The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  But Mike wasn’t any better. With the unending sequence of storms blasting through, school was closed as often as open, and on many mornings we’d defer the morning fight until after the guests had left. There always was a fight. And there always was breakage: lamps, his alarm clock again, the desk, his toys, and more and more windows.

  After school and on weekends we could avoid further conflict by letting him park himself in front of the TV. But TV was a baleful influence. More so than anyone else we ever saw, TV drew Mike in.

  So, thinking it must have something to do with his morning behavior, early in February we terminated his TV. The first day this happened, out of boredom Mike spent the afternoon at the winter barbecue in the St. Charles Church Hall. He went down early and helped set up (for which Deacon Carroll slipped him a twenty-dollar bill), and then he cooked hot dogs all afternoon.

  “Okay,” Sue said, “he’s accepting it.”

  But he was actually striking back. A few days after TV termination, things started to arrive in the mail that he had ordered over the phone.

  “Mike,” I said, holding a hefty package of custom-printed stationery in my hand, “you can’t do this.”

  “I didn’t order anything,” he said with his big blue eyes wide.

  I opened the covering letter and started to read, “Dear Michael, thank you for your telephone call …”

  Then the range of conflict narrowed, as if Mike had decided that random surgical strikes were more effective than this “fight ’em every step of the way” morning routine. We didn’t understand what was happening, at first—only that the mornings got suddenly better.

  When they did, we foolishly felt a little guilty over some of our reactions to his behavior over the past few weeks, and we surprised him with boots, cross-country skis, and poles.

  They seemed to be a big hit. Mike was outside all day long that first day. He even went out at sunset and tried to ski down the lane to the orchards, but as soon as he started into the dark under the trees an owl hooted in a branch just over his head and he set a land speed record coming back.

  Then he put on a charming little pretense at indignation over Teddy, who was with him and had ignored the owl.

  “You can’t trust Teddy,” Mike said, laughing.

  “Well,” I said in a happy, bantering tone, glad to see him in such a good mood, “you can’t expect a dog to climb a tree in the dark and chase an owl. Besides, owls are good luck.”

  “Yep,” he said, laughing again, and then he walked into the kitchen to get a snack.

  “Whose dinner is this on the table?” I heard him shout in to me.

  “It’s Sue’s Mom’s,” I shouted back. “Be careful. I’m just waiting for her to get out of the bath before I bring it up to her.”

  Smash!

  I walked into the kitchen, and the tray and the dishes I had left on the table were broken on the kitchen floor.

  “Mike, what happened?”

  Those big blue eyes again. “I don’t know. It just fell off.”

  “Mike, you had to have moved it. I left it in the center of the table.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Sue, he smashed that dinner tray on purpose.”

  It was late at night, Sue had finished with her last client, and we were having a quiet drink downstairs.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” I said. “I don’t know. But he did it.”

  Sue just looked at me, exhausted, trying to force herself to think. “But why?”

  Then he flashed again two days later on the next Cub Scout meeting night. Mike was picked up by the scoutmaster and his son, and then, at about eight, Henry and I went over to get him in Henry’s truck.

  When he ran out the door, Mike seemed very happy. He had made place mats for the blue-and-gold dinner and was chattering on about the upcoming event.

  But thirty seconds after he got into the narrow cab of the truck, crowded in the middle over the gearshift, he started to call Henry names, then filthy names.

  Then filthier names.

  Every time I told him to stop this bizarre behavior he’d say, “Whatever,” or “You’re not my boss” or “You piss me off.”

  I was dumbfounded, but Henry stayed silent until we pulled into the parking lot and then said to me quietly, “I’ll take care of this, Dad.”

  Mike was walking toward the house when Henry attacked him from behind. He picked him up and threw him into a snowbank, let him struggle up, then chased him. Mike started screaming, “Help, help, help me, Rich,” but Henry shouted back the same snide little phrases Mike had used on me in the truck: “You’re not my boss.” “Whatever.” “You piss me off.” Then he caught him again and threw him into another snowbank.

  I walked into the house, and Sue stormed into the living room from her office and shouted, “What’s Henry doing to Mike outside?”

  I shrugged.

  Lee was sitting by the fire, quietly reading with a pot of fresh coffee next to her. She looked up and out the front window as a screaming Mike was making another circuit of the snowdrifts. “Sit down, Sue,” she said pleasantly. “Have a cup of hot coffee and relax for a couple of minutes. Mike must have started it.”

  “No,” Sue said, “the point is that you don’t let him provoke you.”

  A few minutes later Mike came in red-faced, tears streaming down his face, soaking wet and shivering, but with an enormously satisfied smile on his face.

  “What’s this all about, Mike?” I asked.

  He wouldn’t answer. Instead he ran upstairs, changed into nightclothes, and then for the first time ever, came back down and said that even if it wasn’t his bedtime, he was tired and wanted to go to sleep.

  “What?”

  “I have to,” Mike said, grinning. “Henry said he’s going to come upstairs and watch me.”

  “Huh?”

  But he scampered off without answering.

  “Okay,” Sue said, flustered. “Okay. I give up.”

  The next week was the Cub Scout blue-and-gold dinner. I was tired and didn’t want to go. But Mike was baking brownies, we had promised, and, of course, Sue wasn’t available.

  I washed and ironed his uniform—shirt, pants, neckerchief— and he looked very sharp at first. Unfortunately, he then put something in his trouser pockets that spread out in a red stain.

  It was like a barely controlled riot—seventy-five scouts, a hundred or so parents, and a million younger children. When the gym doors opened, the sound hit you like a sonic wave from a squadron of jets. I stood there, appalled, but Mike happily ran in with his brownies.

  Somehow, the scoutmasters got it organized, all the tables were set with tablecloths, place mats, and a blue-and-gold bouquet of flowers, and the food was actually very good. There was an enormous buffet—meatballs, lasagna, baked ziti, beans, salad, chicken, rice, etc. Mike ate three hot dogs at home before the dinner under the theory that “you never know if there’s going to be enough food.” But on the serving line he loaded down anyway, a heaping plate of meatballs, chicken, and sausage. Then, when they set the dessert line, he came back with four or five types of dessert, grumbling that his brownies were all gone before he got there.

  He now weighed one hundred seven. Maybe we should start cutting back.

  The awards. Mike was the first up. He was getting his bobcat badge and his “mother” pin. I was nervous because I had to go up with him and put my arm on his shoulder while he recited the Cub Scout promise in front of the whole crowd. When he hesitated, I thought, Oh, no, he’s going to be embarrassed. Why didn’t somebody warn me? I could have practiced with him!

  But he recited it flawlessly.

  Then, after we came home, and almost as an afterthought, Mike ran back downstairs and started a fire in the kitchen.

  The Harbour Program does not place or continue to place children with a history of fire-starting.

  Joanne was the first to speak. “I’m going to lay it out to him: he starts fires, he has to leave. And i
t won’t be back to the children’s home. He’s almost too old now.”

  Sue nodded tiredly. She seemed suddenly beaten, unable to cope with Mike, with her mother, with tax season. It was all piling up too high. “I can barely go to sleep in this house, worrying about him finding some matches or going back down to the stove in the middle of the night.”

  Joanne looked at her. “Are you asking for a withdrawal?”

  A long, long moment passed while Sue looked around as if she wanted to get up and run off somewhere. Then she said in a low voice: “Let’s have him in here.”

  After Joanne said her piece and Sue and I followed up a concurrence, Mike gave us an appraising, deep look and then slowly nodded. “I’ll never, ever do that again.”

  Sue was crying behind her eyes. “Okay.” Joanne reached over and touched her hand. “You do realize, Sue, that it’s not entirely your decision or Harbour’s decision? We are going to have to report this to Social Services.”

  Sue sat up straight, finally summoning some sort of energy. “Perhaps he’s been alone with us too much—all this snow and these school cancellations. Maybe …”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  i never went to a real school

  Mike had another friend over for the day, a joey from down the road, also a foster child. Sue knows the family and arranged it. We gave special dispensation, and they played sega genesis all afternoon. Mike made joey lunch—hot dogs, of course.

  No fights that day or the next, but the day after, he smashed the glass in the french doors. Sue’s mother watched him do it. In fact, it looked as if mike had waited for her to come inside.

  “Get him out of that room, sue.”

  “No, mom, that has nothing to do with it. He loves that room upstairs. It’s something else.”

  But the confirmation of lee’s deduction began to come our way several days later, when liam told us that mike got up at about four in the morning to go to the bathroom and then wouldn’t because he couldn’t get teddy bear to go out into the dark of the upstairs foyer with him. Liam had awakened when he heard mike cajoling the dog, but was groggy and went back to sleep.

  How many other times had that happened up there? I asked myself.

  The next night I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m. And went upstairs. when I opened mike’s door, he was sitting half asleep in his desk chair, holding teddy around the neck.

  “Mike, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Mike, are you waiting for it to get light outside?”

  Silence.

  “Where else would we put him?” sue asked.

  “Sue,” I said, “i don’t think he’s slept at all in that room. He’s absolutely terrified of the dark. The dark outside the windows, the dark in that foyer.”

  “Let’s test it out,” sue said. “call him in here.”

  When mike walked in, sue had him sit down. “mike, we’re going to offer you a choice. You can sleep in your room or take a sleeping bag and sleep downstairs outside our bedroom door on the floor. Which would you like to do?”

  Shuffling feet, then he said, “i don’t mind sleeping in a sleeping bag.”

  “Thanks, mike. Now let us alone to talk for a little while.”

  When the door closed, sue shrugged. “well, you’re right, but what do we do, and why didn’t the room downstairs bother him like this?”

  “It’s a change,” I opined, answering the second part of her question first. “he shared the room down here with liam for a few months, so he was used to feeling safe in it. He could always hear some activity going on, and there usually was a light on in the living room or out in the downstairs foyer. Besides, we were just a door away. Up there he’s isolated in the corner of the house in a strange room, nobody next to him, no sounds, no light coming in under the door. Everything you or I would view as a benefit is to him a danger.”

  Sue shook her head. “my mother is talking about going to eileen’s for the last two weeks of her radiation. She’s much stronger now and would like to get away from the long car ride. But that’s a couple of days or so away and the basic fact about that big old room remains. There’s just too much noise coming through. With my mother here we’ve been staying out of the living room, but when she leaves we’ll go back to normal.”

  I made a proposal. “we could rebuild, remove the french doors, put a hallway down one side, then build two smaller bedrooms—one for brendan, who’s now sharing a room with frank and hating it, and another small room for mike, with just one window and a glass door facing a permanent night-light mounted out in the new hallway. That way he’ll have quiet, a light outside, and still be close to us.”

  “Rich, are you nuts?”

  “No.”

  Then she laughed. “so you’ve thought all this out?”

  “Yeah.” I got up and opened my dresser. “here,” I said, taking out a roll of paper. “here’s a floor plan I drew up.”

  “And for the next couple of weeks, until you get all this done?”

  “Put the roll-away bed we have upstairs in the downstairs foyer, and when your mom moves out, roll it into the construction site.”

  The first night on the roll-away bed mike slept like a dead man. When we woke him, he got up without a word, walked the few steps to the bathroom, and started his shower.

  Sue’s mother did move out the next week, and we started rebuilding in earnest—two small bedrooms opening on a new, short hallway, which then opened on the downstairs foyer. There was one window in mike’s room and a fixed night-light on the wall outside his room, shining through a glass-paned door.

  Mike helped at every step of the way, loading in the material from where the flatbed truck stacked it in the snow, cutting the framing, studding it up, hanging the doors, sheetrocking and painting.

  Two weeks of peace in the morning. I asked sue if the banging was disturbing her clients.

  “No,” she said, “those are happy noises.”

  Once the rooms were finished and mike moved in, sue took a walk through, sniffing the fresh white paint. “you know,” she said, “he would never have told us he was frightened or upset. He would have kept up his act and his behavior until, in desperation, we moved him out of his home here and back into the system.”

  I sighed. “we’ve seen that phenomenon before, sue. He believes he just has to deal with things as they happen to him. He reacts to circumstances, but he just won’t ever act to change them. His mind-set says he can’t.”

  She grimaced. Then she looked again at the freshly painted new walls. “I wonder if he understands how much we care about him.”

  For days mike just slept and slept when he wasn’t in school. We tried to be as understanding as we could to compensate for the very bad time he had had upstairs. We tiptoed around him, gave him lots of hugs, told him how great he was.

  But then, once he was rested, and despite how understanding we were trying to be, the east wind blew again. It almost seemed we were back in mid-january. If it wasn’t for how terrified we finally realized he was up in that room, we would have regretted going to the effort and expense of the construction downstairs.

  It began again innocently enough, mindlessly enough. Sue complimented mike on the dessert he had made for dinner, and he started rumbling and grumbling, got louder, louder yet, and then went into his tantrum act. “this family sucks. I want to go back to the children’s home.” and so on.

  Suddenly blindingly angry, sue called his bluff. She put the phone in his hand and told him to call. Then, when he hesitated, she got him the phone number and demanded he call. But he wouldn’t do it. Sue then said she never wanted to hear that out of his mouth again.

  Head down, mike just looked up at sue, sour and glowering.

  “Well, mike?” she asked. “well?”

  He screamed back at her, “i won’t do that fucking homework.”

  “What?” sue said, puzzled and taken aback. “what does homework have to do with anything?” then she walked over and tried to g
ive him a hug. “mike, we don’t want anything but good for you. Either Rich or I will help you with the homework.”

  On her weekly visit joanne and I shared a pot of tea in the barroom.

  “It’s mid-february already,” she said brightly “you’re making it through winter.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rich,” she said, sipping at her tea and not liking the look on my face, “the room issue has been resolved, hasn’t it?”

  I put my hands out in sort of a helpless gesture. “but now that we’re past that, he wants to fight about homework. He wants to fight all the time”

  It was true, and as far as i could understand mike’s tortured reasoning, if he didn’t have homework, he’d have a chance at regaining unlimited access to the tv. Then he believed (i think, although i still can’t understand it) that the way to get us to throw in the towel on homework was to fight with us over other issues in the afternoon and evening when he should be doing the homework.

  But we didn’t want to fight anymore. Both sue and i were sick over the thought of more confrontation. Compounding the issue was the snow. It seemed day after day we were trapped in the house with him. The snow was so deep we weren’t having the parking lot plowed any longer. Instead, we’d hired a man with a payloader and a backhoe. Even getting to the supermarket was a chore. We couldn’t take a walk, send him outside, drop him off at a friend’s house. It was always us and that voice, and he seemed to display an infinite degree of reserve strength. He could fight, argue, ridicule, insult nonstop from dawn to bedtime.

  As sue said, “there’s a downside to mike getting a good night’s sleep.”

  But we couldn’t let the homework go. First of all, the only reason the school was assigning him any work was that we’d complained about the lack of academics and asked for homework. Second, the effect of tv was like a drug to this child. If he watched it for half an hour, there was a mild confrontation when we asked him to eat dinner or go to bed or do his chores. But if he watched it for an hour, there was a major fight. Anything over an hour meant open warfare, the worst sort of language, unimaginable tantrums.