Silent Boy (35 page)

‘Look there, did you notice?’ He pointed up at the bulletin board above his desk to where a blue prize ribbon from an art show hung.

I hadn’t noticed. What had caught my attention was a memo on my desk. All it said was ‘Kevin Richter’ and a telephone number.

I sat down immediately and phoned. A secretary at Seven Oaks answered.

I knew what Seven Oaks was; I had had a couple of kids go there before. It was a lock-up program for adolescent boys, sort of a mini-prison before they committed crimes serious enough to warrant graduation to the real thing. The institution itself was spread out over twelve acres of new, low ranch-style buildings, which housed forty boys. It was well run for a program of that sort, but I knew the psychiatric facilities were minimal and I didn’t think there was anything in the program geared to deal with serious psychological problems. To my knowledge most of the boys were delinquent, not disturbed, just kids who grew up in the wrong environment and had learned to cope with it too effectively. Seven Oaks’s main capacity was in helping the boys unlearn these behaviors and discover new, more socially acceptable ones to put in their place. It seemed like a rather unlikely place for Kevin to end up.

But that was where Kevin had gone. He had been in the hospital for another two months after I’d stopped seeing him. Then had come the hard decision of what to do with him. More by accident than design, he had ended up in Seven Oaks. It was a trial run. There wasn’t room available in any more appropriate program, including the state facilities, and so he was given six months at Seven Oaks to see if he could make a go of it. If not, he was to be slotted into one of the long-term wards at the state hospital, because he would have reached the age of majority.

From the account the counselor was giving me, things hadn’t changed much. Kevin was still full of his old problems. He talked very rarely and could go weeks between comments. His appearance was poor and disheveled. He refused to participate in things the other boys were doing and in general appeared tired and depressed.

Their main difficulty, of course, was his speech. His silence was impenetrable and it precluded their being able to do anything else with him because he wouldn’t even write notes to them. Kevin’s file had mentioned me in connection with the speech problem … There was one of those poignant little pauses, the same sort as I had heard so many other times, harking clear back to when Dana Wendolowski had first phoned from Garson Gayer. Would I be willing to resume therapy? the counselor asked.

I would, I said without hesitation.

Like Big Brother, Dr Rosenthal already knew that Seven Oaks had phoned and why. He met me outside the reception office when I was on my way to lunch, and with neither of us saying anything, we both knew the other knew.

‘May I?’ I asked.

A smile flickered momentarily across his face. ‘If you want.’

‘I do want.’

He had his teapot in his hand. It was full of water. He peered into the depths of it before looking back at me. ‘You knew, of course,’ he said, ‘that if it had been my choice, I wouldn’t have taken you off the case in February. It was Dr Winslow’s decision to take you off. I couldn’t do anything about it. Kevin was Winslow’s patient. But I don’t suppose I ever thought you should have stopped.’

I hadn’t known that but I was glad he’d told me.

Then an unexpectedly conspiratorial grin touched Dr Rosenthal’s lips. ‘He’s a son of a bitch, isn’t he, that Winslow? I always have thought so.’

That night was hot and sticky, more like August than June. I lay down with just a sheet over me and stared into the summer darkness. The drone of distant traffic filtered through the blinds. I had no illusions about why I had been asked back. One single quirk of fate kept Kevin and me bound together. If it had not been for my elective-mutism research, my single claim to expertise, I doubt they would have ever bothered to distinguish me from the hundreds of other therapists available in the city. Most likely, I would have left Kevin dancing on that sunny day the previous May and I would never have heard of him again. That was the way it usually was.

It seemed strange to me to think that the only thing that had brought us back together not once, but twice, was something as incidental and undeliberate as my unsuccessful attempt years earlier to understand why a child I’d known refused to speak. If it hadn’t been for that spark of interest, which had kindled my research so much later, I would have been no more special than any other psychologist. There would have been no reason to take the trouble to keep coming back to me. The irony was that his mutism had ceased to be the issue between Kevin and me only five days after we had met.

When morning came, I rose and dressed and started the long journey down to Seven Oaks.

Kevin clearly had not expected me. I hadn’t even thought to ask if they had told him I was coming. Apparently they hadn’t, because when I entered the dayroom where Kevin was sitting, his eyes widened and his jaw dropped, as if I had been a ghost.

‘Do you want to go with Miss Hayden?’ the counselor asked.

Numbly Kevin nodded and got up. We were led into a small interview room and left alone. I sat down in one of the chairs. Kevin just stood by the doorway and stared at me.

‘I never thought you were coming back. I thought you were mad. I thought you maybe hated me now.’

I smiled. ‘I was mad for a while. But that didn’t have anything to do with it. Dr Winslow and my boss thought it would be better if you and I had a rest from one another for a while. But now it’s over.’

Kevin smiled very slightly. It was a disbelieving smile and just touched the corners of his lips. He still would not approach me. He remained at the door and continued to stare at me, as if I had materialized from air.

‘So how’s it been? Why don’t you tell me about what’s happened in these last months?’

He just stared. The smile still played on his lips. ‘You know what?’ he said softly.

‘What’s that?’

‘I knew you’d come. I knew you had to come. I kept praying and praying you’d come back. I kept thinking, if there is a God, please hear me. Please do this one thing for me. I’d do everything you wanted, if God’d only let you come back.’

I sat in silence.

‘I knew you would. I knew you wouldn’t let me stay like this. That you wouldn’t leave me completely.’

He had more faith in me than I did.

The four months had been hard ones for Kevin. My absence had been jolting. A new therapist arrived, but for a while Kevin remained convinced that I was coming back. He worked hard, he said, because he wanted to surprise me with how well he was doing. Then somewhere along the line he realized I wasn’t going to return. Jeff and me, we’d both left him. That’d been hard, he said. That was the hardest part.

The new therapist must have been good, though, because Kevin did continue to make slow, albeit erratic, progress, and when a decision had to be made over Kevin’s placement, this man lobbied for a less terminal place than some back ward. Seven Oaks was chosen because it had the security features that Dr Winslow felt Kevin needed. Those rages in seclusion must have impressed Dr Winslow, because he clearly did not feel safe having Kevin somewhere without locks. For Kevin it made little difference. He had been behind locked doors so long now that they were taken for granted.

So here he was. He did not fit well into the society of Seven Oaks. The other boys tended to tease and taunt him because he was so naïve. All those years institutionalized with retarded children had left Kevin with a very scanty knowledge of the outside world and he fell easily for the other kids’ tricks in this less-protected environment. But those were the good days. On the bad days he stayed in his room, and no one could pry him out from under his blankets. He refused to talk or to participate, and life came to a grinding halt.

Bill Smith, the counselor who had contacted me, did not feel very hopeful for Kevin’s chances of survival in the Seven Oaks scheme. If Kevin could not get the hang of their social life there, if he wouldn’t cooperate, Bill honestly did not believe he could recommend that Kevin stay on when the six-month trial period ended. While he was willing to give Kevin all the support he could, including bringing me back into Kevin’s milieu, Bill was not willing to carry Kevin as a deadweight.

I liked Bill. He was a good-hearted, honest, straightforward man who did not mince words. He would go out on a limb for Kevin, as I suspect he would have done for any of their boys, but he would not saw it off behind him.

So as I caught up on four months’ absence, I could see things hadn’t changed much. Kevin still lived in the netherland between the outer world and the back ward of some institution, a sort of bureaucratic limbo.

‘Is Jeff coming too?’ Kevin asked me. He had managed to come across the room finally and sit in one of the other vinyl-covered chairs. The room was warm with June heat and filled with a golden darkness from afternoon sun penetrating pulled shades.

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Remember, Jeff left. He left before I did, do you recall? He’s in California now.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Kevin forlornly and turned his head away. ‘I had been kind of hoping it was all a dream. I dreamed a lot there. I was hoping some of the bad things might have been just dreams too.’

I slouched down in the chair and put my feet on a coffee table. ‘So, Kev, shall we give it another try?’

He nodded.

‘But some things have got to change between us,’ I said.

He looked over. ‘Why? Because of what I did at the hospital to you? Are you still mad?’ He paused, chewed his lower lip. ‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean it to happen. I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, I know it. But it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I just think we need to change some things right from the very beginning. I think we need some goals in mind. You and me, we’ve been together almost two years now, Kev, and I’m not sure where we’ve gotten. I felt sometimes like we were floating around like two little boats without anchors, going where we were taken. That works sometimes, but I don’t think it has for you and me. A lot of people have been deciding your life for you, Kevin – your folks, social workers, doctors, nurses, counselors, Jeff, me. I think it’s time you started making some of those decisions yourself.’

‘You’re still mad, aren’t you?’

‘No. Just determined.’

Kevin looked over at me. In the hot, half-light of the room his eyes were fluid gray, like sun on water. ‘Torey, can I ask you something?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Do you still like me?’

‘Well, yes, of course I do.’ I smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be back here if I didn’t, would I?’

‘But do you like me a lot? Like you did before? Do you still like me that good?’

I nodded.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘go on with what you were saying.’

A
nd so once again, we started over.

Discomforted by the persistent ambiguity that had haunted Kevin’s case, I decided what we had lacked were specific goals. And I had gone out to Seven Oaks feeling very strongly about setting some up, which was a rather unusual feeling for me. I’m not a very goal-oriented person myself. That put too much emphasis on the future and the outcome to generally suit me. Both my work and my life-style were more geared for the present and the process of doing things rather than their ends. However, every once in a while I would feel a lack of direction in what was happening around me and I would resort to goals. It was rather like it was at home when I got fed up with not being able to find something in my usual clutter and launched into a full-scale job of drawer and closet cleaning.

This must happen with Kevin. He must have some tangible goals for himself, I decided. And so must I, so that I could justify to myself that two years’ work was not being wasted. I wanted him to go from Point A to Point B to C and I wanted to know from the very start what A and B and C were. And I wanted Kevin to know.

Moreover, it seemed the most viable plan, considering Kevin’s living setup. The whole of Seven Oaks was run on a tightly structured form of behavior management. The boys got tokens for appropriate behaviors and for certain tasks, and they used their tokens to buy basic necessities as well as reinforcing activities and items. As with all behavior-management systems, it was extremely goal oriented, and the boys had regular times to assess their behaviors and their progress and to set new short-and long-term goals. So it seemed most logical to hook right into that network for Kevin. That way the counselors and houseparents would understand what I was doing and I would know Kevin’s behavior was being monitored when I wasn’t around.

Kevin’s reaction to this sudden burst of organization on my part was difficult to interpret. I could not tell if he simply did not understand all of what I was getting at or if he was being passively resistant, thwarting me without making it apparent that was what he was doing. Whenever I arrived with all my ideas tucked under my arm and set about discussing them, he pulled a stupid face. I could get no real cooperation out of him, although he gave the appearance of trying.

Setting the goals with him was an exercise in frustration. He could not think of the things I thought were important, like interacting appropriately with the other boys. Instead, he came up with things like going to California to see Jeff. Patiently I would explain that, yes, that would be nice, but chances were that going out to see Jeff was not a viable goal, if for no other reason than the fact that neither of us even knew where he lived. So around and around and around we went, sorting out the priorities, trying to make his goals and my goals coincide. All the time Kevin would look dumb and not understand, and I never knew for sure if he really didn’t or if he was fooling me mightily.