Silent Boy (7 page)

‘Diana? I thought Diana was your Big Sister from the program.’

‘This is another Diana. This one’s my real, genuine sister. For real.’

‘I see. And that’s all? Are you the youngest?’

She nodded decisively. ‘Yep. I’m the very youngest.

When they got me, they stopped. ’Cause I’m the very best. They didn’t want any more after me.’

I could understand that. For a moment I became absorbed in getting paper to stick to the side of the kite, then I looked over. ‘Hey, wait a minute, Charity. I thought you said you were eight. If you’re eight, how come Diana’s eight?’

Charity looked flustered, but only for a fleeting moment. She smacked her forehead with one hand. ‘Oh, I goofed. Silly me. Diana’s nine. I forgot.’

‘Oh. I thought perhaps you were twins,’ I said, thanking God for not making two of Charity.

‘Yeah! That’s right! I forgot. We’re twins.’

‘But I
thought
you just said –’

‘Well, see, Diana’s the oldest twin and I’m the youngest.’

‘I thought you said she was nine, though. And you’re eight.’

‘Well, yeah, I did,’ she said, looking at me as if I were the one who was losing her marbles.

‘Are you sure you know what twins are, Charity?’

‘Of course I do. Do you think I’m stupid? I just forgot. I got a lot on my mind and I just forgot. Diana’s just the oldest twin and I’m the youngest. First her and then me. So that’s why she’s nine. And I’m going to be nine pretty soon too.’

‘Oh? When?’

‘Next August.’

‘But, Charity, it’s October now.’

‘Yeah, see what I mean? Any day now I’ll be nine.’

Clearly this was a conversation best to be dropped.

Later we walked down to the field to fly the kite. The wind was good and even Charity’s part of the kite held up well, despite its patches. Charity ran when I told her to run and stopped when I told her to stop and let the string out when instructed. When the kite was finally airborne, she sank gratefully into the grass and sprawled out. I sat down next to her.

She looked over. ‘How come we’re doing this?’

‘Because it’s fun.’

‘Oh,’ she said, quite interested. ‘When does the fun part start?’

‘This
is
the fun part, Charity.’

‘Oh, it is?’ Her forehead wrinkled. ‘You do this for
fun?
’

I was a little disenchanted with this kid. After all, it was my Sunday afternoon too. ‘Yes, I do this for fun. And I’m having it. Why aren’t you?’

Charity looked startled. ‘Well, I guess maybe I am,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t know it.’ And for the first time since she’d arrived, she fell silent.

Both of us lay in the grass and watched the kite. Charity rose after a while and walked around the field before coming back and settling down with me again. She chattered on constantly.

At the end of the day when I was preparing to take her home, she fished something out of her pocket.

‘Here.’

It was an unidentifiable wad about three inches across.

‘I brung this for you,’ she said.

I took it and thanked her. There was a piece of thin paper around it which I attempted to unwrap. Inside was a squishy, gummy-looking lump. ‘What is it?’ I inquired politely.

‘A piece of cake. Last Wednesday this girl had a birthday at school and she brang us all some cake. I saved it for you.’

‘Oh.’ That made me feel obliged to eat it and so I took a bite and tried to look like it was scrumptious.

‘I ate a little bit of it. Just there at the edge. But I saved you the most.’ She was smiling sweetly, her empty tooth sockets all showing.

‘Well, thank you, Charity, that’s awfully thoughtful of you.’

‘Oh, that’s okay,’ she replied and shrugged. ‘I tried to give it to our dog but he spit it out.’

K
evin spoke. In the way I had found typical of most elective mutes, he came back with full powers of speech – grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure – as if he had been speaking all along. In the very beginning, his voice was hoarse and gritty sounding from lack of use. We went through a truckload of throat lozenges and hard candies, trying to ease the roughness, but soon he became accustomed to speaking again and the soreness went away.

Kevin was not a hesitant conversationalist. For the first few days our communications were limited while he experimented with his voice. However, he was speaking easily before the following week was out.

Our conversations were none too brilliant in the beginning. After such an ordeal, I think one is inclined to expect profundity at the very least. Thus it was anticlimatic to have most of our conversations revolve around things like crossword puzzles or Kevin’s day on the ward or my work at the clinic. I couldn’t tell how much he was guarding from me because I just did not know him very well.

However, simply because we had conquered his lack of speech did not mean that we had solved all problems. We were a long way from it. His fear, for example, was still of the same magnificent proportions. The only difference now was that he could make occasional comments about it. But we remained trapped under that damned table. In fact, we seemed more firmly stuck under it than before.

I compromised on the table issue, by not always going under it myself. Instead, I pushed the chairs to one side and sat down on the carpet just beyond the table. This was more comfortable because there was more room and I didn’t have to hunch up. But it did not entice Kevin out and he would not talk to me if I got very far away from him. So mostly, I lay on the rug on my stomach, half of me under the table, half of me out.

Kevin was able to make me captive to others of his fears, too. For instance, one morning someone had left a box of old schoolbooks sitting on the empty bookcase in the room. It was a largish cardboard carton, and when I noticed it, I could see old readers and workbooks sticking out of the top but I gave no thought to it. Kevin, however, focused on it right off.

‘What’s in that box?’ he asked from under the table.

‘Some old schoolbooks, I think,’ I replied.

‘What kind of books?’

I don’t know. I didn’t look.’

A worried expression crossed his face. ‘Go look.’ He nudged me. ‘Go look for me. Tell me what’s in it.’

When I didn’t move, he became more agitated. His speech gave him a new power over me because now he could be sure I understood what he wanted. Sweat beaded up on his face.

‘There might be spirals in there,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘On notebooks. There might be spiral notebooks inside that box.’

‘I don’t think so, Kevin. I think there’s just old schoolbooks.’

‘But sometimes there’s spirals on old books.’

‘No, I don’t think there are.’

‘There might be. You said you didn’t look. So you don’t know. There might be and you just can’t see them. They might be under there. Spirals might be in that box. Go look and find out.’

He could not concentrate. Once the terrifying thought had entered his head, he became obsessed with it. He
knew
those small, metal, spring like spirals were in there, lurking, waiting to shoot out and get him. All the little manifestations of fear began, the trembling, the chattering, the sweating, the shallow breathing. He wrapped himself up in a small ball way back in the safety of his table and rocked. Nothing I could say would relieve him. Tears welled up. His knuckles went white. And in the end I got up, took all the stuff out of the box, showed him all of it, just to prove that it was entirely safe with no spiral-bound notebooks to be found. Only then could he relax.

For the first few sessions after Kevin began to talk, I told no one. I’m not sure why. It seemed a secret trust for a while. But once his speaking began to take on all the proportions of normalcy and was no longer such a special achievement in and of itself, I started the usual procedures to generalize it to include other people.

Normally, I was able to quickly generalize an elective mute’s speech beyond the two of us. However, in Kevin’s case I soon realized that Kevin’s choice to speak had little to do with me, personally, and my techniques. Consequently, I had no ability to make him speak to other people. It quickly became apparent that I had not caused him to speak. Instead, he had simply opened his private world of one to include me.

And Kevin chose forthrightly not to speak to anyone else. That drastically narrowed the scope of our first victory.

It drove me mad for a while because I could do nothing. I had told Dana and the staff and Jeff what had happened, that Kevin was speaking to me, but try as I might, if Dana or someone else came into the small white room, I could not get Kevin to talk to them. I tried. There was war between us for a while. I tried my usual approach. I tried my backup techniques. I tried other methods afterward, which I had used with some success with other children. I tried other people’s recommendations, the things I read about in journals. When those all expired from overwork, I invented a few new techniques on the spot. In the end, I hoped to wear him down just by the sheer quantity of tries, if nothing else. But I didn’t. Nothing worked.

Nothing worked for a very simple reason, I suspect. Kevin wouldn’t let it. This was a very different kind of battle than the one that first week. Then, it had been him and me against the silence. Not so now. It was Kevin against me.

Finally I gave up. It had grown to be a power struggle between us and nothing more. I don’t know. Perhaps if I had persisted I might have worn him down eventually. But if I had, the objective would have been tarnished. To dominate, I would have had to let the real objective fall to the wayside, stripped of its integrity. So reluctantly I gave in. When the days passed and I could not generalize Kevin’s speech to other people, I had to face defeat. It was miserably hard to back down, but for whatever reason, this apparently was not the time for it to happen.

Undoubtedly, the most irritating aspect of the lack of generalization was that I don’t think everyone believed me when I said Kevin talked to me. I took a terrible drubbing from Jeff. He was absolutely merciless for a while until I actually got angry with him over it. But with Jeff, no matter how irritating, it was pure jest. He knew that if I said the boy talked, he talked. However, the staff at Garson Gayer really got under my skin. They made half-joking remarks and clustered around the door of the small white room and grew very keen for tapes and recordings, so that they could hear for themselves. Everyone knew that under normal circumstances I did a lot of video-recording of my work. That I wasn’t doing so with Kevin seemed to only strengthen the likelihood that I was fabricating the entire thing. But I couldn’t record. There was no way to disguise a recorder in the bare little room and even if I could have, I don’t think I would. It would have been a kind of betrayal to Kevin, who feared the world beyond the door so much. Winning the power struggle with him or asserting my position with the staff shouldn’t be worth that much. So I just held my tongue, stayed out of earshot when I could and pretended not to hear the insinuations or feel them.

So, as the hazy days of October passed, it remained just the two of us alone under the table.

One of the most remarkable things about Kevin was his almost nonexistent personal history. Previously, I had always considered files a nuisance. They prejudiced people against kids before they even met. They were filled mostly with bureaucratic nonsense and the self-important mutterings of little gods. But nonetheless, all my kids had come with them in one form or another and I had always read them. Usually, the worse the kid, the thicker the file. One time I had a fourteen-inch-thick file in my cabinet for one ten-year-old. For Kevin, however, this was not the case, a very remarkable fact in light of his long history with the state.

His folder was a small one, squashed amidst the fatter ones of other children. There was an intake sheet. His mother’s name was given and his stepfather’s. No mention was made of a natural father. A tick mark indicated that he had siblings, but they weren’t enumerated. Most of the rest of the sheet was blank, owing to the fact that he had been in state care rather than at home. There were a number of data sheets and anecdotal records of things that had occurred since Kevin had been living at Garson Gayer. They made interesting reading: accounts of his various fears, of his refusal to go outside, of his ‘tantrums,’ which had required seclusion and medication. But by and large, they were unremarkable. There were some medical reports of bouts with flu and ingrown toenails. Nothing special.

The only detailed report in the whole folder was his school report. Kevin had attended kindergarten at the far south end of the city. After the first year, he was retained because he didn’t talk. Since he still did not talk at the end of the second year but appeared to be progressing adequately, he was passed to the first grade. That whole next year was disastrous. First grade is designed for children who speak. Kevin didn’t. Subjected to behavior controls, tests, inquiries, Kevin failed to respond. He just sat and watched.

In this first-grade section of the report there were a few notes about Kevin’s home life. In a questionable state, the report said. Kevin had bruises and other evidence of physical abuse. I flipped to the front of the report. It was dated prior to the time when reporting child abuse to the authorities became mandatory. And apparently this abuse had never been noted. Scars. Burns. A bruise on the face. The teacher got salve to put on his broken skin and washed his sores, but she told no one. Only people like me, ten years on, found out. Kevin had a sister, a five-year-old at the time, in kindergarten. They were close, Kevin and this sister, and the teacher thought she had overheard him talk to the sister out on the playground. He was very protective of the child. The only time the teacher had seen him react was when someone threatened the little girl. A good sign, this teacher felt.