Silent Boy (2 page)

His name was Kevin Richter, although no one seemed to call him Kevin. He had earned his nickname because he spent all his waking hours under tables, chairs lined up in front of him and around the perimeter of the table until he was secure behind a protective barrier of wooden legs. There he sat, rocked sometimes, ate, did his schoolwork, watched TV. There he lived in his little self-built cage. Zoo-boy.

But Kevin’s problem went deeper than just an affinity for tables. He did not talk. He made no noise, even when he wept. The files claimed he had talked once upon a time, a long time ago. According to the sketchily drawn past in the Garson Gayer records, Kevin had never spoken at school when he’d attended. He was retained once and then twice because he did not talk to the teachers and no one knew whether or not he was learning. He had talked at home, at least that’s what the report said. And then he’d stopped. First he stopped talking to his stepfather, then a little later to his mother. Supposedly, he continued to speak to his younger sisters but by the time he was committed to the first residential treatment program, at nine, someone noticed Kevin was not speaking at all. No one could say exactly when he stopped talking. One day someone asked, and no one could remember the last time they had heard Kevin. And no one had heard him since.

Far more apparent than his lack of speech were Kevin’s fears. He lived in morbid, gut-wrenching fear of almost everything, his life was consumed by it. He feared highways and door hinges and spirals on notebooks and dogs and darkness and pliers and odd bits of string that might fall on the floor. He was too terrified of water to bathe; too superstitious of being without clothes to change them. And for the last three years Kevin had refused to set foot outside the door of the Garson Gayer residence. He had actually stayed inside all that time. Kevin’s fears had trapped him in a far more secure prison than he could ever have built with tables and chairs.

As the social worker told me these things I braced my forehead on one fist, the receiver of the phone in the crook of my neck. With my other hand I filled the margin of the desk blotter with doodles. The woman’s voice had a hurried desperation to it, as if she knew I would cut her short before she had said everything she needed to say.

Garson Gayer was a new facility, a model progressive institution. They had a full staff, including a resident psychologist, speech therapists, nurses and teachers. Why did they want me? I asked.

She had read about my work. She’d heard I worked with children who did not speak. I wondered aloud, Why, when there was so much wrong with this boy, had they decided to tackle his lack of speech? Well, you have to start somewhere, she replied, and her laugh was hollow. The phone grew quiet for a moment. Truth is, she said, it’s not quite like that. Kevin would be sixteen in mid-September and here it was, already late August. Garson Gayer only took children up through their fifteenth birthdays, so the rules had already been bent for him to allow him to stay this long. The state had custody of Kevin. And so far nothing they’d done for him at Garson Gayer had produced any improvement. If they couldn’t come up with something soon, well … She did not say it. She didn’t have to. We both knew the places boys like Kevin went, who had no family, no money, no hope.

He sounded like a lost cause right from the beginning. He had a lousy past. Very little useful data was recorded in the Garson Gayer file but there was enough to make Kevin’s childhood sound like so many others I had known. School failures, financial difficulties, physical abuse of Kevin and other children in the family, marital troubles, friction between Kevin and his stepfather, alcohol abuse, and perhaps most sinister of all, the fact that Kevin had been voluntarily given into state custody by his mother. What must a kid be like when even his own mother did not want him? Moreover, Kevin had spent seven years already in institutions, more than eight totally mute, and almost sixteen learning to feel comfortable being crazy. If that wasn’t the portrait of a loser, I didn’t know what would be.

I didn’t want this case. As it was, I already had too many children to become involved with one who would obviously be a black hole-a maw to dump time and energy and effort into with no return. And as I sat and listened and drew geometric designs on the blotter, I had an even more shameful thought. This was a private clinic; we usually didn’t get the welfare kids. All I had to do to get rid of this case was mention money in a very serious way. While Garson Gayer would obviously foot the bill for my initial work with Kevin Richter, if I didn’t want the case, well, that would be the easiest way.…

It was tempting. It was a good deal more tempting to refuse this case than I was ready to admit. Yet I couldn’t. I could think such thoughts but I couldn’t make myself act on them. It would have been so different in the schoolroom. Ed or Birk or Lew simply would have rung me from the Special Ed Office and told me, ‘I’ve got a new kid for you.’ And I would have groused because I always groused, and they wouldn’t have noticed because they never did. Then he’d be mine, that loser, that kid with no hope, who couldn’t make it anywhere else, and we’d try there in my room, amidst the battered books and the rummage-sale toys and noisy finches and the stink of unchanged pants, to build another chance. We didn’t succeed very often. Our triumphs, when they did come, were few and small. Sometimes no one else even noticed them. But it didn’t matter. I never thought of not trying, only because I never had the godly privilege of judging if I should. Or if I could. Or if I would. So, while not wanting this case, I took it and agreed to come. Given the option and seeing the odds, I sure wasn’t keen about it. But I did not think that should be my decision.

Because of my classroom experience and my research, I had evolved therapeutic techniques which varied a little from those of my colleagues at the clinic. I preferred to see the more seriously disturbed children daily over a shorter period of time, rather than once a week over many months or years. Also I often went to the child instead of having him come to the clinic, so that we could work in the troubled environment. In the initial sessions, I was very definite about setting up expectations for the child. From the beginning we both knew why I was there and what things we needed to accomplish together. On the other hand, the sessions themselves tended to be casual, unstructured affairs. This approach worked well for me and I was comfortable with it.

My research had yielded a reliable method for treating elective mutes. I set up the expectation that the child would speak, gave him the opportunity to do so and assumed he would. However, I was not sure what I could do for Kevin-under-the-table. While the technique had always worked before, I was concerned about its applicability to him. The most critical question, I thought, as I hung up from talking with the social worker, was whether or not Kevin
was
an elective mute.
Had
he ever really talked? To a worried or wishful parent, so many noises could sound like words. By my calculations, he would have been a very young child when anyone last actually heard him speak, and then it had only been his immediate family. Could a five-year-old sister be a trusted judge of speech? Could a mother assess the quality of her preschool son’s words, if she only occasionally heard him talk at home? And there was no evidence at all that anyone who might be considered a reliable judge of normal speech had ever heard him. Kevin wasn’t deaf; that had been checked repeatedly by the various institutions he had been in. He could gesture his basic needs but he did not know true sign language. Someone had tried to teach him at Garson Gayer, but a suspected very low IQ was cited when he didn’t learn. For all intents and purposes, Kevin was noncommunicative. Whether his silence was the result of choice or of circumstances or of disturbance or of some organic occurrence in the brain, no one knew.

So what could I do with him? How could I find out?

That first day in the therapy room had been vaguely reassuring to me. Despite his bizarre behaviors, he was aware enough of his environment to do something as canny as count the people leaving the room behind the mirror. That wasn’t a stupid boy’s actions, whatever his reported IQ. And yet he had let me in on the secret. When the others had left, he stopped rocking and responded to me.

Another thing I knew he could do was read. In fact, according to Kevin’s written schoolwork, he read startlingly well for a boy educated in institutions as if mentally retarded. He could comprehend a written text at a seventh-grade level.

Armed with these scanty bits of information, I decided to plow my way right in, assume he could talk and try to get him to. I settled on a tactic that had worked with other elective mutes: I’d have him read aloud to me from the book we’d started in the mirrored therapy room.

The next morning I returned to Garson Gayer. Gratefully, I accepted an alternative room down near the ward rather than go back to the room with the one-way mirror. The other therapists needed that room, Miss Wendolowski said, and I was quite glad not to have it. Kevin and I did not need the worry of ghosts along with everything else.

The room we got was a bare little affair. It was small. I could pace it in four steps either direction. The only furniture consisted of a table, two chairs and a bookcase with no books in it. There was a vomit-green carpet, the kind that wears like Astroturf. One wall was half windows, a nice feature. A broad radiator ran along the length below the windows and uttered a small reptilian sound. All other walls were bare and painted white, a not-quite-white white, gloss two-thirds of the way up for washability and the rest flat paint. That was an institutional painting habit and I hated it. I always felt as if I were in a discreet cage and, when a teacher, I’d felt obliged to hang the kids’ work up there on the flat part and get it mucky, just for the freedom of it. Here there were no pictures on the walls at all, no posters, nothing, save a black-and-white clock that audibly breathed the minutes. And the pale golden September sunshine.

I arrived before Kevin that morning. An aide escorted me down and then left to fetch him. I stood alone in the small room and waited. Beyond the windows I could see a little girl outside in the courtyard. She looked to be about eight or nine and was confined to a wheelchair. Her movements were spastic and her head lolled to one side. I could hear her crying for someone named Winnie. Over and over again she wailed, her voice high-pitched and keening. It was a lonely sound that made my skin crawl.

The door opened and the aide pushed Kevin in. Then, without entering himself, the aide asked me when we’d be through. Thirty minutes, I replied. He nodded, jangled his keys a moment and seemed ready to say something else. But he didn’t. Instead he closed the door and I heard the key turn in the lock. That startled me. I had no key of my own to let us out and I hadn’t expected to be locked in. A small twinge of panic pinched my stomach and I had to take a deep breath before I could accept the fact and turn to face Kevin.

He stood paralyzed with fear. His eyes darted frantically around the room. I was between him and the table and I could see him weighing the danger of passing me to get to safety.

He was a tall youth. It was the first time I’d had a real look at him, and he was a big boy, nearly a man, although an aura of youngness clung to him. He was at least as tall as I was, but thin and frail looking, like a winter cornstalk. Brown hair fell lank over his forehead. Adolescence had ravaged his skin, leaving him with lumpy features and cheeks smothered in acne. Thick-lensed glasses slid down his nose, in spite of a black elastic strap to keep them in place. His eyes were gray and lifeless as a city puddle. He wore church-box clothes, a hopelessly too-small red-checked flannel shirt and gabardine trousers that barely covered the tops of his socks. He looked more like a cartoonist’s caricature of a boy than a real person.

God, he was ugly
.

A moment of hopelessness washed over me as I looked at him. Stepping aside, I allowed room for him to pass. Relief flooded his features and he dived past me and under the table.

The chairs went up, seats facing outward, backs tight against the table. I stood watching while he fashioned his cage. He was not shutting me out. He smiled pleasantly at me and gestured in a friendly manner, and I knew it was not me that he felt so compelled to protect himself from. The disquieting fact was that there was no one else in the room, nothing but the walls and the pale sunlight.

I pondered how to work with him, whether to sit on the floor outside the makeshift barricade, as I had in the mirrored therapy room, or whether to join him under the table. After another moment of indecision, I dropped down on my hands and knees and crawled under the table too. He welcomed me with a pleased smile, moved over to make room, of which there wasn’t much, until we both sat hunched together like gnomes in the semi-darkness.

We were only inches from one another. He smelled rather gamey at that distance, and so I just sat for a few minutes, accustoming myself to the lack of light and the cramped space and the odor. Kevin began to rock slightly, his arms clasped tight around his knees, his chin resting atop. He stared at me without wavering.

Well, now what? I really was feeling awfully pessimistic at just that moment. Leaning out, I pulled my box of materials into the cage with us. Taking off the lid, I searched through it for the book we had been reading.

It’s scary, I said to Kevin as I dug through the junk in the box, to start talking when one has been silent so long. But the easiest way to start is to jump right in.

There were other kids, I said, whom I had worked with, who hadn’t been speaking either. I told Kevin about them, of how they had felt before they’d started talking again, of how scary it was the first time and how sure they’d all been that they couldn’t do it. But they could. Every single child had been able to talk in the end, I said, and nothing bad had happened to any of them for it. There was nothing to be frightened of. They all were, because that was the way it felt in the beginning, but there actually was nothing to fear in the end. It was just a feeling.