Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  She shrugged.

  Silence. I sat watching her; she sat watching her Egg McMuffin. I let the silence play around us. One advantage of working with mutes so long was learning to be comfortable with such a powerful weapon as silence.

  ‘I don’t like school,’ she replied at last. ‘I don’t like having to ride on the bus.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The other kids make fun of me.’

  ‘Over what?’ I asked.

  She shrugged again. ‘Over just stuff.’

  ‘What kind of stuff, Charity?’

  ‘Just stuff.’

  Again the silence. The restaurant wasn’t very busy. It was a Wednesday, and only a few truck drivers and some moms and their kiddies were there. I watched them. Charity played with her food, pulling crumbs off the muffin and putting them in her mouth one at a time.

  ‘They call me “Fatty,’” she said in a low voice.

  ‘I see. And that makes you angry with them.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m not really fat. I just got big bones.’

  Silence. I had finished my English muffin and orange juice, so I only sat.

  ‘The kids call you names and that upsets you. So you don’t want to ride the bus. Is that it?’

  She shrugged again. I felt like nailing her shoulders down so she’d quit doing that. ‘I hate Yolanda too.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘The bus monitor. She gets mad at me all the time and it’s not my fault. The kids call me names and then she gets mad at me.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You feel it isn’t fair that she should get angry with you when the other kids are picking on you too?’

  ‘Yes. And so I told her last night I was going to get Sandy to come beat her up. Sandy’s twelve and I said she was my big sister and she was going to beat stupid old Yolanda up. I said Sandy’d punch her in the mouth.’

  ‘You told her this last night?’

  Charity nodded. She fiddled a little more with the Egg McMuffin, which was largely uneaten. ‘And she said I was stupid. She said I don’t have a big sister.’

  ‘Mmm. I see.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘I think you might want to have a big sister.’

  Charity looked up. For the first time there were tears in her eyes. ‘I do have a big sister! I do. And if you don’t shut up, I’ll have her come down here and beat you up too.’

  ‘Char, calm down. There’s nothing to yell about.’

  ‘I do too have a big sister! You say that. You say I do too have a big sister!’ Her voice had risen and people at other tables were pretending not to look.

  ‘She’ll beat you up, Torey Hayden. She will. I’ll tell her about you and she will. She’ll come right down here and punch you in the face.’ Charity was half crying and half screaming at me now. People were no longer pretending they weren’t looking at us. Now they just turned their heads and stared. Charity continued to bellow.

  ‘Come on,’ I said and stood up.

  Charity screamed.

  Coming around to her side of the table, I put my hands under her to lift her up. It was a job; she was no featherweight. Protesting violently, she screamed and wiggled and fought my attempt to get her out of the restaurant. Halfway to the door, she sank her teeth into my hand. I yelped myself and couldn’t make her let go. At least it gave me some way to drag her through the door.

  I shoved her in one side of the car and went around to the other to get in. Charity was beside herself. I think maybe it was no more than an accumulation of things.

  For a few moments we just sat in the privacy of the car. Charity continued to shriek. I sat, wiping blood off my hand where she had bitten me and thinking how truly unpleasant my restaurant experiences had been recently, between her and Kevin.

  ‘Come here,’ I said at last. The gearshift separated us, and when she didn’t respond, I had to lean over and pull her across the barrier onto my lap. I had never held Charity before. She wasn’t the sort of child one held, which I think may have been part of the problem. By this time she was only crying, and when I brought her into my arms, she clutched my shirt to her face and sobbed. I held her close, all of her, the sticky toast crumbs, the straggly braids, the grimy sweater, all of her.

  ‘So, what’s the matter, lovey?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Just things?’

  She nodded and snuffled against my shirt.

  ‘Sometimes it is that way. Things get hard.’

  ‘Do you still like me?’ she asked and looked up through tears.

  ‘I still like you.’

  ‘You still want to be my big sister?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Even though I’m bad?’

  ‘We all do bad things sometimes. That’s the way it is.’

  She snuffled again. Pulling my arms physically closer to her, she snuggled against me.

  ‘You know something?’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Diana, that’s my other Big Sister, she didn’t like me very well. She stopped being my sister. She asked them for someone else and so she got to be Rosa’s Big Sister instead. She didn’t like me.’

  There was a pause. Charity mopped up a little more. ‘And neither did Sandy. Or Cheryl. I did really, truly have Big Sisters. They just all stopped, except you.’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘Are you gonna stop?’

  ‘No. I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I?’

  She sighed and then crawled off my lap and over into her own seat. ‘That’s what they all said.’

  I took her back to school. Then I went back to the office and cleaned up. When she had bitten me, it had torn the skin in a neat little half-moon and I had bled all over everything. At the time it had been the least of my worries, but when I got back to work, I realized I wasn’t very presentable. So in the rest room I sponged blood out of my shirt and applied Band-Aids. But they wouldn’t stick. It was a too-mobile part of my hand. So I dried the area carefully and decided to forget it.

  What a laugh that was.

  By evening I felt hot and achy.

  By the next morning I was running a 102° temperature. I was in bed for a week and had to get a tetanus shot.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The months turned. Winter had given way completely to spring. Easter came and went. The buds on the lilacs were starting to swell.

  So much had changed since early winter when Jeff had joined Kevin and me. There were still the occasional moments when Kevin balked at something or gave evidence of his few remaining fears, but in general, he was so vastly improved as to not be recognizable as the same boy who hid under tables all those months before.

  We went out of the Garson Gayer grounds regularly now. Jeff and I would even occasionally take him out on a weekend to go to the places he especially enjoyed. The zoo was popular because Kevin loved the seals. He saved his meager pocket money to buy packet after packet of fish to feed them. But his favorite destination of all was the amusement park. This puzzled me somewhat because Kevin remained too fearful of most of the rides to go on them, and the cost of the entrance ticket always seemed an extravagance to me because the park was one of those where, after you paid the cover charge, the first ten rides were free. Kevin never did anything there except walk around. He almost never had extra money to buy cotton candy or caramel apples unless Jeff or I gave it to him. And there weren’t many other things to do except the rides. But the park remained his favorite place to go. The only explanation I could settle on was that both Jeff and I liked many of the rides, and Kevin would carefully dole out to us his own tickets to go on the rides he thought we liked best. Perhaps that was it, the only time Kevin could genuinely do something for us.

  The time was coming when Kevin would have to be moved from Garson Gayer. He would be seventeen in September, two years older than the home’s legal age limit. There really was no way that Dana could put off transferring him soon.

  The prospects, however, looked
far different than they had in September. The state hospital was seldom ever mentioned anymore. Free of most of his fears, talking, relating well, Kevin stood a much better chance of living in a less restrictive environment. Even his appearance had improved remarkably. With treatment, his acne had gotten better. The new haircut, the up-to-date clothes and a new pair of glasses gave him the casual appearance of most teenage boys. He wouldn’t stand out now, not much.

  Dana searched vigorously for a foster home for Kevin, or failing that, a group home where he could be exposed to other, more nearly normal boys his own age.

  Kevin was well aware of this new step. He cherished it like a gem in a treasure chest and much of his time was spent speculating about his future.

  Therefore, when the call came in mid-May none of us was too surprised. Dana met Jeff and me at the door on Friday morning as we arrived. Her face was alight. Dana really was a beautiful woman when she smiled like that, and she infected both Jeff and me with her pleasure before we knew the reason for it.

  A group home in Bellefountaine, an outlying community, had accepted Kevin for placement. It was a home for seven boys that had an excellent reputation for work with difficult kids. Kevin would go there at the end of the month.

  It was a placement I had not dared hope would come true. The home was a small working farm on the outskirts of Bellefountaine. They had sixty acres of market gardens as well as cows and sheep and horses and pigs. After seven years of incarceration, Kevin would at last be free.

  Kevin, of course, was delirious with joy. He leapt up on the table and danced for joy when we went into the small white room. ‘I’m free,’ he shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘I’ve got a home; I’m free.’

  There would be a lot of changes in his life. Both Jeff and I had been exploring this fact with Kevin in preparation for whatever might take place. The end was coming for us, for our sessions. Now that he was going as far away as Bellefountaine there would be no way either Jeff or I could continue to see him after he left Garson Gayer. Whatever his future needs, he wouldn’t be with one of us.

  As we talked about it, I could see the time really had come for Kevin. He expressed regret that we were breaking up; he worried that we might forget to write. But they were only fleeting concerns. His heart and soul were in the future. Jeff and I belonged to the past.

  On the very last session on the Twenty–seventh of May, Jeff, Kevin and I had a bit of a private party in the small white room. Jeff brought his cassette player and some tapes and his guitar. I brought some goodies to eat and we celebrated together.

  Toward the very end of the hour, Kevin was lying on the floor putting cake into his mouth crumb by crumb. Jeff sat on the table, his legs swinging. We were kids, really, all three of us. That thought struck me abruptly as I sat on the floor beside Jeff’s swinging legs. In a way I think that was what had brought us together and kept us together long after Kevin ceased needing a fully-trained psychiatrist and a psychologist. Jeff and I were only kids ourselves, a couple of whiz kids in a grownups’ world. But Kevin had given us an excuse to play again ourselves, while teaching him to play. It had felt good.

  Then as we were sitting there, enjoying the last bits of the party food, a waltz started to play on one of Jeff’s rather uniquely created cassettes. Tales from the Vienna Woods.

  Jeff hopped to his feet. Stretching a hand out to me, he bowed. ‘May I have this dance, madam?’

  I giggled from embarrassment. ‘I can’t dance.’

  ‘Yes, you can. With me you can. Come on, the music doth pass us by.’

  ‘Honest, Jeff. I’m terrible.’ But I got dragged to my feet anyway.

  Jeff put his arms around me and waltzed me off around the room to the strains of Strauss. His steps were sure, his movements decisive. Mesmerized out of a cramped, bare room in an institution, I saw the white latex melt away as I watched Jeff’s face. He was smiling, his eyes laughing. I was in the Stardust Ballroom. I was in the cool, verdant woods of Vienna.

  ‘Look behind you,’ Jeff whispered and turned us so I could see.

  Kevin had risen too. His arms outstretched to hold an invisible partner, he had closed his eyes. Head back, he twirled around and around and around the small room. In a strange way he was very graceful. It was an eerie grace.

  When the music stopped and Jeff and I had finished, Kevin kept on for a few bars more, waltzing around the room to his memory. Even when he slowed and stopped, his body swayed. He came up to us.

  ‘Teach me how to do that, Jeff. Put it on again and teach me, okay? So I can do it right?’

  Jeff ran the recorder back.

  ‘Here, it’s easy. Just like this.’ He put his arms around Kevin and showed him the steps before waltzing him off around the room.

  They were an unlikely couple, the brilliant young doctor and the animal boy. Kevin was almost as tall as Jeff but was so much thinner and more slightly built. Jeff was very gentle with him, pushing him in the way he should go in such a way that his mistakes did not show. On Kevin’s face there was a profound and enigmatic expression.

  I found myself on the edge of tears as I watched them. There was something beautiful about them and the music and the springtime brilliance streaming through the window. It was a terrible beauty that woke something deep and unspoken inside me. I think it was touching all of us, this uncanny thing.

  When the music stopped, Kevin turned to me. ‘Will you dance with me now, Teacher?’ he asked.

  I regarded him.

  He smiled.

  ‘I’m not as good as Jeff,’ I said.

  The waltz started again and I felt Kevin’s arms around me. The dance was instinctive in him as it had never been in me. He took me confidently and danced with me. Perhaps it was not the waltz. I suspect it wasn’t. Kevin made his own dance. The dance of the phoenix.

  Part II

  Chapter Eighteen

  I heard about Kevin only through Dana. He left Garson Gayer the first day of June and moved to Bellefountaine. In mid-June he went to a special-education summer camp for two weeks. Apparently he was doing well.

  Then I heard no more. That was the way it usually was with my kids. It was something one grew used to, that final parting and then the silence. It seemed incongruous at first, after sharing such intense and intimate moments of each other’s lives, but it was a natural facet of the job.

  For the first two months of summer I carried on as usual at the clinic, working with the kids and teaching a summer-school course at the local college. My time seemed suddenly very free.

  Over the Fourth of July weekend I took Charity camping with me and some of my friends and their children. We went clear up into the Rockies, driving as far through the trees on the mountainside as the Jeep would take us and then packing in almost three miles farther beyond the end of the road.

  Charity complained the entire three miles. She wasn’t used to walking that far, and even though I had found a pair of decent hiking boots for her, she said her feet hurt and her back hurt and she was tired. It was a bit of a bother as my friends’ twin sons who were five and their little girl who was three all carried their own sleeping bags and rucksacks and even the dog carried his food. But Charity didn’t care if she was almost nine and carrying only a pack full of clothes. She was tired and hot and thought the things were too heavy. But since we weren’t in any hurry, when Charity complained of being tired, we stopped. When her back hurt, I took her pack. And in the end, we made it.

  It was a lovely weekend. Charity came alive in the mountains. I taught her to swim in the small, icy pools under the waterfalls. Charity adored that. We had neglected to pack bathing suits, so she started out swimming in her holey, grimy underpants. However, in a short time she had both pairs wet and none dry and so she dropped her inhibitions altogether and cavorted through the water bare. It was the way it should have been, I thought, as I sat on the rocks by the side of the stream and watched her. I had unbraided Charity’s long thick hair and it flowed about her like a black clo
ak. The pudginess which made her fat in polyester was robustness against the wraithlike lodgepole pines that came right down to the pool’s edge. She was beautiful there, a native to the forest and the water, at once one with the world about her.

  She learned to fish too and loved that best of all. She had a hunter’s instinct. Searching out the best ‘holes,’ watching silently on the banks to see fish moving in the depths below became an hours-long occupation for her.

  And there were also the normal chores of camping. Fuel had to be found, fires started. Tents had to be straightened each morning. Suppers of roast potatoes and hot dogs cooked, smoke wafting up through the pines. Afterward we sat around the campfire in the growing dusk telling stories. A far-off forest fire deepened the air around us and made it pungent with a smell which simultaneously evoked warmth and death.

  We made strange conglomerations out of bananas, marshmallows and chocolate bars and wrapped them up in foil to bake in the embers. We told such stories. We all did. Even Maggie, the three-year-old, had a story. So did I. And so did Charity. I suppose because she was so good at creating her own tales, I ought to have known she’d be a storyteller, but I hadn’t. No one among us was more captivated than I when she started in. She was sitting on the far side of the campfire, almost apart from the rest of us. The flames did not illuminate her face as they did ours. It gave mystery to the small, almost disembodied voice that told us of The Unknown One, who was Son of Two Men. We heard of camps and lodges long dead, even in memory, of gods who had no more worshipers, of a people now faded as mist into darkness.

  There were long pauses in Charity’s story. Not thinking pauses so much as listening pauses. She would cock her head and listen to the night sounds and then continue her tale. At one point, with her voice quiet as the wind through the pines, she lapsed into her native tongue. It didn’t matter really. The soft, strange words carried the meaning of the story just as well.