Silent Boy (25 page)

We were finishing up the dishes one evening when Charity went into the other room and got her coat. ‘I got to go home now,’ she said.

‘You do?’ I replied. Normally she didn’t leave until I turned her out. ‘How come?’

‘My mom told me to.’

‘She wants you home early tonight?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ said Charity. ‘No, my mom said I shouldn’t ought to disturb you so late, since you got to work in the morning.’

‘But it’s only 6:30, Charity.’

‘Yeah, but my mom said you must get awful tired.’

‘What do you mean? Why would your mom say that?’

Charity smiled sweetly. ‘Well, see, I told my mom you were a
real
woman,’ she said with pride.

‘
You what?
’

‘Well, my mom, she only gots one boyfriend. But I told her it took
two
men to keep you satisfied.’ Another angelic smile. ‘So my mom said I better come home early.’

‘Kev,’ I said one afternoon, ‘I got something I have to ask you and you got to tell me.’

Kevin turned from the window to look at me.

‘What happened out at Bellefountaine?’

Silence. He returned to staring out into the dusk.

‘Kevin, you got to tell me. I can’t help you unless you help me. To change things, Kev, I got to know more.’

Still silence.

‘I don’t want your help especially,’ he said softly. It was not spoken in defiance, just a statement.

‘I know you don’t.’

More silence. It was very complete. The doors were thick and so the room was not fringed with outside noises. There was nothing but Kevin and me, and I was too far away from him to even hear him breathe.

‘Things have gotten out of control, Kevin. You’re stuck here in this place. You’re feeling awful all the time. It makes me want to quit and I know that’s not the best thing for either of us. So we need to get back into control again. We can. But you got to help me a little. Okay?’

He did not answer.

‘Okay, Kev?’

‘Nothing happened out there.’

‘But you’re in here now. Why?’

I saw him clench his fist, bring it up and lay it against the glass of the window. ‘Because I busted that woman’s arm.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged.

‘Why did you do it, Kevin?’

‘I just got angry, that’s all.’

‘But why?’

‘I dunno. I just did.’

‘But why did you get angry? What happened? What did she do?’

‘Nothing. I just got angry with her. I just did, that’s all.’

‘People don’t just get angry, that’s all, Kevin. Not for no reason, they don’t.’

‘I did.’ He leaned forward, pressing his face against the glass. He was studying something beyond my view. ‘Look. Look, they’re cleaning out that empty lot over there. They’re taking off the garbage that was there.’

‘Kevin, come away from that window.’

He did not move.

‘Kevin, come here. Come away from that window and come over here.’

For a long moment I thought he wouldn’t. He never moved from that window. It was like a mistress and I wasn’t much in comparison.

But slowly he turned. He came over to the bed where I was sitting.

‘Sit down,’ I said and indicated the end of the bed beside me.

He sat.

‘So what happened, Kevin? You haven’t told me.’

He shrugged.

‘I hate to have to ask at all, but you haven’t told me. And I’m stuck. I can’t figure out where to go next or what to do because you don’t tell me where you’ve been. I hate to make you feel bad. I hate to ask but I need to.’

Something about him was unsettling. I couldn’t tell what, if it was the way he held his body or his expression or some aura about him, but whatever it was, it ran through me. It was a deep, subterranean sensation, like heavy notes on a piano played very loudly so that they vibrate the soft inner organs. Like the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said again. ‘Honest, Torey, I don’t. I liked her. I really did. Her name was Margaret and she was really nice to me.’

‘What sorts of things happened in the home that night?’

‘We were sitting watching TV. I got up to go to bed. And then these other guys started arguing. So I got out of bed again and went to see what was happening.’

‘Were the boys arguing with Margaret?’

‘No. Just with themselves. And Margaret was standing there. So I broke her arm.’

‘You broke Margaret’s arm? Margaret was standing there and the boys were fighting and you came down from your bed and broke her arm? Why? Did it make you angry that they were fighting or something? Why did you break Margaret’s arm then, and not one of the boys’?’

Kevin shook his head. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘You said before that you were angry. How come?’

Kevin paused. ‘I don’t know. I just got mad at her. And the next thing I knew, I broke her arm. I threw her against the wall.’

I did not speak. The silence slipped in around us like the tide coming in.

‘Remember that time at Garson Gayer?’ Kevin asked. ‘That time in our room when you and me were doing that rocket poster?’

‘Yes.’

‘And I got so upset.’

‘Yes, I remember that.’

‘I could have broke your arm then.’

‘Yes, you could have.’

‘But I didn’t though,’ he said. ‘They came and got me first.’

‘Would you have, if they hadn’t come so soon?’

He paused thoughtfully. Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. That was different.’

‘How so?’

Kevin did not answer immediately. In fact, he took so long in responding that I did not think he would.

‘I wasn’t angry at you. I was scared. If I’d have hurt you, I wouldn’t have meant to.’ He glanced at me briefly before hoisting himself off the bed and returning to the window. ‘But I think I might have killed her if I’d had the chance.’

T
hen very, very slowly Kevin begin to improve. He had been in the hospital ten weeks before even the slightest signs of growth started again and those weren’t many. Perhaps he would get up when called one morning. Perhaps he would attend the school program or the therapy sessions or the meals without coercion. With excruciating slowness, he began earning his points, and at last Jeff or I could come every time without interruption.

What caused the improvement was not clear. Undoubtedly, it was a combination of things. There was, however, no new face to his personality. This gradual change for the better was not one of Kevin’s chameleon shifts, and that gave Jeff and me some hope that the boy we now worked with was the real Kevin and that the improvement, agonizingly slow as it was, was genuine.

Jeff started to be more and more obsessed with Kevin’s past. The records were so spotty. Certainly, for a kid who had spent so much of his life tangled up in the red tape of the welfare system, very little indeed was written about him. He seemed almost to be a kid without a past, despite the fact that both Jeff and I knew from our conversations with Kevin that he had had a childhood worth noting.

One morning I came into the office to find Jeff kneeling on the floor and dozens of little bits of paper spread out around him. Carefully, he was shifting the pieces back and forth from one place to another.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. He was due to speak at a conference later in the morning and was all kitted out in a three-piece suit and tie. When I found him on his hands and knees on the floor with all that paper, I thought perhaps he had dropped some odd sort of material for his presentation.

Jeff rose up on his knees and surveyed the situation. ‘Well, when I was in bed last night I got to thinking. Trying to figure out how all the pieces of Kevin’s background go together. You know, your old jigsaw theory. But I just couldn’t conceptualize it.’ Then he looked up with a grin full of boyish pride. ‘So I’ve
made
the jigsaw puzzle up.’

‘You idiot,’ I laughed. ‘It was a figure of speech.’

‘Well, I got to thinking, if I made a sort of time line … and put in order …’ He studied the paper on the floor.

I walked around the snowfall and knelt down myself to see what Jeff had written on the bits of paper.

‘See, here’s his stepfather,’ said Jeff. ‘And there’s Carol. I think Carol’s mixed up in this. His relationship …’

I picked up another piece of paper.

‘How many sisters does Kevin have?’ Jeff asked. ‘There’s Carol …’

‘And Barbara. He told me about Barbara.’

‘Then who’s Ellen?’

‘Ellen? I never heard about Ellen. Besides, we got two and that’s all his folder says there is. Just two sisters. And we know about Carol and Barbara.’

‘But there’s Ellen. He mentioned Ellen once. Do you suppose Carol’s a brother? Carroll and not Carol at all?’ Jeff suggested.

‘No. He drew a picture of her for me once. And he says “she” when he’s talking about her. We wouldn’t have made that mistake.’

Jeff shifted a piece of paper around. ‘Okay, so if this area is his early childhood, before he got carted off to a residential center, when do you reckon the abusive acts he talks about took place? There isn’t really anything in his records on it, is there?’

I shook my head.

‘You do think it’s true, don’t you?’ Jeff looked up. ‘You don’t think he’s fabricating a lot of this? I mean, he’s such a clever so-and-so sometimes.’

‘No. I’ve seen his back. Have you seen it? All those little scars. If they happened, the other stuff probably did too.’

‘I’m going to ask you something, Tor, something that’s been eating at me. But it sounds farfetched. Do you suppose he’s making Carol up? That she’s some sort of fantasy person? That things got so bad for him that he had to personify some of his feelings? Make up someone who cared for him?’

The same thought had crossed my mind too, but deep down I couldn’t believe it. Yet, hadn’t Charity told all those fantastic stories, and I’d swallowed half of them before I discovered the truth? And Kevin was so much subtler than Charity. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

Again Jeff moved bits of paper. He regarded them, shifted another. Then he rose and sat in his desk chair so he could survey the whole arrangement. I leaned over and brushed the dirt off the knees of his trousers.

‘His mother …’ Jeff said thoughtfully and leaned down for one scrap. ‘I wonder where his mother got to. How long’s she been off the scene?’

‘Since Garson Gayer, I think. I’m not altogether sure.’

‘
Shit!
’ said Jeff suddenly and crumpled up the piece of paper he was holding. He pitched it across the room. ‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit.’ He looked at me, his forehead puckered in angry frustration. ‘God damn it, Torey, how the hell are we supposed to do anything? Look at this. Look at this damned sideshow we’re running. We don’t know anything. How can anyone expect to help a kid when we don’t even know who his mother is? The kid might as well not even exist for all we know about him. Damn it. We’re like fortune-tellers. We might as well be reading tea leaves.’ He kicked out at the papers and they fluttered up into the air.

I felt sorry for Jeff then, for his distress, which was mine as well. He was right, of course. But that didn’t make it any better.

When I got to the hospital later in the day, I was accosted by one of the nurses. Kevin, she said, had stolen a coat.

A coat?

They knew he had to be the guilty party. He had been the only one in the vicinity at the time, and all the other kids had been cleared. The evidence all pointed to Kevin. Since he was still refusing to talk to anyone, would I take the matter up with him?

Horrible thoughts went through my head. Why on earth would Kevin take a coat? The only thing I could imagine was that old specter of his stepfather had come back to haunt him and he had decided to run off and kill him once and for all. The conversations between Kevin and me were slowly turning back to his family again, so that was the only thing in my mind. It was a dreadful thought.

But why steal a coat? That didn’t make 100 percent good sense. Kevin did, after all, have a coat of his own. Right there in his room.

Hating to have to take up an argument that I initially was not part of, I begrudgingly went into Kevin’s room. He was sitting on the edge of the dresser. It had been pushed closer to the window, and he sat there on it, with his feet on the windowsill.

‘Kev,’ I said, ‘I hate to be the bearer of tales but I understand there’s been some trouble up here.’ I closed the door firmly behind me.

‘Oh? I’m not having any trouble.’

‘Over a coat.’

‘Oh,
that
trouble,’ he replied knowingly.

‘Yep. That trouble. You want to clear it up for me? They seem to feel you’re involved. Are you?’

‘Me?’

I nodded.

‘What would I want a coat for?’ he asked.