Part 57
Joe saw the obvious; he could easily invite the father and son to the track to work on the car and just hang around himself. The mere presence of a third party could help the son feel more secure. The more time he spent with his father without anything he considered an attempt at manipulation, the closer he would be to feeling like it was a normal father and son relationship.
Though Joe realized "normal" could never completely apply here. It probably never had. At Kelly's one morning, he told Alexis about the conversation that took place as the three of them worked on connecting rods.
It had come to light, to Joe's observation, that one of Zander's main troubles actually was feeling ashamed of having been involved in drug dealing and not wanting his parents to know about it.
"I even think," Joe said, "had he avoided that somehow, he might well have gone home. Once he was in it, had been arrested, and had a record, he didn't want to face his mother or his brother. His father he could have dealt with maybe, but only his father would have had to have been the one to find him."
"When I first represented Zander," Alexis replied, "He was so just plain flat out, adamantly, not going to contact his family for help. In hindsight, how easy it would have been. I think you may very well be right."
"Even from prison, his dad could have helped with that. Hiring a lawyer and whatever else he needed."
"True. Do you think Sergei sees what you're seeing?"
"Well, one way or another, I think he does – I think he was trying to get Zander over it by claiming to be in no place to judge – he's been in jail, he crossed the line of violating the law. Kind of an attempt at bonding a little! Like father, like son, we have this problem, we end up in trouble with the law! He started comparing experience with Zander. Almost a funny conversation if you look at it from a certain angle. Handcuffs, ankle cuffs, slamming doors, crazy guards, nutty cell mates. Sergei told us what other guys who were in prison with him where there for. Tax evasion mostly; it was that kind of prison. But other interesting things you don't often think about. Like hiring too many illegal aliens, catching too many lobsters, selling phony stocks and bonds."
"You think they're getting along somewhat, then."
"Yes. That was a brilliant idea of yours. They both like the speedway and the cars and racing. So it's easy to get a conversation going about something to do with that. Then once they talk about that stuff, it gets easier to talk about something else, and so on."
Alexis stayed after Joe left, looking at a few files. She had sent Zander to the courthouse to make a file and copy a case out of the law library, and was waiting for him. A few days before, she had been tired and aggravated after getting stuck in traffic on the way to a deposition – she had needed the time to look over the file beforehand, and the traffic jam sucked it all up. This kind of thing happened frequently, and now that she had Zander around, she had someone to complain to about it all. That was the biggest difference between her two employees Zander and Emily – Emily would have started looking at her funny and wanting to know what was the next job for her, whereas Zander just listened.
A few days ago, Zander was arguing to Alexis that he should drive her to depositions and the court. At first Alexis thought it would be an inefficient use of time, because they'd both be wasting time in traffic rather than getting anything else done. He countered that if he drove her, she could read files or call people while she was in the car. What she paid him was more consistent with driving than what her time was worth.
Finding this persuasive, she had agreed to try it. It not only worked, it improved her whole outlook. Simply not having driven was lowering her stress level. Driving, traffic, parking, and finding a route had sapped more mental energy than she had ever realized. This saved energy could now be applied to other things, and therefore, she did a better job on those things.
She read the file she had been to court on that morning, making all the notes she would have had to wait until she had driven back to the office to make. Once there, 10 other things might have been distracted her, and she might then not have gotten to it until a time when her memory wasn't fresh any longer. Or never, and then, the next time she looked at the file, she would hardly remember what had happened in court today at all.
When she had finished, she looked up and saw Oksana and another woman at another table.
She went over, deciding it was a good time to check up on Oksana's activities.
The woman was Kathleen Connor. Alexis shook hands with her cordially. Oksana explained that they were looking at Aleksander's school records.
"We figure there has to be a way to deal with this," Kathleen said. "Sit down - please," she said, with a friendly tone.
"I will try to make it up to him," Oksana said. "Like the books you gave me say, I overburden him. His father overburden him even worse. He's so mad about this, his education. He ran away is what is wrong with it. Without that, his education was the best. But even to today, he still will not understand. He's so convinced that he could only finish that in Russia."
"Crazy," Alexis said, humoring her. "Let's see if we can convince him otherwise. If not, I'll take him to Russia and enroll him in school there myself."
"Not going to be necessary, I'm sure," Kathleen said, smiling.
"So you've got all the records?"
"Everything," Kathleen said. "Amazing, considering a foreign country is involved. But that's all translated. Oksana worked hard on this, and it's all together."
"Where would he start?" Alexis said.
"That's the question," Kathleen said. "Oksana says spare no expense. This project is a teacher's dream! We're going to get a tutor and maybe use the home schooling standards."
"That's a great idea!" Alexis said. "Right! Of course there must be standards for that. And Nicholas, my nephew, had tutors. Right here in Port Charles. I bet I can help you find whoever you need."
"Have a look," she said, pushing the records over to Alexis with a look that got Alexis feeling like Kathleen knew Alexis was likely to understand some things that Oksana did not.
There was Ocean View Academy, where Zander had been from first grade through half of sixth. It looked expensive. Zander's grades were average and below average. Every teacher, almost to a man or woman, thought he had Attention Deficit Disorder and it ought to be treated, and it was clear from these records that Oksana thought that was baloney. One teacher even defensively noted she knew ADD was over-diagnosed, but that it would not be so in the most extreme cases, and this was the textbook case, and the most obvious and extreme case the teacher had ever seen.
Sergei didn't seem to be involved at all.
"ADD with no hyperactivity," Alexis said to Kathleen. "So we couldn't say these teachers just want to get rid of a discipline problem by medicating it away."
"And it's a private school," Kathleen pointed out, very reasonably. "In a public school, you could make a good argument that they do that, but they don't have a motive in a private school. They can just expel students who disrupt the class too much. And he was not much of a discipline problem anyway. The ones that aren't hyperactive usually aren't, which is why they miss diagnosing it in public school a lot of the time. The teachers at this Ocean View are top-notch - heck, with that climate, they probably draw the best of the best. Which explains why they didn't miss it."
Next there was Fordham School, a private school Zander had been at for the last half of sixth grade, seventh and half of eighth. "Why did he go here instead of continuing at the Ocean View one?"
"When we moved, when we got the divorce, I moved them there," Oksana said. "I had friends that said it was a better school for going into Daytona Prep."
Alexis read over these quickly, and they were much the same, and made the same assertions about Zander. There were notes on the police coming to check to see if Aleksander and Peter were in school, because their father had not brought them home in compliance with the custody order, and they might be missing. This happened every other Monday for awhile, and then became so routine that the cops seemed to be making their check every other Monday morning as a matter of course, unasked. There were similar notations for several Thursdays. But for the first day back after Christmas vacation of Zander's eighth grade year, there were notes that both boys were missing and that it was not a false alarm this time. Some of the teachers had made personal efforts to find the boys, and one was so upset she was sent into counseling herself.
Those from the school in Russia were really strange. They said nothing about ADD, and Zander's grades were positively excellent. Alexis frowned. There wasn't even a hint that he had difficulty adjusting to the new system or the language. In fact, one teacher mentioned how helpful Zander was to the other students in their class of English, to them a foreign language. This individual, Arkady Petrovich Nikiforov, wrote that he thought Zander would make a wonderful teacher.
Then there were some sketchy records from Daytona Prep. They could be summarized as evidence that no one at this fancy and expensive private school had known what to do with Zander when Oksana brought him to them. They couldn't decide if he was a junior or a sophomore. According to the notes, Oksana seemed to be willing to leave it to whatever they eventually decided, and Zander, now old enough to be a factor, insisted he was a senior. All of the Russian records and their translations were there, but had apparently been disregarded as practically meaningless to the staff at Daytona Prep.
"You see this Russian school," Kathleen said to Alexis, "has just the basics. The students don't have choices or electives or anything. It is all rigidly set out. Say what you want about that, in Zander's case it was a good thing. I think that's why this ADD appears to disappear, like magic. No distractions. Just go to class and do your homework. They don't even have sports in this school."
"Sergei says Zander was in a lot of sports," Alexis said.
"They have it, just that it has nothing to do with the schools," Oksana explained. "It's all after school, and someplace else. The kids just go and join the league."
"Not a bad way to do it," Kathleen mused. "Anyway, Alexis, when I talked to Zander about this, he is still, to this day, totally adamant that he is a senior." Alexis smiled. Kathleen went on: "He has a point. They go to school six days a week - adding up that extra number of days over 11 years and they go to school for about as many days as we do here in 12 years. I think it helped Zander, because continuity is better for one with ADD. I wonder if they think anyone has ADD in that country. I could see where this system may have certain features that minimize that."
"Yeah, less time to forget," Alexis grinned. "Maybe I'll put him in the office fewer hours each day, and some on Saturday."
"Then, there is the basic nature of the subjects," Kathleen said. "These people at Daytona Prep were focused on what he did not have, but he did have the math and science and was even ahead there, in theory, for number of credits. History - It was only American history he was missing. He had this Ancient history and World history a lot of American students never get. He had Russian history that no American student ever gets, but they ignored it too much. It could still have been counted as an elective, even if that school didn't have that particular course."
"When it comes to an elective, yeah, what's the difference," Alexis agreed. "Daytona Prep or any Prep could have 'Russian History' to count that way."
"Right. As Zander so contemptuously says, they counted it against him that he had not taken metal shop or basket weaving or as he puts it, 'Junk 101.'"
Alexis laughed.
"Now you get credits in foreign languages," Kathleen went on, "there's got to be a way to let him just get those! They analyzed this as if actually knowing a foreign language should count for nothing. Take a course and know a little of it, and you get a credit! Actually know it, and you can't get a credit! They should have known of some way to give him a test and just give him credit."
"Like those tests you can take to place out of college classes," Alexis said.
"Exactly. Then when it comes to 'English' as we know it, of course he didn't have that. Still, he's learning all the grammar in the class where, for them, it's a foreign language! Same thing, he ought to be able to test out of it. This particularly infuriates him."
Alexis laughed. "Maybe that Arkady is right! It's Zander's natural calling, and that's why he's so opinionated!"
"Sixteen years old, and he's arguing with them like they're his colleagues," Kathleen said, laughing, too. "He doesn't need 'gym' or 'health' or 'metal shop,' - he is right when he maintains that 'Junk 101' is not necessary! If he ever becomes a teacher, he's going to upset the establishment and reform the whole system!"
"But why not just go?" Oksana said. "So you've got two years rather than one. At his age, he would have, anyway. If he had never gone over there, he would have been a junior that same year. Even had they made him a sophomore, then still, he's close enough in age to the other students that it does not look so bad. Probably some of those sophomores were also 16 already. A lot of kids get held back in an early year. What's the rush?"
"I don't know," Alexis said. "Maybe at 13 you can adjust to a new system, but at 16 it's much tougher. I could understand that."
"His grades were bad in one system and good in the other," Kathleen added. "No wonder he preferred the system where he'd been successful."
"I wish I had thought of that then," Oksana said. "I could have gotten him a tutor. That might have convinced him to stay put. I never thought of it. School is more than that, though. There's sports, and friends and dates, all that comes with the school, in America."
Alexis has been absorbed in the conversation and forgot all about her employee, who had just come into Kelly's for her. She saw him come in and look around. She got up almost instinctively and went to him. She'd at least give him an option on whether or not he wanted to run into Oksana just now.
But Kathleen waved to him and acted as if there was nothing unusual about running into one's mother at a coffee shop. "Come in, sweetie," she said, "we're talking about something important to you."
Alexis walked back with him. He smiled at Kathleen, and just looked at Oksana.
Alexis had been sitting next to Kathleen, and this left Zander to sit across from her and next to Oksana.
"We've got all your school records, here," Kathleen said, "even from Russia."
"Thank you for looking at all that," he said. "It's such a mess. There are so many rules about going from one school level to the next."
Oksana sighed loudly and rolled her eyes heavenward.
"I'm over 18, and it's not your problem," he shot at her.
She turned her eyes towards him without turning her head. "I screw it up for you. OK. Let me fix it."
"How can you possibly do that?"
"We get you a tutor."
"You're not going to throw money at it. I am not taking anything from you or Dad."
"Well then," she replied, "You can afford this tutor, because you've got enough money of your own. All the child support for your last two years."
"I supported myself, thank you very much."
"You were not supposed to, legally. My lawyer says I owe it back to you."
"There is no lawyer who says that!"
"It is true! It is the legal rule!"
"That sounds like a legal rule you made up all by yourself, Oksana!"
"Stop calling me that! I have my lawyer write a letter to your lawyer then," she said, getting up.
"I think that's a very good idea," he yelled at her as she stormed out, turning in his chair. "If you have something to say to me, call my lawyer!"
He turned back around, and looked at Alexis and Kathleen. He came to his senses.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't apologize," Alexis said. "Do your best, let me take you to the counselor as we said, and I can put up with a little arguing here and there. I get enough of it in my profession; it's no big shock."
"OK. But Mrs. Connor doesn't. I feel really bad now; you're trying to help and I just got in the way. But the whole thing is my fault anyway. I don't want anybody else to have to work on fixing it."
Kathleen looked at him sympathetically. "Now, now, don't say that. It's really interesting for me. It is! I swear! Did you know that this teacher said, this," she rifled through the records, and read: "Arkady Petrovich Nikiforov, thinks you would be a good teacher yourself?"
Zander smiled slightly, in spite of himself, at the memory of Arkady Petrovich and at Kathleen reading his name. "I remember. He said that. It was just natural to be ahead of the English class."
"He thought you really helped the other students."
"He was nice," Zander said.
"He really thought so. We teachers don't just go around saying that to be nice."
He smiled a little, to himself, again. He looked up at Alexis. "I should take you back to the office," he said.
"Think about it some more," Kathleen said to Zander, as she left them from out front at Kelly's.
