Kindness for Weakness (23 page)

I want to say something to reassure him, but I can’t talk because my breathing is thin and shallow, and it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open and look at the helicopter blades hanging down at their tips, all wobbly and half-assed. I wonder how something so fragile-looking can fly, but when the rotor powers up, the blades become a cyclone beating the air down and flattening me to the gurney, until the men fold up the gurney legs and slide me into the helicopter.

“Just hold on, buddy,” the guy says again. I try to smile to let him know I’m okay, but my face muscles don’t work.
I can move my eyes, though, and I look out the windows, which are all around. A tornado of dirt and leaves swirls outside, twigs and bugs and other dried-up things riding the currents of air. And I am flying. I look out the window and down at the gleaming metal roof, and the razor wire that shimmers in the sunlight. I don’t know how it’s possible, but in my mind I can see what’s going on inside the facility; all hell has broken loose. Response calls ring out on every unit: three restraints at the same time on Alpha; a riot on Charlie; and boys banging on locked doors on Bravo, cursing, threatening to bust their way out even though that’s not possible. Freddie bangs, too, with a new kind of rage growing inside him, one that will carry him far away, toward his mother, Gwendolyn Peach, and college, and all the nice clothes he’s dreamed of.

Mr. Eboue sits in the staff office with his head buried in his hands, while Horvath paces behind him, intermittently punching the wall. The Sheetrock has given way in the shape of a fist, a symbol of his rage that will stay for weeks, until the maintenance men come with a bucket of Spackle and a roll of tape. They’ll do it under order from the director, who wants the place shipshape for the team of dark-suited investigators (the same ones who visited after Oskar’s suicide).

“This place is fucked up,” one of the maintenance men will say.

“Fucked up,” the other will echo, slathering too much mud over the dent, which will take forever to dry and will probably crack.

I see these things as they are happening, even as I rise
higher in the helicopter. It’s like the shimmering layer of heat and air over the green metal roof is giving me special vision. And I can see farther away, too. As we fly higher, I follow a slow-moving line of pinpoints on the highway to a place in the distance where Louis is helping my mother into his crappy little car. She looks frail and sick, and he holds her arm for support.

“I didn’t even call,” she says.

“I know,” Louis says.

It’s the first time they’ve spoken in more than two years, and she is filled with sadness and shame and other poisonous things. She’s gotten the call from Morton to let her know that I’m in a medical helicopter; she doesn’t entirely understand, but she knows it’s bad and thinks it’s what she deserves. She feels gray and used up, not even capable of tears.

But the tears are already welling, threatening to spill out and glide down her cheeks. They will be the soundless kind of tears, the ones that don’t announce themselves with the heaving, racking mechanisms of a breaking heart, because she is past that, she thinks. A mother like her, she tells herself, hasn’t the right to beat her chest and cry out. But she doesn’t know that she
will
cry out, and that her tears will wash away some of the grayness, at least enough so that she can look at her other son, Louis, and see him as he truly is: another boy pretending to be a man, unsure of everything except his white-knuckle grip on the Honda’s steering wheel, and the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal as he speeds west on I-90 toward the hospital I am being taken to.

“Too many bad things,” they say to each other.

“I’m sorry,” I try to say, but I can’t form the words, and as I watch them, I realize they are crying because they think it is too late. And it
is
too late, at least for me. But then the last thing I see before I close my eyes is my brother loosening his fingers from the smooth plastic shifter and taking my mother’s cold brittle hand in his. He holds it and drives while I smile inwardly, thinking that maybe there are such things as second chances.

The title
Kindness for Weakness
comes from a phrase I heard hundreds of times during the years I worked with boys in New York’s juvenile justice system. Those three words were invoked to explain behavior that might appear to outsiders as narcissistic, violent, and even sociopathic. But to the boys, “kindness for weakness” was more than an explanation; it was a rule, part of a code that taught them that acts of kindness made them look weak, a code that helped define their manhood. If they followed the code, they earned status and respect. And if they didn’t, they risked becoming outcasts, getting beaten, or worse. Harsh, yes, but for boys who were raised by single mothers and grandmothers, boys whose fathers and uncles were either dead or in prison, this code represented all they had to guide them toward manhood.

I wish I could offer an apology for the fact that this is such a sad book. If you’ve finished it and have some dark lingering questions, then this is where I should rattle off frightening statistics and shout for reform. I should tell
you that James’s story was inspired in part by actual events in a facility where I worked … events that affected me enough to set in motion the slow-moving gears in my head that sometimes, after a thousand or so revolutions, lead to the creation of characters and stories. I should make a profound point, leave you with something beyond the observation that for some people—people like James and Freddie—the world is a hostile place.

But to be honest, I’m not sure I have a point other than that, in the face of violence, showing kindness requires tremendous strength and is often punished severely. That’s a terrible point, if you ask me, but one that deserves close study. It’s certainly a turn from
Something Like Hope
, my first book, about an incarcerated girl named Shavonne, in which acts of cruelty were tempered by moments of compassion and understanding. True, those moments were few and far between, but they were enough. And when I finished writing and editing the book, I felt complacent for a little while. I took a new job at a public high school. I turned my attention to a book about a wild road trip that had nothing to do with troubled kids and broken systems. But as time passed, the voices of James, Freddie, and the others began to demand that I tell their story. So I did. And instead of apologizing for the darkness of this story, I will simply thank you for reading, and thinking, and feeling. Thank you, sincerely.