Silent Boy (10 page)

The chair had hit my arm, and already a red-and-purple bruise stretched out along the upper half. Dana touched it gently.

‘They’ll have a doctor in for Kevin,’ she said. ‘You ought to have him look at that before he goes. Does it hurt?’

I nodded.

‘You’ve got a scratch on your nose too.’ She fingered it and then refocused her gaze on me. ‘What happened?’

‘I wish I knew for sure. I don’t.’

‘He just went off?’

I shrugged.

I intended to stay until Kevin quieted down and then go talk to him. However, when I went up to the ward, he was still in the seclusion room, still screaming and throwing himself against the walls. So I went down to see the doctor. There normally was not a physician at the residence, but to increase psychotropic tranquilizers in emergencies and to put an individual in seclusion with the door locked, the affiliated psychiatrist had to come over and sign orders. Thus, when I was unable to go in and see Kevin, I went down to where the psychiatrist was sitting in the back of the reception office, drinking coffee. He was a big, heavyset fellow in his late fifties, white haired and very jolly. He set me awash with antiseptic and plastered Band-Aids all over me while telling me about the king-sized sunflowers he had grown in his garden for a competition. Afterward, I treated myself to a can of Dr Pepper and went into Dana’s office to begin the nasty job of recording all this in Kevin’s chart. Most of the staff I encountered had a wry smile for me, a manifestation of the sort of gallows humor one develops working in such places. At least, they said, they had all heard Kevin now.

When I went back up to the ward an hour later, Kevin had been given a second tranquilizing injection. He was still banging around in the seclusion room, however. Briefly I gazed through the window in the door. He was entirely naked. Everything had been removed to prevent him hurting himself, even his glasses. He careened from side to side of the padded cell, knocking himself against the walls, bouncing off, falling into them again. His movements were woozy from the medication or perhaps just from sheer exhaustion but he kept at it. He was still screaming, although it was just a banshee cry now, thin and reedy and keening. His eyes were closed, his head back as he staggered around. With his hands he clawed at his face and his chest, as if to rip them open.

I stood at the window but stared instead at the grain in the wood of the door. It felt eerie to know I had the power to frighten somebody that much. One of the aides came up beside me. She said nothing but stood very close to me and I could feel the warmth of her body, while still not touching her.

‘He’s psychotic,’ she said. She spoke gently, as if they were comforting words, and I suppose she meant that they should be. My own emotions were in an awesome state. They pressed outward against my ribs and chest and upward until they almost forced tears into my eyes. I wanted to cry without really understanding why. I wasn’t disappointed by what had happened. It was natural enough. Nor was I depressed. I had no special expectations of this boy. In fact, I don’t think my emotions were even over Kevin, himself. But I was so near to tears. My arm hurt. I was tired and feeling very vulnerable. The single thing I wanted most just then was for that unknown aide standing next to me to put her arms around me. I needed comfort. I could not even give conscious thought to what was hurting so much inside of me. It was too deep, too complex for words.

Finally, I had to leave. I couldn’t wait any longer. That perhaps was the worst of all, having to leave Kevin like that. But there wasn’t any choice. I would be late as it was for my next commitment, and Kevin’s siege showed no signs of abating. So I left him there alone in his padded cell, alone with his fear.

T
he next day Kevin did not come. I sat in the small white room, waiting. Finally an aide arrived to tell me Kevin would not be there. When I asked why, the aide said he was ill. I asked if I might go up and see Kevin. The aide couldn’t see any reason why not.

I had never been in Kevin’s room before. It was a small cubicle in a larger dormitorylike room, Garson Gayer’s attempt to give each child some privacy. They felt themselves quite progressive in this matter and advertised it in their brochure.

Kevin lay on his bed, his back to the door, when I entered. I glanced around the small space. It was as bare as our little white room.

‘Kev?’ I said softly, in case he was still going to be frightened of me. He had been or still was weeping and he had his hands over his face. It was a heavy, silent kind of misery. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, I ran my hand along his arm. ‘Kev, it’s our time together. Don’t you want to come down?’

He shook his head.

I leaned against him to see his face. ‘Look, Kevin, I know things didn’t work out so well yesterday. Things went wrong. But that’s the way of things. They do go wrong sometimes. But it doesn’t matter so much. We’ll get over it.’

He shook his head again. I could see the tears running down along his fingers as he continued to cover his face from me.

‘Sure they will. Right now it doesn’t seem very much that way. It feels like the whole world came to an end, doesn’t it? But it hasn’t. I’m here, aren’t I? I wouldn’t have come back, if I hadn’t wanted to. But I do. Because I like being with you so much.’

Kevin did not respond.

I tried again, telling him things would be all right and that I was all recovered from what had happened the day before. Kevin did absolutely nothing but lie there with his hands to his face. I feared perhaps he had decided to stop talking to me.

‘Kevin, won’t you come down? We only have half an hour left. Come on. Get up and come down and we’ll do crossword puzzles together. You like crossword puzzles. Okay? All right?’

He refused to budge. He refused to move, to respond, to even look at me. After another five minutes, I rose. Another day, I said. We’d try again another day, another time.

On my way out of the ward, I stopped at the nurses’ desk to get Kevin’s chart. Because he was institutionalized, I was obliged to record all my activities with him on a running chart. I took the chart and went across the hall to the staff room. Sitting down at the table, I opened it and began to write.

Kevin appeared in the doorway. I was alone in the staff room. I sat at the table amid the chaos of dirty coffee mugs and notebooks of staff activities and tons and tons of loose paper. He simply came to the door and stood until I became aware of someone watching me and looked up.

The ravages of the previous day showed on him. His face was swollen all up one side. He had bruises everywhere. I smiled when I saw him. ‘Hi.’

He said nothing.

I looked down at the chart, back at him. The silence between us was fragile, the way silences often are after arguments, in the aftermath of great anger. Except, for me at least, there had been no argument, no anger.

Kevin stared at me.

I fingered the pen I had been writing with.

The silence breathed between us.

‘Can I sit down?’ he asked me.

I nodded and indicated a chair across the table from me. He came into the staff room, pulled out the chair and sat down.

Again the great, lengthening stillness, like cotton over a tender sore. I bent and began to write again.
Kevin came to the staff room to see me after I had left him in his room. He sat in a chair rather than on the floor. He does not appear to be afraid
.

Out beyond the room were the noises of the ward. Aides and other kids moved around. Nurses chatted. I lived in mortal terror that someone would walk in on us, demand to know what Kevin was doing in an off-limits place like the staff room and destroy the fellowship between us which was so carefully weaving itself back together in the silence.

Kevin crossed his arms on the table and laid his head down.

‘Is the Thorazine still making you sleepy?’ I asked.

He nodded.

I went back to writing.

‘You know what he did to me once?’ he said, as much to the silence as to me.

‘No. What?’ I didn’t even know what he was talking about.

‘I used not to eat my oatmeal. It was the only thing in the whole world I used not to eat. My mom, she used to make it for breakfast. Every day she made it. Then he’d tell me to eat it. He’d make me sit at the table and stay there until I ate every bit. And if I fussed, he went and got more.’

I said nothing, not daring to.

‘If I didn’t eat it and I had to go to school or something, he’d save it for lunch for me. And once, this one time, the oatmeal got to be about two days old. It made me sick to look at it.’

He paused, drew a breath. I was so scared someone was going to interrupt us.

‘He grabbed my hair and pulled it until I opened my mouth. Then he stuffed it in. Well, I sicked it all up again, right there at the table. I couldn’t help it. It had mold growing on it. It was awful. But you know what he made me do? He made me eat the sick.’

I continued to write.

‘It was the only thing I never liked to eat. I ate everything else. I made a special point to eat everything else. But I guess it didn’t matter very much.’

‘It must have made you awfully mad,’ I said and looked up. Perspiration had made huge stains on his shirt.

‘He made me mad all right. He made me want to kill him.’ Kevin looked at me. His eyes narrowed. ‘And I will someday. When I get out of here. He won’t be able to tell me what to do then. And if he does, I’ll carve his body into little bits.’

‘And so,’ said Charity, reclining back on my couch and putting her feet up on the arm, ‘you know what happened next? Well, we got to sleep outside on the porch, me and Sandy did. And so we took our blankets out there and we got to sleep.’

‘You slept on the porch in November?’

‘Yup. Camping out, we was. Just like on TV. Mom let me do it ’cause Sandy was with me. Sandy’s twelve. So my mom said it was okay.’

‘Wasn’t it a little chilly?’

‘Gosh no. We had lots of blankets.’ Charity lay all the way back on the couch and kicked her feet up. For a few moments she bicycled in the air. ‘And the next morning we got up and baked pancakes, me and Sandy. Sandy’s twelve. She can touch the stove.’

‘I see.’ Actually I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when Charity was finding time to do all these things, since she seemed to have moved in with me over the past few weeks. When I would come home from work, there was Charity, hunched up on my doorstep, still dressed in her school clothes. She would stay until supper and eat with me, if I’d let her. Then down in front of the television she’d go. Or if I was writing, she would stand in back of my chair, feet on the rung, and read over my shoulder, all the while making my desk chair sway. She couldn’t read worth a hill of beans, so mostly she just shouted out letters she recognized.
B! R! H!
would come the constant chant behind me while I tried to concentrate on wording a technical paper about bilingualism and psychogenic language problems. Charity would stay until I chucked her out every night. On weekends I was even luckier. One Saturday she arrived at 6:15 in the morning.

Charity’s family seemed quite pleased with the arrangement. I must admit, if I’d had Charity I probably would have too. In the beginning I demanded that she have permission and could prove it before she could stay. But that was hopeless. The family had no phone and the couple of times I had bothered to pile her in the car and drive her home for consent, no one there had even missed her. I suspect they’d realized she’d found a place to go and someone to feed her and were satisfied to let her milk the situation for all it was worth. I was irked by the imposition; it was like having acquired a stray cat. But as with cats, I was too soft to ignore her and send her home hungry.

Truth was, of course, that Charity’s family was full of problems of their own, not the least of them, Charity herself. They lived well below the poverty level in a small dingy place down by the river. I had met Charity’s mother only once when I had brought Charity home. She was a young woman but she looked ancient. Her body was riddled with the stigmata of a rough life, and I suspected they went clear through to her heart. The house was constantly jammed with relatives, and they all seemed to live there on a more or less permanent basis. While Charity had no father, there was no lack of males in her home, but their exact position in the household was something I never knew for sure.

Charity herself continued to be a personal challenge to me. A master of the unintentional put-down, Charity had done more to devastate my ego in three months than most kids had in a lifetime. I have no doubt that if I had encountered Charity earlier in my career, I would have become a medical technologist like my mother wanted.

Still she had an innate charm about her. She would be standing there on my doorstep complaining loudly or would be struggling with some mishap, like the time she had polished her fingernails and then couldn’t get her mittens off, and I’d think to myself, what’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be an
authority!
Sixty pounds of sheer challenge was Charity.

It was a Wednesday evening, when she lounged across my furniture and gave me more excruciating details of life with Sandy.

‘Can I eat supper with you? What we having?’ she asked when I rose with what must have been a suppertime look on my face. She was off the couch in a second and skipping out into the kitchen ahead of me, her body dancing side to side like an excited puppy.