The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  I saw this phenomenon again when Mike had to make a periodic visit to one of these doctors. After the psychiatrist examined Mike, he called me in and asked if I had any questions. I said yes and then recited the latest list of issues and incidents that we were discussing with Harbour and the therapist, and asked if he could help us with them.

  But the doctor just sat back and grinned. “What,” he asked, chuckling, “makes you think that you can develop a rational response to each and every irrational act?”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr. Miniter,” the doctor said, leaning forward, “is Mike healthier than he was a few months ago? You tell me.”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  The doctor nodded. “I guess so, too. In fact, I know he’s a lot healthier, and I know he’s going to get healthier yet. But that doesn’t mean I can tell you how to respond to every bit of stupidity, temper, or anger he’s going to display from this point on.”

  “I guess I see what you’re saying,” I said slowly, but really not seeing it.

  “Look,” the doctor said, chuckling again, “you and I, I will assume, are healthy, normal people, but both of us still do dumb things from time to time. Much less so than Mike, of course, but we still do things we have trouble explaining.”

  “You’re not saying we should forget about therapy and just accept Mike’s behavior?”

  “No,” he said deliberately. “Therapy calls Mike on his behavior. It checks him and makes him think about what he’s doing and wants to do. But don’t get lost in the minutiae. Just keep doing whatever it is you are doing, and if you’re going to worry about anything at all, simply worry about whether or not you’re producing a child who as an adult can function within the range of normal human confusion.”

  I grinned back. “Like I am now?”

  The doctor laughed. “Like you are now.”

  From time to time a lone beaver will stroll out onto the old country lane and spend half an hour or so studying the backyard, looking for a way around.

  The lane is really an old wagon road leading off the mountain. How old, I don’t know. It was overgrown and choked with trees when we moved here, and in putting in the parking lot I had the heavy equipment operator run his machine along it for a thousand feet or so until the road disappeared into the swamp.

  Later we cut the grass that sprang up, and Brendan and I built a small bridge off it, over the tiny stream that ran down one side. The lane then became our foot route to the orchard and the mountain.

  But we hadn’t given the history of this old road much thought until one spring I discovered that the route had stone culverts draining the water from the west side east into a drainage ditch around the hay meadow and then, in exploring further, that it emerges again on the other side of the swamp, where it crosses the larger stream on the north side of our little valley with a fieldstone bridge—in particular, two huge slabs of rough, hand-quarried granite.

  When I studied a topographic map I discovered a little more. What remains of this old road follows the natural contour of the mountain as the newer, shorter roads, cut into and through the hills, do not. So, in the days before earth-moving equipment, the old road must have been a route, maybe the first route, across and down the mountain. Another fact that leaped out at me from the map is that in shadowing the contour, the ancient path crosses and crisscrosses, follows downhill the network of rivulets, streams, and ferny seeps that become the Black Creek, opening on the Hudson River, fifteen miles away.

  It’s natural, therefore, for the beavers to try to pass the house because it appears they’ve followed this old abandoned road all the way up from the mouth of the creek. In speaking to neighbors farther downhill I could trace their progress. In the 1960s there were no beaver anywhere along the waterway. Then, in the ’70s, a few appeared ten miles down along the state route, a few years later higher, then in the late ’80s, they were making trouble in the orchard ponds two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Finally we, almost at the top and almost at the end of the water, noticed them felling trees in 1990, one less than four hundred yards from where we had built the footbridge.

  But I didn’t understand who else they were bringing with them until Mike took me to see a lunatic show at dusk.

  I watched Mike start walking down the country lane and called out to him.

  “Mike, where are you going?”

  He turned around, exasperated. “Nowhere.”

  “Are you going into the orchards?”

  “No. I’m going to watch the ducks land.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to see the ducks land. “Then he turned his back and started walking away again.

  “Mike.”

  “What?”

  “I think I’ll come with you.”

  Mike slouched like he was being put upon, but waited for me to catch up and then impatiently led the way down the lane, over the small footbridge, into the orchard, along the east edge of the apple trees, and inside the brush by the big old oak that nestled an ancient deer stand high up in its huge, spreading branches.

  This is the back way to the beaver pond, I thought to myself. You’re not going to see any ducks back here, kid. It’s way too thick.

  Then I asked, “Where are the dogs?”

  “The dogs don’t like the ducks,” he said tersely, trying to cut off further conversation.

  Even more puzzled, I followed along behind Mike, step by step, as he picked his way through the thorns until we came to the long, snaking dam and within it, the weed-choked pond. The water had the husks of a hundred, two hundred trees rising up out of it. Trees killed by the rising water, leafless, the maze of their dry dead branches reaching up into the darkening sky like the supplicating arms of sinners lost.

  An eerie place when night is creeping out of the shadows.

  But Mike soundlessly squatted down now, and I joined him.

  A few minutes later a beaver silently streamed by fifty feet out in the pond, just its heavy head above the mirrored black water. Then another.

  Okay, I said to myself, we’re watching beaver. What was this about ducks? There aren’t any ducks here.

  Then they came crashing in.

  I heard them before I saw anything. Their high-pitched quack-quack distant at first, and then right overhead. How many, I don’t know—there were lots. I could hear them circling above the wood, gathering, calling to each other.

  “What are they going to do?” I asked Mike.

  But he hissed at me to be quiet and looked up with a smile as the first few ducks started down.

  There was no way for a wood duck to stretch its wings and sail down through that tangle of dead branches high up in the air without breaking bones, so they simply folded their wings and dropped like stones, crashing through, breaking off dead twigs and tree limbs, and in the process tumbling upside down, backward, and sideways through the trees and into the water, where they hit in great splashes. Then, once the first few were down, they called back up into the sky above the dead trees, as if encouraging others in that insane drop out of the night sky.

  It was an uproarious, mad two minutes. Ducks everywhere crashing, spinning, bouncing through, shrieking quacks back, splashing in, and then indignantly trying to avoid the next wave of bodies and broken-off branches hurtling down.

  Mike laughed.

  He stood and laughed and laughed. His arms up high, he stepped forward and slipped into the mucky water but still stood laughing, twigs showering down, ducks falling everywhere now, quacking, popping back up out of the water shaking their heads, swimming off.

  And then it stopped. Silence again in the now-dark pond, just the odd subdued quack of ruffled ducks far off, paddling through the brushy water in the gloom.

  Mike was leaning against the dam, holding his sides, with tears streaming down his face.

  “Mike, does this happen every night?”

  “Every night,” he said, shaking his head. “Those crazy ducks do this ever
y night.”

  I suppose I looked concerned, or at least reluctant to speak, when I had to remind Mike about respite, because he gave me a deep, searching look back and said, “It’s all right, I don’t mind going.”

  In the morning his sheets were dry, but Sue washed them out of force of habit, and he got really upset when he found out! Later, Sue had him clean up his room and remake his bed. He did a neat job. I got home from work about four and lay down on his bed. Then I pretended I was him. “I hate this family. I’m a slave around here. I do all the work in this house. I’m not getting up. I’m tired, I want to leave, I’ve only had ten hours’ sleep.”

  Mike’s face turned red, very angry, but then he laughed and came over and punched me in the belly. Hard!

  Another issue that we’d been hard put to address with Mike was petty theft. Coins, a tool, a poster from one of the other boys’ rooms, Liam’s watch—the list went on and on. An odd collection of missing personal miscellany that, for the most part, turned up in Mike’s room or schoolbag.

  We’d spoken to him about it many times, and he’d continually apologized, but we’d never made it the issue of the moment. But now events had forced our hand, or rather his. Because this time he had stolen exactly the wrong thing from exactly the wrong person.

  Frank had taken Mike fishing, and Mike had admired Frank’s knife—the same fishing knife he’s had since he was ten years old. After they returned home, Mike had slipped into Frank’s closet and taken the knife. Several hours later Frank found out, got very upset, and tore Mike’s room apart.

  Mike admitted taking it, said he was sorry, but wouldn’t tell Frank where it was. I don’t think he could—I think that he had dropped it down the well or otherwise put it out of reach. So now Mike had an immense problem because he couldn’t return it, Frank wouldn’t let it go, and we wouldn’t interfere in what was going on between them.

  Now whenever Frank came home, the first thing he did was loom over Mike and demand the knife back.

  “Dad, Frank is very mad at me.”

  “Well, you stole his knife and won’t tell him where it is.”

  “You should make him stop. I’m afraid. He’s mean.”

  “Mean enough to take you fishing and have his fishing knife stolen?”

  “I told him I’m sorry, but he won’t stop. He’s mean.”

  I’m not big on biblical references, but I remembered one that was used on someone else under identical circumstances and, anticipating this conversation, spent the time to find it. I was determined to do a very hard thing.

  “Mike, get the Bible down.”

  He walked over to my bookshelf and took down the old Pilgrim Edition of King James.

  “Mike, there’s something in Jeremiah.”

  “ ‘… thou art gone backward: therefore I will stretch out my hand against thee and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting.’ ”

  “Mike, do you know what that means?”

  “It means Frank is going to destroy me?”

  “It means that even God loses patience with people who would do wrong and think they can make things right by apologizing”

  Mike wet his bed again, and we called him on it.

  “Mike, this is getting old. Your room smells like the elephant house at the zoo. I think we’re going to get you up in the middle of the night to go, and we want you to stop drinking water before you go to bed.”

  Hooded eyes and a set face. “I have to have a drink before I go to bed.”

  “No, you don’t. Now get in the shower.”

  But while he was in there he put a toothbrush down the sink drain, then wadded up toilet paper and forced it down on top of it. I had to disassemble the drain, take the sink away from the wall.

  When he got off the school bus, I had him bow down and apologize to the sink.

  “Dad, this is really stupid,” he said.

  “Not as stupid,” I said gratingly, “as stopping up the drain.”

  Sue and I packed Mike up for respite with some very mixed feelings. We still had a hard time believing that sending a child away so the parents could have free time was the right thing to do.

  In fact, we were on the point of calling Harbour and pleading a sickness or an emergency or something when Mike’s attitude stopped us. He was indifferent and matter-of-fact about the weekend. Not a big deal, he seemed to be saying.

  He didn’t say good-bye to Sue or even pet one of the dogs on the way out.

  The respite couple’s home was about five miles from our place. Mike wouldn’t look back as he slowly walked away with the husband. I kept watching, hoping he’d turn around and wave, but he never did.

  When I got home, Sue was waiting for me. “How did he act?”

  I shrugged. “He couldn’t have cared less.”

  “Well,” she said, slowly shaking her head, “I just don’t understand.”

  “You can’t be on target one hundred percent of the time, Sue.”

  “What are we going to do this weekend?”

  “I don’t know”

  Sue got up, walked into her office, and slammed the door.

  And suddenly it was awfully quiet in the house.

  Then, at about 7:30, the phone rang in Sue’s office and she picked it up. There was a tremulous, stuttering voice at the other end, then tears. “This is Mike. Are you doing anything special? Can I come home?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I want to come home” More tears, lots of tears.

  Sue stuttered herself. “Ten minutes, Mike. We’ll be there.”

  We jumped in the truck and scooted down to the village. Mike was waiting in the kitchen with his bag between his legs, ignoring everybody else while he waited for us.

  In speaking to the wife, we found out there wasn’t any particular problem. She thought perhaps he was bored. She didn’t even know he had called until we showed up.

  Mike didn’t have anything specific to say either except, “I just want to go home.”

  So we went home.

  Later, Sue looked at me with tears in her eyes. “He got us again, didn’t he?”

  I thought out loud, “What’s Harbour going to say?”

  Sue grimaced. “What I care about is not pushing the fact that he’s a foster child into his face ever again.”

  It was mid-June now, and Henry got Mike up early with the dogs. We got the first bad report we’d had recently from school: apparently Mike had said no when he was told to put something away. But he did his homework on his own. We had more or less a potluck dinner, and he went to bed without a lot of grousing.

  Then Henry got him back up at 11:00 P.M. to see an enormous bullfrog he found outside the back door. Mike caught it and put it in his room in a bucket with some water, then went back to sleep.

  I found out about it when at two o’clock I heard the strangest sounds coming out of Mike’s room.

  “Mike, my God, that’s the biggest frog I ever saw. Where did you get it?”

  “Henry found it for me.”

  “Yes,” I said, groggy and still amazed at the size of the thing. “How nice of him to find one that can sing.”

  Mike and Sue had been very close ever since the attempted respite—heads together, whispering, talking, quietly laughing— but this morning we saw something else. When Sue gently reminded Mike of the time, the stultifying blank face came back, and with it, the same old poisonous words.

  We never seem to lose our vulnerability. No matter how many times Mike demonstrates his ability to switch instantly from sunshine and light into a pocked and vicious persona, we’re always and every time surprised.

  But being surprised doesn’t mean we always react the same way, and this morning Sue responded like a cobra touched with a lit cigarette. She didn’t act patient, hurt, shocked, or reasoning. Instead, she instantly went ballistic and wall-eyed, chased him down and cornered him in his room, then, shaking him, screamed, “You will not call me those filthy names any longer, ever again. If you do, that disgu
sting mouth is getting washed out with soap.”

  Then Mike switched back, the look on his face saying he’d been bushwhacked. (“Hey, you’re not supposed to get that mad that fast.”)

  “Calm down, please calm down,” he said, obviously worried.

  I watched the entire show, and when she stalked back out of his room asked, “What happened with you?”

  “I dunno,” she snapped. “It hit a nerve this time.”

  “Well,” and it was a compliment, although a very wary one, “at least you didn’t play the game.”

  “Huh?” she said indignantly, straightening her skirt.

  Although these scenes with Mike were getting much more infrequent, they still followed the same rigid routine, like a dance he took us through. There were facial expressions, then words—lots of words—then kicking and hitting odd things, then screaming. It was a set, scripted procedure that took an hour or more, a perfidious pirouette. But Sue short-circuited him this time, and you could see confusion written all over his face.

  “You didn’t let him work you. After you exploded, Mike looked like a matador who waved his cape, but the bull went straight for his legs instead.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” Mike said, peeking out of his room.

  But Sue continued to seethe, refusing to talk to him in the car and making him sit three or four pews in front of her in church. Yet she was watching him and noticed that when the collection came he reached into his pocket, pulled out one grimy, wadded-up dollar of his allowance, and put it in the basket.

  “Damn,” she spit later, not knowing whether to keep her mad on or not.

  But then she said something very interesting. “He goes nuts when we push him into some forward movement, whether it’s a schedule he has to keep or organizing his own time to achieve some goal. He hates plans that he has to follow. He doesn’t like to deal with the future—it’s as if he’s afraid of the future, any sort of future.”

  In the afternoon we all went over to Susanne’s for dinner. Susanne and David, Sue and I, Mike, Liam, Frank, and Brendan. Lovely dinner, very nice table set.