Silent Boy

by Torey Hayden

  I let us into the schoolroom. Carefully, I shut the door behind us. I unlocked the closet at the back of the room.

  The closet was pantry sized, maybe eight feet long and four or five feet wide. On both sides there were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with a glorious array of things, every conceivable type of art paper, tempera paints, watercolors, boxes of crayons and chalk and colored pencils. There were books and note pads and workbooks. It was chockablock with all the sorts of things that my greedy little teacher’s heart coveted.

  ‘Here,’ I said, taking down some paper and giving it to him. ‘You can carry that. What kind of paint do you want? Tempera? Or do you want to use watercolor? Here, look these over.’

  He stood behind me, between me and the door, while I rummaged around at the far end of the closet getting different types of paint out.

  ‘Kev, which do you want?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Kevin, come here and decide. Do you want these? Or this kind? Or we could use these and these. What do you think? You’re the artist. You decide.’

  The lights went out.

  I turned in the darkness. ‘Kevin?’

  There was no sound. I could see nothing whatsoever.

  ‘Did you hit the light switch? Or have we had a power failure? What a place to be stuck in a power failure, huh!’

  I could hear him but he said nothing. Suspicion began to build in my head. ‘What’s going on, Kevin? Did you turn off the light?’

  I heard him move toward me. There in the closet, he did not have to move far before we were chest to chest. It remained so black that I couldn’t even make out his outline.

  ‘Kevin, move back.’

  He pressed against me.

  ‘Kevin, I said move back. I’m not kidding. I mean it. Move yourself back.’

  He pressed closer.

  ‘Kevin, I said move back.’

  His body was heavy against me; his breath was hot. Fear came bolting up into my mouth like bile.

  ‘Don’t do this, Kevin. Don’t do it. Don’t.’

  ‘I hate you,’ he whispered back. The words were cold, like a knife blade. His hands were on me. On my shoulder, on my breasts.

  ‘Come on, Kevin, give over. Stop it. Cut it out.’

  ‘I hate you.’

  I was scared. I was scared like I had never been scared in all my life. No other time, no other situation had ever made me feel the way I did just then. Everything gave way to fear. Even the hyped-up bravado I normally felt in moments of high tension. All was gone from me except for fear. The sickly sweet stench of it hung in the air about me.

  His hand was fumbling on my shirt, groping at the buttons. His body was tight against mine, heavy enough to press me painfully against the shelves in back.

  And it was the little things that added eerie reality to the moment, the soft crinkling of fallen paper as it was walked on, the waxy odor of crayons, which had always meant warm, sunny classrooms and children’s laughter to me before, but never again. Sweat had run down along my body and through my shirt. I felt a piece of newsprint stick to me as I managed to move a little to relieve the pressure on my backbone.

  Thank God for small buttons. He could not get them undone in the blackness and I kept wriggling beneath his fingers to make sure he wouldn’t. Yet I moved slowly because I was afraid to upset him too much.

  Then came the unaccountably loud sound of his fly being unzipped.

  ‘Kevin, stop it!’

  ‘I’m a man now, Momma. I’m gonna show you I’m a man.’

  ‘Kevin!’

  We fumbled violently in the dark for a few moments, him pressing closer, me wiggling first this way and then that. He had not managed to breach any of my clothes yet, and I was grateful for tough old Levi’s and a sturdy bra beneath my shirt.

  ‘I’m gonnna show you, Momma,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m not your momma, Kevin.’

  ‘Shut up. You bitch. Shut up, you.’

  Silence. The stink of fear was nauseating me. It smelled like jasmine or orange blossoms, only far too sweet, and under it was a musky odor, like fox.

  ‘Let me go, Kevin. I’m not your momma. It’s just me. I’m Torey. I’m not your momma.’

  ‘Shut up, bitch.’ His hand came up under my chin. ‘I’m gonna make you hurt. I’m gonna make you know what hurt is.’

  ‘You don’t want to hurt me, Kevin,’ I said. His body was against me; I could hear his breathing near my left ear. I could feel the rock-hard warmth of his penis against my left side.

  ‘It’s me, Kevin. Me. No one else. You don’t want to hurt me.’

  ‘I said shut up. Now shut up! I mean it. Shut up!’ He forced himself against me, pinning me into the corner of the shelves. I could hear him though; I could hear his breathing. He was growing upset.

  ‘Zip up your pants, Kevin. Zip them up and turn the lights on and let’s get out of here.’

  ‘I hate you! You bitch. You bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. I hate you so much.’ He was almost sobbing, his voice almost incoherent.

  ‘I’m not your momma, Kevin. I’m not her.’

  ‘Shut up!’ He swung at me to shut me up. In the close space he could not help but hit me fully, and because I had not known it was coming, I hadn’t ducked. He hit me squarely on the side of my head. My ears rang.

  I hit him back. Immediately. It won me enough space to reach the light switch. I turned it on and what had been a small eternal night dissolved into forty-watt brightness.

  I had hit Kevin hard. He’d sunk to the floor with his arms over his face. There was blood, although I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine. He was crying, either from pain or misery or both. I stood a moment, my hand still over the switch, and watched him. I had to admit, I wasn’t feeling very sorry for him.

  Chapter Thirty–one

  There had been no choice about whether or not to report what had taken place between Kevin and me in the art closet. While it was over and done with and I had come out of the incident none the worse for the wear, it was not the sort of thing one could shrug off.

  I was feeling angry and unsettled. The experience had been humiliating for me, regardless of what might have prompted it and whether Kevin ever did distinguish me from his mother. But reporting it was even more awful. I guess I should have known such a thing was a possibility when working with a seventeen-year-old but up until then I had not given it serious consideration. In my baggy jeans and work shirts, I was hardly dressing provocatively, and Kevin’s sexuality had never been a problem before. When it had appeared, Jeff had dealt with it, explaining to Kevin those things he needed to know.

  Even in the midst of the turmoil that followed, however, I could not believe Kevin had plotted the act beforehand. A lot of emotions had been building up in him over the preceding weeks. The big breakthrough I had anticipated after he had told me about Carol had perhaps happened after all, although in a way I hadn’t expected.

  While Kevin was and always had been openly hostile regarding his stepfather, this sudden violence led me to speculate that the hard-core hate he nursed was actually for his mother. It was easier to hate his stepfather. After all, he’d murdered Carol. He had perpetrated all the abuse. And he was an outsider to the family unit. That produced a straightforward, uncomplicated sort of hate. But it was Kevin’s feelings for his mother that abruptly began taking precedence in my thoughts. Added to the murky complexities of any child’s relationship with its mother was the fact that Kevin’s mother had been able to abandon her son willingly in favor of a violent, brutal man. That experience must have hurt Kevin in a way that someone like me with my normal experiences in life had no concept of. And perhaps most important, I now saw the impact that Kevin’s mother’s behavior on the night of Carol’s death had had. She had betrayed Carol by standing there and doing nothing. And she had murdered her relationship with her son. He had not forgotten and he had certainly not forgiven. I had little doubt that by the ti
me she gave Kevin up to the state when he was twelve, he had long since given her up.

  So, I could not believe, even in the worst of the chaos that followed the incident in the closet, that Kevin had consciously planned to corner me. It was just one of those things. The weeks had piled in upon themselves and the emotions had just become too much to control. In the dark of an art closet, anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way could have been his mother.

  But in the heat of the moment, lucid analysis didn’t matter much. My own emotions continued to run high. It just wasn’t the sort of occurrence that one could be totally rational about. And I wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood myself, when I had to sit down with Dr Rosenthal and Dr Winslow and then the nursing staff and tell them what had transpired and what I believe led up to it and then answer their questions. I felt nothing but embarrassment and confusion. I was angry with myself for having gotten into such a vulnerable position. I was resentful and suspicious of the other people and their allusions and implications. I was distressed that I had managed to sit behind a book for four weeks and feel all that anger building up in Kevin and still was stupid enough not to do something constructive about it. But most of all I was humiliated, not only because I was forced to sit and talk repeatedly about such personal matters with every passing soul who showed an interest, but chiefly because my professional judgment had taken such a crushingly public blow.

  I knew what had to be done. I knew when four-thirty rolled around the next afternoon that I had to return to the hospital and see Kevin. It was like falling off a horse. One has to get right back on again then and there or one never will. So, gritting my teeth to get by the nurses’ station, I went back.

  Kevin was in his room under the blankets of his bed. He had pulled them so high that not even the top of his head showed. Well, I said, and sat down in the orange chair, that was that. We goofed. But it was over and we were best off forgetting that it had happened. I wasn’t angry, I said to him when he still refused to come out from under the covers, and immediately I realized I was. The hurt was too new. When he lay there and wouldn’t talk to me and wouldn’t even come out from under the stupid blanket and look at me, I exploded. He’d ruined everything I’d tried to do for him, I said. He’d betrayed me, more in heart and spirit than in body.

  Kevin for his part let me have my little bit of scream therapy. He just lay there and never moved a muscle.

  Back at the clinic the next morning I was called down to Dr Rosenthal’s office. He wasn’t alone. Dr Winslow sat, like an aging Adonis, and smiled sweetly.

  ‘We’ve been talking,’ Dr Rosenthal said, ‘and we’ve come to the conclusion that it would be best to close the Richter case. Dr Winslow and I have discussed it and it seems the best for all concerned if you and I pull out of it and leave it to them at the hospital.’

  I looked at him.

  Silence.

  ‘I can get myself out of this,’ I said. ‘It was stupid. I know it was my fault. But it’s over now.’

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘The worst of it’s behind us,’ I said. ‘I went over to the hospital last night and Kevin and I, we can survive it. I’m quite sure. If we just have a little time.’

  ‘No,’ said Dr Rosenthal.

  ‘Why?’ I looked from one man to the other. Abruptly all my emotions, all the anger and embarrassment and humiliation, gave way to panic. Of course the possibility of closing down the case existed when something like this occurred. The possibility always existed. But I’d never given it much thought.

  ‘Couldn’t I just try for a little longer?’ I asked. ‘Maybe if you wanted to supervise the case … if you wanted to come in yourself personally …’ I said, first to Dr Rosenthal and then when he did not respond, to Dr Winslow. Desperately, I searched their faces for some negation of what I now was realizing was inevitable.

  Dr Rosenthal shook his head. ‘I’m afraid this just isn’t the best case for you, Torey. Kevin’s had a traumatic life. You’re young; you’re good looking; you’re awfully female, whether you mean to be or not. It makes it too easy for things to happen.’

  For the first time since the whole crazy episode had started, I began to cry. Was this going to be it? Was one and a half whole years of my life going to end like this? So suddenly? So simply? So stupidly? Just because of all the millions of times I had had to guess with this kid, this one time I had guessed wrong?

  ‘We’ll get a male therapist in,’ Dr Winslow said. His tone was comforting and he leaned toward me.

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Rosenthal agreed. ‘Look how well Kevin did with Jeff Tomlinson. That’d be better. Don’t you think? Now, honestly? You yourself were talking about all the bad feelings Kevin had for his mother. Maybe a woman therapist just is not a good idea for him, period. He’s too unstable.’

  ‘He’s not unstable,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t because …’

  Dr Rosenthal raised his shoulders in a shruglike motion. It was a pathetic little movement, and then he looked away. He couldn’t meet my eyes any longer. ‘It’s a tragic way to end a case, Torey, I know that,’ he said to his fingers. ‘But maybe it’ll all be for the best in the end. When everything’s said and done.’

  ‘But couldn’t I just …?’

  Without looking up, Dr Rosenthal shook his head and I knew it was all over. Eighteen months. And this was all there was.

  I went home shattered. I was filled with that sodden, half-sick sort of depression too heavy for tears. Was this it? After all those months of work, was it going to be killed so unceremoniously by twenty unfortunate minutes in an art closet? The horror of what Kevin had tried to do had seemed at the time like the worst thing a kid had ever tried to do to me, but now it was superseded by something that seemed even worse. We could have survived it. Horrible as it was, I knew Kevin and I could have come to terms with it. After all, I was hardly an innocent victim. This was part of the risk one took in this type of profession. I had always known that and I had accepted it the day I chose to go behind the locked doors.

  We could have worked it out. But what now? All I had managed to do in the end was to prove Kevin right. No one wanted him and sooner or later, everyone would walk out.

  Late that night an old, old friend from my college days showed up. I had not seen Hal in ages, not since the Vietnam War days when we spent our evenings together in dark, smoky coffee houses and planned the Brave New World to the strains of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary.

  Despite its being late and my being terribly out of sorts, I accepted his invitation to dinner. We went to one of those funky, fashionable places where the music is too loud and the hanging plants trail in one’s food. We sat in the dark and chatted, a little uneasy with one another because so much had happened in ten years and we were both such different people now.

  I went out that evening, I think, to get away from Kevin, away from the present. In his day, I had loved Hal. He’d been the Idealist. Of all of us who’d grown up during those turbulent years with fire in our hearts to change the world, it was he who was really going to do it. No day job for him. No ordinary Establishment life. While I had gone on to graduate school and teaching, Hal had drifted. He’d become an actor, a halfway successful one at that, had been through two marriages and a lot of hard living. But now, a decade on, the smell and feel of the sixties still clung to him. He still spoke with the vocabulary of our lost generation and his dreams were not entirely faded. I sat in the darkness and listened to him and drifted back myself to what seemed a gentler, more hopeful time.

  Then Hal began to cry. There had been a reason for looking me up. It hadn’t been just a random chance. He pulled out pictures to show me. There was his daughter. And his son, a red-haired, freckle-faced imp. That’s Ian, he said to me. Ian was autistic. He had just been committed to a state institution because he had already torn apart two families and Hal just couldn’t keep him any longer. Ian was seven.

  As Hal wiped back embarrassed tears, neither of us mentioned the irony of H
al’s being given a child who had made him leigeman to the most dehumanizing of all society’s establishments. Neither of us mentioned the Brave New World either. But the silence yanked me mercilessly back into the here and now.

  So in the companionable blackness we quaffed too much Blue Ribbon together and dallied with food neither of us wanted. Finally, I told him about me and Kevin, just to take his mind off things. Both of us ended up crying in our beer, weeping for a world that never was, save dreams.

  Part III

  Chapter Thirty–two

  Life went on. The cold months of winter turned to spring. March came without daffodils that year because it was too dry. April came with the heavy, wet snowstorms, which should have been in February. And May at last brought sun.

  There was a new doctor sharing my office with me. He was an older man named Jules. He wasn’t much to look at, short, fiftyish, balding and somewhat overweight, but he had such a sweet and self-effacing manner about him that all the women in the clinic were at least a little in love with him at one point or another. In his spare time Jules was quite a serious sculptor and he spent a lot of his evenings and weekends at shows and galleries. Indeed, I suspect Jules had more the heart of an artist than a doctor. So much of our office conversation revolved not around our cases, as Jeff’s and my discussions had, but around our artistic pursuits.

  While there never was the magic between Jules and me that there had been with Jeff, I liked Jules a lot and was glad someone was back in the office with me. I’d grown very lonely in there with the three phones. Jeff I had heard from a couple of times since he had left, but he never put an address on his envelopes, so I could never write back. I got a St Patrick’s Day card from him, for goodness knows what reason, since neither of us was Irish. And I got another card on my birthday in May. Jeff seemed to have settled into his new work in California and sounded happy. But I didn’t know. Cards don’t say much. He never mentioned Kevin nor the clinic nor whether or not Hans was still with him.