Silent Boy (4 page)

‘No.’

‘Diana did. She was practically blind. And they kept falling out. Once they dropped right out and we had to look all over the floor at Woolworth’s on our hands and knees and then this guy comes in and he goes
CRUNCH!
’ Charity fell about with laughter. I finished my Kool-Aid.

‘You don’t got much to say, do you?’ she said to me. ‘You got a funny voice. Is that why? Are you embarrassed? Where did you get your funny voice at? Is something wrong with it?’

‘I don’t think so. I was born with it.’

There was a long, long pause while Charity regarded me further. Then she shook her head with resignation. ‘You really aren’t very interesting, are you?’

I could hardly have described Charity that way. Full of cheeky arrogance and a surety about herself that was intimidating, Charity was convinced she owned the world. Five minutes with her and I knew that. I also knew that if Charity had been the first kid I’d ever met, I’d probably not have chosen a career working with children.

I supposed she was a street kid, wiser at eight than I’d be at eighty. She had that streetwise air about her, the confidence that shifting for oneself gives. Yet she was terribly disarming with her chubby cheeks and her Band-Aids and her huge, gaping grin.

‘So,’ she said, her mouth full with a cookie she’d charmed off the refreshments lady, ‘what do you do when you ain’t here?’

‘I work. With kids.’

‘Oh? What kind of kids? Where at? Do I know ’em?’

‘I work at the Sandry Clinic.’

‘Ohhhhhh,’ she replied with a wise nod. ‘
Them
kind of kids. What’s the matter with your kids? They jump up and down? My brother jumps up and down and he wets the bed. He went to one of them places once. But you know what? It didn’t do no good. He still wets the bed.’

‘That happens sometimes.’

‘So what they like, your kids? What do they do?’

I told her about Kevin. I would hardly have expected myself to, but I did. I told how this boy had lived in a treatment home all these years and how he hadn’t talked in ever so long a time. I told how we sat together under the table and tried to read. The strength of Kevin’s fears came back to me, and I tried to describe to Charity what it had been like being with him when he was so afraid.

Charity was leaning forward, her chin in her hands. She listened carefully. ‘Why do
you
go to work with him?’ she asked.

‘Because that’s what my job is.’

‘He sounds weird to me.’

‘He is weird. But that’s okay. I don’t mind that.’

‘Can I meet him sometimes? Will you take me to meet him?’

‘Maybe. Someday maybe.’

‘He’d talk to me. I’d say, “Kid, you don’t have to be scared of me. I’m just a little kid.” Then he’d talk to me.’

‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘we don’t even know if he can talk. Maybe we’re trying to make him do something he can’t really do.’

‘How come you don’t know?’

‘Because we don’t know,’ I replied, feeling a little exasperated. ‘That’s how come.’

A look of disdain crossed her face and she leaned back on the bench. ‘You’re silly. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.’

‘What is? Why?’

‘Well, how come if you don’t know, you don’t ask him? How come you don’t just say, “Kid, can you talk?” Then you’d know.’ She smiled affably. ‘How you supposed to know, if you don’t ask?’

T
he staff behind the front desk at Garson Gayer were beginning to recognize me. They called Hello to me from behind their glass partition as I came past. When I went in the back room to get a cup of coffee, I could hear one woman tell the other who I was: Zoo-boy’s therapist. Come to try and make him talk, she said, and I could tell from her tone of voice that she didn’t think it would happen. I hung up my jacket and went on down to the small white room. I didn’t even have the secretaries fooled.

Kevin and I had no more success this second try than we had had the day before. The only variation was that the tears came sooner. Over his pimply cheeks, down onto his chin they rolled to drip off onto the book where he would rub them out furiously with his fingers, leaving big smeary blobs on the paper. However, never once did the tears deter him. He kept trying. Long after I was ready to give up, long after the whole enterprise took on a dreary, somewhat perverse mood, Kevin kept trying, kept laboring away to get cooperation out of his voice and his mouth and his heart. And he kept failing.

The hell was not Kevin’s alone. It had fast become mine as well. I felt as trapped in his fears as I did in the table-and-chairs cage. There was an odd, deviant feel to his efforts because, while he tried so hard, futility was draped over us as tangibly as a cloak. I could not shake it off. Like Sisyphus rolling his huge stone to the hilltop, Kevin continued to struggle but with the foregone conclusion that regardless of the effort, the stone would go rolling back down again. That was the perversity of it to me, that he could appear to try so hard and still emanate such hopelessness.

Every muscle in my body grew rigid. I had a headache from clenching my teeth too tightly. My own voice faltered. I had urged and coaxed and cajoled until even coffee could not lubricate my throat enough.

Kevin trembled. His shoulders shook. Even his head shook. I could hear fear-torn breath come through chattering teeth. And all the effort was in vain.

Finally I put my hand over the book. Our time was nearly up. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow, okay?’

He regarded me wistfully. His chin trembled a little more.

‘We’ll get it done, Kevin. Don’t worry.’

But clearly he did.

‘Kevin, I want to ask you something.’

He watched me.

‘
Can
you talk? I mean,
can
you? Are you able to?’

His eyes fell. To the carpet. To the book. To his hands. A great silence loomed up which was both divisive, putting infinity between us, and binding. For a boy who said nothing, he certainly left nothing unsaid.

‘Kevin?’

He gestured. I didn’t understand. He gestured again and grimaced, frustration sharpening the movements of his hands. But I was stupid. Disgruntled, he smacked the floor with his fingers, and we sat again in silence.

‘Can you, Kevin?’

His eyes came back to me, back to meet my eyes. He nodded.

‘You can?’

He shrugged.

‘You can, though. You
can
talk? You can but you don’t? You won’t? Is it something like that?’

An incomplete gesture with one hand and then he dropped it. He shrugged again and stared only at the carpet.

‘Why don’t you then?’

He began to cry, his mouth dragged down in misery. I thought to put my arms around him and comfort him but I didn’t. I shouldn’t. The silence between us told me that much, so I just sat, my hands in my lap. Kevin only wept harder, his big man-sized fingers locking and unlocking. His shoulders shook. But no sound came from him.

On my way back to the clinic from Garson Gayer, I stopped in town to pick up some labels from the printer’s. As I was walking down the street toward the print shop, I passed a drugstore window filled with an array of Halloween decorations for sale. I had gone completely by the store before being pulled back to pause and gaze at the display. Black cats on pumpkins, honeycomb jack-o’-lanterns, glow-in-the-dark skeletons, ghost lapel pins, a book of Pumpkin carols and other
Peanuts
memorabilia lined the window.

A profound, aching nostalgia flooded me as I stood there. I no longer had any children to buy decorations for, no longer had a reason to make a room gay with orange and black crepe paper. Suddenly my life seemed so empty, cast adrift as I was in an all-adult world.

I could hear the kids. Standing right there on a city street in front of the drugstore, I could hear things like Robbie Cutmar’s gleeful whoops when I had pulled that big, honeycomb pumpkin out of the bag. It had cost me $3.98 in a year when $3.98 was a lot of money to me but it had been such a glorious thing. We made legends about that pumpkin, about where it had come from, about the mysterious things it must have seen when our dingy little classroom was empty for the night. Halloween came and went and still we couldn’t take that pumpkin down. It’d stayed with us in the classroom until almost April, until Tessa had accidentally fallen on it during a seizure and smashed it flat. And yet, for all its glory, that pumpkin wasn’t nearly so splendid as any of these in this window. That was the problem, I thought sadly. I could now afford to buy whichever pumpkin in the window I wanted but there was no place in my life to put it.

The window display proved too attractive. I had to go inside the drugstore to look at the things more carefully. All the while a black-hearted little gremlin sat somewhere inside me and chided me for the irrationality of what I was doing. After all, I had no class now; I might never have one again. I didn’t have any children of my own. I had no excuse to buy things like this for myself. But at the same time I fingered the change in my pocket, counting how much was there beyond what had to be spent at the printer’s.

I succumbed. I got a little package containing two cardboard bats with honeycomb bodies to be attached. With a piece of thread they could fly. Then I picked up a copy of the Pumpkin Carols. I’d always been an ardent
Peanuts
fan. One of the greatest pleasures of my career had been the last year I’d taught, when the kids had gone together and bought me a Snoopy wristwatch as an end-of-the-year present.

Paging through the songbook, I giggled aloud. Then I turned it over to see the price. One dollar. A whole crummy dollar for four pages and seven songs. What an awful lot of money for something like that. Especially when I did not need it. I put it back.

Aimlessly I wandered around the store and looked at other things, at birthday cards and ball-point pens. I walked through the aisles of shampoos and cotton balls and nail clippers. But I wasn’t being very successful. I could actually hear the kids singing those stupid little songs.
But there aren’t any kids now!
Still, I could hear them. And without half trying I could see their faces. Whoever said an active imagination is a blessing?

I returned to the display, lifted the songbook, flipped through the pages again. Then like a shoplifter, I slipped the book under my arm so that I would not have to acknowledge to my black-hearted little gremlin that I was doing such a stupid thing as buying it.

Back in the office I tore open the package with the two cardboard bats and punched them out of the sheet. Laying out the directions in case I got desperate enough to resort to them, I began assembling the things. It was no mean feat. A Ph.D. in engineering would have been the most helpful.

‘What the
hell
are you doing?’ Jeff stood in the doorway.

Having stacked three of his medical dictionaries on top of my desk, I was standing on them in an attempt to reach the ceiling. We worked in an old building and the ceilings must have been at least eleven feet high.

‘I’m hanging these bats.’

He shut the door and came across to my desk. Skeptically, he gazed up. ‘Escaped from your belfry at last, did they?’

I made a face at him.

‘Where did you get the idea that we needed bats hanging in here?’

Finally I managed to get one thumbtack into the ceiling and then reached up to tie a thread around it. Even with three massive books under me, I was not tall enough.

‘You’re not intending on hanging any of those over my desk, are you, Hayden? They’re not going over there.’

The thread was refusing to cooperate. Once I did get it around, it pulled the thumbtack out of the ceiling when I tried to tie it. That, along with Jeff’s comments, was serving to stretch my vocabulary into a more colorful vein than I normally used.

Jeff’s interest, however, was definitely aroused. He was leaning over my desk and staring up. ‘Why don’t you make a loop first?’ he asked.

‘Why don’t you move off?’

‘I mean, put the tack in, then make a loop and try to lasso it.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Jeff. I’ll manage fine.’

Jeff went over to his desk and picked up his new edition of
The Physician’s Desk Reference
and brought it back. He nudged my leg. ‘Here, Hayden, move over. Let me do it.’

Within moments we were both balanced on books atop my desk with cardboard bats swinging from our hands.

I liked Jeff. Everyone liked Jeff. There was something about him which was innately likeable, but it was a mercurial, undefinable quality. He was tall but not particularly handsome, at least not in the classic handsome-doctor way. He was more what you’d call cute, like a boy you’d take home to Mother when you were in high school. His hair was brown and wavy, a few freckles were still left on his nose and he had never had his teeth straightened, so when he smiled, it came out a cheerful, lop-sided grin. He had an unsurpassable sense of humor, brash, zany and somewhat more juvenile than one would expect from a doctor. Secretly, I suspected that was the reason Jeff and I had been sequestered off together. Between the two of us, we pretty much comprised the clinic’s contribution toward New Wave psychiatry. But for all his beguiling boyishness, Jeff was brilliant. Of all the people I had met in my career, I don’t think I had ever come across anyone with as much sheer intelligence as Jeff had. It glowed from him. We all knew Jeff was brilliant, including Jeff himself, which made him rather hard to live with sometimes. But he had the golden touch. And while he wasn’t modest about it, he took it casually, as if it were not something special. That made him likeable, that quality of off-handed genius, and it made the rest of us feel lucky to know him.