Silent Boy (22 page)

It was a huge hospital, one that I did not know because it had no affiliation with the clinic. It was built up on a rocky outcropping overlooking the city, and part of the hospital was as many as ten stories high while other parts, because of the hill, were only seven or eight stories. It was a gigantic complex, sprawling over the rocky ledges above the river like a great sleeping beast.

While the hospital catered mainly to medical patients, it contained the county’s largest long-term psychiatric unit. It also had the only unit equipped to hold the criminally disturbed. The entire fifth floor was devoted to psychiatry, and getting into the unit was an experience in itself. One had to take a public elevator to the fourth floor then locate the private elevator, which went only to the fifth. To use the private elevator, one had to be accompanied or be issued a key. On the fifth floor, the elevator opened into a reception area. One’s appointment was confirmed and a large set of metal double doors were opened electronically by the receptionist. Inside these there was a second set of double doors. There one buzzed the unit and a staff member came and unlocked one of the doors.

I had been in a number of hospital psychiatric wards before, including the ones at the University of Minnesota where I had worked, and I had never come across a security system as imposing as this one. After I got used to it, I could get through the entire setup in about four minutes, if the elevators cooperated. But that first day I got lost repeatedly and confused and grilled by untold numbers of white-suited people before I finally made it, almost twenty minutes after coming through the front door.

Kevin was in his room. It was a long, narrow room with a largish window at the far end and a bed and chest of drawers, which reduced the width of it even more. There was a chair, too, a small plastic sucking type. Kevin’s gangly frame was sprawled over it.

He regarded me as the nurse led me in. He didn’t look especially surprised to see me. Perhaps he had known all along that his actions would bring me back in one way or another.

He’d grown since I’d last seen him. He must have reached six feet sometime during the summer. His hair was quite a bit longer. It still kept roughly the style Jeff’s barber had given it in the spring but it was shaggy now. The rumpled length gave him a sort of wild look, not unappealing, but different. In a way he was even rather attractive. His skin was dramatically improved. Either the summer sun had helped or the antibiotics had finally taken hold. He was seventeen now and he definitely had the look of manhood about him. It had been a long, long year since last September.

I asked the nurse to leave us. When she did, I shut the door behind her quietly but firmly. Then I returned to where Kevin was sitting. There was no other chair in the tiny, narrow room so I sat on the bed.

We regarded one another in silence.

‘So?’ I said at last.

Kevin looked down at his hands and shrugged.

‘What the hell happened?’ I asked.

Another shrug.

Silence. It was a wicked silence, grabbing me around the throat and not letting go. I kept having to swallow.

And deep inside I was angry. I could feel it and identify it as anger. ‘Whatever were you thinking of, Kevin? What did you do out there? What happened at Bellefountaine? And what the hell did you think you were doing with the knife?’

No answer.

Silence. And again silence. Just like all my other feelings, the anger sat in my gut. It boiled. Putting my hand over my stomach, I could feel it, pulsating heavily to the rhythm of my heart.

‘You want to be your father’s son? Is that what you want? You want to prove to everyone that you’re just as brutal a man as your stepfather is? He’s getting inside you, Kevin, and if he does, you’ll never kill him because you’ll be carrying him around with you. You’ll never be rid of him. Is that what you want? To be like him?’

Kevin sighed.

‘There’s a better path for you. There’s a better way than that one. Don’t go out and prove that everything he said about you is true.’

There was no change in Kevin’s expression. In fact, there almost was no expression. He only sat in his chair, twiddling his fingers back and forth. He would not look at me.

‘So what the hell did you think you were doing?’ I asked. ‘What got into you?’

His shoulders sagged slightly. He took a deep breath. ‘You know Murphy’s Law?’ he said softly, ‘the one about if anything can go wrong, it will?’

I nodded.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I reckon I must be Murphy’s boy.’

A
nd so, we started over again.

Kevin crashed into depression within days of arriving at Mortenson. I don’t know what caused the depression. Perhaps having lost the opportunity to kill his stepfather – that central goal in his life – left him empty and without focus. Perhaps it was just another way of avoiding the war within himself that we on the outside could not yet fully see. It could have been any number of things, but whatever it was, he plunged headlong past us into it and left us with less to work with than we had had before.

The logistics of starting over were wretched. What the hospital wanted from me was my ability to make Kevin talk again, because at that moment, apparently he talked to no one except me. However, they didn’t want me for therapy. They had their own therapists, and Kevin now had a psychiatrist, as well, the man who had admitted him from the emergency room when the police brought him in. Therefore, it was obvious they would not allow Jeff to come at all. Policies regarding actual psychiatrists were rigid.

The hospital did not want to pay the clinic for my release. Under what sort of contract could they obtain my services? Could I guarantee the length of time I would be involved? Could I guarantee my work, if they paid the clinic in advance? God, it sounded like I was repairing motor cars or something. And what about my unorthodox preference for seeing the patient more than once a week? Would that cost proportionately more? Would they have to pay me for every visit? Or could they just pay, say, for a block of time, like two weeks? Money, money, money. All was money.

I wanted Jeff. And Jeff wanted to come. But there was no way. He was overqualified. They could not ignore the fact that he was a bona fide psychiatrist, despite his willingness to attest that he was working under me, the psychologist, on this case. Back and forth we went over the issue. How much would he cost? The clinic would have to release him, even if the hospital would not pay for him. Understandably, that upset the clinic and made them unwilling. And because the hospital was paying the clinic for my services and not paying me, myself, I could not give over part of my income to cover Jeff. It was a nightmare in 3-D.

In the end we cheated a bit. My integrity was not such that it disallowed a little fiddling. They didn’t actually know what Jeff looked like over the hospital, so we gave in to them about not having him as co-therapist and dropped the issue. Jeff was then reduced to the ignominious role of ‘research assistant’ with my elective mutism project and came in to see Kevin as my ‘aide.’ Because the clinic did not feel it could afford to release him, Jeff had agreed to come in on his own time after work. And bless him, when I offered to pay him meagerly from the funds of my research grant, he just shrugged and smiled and said not to worry about it.

It was all through this tangle of finances, when I spent so much time with Dr Rosenthal and the clinic bookkeeper, that I began to perceive one of the major differences between what I did in education and what I was doing now. There is something basically disgusting about being paid to care about someone and being able to decide on the basis of money, if one will or will not become or remain involved in someone else’s life. While teaching, I had been paid only to transfer knowledge. The caring I did for the kids had been all my own. But all of this work now at the clinic seemed a little whorish to me.

The first few weeks were agony. Kevin was terribly depressed. He had plunged us all back into the old quagmire of selective speech because, while he willingly spoke to Jeff and me, he spoke to no one else, and nothing we did or said could persuade him to do otherwise. It was a saving grace, I suppose, because if he had talked to others, undoubtedly Jeff and I would have been booted out.

However, even we weren’t greatly blessed. He spoke only when he chose and that grew to be less and less frequently. I never knew for sure when I arrived if he was going to do anything with us, if he was going to sit with us and talk or if he was going to spend the entire time hidden under his bedclothes, blanket over his head, and refuse to even look at us. We had had to schedule our sessions in the vicinity of five o’clock, because of Jeff’s situation, and that seemed to be everyone’s absolute worst time of day. I was usually tired and hungry and not at my most understanding. Jeff was more hyperactive than normal then. And as for Kevin, well, nothing seemed to improve him much.

One evening when I was sitting in the dusky September darkness because we hadn’t turned the lights on, I recalled only a year ago when I had first encountered Kevin rocking under his table. As I sat in the semidarkness and listened to Kevin’s and Jeff’s soft breathing, I remembered how Kevin used to line the chairs up and cower in the gloom and how in the beginning I had had to crawl under the table with him too. With sharp abruptness I longed for those first days again. Tables and chairs had never been able to form the kind of barrier that Kevin had built around himself now.

The weeks went by. I cannot even remember them now, as to how they passed. Nothing happened; nothing changed. Kevin remained sunk in his depression, medicated beyond coherence, locked in some internal prison. I didn’t know what to do to get him out. No one did, neither Jeff nor I nor the hospital staff nor the consulting psychiatrist. So we simply lay siege and waited.

Jeff and I started having dinner together afterward, mostly as a catharsis for having sat in silence for the hour before, but also partly as a bribe to keep us doing it. At least if we had something to look forward to, it didn’t seem too hopeless. We began first by eating at the fast-food places around Mortenson, and then Jeff started coming over to my house for supper when we got tired of greasy food and wanted more time to just sit and talk. I don’t think we meant to take over one another’s lives. It just sort of happened. Kevin’s depression was catching.

Then we split the sessions up, me with three and Jeff with two, because he just couldn’t balance it out with his work and his on-call roster at the other hospital. That eased the burden, but we found we had to continue our suppers together. Sanity sessions were what Jeff called them. He was probably right.

There was a window in the room, down at the far end. The view was panoramic, looking down from the rocky aerie where the hospital sat. The city stretched into the distance, and below the river moved angrily in eddies and rapids through a narrow canyon it had carved into the heart of the stony land. On the far side, houses and office buildings crawled up the tangled slopes, their angles softened by autumn-colored trees.

Kevin began to live at that window as the weeks passed. Every time when I arrived, he would be standing there, hands behind his back, eyes fixed on some unseen point beyond the glass. That window became the thing around which our whole lives revolved. Kevin was able to stand there and talk to me without having to actually look at me. Often, he was able to stand without talking either. I was not much competition, I think, for the things he was looking at.

‘I wonder what’s happened to my sisters,’ he said to me one afternoon when the sun had set and still he stood, a silhouette against the brightening city lights beyond the glass. I hadn’t heard him speak of his family in a long, long time.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘I wonder. I think about them sometimes. You know how long it’s been since I seen them?’ He turned briefly to look at me. When I shook my head, he turned back. ‘A long time. Six years. Well, almost six years. Five years, eight months and about a week and a half.’ He fell silent a moment in calculation. ‘Eight months, one week and three days. You know how I know that?’

‘How?’

‘I remember. I remember and I don’t forget. I got a very good memory.’

‘I can tell.’

‘But that’s a long time in a little kid’s life. My sisters were just little when I saw them last. I wonder how they are.’

I said nothing.

‘My stepdad, he’d come home drunk. He used to get my sister Carol out of bed sometimes. You know, I think he did things to her sometimes. You know. Dirty things. She never said he did, but I think he did. Carol’d be embarrassed to say those things, even to me. But I think I knew anyway. I was always watching. And once he got Barbara out of bed too. But mostly it was Carol. She was oldest.’

He paused.

‘They had to take Carol to the hospital once. After he’d gotten her out of bed.’

Kevin turned to me. The dusk had just settled and I could barely distinguish his features when he had his back to the window, blocking the lights of the city. ‘I wonder how my sisters are now. I haven’t seen them since … well, since all that time ago. Ever since my mother stopped coming. That’s a long time. A lot can happen in that time.’

He returned to the window. ‘You know what, Torey? I worry about them sometimes. I’m laying here and I get to thinking. Maybe my stepdad’s still doing things to them. Maybe he’s even doing it to the baby now, only she wouldn’t be such a baby anymore. But maybe he is. Maybe they weren’t so lucky as me and got out.’