Silent Boy (32 page)

‘Then Carol sicked up. He was holding her and making her drink the hot sauce and she sicked it up all over him. He got mad. He started screaming and hollering at her. She shouldn’t ought’ve done that, he yells. She’d be real sorry now. Lot sorrier than for peeing on the floor. And he picks her up by the hair and throws her across the room. I ran after her. I ran and he knocked me over and he kicked me. He kicked me so hard I peed blood and it showed on my pants. I was scared he was gonna get me then for it, but he had Carol. By the rocking chair. He sat on her and he held her head by the hair and banged her head against the floor. Over and over and over. Right by the rocking chair.

‘I was crying and screaming at him, but my mom, she just stood there. And I yell at her, I say to my mom,
help
her! Make him stop! And my mom just stood there. She says, leave them alone. It isn’t any of your business.

‘When he stood up, Carol didn’t move. She just lay there, and he says, that shows you. Don’t it? That shows you who’s boss in this house, and it sure ain’t some little girl who pees the floor. Some little girl that can’t even read. He said that to embarrass her. She was in first grade for the second time and she still couldn’t learn to read yet. And I hated him most of all for saying that, for making Carol feel bad. I wanted to kill him.

‘Now get up, he says to Carol. And Carol, she doesn’t move at all. She just lays there. I see her bleeding. It was coming out of her ear. I kept praying he wouldn’t see it, because he’d be mad again for her messing up the floor. And he hollered at her because she wouldn’t get up. Get up, Carol, I said, do like he says. And I kept praying to God that she’d hurry up and get up so he wouldn’t be madder than he already was. I kept praying. To God and to Jesus, for them to listen to me. I kept saying,
please
, Jesus, make her get up. But she didn’t. So he picked up the iron plate from the stove. And he says, get up, Carol, or I’m going to make you really hurt. And she didn’t get up. So he threw it at her. And he threw it again.’

Kevin paused. He lay rigid as death on the bed, all his muscles tight, his fingers white where they gripped the blanket.

‘You know what. I seen her brains come out all the way across the floor at me. I could have touched them if I’d put my hand out. I could have touched Carol’s brains.’

Kevin stopped talking, and in the sudden, short interlude of stillness, the hospital noises came whooshing back in around us like air into a vacuum.

Kevin turned slightly, as if to look at me, but he didn’t. ‘And my mom seen. My momma seen the whole thing and she just stood right there. She said, leave him alone, it ain’t none of your business. And she never once did a thing.’

B
ack in the office, I went through my telephone file to locate Marlys Menzies’s number. I dialed.

Torey Hayden, I said. Do you remember me? I’m Kevin Richter’s therapist. At Mortenson Hospital. She didn’t remember me, I suspect. Her voice had the hollow ring of false recognition. She didn’t remember me from the
Torrey Canyon
.

Was there an abuse incident in his history? I asked. Avery serious one, where a child was either badly injured or killed?

Kevin Richter. Hmmm. Mmmm. Let’s see. Let me think. After a long pause, she asked if she could call me back. Yes, I said. Feeling angry and disgruntled, I hung up the phone.

At 2:30 when I was down in the reception office, drinking a can of Dr Pepper and chatting with Shirley and the girls, the phone rang.

‘Torey?’

‘Yes?’

‘This is Marlys at Social Services. I found the Richter file for you. I checked. There was an incident. Quite a while back now. About nine years. A Carol Marie Richter, aged seven years, two months, was battered to death by the stepfather during a family argument. He was drunk apparently. Jailed for the offense. Four years.’

‘He got four years for murdering a child?’

‘Yes, well, you know how those things are.’

‘Is there anything else in that file? I mean, are there going to be any other skeletons to fall out of the closet, to make a sick pun?’

She thought that was very funny. I hadn’t meant it to be. I hadn’t realized what I was saying until it was half out. ‘No, no,’ she said midst her giggles, ‘nothing special. I suppose you could even see the chart if you wanted to get clearance.’

It was an old, old story this, made ugly not only by the principal characters but by the bungling bureaucracy that staged it. Over and over and over again Kevin’s stepfather had abused the children. Over and over the children were returned to him and his wife, even after Carol’s death. Of the five children, three were now permanently gone from the home.

‘How is it,’ I asked, ‘that social services knows so much about this family and yet there was none of this, neither of the abuse Kevin suffered from his stepfather nor the dreadful thing about Carol in Kevin’s file at Garson Gayer? I’ve been working with him almost eighteen months now and I never knew any of this.’

She did not answer immediately. ‘Well,’ she said after a bit, ‘I think maybe we just thought it might be better for Kevin if he had a completely fresh start when he went into that home. He hadn’t had what you could call a really good childhood. He had had so many bad trips already that people were terribly prejudiced about the boy. I mean, you’ve never seen a youngster who has had more things go wrong for him. If it could, it has. After a point, no one wanted to touch him. It was hopeless. So I guess it just seemed best to wipe the slate clean and start over. To just forget he had a past before he went into care.’

‘But the thing is, Marlys,
Kevin
never forgot his past.’

‘Yes, well …’

‘Whose decision was it to do that? To not tell anyone at Garson Gayer what his previous life had been like?’

‘Just a general consensus.’

‘Whose?’

‘Ours, I guess.’

‘You know, of course, it would have made my job a lot easier to have known these things all along. They explain a lot.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Are there any other surprises lurking?’

She sighed. ‘I guess if you’ve heard that, you’ve heard the worst.’

It wasn’t much consolation.

Things didn’t change much between Kevin and me. They went on pretty much the way they had before he’d made me the gift of that small story.

I guess I had expected more out of it. I guess I’d expected that when I finally found myself with all the pieces of the puzzle, I’d be able to get it together at last. But that wasn’t so. Instead, Kevin returned to silence or at least to near silence, and his life and my life continued on in a very ordinary manner, if one could take our circumstances as ordinary.

I kept reading. Every day, every hour we spent together, I read. I don’t believe Kevin was listening to me read. Hunched up atop the bed or over in the orange plastic chair, he would sit with his arms resting on his knees, chin on them, and he’d stare off. Occasionally, some thought would break to the surface and he would talk to me for a few moments. Usually it was a complete non sequitur to what I was reading. In a way, because I knew he wasn’t listening, it made the whole act of reading aloud seem a little ridiculous and I questioned myself for doing it. However, the books gave substance to my being there. They gave validity. And like the window in the other room, they took away our self-consciousness about other matters, the real matters that brought us together.

‘I don’t think there must be a God,’ Kevin said to me one afternoon. I was reading
Men of Iron
and spewing out such lovely lines as, ‘Thou art as harebrained knave as ever drew the breath of life,’ quoth Gascoyne.

I looked up, relieved for a break. The book was marvelous but it was meant to be read aloud by someone like Richard Burton.

Kevin turned his head to look at me. ‘Do you believe there’s a God? I was just thinking and I don’t think there can be.’

‘What makes you feel that way?’

‘No God would make a world where there are so many people who got no one to love them. If it had been done to a plan, there would have been enough people to love everybody.’

‘There’s a lot of people, Kevin. Maybe there are enough.’

‘No. No, there isn’t. There are a lot of people in the world who aren’t really loved by anybody.’ He paused and studied his hand.’ I mean real love, where people love you regardless of what you are.’

‘Well, I must admit, I don’t think that it’s necessarily God’s fault. I reckon God gave us all the equipment to do it with.’

‘Hmmph.’ He sneered at me. ‘You don’t know what I’m even talking about, Torey. You haven’t the slightest idea. You’ve always been loved, haven’t you? You always had people to love you.’

I didn’t reply.

‘Well, you have, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Then you haven’t the slightest idea, not even the tiniest little inkling of what I’m talking about. You got no idea about never being loved.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘You know what most people die from?’

I shook my head.

‘Heart rot. It’s a kind of invisible cancer. You get it in your heart. You can feel it. It eats you up inside. It’s what you get when all you do is get born into the world. Your heart’s never got any use. And so you get heart rot and your heart rots away. Sometimes a long time before your body does. Only it doesn’t matter because once you’re dead in your heart, you’re dead.’

I said nothing.

‘So the way I see it, there can’t be a real God. No God would make such a loused-up world as this one.’

When I continued not to speak he turned to me. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like? Do you know how it feels to realize there’s four billion people in the world and not one of them cares a shit about you?’

‘I care, Kevin.’

‘But who are you? Just somebody who’s here now and will be gone. You’re just here because I’m your job. You’re paid to come and care for me. You wouldn’t have ever come. You wouldn’t have cared, if they hadn’t paid you.’

‘And there’s a lot of times I haven’t been paid.’

‘Yes. But in the beginning you only came because you were paid. No other reason. You wouldn’t have come then if it hadn’t been your job. Would you? Tell the truth.’

‘But I did come.’

‘But you wouldn’t have, Torey, would you? Not if they hadn’t paid you. Would you? Tell the truth. You wouldn’t have come.’

‘This isn’t fair, Kevin. I didn’t know you then. How could I have come?’

‘So I’m right.’

I sighed in frustration. ‘Yes, you probably are right. I probably wouldn’t have come. But I didn’t know you then, Kevin. You can’t blame me because I didn’t know about you. That was hardly my fault. There’s zillions of people I don’t know and I won’t accept any blame for not caring about them. If you don’t know something, you can’t do much about it. But that’s a false argument anyway, Kevin. It isn’t whether or not I came because I was paid to. The important thing is that I came back. And back again. Out of all the kids I work with and have worked with, I came back to you. Time and again I’ve come back. Sure, I’m paid to, all right, because it’s my job and if I weren’t paid to, I couldn’t afford to come here at all because I’d have to go out and do some other kind of work. But regardless, I still don’t have to come here. There’s lots of kids out there I could be working with, if I just wanted to earn a salary. And a whole damned lot of them are easier than you. But I came back here. I chose to come back and don’t you forget I made that choice. The beginning already happened and if it weren’t for my job and the fact someone paid me to do what I do, I would never have been here then and I sure as hell wouldn’t be here now. So don’t keep harping at me, Kevin. Don’t keep telling me I come because I am paid. Yes, I am paid. We both know that. It’s old news. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with why I keep coming here. The way doesn’t justify the end. I’m here in the end because I’ve chosen to be. Because I care. How I got here doesn’t matter.’

‘I thought,’ he said very quietly, ‘that it was the other way around, that it was the end that didn’t justify the means.’

‘Oh Kevin, for Pete’s sake, don’t go looking for what isn’t there all the time.’

Bringing up a hand, he rubbed it over his face wearily. He sighed. ‘Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it is enough,’ he said. ‘I guess I was just wanting more.’

T
he days turned into weeks. The weeks passed. They made up a month. Still I did nothing but read aloud.

It was an eerie time. Kevin talked to me with diminishing frequency and, when he did talk, there was an increasingly irritable note in his voice. But for the most part he just sat, hunched up on his orange chair, and he watched me with an unflinching, brooding gaze as I read. I could feel emotion building up in him, although for a long time I could not tell what it was, partly, I suppose, because I was so busy reading. However, each day he grew a little fiercer, his attitude toward me a little surlier. It was hard for me to gauge whether or not this was all aimed in my direction or if he was just feeling this way generally toward everyone because he hardly spoke to me anymore and of course, he never spoke to anyone else.