Silent Boy (17 page)

‘You’ve been looking at him too long, Hayden.’

When Jeff appeared on the scene, Kevin’s hate retreated almost immediately. After all the weeks in November and December and the first part of this month when all I saw were brutal drawings and all I heard were grisly stories, it surprised me to realize that three or four days went by before I even noticed the tales were gone. I suppose I was just wrapped up in the trauma of Jeff’s arrival. Perhaps Kevin was too.

We went through most of the snowy weeks of midwinter before Kevin gave even the smallest signs of settling down again. We continued to meet in the therapy room, first with just Kevin and me doing what we always did. Then later I started shouting at the mirrored wall, holding up our puzzle books or our games and talking to Jeff behind the mirror as well as to Kevin. Then Jeff started shouting replies. Kevin never joined into this high-decibel discourse but he finally began making remarks to me to pass on to Jeff. At long last, after February dawned and Jeff had been behind the mirror for a couple of weeks, he was able to come around for part of the session and join us. Kevin still did not talk to him but he would talk to me in front of Jeff and he would let Jeff talk to him without ignoring him entirely.

The content of our sessions were commonplace, even dull on occasion. It went back very much to what Kevin and I had been doing in the very beginning before the rocket poster blow-up – things like coloring and joke books and other rather untherapy-like activities. Mostly Kevin directed what we did and he preferred to navigate as far away as possible from personal things.

Then abruptly Kevin changed again. In mid-February, his distrust of Jeff subsided sharply. Within the space of a week he turned eager and talkative, speaking directly to Jeff. His manner was charming, suddenly, as if Jeff were an old, long-forgotten friend he’d just rediscovered. Kevin was warm to me but he became especially enamored of Jeff.

This time I could not detect a reason for the sudden change, although it was as sharp a change as his shift from fear in November and from hate in January. But whatever it was, Kevin changed. He grew friendly and outgoing. He and Jeff became buddies. Kevin forgot his knife (which he had never mentioned again after Jeff arrived), he forgot his sketchbook, he forgot his stepfather. He forgot all the weeks of sulky opposition. Instead, he leapt with both feet into affable camaraderie with Jeff. Jeff, in his turn, responded. He taught Kevin how to play Monopoly and checkers and they took turns crucifying me because I was routinely awful at both games. Jeff unearthed two books full of Little Moron jokes and Kevin literally rolled on the floor with laughter. Jeff discussed the finer points of male adolescence with him: shaving, food and girls.

I was ignored. I was ignored so thoroughly for a while that I got a little out of joint over it. And when I wasn’t being ignored, they ganged up on me. They played ‘get Torey.’ It was make Torey the butt of the moron jokes, beat Torey at this game and not just by a little – cream her. Kevin wanted to really do me in in the games, push me into crushing bankruptcy at Monopoly or cow me with five kings at checkers. I think I understood what was going on. In a deep, subconscious way what he was doing was understandable and I realized it had to happen, but on the surface, I had to admit it hurt and the games ceased to be much fun for me. I had a very difficult time not becoming hyper-competitive myself and trying to cream him back.

During this period I had several opportunities just to sit back and watch the action because he and Jeff would get caught up together in one of their activities. When I did that, Kevin amazed me. He was such a complex character. He had altered completely over the five months we had been together, but they weren’t the subtle chameleonic changes that I was used to seeing in kids. He could, instead, alter his personality entirely. For him it was more like the turning faces of one of those mirrored globes, reflecting first one image then another. I did not believe Kevin had multiple personalities. In my gut I felt he had to be very close to being able to control these changes, that he did them with, if not malice aforethought, then at least thought aforethought. And in my deep heart of hearts I could not shake the belief that Kevin had always been one jump ahead of us. From the very beginning, he had. Even while rocking under the table he had managed to count the number of openings and closings of the observation room door. For all that I did not know about him, one thing I did know for certain: We had all vastly underestimated his intelligence and even more so, his canniness.

Watching Kevin during these weeks, I grew increasingly uneasy. When we were back in the office alone, I tried to tell Jeff that something felt wrong to me about Kevin but my words never came out right. What exactly? Jeff would ask. Give specifics. But I couldn’t. It was just in my gut. Jeff listened to me but eventually he would just sit at his desk and shake his head when I brought the topic up. I was just jealous. Kevin was going through a very trying stage of therapy and working out some strong feelings about me and probably about his mother, he said. That was why he so persistently attacked me in the games and verbally. That was why he sided with Jeff on everything. It was understandable, Jeff said, that it would all get under my skin after a while but it was critical that Kevin have the opportunity to work these feelings through. No, I said, there was something else. But I couldn’t tell him what. The words just never formed in my head. It’s in my gut, I would keep saying to him, and he’d tell me to forget it. I made more decisions with my gut than any other part of me, he complained. I was the only person he knew who did all of her thinking with her stomach. Give it a rest.

I remained disquieted for a while longer but then other thoughts began to take over. Jeff was right about one thing. I
was
jealous. Kevin seemed to grow so close to him so quickly. After all the work I had put into this kid, I hadn’t brought Jeff in to take it over from me entirely. It hurt. Rapidly he and Kevin had jokes between them and special references of which I had no part. So I had to agree; Jeff was probably right in his assessment.

Kevin made marvelous progress at last. Maybe knowing a spirited, caring, interested man who could model appropriate male responses to things was what had been missing all along and something I clearly could not give him. My gut shifted about a little longer, but by the time the first winds of March came, I too had closed my mind to the other Kevins I had known. It was too hard to resist him and Jeff and their antics. After a while I felt only guilty for my feelings and for being such a wet blanket, so soon I joined them and then I couldn’t remember anymore what my worries had been about.

Kevin sailed. Like a long-captive bird, he struggled to move his wings and then was airborne. Suddenly the world came alive for him. He wanted to know everything at once. What was beyond the walls of the Garson Gayer estate? What were the streets like leading up to it? How did snow form? What made a girl like you? Why does your stomach feel so funny when you’re scared? Where is India? Had I ever been there? Were there elephants there? What is it like in a rain forest? Did I think Linda, the new aide, was pretty?

Kevin was forever on his feet in the small white room, running back and forth between Jeff and me, a book in his hands as he read some amazing fact. Look at this! Listen here! Listen to what I’ve found! Or he’d plaster himself to the window, nose against the glass. See that? See that part of the building? Do you know that kid out there? Do you know what her name is? That’s Kelly. She lives in 4D.

His improvements quickly spilled over into other areas outside the small white room. For the first time his schoolwork progressed. He took a desperate interest in books. He wanted to learn games that the other kids played: table tennis, volleyball, wrestling. And he wanted to play with the other kids. For the very first time he actually wanted to socialize with the other children. Dana and the staff were delirious with this change.

Jeff kept pumping Kevin full of wonderful stories about the outside world in hopes of finally breaking through that barrier, one of the last of Kevin’s great fears. The way Jeff talked, he made everywhere he’d ever been sound wonderful. Where would you like to go most? he’d ask Kevin and then tell about the zoo or the science museum or our office or the theater or the amusement park. Later, back in the office, Jeff would still be dreaming. We’d give the world to Kevin, if only he’d let us.

There certainly was a lot to accomplish, however. Kevin was not lacking for things to work on. The one other immovable fear, besides that of going outside, was Kevin’s continuing terror of water. He absolutely refused to be submerged in even the tiniest amount. He couldn’t even be persuaded to soak his foot when he had an ingrown toenail. Consequently, he had gone God knows how long without bathing or even really washing.

Jeff took over this segment of Kevin’s therapy and in the end he hauled Kevin under the shower, clothes and all, and stripped him there. That worked reasonably well. Kevin survived the shower. If the water didn’t run too fast and there was plenty of room to back out of it, if he wanted, and the drain worked well so that no water collected, he could tolerate it. Just barely, but he could.

This left us with the next problem: clothes. Now that there was a way to get Kevin reasonably clean, he had nothing to wear that matched his new state of hygiene. He owned a total of three shirts and two pairs of pants, all of which had been donations to the home. So we rooted about in the Garson Gayer books until we unearthed his clothing allowance and then Jeff and I went out to the shopping center one evening, armed with Kevin’s measurements.

What a hoot. We were hopeless together. All we did was argue. If I wanted one color, Jeff wanted another. If I thought this size was right, Jeff was convinced it wouldn’t fit. If I wanted to get it because I liked the style, Jeff groaned and said boys hadn’t been wearing that since 1934. Or it looked like a preppy golf bag with buttons. I said
I
thought I knew what teenagers were wearing. Women paid more attention to things like that than men did. Jeff said I was sexist. Besides, he had
been
a teenage boy, hadn’t he, and he should know no self-respecting guy would get caught dead in something like that. The saleslady thought we were married and shopping for our son. With all the arguing we were doing, that didn’t say much for her ideas of marriage. Worse, it meant she couldn’t tell that both of us were under thirty and would have been about eleven at his birth. But she did end up selling us three wrong-sized pairs of jeans because Jeff insisted that I had measured Kevin’s inseam wrong. We also got a range of colorful, easy-care T-shirts and Jeff found a white muslin shirt he insisted we get, which ended up making Kevin look like Mahatma Gandhi.

But while the clothes and the showers made a tremendous change in Kevin’s appearance, the best improvement occurred when Jeff was able to get his own barber to come out to Garson Gayer. Kev got the whole works – a wash, a cut, a style and blow-dry. Jeff and I had to pay for it out of our own pockets but it was worth it. It didn’t exactly transform him into Robert Redford, but Kevin was so proud of it. When the session was over, Jeff and I stood in the doorway of the small white room and watched Kevin go back to the ward with the aide. He strutted like a rooster, his scrawny chest thrown out, his too-long jeans rolled up, the smell of Old Spice trailing after him.

‘He’s still kind of ugly,’ Jeff whispered to me.

‘I dunno. I was sort of thinking he was kind of okay looking.’

Jeff paused. A smile touched the corners of his lips. ‘Yeah, I guess he sort of is, isn’t he?’

A week later Jeff and I decided to split the workload. It was mid-March and almost two months had passed since Jeff had joined us. The strain of coming every day was beginning to tell on both of us. So we reduced our visits to three times a week. On Mondays Jeff came, on Wednesdays I did and on Fridays we came together.

Kevin was surprisingly unperturbed by this change. We explained it to him and he nodded. That sounded okay to him. For the first time I realized that he actually had grown in therapy and was perhaps already beginning to outgrow us. A few months more perhaps, and Kevin would not need us.

‘Kev?’

It was evening. I’d come in my free time because I had promised to help Kevin with a school project. We were making a papier-mâché map of the U.S. for the school-district science fair. I had told Kevin about the fair and the map was his idea. Garson Gayer students did not normally participate in such events, but Kevin thought it might be exciting to do so, to be the first kid to try. He’d gotten the map idea out of a book his teacher had, and I’d offered to come in my free time and give him a hand, since I’d used papier-mâché with my kids in the classroom.

So there we were, both on the floor of the small white room, our sleeves rolled up, a bucket of soaking newspapers between us. I was mangling the Rockies of Colorado. Kevin was intent on straightening out the Great Plains.

I said his name. He answered with a grunt. Most of his attention was on Kansas.

‘You know what sounds good to me?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Hot chocolate.’

‘Mmm, yeah,’ he agreed without taking his eyes off Kansas.

‘Let’s go get some.’

Kevin looked up. There was a blob of the Northern Rockies on his nose where he had been leaning too close to his work. ‘What do you mean? The cook won’t let you in the kitchen. It’s not a mealtime. That’s a rule.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of the dining room. Every day when I come here, I go past a Frosty-Freez. It’s just down the road. On the corner of Hill Street and 23rd. I thought we could go there.’