Previous Chapter

Chapter 8 - Getting Settled

Back in Cassandra’s room, he discovered that another patient had been moved in and was asleep. The curtain had been drawn around that bed, so they spoke quietly.

“My doc was here and told me that I should be ready to leave on Monday. My burns are mostly closed up and the seeping’s stopped. Their worries about infection are mostly over. He said that was because of the very good initial care you did. They’re using these... um... impregnated gauzes so they don’t have to be changed so often, which is good...”

A nurse had bustled in and took her blood pressure and checked her temperature.

“Okay, sweetie,” she told Cassandra, “Your IV can come out now. We stopped your antibiotics twelve hours ago and it looks like you’re clear of any systemic infection. We just need to watch for any local infection now. We’ll keep observing you for two days, and if there’s no change, we can release you to outpatient care. Tomorrow we’ll get someone from Physical Therapy to work with you to show you how to get around with crutches. You need to keep any weight off that left leg for probably six weeks. The doctor put in your chart that if there’s no change, he’ll release you on Monday. Mr Bernard, will you be able to check and possibly change her dressings between outpatient visits, if necessary?”

“I can.”

“Someone will show you what to do on Monday, then. I’m so happy you’ve done so well here, Mrs Bernard. I’ll be checking back later, just before the end of my shift.”

Five minutes later, another nurse came in and disconnected the IV apparatus and pulled the catheter.

Jonas looked at his watch. “Say, since you’re getting out, I should get a head start on looking for an apartment while you’re an outpatient and Fab... Tamara is recovering. Would two bedrooms be enough? In the U.S., most standard apartments will have a kitchen, sometimes a separate dining area, living room, bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, and sometimes even a laundry area.”

“That sounds like a palace, darling,” Cassandra told him. “Whatever you think is good and yes, two bedrooms. That would be better than the little house we had in Haiti.”

Jonas left and the first thing he did was to go to the closest bank. He needed to open an account immediately. He got one set up and had some funds transferred electronically from his bank in the Dominican Republic. He decided to leave the Cayman Islands account untouched. Then he got a temporary debit card. He had an adequate nest egg, he thought, but getting a job soon was essential.

Then he stopped by a real estate office to check on temporary apartment rentals in the medical center area. He found several very close by which were in his price range, so he made an appointment to view them on Saturday. He and Cassandra could continue to stay at the VA family house while Tamara was still an inpatient.

~~~~

Monday morning was hectic. Cassandra had been cleared to check out. Jonas decided that having her at the FBI meeting was important, so he arranged with his FBI contact to have the meeting at the VA hospital instead of at the field office and they were given the use of a conference room.

When the meeting time drew close, the attendees began arriving. They were Andrew Johnson and Sarah Wilkins from the FBI, Evan Masters from the State Department, and Wilbur Zane from the CIA.

The FBI agents took the lead in running the meeting.

Wilkins began. “The reason our agency is involved with this case is that we have a number of unsolved crimes in Miami and New Orleans, and two in New York City, which all seem to have a common association with someone or someones from Haiti. Going back some 36 years, Mr Bernard’s father was shot here in Miami and we know that this was a political assassination, ordered by the Jean-Claude Duvalier administration in Haiti. There were other murders of expat Haitians which occurred roughly during that same period in cities with a large Haitian population. These murders always involved people who had requested political asylum.

“Now, most recently during the last year, there have been a few murders which again seem to be targeting Haitians living here, but these crimes seem to also be targeting religious figures, practitioners of the Haitian Vodou religion, plus of politically connected people. We’re hoping, from what we have heard about Mr and Mrs Bernard’s situation, that they may be able to give us some leads to the possible perpetrators.”

Then Masters spoke. “This ties into information we’ve collected from Haiti’s current political situation, so let me play the recording which Mr Bernard provided to our attaché in the U.S. embassy there. They were speaking French, so I have a transcript if you need it.”

He passed out the transcript and played the recording.

The CIA agent, Zane, spoke after the recording finished.

“This shows that there’s an effort being mounted to organize some kind of magical assault to either take over or supplant the current government. But how can magic actually work to do that? I’m sure that the idea of voodoo dolls and zombies and such can’t induce educated people to become influenced by threats of magic.”

“That’s where you’re really wrong, Mr Zane,” Cassandra told him. “First, most Haitians, despite their education, have a deep-seated respect for their ancestors and Vodou is their ancestral religion, although Catholicism has, in large, replaced it. But for most Haitians, their Catholicism is heavily overlaid with the folk practices which make up many Vodou beliefs. And despite their education, superstition still affects many people’s beliefs and behavior.

“Second, as the recording showed, Vanessa and her followers or supporters are trying to recruit people who have a certain skill, one which has been bred into a number of my countrymen and women over the many generations since our ancestors were brought to the New World as slaves. Our Vodou rites are based upon getting our adherents to attain a certain state of mind where they can become one with a spiritual figure with whom they identify. You probably know that many Catholics say that they have an affinity for, or hold a special attraction to, a certain saint. A ‘patron’ saint, as they believe.

“During our ceremonies, worshipers can become very susceptible to suggestion or psychological manipulation by a skilled priest or priestess. Some of these practitioners may be so skilled that they can influence other people’s thoughts or behavior, or even both. Some religious practitioners may even use their skill to influence the believer that they are ill, in pain, in danger, or will have bad fortune. This is a dangerous power to hold over someone, if used improperly.

“I have seen examples in my own practice of how powerful psychological suggestion can be, especially when the worshiper is a devout believer. I know that I myself can commune with residents of the spirit world. They give me guidance and support. How does my ability differ from that of the Catholic priest who says ‘Jesus answered my prayer and gave me guidance’? We all worship the One God, and God manifests God’s self in many different ways, according to the beliefs and cultures that the believer was raised in.

“My mother was an extremely powerful priestess and could influence a person to do whatever she wanted them to do. I personally saw her power. She was approached by Vanessa, perhaps twelve years ago now, and was probably asked, or perhaps forced, to join her. I’m sure she rejected Vanessa, so she was killed. I no longer feel her presence in this world, but have seen convincing spiritual evidence that she now resides in the spirit world.

“So you must not denigrate the skills and power of people who wield such abilities because it first, damages your reputation among those who know that these abilities are real, and second, discounting an opponent’s abilities and power is a sign of your own weakness.”

The group was listening to her raptly and sighed when she apparently finished talking.

Jonas looked around at their shocked faces and remarked, “Right. What she said.”

They all chuckled, but nervously.

Jonas went on, “You see why I wanted you to meet Cassandra. You might think she’s just an uneducated Vodou practitioner, but she’s actually a highly educated, brilliant analytical thinker and an astute student of human relationships.”

“That was ... was ... an incredible presentation, Ma’am, if I may say so,” Zane remarked. “I had no idea...”

“... that Vodou wasn’t some kind of new age magick—with a ‘k’—for tourists and movie plots?” Cassandra smiled.

“Err... exactly, Ma’am. So how come people associate voodoo with dolls stuck with pins and that nonsense?”

Cassandra nodded. “Nonsense, exactly. In the New World, Vodou has basically two main traditions. Mine is obviously Haitian. West African people were brought to the Caribbean as slaves to work in the sugar plantations, mainly by the French. The French also brought their slaves to Louisiana, New Orleans, to tend sugar and cotton crops, and when the Haitian slaves revolted during the period of 1791 to 1803, many Haitian planters fled to New Orleans with their slaves. But what most people don’t know is that the idea of using pins to stab dolls comes mainly from medieval Europe, not Africa.

“I studied the history of France and learned that, in the French court of the thirteenth century, the practice of putting pins into wood or wax dolls was well known and was being written about. The best known work describing the practice was by a French courtier who was a protegé of Catherine de Medeci. It was an example of European folk magic—a sympathetic magical attempt to harm or kill the king or the barons and had been practiced throughout Europe for many years. Other examples of this practice actually exist in cultures throughout the world.

“In fact, many of the magic and sorcery practices attributed to Vodou and Africa actually were exported from France with the colonists who came to the Caribbean and then to New Orleans in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The colonists were mostly from the Berry, Picardy, Limousin, and Normandy provinces—they’re in central and coastal France. Some of those European magic practices were adopted into Haitian Vodou, but there appeared to be little interest in the doll-and-pins practice. That idea never took hold in the New Orleans Vodou branch; many of their other ritual practices differ from the Haitian ones.

“When pro-slavery activists began slandering the black citizens of New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, fearing that they would foment a slave revolution in the South in a manner similar to what had happened in Haiti in 1791, those pro-slavery people began slandering and sensationalizing Vodou, claiming that its practitioners held orgies, engaged in cannibalism, and stuck pins in dolls. Those were only a few of the false claims that were made about the religion. Then, beginning in the late nineteenth century and even to the current day, Vodou is being commercialized by people selling these trinkets and producing horror movies. But the pin-in-doll practice doesn’t even exist in New Orleans; in Haiti we sometimes saw it. But basically, the practice is a historical artifact from medieval Europe.

“Oh dear, I got carried away. I’m so sorry for the lecture...”

“No, no. That was extremely interesting and very informative,” Zane responded. “Could I be so bold as to ask if the CIA could call on you when we have an issue in understanding your culture and belief system? If that’s not against your religion, that is.”

“Ditto for the State Department,” Masters interjected.

“Hmm. I’m afraid that the FBI probably couldn’t use guidance like that, Ma’am; Our methods are somewhat more direct,” Johnson said with a grin and the others chuckled.

“I’d be delighted to help in any way which shows my beliefs in a positive way,” Cassandra agreed.

Wilkins looked around at the group. “Mr Zane, is the CIA satisfied with the information that Mrs Bernard provided?”

“Absolutely. I took notes and I’m going to have the section do some intensive research on Haiti, its history and culture, and Vodou itself. I’m sure we’ll come up with questions that we’ll ask Mrs Bernard about?”

“Certainly,” Cassandra replied.

“Then there’s no further need for me here since the rest of the meeting is internal U.S. and we’re not supposed to poke our noses into internal stuff,” he grinned, picked up his papers, and left, shaking hands as he came around the table.

“What kind of details can you give us about your experiences with this ‘Vanessa’ or her associates that the recording didn’t provide?” Johnson asked.

Cassandra nodded. “She came to my ounfò—temple—one day when I was alone. She must have been watching until our compound was unoccupied, since I have at least one person visiting, all during most days. I’m a faith healer and provide herbal folk medicines to my congregation; I do religious and spiritual counseling too.

“I didn’t know at first who she was but she had an enormously powerful persona and her speech seemed to me to be deliberately hypnotic. An unsuspecting person would have come under her influence quite quickly, I thought. She asked me trivial questions about the area and my congregation but I became alarmed when she began asking about my family.

“Then she began talking about the ‘old days,’ when a person of ‘real power’ was Haiti’s ruler and the priests and priestesses had real political power because the people of Haiti worshiped them like the ancestor spirits and the lwa—they’re spirits who correspond to the Christian saints. If there’s anything in the Vodou tradition that’s sacrilegious, it’s the idea that the priests and priestesses should be worshiped.

“She told me that she could tell that I had real power and should join with her so that I could learn—you’d call it black magic—and learn to commune with the baka, the malevolent spirits. I told her that I could never do evil, that my guardian lwa, Papa Legba, would not allow it either. She told me that wasn’t any difficulty and that she could exorcize any lwa easily.

“When I further refused, she threatened my life and family. She said that she’d give me three weeks to decide; if I didn’t join her, she would make me wish I hadn’t rejected her offer.”

Jonas looked at the notes he had prepared.

“When Cassandra told me about the threat, I checked Vanessa out. She has a very secure compound in a city just south of Port-au-Prince in an area where the wealthiest Haitians live. I thought possibly with my Marine training I could... well... since I left the Marines, I’ve become somewhat of a pacifist and deliberately harming someone would be repugnant. But if there was a direct physical threat... whatever.

“That recording. We were very lucky getting it. The son of the guy I worked for was doing a repair for this rich person on an estate just south of Port-au-Prince, not far from Vanessa’s compound. He was on the floor of a van inside a garage, doing some electrical repairs under the dash, when someone pulled into the garage. Vanessa was in that car. They began to talk and when the mechanic heard Cassandra’s name, he started the recording. He had his phone out and was using its flashlight. You heard what they all said. He said he got almost everything they said, up to when their car pulled out.

“My boss’s son packed up his stuff and hightailed it back to his home and my boss called me. We got the recording onto my phone. You heard the three voices on the recording and the fourth, which was too low to make out, but he didn’t say much. The son thinks that the people were, besides Vanessa, the estate owner, who’s a government minister, and two of Vanessa’s muscle.

“Using the info from the recording, we watched our daughter carefully, since they had cased us and knew our travel patterns. On the date they had planned to do the kidnapping, we watched, and sure enough, they had a van stationed at an isolated corner where she would pass. They were there the two following days as well. They also drove into our compound where we lived on those second two days and looked around. Then it was the weekend and our own compound was busy. The earthquake hit on that following Monday.

“Finally, when I was at the embassy getting the official paperwork to come to the States, the security officer told me that my wife and daughter were being searched for by some men who had their photos. That’s when I had the idea to fake their deaths. Later I heard from my boss there, that men had been seen in Aubry, our town, and asking about the funeral.”

“Listening to that and knowing the past history of Haitian violence to its expats, clearly you’re all in danger,” Wilkins told them.

“I think we need to set up a variant of a witness protection scheme here,” Johnson said.

“Agreed,” Wilkins replied. “Mr Masters, we’ll need help from the State Department.”

“We can do that,” Masters agreed.

Jonas and Cassandra looked from one person to the next. “Do what?” Jonas asked.

“We need to change your identities,” Wilkins said. “Name changes, record changes, whatever. Fortunately instead of three histories, we need to change just one: Jonas’. The others just need new records created.”

Johnson asked, “You get to pick new names. How cool is that?”

Cassandra jumped. “That’s what she told us!”

“What?” Wilkins asked.

“Um... well, seems our daughter already thought of that because she has a new name for herself and one for Cass.” Jonas told him.

“Oh... Okay... Bright kid?” Wilkins wondered.

“Believe it,” Jonas sighed.

~~~~

Actually, changing Jonas’ name was complicated by his award of the Medal of Honor. So they had to involve the Department of Defense, since the honor was awarded in his original name, but he would be receiving the award under his new name. That took a bit of anguish and teeth gnashing, but a solution was proposed:

Jonas had enlisted under a false name because he was underage.

All of Jonas’ military records had to be altered, including the DD-214 and award citations, but obviously people’s memories couldn’t be, so that was the best choice.

For Florida, the FBI got a judge, in camera, to authorize the change of Jonas’ birth certificate and the old driver’s license records were “lost.” So were all of his school records. A Florida marriage certificate was issued in their names. Then a cohesive past history had to be constructed for him, showing that he lived in Florida (because involving any more states would have made the project much more difficult) for the past eleven to twelve years. This entailed a search for recently closed auto shop businesses in rural areas throughout southern Florida and several were found. One likely one was chosen and the official copies of its old business records were altered to show that “Wilson Alexandre” was a past employee. Federal and state tax records needed to be constructed.

The county records were fixed to show that the Alexandre family lived in a trailer on a site not far from the shop. That local school district recorded that one Tamara Alexandre was registered as a home-schooled student. A birth certificate and other documents were created for Cassandra. Creating a whole new set of identities for three people is a huge undertaking.

A new Social Security number was issued and the State Department re-issued their passports. The Veterans Affairs Department issued a new ID and changed Jonas’ Compensation and Pension records. They had to get the VA hospital records changed too. Making a name change at the bank presented only a small problem compared to the other changes.

When it was all completed, Jonas was now Wilson Alexandre and his wife and daughter were named Nadine and Tamara, just as Tamara had said it should be. She did allow them to give her a middle name but insisted that it must be “Nadine.”

~~~~

Wilson had also heard from Henri about their former home. Henri had the man with the heavy equipment shift some of the rubble on the site and Henri had recovered some of their personal possessions, enough to fill several large cartons.

Henri used email to contact Wilson who responded with a phone call. Calls from Haiti to the U.S. were usually expensive through traditional services, but Wilson located a service for Henri to use that had a reasonable cost.

“Hi, Jon... er, Wilson. Hard to get used to that. We pulled some stuff out of your house. Some furniture wasn’t damaged. There was undamaged stuff in the kitchen too. The clothing was okay. You had some boxes of paperwork. Tamara’s room had books too.”

“Okay, we won’t need any furniture to be shipped. We could replace it here for what that would cost to ship. Same with the kitchen ware. You can sell that stuff or donate it. Say, how is the earthquake recovery progressing?”

“Really slow. But we’ve got no complaints personally and business is booming for us. I’m looking at hiring someone, in fact. Not to replace you—finding someone with your skills is nigh on impossible.”

“Okay, Henri, cut the crap. You can ship clothes—have Julianna check on Nadine’s and Tamara’s to see if they’re worth sending. I think I can use most of my own stuff. Tamara would love to get her books. And those papers—send them too.”

“Okay. I’ll check with my import broker for shipping arrangements and costs and let you know.”

They made the necessary arrangements and then disconnected.

Miami, Florida: one month later

A month after the family had been christened with their new names, they had finally settled into somewhat of a routine. Wilson (he was still trying to get used to the name) had tried contacting the shop where he had worked years ago, but it had been sold and now an apartment building stood on its site. Nadine (she took to her new name easily) was now down to weekly outpatient visits for her burns and her leg fracture was healing well. And Tamara? (No question there: “That’s my name!”) She was still avidly reading.

On one visit to the hospital early on, Wilson was looking at a community bulletin board in the lobby while he was waiting for Nadine, when he saw a job posting for Miami-Dade County. The position was for a mechanic for light and heavy-duty vehicles. The posting indicated that preferences would be given to veterans. He quickly called and got an interview date.

At the interview, it turned out that the supervisor was a Marine too; he had served in Iraq, and they wound up swapping war stories, but then they turned to business. Wilson had his diploma (in his new name) and a number of paycheck stubs (no name appeared) from Henri’s shop in Haiti and ones from the closed shop to verify his work history and a reference. He was able to easily show that he knew his way around anything with wheels or tracks and an engine, so the only remaining step was verifying his reference.

The following day, the supervisor called him to offer him the job.

“We had a bunch of applicants, but they missed out because they either didn’t have the skills, their references weren’t okay, or they didn’t pass the background or drug check. Your former boss had nothing but good things to say about you. Don’t get a swelled head, but you must have been a magician to keep sixty-year-old cars and trucks running with the repair parts you could find.”

“Yeah. Lots of improvising and back-yard engineering.”

“Well, welcome aboard. You need to stop at the county office to go to personnel to get all signed up. Lots of paperwork to fill out. We’ll start you working this coming Monday. Will that work?”

“Sure. And thanks.”

“Okay, report to the heavy equipment repair shop on 87^th Avenue SW, where I interviewed you. That’ll be your home base for now, but our mechanics may go to all of our locations based on available work and special skills. And we need to trade more war stories. Semper Fi, you grunt!”

Wilson got signed up for the job. The pay wasn’t the best, starting about $30 an hour, but the health insurance and other benefits were excellent.

Hmm, He thought. Nadine will need to get a job. My pay isn’t quite enough to get by here. She’s open to that, she told me, but she also wants to have her own congregation. Oh, right. There’s the stipend for the Medal of Honor too and all my pay will be exempt from federal and state income taxes. That’ll help.

They had found an apartment to lease near the medical center complex, the one that Wilson had found on their first weekend in Miami, and Tamara (of the “that’s my only name” persuasion) had agreed to participate in Dr Beauford’s research project.

Wilson recalled that meeting at the medical school with the doctor with wry amusement. He had called Beauford’s office to set up an appointment for the family.

The secretary asked for their names, so Wilson answered, “Tell him it’s Tamara. He’ll remember.”

“Okay. Last name?”

“Just Tamara, okay? He will definitely remember her.”

Standing next to him, Tamara giggled.

When they met with Dr Beauford, he was delighted, but was puzzled when Wilson mentioned his name and Nadine’s.

“I’m certain that those weren’t the names I have in my notes from the surgery,” he mused. “I need to check.”

He opened the computer hospital patient file and saw that it read, “Patient: Tamara Alexandre. Father: Wilson. Mother: Nadine.” Then he grabbed his hand-written notes and saw that he had written “Tamara Bernard to contact me about MRI study.”

He turned to them. “I have Tamara’s last name different in my notes,” he looked up at her. She peered back at him with a tiny grin. “... but clearly I must have been distracted when I wrote this. Sorry for being so sloppy,” he finished.

“Well, Dr Beauford, Tamara is doing better on strengthening her leg, as you can see,” Nadine said. “It can almost support her weight now. She’ll need the crutches for another three or four weeks. So she says she’s ready for your MRI project and since you’re meeting with us, we assume that you’re still interested.”

“Oh, certainly. We can do the paperwork for it when we finish here. In fact, the new machine is here and it’s almost finished being installed. Why don’t we go see it? Then you’ll get an idea of what Tamara will be doing. “

They entered the MRI room and looked at the machine.

“Oh, it’s like a throne,” Wilson observed. “Not a tube that you roll into.”

“Right,” Beauford replied. “It’s an upright MRI. They had uprights before, but this one is completely room-temperature superconductor-enabled. The Johns Hopkins engineers developed electromagnets which don’t need liquid helium to cool them. The regular MRIs use so much current that the magnets would get too hot to work unless they’re kept extremely cold; these stay around room temperature, despite their high current load. We’ll be using a special head coil—Princess Tamara, would you mind sitting on your throne there?”

She giggled and hoisted herself up onto the seat. Beauford took a helmet device off a rack and brought it over to her.

“Can I slip this over your head, dear? I’ll be careful not to bump it.”

Tamara smirked. “Well, your scotch tape fell off last week but I think there’s still some glue left holding things together. Told you band-aids with rubber bands work better.”

Beauford almost dropped the helmet; he was laughing so hard.

“Oh, I’m gonna love working with this imp,” he snorted as he collected himself. “Anyway, this space helmet goes over her head; it generates radio waves which wobble atoms in the body and collects the signals that are produced, and those go to the computer which turns the signals into pictures of the organs we’re scanning.”

“Like an x-ray?” Nadine asked.

“X-rays are in the same family as radio waves, but their frequency is many orders of magnitude higher. They can injure body tissues if they’re too frequently applied or misused. The radio frequency waves that this device produces are harmless; like the signals your cell phone makes. When we do the tests, Tamara, we’ll show you things on the screen right here. For some tests, you’ll do arithmetic, for others, you’ll read the screen aloud. We’ll even have tutors come and work on school lessons with you while you’re in here. Now this contraption is very rude and makes a lot of noise when it’s running, like the other MRIs you’ve been in, so you’ll have earphones so you can hear the person talking to you. And every once in a while, we may want to inject a dye into your arm to be able to see inside your brain better.”

“That won’t hurt, right?” Tamara asked.

“Remember in the hospital, you had blood drawn from inside your elbow, right?”

“Uh huh. That was just a poke.”

“That’s the same as getting the dye.”

“Um, okay.”

“Do you have any questions, any of you? No? Okay. While we’re doing the study, we’ll want to meet with you parents every two weeks or thereabouts, so we can give you progress reports. We’ll cover the healing of her injury and also anything else of interest we might learn. Okay, let’s go down to the scheduling nurse. She’ll have all of the permission forms plus the materials which cover Tamara’s care and benefits for the study. Oh, right. Don’t think Tamara’s the sole guinea pig here; there are seven others in the study. Several are college students; also there’s a teen and a geriatric volunteer.”

~~~~

Nadine was working at trying to put her life together again, now that she was living in a strange environment. She understood the need to find employment. Watching the health care personnel at the hospital at work, and with her own experience in folk healing, she decided that was a very appealing job, so she began to look into a health-care job. At one of her outpatient sessions, she asked a nurse about it.

“Sweetie, yes, we’re always short of people. A quick way of getting into an entry level job would be by becoming a certified nurse’s assistant. The American Red Cross has a program, it’s for four weeks, and then there’s a state exam. You can look into that. The local community colleges also have courses and there are a few which are taught on-line, but you always need to do some clinical training in person, whatever course you take.”

Later, Nadine asked Wilson about her taking the course and he agreed that she might enjoy helping people in a very personal way.

~~~~

Now that Tamara was a little more mobile, her parents began thinking about school for her. She would be getting tutoring while in the study, but that wasn’t the answer. The answer actually came from a random meeting of someone who lived in their apartment building. The building had a small fitness room which contained two treadmills and some other exercise equipment. One day Tamara was using a treadmill to strengthen her leg while Nadine sat and watched; it would be several weeks before her leg cast would come off.

A woman entered and began using the other treadmill and the two women began to talk. The newcomer, Susan Gilson, was a retired electrical engineer who had returned to college to get certified to teach high school. Now retired from that second career and having moved to Miami with her husband who had retired from his, she had been getting bored with retired life. In talking with Sue, Nadine mentioned the predicament that schooling her daughter was presenting, since Tamara was so advanced in science but not as much in other subjects, and Sue was intrigued.

“Where is she in school now?” Sue asked.

Nadine laughed. “Where isn’t she. Well, when we stopped home-schooling her, she was reading classic literature in English and French using high-school texts. I’m not sure about her writing skills or general studies like history and similar subjects...”

“You mean social studies?”

“Yes. In science, she’s at ... college level? We’ve seen her working with college physics texts. Oh, and she apparently knows electronics...”

Nadine described Tamara’s electronics lab incident, placing the locale at a Florida community college.

“So we don’t know what to do about school. She’s ten, eleven in two months. She’d be bored silly in grade school and is much too young to be put into high school, let alone a college.”

Tamara finished on the treadmill and hobbled over.

“Hey, Momma, have you been talking about me? You know I can tell,” she smirked. “You say something and then look my way.”

“Yes, smartie, we were talking about school for you. You’re really advanced in some things but not in others. What do you think we should do?”

“Well, can the school teach me the ten-year-old stuff and I can do the really interesting things in physics, like I’m doing electromagnetism now, on my own? I was doing that at home, just before we left, but got stumped by Maxwell’s equations. They use integral and differential calculus—Gauss’ law, Faraday’s law, and Ampère’s law do, and I haven’t learned calculus yet. I can figure out basic circuits ‘cause they use Ohm’s and Joule’s laws,” Tamara complained.

“You know what...?” Sue said. “I’m very impressed. Tamara, you’re ten?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, I’m at loose ends with myself now and, Tamara, you sound like you love to be challenged. Tamara, I used to be an electrical engineer. I designed integrated circuits and circuit modules for industrial process control systems. I can teach you calculus and how to apply Maxwell’s equations. If you think you’d like to work with me, I’d be delighted to help you. Nadine, would you allow her to work with me?”

“Ah, we can’t pay much...” Nadine started.

“No, we don’t need any money; we have everything we need. My husband sold and retired from his private medical practice and works part-time as a doc-in-a-box now just to keep occupied. Your daughter is every teacher’s dream and I’d love to be able to guide her.”

Nadine and Wilson met with Sue two times to discuss her tutoring suggestions and they contacted the school where she last taught; the school principal spoke highly of her skills. Sue would work with Tamara for four hours each day, whenever she wasn’t in rehab or at the medical school study. Sue even agreed to drive Tamara to her appointments, which freed up some of Nadine’s time and allowed Nadine to sign up for a version of the nurse’s assistant program which was mostly on line.

Life in the U.S. for the Alexandres was beginning to take shape.

Next Chapter            Return Home

Copyright © 2023 Seems Ndenyal. All Rights Reserved.