The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  I shrugged. “Everybody gets a little tense at pillow-arrangement time.”

  Liam looked at me for a long moment and then got up. “I know he’s emotionally disturbed, but sometimes I think you and Mom are nuts, too.”

  “Liam,” I said, looking up at him, trying to speak seriously and work out a badly organized thought at the same time, “I really don’t know what emotionally disturbed means. After all, emotion is a type of disturbance, and it’s usually good. If nothing moved your feelings, you’d be a zombie. It’s a dumb label that seems to get tossed around pretty casually, but I think people are trying to describe someone so traumatized by past experience that he’s forever affected by it. Like a person who survives a shipping disaster but gets the shakes when he hears a foghorn. Families were Mike’s big past disaster, so maybe just being with a family again gives him the shivers. Then, too, he knows everybody has said he can’t make it in a family, so maybe he feels a lot of pressure to perform.”

  Liam held his hands out. “But this family is all right.”

  “How could he know that?”

  Liam shrugged and walked back upstairs.

  Mike cries in his sleep.

  Why hadn’t we noticed that on his visit that week?

  We heard muffled cries and walked into the bedroom at midnight. Mike had the covers over his head and was crying out in a loud voice. His knees were up under his belly, and his arms were folded under his chest. Thinking it was some sort of game, I pulled the covers off, but he was really asleep.

  We tried to straighten him out so he could rest more comfortably, but it was impossible to move him. His sheets were soaked, not with urine but with perspiration.

  Finally, Sue just sat down next to him and rubbed his back for about twenty minutes. Little by little the cries petered down to a whimper.

  But at about four in the morning, we heard them start up again.

  Sue is justifiably smug about reveille. The children’s home stressed the impossibility of getting Mike up in the morning, and they were right. But after the first week she found that if she goes in there with the two dogs, he doesn’t give her any problem. She just has them jump up on his bed.

  “Come on, Mike,” she’ll say, “let these dogs outside, they have to go.” And then Mike gets up and runs to the front door.

  But later there is always a shower argument, and then the noise starts again.

  “I don’t have to take a shower.”

  “Mike, you wet your bed last night, so you have to take a shower.”

  “I don’t have tooo …”

  “Mike!”

  “I don’t have tooo …”

  Mike is afraid of the dark. Not just leery or nervous. Terrified.

  And not just of the dark, either—he’s afraid of shadows and quiet rooms. If the light is off in the downstairs foyer in the daytime, he won’t set foot into the half-lit entranceway and try to reach the bathroom door.

  When we set him up with his paints and a model on the workbench in the cellar, he followed us right back out.

  Sue said, “Mike, I thought you wanted to paint your dinosaur model.”

  “You help me, Sue”

  “No, I have to make dinner. You’re a good artist. I know you can do it by yourself.”

  “No, you help me.”

  I didn’t understand. Later I realized there are banks of fluorescent lights in the cellar, but in the far distance lie shadows and hidden areas.

  Joanne came over twice in the first few days. One of the significant ways in which Harbour differs from foster care is the close network of support for families. The family specialist visits every week and takes the child out alone for an hour or two. It’s a double check. The family specialists are experienced enough to pick up on nuances that may vibrate from the child, but at the same time, the child is given the model of an older sister or brother or perhaps an aunt, who can offer up third-party advice.

  Later, the family specialist sits down with the Harbour parents for a chat.

  “Why this constant barrage of talk? Mike never shuts up.”

  Joanne’s dark eyes were measuring our posture, our attitude. Finally, she said, “Most of our children, particularly those who have spent a long time in the system, have perfected a story about themselves. It might be wholly imaginary. But it’s a defense mechanism with their peers and adults. Sort of a verbal barrage they’ve learned to throw up and keep up.”

  “Will it ever stop so that we can talk to him?”

  Joanne had been taking notes. Now she tapped her pencil on the table. “Maybe. But with these children it sometimes goes on a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “A long time.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  the honeymoon

  For two weeks I went to work early and stayed at the plant for ten or twelve hours. Then I came home late, had a loud dinner with Mike and Sue, and listened to Sue struggling to get him into bed.

  If I tried to lend a hand, I’d hear the “you’re not my boss” routine or get the silently turned-away back in my face.

  By this point Sue was struggling to keep a smile up. Mike demanded her attention every waking moment. He would not amuse himself at all. He wanted Sue to play a game with him, make a cake with him, help him with lunch, with breakfast, and all the eternal while he was shouting in his loud, loud voice some variation of the theme he played at dinner. Then, too, he had to be supervised in the bathroom or he wouldn’t shower. He would not leave the grounds to take a walk or explore the mountain or kick a ball around by himself for five minutes. When Sue was on the phone with a client, he was right there at her elbow, talking.

  And it was always a threesome. Somehow, Mike and the dogs had become inseparable, two dark shadows constantly slipping around his legs, getting in our way, too.

  Sue was still determined, but any sense of peace in the house was slipping away. I was really starting to resent this kid. “Doesn’t he ever shut up?” This clinging, stream-of-consciousness talk wasn’t something I ever would have imagined. I could make a huge allowance for the fact that he was frightened and had to work through that, but when would it end? My experience was that as a rule, boys don’t talk—you have to pry information out of them with a crowbar—and they don’t hang on you, either. If anything, you usually had to worry about where they were and what they were getting into.

  I was raised in Brooklyn, and when I was ten, eleven, or twelve years of age and even older, the notion that boys living outside the city limits were able to escape supervision by having woods and fields available right outside their back door always struck me as horribly unfair, and I was most content on vacation in the country or up at my aunt Alice’s hotel in Cold Spring, New York, when I too could vanish under trees, climb rocks, or fish or swim in a lake. Yet here Mike was, snatched out of jail for all practical purposes and set down free on top of a mountain, with miles of new territory to explore, lakes and streams to fish in, two dogs who’d run after him, woods, apple, pear, and cherry orchards all around him, beaver ponds, deer in the meadow, with an occasional old sow bear grumbling her way through the briars. Sue and I should be reporting him missing two or three times a day instead of having to amuse him every waking minute.

  This was getting very old very quickly for me.

  And Sue appeared awfully tired and frustrated herself on the night she called me into her office. But wary, too.

  I looked around. I had taken to staying out of here; this was where Mike usually was talking and talking and talking to Sue. Now I could see that after several weeks the office was in disarray, with files and phone messages piling up. She was getting behind.

  “Rich, Tom is moving out.”

  “Why?” Tom Hanaan had been a guest of ours for more than a year. A quiet sort of guy who kept to himself, he was liked by the other guests and by us, too. A middle-aged man who worked for the state highway department, he had come to us after a bad divorce, and he was always neat and clean and paid on time. In
the late evenings he read quietly in his room or took long walks through the orchards. Once or twice a month he and I would have a drink together in the barroom, but most of the time we never saw him. He’d come in the guest entrance, go to his room to shower and change, and then go back out for dinner. On weekends he visited a sister in Albany.

  I looked at Sue. “Mike?”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking down and tapping one hand on her desk, “the noise.”

  “Okay,” I sighed, “I’ll get some ads back up, and I have some people on the waiting list.”

  Sue made a little offhand gesture with her head. “Phyllis complained, too.”

  I winced. As quiet and circumspect as Tom was, Phyllis was even less of a bother. She’d been in one of the corner rooms for almost two years. In fact, she had moved in while we were still painting and plumbing. She was working on her master’s locally and working part-time.

  Six of the inn rooms were on the upper level and opened on a large common foyer, and although the old thick plaster walls kept much noise from moving room to room up there, I knew sound carried well from floor to floor. Mike was right under Phyllis.

  What we were selling were nicely finished rooms, cooking facilities, a laundry room on the premises, the barroom lounge, offroad parking, coffee and tea in the morning, but most of all cleanliness, security, and quiet. Lots of quiet. And our guests usually stayed with us for a long time in consequence.

  “Has she talked about moving, too?”

  “She hinted at it.”

  This time I flinched. I didn’t want to be two rooms down. It took a long time to find someone suitable.

  Then whatever patience I had left suddenly collapsed and I was very angry with the situation and at Sue for getting us into it, for involving us with Harbour, with this child. She might be willing to stay with this program, but I sure wasn’t. In fact, I had a long stream of bitter and sarcastic remarks ready and felt like kicking something, so after shifting back and forth on my feet for a minute or so, trying to calm down, I turned my back and stormed off outside.

  The hill the house stood on had been terraced—landscaped, that is—years ago with hundreds and hundreds of feet of dry-laid stone walls, each originally about five or six feet high but now tumbledown and overgrown with wild rose and sumac. One of my interminable projects was a foot-by-foot excavation of these ruins, digging the rough quarried stones out from under a yard or so of soil and knotty roots and relaying the old walls. I always had a spot going that I could work on in odd moments, and now I dragged my long-handled shears, five-foot pry bar, shovel, pick, and oak plank out of the barn, banged them down next to a wall, and mindlessly started digging.

  It was dark when I gave up, slumping against the stone, covered head to toe in sticky black soil and more resigned now than angry. Mike was loud, churlish, impossibly demanding of time, hopelessly, endlessly juvenile, and he was costing us money, but I realized that unless and until Sue herself rethought this thing on her own, there just wouldn’t be much sense in my saying one damn thing.

  Besides, that point couldn’t be all that far off. Her business was suffering, and that was very much her baby, too.

  But then Mike started school, and for a brief time Sue and I switched roles.

  Not having firm arrangements made for the school year had been, as Kathy had predicted, the last of the children’s homes objections. Sue handled it by explaining that she was self-employed and that if Mike was home with her for a couple of days that was all to the good. Meanwhile, she left it to the professionals at Harbour to work out whatever problem there was with the local school district.

  We had never had a special-needs child before, and we had kept our other children out of the public schools as much as we could, so the entire system of “special education” was well beyond our experience. We started from the naive belief that since our local public school district had classrooms and teachers and should know what they were doing with both, it was incumbent upon them to simply tell us what bus he had to get on, what his teachers name was, and then do what they had to do. In a couple of weeks we’d visit his teacher, find out how he was doing and what she wanted from us, and then follow up on his homework.

  “No,” Sue’s sister Eileen, an experienced public school teacher, laughed when, after the first few days of the school year passed, Sue said something like that to her. “It’s just not that simple. He’s a special-needs child. They have to formulate an IEP first.”

  “What’s an IEP?”

  Eileen then took a deep breath and explained that there were new federal laws involved, laws that required all children diagnosed as having “special needs” to be evaluated by a standing committee of the local school district called the Committee of Special Education. Then, in each case, the laws further required an Individual Educational Plan or IEP be developed, approved, and filed under complex guidelines for appeal.

  “Huh,” Sue said, puzzled. “Why don’t they just test him and put him in the right class?”

  “Because the IEP has to stipulate in writing the resources they will make available to him first. The school system doesn’t want to get sued by parents who don’t like the plan. They are sued all the time over IEPs by parents who want some form of extra-special treatment for special-needs kids.”

  “How long does an IEP take?”

  “Usually not long. It’s just that right now Mike is probably standing in line. The number of special-needs children is constantly growing. The definition of handicaps is very elastic, and there are no real criteria. We’re not talking here about dyslexies or kids in wheelchairs any longer. Parents of overweight children are now demanding that their children be classified as handicapped and be given an IEP, parents of bored kids or slow learners are going out and having their children diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder (ADD) and demanding classification, and it goes on and on.”

  “Oh.”

  And in fact, after Labor Day came and went, The Harbour Program came through; Joanne ran around in another busy series of meetings that got Mike placed. Everybody lives in some local school district, of course, but in New York State there is also an entity called the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, for short. BOCES extends over many school districts and began as centralized vocational training, but eventually expanded into other areas, particularly special education. In a nearby town, BOCES occupied one wing of an elementary school, where it maintained a therapist, secretarial staff, and several classes for special-needs children.

  Mike’s IEP called for him to be placed in one of these, a 1:4:2 class.

  As Joanne explained, 1:4:2 is the ratio of teachers to students to teacher aides. One teacher, four students, two teacher aides. This was fairly puzzling to Sue and me. Although we didn’t know each other then, we both remember St. Patrick’s parish school in Brooklyn, where the teacher-student ratio was as high as 1:93. One Dominican nun to ninety-three students, and everybody learned to read and write.

  Why did they need three adults for four children?

  At first we thought it was for intensive instruction—that all of these resources would bring Mike up to the proper academic level, or at least to the best level he could attain.

  But the first thing it got him was tied to a chair.

  When Mike came home upset on the afternoon of the second school day, Sue got the story out of him in bits and pieces. Then, the next morning, she stormed up to his classroom, determined to clean somebody’s clock.

  What she found was a thoughtful, well-groomed, professional, calm, reasonable male teacher who patiently explained that Mike’s behavior was so extreme that for his own protection he had to be “restrained.”

  “Mrs. Miniter,” the teacher said, “I’ve been working with emotionally disturbed children for many years, and Mike is perhaps the most disturbed child I’ve seen. He assaulted the assistant, threw his materials around, and was flailing wildly. I’ve learned that we have to firmly establish appropriate rule
s of behavior straightaway and prevent him from injuring himself or somebody else. We had no choice but to restrain him.”

  That defused Sue’s anger. Our home discipline grew out of certain basic rules, violation of which evoked an immediate response. So what he was saying made sense to her. How could classroom work take place if there was no classroom atmosphere?

  “But he’s been with us for over two weeks, and he’s never assaulted anybody.”

  The teacher looked down at his desk and drummed his fingers on the table. “Does he talk nonstop at home, the same way he does at school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Miniter, the longer he’s like that at home, the more disturbed he really is. He’s struggling to hold it together, and the longer he struggles, the higher the pressure builds. So you can think of this beginning period with him as a honeymoon. Believe me, it will be over all too soon. Meanwhile, of course, he’s not holding it together in school, and we have to do what we have to do.”

  “Honeymoon? What I’ve been going through with him is a honeymoon?”

  “Mrs. Miniter, to be perfectly honest, you don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’ve had six normal, healthy children. Mike is not normal, not healthy. He can’t function in any sort of social setting where he is not the sole center of attention. In fact, I’m really surprised that the system would place him in a home like yours. You and your husband are completely untrained. He can hurt himself; he can hurt you. If that happens, The Harbour Program has a lot to answer for.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Have you had any instruction in how to properly restrain children?”

  “No,” Sue answered doubtfully.

  “Well, I’m organizing some classes after school hours. Normally, they would be open only to professionals, but I’ll see what I can do to get you admitted.”

  Later on at home, Sue and I discussed her interview with Mike’s teacher.

  “Sue, I don’t care what you say, this is macabre. You’re overreacting. If the longer you just talk and don’t assault people at home is proof of how sick you are, then the most disturbed person in the world must be Mother Teresa. I don’t believe he can’t function in a social setting. I think he just doesn’t want to. I do know that if you or I tied up this boy, we’d be arrested and charged with child abuse. Why can’t three grown adults handle four children without roping them?”