Silent Boy (37 page)

I sat down on the chair beside his bed. At first I only watched him as he lay on his stomach, his face half-buried in the pillow. He kept his eyes closed, as if opening them would be too much effort.

I watched him. I had thought I would be angry with him for all the trouble and worry he had caused me. I had expected that when we were alone I would give him a good piece of my mind for what he’d done.

But I didn’t. I leaned over and pushed the hair back from his face, smoothed it back. I loved the kid. For the first time since I had known Kevin, it came to me as love. The thoughts I had had during that night when I had been driving home came back to me, but in an academic way, and they seemed unreal. This was what was real. I loved the kid and I was thankful and relieved that he was back.

‘How come you ran away?’ I asked.

He did not respond. Instead, he only lay there, unmoving, his face partially obscured. I touched his hair again.

‘You worried me, leaving like that. Why did you go?’

Kevin stirred. ‘I dunno. I just wanted to get out. They were going, so I asked if I could come too. It was sunny. I just wanted to know what it was like to be free.’

‘I
thought maybe you had decided to go up to the prison and kill your stepfather,’ I said.

‘Who told you that?’

‘No one. I just thought it, that’s all. Is it true?’

Kevin paused. We had been planning to go swimming, but they had closed the pool to clean it, so we sat under the elms, both of us still in our swim suits. I had my towel draped over my shoulders so that I could lean back against the tree without getting mangled by the bark. Kevin lay on his stomach on the grass.

‘Well, Kev, is it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’d think you’d have to. That seems to me like one of those things either you’d plan to do or you wouldn’t. So did you?’

He shrugged.

‘Is that yes?’

‘No, not especially.’

‘Is it no, then?’

He shrugged.

‘I told you, I don’t know.’

‘But what do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know a thing like that?’

Another shrug. ‘I just don’t. Last year I did. Last year I was going to. But now? Maybe he isn’t even in the prison anymore. Maybe he’s somewhere else. Who knows. I was sure last year. I’m not so sure now.’

I pulled a long strand of hair over my shoulder and studied it. It needed cutting. I fingered through for split ends. ‘What we gonna do about your stepfather, Kevin? And your mother, for that matter.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, how are we going to lay them to rest? Your mom and your stepdad were part of your life, Kevin. The things they did to you, right or wrong, are part of your life too. And once a thing happens, there’s nothing much anyone can do to make it un happen. It’s there. One can never go back. One can never change things that have already happened. You or I or the counselors, none of us can make it so that your stepdad didn’t beat you ten years ago or so that your mom would step in and stop what happened to Carol. Or any of that stuff. It happened. It’s over. We can’t change any of it. All we can do is accept that it happened and then move forward the best we can.’

‘I know that.’

‘I know you do. But just the same, I know you look back too. And I feel like you still want to go back and undo what’s already been done.’

He was watching me.

‘Am I right?’ I asked.

Kevin shrugged.

‘And I keep thinking, we got to do something about that, you and me. Because it’s eating away at you, Kevin. They’ve still got you in their grasp. Your stepdad is torturing you just as much today as he did all those years back and you haven’t even seen him in six years. We’ve got to lay them to rest, one way or another, to get you free.’

Kevin fooled around with a piece of grass. The day was very hot and the wind was warm on my skin. All around us were the sounds of summer and yet between us it was very still.

‘You know that lady, Margaret,’ he said, ‘that lady at Bellefountaine?’

I nodded.

‘You know what she said to me once?’

‘No. What?’

‘She said, “You’re never going to really be normal, Kevin.” She said, “That’s okay. A lot of people aren’t, you just got to get used to it. Some people in life, they got the breaks. Some people don’t.” She said, “You got to accept some things.” And afterward, I went upstairs and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, you know, I
look
normal. I do. I mean, maybe I’m not so good looking and stuff as some guys are. But I look like I could be normal. So I went back downstairs and said so. I said, “Margaret, I look normal to me. Why can’t I be?” She didn’t answer me.’

‘So you broke her arm?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That was another time.’

‘What happened then?’

‘One of the other boys had punched this kid. Hit him really hard. And I’d come down from being in bed ’cause I’d heard them. And I said, “Margaret, you got to help him.” And she just stood there. She stood there and done nothing. And this kid was really getting the crap knocked out of him. And I said, “Margaret, why don’t you help him? You
got
to help him. You can’t just stand there and watch. He might get killed.” And she said, “Leave ’em to fight it out. It isn’t any of your business.” So I grabbed her arm. I was just trying to make her stop them. I didn’t mean to break her arm, really. I just wanted her to do something.’

‘Kind of like you wanted your mom to do something the time she just stood by when Carol took a beating, huh?’

‘Yeah, kind of like then,’ Kevin said. ‘Only this time I was bigger.’

A bug hopped up on my leg. I watched it for a moment as it crawled along but it made my leg itch, so with my other foot I brushed it off. It hopped backup again.

‘But Torey, what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘About my being normal. Don’t you think I look like I might maybe be a little normal? Just a little even? I was thinking about that. I mean when I ran off with Troy and Carlos. I was thinking I could walk down some street and nobody’d notice, would they?’ He paused and looked over at me. ‘Would they? I mean, it doesn’t show, does it, like I’m wearing a sign or something? Or does it?’

I shook my head.

‘That was what I wanted to do most of all when I was out there,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to walk down the street and pretend I was like everybody else.’

I smiled. ‘I think you’re normal, Kev. And I don’t see why you can’t walk down any street you want to and be just like anyone else on it.’

‘Then why am I here?’

‘Because,’ and I stopped. That was a question mostly without answers. He sat, tuned in to my silence like a man on a radar machine. Then wearily he turned away from me. He plucked another blade of grass.

‘I told them to call me Bryan. Carlos and Troy, I said to them, “My name’s really Bryan, call me that now.” But you know, Torey, a name isn’t going to do it, is it? There’s more to it than just a name. I may be Bryan on the inside. I may be Bryan through and through, but on the outside, I’m always going to be Kevin. Just like Margaret said.’

The following weeks were hell. Perhaps more than ever, Kevin focused on the concept of getting out and leaving behind his many years of institutionalization. At moments like those under the elms, he was desperate to go free and searched the question so thoroughly with heart-wrenching queries that I could have wept for him. But at other times he was maddeningly stubborn about giving up his old institutionalized behaviors and, when reprimanded for them, would retreat back into saying he didn’t care, he wanted to stay crazy anyhow.

I went a little berserk. I never knew from one day to the next what he was going to be feeling, and worse, I didn’t know what to do about it, other than ride the tide. The two ends of the spectrum seemed farther separated than ever. He could act more normal than I had ever seen him; he could want more desperately to be normal than he had ever wanted to before. But then by the same token, he could refuse normalcy more effectively, grinding his heels in about any little change and be more determined than ever not to do something new. The only real light at the end of the tunnel was that despite his protests and his stubbornness, he never did revert to any really aberrant behaviors, as he had at Garson Gayer and the hospital.

Perhaps this was all a reasonable stage for Kevin to go through. After so many years behind locked doors, the prospect of freedom must have seemed daunting, regardless of its attractions. Perhaps this was a positive sign of growth, this constant seesawing. However, it was enough to drive me around the bend myself on some days.

It was also during this period that my clever system of charts and goals crumbled. I had seen the cracks. Despite the theory of its working, and in fact, the real-life edition’s working to a degree, too, it just was not right. Kevin continued to hate it and I wasn’t very comfortable with it myself. It was just a bit too organized for me; it regimented my behavior more than was helpful for either Kevin or me. We were spending more and more time in the vicinity of the swimming pool, both of us seeking refuge from the tight little ordered sessions when I ticked off goal sheets and Kevin counted points. In the end, I had to face the fact that for me, personally, it was a more effective backup system and that I functioned better under something less structured for my major approach.

‘You want to do away with this?’ I finally asked Kevin one afternoon.

‘Oh yes. Oh God, yes,’ he said gratefully. ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’

‘It means no special treats. No prizes for getting your goals accomplished. And it still means we’ll have to work hard. No slouching.’

‘That’s okay.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I’m very sure.’

‘You really didn’t like it, did you?’ I asked.

‘No. Not at all.’

‘How come?’ I asked. ‘It did work. We did get things accomplished.’

‘Because,’ Kevin said. He closed his eyes a minute and leaned back. ‘I can pretend again now,’ he said.

‘Pretend? Pretend what?’

‘Well,’ Kevin replied and there was a wistful smile on his lips. His eyes were still closed. ‘Back when I was at the hospital, I used to pretend. The other kids, they always had someone to come visit them. And I only had you. I kept pretending you came for me. That it didn’t have nothing to do with you being a psychologist and everything but that you just came for me. I even told the other kids that sometimes. I told Larry. I told Larry you were my sister. So he’d think you were just coming for me.’ His head back, Kevin laid his arms over his closed eyes.’ But I couldn’t very much do it here, could I? Not with those charts. I couldn’t pretend at all, not even to myself. ’Cause the conditions just always showed too plain.’

As the warm, warm weeks of July wore on, I could see the growth in Kevin. All the fluctuation was maddening but I was able to see slowly that the ups were higher and the downs were shallower. The growth was snail paced; it had been so much so for a while that I don’t think any of us even noticed it at first but now it was increasingly apparent. Kevin was integrating into himself all the parts of him, his anger, his fears, his violence, his depressions, the way those things are in all of us. He still resorted to old tricks occasionally but they were only in short bursts.

Why, after all this time, things were finally coming together for him was one of those basically unanswerable questions. There was no way of knowing, nor in fact, any real need to know. But whatever it was, we all recognized it. For the first time serious discussion was going on in the office of Seven Oaks about Kevin’s future placement. We all agreed he did not belong in a state hospital. But where should he go? Should he stay on at Seven Oaks? Perhaps. Perhaps there would even be a less-confining alternative.

Kevin himself was aware of his improvement.

‘You know what I want to do?’ he said to me one afternoon. We were sitting on the carpet in the dayroom. We were just below the window, and a warm, very yellow sunlight poured over us. It illuminated the dust motes in the air. There were millions of them, drifting down, giving subsance to the insubstantial sunshine. The motes and the light gave an aura to Kevin, like those golden haloes around saints in icons. ‘I want to go to high school.’

I looked at him. ‘High school?’

‘Yeah. If I ever get out. If I do, I’ve decided that’s what I really need to do. Go to high school.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know really. Just to go. To be with other kids. To see what it’s like to be real.’

The room was very warm. I lay back on the rug and put my arms behind my head. It drew me back suddenly to the hot, dry summer days of my childhood when I would lie up in the attic, my cheek pressed against the rough boards of the attic floor, and watch the spiders that lived there. The sun would leak through the slats in the attic fan and spotlight the little creatures. The air around me was always palpable with dust, and it had been very hot.

‘What do you think?’ asked Kevin when I did not respond.

‘It’d be hard, Kev. They work really hard in high school and you haven’t been in a real school since …’