by Torey Hayden
‘So you broke her arm?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That was another time.’
‘What happened then?’
‘One of the other boys had punched this kid. Hit him really hard. And I’d come down from being in bed ’cause I’d heard them. And I said, “Margaret, you got to help him.” And she just stood there. She stood there and done nothing. And this kid was really getting the crap knocked out of him. And I said, “Margaret, why don’t you help him? You got to help him. You can’t just stand there and watch. He might get killed.” And she said, “Leave ’em to fight it out. It isn’t any of your business.” So I grabbed her arm. I was just trying to make her stop them. I didn’t mean to break her arm, really. I just wanted her to do something.’
‘Kind of like you wanted your mom to do something the time she just stood by when Carol took a beating, huh?’
‘Yeah, kind of like then,’ Kevin said. ‘Only this time I was bigger.’
A bug hopped up on my leg. I watched it for a moment as it crawled along but it made my leg itch, so with my other foot I brushed it off. It hopped backup again.
‘But Torey, what do you think?’
‘About what?’
‘About my being normal. Don’t you think I look like I might maybe be a little normal? Just a little even? I was thinking about that. I mean when I ran off with Troy and Carlos. I was thinking I could walk down some street and nobody’d notice, would they?’ He paused and looked over at me. ‘Would they? I mean, it doesn’t show, does it, like I’m wearing a sign or something? Or does it?’
I shook my head.
‘That was what I wanted to do most of all when I was out there,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to walk down the street and pretend I was like everybody else.’
I smiled. ‘I think you’re normal, Kev. And I don’t see why you can’t walk down any street you want to and be just like anyone else on it.’
‘Then why am I here?’
‘Because,’ and I stopped. That was a question mostly without answers. He sat, tuned in to my silence like a man on a radar machine. Then wearily he turned away from me. He plucked another blade of grass.
‘I told them to call me Bryan. Carlos and Troy, I said to them, “My name’s really Bryan, call me that now.” But you know, Torey, a name isn’t going to do it, is it? There’s more to it than just a name. I may be Bryan on the inside. I may be Bryan through and through, but on the outside, I’m always going to be Kevin. Just like Margaret said.’
The following weeks were hell. Perhaps more than ever, Kevin focused on the concept of getting out and leaving behind his many years of institutionalization. At moments like those under the elms, he was desperate to go free and searched the question so thoroughly with heart-wrenching queries that I could have wept for him. But at other times he was maddeningly stubborn about giving up his old institutionalized behaviors and, when reprimanded for them, would retreat back into saying he didn’t care, he wanted to stay crazy anyhow.
I went a little berserk. I never knew from one day to the next what he was going to be feeling, and worse, I didn’t know what to do about it, other than ride the tide. The two ends of the spectrum seemed farther separated than ever. He could act more normal than I had ever seen him; he could want more desperately to be normal than he had ever wanted to before. But then by the same token, he could refuse normalcy more effectively, grinding his heels in about any little change and be more determined than ever not to do something new. The only real light at the end of the tunnel was that despite his protests and his stubbornness, he never did revert to any really aberrant behaviors, as he had at Garson Gayer and the hospital.
Perhaps this was all a reasonable stage for Kevin to go through. After so many years behind locked doors, the prospect of freedom must have seemed daunting, regardless of its attractions. Perhaps this was a positive sign of growth, this constant seesawing. However, it was enough to drive me around the bend myself on some days.
It was also during this period that my clever system of charts and goals crumbled. I had seen the cracks. Despite the theory of its working, and in fact, the real-life edition’s working to a degree, too, it just was not right. Kevin continued to hate it and I wasn’t very comfortable with it myself. It was just a bit too organized for me; it regimented my behavior more than was helpful for either Kevin or me. We were spending more and more time in the vicinity of the swimming pool, both of us seeking refuge from the tight little ordered sessions when I ticked off goal sheets and Kevin counted points. In the end, I had to face the fact that for me, personally, it was a more effective backup system and that I functioned better under something less structured for my major approach.
‘You want to do away with this?’ I finally asked Kevin one afternoon.
‘Oh yes. Oh God, yes,’ he said gratefully. ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’
‘It means no special treats. No prizes for getting your goals accomplished. And it still means we’ll have to work hard. No slouching.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I’m very sure.’
‘You really didn’t like it, did you?’ I asked.
‘No. Not at all.’
‘How come?’ I asked. ‘It did work. We did get things accomplished.’
‘Because,’ Kevin said. He closed his eyes a minute and leaned back. ‘I can pretend again now,’ he said.
‘Pretend? Pretend what?’
‘Well,’ Kevin replied and there was a wistful smile on his lips. His eyes were still closed. ‘Back when I was at the hospital, I used to pretend. The other kids, they always had someone to come visit them. And I only had you. I kept pretending you came for me. That it didn’t have nothing to do with you being a psychologist and everything but that you just came for me. I even told the other kids that sometimes. I told Larry. I told Larry you were my sister. So he’d think you were just coming for me.’ His head back, Kevin laid his arms over his closed eyes.’ But I couldn’t very much do it here, could I? Not with those charts. I couldn’t pretend at all, not even to myself. ’Cause the conditions just always showed too plain.’
As the warm, warm weeks of July wore on, I could see the growth in Kevin. All the fluctuation was maddening but I was able to see slowly that the ups were higher and the downs were shallower. The growth was snail paced; it had been so much so for a while that I don’t think any of us even noticed it at first but now it was increasingly apparent. Kevin was integrating into himself all the parts of him, his anger, his fears, his violence, his depressions, the way those things are in all of us. He still resorted to old tricks occasionally but they were only in short bursts.
Why, after all this time, things were finally coming together for him was one of those basically unanswerable questions. There was no way of knowing, nor in fact, any real need to know. But whatever it was, we all recognized it. For the first time serious discussion was going on in the office of Seven Oaks about Kevin’s future placement. We all agreed he did not belong in a state hospital. But where should he go? Should he stay on at Seven Oaks? Perhaps. Perhaps there would even be a less-confining alternative.
Kevin himself was aware of his improvement.
‘You know what I want to do?’ he said to me one afternoon. We were sitting on the carpet in the dayroom. We were just below the window, and a warm, very yellow sunlight poured over us. It illuminated the dust motes in the air. There were millions of them, drifting down, giving subsance to the insubstantial sunshine. The motes and the light gave an aura to Kevin, like those golden haloes around saints in icons. ‘I want to go to high school.’
I looked at him. ‘High school?’
‘Yeah. If I ever get out. If I do, I’ve decided that’s what I really need to do. Go to high school.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know really. Just to go. To be with other kids. To see what it’s like to be real.’
The room was ver
y warm. I lay back on the rug and put my arms behind my head. It drew me back suddenly to the hot, dry summer days of my childhood when I would lie up in the attic, my cheek pressed against the rough boards of the attic floor, and watch the spiders that lived there. The sun would leak through the slats in the attic fan and spotlight the little creatures. The air around me was always palpable with dust, and it had been very hot.
‘What do you think?’ asked Kevin when I did not respond.
‘It’d be hard, Kev. They work really hard in high school and you haven’t been in a real school since …’
‘Since a long time. I know it. But I could do it. Mr Gomez, who was my tutor at the hospital, he gave me tests. He said I read like a tenth grader. He said I could do everything almost that good. Even math.’
‘But that’s still two years behind, Kev. Tenth graders are fifteen and you’re almost eighteen. But it’s not just the work. In fact, it’s almost not the work at all. I think you could do the work, if you tried.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘It’s the other things.’
‘But what other things?’
‘Oh, the going to and from classes. Having to get by on your own. And the other kids. They’d tease you, Kevin, because you’re different. Adolescence is a hard time in a kid’s life, for all kids, and because of it, they aren’t very tolerant. They could make it hell for you without even knowing they were doing it.’
Kevin regarded me. He had gum in his mouth and he chewed it thoughtfully and occasionally pulled part of it out of his mouth in a long string. I think I had hurt his feelings by saying outright that he was different, although both of us knew it. He wanted to refute me, I suspect, but he was too honest with himself.
‘I’m just saying that it would be hard, Kevin, that’s all. Kids would tease you. They do that sort of stuff without even meaning to be cruel. Kids don’t think very much before they act. They’d say you flunked or that you were stupid and that’s why you are so much older. Even if it wasn’t true they’d still say it.’
‘I’ve had hard times before, Torey.’
‘Yes, but this would be different. You’d be all on your own. There’d be no one there to back you up and it would be all your responsibility to keep your act together.’
Still he studied me. Then his shoulders sagged slightly and he looked down at his hands. ‘Don’t you see, Torey? I gotta do it. I got to know I’m real, if I get out of here. Just for once in my life, I got to know for myself.’
I wanted to agree with him but I couldn’t bring myself to. It was more a dream than a plan or even a hope. I suspected he had no idea what an unsheltered place a high school was. ‘It would be so hard, Kev. You’d get hurt in so many ways and so badly. There’s other things you could do instead. Things just as good, if not better. Maybe go to the community college or something.’
‘But it’s gotta be hard, Torey, don’t you see that?’
I said nothing.
‘I’ve done hard things before.’
‘Yes, I know you have.’
‘I can do it,’ he said softly. ‘I can do some things even you don’t believe I can. Even you don’t know how much of me there is. I have to do it. You guys aren’t the only ones I got to prove myself to. There’s me. Just once in the while I got to prove it to myself as well.’
Chapter Thirty–five
The one issue which kept returning to my mind was that of Kevin’s mother and stepfather. If he was ever going to leave places like Seven Oaks and Garson Gayer behind, the authorities had to be assured that he was not going to go around breaking people’s arms because of a mis-said word. I found him a predictable youngster. Very little of what Kevin did seemed without reason when I finally got all the information. However, it was apparent that the things that had happened to him in his past continued to influence his present behavior and this made it difficult for anyone to guarantee how safe he was. Knowing why he did something was not the same as knowing if he would or not. And obviously this was going to have an effect on any committee trying to decide if he was fit for freedom or not.
I wasn’t one for playing a waiting game. We didn’t have years and years and years to resolve these issues in therapy. Every week or month Kevin spent in an institutionalized situation took him further away from the ability to adjust satisfactorily in the outer world. After such a lengthy incarceration as he had already had, I was worried by each additional day. In a way, Margaret from Bellefountaine was right. Normal might very well be outside Kevin’s grasp already. The culture shock would be stupendous, and without the benefits of even a partially normal childhood, Kevin did not have many resources upon which to draw.
Kevin himself was not much help when it came to resolving the issue of his parents. If he felt disinclined to talk about something, nothing I did could get him to. If I hadn’t kept coming back to the issue, I don’t know when he ever would have. And when I did, he didn’t have any answers for me or for himself. What are we going to do? I’d ask. How can we learn to cope with those feelings? Kevin would just shrug and occupy himself in other ways.
Yet, in the end it was Kevin who found the missing piece.
In his regular program Kevin finally earned enough tokens overall to exchange for an off-campus pass. He had been coming up on it for some time and had been very excited because it would be the first time he’d been allowed off the Seven Oaks grounds since the runaway five weeks earlier.
His intention was for me to take him to Taco John’s. Kevin adored Mexican food, and I had told him way back when we were running our own behavior-management program that if he hit a master goal and earned enough points, I would take him for a pig-out and he could eat as much as he wanted.
So, pass in hand, he set off with me one August afternoon. It was just the beginning of August, and the nights and the days had run into one, as they do that time of year, without ever cooling down, with the nights so short and the dusks and dawns so long that the heat seems to stretch out over the season like a sleeping lion, powerful but indolent.
We made the journey into the city lazily. Leaving Seven Oaks a little after one in the afternoon, I drove Kevin through the countryside most of the time rather than take the freeway. I think both of us knew that the beginning of the end was nearing for us, whatever way the future went, and there was that unspoken urgency to preserve the small moments of our relationship. Such a long time had passed since Kevin had been out and free that I wanted to make the afternoon good for him, so he would remember it.
We puttered down tree-lined country roads and along the river, sleepy in the August heat. Coming up to a small roadside safari park, I pulled into it and we drove through a large enclosed area filled with local wildlife. There were elk and deer and antelope and a lone moose, as well as smaller animals. In a separate area a bear begged shamelessly for treats, even though a huge, red-lettered sign forbade feeding him. Kevin sat mesmerized, his face against the glass as the bear ambled by, while I told him stories of my childhood, growing up in a gateway town to Yellowstone Park, where bears were part of every child’s life. At the end we stopped and went into the little shop and museum and Kevin squandered his meager spending money on a plastic deer statue and six postcards to put up in his room. That left him with only enough to buy seven-eighths of a candy bar, and so I had to lend him the other three cents.
Farther down the road on the way to the city, I pulled over into a small picnic ground beside the river. I parked the car in the shade and we went walking. Taking my shoes off, I waded in the shallows of the river, where the clear water eddied around the rocks. Kevin watched cautiously from the bank, uncertain of the slippery rocks and the moss and the small things that lived under them, to say nothing of the water itself. He had become quite a good swimmer over the summer, but this was very different water. When at last he felt reassured enough that nothing was going to happen, he took off his shoes and socks and came forward to the water’s edge with the wariness of a young child. Reaching a hand out
for my shoulder to steady himself with, he put his toes in. Kevin jumped in surprise at the temperature, and we laughed together and searched for colored stones and stirred up foam in the shallows with willow wands.
So it took us quite a while to reach the city, probably the better part of three hours. I saw rising in the west the tremendous anvil shapes of thunderclouds, and a hot wind had started to blow, gentle but heavy and warm, like some animal’s breath.
The idea to go to Taco John’s was an old one, actually, harking back to the days when Kevin was first in the hospital, perhaps even as far back as the spring at Garson Gayer. There had been a Taco John’s near both places, but the one near the hospital, you could see from the fifth-floor unit. However, Seven Oaks was almost forty miles south of the city. There was no point in going clear up to the vicinity of the hospital, and Garson Gayer was even farther, an additional eight or nine miles. So I decided to turn off the freeway when I saw what looked like a shopping district.
I wasn’t at all familiar with that part of the city. It was way to the south of anywhere my work had taken me. But I did manage to land us in an area full of McDonald’s and Burger Kings, so I reckoned a Taco John’s had to be nearby too.
‘You know,’ said Kevin as we rounded another block, ‘I think I’ve been here before.’
‘Have you? I don’t know this area at all.’
‘Yeah. I think. Yes, a long time ago.’ His brow furrowed as he stared out of the window. ‘Over there. See? If you turn that corner, there’s a laundromat. Go that way and see.’
I went down the street and around the corner. Sure enough, there was a seedy-looking laundromat.