The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  So i didn’t know how to answer mike’s question. If i gave him the extended answer and said what i really thought, i’d be parting company with sue because she had an entirely different viewpoint. Never one for sloppy gradations, her attitude was, “you’re a child? then go to school. Stay home and get yourself together? complain because you don’t like your particular school? are you out of your mind?”

  But on the other hand, if i gave mike the short answer and just said, “yes, liam went to a normal school,” i’d be as much as smacking him in the face.

  So I produced the trite “party line” answer: “mike, you’ll be going to a normal school one of these days. What you have to do is concentrate on what you’re doing right now.”

  Mike didn’t answer, so sue prompted him. “mike, what rich means is that you have to work hard and improve your behavior, and then you’ll be moved out of that school, into the same type of school as everybody else. You understand that, don’t you, mike?”

  “No,” he answered. “I’m in a family, so i should be in a normal school right now.”

  “That isn’t always possible, honey”

  “I want to! i’m in a family!”

  “I’m sorry, mike.”

  Then he bored back with the original question. “did liam go to a normal school?”

  I sighed and gave up. “yes.”

  No movement, no response. The fork stopped stirring.

  “I’m not really a member of this family, am I?”

  Whew! but then sue spoke up. “mike, we couldn’t love you more if you were our own child. You have to remember that you chose us and we chose you. That makes us even more special as a family.”

  “I’m not special,” he screamed.

  Sue got flustered and backed up. “hey, i didn’t mean special in that way.”

  Mike relentlessly pushed the point. “did brendan go to a normal school?”

  “Yes,” and i winced.

  “Susanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Henry, frank, and richard?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I could only slouch and answer, “yes, i’m sure.”

  He put his head down, shouting, “i don’t want to see them. If any of those sons come near me again, i’m going to stab them with a knife.”

  “Mike,” sue said, shocked, “what an awful thing to say”

  I had a brilliant thought. “david, susanne’s husband, didn’t go to a normal school, either. He was in an orphanage in vietnam a long, long time ago. Then he had to fly out of there on a plane, and it was very dangerous. In fact, he took off right after a plane with other orphans was shot down, and then, when he got here, they didn’t put him in a normal school. He had to work and learn the language and learn how to behave.”

  The food stirring started again as mike thought about that, but after maybe thirty seconds or so he dropped the fork. “I’m not an orphan, i’m a foster child. I have a mother and father. I’m just not living with them.”

  I walked into our bedroom and dropped the morning new york times on the bed.

  “Mike’s on the bus and you’ve been down to town already?” sue asked.

  “Yeah, i had to get milk.”

  “So,” sue said, taking a cursory look at the paper, “what are your plans today?”

  I yawned and stretched. “I’m sanding the floor in number five.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” i asked.

  “And,” sue said sweetly, “you’re going to go out and pick up mike’s birthday present.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” i said. “It’s this friday?”

  “No,” sue said patiently, “its the day after tomorrow. His brother and sister will be here, some friends from school, and maybe joanne will come down. I’ll be here, too, of course, but i have to see clients in middletown all the early afternoon, so you’ll have to decorate the barroom before he gets home from school.”

  “How should i decorate the barroom?”

  “Oh,” said sue distractedly, “just a couple of balloons. Remember, we’re still keeping our distance.”

  Balloons, balloons, balloons. I spent the entire afternoon putting up a mile of streamers and a big “happy birthday” banner. Then i put balloons on the mailbox, on sue’s sign, on the door to the barroom, over all the lights, the mirror, even on the deer head hanging off in the corner.

  Liam came in an hour before mike was expected. “dad, are you out of your mind? mom told you to keep this thing relaxed and low-key”

  “The hell with that. I’ve been a good boy for weeks now, and i’m sick of being low-key and detached. Today i’m going to overload every circuit in mike’s feeble little emotional brain path.”

  Sue walked in from the parking lot then, an attaché case in one hand and a box of accounting records under the other arm. She just stood there with her mouth hanging open.

  “Mom,” liam said, “i think dad has been drinking or something.”

  Then she started laughing. “oh, my god.”

  The party was in full swing, but mike was tense and edgy, quietly watching.

  His half sister, a short, quiet girl about thirteen, and a much taller but just as quiet half brother a year or so older, had arrived with their adoptive parents, the johnsons, and i thought their presence might have been difficult for mike. Was he embarrassed over them? or feeling awkward at having wound up with a different family?

  There wasn’t any chemistry at all between sue and me and the johnsons, despite having spoken on the phone any number of times, and there was always that mystery hanging fire in any appreciation of them by us—the whys of their failed adoption attempt in regard to mike. But their behavior at the party seemed downright strange.

  When we offered to lend their children a couple dozen videotapes, the johnsons picked through the tapes in front of us and the children, rejecting walt disney movies like parent trap as “garbage” and “immoral,” movies that “exalted” divorce and violence. Yet both of them were divorced. And almost the first words out of their mouths when they walked in had been that he was an alcoholic and could shoot somebody (he actually worked for the post office), and she explained to us that she had a medical condition that caused her to faint every half hour or so, but she could be revived with cigarette smoke. Throughout the party they discussed their children in a derogatory way right in front of them, consistently calling their youngest adopted child “the crack baby.”

  Despite what we viewed as hurtful behavior, the two older children seemed pleasant, although extraordinarily reserved. Mike’s sister looked away whenever she smiled. Oddly, there had been no hugs and kisses between the children when they arrived.

  Sue, however, was ignoring any straight faces and trying to whoop it up, popping balloons and making a big show. She had the children from mike’s class at school laughing and even nudged mike’s brother into half a grin.

  Then i realized what was going on. Mike was wondering what he would get for a present from us. He had been talking about little else for the past few days. He had tried the toe-in-the-water technique in regard to tv time by asking for another sega game cartridge, knowing that we would let him play it. But pathetically, he also asked for a new tire for his bike. Liam had given him an old bmx and helped him get it going, but it was in bad shape, with parts always falling off and the rear wheel wobbly and out of round.

  Finally, sue dashed into the kitchen for the cake and candles, and i ducked into the cellar to get his present, too big to wrap but as safe from being found by him far back there in the dark as it would be in fort knox.

  A brand-new, adult-size, metallic-blue, eighteen-speed mountain bike, an air pump, a water bottle, and a helmet.

  I watched his face as i wheeled it out into the barroom. He wouldn’t look at it directly at first, just stared out of the corner of his eye. But with everybody prodding him, he finally got up and put hands on it, then gave a big, big grin.

  Sue
whispered to me, “i hope this doesn’t get him angry enough to take out four or five windows.”

  “Later,” i said sarcastically, “later. Right now, he’s actually happy.”

  Then, an hour or so afterward, mike and i were outside in the parking lot and he was shouting at me. “I know how to ride this bike. Leave me alone.”

  “Fine,” i said. “fine,” and just backed away with my hands up.

  A few minutes later i was checking one of the truck tires, bent down on my knees at the bottom of the parking lot, when i saw him start into the drive up above.

  Seconds later he hit me. He hit me so hard i thought my legs were broken and i actually blacked out for a few seconds.

  When i came to, mike was looking down at me, spinning the pedals backward on his bike. “I’m sorry,” he said. “we have to get some brakes on this thing.”

  “Hand brakes,” i managed to grunt out. “those things on the handlebars are hand brakes.”

  “If there’s one thing i’m certain of, rich, it’s that mike desperately requires the services available in the special educational program.”

  I tried to be patient. Sue had made the appointment with this school psychologist and at the last minute couldn’t go. She wanted to explore the possibility of shifting mike over into at least a few real classes. But the chemistry between us was bad from the get-go.

  “But tom—” i insisted on calling him tom because he had insisted on calling me rich “—this is a fundamentally bright kid. He’s made enormous progress at home socially, and he wants to try mainstream classes.”

  “I don’t know what we can do. Mike has a long history of emotional disturbance. He’s been duly diagnosed.”

  “Well, then,” i said, “suppose we get him to another psychiatrist and have him duly undiagnosed?”

  “Hah,” he said with a self-deprecating little smile, “even under those circumstances, boces will insist upon special resources being made available. There’s an immense amount of prior documentation, there’s the federally mandated iep, the individual educational plan—too much to ignore, even if it wasn’t legally required.”

  “So he’s trapped.”

  The psychologist sat up somewhat indignantly. “this is one of the best programs in the state. There’s even a waiting list. Mike was very fortunate to get in here.”

  “Tom,” i protested, waving my hand at the modern offices and complex of rooms, “mike doesn’t consider all this a resource for himself; he considers this a stigma. He wants to be a normal kid.”

  “But he’s not a normal child.”

  I got my back up. “I don’t know what’s normal, what an average kid is. If we were all average, every one of us would have one testicle and one breast.”

  The psychologist gave that remark a perfunctory, flat smile and then said, “mike’s severely emotionally disturbed—just look at his handwriting. After months of coaching, he still writes a scrawl. It’s not possible for him to keep written words between the lines on a sheet of paper despite fairly good small-motor development. There are emotional issues there, deep emotional issues.”

  At seven-thirty that evening mike was doing his homework on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. I picked up his homework paper and saw that his penciled answers were scrawled all over the page. So i tore it up.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  But i sat down and pulled a fresh piece of paper over in front of him. “what’s the answer to the first question?”

  He looked at me sullenly. “apple.”

  “Fine. Write the letter a and keep it between those blue lines.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Scrawl.

  “Okay, erase it and do it over, and this time keep it between the lines.”

  He erased it and wrote again.

  Scrawl.

  “You didn’t keep it between the lines, so erase it again.”

  Rub, rub, rub, and then he picked up the pencil again.

  Scrawl.

  “Erase it.”

  In a couple more tries he had worn a hole through the paper and i put a new sheet in front of him.

  It was about nine o’clock when he angrily wrote it between the lines. “there.”

  “Good,” i said. “that’s a perfect a. now write p,p,l,e, keeping the letters between the lines.”

  When mike finished his assignment, i stood up and over him.

  “Mike, why don’t you keep the words between the lines on all your schoolwork?”

  He glared up at me. “I hate that fucking school.”

  “Don’t use that word.”

  “I hate that fucking classroom.”

  I leaned over to give him a punch in the shoulder, but he ducked away laughing, pleased at his wit.

  Then i went into sue’s office, made a copy of his homework, and attached it to a very angry letter.

  Later i tried to put this dispute into context. I knew why the school backed away from pushing mike onward—they had looked at his file and didn’t really think he belonged in their relatively open setting in the first place. A fact which ties into the mystery of why we were ever introduced to mike, because we’ve come to understand in a backhanded sort of way that he should never have been selected for the harbour program.

  It wasn’t anything said directly, but rather what was hinted at—that harbour is a therapeutic foster-care program designed for children who stand a reasonable chance of benefiting, and that mike’s file was much too daunting for any of that.

  So, then, why was he here?

  Somehow he sailed through the first independent selection committee, through harbour’s own screening, and then was handed to sue and me as our first and only file. I suspect the hidden hand of personal interest. I think somebody felt really sorry for mike and took a long, long chance.

  Which goes a long way toward explaining why joanne and paula, the director of the harbour program, trundled on down here this afternoon, the day after joanne’s latest visit with mike, primed with a “stop pushing mike, keep a low profile, don’t rock the boat” lecture.

  After a preface, what we got was a blunt caution against any further unilateral action, and then an even blunter reminder about who should be calling the plays. In fact, paula told us that we were to regard harbour, in the matter of mike, as “our employer.”

  I suppose this conversation had to happen. When you sum up mike’s peculiar status, along with our behavior, it must have equaled extreme organizational discomfort. At our weekly meetings we always told joanne exactly what had happened, but rarely what we were planning. Not necessarily because we didn’t want her to know (although, to be honest, that was sometimes the case); it was just that we ourselves often hadn’t the foggiest idea of what we were going to do. Yet i could see how that would appear from the other side of the fence: getting the medication dropped, taking him to the adirondacks, taking him to vermont and what happened there—“i got blown over by a cannon. Wow!”—joanne’s initial anxiety over the karate school, putting dogs on his bed, household chores, sue’s smugness about shutting him up by yelling back (what she calls “tantrum therapy”), the fact that mike must have told joanne that we took him “hunting” and that we had physically dragged him out of bed morning after morning. All in all, a picture of a self-willed couple more than a tad out of control.

  But somehow, i thought today’s meeting would have more to do with the school than any other one issue.

  I looked over at sue. Under most circumstances paula’s remarks would have had the effect of a lit match connecting with an open pan of gasoline. But today she was just radiating sunshine. So i made a self-justifying stab on my own. “you know, paula, mike has gained thirty pounds since he’s been with us.”

  Paula looked at me, startled, and said, “no, i didn’t know that “then she turned to joanne. “you should put that in the report.”

  Sue said lightly, starting to get interested for the first time, “a report? is somebody, some
where up the food chain, interested in mike?”

  Paula waved the question away. “It’s just what we do from time to time.”

  Sue made a low sound in her throat, and i topped off with another comment. “he’s getting up in the morning. He wouldn’t do that at the children’s home.”

  “I remember reading that in his file,” paula said. Then she looked at joanne again and joanne scribbled.

  Sue finally kicked in behind me, “and he’s had a friend— friends, in fact—over for the day. We had been told he couldn’t handle that sort of one-to-one relationship.”

  “I see.”

  “He had been diagnosed with tourette’s syndrome, but his facial tic has disappeared.”

  “Really?”

  I snapped my fingers. “he’s helping with family meals.”

  “And doing chores.”

  “His night crying has stopped.”

  “He’s writing between the lines.”

  “He learned how to play chess.”

  “He’s taking long walks with the dogs and not hounding us for attention any longer.”

  I looked at sue and smirked. “and don’t forget, he’s wiping his ass now.”

  “Yes, there’s that,” sue said, smiling sweetly at paula, then carefully punctuated every syllable with her voice like a rasp on slate. “he is wiping his ass.”

  Both of us stared across the table at paula with the unspoken question on our lips: after that shot about an employer-employee relationship, what are you prepared to do?

  A long, long eye contact, and then paula put up her hands and smiled. “okay. Now look, folks, i’m on your side, because i know you’re on mike’s. Please don’t take anything i said personally. But mike is severely disturbed, and in many ways, you folks are still in the honeymoon stage with him. So we have to understand a couple of things. First, how important it is to maintain the proper services …”