Silent Boy (27 page)

‘How is Kevin?’ she asked shyly.

‘He isn’t exactly problem free,’ said Jeff. ‘We were hoping you might be able to give us some background on things about Kevin when he lived with you.’

‘He isn’t my son anymore,’ she said softly. ‘Ain’t nothing to talk about. You knew that, didn’t you? I had to give him up’

Jeff’s brow furrowed. ‘I was under the impression he was relinquished willingly.’

The words were too big. I could see her confusion.

‘We thought you gave him up because you wanted to,’ I said.

Her eyes dropped and there was silence. ‘We were having problems.’

‘Yes?’

‘Couldn’t keep him no more.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because of Malcolm. My husband.’

‘How many children do you and your husband have? Altogether?’ Jeff asked.

‘Counting Kevin?’

Jeff nodded.

‘Well, him,’ she indicated the little boy. ‘Him and the girls and Kevin, of course.’

‘How many girls?’

‘Just the two. Barbara and Ellen. Barbara …’ she paused. ‘Well, they got Barbara in a home, you know. But Ellen, she goes to school now.’

Jeff looked at me, back at the woman. She was a pitiful thing. ‘What about Carol?’ he asked, his voice gentle.

She studied her hands. ‘Just the two girls. Just Ellen and Barbara. Just them.’

There was a moment’s silence. The little boy whimpered and she took him into her lap to cuddle his bare feet against her hands.

‘Malcolm, your husband, he didn’t get along with Kevin, did he?’ Jeff asked.

She shook her head.

‘And so did Malcolm ask you to get rid of Kevin?’

She did not answer. She pressed her face against the small boy’s head. Then slowly she shook her head. ‘No, the law did.’

Like Jeff, I had been under the general impression that the parents had voluntarily relinquished Kevin to the state. In fact, I had read as much in Kevin’s file at Garson Gayer, so this seemed odd to me.

‘The courts told you to get rid of Kevin?’ I asked.

The conversation was beginning to bother her. She clutched the little boy closer. Her breathing quickened. Again she shook her head. ‘Well, after … after, well, you know, that last thing.’

‘What thing?’ Jeff inquired. Both of us were lost.

She wouldn’t look at us. ‘You know. The
thing
. That Malcolm did to him, to Kevin …’

‘No,’ said Jeff, ‘I’m afraid we don’t know. That’s our problem.’

‘Well, that last time. When he beat him. You know.’

We both watched her. She had the shoulder closest to us drawn up almost to her ear, as if Jeff and I might strike her.

‘Malcolm, well, you know, hit him. A bit. He, well, Kevin, he went to the hospital, you know. Well, them judges, well, you know, they told us Malcolm couldn’t be around Kevin no more. They said he’d get put, you know, in the slammer. If they ever found him around Kevin again. You know. So …’

Silence came and sat beside us. The room was unheated and the little boy in wet pants shivered. He wore nothing else except those training pants, no clothes, no shoes, no socks.

‘So, well,’ she said, ‘I had to put Kevin somewhere. You know. Else I couldn’t have Malcolm back with me. He couldn’t come ’round, if I’d’ve kept Kevin. You know.’

In the car on the way home I was angry. What kind of abuse had happened to this boy, that he had been hospitalized and the stepfather had been banned from seeing him again, when the two of them had lived under the same roof? And why the hell wasn’t something in Kevin’s records? I was really mad. I was almost yelling and, because Jeff was the only other person in the car with me, I was yelling at him. What were the goddamned lunatics in social services doing this time, keeping that kind of information from us? Jeff said nothing. We both knew it wasn’t he I was angry with. It wasn’t even the dementia that had apparently gripped the interdepartmental reporting of the welfare services. But how did one put into words a thing like a woman loving a brutal man more than her own son?

In the office the next day I started phoning. There had to be someone somewhere in this city who knew Kevin’s story. Late in the day I found her, a social worker named Marlys Menzies, who still worked for child welfare.

Kevin was twelve, she said, when it happened. He had just been returned from a group home and had been living with his family for about three months. Friction between the stepfather and Kevin had always been common, Marlys Menzies said, and the major factor continued to be Kevin’s refusal to speak to him.

There had been a small incident one night; no one quite remembered what it was. Kevin and the stepfather got into a fray and the stepfather had demanded an explanation from the boy. Kevin, of course, did not answer him. The father punched him. Then locked him up in a broom closet because he knew Kevin feared the dark. Refused to let him out until he answered. And Kevin didn’t. The father then took Kevin into the bedroom, stripped him in front of his two young sisters, and tied Kevin spread-eagle on the bed. The girls were then forced to touch and kiss Kevin sexually.

The next morning Kevin still lay trussed up, his sisters having been made to watch him wet himself because he couldn’t get up and then to laugh at him, lest they be beaten themselves. When Kevin still refused to speak, to answer on his own behalf, the stepfather became enraged. He cut Kevin loose, dragged him into the kitchen and beat him with a frying pan until the boy passed out.

After the stepfather left the house, Kevin’s mother took him into the living room and nursed him. She bound his wounds, and when he bled through the bandages, she changed them and burned the bloody ones. She put away the frying pan and did not dress Kevin, lest he bleed on any clothes. When it became apparent that Kevin was seriously injured and wouldn’t recuperate without medical attention, she called in a neighbor. The neighbor then notified the police.

While Kevin’s mother made a statement to the police, Kevin was rushed to the hospital where emergency surgery was performed to relieve pressure of a hemorrhage on his brain.

Marlys Menzies had one of those smooth, honeyed voices that one associates with Southern belles. The gentleness of her voice provided a bizarre contrast to her words.

According to the mother, I said, the stepfather was only fined and banned from seeing Kevin. Why had he not been criminally charged?

Ah well, Marlys Menzies said, that was the rub. The mother wouldn’t swear out a complaint against him and Kevin, of course, didn’t speak. There was no way to put Kevin on the witness stand. And the mother had destroyed all the evidence that there had been any real assault and battery. The stepfather was charged with a misdemeanor.

I thought there were child-abuse laws in this state, I commented.

Marlys Menzies was silent. Well, there are, she said at last. They just don’t always work.

The anger I had felt coming home in the car roared up inside me again. What lousy kind of charade was this anyway, where a kid could get half his brain knocked out, and not only was it only marginally condemned, but also collectively forgotten? In a bit of bizarre mental hopscotch, I thought of Hitler’s concentration camps. What had happened there wasn’t so terribly unfathomable. We had mini-versions of it going on all around us every day. And we, like the Germans, looked the other way and forgot.

Late in the week I mentioned to Kevin that we had tracked down his mother and had gone to see her. He and I were in his room as usual. I had brought him a crossword puzzle book, one of the few old interests he still enjoyed. So he sat on the bed and tried to solve one while we talked.

‘Is she coming to see me?’ he asked but there was no lilt of hope in his voice. It was a flat question. He didn’t even bother to look up from his puzzle when I told him.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I didn’t expect she would.’

I looked up at him. I was sitting on the floor and was even with his training shoes as they stuck out over the bed. ‘She told us how they came to bring you to Garson Gayer.’

‘She tell you everything?’ Still no emotion in his voice.

‘No. But I found out. I called a woman named Marlys Menzies. Do you remember her?’

‘Yes.’

‘She told me the rest.’

‘Well then,’ Kevin said, ‘you should know they didn’t bring me to Garson Gayer. You should know Mrs Menzies took me over. I saw my mom last on that day my stepfather beat me up. I haven’t seen her since.’

‘Do you want to?’

He lifted his eyes from the crossword puzzle and gazed in front of him. For several seconds he was lost in thought. Then he shook his head and went back to the puzzle. ‘No, I guess not. Not really. Some things you quit wishing for. And after a while they’re gone. They’re completely gone and you don’t even have the memory of wanting them.’

T
hen Kevin talked.

It was the same as at Garson Gayer. After days and weeks and months of silence, Kevin suddenly decided to talk again to the hospital staff. It must have been hard to do, the way he did it, because everyone had become so accustomed to his silence. It created a terrible furor for the first few days afterward, which caused Kevin to slink around in embarrassment. To me he did not appear to enjoy all the commotion he had created, although to keep doing that kind of thing, perhaps some deep, inner part of him did.

It was very nearly Christmas by then, and he had been on the unit since September. Like the time before, I asked him why he had chosen to talk and why now. Secretly I wondered if it reflected anything Jeff or I had done, but I couldn’t tell. As always, Kevin seemed to run a parallel path of development. While he did improve, there was never any real evidence to link it with something we were doing. Maybe he would have gotten better anyway, without us.

Kevin’s reason for talking was less specific this time than it had been the year before. He didn’t know, he said, and I believed him. I don’t think he really did know. To Jeff he said that he had grown tired of having a single room to himself. And they wouldn’t put him in with a roommate if he didn’t talk. So he talked. First to another boy on the unit whom everyone called Loopy Larry, who really was crazy as a loon, and then slowly to a couple of the staff whom Kevin especially liked. Within days Kevin was moved in to share a room with Loopy.

While Kevin was clearly happier having someone to share his days with, this change made things unexpectedly difficult for Jeff and me. We no longer had Kevin’s private room to work in, and with the loss of it, we also lost that spontaneous, natural sort of interaction we had developed among us. Now we had to go down the hall to the therapy room. It was typical, with a linoleum floor and a table, chairs, a couch and a oneway mirror. The first time I saw it I harked abruptly back to my first encounter with Kevin and again realized how far we had come.

The room was drafty and the floor was not well swept, so that kept us sitting in chairs, something Kevin and I had never done in our whole time together. I failed to realize before then how much time I actually spent working on floors. They seemed a natural place to interact with people, especially children, because I was so tall that otherwise I could never look at them face to face. That certainly wasn’t my problem with Kevin, but because we had started in the very beginning on a floor, we never had changed much. Now here we were stuck in chairs where neither of us could move surreptitiously one way or the other.

More significantly, Kevin’s window was gone. His new room was on the other side of the hall and its window did not face out on the dramatic panorama of the city below but rather onto the hospital parking lot. Moreover, Loopy’s bed was under it. There were no usable windows in the therapy room at all. They were all small, high and frosted over. When the light hit them right, I could see the fine mesh of wire embedded in them.

However, we managed, chairs, windows and all. Our sessions became considerably less informal and more like proper therapy sessions, which may not have been such a bad thing. Kevin didn’t appear to mind the change at all and I was resigned to it.

Following his decision to speak again, Kevin started to make progress at a steadier rate. It was still not at the speed it had been the previous spring but at least we had left the plateau behind. The paralyzing depression had finally lifted, and Kevin began to show a rekindled interest in the outside world.

Heartened by this, both Jeff and I were encouraging Kevin to earn enough points to gain a pass to go out of the hospital. We tempted him with all sorts of interesting prospects. The amusement park was closed for the winter but there was still the zoo and the museum and Taco John’s with its unlimited supply of tacos. However, out of all the choices, Kevin came up with one of his own.

Kevin had only one major fear left, or at least only one that routinely interfered with his life. He remained terrified of water. He could bear water running over him, as in the shower, but that was the extent of it. The thought of being submersed in even a small pan of water frightened him.

Yet, it held a horrible fascination for him too. One night when I was there with Kevin, he asked me, would it be possible, maybe, perhaps, if I thought he could, well, if he earned an outside pass, could he, well would I take him swimming?