Silent Boy (33 page)

But soon I didn’t need much of a gauge. Whatever it was, it was growing strong enough to be almost palpable.

Anger. Hate. I recognized it finally. It was the selfsame white-hot emotion Kevin had had back at Garson Gayer before Jeff came into the therapy sessions. But unlike then, he didn’t acknowledge it. Nor did he direct it. It just sat with us, growing.

I grew nervous in the face of that kind of anger. It had appeared slowly, in a most ethereal way over the passing weeks, on the edge of conversations more than in them, in the shadow of other emotions more than with them. But it fed upon the silence that had come between Kevin and me and soon it was strong enough to be perceivable even over the continuous drone of my voice. Yet Kevin never said a word about it to me. As frightening as his hate had been at Garson Gayer, at least it was there out sitting in the stone cold light of day for me to see. But this time he never acknowledged it at all. Kevin never even gave it the feeble substance of words.

One afternoon I came in late. There had been another boy on my mind that day and I had gotten held up at the clinic because of him.

When I did arrive, I found Kevin pacing in his small room. Hands in his pockets, he shuffled up and down. It was the most activity I had seen in him in ages, and I wondered if they’d been monkeying around with his medications again. He seemed jumpy and distracted.

‘You’re
late
,’ he said accusingly when I entered. ‘How come you’re late?’

‘I got caught at the clinic.’

‘It’s five o’clock. You were supposed to be here at four–thirty. You’re a whole half hour late.’

‘I’m sorry. Kev. But I was having problems with another boy. I couldn’t get away any sooner.’

‘I don’t care. What do I care about some other boy? You’re late here. Four-thirty is your time with me. Didn’t that other kid know that? You are supposed to be here with me at four-thirty and not anywhere else. I had to wait a whole half-hour for you.’

‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

‘I’m not upset. It’s just your fault for being late.’ He flopped down on the bed.

I sorted out the book from my box and began to page through it. ‘You want to read today, Kevin?’ I suggested. I just wasn’t up to reading. The day had been a hard one for me. Too hard, really. Besides, he seemed so edgy. I thought perhaps it would calm him down. ‘Here, you read, okay? I’ll listen. How about that?’

Kevin took the book from me and studied the page we were on. Then abruptly he smiled. ‘This is just like the beginning, the very beginning. Remember that? Way back then? When you first came to see me and you wanted me to read. Remember how I was then?’

I smiled too. God Almighty, that seemed a long time ago. It seemed a lifetime back.

Then just as suddenly he threw the book down on the bed. ‘I don’t wanna read. What do I want to read for?’ Restless again, he paced a few moments.

Going over to my box of materials, he knelt and took the lid off. In rough motions, he went through the contents. Eventually, he dumped everything out on the bed and then began putting it back, bit by bit. The puppets he pulled over his hands, wiggled, tugged off and threw back in the box. The carton of crayons he opened, tried a couple on the edge of the box, studied the results, rejected. The colored wooden blocks he examined and, unable to figure out their use, pitched them back in. All the paper in there, the pencils, the felt-tipped markers, the sketchpads he riffled through before discarding them with the rest. ‘There isn’t anything good to do in here any more,’ he grumbled. ‘You never have anything interesting for me to do.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I dunno. Something interesting. You never let me do anything interesting.’

‘Well, give me an idea of what you want to do.’

He shrugged. He thought a few moments. ‘I want to paint. I haven’t painted in a long, long time. That’s what I want to do. But you don’t got any stuff.’

Caught completely unprepared for such a request, I pondered it. After such a long period of inactivity, I was eager to comply with anything that might indicate a lift in his depression. And I was desperate to channel his irritable restlessness. Doing anything was better than doing nothing.

‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘we could borrow some supplies from the unit schoolroom.’ I knew from previous raids that the school program was held in a room at the end of the ward and that there was a large closet in back that held a wealth of supplies. Undoubtedly, there would be materials for painting there.

It was a simple task to get permission from one of the nurses to go back there and get some materials. Armed with the keys, I headed down the hall. Kevin decided to come along and help me carry things.

I let us into the schoolroom. Carefully, I shut the door behind us. I unlocked the closet at the back of the room.

The closet was pantry sized, maybe eight feet long and four or five feet wide. On both sides there were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with a glorious array of things, every conceivable type of art paper, tempera paints, watercolors, boxes of crayons and chalk and colored pencils. There were books and note pads and workbooks. It was chockablock with all the sorts of things that my greedy little teacher’s heart coveted.

‘Here,’ I said, taking down some paper and giving it to him. ‘You can carry that. What kind of paint do you want? Tempera? Or do you want to use watercolor? Here, look these over.’

He stood behind me, between me and the door, while I rummaged around at the far end of the closet getting different types of paint out.

‘Kev, which do you want?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Kevin, come here and decide. Do you want these? Or this kind? Or we could use these and these. What do you think? You’re the artist. You decide.’

The lights went out.

I turned in the darkness. ‘Kevin?’

There was no sound. I could see nothing whatsoever.

‘Did you hit the light switch? Or have we had a power failure? What a place to be stuck in a power failure, huh!’

I could hear him but he said nothing. Suspicion began to build in my head. ‘What’s going on, Kevin? Did you turn off the light?’

I heard him move toward me. There in the closet, he did not have to move far before we were chest to chest. It remained so black that I couldn’t even make out his outline.

‘Kevin, move back.’

He pressed against me.

‘Kevin, I said move back. I’m not kidding. I mean it. Move yourself back.’

He pressed closer.

‘Kevin, I said move
back.
’

His body was heavy against me; his breath was hot. Fear came bolting up into my mouth like bile.

‘Don’t do this, Kevin. Don’t do it. Don’t.’

‘I hate you,’ he whispered back. The words were cold, like a knife blade. His hands were on me. On my shoulder, on my breasts.

‘Come on, Kevin, give over. Stop it. Cut it out.’

‘I
hate
you.’

I was scared. I was scared like I had never been scared in all my life. No other time, no other situation had ever made me feel the way I did just then. Everything gave way to fear. Even the hyped-up bravado I normally felt in moments of high tension. All was gone from me except for fear. The sickly sweet stench of it hung in the air about me.

His hand was fumbling on my shirt, groping at the buttons. His body was tight against mine, heavy enough to press me painfully against the shelves in back.

And it was the little things that added eerie reality to the moment, the soft crinkling of fallen paper as it was walked on, the waxy odor of crayons, which had always meant warm, sunny classrooms and children’s laughter to me before, but never again. Sweat had run down along my body and through my shirt. I felt a piece of newsprint stick to me as I managed to move a little to relieve the pressure on my backbone.

Thank God for small buttons. He could not get them undone in the blackness and I kept wriggling beneath his fingers to make sure he wouldn’t. Yet I moved slowly because I was afraid to upset him too much.

Then came the unaccountably loud sound of his fly being unzipped.

‘Kevin,
stop
it!’

‘I’m a man now, Momma. I’m gonna show you I’m a man.’

‘
Kevin
!’

We fumbled violently in the dark for a few moments, him pressing closer, me wiggling first this way and then that. He had not managed to breach any of my clothes yet, and I was grateful for tough old Levi’s and a sturdy bra beneath my shirt.

‘I’m gonnna show you, Momma,’ he whispered.

‘I’m not your momma, Kevin.’

‘Shut up. You bitch. Shut up, you.’

Silence. The stink of fear was nauseating me. It smelled like jasmine or orange blossoms, only far too sweet, and under it was a musky odor, like fox.

‘Let me go, Kevin. I’m not your momma. It’s just me. I’m Torey. I’m not your momma.’

‘Shut up, bitch.’ His hand came up under my chin. ‘I’m gonna make you hurt. I’m gonna make you know what hurt is.’

‘You don’t want to hurt me, Kevin,’ I said. His body was against me; I could hear his breathing near my left ear. I could feel the rock-hard warmth of his penis against my left side.

‘It’s me, Kevin.
Me
. No one else. You don’t want to hurt
me.
’

‘I said shut up. Now
shut up!
I mean it. Shut up!’ He forced himself against me, pinning me into the corner of the shelves. I could hear him though; I could hear his breathing. He was growing upset.

‘Zip up your pants, Kevin. Zip them up and turn the lights on and let’s get out of here.’

‘
I hate you!
You bitch. You bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,
bitch!
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. I hate you so much.’ He was almost sobbing, his voice almost incoherent.

‘I’m not your momma, Kevin. I’m not her.’

‘
Shut up!
’ He swung at me to shut me up. In the close space he could not help but hit me fully, and because I had not known it was coming, I hadn’t ducked. He hit me squarely on the side of my head. My ears rang.

I hit him back. Immediately. It won me enough space to reach the light switch. I turned it on and what had been a small eternal night dissolved into forty-watt brightness.

I had hit Kevin hard. He’d sunk to the floor with his arms over his face. There was blood, although I wasn’t sure if it was his or mine. He was crying, either from pain or misery or both. I stood a moment, my hand still over the switch, and watched him. I had to admit, I wasn’t feeling very sorry for him.

T
here had been no choice about whether or not to report what had taken place between Kevin and me in the art closet. While it was over and done with and I had come out of the incident none the worse for the wear, it was not the sort of thing one could shrug off.

I was feeling angry and unsettled. The experience had been humiliating for me, regardless of what might have prompted it and whether Kevin ever did distinguish me from his mother. But reporting it was even more awful. I guess I should have known such a thing was a possibility when working with a seventeen-year-old but up until then I had not given it serious consideration. In my baggy jeans and work shirts, I was hardly dressing provocatively, and Kevin’s sexuality had never been a problem before. When it had appeared, Jeff had dealt with it, explaining to Kevin those things he needed to know.

Even in the midst of the turmoil that followed, however, I could not believe Kevin had plotted the act beforehand. A lot of emotions had been building up in him over the preceding weeks. The big breakthrough I had anticipated after he had told me about Carol had perhaps happened after all, although in a way I hadn’t expected.

While Kevin was and always had been openly hostile regarding his stepfather, this sudden violence led me to speculate that the hard-core hate he nursed was actually for his mother. It was easier to hate his stepfather. After all, he’d murdered Carol. He had perpetrated all the abuse. And he was an outsider to the family unit. That produced a straightforward, uncomplicated sort of hate. But it was Kevin’s feelings for his mother that abruptly began taking precedence in my thoughts. Added to the murky complexities of any child’s relationship with its mother was the fact that Kevin’s mother had been able to abandon her son willingly in favor of a violent, brutal man. That experience must have hurt Kevin in a way that someone like me with my normal experiences in life had no concept of. And perhaps most important, I now saw the impact that Kevin’s mother’s behavior on the night of Carol’s death had had. She had betrayed Carol by standing there and doing nothing. And she had murdered her relationship with her son. He had not forgotten and he had certainly not forgiven. I had little doubt that by the time she gave Kevin up to the state when he was twelve, he had long since given her up.

So, I could not believe, even in the worst of the chaos that followed the incident in the closet, that Kevin had consciously planned to corner me. It was just one of those things. The weeks had piled in upon themselves and the emotions had just become too much to control. In the dark of an art closet, anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way could have been his mother.