Margaret Morgan waited several days after her third visit with Amir to begin to write the conclusion to her report. She told herself that the delay was to better consider the boy’s situation, though she knew the nebulous, unformed questions hovering about in the background of her thought had as much to do with her interior state as they had to do with the child’s. It wasn’t until she finally completed writing her evaluation that the retired professor became aware that her postponement of the process had, in fact, been because the report would mark an end to her involvement with the boy. Putting the thought to the side, she submitted her evaluation to the charitable agency.
Margaret followed up her report with a phone call to Jane Coleman, ostensibly to discuss any questions the program director might have regarding it, though behind that straightforward act sat the motivation of a far deeper and complicated urge. Margaret began her conversation with Jane by recounting the general details of her three visits with Amir. She went on to tell the administrator that she found indications of emotional disturbance within the boy’s behavioral pattern. Exactly how profound, and stemming from what, remained to be seen, but she had noted clear symptoms of anxiety, difficulty in concentrating, detachment, and emotional numbness. He appeared, Margaret added, to be of above-average intelligence and beneath his quiet, withdrawn demeanor showed signs of a healthy, bright curiosity. Margaret didn’t believe the boy’s best interest would be served by placing him in any kind of institutional setting. Despite the complexities of his case, the retired psychology professor concluded, a long-term, individual care environment, where Amir could receive both the attention and the freedom of movement he needed, would be the best option for his care.
The clear, concise, and professionally neutral demeanor in which Margaret delivered her opinion to Jane Coleman belied the feelings that strained within her. The visits with Amir had stirred a profound force inside her. Had the child’s disabilities triggered her empathy for the trauma of a child caught in war? Did his story spark her professional interest? Her sympathy? Or something else? Strangely, there was something of her own need calling out. The retired professor was weary of her own issues. She worried that she had lived a life too far removed from risk—the secure, fixed comfort of her identity coming at the cost of growth and spontaneity. Her career had been marked by maturity, intellectual advancement, and the attainment of society’s respect. Had the safe and the certain become her spirit’s master? Privilege bred privilege and, left unchecked, bred a complacency that smothered the instinct of real compassion, leaving only a veneer of caring. It was a trap she’d fought against the whole of her life. Had she really managed to evade it? Or had she simply become so accustomed to it that she no longer was even aware of being caught within it?
A battle flared up in her mind, one part of her decrying another, a determination growing to surrender neither to apathy nor to false contentment. If the dimensions of her hope had retreated and shrunk, if doubt and fear had reduced the boundaries of her possibilities to the known and sure, then at least she could help provide an opportunity for someone else to find the place of their promise and follow its lead into the future. Margaret tried to imagine what that struggle might look like for Amir. If her own hope had become a mountain of daunting height to scale, then what must the experience of hope be like for the orphaned boy? She imagined, given all he had suffered, that for the child, hope might be infinitely more distant…a planet so far away it was but a speck in the night sky, at one moment its tentative blink signaling a presence, only to vanish the very next second into the vast blackness of the cosmos. Yet, as repressed as Amir seemed, she sensed that in the depths of his inner life, hope persevered.
In the end, there would be no battle of mind and heart for Margaret Morgan. As shocking and illogical as the idea of becoming the boy’s caregiver seemed to her, a voice within her called out that it was the right thing to do—despite another, opposing voice, speaking in practical tone, declaring that she was acting irrationally. Pushing aside all doubt, after she finished giving her assessment to Jane Coleman, Margaret asked the program director if she might be considered to become the orphaned boy’s foster parent. It was only when the call had ended and she had replaced the phone on the receiver, Jane Coleman’s positive and enthusiastic affirmation of her request still sounding in her ears, that Margaret began to grasp the enormity of her decision and the depth of the change it would bring to her life.
Chapter 12
Some years before her retirement, Margaret Morgan had bought her country home as a place of retreat from the dense constancy of city life, even though her principal residence sat in an oasis of metropolitan privilege surrounded by its own, small slice of nature, affording her both privacy and escape from the harder, less yielding lines of an ever-growing cityscape.
Her country property was a very manageable two-hour drive from her Cambridge home and was located within walking distance of a small village center whose rural quaintness had been as much the reason for her purchase as the house itself. The center-chimney colonial home was surrounded by nearly ten acres of cleared land, most of it on the south side of the residence. The property was accessed by a private driveway lined by a stand of sugar maples. The driveway ended in a clearing where the house sat on a small plateau overlooking the valley that cradled the village.
A wooded area occupied the area north of the house. A brook wandered along the wood’s edge and worked its way downslope, past a small orchard of old apple trees at the far end of the field. Although the village offered little in the way of the amenities and activities she had grown accustomed to in her many years of city life, Margaret’s country home was less than a half-hour’s drive from a large university town rich in cultural and commercial resources.
Amir showed little reaction at leaving the Thorensons’ house and being shuttled to a different one. Howard and Joy Thorenson hugged him good-bye, the dual feelings of sadness at his departure and happiness that he was going to a good home apparent in their faces. Of the three older boys who had been there when he arrived, only Andrés, the Nicaraguan boy, remained. The two older Bosnian boys each had recently found placements in Bosnian households, one in the suburbs near Boston and the other in Connecticut. They would soon be replaced by a brother and sister whose mother had been incarcerated on felony drug charges. For the Thorensons, the emotional pain of losing children they had become attached to was mitigated by the arrival of new foster children in need. It was how they coped with being short-term caregivers and having to face the ultimate removal of the children they had bonded with. As he drove away with Margaret Morgan, Amir looked out the car window at Howard, Joy, and Andrés waving good-bye. He raised his own hand in farewell, moving it back and forth twice, and then turned his head.
For the first few days at Margaret’s house Amir felt like he wasn’t really there. It was as though his body walked about the place empty, the rest of him floating off somewhere in the distance, looking down upon his physical self with no sense of ownership or relation. Even as Margaret showed him about and made every attempt to make him comfortable, Amir’s eyes looked out upon his new world dulled and without shine or spark, as though jaded at having seen it all a thousand times before.
It had been apparent from the very first moment he’d set eyes on the house that it was one of wealth and privilege. It was not so much that the structure was large, though that it housed only one person surprised him. Rather, it was the quality of everything about it, both on the outside and within, that had made him feel discomfited to live in such a rich environment.
It had previously been explained to Amir on a number of occasions that the place to which he would be moving would be his new home. Yet upon seeing it he could think of no other logical explanation that he should be taken to live in so grand a property, other than that he had been brought there to work. This made perfect sense to him. The woman was old, and he had to earn his keep. When she had taken him upstairs to show him the bedrooms, the woman led
him into the one across from hers and signed to him that he could stay there if he wished. It was large, its furnishings were old and of fine quality, and it had its very own bathroom. He felt strangely insecure in such a big and fancy room. The woman must have seen the discomfort on his face. Smiling, she signed for him to follow her down the hall and showed him a smaller room off by itself, this one just large enough for the bed, a bureau, and a small writing desk. It had two windows on each of the exterior walls, and they looked out onto the fields on one side and the woods on the other.
By the end of his first week at Margaret’s, Amir began to relax and feel freer to enjoy the many aspects of the place that had drawn his interest but in which he’d initially been too withdrawn to engage. Of all the things about his new home that impressed Amir, nothing did so more than the property itself. The fields and gardens surrounding the house were beautiful. It was clear that they were very well tended and cared for. A large barn stood as strong and sure as the house itself, everything within it neat and ordered. Not far from it, a small brook ran down from higher ground along the edge of the field, its waters clean and cold, reminding him of the streams and rivers he had known in Bosnia. All of the cleared land was bound by stonewalls, carefully laid, solid and strong.
Walking the perimeter of the fields, Amir found the places where the hollow of the ground revealed the pathways of the forest animals as they traveled from woods to field in search of food. There was no more popular trail, it seemed, than the one that traveled through a break in the stone wall that led from the forested area to the old apple orchard that stood in graceful pose at the far side of the fields. The trees, pruned and healthy, held a bounty of fruit that now, late in the season, dropped plentifully to the ground for the birds and animals to feast upon. Amir was surprised that the apples should be left for animals and not harvested by the woman to sell or store.
Informed by his previous foster parents that Amir loved the outdoors and handled himself well there, Margaret had indicated to him that he was free to roam about outside, her only injunction that he not travel far into the woods until he came to know the lay of the land. Though she understood from the Thorensons that Amir spent a great deal of time outdoors, she was still surprised at the number of hours he occupied himself wandering about the property. At first, it felt strange to see him roaming the fields, walking along the brook, or moving in and out of the woods. It was as though she had spotted a new animal among the regulars who visited her land. The way the boy walked, lightly and with care—his body’s posture vigilant and aware—seemed more akin to the creatures of the bordering forest than it did to someone of her own species.
One warm, sunny fall day, sitting quietly on her patio, Margaret looked up from the book she was reading, sensing a movement in the distance, and saw Amir emerging from the woods at the far edge of the fields. She watched her new foster son as he crossed into the orchard, losing sight of him as he wandered among the apple trees. Neither seeing him exit its other side nor within the orchard itself, she became perplexed. After some moments, her curiosity roused, she rose from her patio chair and walked out to the orchard.
Coming up to the first row of trees, she guessed that he had come in on the deer track that wound its way into the orchard from the woods. Looking around, she was mystified as to what could have possibly become of the boy. He had been there one instant and was gone the next.
Margaret walked, scanning the trees as she went, then stood quietly for a moment without looking about. Finally, with a slight shake of her head, she started to take her leave. No more than two steps into her return, an apple suddenly fell softly nearby, its descent bringing with it the distinct sense of the object having been gently propelled, not fallen of its own accord. She turned and looked up in the direction of its fall. It took several seconds of gazing up through the leaves for her to make out the face of the boy staring back down at her. His expression at first appeared blank. But then the subtlest of smiles rose from the corners of the boy’s mouth, momentarily breaking through the strange, sad seriousness that often marked his face, and it seemed to Margaret that something of his spirit had shyly emerged from its place of quiet.
It had been a spontaneous action. Amir saw that the woman was leaving, and his hand had reached out by its own accord, though even then, when it was about to make him known, it took the apple soundlessly. When her eyes found him, she made no move in his direction but, like himself, was content to simply observe. What he saw in her face had made him smile.
“Many apples,” Amir’s fingers spoke, pointing to the fruit-laden branches around him as he looked down to the woman below.
“Yes,” Margaret smiled, her fingers answering back, “many apples.”
“They are falling to the ground,” Amir indicated by pointing to the ground.
“Animals like them. The deer come here to eat,” Margaret signed, raising both her open hands to her head and placing thumbs to forehead in mimic of antlers.
“And you?” Amir asked. “Do you like apples?”
“Yes, I do,” Margaret answered.
“I can pick them,” Amir responded, gesturing toward the apples as if plucking them from their branches.
Margaret smiled at the enthusiasm of the boy as his hands demonstrated how quickly and easily they could harvest the fruit. She signed to him that it would make her happy to have some apples to eat. She had not before seen such animated display of emotion in her new foster son and was glad of its arrival. Amir climbed down from the tree and indicated that he would walk down to the house with her. He remembered seeing some old apple crates stacked in the barn. He would need them to store all of the apples he would harvest.
Back at her seat on the patio, Margaret watched as the boy ran off to the barn and emerged with a wheelbarrow piled high with the old wooden apple crates left over from times long past, crates that had seemed so much a part of the barn she’d never had the heart to throw them away. She was bemused to see the boy carrying the ambitious reservoir of storage containers and thought to intercede. A small bag of apples would more than suffice to meet their needs. Yet, seeing the happiness in the focused rhythm of Amir’s movements, she held back. Observing Amir push the heavy load across the field with determined perseverance, Margaret was struck by a powerful sense of the reality of his sudden presence in her life. How had it happened? The fact of it seemed strange, wonderful, and frightening at the same time.
Watching him struggle with his load up the small rise to the orchard, Margaret strained to feel some tangible sense of the child as her foster son, or even just of him as a person called Amir. But the only solid connection her mind could grasp was that of him as being simply the boy who was now living in her home. They had yet to come to know each other. Without speech between them, there was no distraction of the spoken word to fill the voids of awareness between the one person and the other, no easy chatter to distract the mind and quiet the emotion’s precarious vulnerabilities.
Margaret continued to watch as Amir reached the orchard and unloaded the crates. Taking up an old, thin canvas drop cloth he’d scavenged from the barn, he fashioned a harvest bag, folding it in half, knotting its ends, and tying it around his waist. In another second he disappeared up the trunk of one of the trees. Smiling, Margaret returned to her reading while Amir continued up and down the apple trees, filling one wooden crate then the next, his foster mother unaware of the growing number of boxes the boy was loading with steady and focused pace.
Amir liked being up in the apple trees. He liked the idea of working, of being productive at something he knew. And although he wasn’t able to express it, he enjoyed the sense of independent well-being coming from life reduced to the essential: his body at work, his mind fixed on the task at hand, and his heart at peace in nature. Carefully stepping out onto the trees’ stronger limbs, he picked their fruit with sure, graceful movement as he slid carefully along their branches. High up in the trees, Amir could feel the pieces of his diffused emotional se
lf coming together, touching with the sensation of wholeness—a reminder of times once known that had vanished into oblivion.
Every fall he had harvested apples with his father in his family’s small orchard, much the same size as the one he was working in now. His mother and sister helped. They packed some of the fruit for storage and some to be turned into a rich, thick apple butter. Later they would all be busy in the kitchen peeling and cooking the apples, the house filling with the smell of the simmering fruit. There had been purpose in their work, in his life, a bounty of love there. Lost to the cadence of his hand moving back and forth from apple to bag, Amir’s mind wandered from his task, obscured images flowing in distant thought.
Amir didn’t notice Margaret’s approach until she stood beneath the tree he sat in, her hand holding forth a glass with tiny beads of condensation clinging to its side. Descending from the tree, Amir received the cold drink his foster mother had brought him and signed his thanks, the fingers of his right hand touching his lips and then falling slightly back in her direction, his face smiling in affirmation.
Returning Amir’s smile, Margaret glanced at the crates he had filled and gave a mock look of shock to indicate she was very impressed with his efforts. A shy grin of boyish pride broke out on Amir’s face along with a hesitant blush. He paused for a moment between the small, careful sips with which he drank as his mind searched for some comment or piece of conversation to add, but he came up empty. When he finished his drink, Margaret took the glass and left without any further communication other than her smile.
The Solace of Trees Page 12