Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  Then we were alone, Charity and I, snuggled warm in our sleeping bags. The air was summer warm, a breezy, breath-soft sort of night, and the stars were veiled behind distant smoke. I left the flap of the tent open so that we could see the night.

  We had camped up on a ridge between two mountains. The taller was to our left, an old extinct volcano named Hollowtop. From where we lay in the tent, the huge massif of the mountain was silhouetted against the hazy tapestry of stars.

  Long after all was quiet in the camp and I had drifted asleep, I heard Charity call out cautiously. ‘Torey?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Where are we?’

  I rolled over sleepily. ‘In the tent. We’re camping, remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she replied, a little troubled.

  ‘Are you frightened, Charity?’

  ‘Oh no. Not me.’

  Silence.

  Are there any bears up here, Torey?’ she inquired politely.

  ‘No,’ I answered.’ I shouldn’t think there are. They’d be other places.’

  ‘Do you know that for sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There might be bears.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I know bears, Charity. And none would be here.’

  ‘What if there were?’

  ‘I’d keep them all away from you, Char. I’d keep you very safe. Now go back to sleep.’

  ‘Torey? How’d you keep me safe? Would you fight ’em?’

  ‘I’d fight ’em, Char. And I’d win. Now go to sleep.’

  Silence.

  ‘Torey?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  Are there any lions, Torey?’

  ‘No. There are absolutely, positively no lions. None at all here. Now go back to sleep and don’t worry about it.’

  ‘What about mountain lions? There might be mountain lions.’

  ‘No. No mountain lions. I’d hear them, if there were. And I don’t. So we’re quite safe. Now go to sleep.’ I closed my eyes. Charity moved her sleeping bag closer to mine and I made a little hollow where she could cuddle.

  The night-time stillness came down again and I thought she had fallen back asleep.

  ‘Torey?’ in the tiniest voice.

  ‘Yes, Charity.’

  ‘Well, my mom said I wasn’t to sleep with you unless you asked me to. But if you did ask me, well, she said I could, you know.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I thought you’d want to know that. Just in case you did want me to sleep with you.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘No. No. I just thought you might be cold or something and didn’t like to ask. But if you did want me to, I wouldn’t mind.’

  Sleepily I sat up. I smiled at her. ‘Yes, I wanted you to sleep with me all along.’

  She broke into a most glorious smile. ‘I thought you did!’

  Then I took a month off and went to Wales.

  The cool, misty mountains in the north of that small country had become a home to my heart. I never knew quite why; I only knew the yearning, the hiraeth, as the Welsh called it in their own language. So in late July I packed my mountain boots and my rucksack and left the clinic and the city and the hot Western summer behind. I spent weeks walking through the wet, wild places, across the windy moors and over the Pass of the Arrows, where King Arthur met defeat. Nights were spent in small stone cottages of friends or around the coal fire in the pub while mists rolled up from the Irish Sea. They are called simply The High Places by their own people. And one local poet said that the Welsh left their mountains only once because they could never bear the pain of leaving them again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My head was still somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when the phone rang. I lifted my head from the pillow and was totally disoriented. It was daylight. Morning? Afternoon? Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? I still had not managed to answer that question satisfactorily by the time I had stumbled to the telephone.

  It was Jeff. I was in no mood for his company.

  ‘My God, Jeff, I just got back. What are you calling at this time of day for anyway? What time is it?’

  ‘8:30.’

  ‘Oh. In the evening? The morning?’

  ‘In the morning. I’m at the office.’

  I was squinting at the kitchen clock. Yes, it was 8:30. ‘I’m not due in today, Jeff. It’s still my vacation. I’m not coming in until Monday.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Then what on earth do you want?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, and there was a sigh. ‘Do you remember Kevin Richter? From Garson Gayer?’

  ‘Of course I remember him.’

  ‘He’s in the psychiatric unit at Mortenson Hospital.’

  I came fully awake. In a way I wish I hadn’t. I wished I were still in Wales and this was all just a dream.

  On a hot August night Kevin had apparently become involved in a fracas out in Bellefountaine with a couple of other boys and with a woman counselor. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, according to Jeff, but Kevin seemed to have attacked the woman in the course of an argument. He broke her arm and dislocated her shoulder. The police were called. Kevin was summarily removed from the home and taken down to the juvenile center at the courthouse.

  Geez, I said. Just wait, Jeff replied, that’s only the first of it.

  Kevin was retained at juvenile hall for three or four days while they tried to decide what to do with him. Then he broke out. Loose for two days in the city, he had broken into the clinic the previous night.

  The clinic? I echoed. Yeah, Jeff said. Our office. What the hell did he want to break into our office for? I asked.

  Easy. He was looking for his knife, for the blue metal bedstead knife he had given me to keep for him so many months before. Did I remember that? Jeff asked. How could I forget it. Apparently, Kevin had only one goal in mind when he escaped from juvenile hall. To kill his stepfather. He knew I had the knife, although he didn’t know I had been on vacation. A boy matching his description had been around the clinic during the day, pestering Shirley, the receptionist, to see me. When she had told him I wasn’t due back yet, from Wales, he had left. Then after dark, he had broken in.

  They caught him, the police did, him and his knife, which he had found in my desk drawer. Now he was in the high-security unit at Mortenson.

  Understandably, Jeff and a whole lot of other people were quite keen for me to come in to work. You ought to see what our office looks like, Jeff said. You just wait. And wait until the people from Mortenson get hold of you. They’re dying to talk to you.

  I just bet they were.

  I went into the bathroom, ran a basin full of water and had a good scrub. As I pulled the washcloth down over my face, I saw myself in the mirror. I literally had not been back Twenty–four hours and was exhausted. It showed in my face and no amount of soap and water could wash it away.

  I arrived to find our office a declared disaster area. All the drawers had been pulled out of both our desks and the contents strewn about the floor. The bookshelves had been emptied. Paper was everywhere.

  Jeff sat in his office chair in the middle of it all. He looked like I felt, devastated.

  ‘I suppose it’s what we should have expected,’ he said forlornly as I picked my way across the room and sat down in my chair. ‘There had to be more to that kid, didn’t there? It couldn’t have been as easy as it was, could it? Not after all those years.’

  ‘I had been kind of hoping it had been,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, So had I. But …’ Jeff swiveled his chair back and forth aimlessly. ‘I guess I have to face the fact that the kid never really ever told me much. Not really. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think he ever told me anything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I looked over at him.

  Jeff shrugged. ‘You know. You know as well as I do. He just never said anything. It was all surface stuff. It’s just that…’Jeff paused. ‘It’s just
that I got so sick of you. You always sitting there, saying “My gut says this.” “My gut says that.”’ He smiled drily. ‘I knew you were right all along. I knew the stupid kid wasn’t telling me a damned thing, that it was all just some sort of class act of his. But I got so blooming sick of hearing about you and your gut …’

  I grimaced.

  Jeff shrugged again. ‘But I got nothing from him. And after a while you begin to believe in nothing.’

  ‘I’d believed,’ I said softly. ‘I think I really did believe that he was getting better. I thought we’d fixed him.’

  I felt like crying. I hadn’t wanted Jeff to say something like that to me. I hadn’t wanted to know the actual problem had been the communication between him and me. Most of all, I hadn’t wanted to be right.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Jeff gently, ‘I guess maybe I believed him too.’ He smiled at me. ‘Don’t blame yourself for it.’

  ‘But he was getting better. He did improve, didn’t he? What more was there? I guess I thought maybe that was enough.’

  ‘I guess we both did,’ Jeff replied.

  ‘But he was improving, Jeff. He did get better. Even this, Jeff, is better than what he was under his table. At least I think maybe it is. I don’t know. What more is there? I have no answers. I was good at the questions but I never had any answers.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We never had any answers. In a way we never even had all the questions. We really don’t have anything.’

  The hospital wanted me up there. They recognized, I suspect, the strange, twisted part I was playing in this. Moreover, Kevin had ceased talking. He hadn’t said a single word to anyone other than the police. So after an hour with Jeff in the office, picking up the ruins of our desk drawers, I got back into the car and drove across the city to Mortenson Hospital.

  It was a huge hospital, one that I did not know because it had no affiliation with the clinic. It was built up on a rocky outcropping overlooking the city, and part of the hospital was as many as ten stories high while other parts, because of the hill, were only seven or eight stories. It was a gigantic complex, sprawling over the rocky ledges above the river like a great sleeping beast.

  While the hospital catered mainly to medical patients, it contained the county’s largest long-term psychiatric unit. It also had the only unit equipped to hold the criminally disturbed. The entire fifth floor was devoted to psychiatry, and getting into the unit was an experience in itself. One had to take a public elevator to the fourth floor then locate the private elevator, which went only to the fifth. To use the private elevator, one had to be accompanied or be issued a key. On the fifth floor, the elevator opened into a reception area. One’s appointment was confirmed and a large set of metal double doors were opened electronically by the receptionist. Inside these there was a second set of double doors. There one buzzed the unit and a staff member came and unlocked one of the doors.

  I had been in a number of hospital psychiatric wards before, including the ones at the University of Minnesota where I had worked, and I had never come across a security system as imposing as this one. After I got used to it, I could get through the entire setup in about four minutes, if the elevators cooperated. But that first day I got lost repeatedly and confused and grilled by untold numbers of white-suited people before I finally made it, almost twenty minutes after coming through the front door.

  Kevin was in his room. It was a long, narrow room with a largish window at the far end and a bed and chest of drawers, which reduced the width of it even more. There was a chair, too, a small plastic sucking type. Kevin’s gangly frame was sprawled over it.

  He regarded me as the nurse led me in. He didn’t look especially surprised to see me. Perhaps he had known all along that his actions would bring me back in one way or another.

  He’d grown since I’d last seen him. He must have reached six feet sometime during the summer. His hair was quite a bit longer. It still kept roughly the style Jeff’s barber had given it in the spring but it was shaggy now. The rumpled length gave him a sort of wild look, not unappealing, but different. In a way he was even rather attractive. His skin was dramatically improved. Either the summer sun had helped or the antibiotics had finally taken hold. He was seventeen now and he definitely had the look of manhood about him. It had been a long, long year since last September.

  I asked the nurse to leave us. When she did, I shut the door behind her quietly but firmly. Then I returned to where Kevin was sitting. There was no other chair in the tiny, narrow room so I sat on the bed.

  We regarded one another in silence.

  ‘So?’ I said at last.

  Kevin looked down at his hands and shrugged.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ I asked.

  Another shrug.

  Silence. It was a wicked silence, grabbing me around the throat and not letting go. I kept having to swallow.

  And deep inside I was angry. I could feel it and identify it as anger. ‘Whatever were you thinking of, Kevin? What did you do out there? What happened at Bellefountaine? And what the hell did you think you were doing with the knife?’

  No answer.

  Silence. And again silence. Just like all my other feelings, the anger sat in my gut. It boiled. Putting my hand over my stomach, I could feel it, pulsating heavily to the rhythm of my heart.

  ‘You want to be your father’s son? Is that what you want? You want to prove to everyone that you’re just as brutal a man as your stepfather is? He’s getting inside you, Kevin, and if he does, you’ll never kill him because you’ll be carrying him around with you. You’ll never be rid of him. Is that what you want? To be like him?’

  Kevin sighed.

  ‘There’s a better path for you. There’s a better way than that one. Don’t go out and prove that everything he said about you is true.’

  There was no change in Kevin’s expression. In fact, there almost was no expression. He only sat in his chair, twiddling his fingers back and forth. He would not look at me.

  ‘So what the hell did you think you were doing?’ I asked. ‘What got into you?’

  His shoulders sagged slightly. He took a deep breath. ‘You know Murphy’s Law?’ he said softly, ‘the one about if anything can go wrong, it will?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I reckon I must be Murphy’s boy.’

  Chapter Twenty

  And so, we started over again.

  Kevin crashed into depression within days of arriving at Mortenson. I don’t know what caused the depression. Perhaps having lost the opportunity to kill his stepfather – that central goal in his life – left him empty and without focus. Perhaps it was just another way of avoiding the war within himself that we on the outside could not yet fully see. It could have been any number of things, but whatever it was, he plunged headlong past us into it and left us with less to work with than we had had before.

  The logistics of starting over were wretched. What the hospital wanted from me was my ability to make Kevin talk again, because at that moment, apparently he talked to no one except me. However, they didn’t want me for therapy. They had their own therapists, and Kevin now had a psychiatrist, as well, the man who had admitted him from the emergency room when the police brought him in. Therefore, it was obvious they would not allow Jeff to come at all. Policies regarding actual psychiatrists were rigid.

  The hospital did not want to pay the clinic for my release. Under what sort of contract could they obtain my services? Could I guarantee the length of time I would be involved? Could I guarantee my work, if they paid the clinic in advance? God, it sounded like I was repairing motor cars or something. And what about my unorthodox preference for seeing the patient more than once a week? Would that cost proportionately more? Would they have to pay me for every visit? Or could they just pay, say, for a block of time, like two weeks? Money, money, money. All was money.

  I wanted Jeff. And Jeff wanted to come. But there was no way. He was overqualified. They could not ignore the f
act that he was a bona fide psychiatrist, despite his willingness to attest that he was working under me, the psychologist, on this case. Back and forth we went over the issue. How much would he cost? The clinic would have to release him, even if the hospital would not pay for him. Understandably, that upset the clinic and made them unwilling. And because the hospital was paying the clinic for my services and not paying me, myself, I could not give over part of my income to cover Jeff. It was a nightmare in 3-D.

  In the end we cheated a bit. My integrity was not such that it disallowed a little fiddling. They didn’t actually know what Jeff looked like over the hospital, so we gave in to them about not having him as co-therapist and dropped the issue. Jeff was then reduced to the ignominious role of ‘research assistant’ with my elective mutism project and came in to see Kevin as my ‘aide.’ Because the clinic did not feel it could afford to release him, Jeff had agreed to come in on his own time after work. And bless him, when I offered to pay him meagerly from the funds of my research grant, he just shrugged and smiled and said not to worry about it.

  It was all through this tangle of finances, when I spent so much time with Dr Rosenthal and the clinic bookkeeper, that I began to perceive one of the major differences between what I did in education and what I was doing now. There is something basically disgusting about being paid to care about someone and being able to decide on the basis of money, if one will or will not become or remain involved in someone else’s life. While teaching, I had been paid only to transfer knowledge. The caring I did for the kids had been all my own. But all of this work now at the clinic seemed a little whorish to me.

  The first few weeks were agony. Kevin was terribly depressed. He had plunged us all back into the old quagmire of selective speech because, while he willingly spoke to Jeff and me, he spoke to no one else, and nothing we did or said could persuade him to do otherwise. It was a saving grace, I suppose, because if he had talked to others, undoubtedly Jeff and I would have been booted out.