by Torey Hayden
The ravages of the previous day showed on him. His face was swollen all up one side. He had bruises everywhere. I smiled when I saw him. ‘Hi.’
He said nothing.
I looked down at the chart, back at him. The silence between us was fragile, the way silences often are after arguments, in the aftermath of great anger. Except, for me at least, there had been no argument, no anger.
Kevin stared at me.
I fingered the pen I had been writing with.
The silence breathed between us.
‘Can I sit down?’ he asked me.
I nodded and indicated a chair across the table from me. He came into the staff room, pulled out the chair and sat down.
Again the great, lengthening stillness, like cotton over a tender sore. I bent and began to write again. Kevin came to the staff room to see me after I had left him in his room. He sat in a chair rather than on the floor. He does not appear to be afraid.
Out beyond the room were the noises of the ward. Aides and other kids moved around. Nurses chatted. I lived in mortal terror that someone would walk in on us, demand to know what Kevin was doing in an off-limits place like the staff room and destroy the fellowship between us which was so carefully weaving itself back together in the silence.
Kevin crossed his arms on the table and laid his head down.
‘Is the Thorazine still making you sleepy?’ I asked.
He nodded.
I went back to writing.
‘You know what he did to me once?’ he said, as much to the silence as to me.
‘No. What?’ I didn’t even know what he was talking about.
‘I used not to eat my oatmeal. It was the only thing in the whole world I used not to eat. My mom, she used to make it for breakfast. Every day she made it. Then he’d tell me to eat it. He’d make me sit at the table and stay there until I ate every bit. And if I fussed, he went and got more.’
I said nothing, not daring to.
‘If I didn’t eat it and I had to go to school or something, he’d save it for lunch for me. And once, this one time, the oatmeal got to be about two days old. It made me sick to look at it.’
He paused, drew a breath. I was so scared someone was going to interrupt us.
‘He grabbed my hair and pulled it until I opened my mouth. Then he stuffed it in. Well, I sicked it all up again, right there at the table. I couldn’t help it. It had mold growing on it. It was awful. But you know what he made me do? He made me eat the sick.’
I continued to write.
‘It was the only thing I never liked to eat. I ate everything else. I made a special point to eat everything else. But I guess it didn’t matter very much.’
‘It must have made you awfully mad,’ I said and looked up. Perspiration had made huge stains on his shirt.
‘He made me mad all right. He made me want to kill him.’ Kevin looked at me. His eyes narrowed. ‘And I will someday. When I get out of here. He won’t be able to tell me what to do then. And if he does, I’ll carve his body into little bits.’
‘And so,’ said Charity, reclining back on my couch and putting her feet up on the arm, ‘you know what happened next? Well, we got to sleep outside on the porch, me and Sandy did. And so we took our blankets out there and we got to sleep.’
‘You slept on the porch in November?’
‘Yup. Camping out, we was. Just like on TV. Mom let me do it ’cause Sandy was with me. Sandy’s twelve. So my mom said it was okay.’
‘Wasn’t it a little chilly?’
‘Gosh no. We had lots of blankets.’ Charity lay all the way back on the couch and kicked her feet up. For a few moments she bicycled in the air. ‘And the next morning we got up and baked pancakes, me and Sandy. Sandy’s twelve. She can touch the stove.’
‘I see.’ Actually I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when Charity was finding time to do all these things, since she seemed to have moved in with me over the past few weeks. When I would come home from work, there was Charity, hunched up on my doorstep, still dressed in her school clothes. She would stay until supper and eat with me, if I’d let her. Then down in front of the television she’d go. Or if I was writing, she would stand in back of my chair, feet on the rung, and read over my shoulder, all the while making my desk chair sway. She couldn’t read worth a hill of beans, so mostly she just shouted out letters she recognized. B! R! H! would come the constant chant behind me while I tried to concentrate on wording a technical paper about bilingualism and psychogenic language problems. Charity would stay until I chucked her out every night. On weekends I was even luckier. One Saturday she arrived at 6:15 in the morning.
Charity’s family seemed quite pleased with the arrangement. I must admit, if I’d had Charity I probably would have too. In the beginning I demanded that she have permission and could prove it before she could stay. But that was hopeless. The family had no phone and the couple of times I had bothered to pile her in the car and drive her home for consent, no one there had even missed her. I suspect they’d realized she’d found a place to go and someone to feed her and were satisfied to let her milk the situation for all it was worth. I was irked by the imposition; it was like having acquired a stray cat. But as with cats, I was too soft to ignore her and send her home hungry.
Truth was, of course, that Charity’s family was full of problems of their own, not the least of them, Charity herself. They lived well below the poverty level in a small dingy place down by the river. I had met Charity’s mother only once when I had brought Charity home. She was a young woman but she looked ancient. Her body was riddled with the stigmata of a rough life, and I suspected they went clear through to her heart. The house was constantly jammed with relatives, and they all seemed to live there on a more or less permanent basis. While Charity had no father, there was no lack of males in her home, but their exact position in the household was something I never knew for sure.
Charity herself continued to be a personal challenge to me. A master of the unintentional put-down, Charity had done more to devastate my ego in three months than most kids had in a lifetime. I have no doubt that if I had encountered Charity earlier in my career, I would have become a medical technologist like my mother wanted.
Still she had an innate charm about her. She would be standing there on my doorstep complaining loudly or would be struggling with some mishap, like the time she had polished her fingernails and then couldn’t get her mittens off, and I’d think to myself, what’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be an authority! Sixty pounds of sheer challenge was Charity.
It was a Wednesday evening, when she lounged across my furniture and gave me more excruciating details of life with Sandy.
‘Can I eat supper with you? What we having?’ she asked when I rose with what must have been a suppertime look on my face. She was off the couch in a second and skipping out into the kitchen ahead of me, her body dancing side to side like an excited puppy.
‘Stew,’ I said. ‘Stew and salad and bread.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Why don’t you ever keep any good stuff around?’
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘Like ice cream or Cokes or something?’
‘Because that’s not what I make my suppers out of.’
‘Oh well,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘If that’s what we gotta have, then that’s what we gotta have, huh?’
I nodded.
I gave her the lettuce to wash and the carrots to slice. Touché she shouted to herself and stabbed the knife into the air at unseen dangers. I took it and the carrots and let her shake the dressing instead.
And then as I was putting the stew into bowls, Charity came bounding over and leaned across my arm to see what was happening.
‘Tor?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I spend the night with you?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a school night.’
‘So? What difference does that make? I’ll sti
ll go to school.’
‘You need to go home and get a bath and –’
‘Why?’ she interrupted, looking down at herself. ‘Am I dirty? Don’t you got a bathtub here?’
‘That’s not the point. It’s a school night. You ought to be home in bed and then be able to get up and put on school clothes and get there before the bell rings. It would be too hard from clear over here. We’re practically across town. And I have to leave for work a lot earlier than you have to go to school.’
‘It wouldn’t be so hard. I could do it. I could wear these here clothes. They ain’t dirty. I could get up real, real early. Okay? Can I? Please?’
I shook my head and handed her a bowl of stew. ‘No, not on a school night, Charity. Maybe some weekend. But not on a school night. End of conversation.’
Carefully she carried her bowl over to the table. Setting it down, she climbed up onto the chair. ‘You gonna have a man over here tonight, is that how come I can’t?’
I looked at her. ‘No, Charity. That isn’t how come you can’t. I told you how come you can’t.’
She had already started shoveling her food in, so she just shrugged. ‘Well, that’s all right. I understand. That’s when my mom works too. Every night but Mondays.’
The next morning dawned dark and gray, and when I drove to Garson Gayer at 9:30, the streetlights were still blazing.
Kevin had arrived in the room ahead of me. When I came, he was standing at the window looking out. It was the first time I had ever seen him just standing without being in the process of getting somewhere, unless of course I counted the day before, outside the staff room. He appeared to have momentarily put down the burden of fear.
He did not turn when I entered but continued to stare out of the window. The day was so gray, a bitter November day that spoke only of winter and made the icy darkness ahead of us seem millennia long. It was not snowing. It was doing nothing outside at all. It was silent, motionless and cold, like death.
I came up behind Kevin, put my box down on the radiator below the window and did not speak. I had to admit feeling a little afraid of him, standing there. The other day was not long enough past. I was still sore, and he had demonstrated his strength so well. This wasn’t like it had been with the little children. I was a physically strong person myself and even with the older children, with the boys ten or eleven or twelve, I could easily subdue them when I had to, no matter how out of control they might have been. I had always had the confidence to act without much regard to physical danger because I was tall and in good condition and strong and I knew it. But things were different with Kevin. He wasn’t a child. He was a man. I found it scary to know all I had to rely on were my wits. They didn’t always feel so sharp.
Kevin still did not turn from the window, and something about him made me unwilling to break the silence. I too looked out the window. The small courtyard was without life.
Kevin stood quietly, his shoulders back, his hands interlocked behind his back. The side of his face was still swollen, turning bluish green at the jawline where the bruise appeared deepest. As I watched him, I could see that he had not necessarily put his fear aside but rather some other thing had superceded it. He seemed suddenly very old to me, a thing Kevin had never seemed before. And he seemed weary.
‘I wish I could see more,’ he said at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Beyond this window. This isn’t a very good window. It doesn’t let you see anything except where you are. I already know where I am. I wish I could see more.’
Then the silence again.
The silence grew very long. I was uncomfortable with it, I think only because I feared to break it. Kevin was clearly somewhere else, and I did not know if I should call him back or not. This was a different Kevin; he had changed from the boy under the table. I did not know him.
He turned slightly, glanced at me. ‘They pay you, don’t they?’
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘For what?’
‘To come here.’
I nodded.
‘You come here and do this with me because someone pays you to.’
‘It’s my job, if that’s what you mean.’
Silence.
‘You knew that,’ I said. ‘You knew all along.’
He shrugged, a half shrug really, just one shoulder. It lent an air of indifference to the gesture.
‘What’s eating you, Kev?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I can hardly believe that.’
Another shrug. Then the silence. He was a master at silence. It protected him as effectively as chain mail. But I wasn’t bad at the game myself. I too said nothing and we stood together, staring out into the heavy grayness. The minutes passed.
‘I thought,’ he said softly, ‘that maybe you came because you wanted to.’
‘I do.’
‘But not because you got money for it.’
‘That’s secondary. I do come because I want to. I wouldn’t come, if I didn’t. Nobody can pay me enough to go where I don’t want to go. So the money’s not the issue.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m used to it.’ He looked over at me. ‘They told you I got no family, didn’t they? They told you that I just got brought here and left and I’ve never seen them since.’
‘No, they didn’t exactly tell me.’
‘I guess I was just thinking,’ he said, ‘that it would have been nice to have at least one person in the world who didn’t have to be paid to like me.’
Chapter Ten
The days grew eerie. It was mid-November. Usually this was a time for pale white skies and large, floating snowflakes, when winter came upon us tenderly and beguiled us. But not this year. The temperature dropped to just above freezing. The clouds hung low and dark, making it necessary to leave the lights on all day. However, they gave up no rain. As the days strung out lifelessly, one behind the other with no change, a fog began rising up from the land. It cloaked the deathly pallor of the days in a soft, white shroud. It was what they would have called Mabinogi days in Wales, days for spirits to come alive and for ancient things no longer in the present world.
Kevin seemed to take on the same secret nature as the weather. He never recovered from the blowup over the rocket poster. Whatever had happened then had been complete. Kevin changed.
Kevin’s behavior remained especially enigmatic over a period of about ten days. He talked to me little; he did very few of the old things which had given him pleasure. No more crosswords or activity books or games with small toy cars. He grew up very suddenly in those ten days, and the aura of youngness which had clung to him vanished. Instead he was restless, spending most days before the window or pacing up and down the length of the small white room. The most mysterious change of all, in my opinion, was that his fear seemed to have fallen away from him, shed like a reptile’s old skin. His chart indicated that he was still fearful on the ward and in the schoolroom and still protected himself with tables and chairs, but when he came to me, he put his fear away. He now walked into the room, he sat in chairs, on the table, on the radiator below the window. His shoulders were held back and he seemed an altogether different person than he had before. But the fearlessness had been replaced with a different sort of burden, a kind of weariness about him, which made him seem very old yet without vulnerability. Perhaps it was a type of depression. I didn’t know. But it emanated from him, this heavy, heartless tiredness.
I did not understand what was happening to him. I made no pretense to. I only came, wary and watchful. I was no longer afraid of him, as I had been the first couple of days after the explosion. But because I had so few concrete clues as to what was happening to him, I remained vigilant. It was a vaguely anxious period for me, the way it is when one awaits a tornado after the watch has been sounded, although at the same time, it was intriguing.
‘I drew you something,’ Kevin said to me when I arrived. As on other days, he had come into the room ahead of me. He was at the window, perc
hed on the radiator, but as I entered, he came to the table. He walked. Like a man, he walked, with big, powerful strides. No more crouching or cowering. Pulling out a chair, he sat down. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘See what I drew for you.’
He had a piece of brown paper, a sack that had been cut open as carefully as possible to expose the maximum amount of unwrinkled space.
‘It isn’t very good,’ he said. ‘They don’t let us have pencils on our own here, so this one I had to steal from the schoolroom when I was having lessons. It was easy. They don’t watch me under the table. But see, it’s just a grubby little thing. And I had to use a crayon for the red. If I had colored pencils, I could have done it better. But I don’t. I’m sorry it isn’t so good.’
It was good enough. In fact, it was hideously good. On this piece of opened sack was an expertly executed drawing of a man lying on a road. He had been disemboweled, the curvy, squirmy coils of his intestines strewn across the tarmac. A bird – a crow, I think – sat upon the protruding bone of one leg and pulled forth a long, sinewy bit of meat from the body cavity. Blood had spilled everywhere, puddling in the road, trickling through blades of grass. On one side I could even see the red footprints of some vermin which had trailed through the blood and off the side of the paper.
It was a horrible picture, shocking in its photographic accuracy and demonic in its incredible attention to detail. That Kevin’s obvious talent was unsuspected made the entire thing more sinister.
‘It could have been better,’ Kevin said quietly. ‘If I’d had real pencils.’
‘It’s very good as it is. I hadn’t realized you drew so well.’
‘I draw very well,’ he replied and the note of confidence in his voice was menacing, the way it is when one knows precisely the power of one’s abilities.
‘I can see that.’
He was studying me carefully, hoping to see, I think, if the contents of the picture shocked or sickened me. It had, more by virtue of its unexpected excellence than anything else, but one could hardly ignore what the picture was about either. It was the detail that unsettled me the most, especially those bloody rat footprints. However, I did the best I could to show no reaction at all. That seemed best.