Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said again. ‘Honest, Torey, I don’t. I liked her. I really did. Her name was Margaret and she was really nice to me.’

  ‘What sorts of things happened in the home that night?’

  ‘We were sitting watching TV. I got up to go to bed. And then these other guys started arguing. So I got out of bed again and went to see what was happening.’

  ‘Were the boys arguing with Margaret?’

  ‘No. Just with themselves. And Margaret was standing there. So I broke her arm.’

  ‘You broke Margaret’s arm? Margaret was standing there and the boys were fighting and you came down from your bed and broke her arm? Why? Did it make you angry that they were fighting or something? Why did you break Margaret’s arm then, and not one of the boys’?’

  Kevin shook his head. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You said before that you were angry. How come?’

  Kevin paused. ‘I don’t know. I just got mad at her. And the next thing I knew, I broke her arm. I threw her against the wall.’

  I did not speak. The silence slipped in around us like the tide coming in.

  ‘Remember that time at Garson Gayer?’ Kevin asked. ‘That time in our room when you and me were doing that rocket poster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I got so upset.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that.’

  ‘I could have broke your arm then.’

  ‘Yes, you could have.’

  ‘But I didn’t though,’ he said. ‘They came and got me first.’

  ‘Would you have, if they hadn’t come so soon?’

  He paused thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. That was different.’

  ‘How so?’

  Kevin did not answer immediately. In fact, he took so long in responding that I did not think he would.

  ‘I wasn’t angry at you. I was scared. If I’d have hurt you, I wouldn’t have meant to.’ He glanced at me briefly before hoisting himself off the bed and returning to the window. ‘But I think I might have killed her if I’d had the chance.’

  Chapter Twenty–three

  Then very, very slowly Kevin begin to improve. He had been in the hospital ten weeks before even the slightest signs of growth started again and those weren’t many. Perhaps he would get up when called one morning. Perhaps he would attend the school program or the therapy sessions or the meals without coercion. With excruciating slowness, he began earning his points, and at last Jeff or I could come every time without interruption.

  What caused the improvement was not clear. Undoubtedly, it was a combination of things. There was, however, no new face to his personality. This gradual change for the better was not one of Kevin’s chameleon shifts, and that gave Jeff and me some hope that the boy we now worked with was the real Kevin and that the improvement, agonizingly slow as it was, was genuine.

  Jeff started to be more and more obsessed with Kevin’s past. The records were so spotty. Certainly, for a kid who had spent so much of his life tangled up in the red tape of the welfare system, very little indeed was written about him. He seemed almost to be a kid without a past, despite the fact that both Jeff and I knew from our conversations with Kevin that he had had a childhood worth noting.

  One morning I came into the office to find Jeff kneeling on the floor and dozens of little bits of paper spread out around him. Carefully, he was shifting the pieces back and forth from one place to another.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. He was due to speak at a conference later in the morning and was all kitted out in a three-piece suit and tie. When I found him on his hands and knees on the floor with all that paper, I thought perhaps he had dropped some odd sort of material for his presentation.

  Jeff rose up on his knees and surveyed the situation. ‘Well, when I was in bed last night I got to thinking. Trying to figure out how all the pieces of Kevin’s background go together. You know, your old jigsaw theory. But I just couldn’t conceptualize it.’ Then he looked up with a grin full of boyish pride. ‘So I’ve made the jigsaw puzzle up.’

  ‘You idiot,’ I laughed. ‘It was a figure of speech.’

  ‘Well, I got to thinking, if I made a sort of time line … and put in order …’ He studied the paper on the floor.

  I walked around the snowfall and knelt down myself to see what Jeff had written on the bits of paper.

  ‘See, here’s his stepfather,’ said Jeff. ‘And there’s Carol. I think Carol’s mixed up in this. His relationship …’

  I picked up another piece of paper.

  ‘How many sisters does Kevin have?’ Jeff asked. ‘There’s Carol …’

  ‘And Barbara. He told me about Barbara.’

  ‘Then who’s Ellen?’

  ‘Ellen? I never heard about Ellen. Besides, we got two and that’s all his folder says there is. Just two sisters. And we know about Carol and Barbara.’

  ‘But there’s Ellen. He mentioned Ellen once. Do you suppose Carol’s a brother? Carroll and not Carol at all?’ Jeff suggested.

  ‘No. He drew a picture of her for me once. And he says “she” when he’s talking about her. We wouldn’t have made that mistake.’

  Jeff shifted a piece of paper around. ‘Okay, so if this area is his early childhood, before he got carted off to a residential center, when do you reckon the abusive acts he talks about took place? There isn’t really anything in his records on it, is there?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You do think it’s true, don’t you?’ Jeff looked up. ‘You don’t think he’s fabricating a lot of this? I mean, he’s such a clever so-and-so sometimes.’

  ‘No. I’ve seen his back. Have you seen it? All those little scars. If they happened, the other stuff probably did too.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you something, Tor, something that’s been eating at me. But it sounds farfetched. Do you suppose he’s making Carol up? That she’s some sort of fantasy person? That things got so bad for him that he had to personify some of his feelings? Make up someone who cared for him?’

  The same thought had crossed my mind too, but deep down I couldn’t believe it. Yet, hadn’t Charity told all those fantastic stories, and I’d swallowed half of them before I discovered the truth? And Kevin was so much subtler than Charity. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  Again Jeff moved bits of paper. He regarded them, shifted another. Then he rose and sat in his desk chair so he could survey the whole arrangement. I leaned over and brushed the dirt off the knees of his trousers.

  ‘His mother …’ Jeff said thoughtfully and leaned down for one scrap. ‘I wonder where his mother got to. How long’s she been off the scene?’

  ‘Since Garson Gayer, I think. I’m not altogether sure.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Jeff suddenly and crumpled up the piece of paper he was holding. He pitched it across the room. ‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit.’ He looked at me, his forehead puckered in angry frustration. ‘God damn it, Torey, how the hell are we supposed to do anything? Look at this. Look at this damned sideshow we’re running. We don’t know anything. How can anyone expect to help a kid when we don’t even know who his mother is? The kid might as well not even exist for all we know about him. Damn it. We’re like fortune-tellers. We might as well be reading tea leaves.’ He kicked out at the papers and they fluttered up into the air.

  I felt sorry for Jeff then, for his distress, which was mine as well. He was right, of course. But that didn’t make it any better.

  When I got to the hospital later in the day, I was accosted by one of the nurses. Kevin, she said, had stolen a coat.

  A coat?

  They knew he had to be the guilty party. He had been the only one in the vicinity at the time, and all the other kids had been cleared. The evidence all pointed to Kevin. Since he was still refusing to talk to anyone, would I take the matter up with him?

  Horrible thoughts went through my head. Why on earth would Kevin take a coat? The only thing I could imagine was that old
specter of his stepfather had come back to haunt him and he had decided to run off and kill him once and for all. The conversations between Kevin and me were slowly turning back to his family again, so that was the only thing in my mind. It was a dreadful thought.

  But why steal a coat? That didn’t make 100 percent good sense. Kevin did, after all, have a coat of his own. Right there in his room.

  Hating to have to take up an argument that I initially was not part of, I begrudgingly went into Kevin’s room. He was sitting on the edge of the dresser. It had been pushed closer to the window, and he sat there on it, with his feet on the windowsill.

  ‘Kev,’ I said, ‘I hate to be the bearer of tales but I understand there’s been some trouble up here.’ I closed the door firmly behind me.

  ‘Oh? I’m not having any trouble.’

  ‘Over a coat.’

  ‘Oh, that trouble,’ he replied knowingly.

  ‘Yep. That trouble. You want to clear it up for me? They seem to feel you’re involved. Are you?’

  ‘Me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What would I want a coat for?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, that’s what I told them. But they seem to still feel you may have taken it.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just have a look around the room for it then. Just to say I checked the matter out thoroughly. Okay?’

  ‘I didn’t take it, Torey. I wrote them a note. I said to them I didn’t take it. And I didn’t. Why are they making you come after me?’

  ‘Do you mind if I look around?’

  ‘I didn’t take it! Yeah, go ahead. Look if you want to. Search me. Search my room. See if I took the stupid coat. What would I want a coat for anyway? I never go out.’

  I was beginning to have a hunch he did take it. His voice was rising in pitch and something in his demeanor hinted at guilt. ‘Yes, I was thinking those same things myself, but the question is, did you take it?’

  ‘I didn’t! How many times do I have tell you I didn’t?’

  I paused and looked over at him.

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Well, if you did, it would probably just be easier to go get the coat for me and not make me have to look for it. Then we could get on with other things.’

  His face crumpled and I thought he was going to cry. ‘I said I didn’t. Why don’t you believe me? I said I didn’t.’

  I pulled the orange plastic chair over and sat down. ‘Sometimes these sorts of things happen. They shouldn’t and it would be nicer if they didn’t, but they do. People are that way. Everybody does this sort of thing occasionally.’

  Kevin just sat, his face frozen in a grimace, not crying but not quite not crying either.

  ‘Why don’t you just get me the coat, okay? And I’ll take it out to the nurses’ desk and we’ll be finished and done with it. All right, Kevin?’

  The pause was lengthy. ‘I didn’t take it,’ he said one more time under his breath and kicked at the dresser with one toe. When I said nothing and did not rise to search the room, he regarded me through his eyelashes. Then very slowly he rose from where he was sitting. His movements were heavy as if his limbs were unwilling to cooperate. Coming over to the bed, he lifted the mattress. There folded carefully between the mattress and the box spring was a duffel coat with toggle buttons and a hood. Kevin took it out gently and handed it to me. Then he returned to the window. I went and took the coat out to the nurses’ desk.

  ‘Kev?’

  He knew what I was going to ask. ‘I thought you said we were going to be finished with it, if I gave it to you. You weren’t going to ask any questions.’

  ‘I was just wondering … Just between you and me.’

  ‘I thought you said.’

  ‘I did say, I guess. And if you want, I won’t ask any questions.’

  ‘I do want.’ With that he turned and came over to the bed and sat down on it.

  Most of the session passed quietly. We did other things and talked on other topics. However, for both of us the coat remained a ghost haunting every conversation. Toward the end, just as I was packing up, Kevin relented.

  He rose from the bed, paced the small room, kicked at the dresser leg and the chair leg before settling down in front of the window. Half his life must have been given over to that window.

  ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘clothes make you feel like you are inside. Have you ever noticed that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was weird. I saw that coat … I saw it and I thought, well, …’ He paused. There was dust on the windowsill and he reached out to push it aside with one finger. ‘That’s sort of a Bryan coat. You know what I mean? That’s the sort of coat a Bryan would wear, it’s so neat looking.’ He turned. ‘I wasn’t stealing it, Torey. I wasn’t, honest. I just wanted to try it on. I just wanted to see what I’d look like in it.’ He smiled pathetically. ‘That was all, just to try it on. But I couldn’t very well ask, could I?’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I suggested.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have understood. It was me asking. Bryan could’ve but not me. They didn’t see Bryan. Even if I’d had the coat on, they wouldn’t have noticed. It would’ve just been nerdy old Kevin in somebody else’s coat.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so I had to sort of borrow it. So they wouldn’t laugh at me. I just wanted to try it on.’ He returned to the window.

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘Torey?’ he asked without turning back to look at me.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you think it was a neat-looking coat?’

  ‘Yes. It was a lovely coat, wasn’t it?’

  He nodded. ‘Bryan might have wore it, huh?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  I came over and stood beside him. There was an inward sort of smile on his lips and it stayed a long time before finally playing itself out. I thought he was going to say something else; the expectant atmosphere lingered. But he didn’t. He only stood with his hands in his pockets. Beyond him I could see the snow falling, and the grinding gray filth of the city below us faded under downy white.

  Chapter Twenty–four

  Hockey season was well launched, and Hans had promised us tickets to one of the home games. Consequently, there we were, one pre-Christmas Saturday evening, getting ourselves ready to go watch hockey. Personally I despised the game, something I could hardly say to Hans. It seemed like gladiators on ice to me, needlessly brutal and gory. I had been surprised the first time I met Hans to learn that he was a local team hockey player because he had seemed such a pleasant, even-tempered chap and not at all how I had stereotyped men who played hockey. So I had to admit I was looking forward to going just to see Hans play. He could never bring himself to make Charity behave when she was larking about obnoxiously, so I was curious to see him lustily bashing in the skulls of the other team.

  Unfortunately, it was not an ideal occasion to go. I was baby-sitting that weekend. My next-door neighbors were a likeable but somewhat odd couple, part of the expired flower-power generation, and they had produced a likeable but odd daughter. Her name was Shayna-Jasmine, she wouldn’t eat meat or anything that didn’t come out of a sack from the health food store and she had some extremely liberated topics of conversation for a four-year-old. She’d also been born prematurely with a stomach tumor and had subsequently had most of her stomach removed. This meant I had to feed her six times a day instead of three and that she threw up a lot.

  But Saturday night was the game Hans got tickets for, so Saturday night, Jeff, Charity, Shayna-Jasmine and I packed up a tailgate picnic and left for the sports arena.

  Charity loved the hockey game. All the blood and gore were right up her alley. Jeff, too, was a keen enthusiast. So he and Charity did a lot of yelling and cheering for Hans’s benefit. That left Shayna-Jasmine and me to puzzle out a game neither of us understood too well.

  ‘What are they doing?’ S
hayna-Jasmine asked after half a dozen men swooped down on some poor fallen teammate, all their sticks flying.

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ I replied.

  ‘What’s that thing for?’ she asked, pointing to a strange-looking affair over by one team’s goal.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  We watched in silence. The teams skated by and there was a frantic attempt to place a goal which ended in a pileup right below our seats and some nasty hollering, all the words of which were in Shayna-Jasmine’s vocabulary already.

  Shayna pulled at my arm. ‘How come they’re fighting?’

  ‘They’re trying to get that little puck there.’

  ‘Well, how come they don’t just ask for it?’

  ‘The other men wouldn’t give it to them.’

  ‘Well, they could say please, ’she replied emphatically.

  I smiled at her. ‘That’s not part of the game.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said and gave a disgruntled little sigh. ‘It’s a stupid game, isn’t it?’

  Afterward, after the teams had changed and left and the maintenance men were cleaning the ice, Hans came out of the locker room with pairs of skates in his hands.

  ‘I thought maybe we could all skate a little while they’re redoing the ice. Before they refreeze the surface. It wouldn’t be so slippery for the girls.’

  Hans grinned. He had evidentally planned this as a small surprise for Charity and Shayna-Jasmine. The arena was a regular rink during part of the week and had a large supply of skates to rent, so before the game he had gone down and gotten skates from the rental room for all of us.

  I hesitated to point out to him that it was after eleven at night and both girls were a little bleary-eyed. Plus Jeff had been feeding licorice to Shayna the entire game, and I was sure she was going to throw up all over us if we jiggled her too much. But naturally, the prospect of such fun appealed greatly to Charity, who came wide awake again and had her shoes off and was tugging at the skates before I found the heart to object.