As the days and weeks passed, Amir’s ability to speak English was slowly but steadily advancing toward elementary proficiency; his ESL instructor said he expected the boy to have basic conversational ability by the end of the school year. The reports coming back from his other teachers were for the most part just as encouraging. Although he was somewhat withdrawn and his social integration with his classmates was slow, his teachers said he appeared to be making efforts on that front and was demonstrating an active interest in his school subjects.
Margaret was pleased with her foster son’s progress. She forwarded the teachers’ reports to Dr. Caron, who had begun seeing Amir regularly since the return of his hearing and speech faculties. The behavioral pediatrician, while happy to hear about the positive developments, cautioned about reading too much into the school reports.
As winter phased into spring, Margaret’s thoughts turned to the outdoors and ideas of how she might engage her foster son in outside activities typical for boys his age. It had been a long time since she had worked at the role of being a mother, and even then, she had never parented a son.
Checking out the various options, she discovered that there were a number of different team sports available for Amir to participate in. Of those, soccer seemed to be the one most likely to interest him. He had, he told her, played the game back in Bosnia. But the sport was just beginning to grow in popularity in the US and there wasn’t much opportunity for play outside of the fall season.
Margaret spoke with Amir’s counselor at school for advice in ways she might be able to create opportunities for her foster son to expand his socialization outside of school. His counselor suggested that Amir sign up for one of the afterschool programs offered by the school, but Amir was reluctant to do so. Margaret persuaded him to attend an afterschool art class because she knew he liked to draw. But he showed little of the same enthusiasm he displayed when he went off alone into the woods with his nature journal and drawing pencils in search of some new plant or insect species he might sketch in its pages. After only several classes, he said he didn’t want to attend the afterschool program anymore. He preferred, he told his foster mother, to be outside after having already spent so much of the day inside.
For Margaret, there were both positive and worrisome elements in her foster son’s solo forays into the forest. She found herself vacillating between appreciation of the boy’s love of nature and concern about his propensity to turn inward to the point that it sometimes seemed like a withdrawal from the world of humankind. The aspect of Amir’s outdoor wanderings that concerned Margaret more than any other was his tendency to extend his explorations into the evening hours.
One chilly spring night, Margaret looked out the window next to the patio, worried that Amir had been outdoors in the cold for over an hour. He had come inside at one point and asked whether he could turn off the lights in the adjacent rooms because, as he explained, they interfered with his view of the stars. Not wanting to disturb him by the sudden appearance of bright light, Margaret opened the door to the outside and called out his name. When no answer came she grew anxious. Fetching her coat, she walked out onto the patio. Her eyes, attempting to adjust to the dark, searched about for the boy. Not seeing him, she hesitantly began to make her way toward the fields. She was about to call out his name again when she saw his form quietly moving toward her. When they were close enough so that her eyes could make out his face, she could see that he looked happy and that there was a small, gentle smile calling out to be shared.
“I didn’t see you on the patio. I was worried,” Margaret said. “I called for you, but there was no answer.”
“I am not hearing. Sorry,” Amir answered.
“Why don’t you come in now? It’s awfully cold. Aren’t you freezing?”
“OK. You come, please. Yes?”
“I don’t understand,” Margaret said, confused.
“I show you a thing. OK?”
“What is it? I hope it’s not a bear,” his foster mother said half-jokingly.
“No, no worry. Come,” Amir answered, his smile broadening as he led his foster mother forward, in the direction from which he had come. He stopped in the center of the field and stood there quietly for some few moments before speaking. “Listen,” he gently commanded.
Margaret stood still, attempting to hear what the boy wished her to experience. Yet all she heard was silence floating upon the darkness of the night, everything quiet, the breeze noiseless across the still-leafless, budding branches. Only the slightest whisper of wind made its way through the boughs of the pines and hemlocks, and she had to struggle to hear it.
Occasional, isolated sounds emanated from behind the dark silhouette of the trees bordering the fields, echoing through the night. Amplified by the cold air to bigger proportion, the distant, eerie, singular notes floated like lonely ghosts lost among the trees.
Margaret wondered what it was Amir wanted her to hear, unsure of what it could be until he spoke, and the wonder in his voice brought the realization that she had, in fact, been listening to it the whole of the time.
“Is beautiful. The sound…is beautiful. Yes?”
Margaret heard it then. Felt it. What to her had been a void was to him a symphony of hearing. Even in the absence of what seemed any distinct audible impressions, a miracle of subtle sensation enveloped her, an entire world of quiet entering her ears.
The retired academic closed her eyelids and drank in the silence, feeling it return her meditation a hundred times over. When she opened her eyes, she saw the boy looking up at her. He had seen that she understood. And through the darkness his eyes spoke his happiness at having her by his side in sharing those few moments of quiet, immense beauty.
With the school year coming quickly to its end, Amir’s foster mother was concerned about how she might occupy her foster son’s time during the long summer vacation. She considered a number of events she thought Amir might enjoy, though she herself was less than enthusiastic to take part in them: a hike to the top of Mt. Monadnock; a camping trip to the Green Mountains; or perhaps boating on a lake in Maine or New Hampshire. When she mentioned the possibility of these ideas to him, however, Amir could see the hidden ambivalence behind her enthusiasm and truthfully responded that what he wanted most was just to be able to stay home, to have time to play in the woods and read in the library without schedule or plan.
At first Margaret thought to insist, or at least persist, in the pursuit of some special events for her foster son, but she soon desisted, coming to realize that, given the great upheaval in his life, staying at home was what he really desired and needed. And there was, after all, the vacation at the beach in August.
Every year she rented a house on Cape Cod for a couple of weeks. This year she had rented a house in Truro, one larger than she normally would have rented for just herself. There was Amir now, as well as Alice and Paul, who had arranged their own vacation to coincide with hers. Still, she was worried that not having any continuing educational or social opportunities for the entire summer, Amir might lose precious ground. Despite the dramatic recovery of his speech and hearing, Margaret could see that there still lay an intense knot of repressed emotion deep within him. Her foster son was at times nervous, on edge, and continuing to have periodic difficulty in sleeping. Dr. Caron had advised her that those symptoms, along with others the boy exhibited, were consistent with the post-traumatic stress disorders he had seen in other young war victims. It would, he reminded Margaret, take a long time for her foster son to heal from the kind of intense trauma he had experienced.
Acknowledging her foster son’s need to have a summer free of the pressures of forced activities and events, Margaret nevertheless felt he needed some structure and routine in his life. Given the importance of his English-language skills for his continued progress in both school and in developing peer relations, she arranged for Amir to be tutored by an ESL teacher over the summer months. Margaret drove her foster son twice a week to the tutor’s
home, where she left him for the two-hour, intensive session while she occupied herself with errands.
“How did it go today?” Margaret asked when she had picked Amir up from his class.
“Good,” Amir answered.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Margaret replied, smiling at the boy’s one-word reply. “What did you work on today?”
“Things not now. Like happen before and happen later.”
“I see. Past and future tenses. Do you find it difficult or easy?”
“Not so easy.”
“Well, that will change soon enough. Is there anything you want to do while we’re in town?”
Amir shrugged his reply, his gesture saying he was ambivalent. “Is not important,” he added by way of further explanation.
“Are you tired from the class?” Margaret asked.
“A little, yes,” he nodded.
“Want ice cream?” Margaret signed, switching gears from the spoken word back to the language of hands and facial expression she and her foster son still used on occasion.
“OK,” Amir answered back with his own hands, a smile coming to his face as much for Margaret’s signing the question as the idea of enjoying an ice cream on a warm summer’s day.
After finding a parking space around the corner from the town’s main street, the two walked to the ice cream store, made their selections, and carried their orders outside to eat. They sat on a bench beneath one of the maple trees that lined both sides of the street, providing shade and a pleasant aesthetic for the town’s center. With much of the student population having gone home for the summer, everything moved at the pace of a more typical, small New England town, allowing residents like Margaret, living in the outlying villages, to once again reclaim it as their own.
Amir ate his ice cream slowly and without words as he watched the people and traffic move past him. Although he had been living in his new country for a year now, there was still a sense of strangeness to it all. It amazed the boy that the people here could move so quickly, with such single-minded intent. Yet at the same time there seemed to be some invisible, mysterious synchronicity that linked the solitary aspect of their movement, as though all of their trajectories were tied to the rhythm of the same beat.
As her foster son sat watching the world go by, Margaret smiled and fell into her own private ponderings, her mind not focused on the world in general, but rather turned in direction of the boy. How similar in temperament the two of them seemed to be, she thought, and how little they needed the reassurance of words as a sonar to each other’s presence; the quiet between them acted not as separation but rather as their connection. She was struck by a sense of how much could be communicated with so little, and how much of what was spoken too often had so little to say.
Margaret wondered what caused the silence in Amir even after he had regained his power of hearing and speech. Was it wholly the effect of the war, or was it something of the boy’s nature as well? Then, of course, there was also the cultural element to be considered. He was not a child brought up on computers, televisions, cell phones, trips to the mall, taxied to this soccer match and that martial arts class, addict to activity as much as the coffee drinker to caffeine. Life for the young in a rural Bosnian village would have been of a different order, much more akin, she imagined, to the world of her own childhood over a half century past than it was that of the modern-day American child.
After finishing their ice creams, Margaret and Amir returned home, each to their own orbit: Margaret to work on an article she had promised to write for a psychology journal, and Amir to the small tasks that were part of the household chores he shared with Margaret. Unable to concentrate, Amir went about his work with less than his usual thoroughness, and after a time of simply going through the motions of it, he wandered off into the field and from there into the woods.
It had now been half a year since his hearing had returned, but the wonder of sound had not left him. He loved the whisper of the wind through the trees, the music of their leaves as they brushed up against one another. Lone, distant noises suddenly echoed through the forest growth, and his attention, if having wandered, would be brought back to the present to scan the foliage for a bird or animal that might be furtively moving about.
He could spend hours in just one spot, unaware of any measurement of time other than the sun’s slow passing through the treetops. Sometimes he would lie down to watch the sky past swaying branches, to follow the white tail of a distant jet making its way to…where? Or he might rise from his sitting position to climb to the top of a tree to look down, his view like that of the bird gazing down watchfully on all that moved below.
Amir had his favorite trees as another person might have favorite chairs or resting places. Usually these were older, large-limbed hardwoods that stood guard near forest paths or streams where wildlife was more likely to be spotted. But even if no animal or bird passed by, Amir was content to sit and watch, especially so if there was the sound of running water, in whose music he could lose almost all sense of self, as though he had become part of the forest itself.
That night, unable to sleep, Amir returned to the fields behind the house. The periodic nightmares he suffered seemed to have no rhythm, no regularity to their arrival. Most often, they came unannounced, shaking him from his sleep with sharp, stabbing thrusts of terror. At other times, though, such as that evening, they would insinuate their visit upon him just before sleep came…the fear of the nightmare’s images chasing the boy from his bed out into the night before they even had chance to arrive.
He waited until his foster mother’s reading was done, her bedroom light turned off, and then walked quietly downstairs and out into the field in attempt to find solace in the dark of the night, alone in a world quiet with sleep. Once outside, with the fresh air bathing his skin and filling his lungs, a calm came over him, washing away the anxiety of unwanted, fearful images that threatened to assault his mind. Sitting down in the grass, he stared up at the stars, the waves of light radiating from those distant, luminous bodies bringing peace to the whole of his mind and body. His gaze lingered upward for a time and then rested upon the land about him, feeling a sense of kinship in it, until, finally, a deep tiredness crept over him, and he made his way back home. There, he lay in his bed, hoping sleep would bring the same still landscape of the night to his dreams, freeing him of those other visions that caused his body to shake and tremble and left his sheets soaked in sweat.
Chapter 17
Summer drifted toward its end in recurrent days of warm, brilliant sunshine with little humidity, blue sky followed by blue sky, broken only by the occasional passing of sculpted afternoon clouds that brought welcomed moments of respite from the sun’s rays. Evenings came with cool air and occasional rains, making for restful sleep and moist, productive soil. August arrived warm and lush, prepared to linger. Margaret and her family spent the last half of the month at their rented beach house in Truro; the time spent together providing her daughter and son-in-law the opportunity to bond with Amir. Paul spent a good portion of every day with the boy, kayaking, swimming, or throwing a ball about—Margaret happy to see a positive male influence in her foster son’s life, Amir taking to Alice’s husband with surprising ease.
All were sad to leave the vacation home, as much for the familial bond engendered in its tranquil setting as for the respite it had given them from the routine of their schedules at home. Although Margaret could see that the vacation had been successful in its effect upon her young foster son, it was still evident to her that the memory and lingering pain of the traumas he had undergone in Bosnia remained buried deep within him. As well as things had gone since he had come to live with her, she still sensed a profound obstruction in the boy’s spirit. His nightmares, while less frequent and less intense, were still occurring. Their slow waning was seen by Margaret as a cause for concern rather than as a positive sign. Something was not being let out, and she was afraid it would become burrowed within him, perhaps
so deeply that it might never see the light of day.
Both Margaret and Dr. Caron had, over the course of time, slowly begun to address the death of Amir’s family. Though it had been clearly established that he was present when the paramilitary had invaded his family’s home, Amir couldn’t recount the details. All he remembered, he said, was that there had been shooting, followed by the explosion that had caused his head to feel like the inside of a ringing bell, and after that there was only the memory of silence.
Dr. Caron felt that the child was likely suffering from, among other effects, survivor’s guilt syndrome. Amir had, after all, escaped while his family was murdered. The doctor explained to Amir that such feelings of intense, often subconscious, guilt were natural, even when they had no real basis in reality. Dr. Caron and Amir continued to talk about this during a number of their sessions, and circumstances did seem to improve after that: Amir’s appetite increased; he seemed on edge less often; the times when he would interact with Margaret with a relaxed, open demeanor came more often; and his sleeping difficulties appeared to somewhat decrease.
Since becoming aware of his sleeping problems, Margaret had begun to cultivate a casual dialogue about them with Amir, especially when he awoke looking tired and drained of energy. She spoke to him in mostly general terms so that he felt comfortable confiding in her about those periods when sleep eluded him because of what they had come to term the “bad dreams.”
“You look like you didn’t sleep well last night,” Margaret remarked to Amir one morning as he entered the kitchen.
“No, I not sleep so well,” Amir said, rubbing his eyes as he sat down at the breakfast table.
“Bad dreams last night?”
“Yes, bad dreams,” Amir let the words out with a long breath.
“Which one?”
Amir looked up toward Margaret, his eyes tired.
The Solace of Trees Page 17