The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  I got a pretty big lump in my throat.

  “I’m not going back there. I’m not going to watch Liam take that stupid test.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to, Mike. We don’t have anybody to watch you, and it will be three hours long this Sunday.”

  “No.”

  “Sorry But listen, Mike, if you decided to take that test, you’d be as proud of yourself as I am of myself and that deer.”

  “Goddammit, I hate this fucking family.”

  “Mike, we’ve told you a thousand times about that language. You keep it up and you’ll have to spend every hour until the karate test in your room. Now go there and think about that for a while.”

  He turned back on his way to his room. “Yeah, you’re trying to make me look like a fool. I want to leave this family. I’m going to call Joanne.”

  “Mike, nobody but you can make you look like a fool.”

  “I don’t like karate.”

  “Fine. Just go up there and tell Bob in front of everybody.”

  Slam, bang, bang. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” I could hear him chanting through three closed doors.

  On Sunday afternoon, Sue, Liam, and I waited out in the snow-filled parking lot. Liam was in his jacket over his karate uniform, Sue in her long leather coat with her back to the wind, and I stood there head-on, flinching at the gusts of icy flakes whipping through, watching the porch door.

  Liam chattered, “Mike said he was coming.”

  I turned away and Sue said, “He should have his jacket on.”

  I turned back and looked. Mike was running toward the car without his jacket, hat, or gloves, his karate uniform flapping open against his bare chest.

  “I have to take him back and get him dressed,” Sue snapped.

  “No,” I said. “It looks like it was a last-minute decision. Let him warm up in the car.”

  Four hours later it was dark out and Mike had a sweatshirt we had found in the trunk of the car stretched over his uniform. We were eating pizza in a restaurant in Highland just down the street from the karate studio, the only customers having a Sunday dinner, sitting on cold Formica seats in the little storefront shop.

  “Maybe I passed,” Mike said hopefully.

  “Ahhh,” Liam said, tapping him on the shoulder, “you didn’t win the yellow belt, but Bob said you’d be awarded a yellow stripe for your white belt because you knew a lot of the moves.”

  “Then I passed the test?”

  “It looks like it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  snow and conflict

  We were into January and piled up with snow everywhere. We were down to two guests and the general activity around the place settled into the morning routine of finding out if Mike’s school bus made it through, then getting the walks shoveled and cleaning up inside. Sue spent most of these days in front of the fireplace, reading. The sand was running out on her quiet time, with tax season just a week or so away.

  The big change was Henry being home. His academics were finished, and he’d return to Norwich in May for graduation, but meanwhile, he was refocusing. His goal had been a flight commission in the Marine Corps, but a high octave of hearing turned out to be missing in one ear. Despite a retest, and despite our getting him to a civilian specialist, there wasn’t anything to be done. He joked about it—maybe not being able to hear a dog whistle would entitle him to a handicapped sticker for his car—but I could see he was rocked. The Marine Corps did offer him a commission as an infantry lieutenant, but he would have to wait a long time for that; the military was shrinking.

  So Henry was reverting to Plan B: get appointed to a state police department, earn a law degree, enter the FBI. Meanwhile, Lake Mohonk, the vast preserve and old hotel property from the last century, perched high atop Shawangunk, had hired him as a hunter culling individual deer under state permit. It was brutal work—waist-high snow, dead cold, inching his way with his rifle hard among the cliffs where hikers had been killed during summer months.

  He loved it.

  “Henry,” I said seriously, “you’re one of the few people left in the world who can add the words professional hunter to their résumé.” He gave me one of those reserved smiles.

  For the first time, this most mystifying son of ours and I were able to talk quietly at night—no girlfriends, no brothers or holidays interfering. It wasn’t only the fact that we had the time and opportunity but that for the first time in a long time, if ever, he’d found himself willing to talk.

  The time had blurred by a little bit too fast for me lately. The years seemed to shade, with the images of boys flickering in and out at random. Yet sometimes, not often, it all seemed to slow and pause and I could study one single reflection for a brief moment. It was that way with Henry on those snowed-in winter evenings. He reminded me of other men—boys, really— who had once worn Marine green. But most of all I realized now, with intense shock, that most of all he reminded me of my father.

  Henry even looked like my father. He had the same soft, extra-polite, measured manners, and the same cocky stance, with laughter trickling through a wry smile as if he knew how much all of this was a joke and how much you didn’t. My father was a fighter, a seaman, an inventor, and then he became a fireman in the City of New York. It was Depression days, and he just made the height requirement by having himself driven downtown for the physical lying stretched out on the backseat of a car until minutes before they measured him. Then, when he passed out of training, he started a career that seemed bent on proving he was bigger than any fire. Before he was through, twenty-odd years later, he had fallen ten stories in an elevator shaft, broken both arms a few times, broken his back, been blown off the stern of an exploding ship, and then, as a lieutenant, calmly waited until every one of his men had been evacuated from a tunnel beneath President Street in Brooklyn before even thinking about starting out himself. He had almost made it when the leaking gas main they were fleeing exploded behind him. Although he stood up afterward for a few moments, the muscles had been torn apart in his legs, in his back, in his heart.

  A battalion fire chief’s car came to school for me and drove me downtown, bell clanging, siren screaming, weaving in and out of the city traffic at seventy, eighty miles per hour to have me see him before he died. Although he didn’t die, not then. He was retired and only later, still what I’d now consider a young man, passed away from those injuries. Afterward there was a ceremony at Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive, words from the mayor, a medal, and the life of this wonderful man whom his children loved unreservedly, whom his wife loved out of mind and forever, was over.

  Tough guy.

  Why he did what he did was always a mystery to me. I was never a tough guy, not really tough. Something about my father’s life and the way he loved life had held me back. Something that, when thinking of him, told me no, not this way, this didn’t work.

  And suddenly here he was again, drinking a cup of coffee and laughing gently with me at night, planning his life, reassuring me.

  Mike’s attitude toward Henry was a farrago of feelings. Remembering the first disdainful distance over Thanksgiving, he was leery of Henry and also resentful of the time I was spending with him. Yet still Mike followed him around like a worshipful little acolyte whenever he had the chance.

  “I don’t like Henry. I don’t like him living here all the time. He should go back to Norwich.”

  “So, you want him to leave?”

  Little knots of confusion ran across his face. “No, but why does he have to go to work and not come back until it’s real late?”

  I walked into Sue’s office to find her on the phone, speaking very softly. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I picked up a magazine.

  A couple of minutes later she hung up, and when the phone immediately rang again she didn’t put her hand out for it. Instead she sat there until it had rung three or four times, then reached over and turned her answering machine on.

  “Sue, can we talk for a minute?”


  “Huh?” she asked, slowly shaking her head.

  “Can we talk?”

  She looked over at me blank-faced and said, “Rich, my mother has cancer.”

  “What? When?”

  She shrugged lightly, then shivered. “Her doctor upstate diagnosed her, and she’s going to Boston General for a second opinion. Then, if it’s confirmed, they’ll operate right away and she’ll do chemo and radiation treatment for six weeks in Dutchess County.”

  “New York?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That was Eileen on the phone. We agreed that she’ll stay here for those six weeks, not at Eileen’s. Even if Eileen’s place is closer, there are just too many steps down and back up from her house.”

  I nodded. Sue’s older sister, Eileen, lived in a development built above a lake on the other side of the river. Her house was out of sight of the road, forty or fifty feet down the face of the hill, with a very long set of concrete stairs.

  “How will we avoid steps here?” I asked.

  Sue raised her eyebrows. “We’ll have to put her on the first floor, in the room Mike is sleeping in. It’s a tremendously big room—much too big since Liam moved upstairs.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Number three is open. We’ll redo it for Mike. How long do we have?”

  “Only about a week, maybe two.”

  Then I forced myself to look back into her eyes. “The prognosis?”

  There were tears in there, and her voice was brittle. “Not good.”

  In contrast to the depression everyone else was feeling, Mike seemed excited, even ebullient, about the move. In fact, he was so bubbly and happy that it grated on our nerves and we got a little snappy around him. But he ignored that and worked with us getting both rooms ready. He talked and talked about nothing else for the next week—how he liked the view, liked being up on the same floor as Liam, liked the long shelf running along one side of the room.

  I quickly repainted number three, hung up Mike’s pictures, mounted his big stuffed bear up high in one corner where it would look down on his bed, and then, on Friday night, we spent an hour or so getting everything else of his up. He had accumulated quite a bit over the past few months—clothes, models, games, books.

  Then he got under the covers and we read together for half an hour.

  “Good night,” he said with a lilt in his voice.

  “I’m glad Mike rose to the occasion and settled in upstairs,” Sue said a couple of days later.

  “I don’t know how settled in he is,” I said. “He’s still jumping up and down about how much he likes it. In fact, he’s running out of adjectives. Each night he spends more and more time telling me what a great room it is. He’s so excited he doesn’t even seem to be sleeping all that well.”

  Sue looked thoughtful for a moment or two, then she shook her head and said, “Well, it’s new. I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

  I nodded.

  “The underwear?” she asked.

  I sighed. I usually got up first and made coffee, so I usually dealt with Mike in the morning. “He’ll still hide it if you give him half a chance, and when you question him he gets defensive and starts yelling.”

  “Then he’s wetting every night?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it seems so.”

  “Odd,” Sue said, slowly shaking her head again. “When he was downstairs, he was starting to have dry nights a couple of times a week.”

  I shrugged.

  Sue stood up and stretched. “We should pick a fight with him over hiding the underwear. But not now. We’ve got too much on our plate. Too much to work out.”

  When Sue’s mother, Lee, was driven down from Boston by Eileen she looked wan and weak and had lost a lot of weight. We set up a double bed in the old library room, a hospital table, a good light so she could read, and a stack of books she had asked for. It was a good arrangement. Lee could work her way out the few paces through the connecting French doors into the living room and take her meals in front of the fireplace.

  “Hello, Mike,” Lee said in almost a whisper, smiling. “I’m glad I’m getting to meet you again.”

  But Mike looked down at her sitting in one of the wing chairs in the living room and asked in a loud voice, “When are you leaving?”

  “Mike!” Sue protested.

  We had followed through and started Mike in the local Cub Scout pack. His weekly den meetings were only a mile down the road in the Quaker church, the Friends Meeting House in Clintondale, built in 1810.

  The den leader was a pleasant, patient man named John Thomas who did his best to fit Mike in. Mike was on the older side for Cub Scouts. Most of the boys had been there two or three years and were getting ready to move on to Boy Scouts in the late spring. But the den meetings themselves were artsy-craftsy sorts of sessions, just the sort of managed activity Mike was used to, and he seemed to fit right in.

  “Maybe Cub Scouts is more Mike’s kind of thing right now,” Sue said. “At least it’s exposing him to normal children. More than that, the kids are local, so he might make some friends.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “So don’t prod him into going to karate on Thursday nights if he wants to take a pass.”

  I looked the question at her.

  Sue arched her back. “I think the socialization shock treatment has had its effect and he’s proud of himself for it. Right now I think he should concentrate on friends and parties and get-togethers.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why. There’s something there. He’s swimming out of focus, acting weird. You heard how he talked to my mother. I think he’s getting ready to turn sideways again.”

  The next morning, half asleep myself, I padded into Mike’s room at six-thirty, shook him awake, and got punched in the jaw.

  “Mike, time to get up.”

  “No!” he screamed, then jumped to his knees on the bed, pulled back his left hand in a fist, and swung a long haymaker.

  I saw it corning, but just couldn’t believe it. I even had a hard time believing it when his fist connected with my chin.

  Then Mike threw himself back down on the bed and wrapped himself up in his quilt. “Fuck you” came up at me.

  I reacted out of reflex—or rather, I overreacted. I reached down, grabbed one side of the mattress, and flipped. He spun off and hit the floor. I had logrolled him.

  He lay there for a moment before starting to make hurt sounds. “Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

  I got him up on his feet, and he wasn’t injured. He had, after all, landed on the floor still wrapped in his quilt. But I was deeply ashamed of myself. Angry, too. How could he do that? Why did he do that?

  That afternoon he slammed into the house after school.

  “Mike, you have to lower your voice. Sue’s mother is trying to get some rest.”

  “When is she leaving?” he yelled back.

  Finally, Sue decided she would take over getting Mike up in the morning. “I’m going to have to make the time. You’re far too abrupt,” she said to me that night. “With my mother here, he’s getting pushed out of the way a little bit, and you treat him like he’s in the Marine Corps.”

  But when she went up in the morning, Mike smashed the window next to his bed. His fist went through the inside pane and then the storm window.

  Sue just stood there for a few moments, the wind swirling through the window, and watched the snow dust his little figure. Then she reached under the quilt, grabbed his pajamas, and hoisted him bodily half upside down over the broken glass.

  “March,” she hissed.

  “No.”

  “March.”

  As January snowed and snowed on, the morning confrontations escalated. Each night we’d put him to bed, read to him, tuck him in, and give him a hug, he’d tell us what a great room he had and how happy he was, and then, in the morning, there’d be open warfare.

  An endless series of discussions went like this:

  “Mike, it’s terribly inappropriate to hit
people or break windows.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Mike, why are you so angry?”

  “Everybody really pisses me off.”

  “You’re frightening the dogs. They don’t want to come in the room with you anymore.”

  “I don’t care”

  “You’re forfeiting your allowance to pay for this glass.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Can you tell us what’s bothering you?”

  “You. You bother me.”

  “How?”

  “You really piss me off.”

  “Mike, how do we make you angry?”

  “Everybody really pisses me off.”

  Sue was inwardly cringing, not only because we were down to two guests and they were getting ready to move, what with Mike’s yelling or breaking things in the morning, but also because her mother was in the house.

  One morning, while slowly sipping a cup of coffee in front of the fire, Lee rolled her eyes at the loud scene unfolding upstairs yet again and then looked shrewdly sideways at me. “Sometimes I feel like hobbling up those stairs with my walker in one hand and a belt in the other.”

  I laughed ruefully. “That’s not part of his treatment plan, Lee.”

  Then she lit one of her unfiltered cigarettes with a wooden match, took a sip of the coffee, exhaled, flicked the match into the fireplace, and said, “Have you considered getting him out of that room?”

  “He loves that room, Lee.”

  That crafty sideways look again. “Really, now.”

  January ended, and Sue finally did have to give up almost all involvement with Mike as tax season opened and the long parade of clients began trooping in. Lee gradually seemed to improve, and her appetite quickened. We started making her some decent meals—London broil with new potatoes, baked chicken, good strong soups with dark bread and butter. She had the strength now to get up and watch TV for a couple of hours and, finally, to come downstairs for coffee in the morning, where she’d chat with the guests about her home in the Adirondacks.