The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts by Laura Tillman Read Free Book Online

passed out from drinking. They had to dress John and make sure he tied his shoes before school, something they said he sometimes had trouble doing even in high school. Manuel, the oldest, would cook for the boys when he was home, but once he moved out, they often had to fend for themselves, eating whatever was around. John’s younger brother Rodrigo remembered getting a book as a gift for Christmas one year, and a Tonka toy. Those are the only Christmas presents he ever recalled receiving from Hilda. John’s uncle Juan painted an even bleaker picture, based on the time he lived with them: John went to school wearing dirty clothes, birthdays were not celebrated, and as for Christmas, “We had no Christmas tree, we had no presents, we had nothing.”
    Brownsville has ranked several times as the poorest city in the United States. As of the most recent census, more than a third of its residents lived below the poverty level, with a population that was 93 percent Hispanic, the vast majority of Mexican descent. The region’s institutions of higher education have historically been underfunded by legislators in Austin. There is no law school here, or for 250 miles within the United States, and only after decades of battles has a medical school at last been planned. As an outgrowth of this, the region has lacked doctors who specialize in mental health. To become a professional in medicine or law, the best and brightest have continuously been drawn far away. If they stay in Brownsville, they often find that they cannot realize their aspirations because the tools to do so are simply nonexistent.
    In a city of such overwhelming poverty, John and his brothers’ lives may not have been so unique. Many families struggled to feed their children, and getting government lunches at school was not the exception but the norm. Parents worked late hours or lived in Mexico and sent their children to live with a relative, so a lack of homework help wasn’t unusual. In one way, such children might have seen themselves as fortunate: they weren’t among their classmates who had just crossed la frontera from Mexico and spoke no English.
    I met one of John’s teachers from elementary school, Pablo Coronado Jr. When he’d heard about the case on the news, more than a decade after John left his classroom, he didn’t immediately recognize his former student. Then it clicked: he had been a silly little boy in his class during one of his first years as a teacher. John, he remembered, always tried to make his classmates laugh.
    Coronado remembered John as a child who was in need of care, whose clothes were often dirty. Sadly, Coronado said, his situation was not unheard of, even in the second grade.
    â€œThey come with a lot of baggage already,” he said. Coronado remembered that he tried to begin the process of getting John extra help. He requested a psychological evaluation. In third grade, John was diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and Hilda said John told her he was seeing shadows. She reported this to the Social Security office.
    When John heard or saw something strange, he told me that he would ask the person next to him if he or she did, too. Sometimes people said they had. He took such occasions as evidence that unusual forces were in the world that other people were also at a loss to explain. Hilda corroborated this in her testimony, saying that John told her he was the chosen one, but that she didn’t see this as a cause for concern.
    Dr. Brams believed Hilda didn’t handle John’s delusions appropriately: “One of the issues here is that children will become what their parents help them become. And I know that may sound trite, but that’s very true.” Hilda and John had a love-hate relationship, according to Dr. Brams’s analysis. “She rejected him but she also manipulated him. And one way that she did that was byconvincing him that witchcraft was real and demons were