The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

Aha, i thought. It is about the school.

  “And,” paula continued, “maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to shove mike along quite so vigorously.”

  “Yes,” sue said, smiling again, “of course.”

  We had missed having a big dinner on easter because susanne and david were away and so sue decided to hold it later in the month. Mike pitched in and peeled potatoes. Then, since we were all still very busy, he decided that he would take a walk. He and the dogs loped up and down the mountain for almost two hours, and he came back tired, relaxed, with red cheeks and windblown hair, and very hungry. He slid into the kitchen and started lifting pot covers. “ah, excellent,” he’d say with one—clang. “my favorite,” with another—clang.

  Sue bumped into him with a heavy, hot pot in her hands. “mike, get the blazes out of here and go wash up,” she said and he ran out.

  Roast lamb, potatoes whipped with sour cream, gravy, lots of vegetables, salad, two types of pie, brownies, and rocky road ice cream. Mike was the subject of a lot of well-thought-out ribbing from david, liam, and henry (he had started it by remarking in a hurt tone of voice that last saturday he had had only one-and-a-half hours of tv). but mike seemed to revel in the joshing. He asked for a beer and i said no, then asked for wine and i gave him cranberry juice in a stemmed glass. Later liam asked him if he was drinking wine, and mike said aggrievedly, “no, rich did the cranberry switch on me again.”

  Mike ate both brownies and lemon pie for dessert, then quietly played scrabble with david with the table light turned low and everybody else silently reading next to them or chatting, whispering together in the still shadows of the room. Then, at bedtime, he went off happy and sleepy and holding a kitten named calico that theresa, one of our guests, had given him.

  Wow, that was almost civilized.

  A sunny day. You could stand on the back lawn and see the catskills forty miles off or a hawk start from a tree a mile distant.

  I restrung mike’s fishing pole with stren fishing line, fixed the ferrule, and we practiced casting on the grass. Mike was fascinated with the way stren fishing line fluoresces purple in the sunlight but goes clear when it hits the water (so am i, for that matter). he went back to the lakes to fish and stayed there with the dogs almost until dark. I checked on him once with the binoculars and could clearly pick out his figure casting into the big lake, with the two black blobs of teddy bear and pupsy next to him on the grass.

  Later he ate dinner at the bar—hamburgers, french fries, salad—and we actually allowed him to watch tv until bedtime, which he did relaxed and sleepy on the couch with a quilt over him. The kid was actually tired, not keyed up or hyper.

  On his way to bed he asked me if he could grow a ponytail. I said, “not while i’m drawing a breath.”

  Late in the afternoon several days later, mike headed up to the mountain with his bike, and when he didn’t return i followed him on brendan’s bike. No matter what you do, you think the worst. Maybe he ran down the road out of control and crashed into one of the lakes and drowned? maybe he took a spill and hit his head?

  I found him talking to gene coy about a mile or two back. Gene is the farmer next door. Gene was in his truck with his black lab, cinder, sitting next to him on the seat. Mike was telling gene his life story and asking a thousand questions about the dog. “does he help around the house? is he a good guard dog? does he swim? does he poop on the walk? does he get carsick? does he …”

  Gene sat in his truck, lean, tanned, saturnine, with graying hair, carefully smoking a cigarette while trying to nod as fast as the questions ran by. Finally, he blurted out, “nice to meet ya, gotta spread calcium, so long,” and got out of there with his tires spinning gravel and the dog looking back vaguely out of the passenger window, no doubt wondering what all that noise was about.

  The next day, mike upped the ante on the school issue—or at least, that’s what we thought it was about.

  I had to meet someone at 7:00 a.m. In kingston, which is about thirty miles north of our place. It was a recreation day for me, shooting skeet farther up the river at germantown, so i was long gone from the house when sue shuffled into mike’s room, still half asleep, dressed in slippers and a robe and sipping her first cup of coffee.

  The awful way in which mike’s eruptions could astonish us is something we had never gotten used to, particularly since we were forever thinking he’d grow beyond these things. But they were his weapon of choice when he was dissatisfied about something, and the hard fact was that on any night at all mike could go to sleep happy and exhausted and then rear up out of his sheets in the morning like some demon from the pit. Often we couldn’t help thinking that something this awful couldn’t be emotional, that it was organic brain damage, perhaps from when he was so young and beaten so severely. But we also knew that he’d been examined and cat-scanned and x-rayed and tested time and time again. And the targeted nature of these fights told us that there was a strong element of control involved, that he was actually making decisions. For instance, when he smashed something, ninety percent of the time it was something of his own or a window in his room. And while his behaviors used to be distributed over any and all social settings, they had now narrowed their focus to sue and me or the school, to people acting in a parental role.

  Knowing that we’d become the sole target was little consolation, and perhaps most unnerving was the fact that these explosions usually occurred when we were most vulnerable or least expectant.

  And apparently sue got it with both barrels this morning. Then, later in the day, she got a call from school. It wasn’t over by a long shot—big trouble on the school bus, big trouble in class, lying, shouting, and so on.

  On my unsuspecting way home i stopped in town and picked up his bike from the repair shop and the new boy scout equipment he required. Then, when i walked in after four in the afternoon relaxed and smiling, laden down with his parcels, a repetition of the morning began—screaming, smashing more windows—and it went on until late in the evening, with mike having to be restrained any number of times. It ended only when he had depleted every ounce of energy he had and dropped, sobbing, into a corner of his room.

  Not for the first time, we wondered if it was right to get in his face and stay in his face, driving him through these cycles. There just didn’t seem to be any option, and we told him that over and over again, trying to put as impersonal a face on it as we possibly could: “mike, it’s our job as parents to get you up for school, or to see that you do your homework, or that you’re dressed and clean and fed, and no matter what you do, no matter what anyone else does, that’s what we’re going to do. We will never, ever stop.”

  Late that night, with mike washed up and changed and slumping on his bed, i tried to think of another way to get through to him and said, “we don’t want to fight anymore over getting up in the mornings, but we will. Wouldn’t it be better if you got us up, instead? can you come up with a plan?” interestingly, he did come up with a plan, mumbling something about alarm clocks being set for certain times, a better attitude on his part, and so on.

  But i didn’t have all that much confidence he’d follow through. He still hadn’t gotten what he wanted.

  Liam got his braces off this afternoon, after two years in them. He asked me if he could have some “real food.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Mcdonald’s.”

  So mike, liam, and i went to mcdonald’s for dinner. Mike was upbeat from time to time, saw a kid ride by on a bike and said with a grin, “i have a better bike than that one!” he chattered away over the food, but there was something to his attitude, like a dark mirror flashing through his eyes from time to time. It was making me edgy and nervous. I felt like a twitchy dog who can sense a thunderstorm working up close by. Then i remembered that mike had talked to his sister several times over the phone during the last few days. That was unusual— they usually spoke only once a month or so. Did that have any bearing on his behavior?

  When i
mentioned this to sue, she recalled that joanne had taken mike to visit his brother and sister at the johnsons’ a short time before, and we decided to ask her about mike and his sister’s relationship.

  What joanne reluctantly described to us was a very sad situation. Although schooling was something of an issue, mike’s sister constantly complained about the broader position of herself and her older brother in the johnson family. Apparently they were enrolled in a small, restrictive christian academy, had to come home immediately after school, and then were rarely allowed out unsupervised. Where mike’s brother seemed withdrawn and uncommunicative, his sister was rebelling and fantasizing about getting out on her own. Joanne thought it possible that the sister might be passing on this vision to mike in a manner that suggested that, despite being only thirteen, she might escape from the johnsons and come for him.

  The three of us tried to sort this out. There was a special relationship between mike and his sister—not overtly affectionate, but rather, based on shared secrets. In a very counterproductive way the sister might only be trying to perpetuate a role she had assumed many years ago, and although it was very difficult to ferret out the details of what actually had occurred in their biological home, it seemed that mike as an infant got something to eat only when his sister stole it for him, and the same seemed to be the case for any other sort of care or attention he received.

  How could adults deal with that relationship? his sister might be the only person in the universe mike really trusted, and we certainly didn’t want to touch that. But we couldn’t reason with her, either: apparently she was just too angry about her own predicament.

  Did Mike sense that he had pushed things far enough, for now, or did he know something we didn’t? apparently one or the other, because the next day he surprised us by coming home from school and getting his homework done all by himself. Then he ate a good dinner and went outside around dark to play with the dogs on the back lawn in a warm misty rain, tumbling, slipping, sliding, laughing for an hour or more. Later he worked out with henry in the basement. Henry had set up a new bench press with butterfly-type workout bars and was spending an hour or so every night in there. This evening mike was allowed to join in. Later mike came in and told me he could now do a pull-up and was trying to do more. Good. The kid needed some sort of fitness goal.

  But where had the anger gone?

  It hadn’t returned by morning, either, because in a complete surprise, he woke me up with a cup of coffee at 6:15. A number of days had passed since we had worked out that morning plan, and i was certain he’d let it go.

  I was grateful—pathetically grateful.

  April was almost over when henry came back from a trip to connecticut to take mike up to shawangunk, where they cycled the woods roads together until dark on their mountain bikes. All in all they covered four or five miles, and it was mike’s first introduction to the wild, high little world where the five older boys grew up. Pretty rough country, the woods’ roads overgrown and brambly, the forest mostly second-growth hardwood—oak, maple, and ash, with scattered clusters of virgin hemlock castling up like the forbidding old trees of mirkwood. Lots of rock and high little bogs where the seeps work their way through the terraces. Far back in there are the foundations of farms abandoned a hundred years ago. It’s spooky and dark in some places where the canopy is high and all very wild. But very pretty, too, if you enjoy deep woods. They saw deer.

  When they didn’t turn up by nine i called susanne’s house, and sure enough, they had stopped there on the way back. Susanne was baking cookies, and david let mike play with his samurai swords. Another thing not to tell harbour. I asked susanne to get them on their way so mike didn’t get to bed real late—he was tough enough in the morning. They showed up at home about nine-thirty, ate dinner, and mike went to bed exhausted, muddy, and sunburned, around ten. Henry said mike’s physical stamina was still deplorable, but that he was showing improvement.

  “What did you two talk about?” i asked henry.

  He shrugged. “about the only thing he would talk about— how much he hates his school.”

  I walked in the door, and sue was sitting at the barroom table having a glass of wine.

  “Is that an adult beverage i spy there? before dinner and not on a weekend and all alone?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “this is a special occasion.”

  “What?”

  “Joanne called. She said their report had an effect, as did apparently all of your bitching. Mike is being moved to a transitional classroom, a full day of schoolwork, grade-level subjects, and it looks like a normal classroom.”

  I sat down with a thump. “did she ever tell you who their report was being made to?”

  “No, she didn’t, and i didn’t ask, either, but i guess they have lawyers as well as therapists and social workers.”

  “So they were on our side, after all?”

  “Well,” sue smiled, “on mike’s side. Harbour is all about being on mike’s side.”

  “And next year?”

  Sue turned her hands up. “he’ll be moving into the school district dragging that file of his behind, so i guess we’ll have to fight this thing all over again.”

  “Yeah, i guess so,” i said doubtfully

  “But rich …”

  “What?”

  “I want to say something. “there was a dead, brittle seriousness in her eyes. “If we didn’t get this break and he started up again, he would have had to go somewhere else. I was at the end of my rope. I just couldn’t take living in a war zone any longer and was looking for a way to tell you. I’ve given one hundred ten percent of what i have in me. I don’t think i have anything left, and there’s no payback with this kid. In many ways—in most ways, in his mind—i don’t think i’m any closer to being his mom than i was last summer. He’s still calling us rich and sue, he’s still just thinking of this as another placement.”

  “That will change, sue.”

  “Maybe.”

  A long silence, and then i looked up. “where is he now?”

  Sue pointed out the window. “I told him, he started crying, and then ran off toward the beaver pond.”

  I looked out toward the beaver pond area. “It’s still flooded over back there.”

  “Oh, rich, don’t worry. The dogs are with him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  broken glass, broken-paw, medicine man

  A week or so of work, morning walks up the mountain, a quiet Mike, and endlessly relaxed dinners. So relaxed, in fact, that Sue took off for a few days to visit her mother. I was alone on that first sunny Wednesday in May when Joanne picked Mike up from school, stopped at McDonald’s, and then brought him home at about five-thirty.

  Mike made his usual gracious entrance, banging in through the upstairs doors, but when Joanne accepted a cup of tea I could sense something was wrong—something out of sorts.

  She was fussing.

  “He’s upset with his new class,” she said finally. “It’s steady work from 9:00 A.M. to 2:15, with only lunch and one fifteen-minute recess.”

  “So?”

  “So.” She grimaced lightly and then continued with that circumspect speech of hers, the words measured, thought out, and soft, “Mike didn’t fully understand what he was asking for when he said he wanted to go to a regular class. He’s never had to sit that long in one place, and so now when he keeps asking to go out and play, the other kids pick up on that and make fun of him. Then he responds with inappropriate language, the teacher intervenes, and there’s a scene.”

  “We haven’t heard any of that. It’s been very quiet here.”

  Joanne shrugged. “Well, that’s what I got by putting together the little bits and pieces of what he told me this afternoon.”

  “Making fun of him?”

  “Every day. Apparently it’s been going on every day, Rich. Every day since he began.”

  I stood up and paced. “That’s horrible.”

  Joanne stretched and th
en sipped at her tea, but she was watching me carefully. “Rich, just how emotionally vulnerable are you two?”

  Puzzled by this tack in her conversation, I could only state the obvious. “Mike’s been a child in this house for eight months.”

  “Well, be careful,” she said, nodding. “I don’t think you can avoid becoming close, but you must remember that he can, and when he does things, it’s not meant to hurt you or Sue; it’s just how he deals with issues that aren’t going well.”

  Still puzzled and now a little bit put off, I said back slowly, “Well, yes, you’ve said all of that before.”

  Then, starting to understand what she was saying, I sat down. “Joanne, are you telling me that Mike’s going to start fighting with Sue and me again?”

  She shrugged one shoulder and made a hapless face. “We may have made a big mistake in getting him out of that special-needs program, because sooner or later he’s going to act out here in response to what’s happening to him there.”

  I looked down. This was all too sad. I thought the school issue had settled something in his life, in our life.

  Why didn’t he talk to us? Why didn’t he just keep his mouth shut in class? And how would Sue react if he did start acting out again?

  Joanne was reading my mind. “What about Sue?”

  I blew out my breath and tried to think the issue through out loud. “A month or so ago I came home and found Sue crying facedown into her pillows. She won’t go back to that. She’ll never go back to that.”

  “Too much pain,” Joanne said.

  “Yeah, way too much pain or rejection or disappointment. Push comes to shove, Sue wants to mother Mike and was ready to give up when she couldn’t.”

  “But she didn’t give up” Joanne said quietly.

  “No,” I said, “she didn’t, we didn’t, but without some sort of gesture from Mike, I’m afraid she will pack it in if he starts smashing things again.”