really is just having a little slump or something.”
“Of course,” Mary said, putting a comforting hand briefly on Cadence’s shoulder. “I’d be happy to.”
The two of them continued the rest of the short distance to Izzy’s classroom, and Cadence smiled faintly at the sound of a burst of laughter coming from one room, then the sight of a series of eagerly waving hands coming through the door of another.
When they reached Izzy’s classroom, the door was closed, but Cadence stood at the window of the door at an angle that let her see most of the room.
She could see Izzy in the back, tapping her pencil against her notebook, as her teacher guided the class through the diagram that he had drawn on the board about the life cycle of amphibians.
Mr. Hartley was a young teacher, perhaps in his mid-twenties, and he delivered the science lesson with an animation that was palpable even through the closed doors.
He drew the students into the discussion regularly, although as Cadence watched, Izzy didn’t raise her hand once.
She was, however, attentive. She was watching the lecture, apparently interested, except for occasional glances down at her notebook.
Cadence felt her frustration and worry bubble up inside her.
“I’m so confused,” she confessed quietly to Mary, who was still standing at her side, peering through the window with her.
“She’s clearly listening. It’s not like she’s gazing out the window and daydreaming.
But a month ago, she was doing great in science.
She was really doing well in all her subjects.
We would have the occasional hiccup in math, but if Tyler or I sat down with her and talked it over again once or twice, she’d figure it out.
It was the details she was missing, not the whole picture.
” She fought the urge to hang her head in her hands. “I’m just so lost on what to do.”
Mary’s expression was sympathetic, but her eyes were still fixed on Izzy.
“You know…” she began carefully, speaking as though she was thinking and talking at the same time. “I might have an idea.”
Hope flared in Cadence. She was almost afraid to feel it, lest it be quashed.
“Oh yeah?” she asked.
Mary nodded carefully. She still hadn’t looked away from the window, and as Cadence watched her friend, Mary’s expression flared with triumph, then she pointed.
“See that?” she said.
Cadence looked. Izzy was looking at the board for a long moment. After a few seconds, she glanced down at her notebook.
“She’s taking notes?” Cadence said.
“Except she’s not actually writing anything,” Mary clarified.
As the nurse spoke, Cadence saw that this was true.
“I’ve seen this before. I think she’s having trouble seeing the board.
So, she looks, realizes that she can’t make out what it says, and then looks down at the notebook to rest her eyes from the strain.
But she doesn’t write anything down because she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be writing down. ”
The words sounded more and more confident the longer Mary spoke and, indeed, as Cadence watched her daughter, she saw the exact pattern recur. Izzy looked up for a while, then looked down, and didn’t write anything. This time, though, Cadence was looking for it.
Izzy, squinting.
It was there for just a moment and then gone, almost as though her daughter was trying to hide it. But it was unmistakable. She squinted at the board before she gave up and looked back at her desk.
“How did you see that?” Cadence asked wonderingly. She knew her daughter well, but even she hadn’t spotted it.
Mary smiled. “Experience,” she said. “Kids are weird about needing glasses. Some years, they become all the rage, and I get a dozen kids claiming they can’t see the board when they actually have no trouble at all.
Other years, I get hiders. The ones who want to pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. And some years, there’s a mix.”
“Why are they such little mysteries?” Cadence asked.
The words were a complaint, but there was a bubble of laughter in her tone.
This wasn’t a guaranteed solution, but it felt right.
Maybe Izzy just needed glasses. Cadence and Tyler both wore contacts, so that was very possible, although they had both been a bit older when they’d gotten their first corrective lenses.
There had definitely been signs, though.
She’d recently come across Izzy lying on her stomach in front of the television as she’d taken her weekend morning screen time.
Cadence had originally assumed that this was just a way for Izzy to be comfortable, but maybe it had been because she couldn’t actually see the screen from the couch where she usually sat.
And recently Cadence had offered to go to the movies with Izzy on a rainy day, but Izzy had said no; she wanted to play at home, instead.
Could that have been another missed sign?
But there was no point in asking herself what she might have missed. What she had to do was move forward.
Mary shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you, but at least it keeps our lives interesting, right?” she said.
“It sure does,” Cadence agreed. “Although, if I could pick your brain for one more moment…”
“Of course!”
“Do you have any suggestions for getting her excited about glasses if it does turn out she needs them? Obviously we’ll start with getting her in for an appointment at the eye doctor, but if she’s this resistant to even telling us she has the issue, I’m worried that she won’t want to wear the glasses if she gets them.
I can’t exactly follow her around and make her wear them everywhere. ”
“Honestly, I suspect that won’t be an issue for very long,” Mary said.
“I know that’s not a super helpful action for right now, but if you let her pick out her own frames, maybe make a big deal about letting her pick them out.
Usually it’s just the change that worries them.
Once she gets over the adjustment, she’ll probably realize that it’s much, much better to be able to see than not.
And if she really, really hates them, you can start thinking about contacts.
She’s still a little young, not necessarily from a medical standpoint, but because the littler ones don’t always bring the right level of hygiene when it comes to sticking their fingers in their eyeballs, but…
” Mary shrugged. “You have that option in your back pocket. But again, I doubt you’ll need it. ”
Despite Mary’s assessment that this advice wasn’t necessarily actionable, Cadence felt a whole lot better hearing it.
“Okay,” she said, feeling some of the worry of the last few weeks pour off her in waves. “Okay. I’ll make an appointment with the optometrist, and go from there.”
“That will give you a solid answer, but I feel… oh, about eighty percent certain,” Mary said.
“Maybe even ninety. So, try not to worry until after you see the doctor, okay? And in the meantime, I bet Mr. Hartley would be open to switching up his class seating. He’s very nice, so I bet he would even move the whole setting around so that nobody suspects that the move is about Izzy specifically. I’ll mention it to him.”
From the faint way that Mary brightened when talking about the young teacher, Cadence wondered if the nurse didn’t have a little bit of a crush on the man. But that wasn’t her business unless Mary made it so, so she decided not to comment.
“You’re the best,” Cadence said. “Thank you so much.”
“Oh, all in a day’s work,” Mary said, dismissively.
“We only test the kids’ eyes once per year, and it’s really not frequently enough.
Sometimes, the issues come on relatively quickly.
Or they don’t, and the kids don’t say something, or don’t even notice, until they really do need the glasses.
But your doctor will clear all that up.”
Cadence stayed at the window to her daughter’s classroom for a few more minutes after Mary said goodbye and headed back to her office to continue with her workday.
Izzy repeated the same pattern that Mary had described a few times, where she would look up at the board like it was some kind of mystical puzzle, then return to just tapping her pencil on her notebook, rather than actually writing anything down.
No wonder Izzy had been having a hard time with her studies, Cadence thought with sympathy. She’d been trying to memorize everything without any help from written notes.
Cadence left after that, waving a much more cheerful farewell to the secretary at the front of the school than her welcome had been.
She felt lighter than she had since Izzy had started bringing home tests with uncommonly low scores.
She would wait to hear from the doctor before she considered the matter settled, but this information felt right.
She made the appointment at the eye doctor before she even left the school parking lot. They were able to offer Izzy an appointment for the following week, which gave Cadence just enough time to prepare her daughter for the visit but not enough time for them all to stress over it unduly.
As she drove herself home, she wanted to laugh out loud with the relief of how good it felt to finally, finally make some movement forward on Izzy’s difficulties. With just a little bit of luck, this would be the solution, and they could put all of this behind them.
Besides, she thought with a smile, Isabelle would look simply adorable in glasses.