Silent Boy (26 page)

‘Well, that’s what I told them. But they seem to still feel you may have taken it.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just have a look around the room for it then. Just to say I checked the matter out thoroughly. Okay?’

‘I
didn’t
take it, Torey. I wrote them a note. I said to them I didn’t take it. And I didn’t. Why are they making you come after me?’

‘Do you mind if I look around?’

‘I didn’t take it! Yeah, go ahead. Look if you want to. Search me. Search my room. See if I took the stupid coat. What would I want a coat for anyway? I never go out.’

I was beginning to have a hunch he did take it. His voice was rising in pitch and something in his demeanor hinted at guilt. ‘Yes, I was thinking those same things myself, but the question is, did you take it?’

‘I didn’t! How many times do I have tell you I didn’t?’

I paused and looked over at him.

‘
I didn’t!
’

‘Well, if you did, it would probably just be easier to go get the coat for me and not make me have to look for it. Then we could get on with other things.’

His face crumpled and I thought he was going to cry. ‘I said I didn’t. Why don’t you believe me? I said I didn’t.’

I pulled the orange plastic chair over and sat down. ‘Sometimes these sorts of things happen. They shouldn’t and it would be nicer if they didn’t, but they do. People are that way. Everybody does this sort of thing occasionally.’

Kevin just sat, his face frozen in a grimace, not crying but not quite not crying either.

‘Why don’t you just get me the coat, okay? And I’ll take it out to the nurses’ desk and we’ll be finished and done with it. All right, Kevin?’

The pause was lengthy. ‘I didn’t take it,’ he said one more time under his breath and kicked at the dresser with one toe. When I said nothing and did not rise to search the room, he regarded me through his eyelashes. Then very slowly he rose from where he was sitting. His movements were heavy as if his limbs were unwilling to cooperate. Coming over to the bed, he lifted the mattress. There folded carefully between the mattress and the box spring was a duffel coat with toggle buttons and a hood. Kevin took it out gently and handed it to me. Then he returned to the window. I went and took the coat out to the nurses’ desk.

‘Kev?’

He knew what I was going to ask. ‘I thought you said we were going to be finished with it, if I gave it to you. You weren’t going to ask any questions.’

‘I was just wondering … Just between you and me.’

‘I thought you said.’

‘I did say, I guess. And if you want, I won’t ask any questions.’

‘I do want.’ With that he turned and came over to the bed and sat down on it.

Most of the session passed quietly. We did other things and talked on other topics. However, for both of us the coat remained a ghost haunting every conversation. Toward the end, just as I was packing up, Kevin relented.

He rose from the bed, paced the small room, kicked at the dresser leg and the chair leg before settling down in front of the window. Half his life must have been given over to that window.

‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘clothes make you feel like you are inside. Have you ever noticed that?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was weird. I saw that coat … I saw it and I thought, well, …’ He paused. There was dust on the windowsill and he reached out to push it aside with one finger. ‘That’s sort of a Bryan coat. You know what I mean? That’s the sort of coat a Bryan would wear, it’s so neat looking.’ He turned. ‘I wasn’t stealing it, Torey. I wasn’t, honest. I just wanted to try it on. I just wanted to see what I’d look like in it.’ He smiled pathetically. ‘That was all, just to try it on. But I couldn’t very well ask, could I?’

‘Well, maybe,’ I suggested.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have understood. It was me asking. Bryan could’ve but not me. They didn’t see Bryan. Even if I’d had the coat on, they wouldn’t have noticed. It would’ve just been nerdy old Kevin in somebody else’s coat.’

‘I see.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so I had to sort of borrow it. So they wouldn’t laugh at me. I just wanted to try it on.’ He returned to the window.

I didn’t speak.

‘Torey?’ he asked without turning back to look at me.

‘Yes?’

‘Did you think it was a neat-looking coat?’

‘Yes. It was a lovely coat, wasn’t it?’

He nodded. ‘Bryan might have wore it, huh?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

I came over and stood beside him. There was an inward sort of smile on his lips and it stayed a long time before finally playing itself out. I thought he was going to say something else; the expectant atmosphere lingered. But he didn’t. He only stood with his hands in his pockets. Beyond him I could see the snow falling, and the grinding gray filth of the city below us faded under downy white.

H
ockey season was well launched, and Hans had promised us tickets to one of the home games. Consequently, there we were, one pre-Christmas Saturday evening, getting ourselves ready to go watch hockey. Personally I despised the game, something I could hardly say to Hans. It seemed like gladiators on ice to me, needlessly brutal and gory. I had been surprised the first time I met Hans to learn that he was a local team hockey player because he had seemed such a pleasant, even-tempered chap and not at all how I had stereotyped men who played hockey. So I had to admit I was looking forward to going just to see Hans play. He could never bring himself to make Charity behave when she was larking about obnoxiously, so I was curious to see him lustily bashing in the skulls of the other team.

Unfortunately, it was not an ideal occasion to go. I was baby-sitting that weekend. My next-door neighbors were a likeable but somewhat odd couple, part of the expired flower-power generation, and they had produced a likeable but odd daughter. Her name was Shayna-Jasmine, she wouldn’t eat meat or anything that didn’t come out of a sack from the health food store and she had some extremely liberated topics of conversation for a four-year-old. She’d also been born prematurely with a stomach tumor and had subsequently had most of her stomach removed. This meant I had to feed her six times a day instead of three and that she threw up a lot.

But Saturday night was the game Hans got tickets for, so Saturday night, Jeff, Charity, Shayna-Jasmine and I packed up a tailgate picnic and left for the sports arena.

Charity loved the hockey game. All the blood and gore were right up her alley. Jeff, too, was a keen enthusiast. So he and Charity did a lot of yelling and cheering for Hans’s benefit. That left Shayna-Jasmine and me to puzzle out a game neither of us understood too well.

‘What are they doing?’ Shayna-Jasmine asked after half a dozen men swooped down on some poor fallen teammate, all their sticks flying.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ I replied.

‘What’s that thing for?’ she asked, pointing to a strange-looking affair over by one team’s goal.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

We watched in silence. The teams skated by and there was a frantic attempt to place a goal which ended in a pileup right below our seats and some nasty hollering, all the words of which were in Shayna-Jasmine’s vocabulary already.

Shayna pulled at my arm. ‘How come they’re fighting?’

‘They’re trying to get that little puck there.’

‘Well, how come they don’t just ask for it?’

‘The other men wouldn’t give it to them.’

‘Well, they could say
please
, ’she replied emphatically.

I smiled at her. ‘That’s not part of the game.’

‘Oh,’ she said and gave a disgruntled little sigh. ‘It’s a stupid game, isn’t it?’

Afterward, after the teams had changed and left and the maintenance men were cleaning the ice, Hans came out of the locker room with pairs of skates in his hands.

‘I thought maybe we could all skate a little while they’re redoing the ice. Before they refreeze the surface. It wouldn’t be so slippery for the girls.’

Hans grinned. He had evidentally planned this as a small surprise for Charity and Shayna-Jasmine. The arena was a regular rink during part of the week and had a large supply of skates to rent, so before the game he had gone down and gotten skates from the rental room for all of us.

I hesitated to point out to him that it was after eleven at night and both girls were a little bleary-eyed. Plus Jeff had been feeding licorice to Shayna the entire game, and I was sure she was going to throw up all over us if we jiggled her too much. But naturally, the prospect of such fun appealed greatly to Charity, who came wide awake again and had her shoes off and was tugging at the skates before I found the heart to object.

It turned out to be one of those gloriously crazy little times in one’s life when one abandons all good reason and does solely as one pleases. Hans was a lousy judge of small girls’ shoe sizes. Charity’s were at least three sizes too big and we had to stuff the toes with a pair of Hans’s smelly sweat socks. Shayna’s were too small and she fussed as I crammed her feet in. But once out on the ice, those things were soon forgotten.

Hans, of course, was an excellent skater and he had both Charity and Shayna-Jasmine up on their feet and steady in no time. I had skated all my childhood on the creek below our family home and on down to the lagoon where the creek emptied. In adulthood I had forgotten the almost airborne feeling and was giddy with it on the huge arena, where I had to swerve and curve around bewildered maintenance men and their long brooms.

For once, Jeff was hopeless. I felt terribly smug when I discovered there was actually something I could do so much better than Wonder Boy. I teased Jeff mercilessly, as he clung unsteadily to the rail. It was late and I was tired. That could be my only excuse for behaving that way.

We fooled around until almost midnight, when the maintenance men were clearly ready to flood the arena and go home. The end came when I missed Shayna-Jasmine. She had left the rink to go get a drink of water, and I found her, skates and all, cuddled up on our coats, sound asleep.

Afterward we returned to my house so I could put Shayna to bed. Charity was also spending the night, so I promised hot chocolate to her and Irish coffee to Hans and Jeff before they left.

We were all exhausted. It was late and the physical exertion only added to it. Jeff made no pretense of vitality. He slumped down in front of the television and flipped it on. Hans came out in the kitchen with Charity and me to give a hand with the drinks. Rummaging around through the liquor cabinet, he decided that Kahlua might make an interesting addition to Irish coffee. We could add some cocoa too, he explained, and create a mocha drink. This launched him, the only person who seemed to be coherent at that hour, into some long story about Germany punctuated frequently by German words I didn’t know the meaning of. Not feeling nearly so creative, I flinched at the prospect of coffee, cocoa, whiskey, Kahlua and cream together but dumped them in anyway.

When I turned to take the mugs over to the table, there was Charity sleeping peacefully with her head down on the place mat. So I put her mug back on the counter and picked up Jeff’s. In the living room, draped over a chair, Jeff too slept. The national anthem blared out over the television.

Returning to the kitchen, I met Hans waltzing his coffee around the room and humming ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin.’ With Jeff’s mug still in my hand, I grinned at him.

‘What a motley crew you all are,’ I said. ‘This place is like a halfway house.’

A smile spread over his lips. ‘Ah well,
Schatzie
, ‘he said.” The real question is, halfway between what and what?’

‘Here,’ said Jeff when I arrived on Monday morning. He tossed a note pad over onto my desk.

‘What’s this?’ There was a telephone number on it. From the area code I could tell it was from the bordering state.

‘I’ve traced Kevin’s mother.’

My eyes widened.

‘You want to go see her with me? I’ve spoken to her. I was hoping she might have information she would be willing to share.’

Jeff and I made the hundred-mile trip to spend an afternoon with Kevin’s mother. We found her in a small, dilapidated duplex on the edge of a community just over the border from our state. The place was scantily furnished and absolutely filthy In the living room there was only a sagging couch, a television and a cardboard box serving as a coffee table. A small boy with wet pants opened the door for us.

While she greeted us with a bashful hesitance, Kevin’s mother obviously had intended to make our visit a pleasant one. Even though we had arrived well after lunchtime, she had made a meal for us. It was a heartbreaking thing really. The foods she had bought for us to eat were expensive things – cheeses, pickles, fruits out of season-and must have depleted her benefit check severely. They had to be laid on a card table in the kitchen because there was no other furniture except two wooden benches. She had only bought enough for Jeff and me, not for herself or the little boy, who stood shivering in his wet training pants, gazing longingly at the tomatoes and cookies but never asking for any.

We had to eat it; it was one of those situations where one could in no way refuse, even though we hadn’t wanted the food and they could have used it more. But I found myself embarrassed to be eating when she and little boy didn’t. Jeff must have felt the same because I could see his cheeks blazing.