The Things I Want Most (15 page)

Then, from the twinkle in her eyes, I realized Sue had answered her own question. Normal people don't take in a child like Mike.

But she was still shaking her head.

I never thought Mike would actually hurt himself. He had threatened to a number of times, and of course we were familiar with his history in the children's home, but I viewed the possibility as a nonstarter in our home. I hadn't even taken any of the precautions Harbour had suggested (but not required), like locking up the sharp instruments in the kitchen. There were two reasons for this. One was that a trite act like hiding the carving knife would never stop a determined suicide, and the other was that kitchen implements were among the least deadly appliances around the place. Our home was purposely designed for boys to grow up in, and while that meant plenty of books and weight-lifting equipment, camping gear, maps, and dogs, it also meant scores of firearms, bows and arrows, sharp carpentry tools, razors, and hunting knives, most of which by this point didn't belong to me anyway—they belonged to my sons. What could I possibly do? Besides, I thought (perhaps too simply), since the place was an ideal boy's place, why would he ever kill himself?

I never considered the fact that people usually hurt themselves in order to hurt or get back at other people, or to get other people to back off.

Sue had started Mike on vacuuming the downstairs and then left him, and I was upstairs when Liam called out.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Come downstairs fast.”

I rumbled down the barroom stairs. “What?”

“Look.” Liam was pointing into the kitchen.

Mike was standing against the ceramic tile wall with his face flushed and his eyes wide open.

I turned to Liam and asked again, “What? Why did you call me?”

Thump.

I looked back over at Mike, who had started rhythmically banging his head into the wall. “I don't do work,” he was chanting, and every time he said
work
, he hit his head. It wasn't a joke. I could feel the wall vibrate and the dishes in the cupboard rattle when he hit.

I walked over to stop him, but when I got close he started to hit harder and faster—thump, thump, thump.

My thoughts were shrieking,
Do the right thing!
Mike seemed possessed, the pupils in his eyes tiny black arrowheads, his tongue flicking in and out.

Then, from somewhere, the thought came: Don't give this conduct any respect. Don't act afraid.

So I laughed.

And he stopped immediately.

“You know the best thing about what you're doing, Mike?”

“What?”

“It doesn't hurt me at all.”

Angrily he banged his head once more.

I gestured to Liam. “Look at this. Did you ever see anything so ridiculous?”

“I hate this family.”

But since he wasn't banging his head, I turned and walked back upstairs.

A minute later I heard the vacuum start up and had to sit down. My legs were weak and rubbery.

Wednesday night the week before Thanksgiving a tall, silent young man materialized in the doorway to our bedroom. Lean, short haircut, dressed in a long gray wool overcoat with a white turtleneck.

Sue smiled. “Hello, Brendan. “Then hugs and talk about when the rest of the family was getting in.

“Where's Teddy?”

Sue and I exchanged surprised looks. Teddy Bear was actually Brendan's dog. He had raised him from a pup, and the dog had always slept in his room, sat by his chair while he read. Brendan was probably looking forward to seeing Teddy almost as much as anybody else in the family.

How do you tell a boy that his dog has a new friend?

“He's in the library. Liam and Mike are sharing it.”

“I'll get him.”

“Brendan.”

“Yes?”

“Uh, nothing … just make sure you leave Pupsy in there.”

“Sure.”

Pupsy? No! We hadn't thought this out at all. Just as Teddy was Brendan's buddy, Pupsy was Henry's. In addition to being shoved out of the way over the next two weeks, Mike was about to lose his best friends for a little while.

Sue put her hands out, palms up. “About all we can do is hope for the best and go to bed. They could be in an hour from now; they could be in at dawn. Maybe Henry won't look for Pupsy.”

“This is not going to be good, Sue.”

Sure enough, about two in the morning we heard Mike crying. When we went inside, he was sitting on his bed bawling, with the sheets over his head.

It was the first time we had seen him cry when he was awake.

Sue went downstairs and then came right back up. “Henry's not downstairs. He must be up in his room with Pupsy. I can't go there and start an argument. I'll wake up the guests.”

Sue bent over Mike and rubbed his back. “I tell you what. As a special treat, you can have Jerome. Do you want Jerome?”

Mike nodded, and Sue went and got the cat. Mike clutched it to his chest and then lay back down. But his eyes were staring off somewhere.

“I hate them.”

“I know you do, Mike”

Mike avoided the boys in the morning. Then when Brendan, Henry, and Frank had left for the mountain early, Mike got up, reclaimed the dogs, and went out to the stream without a jacket. He stomped up and down through the boggy pools of icy water and followed that up with a long squishy walk through the swamp.

Later he walked back to the house and presented himself in Sue's office, dripping puddles of muddy, filthy water.

“I'm all dirty and I'm freezing. I'll get sick.”

Sue looked over. “So take a hot shower and change.” Then she turned back to her paperwork.

He stamped his feet. “I'm all dirty.”

Sue took her glasses off and peered back around at him. “Look, Mike, the fact that a boy was out with two dogs in the woods and came back wet and dirty isn't the sort of news that ranks up there with the loss of the
Titanic
. Now, run off and let me finish. I'll be free in a half hour or so, and we can get on your chores.”

“I don't do work.”

“We'll see,” Sue said tiredly.

“I didn't have a jacket on.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Mike tried once more. “My clothes are all dirty.”

“So,” Sue said over her shoulder, letting her voice fade off as she got back into her numbers, “the water in the washing machine will be a little darker.”

Disgusted with Sue's reaction, Mike stamped inside to where I was working. “Rich, I'm all dirty and I'm cold.”

“Yes,” I said, “it certainly looks that way.”

“I hate this fucking family.”

A little while later Sue smelled smoke.

She ran down to the kitchen and found that Mike had lit a stack of wooden matches one by one and thrown them on top of the stove.

“Mike,” she shouted furiously, “if you ever touch matches again, you're going to be barred from the kitchen.”

“I hate this fucking family”

Sue gritted her teeth. “Okay, I just found some free time, so we can start your chores now We're having a big dinner tonight, and you are going to field-day this kitchen.”

Mike backed up. “I don't do work.”

Sue was about to make a savage retort when the look on Mike's face stopped her. He was struggling to say something else.

Fighting each word that was spilling out of his mouth, he stuttered, “I don't do work, please. Please don't do this to me, please.”

Sue reached out to touch him, withdrew her hand, and covered her mouth. Then she braced her shoulders and said in a new, softer tone of voice, “Mike, I have a lot of work to do in the kitchen. When I'm doing it, can you help me? That way you and I can spend some time together. You know we have a lot of things to do, but you don't have to do work, just help.”

Mike seemed to wilt. “I can help. I'm good at helping.”

Sue smiled. “I know you are. Now, go change into dry clothes.”

When he ran out of the kitchen, Sue turned toward me and kicked a chair out of the way. “I'm so stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid …”

That night Sue got our boys together—Henry, Frank, Brendan, and Liam—without Mike. The four of them—wide-shouldered, lean, defensive—were still in their hunting clothes, dirty, unshaven, knives in their belts, surrounded by the
rifles, portable tree stands, and backpacks they had just dropped on the floor. Sue had made them all sit down while she stood up. That way she was taller.

“Look,” she said in a sharp bark, “you're just about grown men, and I'm only going to say this once. Mike can't sleep well if he doesn't have a dog on his bed. I know these are your dogs, but he's been with them for months now while you've been gone, and Liam will tell you that ever since he's been able to have a dog, he doesn't cry or moan at night. So here's what's going to happen. Mike will always have a dog, and since I'm not going to get another one to clean up after, it'll have to be one of yours. I don't care which; they can take turns.”

“Mom.”

“Don't ‘Mom' me. This kid has been working all afternoon to make your meal for tonight. So if any of you give me one single little itsy-bitsy word of argument, I'm going to rip your lips off.”

“Cinderella.”

“What?” I looked up from my book the next morning.

“Cinderella,” Sue repeated. “He's a foster child, and he feels it. He's smart, he resents being a foster child, resists it, and he's supersensitive about being labeled one. Any child in his situation would feel the same way. Then it follows that if you hand him chores to do by himself, you're working him like Cinderella was forced to work for her stepmother. To his mind it's as much as hanging a sign on him saying ‘foster child,' ‘stepchild,' ‘I don't fit in.' It's what Kathy meant when she said his own image of himself was the most important possession he has.”

“So?”

“So when I asked him to help me, not work for me, he was more than happy to—grateful, even. He stayed with me in the
kitchen for over three hours, cleaning, putting the lasagna together, doing pots and dishes, carrying out the garbage.”

“It's a subtle distinction—he still worked.”

“To us it's subtle. To him there's a world of difference between helping and working. And to tell you the truth, I never saw him enjoy a dinner more, despite the fact that the boys cold-shouldered him. He felt that the lasagna was partially his.”

“Hmmm. So it seems both of you got what you wanted. He's not working and you have him pitching in around here.”

“Yeah,” she said slowly, thinking it out, “although every chore can't be a group effort. So I have to go out of my way to make him think it's inclusive, not isolating. If I manage that, I'm positive he'll look around in a couple of months and feel much more secure and a little bit more responsible. In any event, it's got to be downhill from here.”

But instead, it turned into a hard slide up. Acquiring a place in the family requires acceptance, and there was more to this family than just Sue and me.

We had been concerned that the boys' acceptance of Mike would be rough. We should have been concerned about there being any acceptance at all.

Brendan is usually susceptible to a kind impulse, and Liam was doggedly cooperative even as he watched his relationship with us get shortchanged with Mike on the scene, yet both of them also take cues from the older Henry and Frank, and those two were just about unreservedly of one mind about Mike. In the infrequent conversations we'd had since the summer and over parents' weekend, they'd as much as told us straight out that they considered Mike insignificant, a “welfare” child with strange, quirky habits and a bizarre fringe history. Not that they meant him any harm; it was just that they didn't see the necessity or the economics in salvaging a grievously wounded animal,
and that's how they talked about Mike, as a social cull who had somehow become a fixation of their parents in late middle age.

And besides, he had their dogs.

Not that we were entirely without hope. All the children exhibited a hefty degree of intractability, but Frank and Henry's steel-tendoned and decade-long determination to focus
on
first the mountain, woodcraft and hunting, and then on academics in college, to the exclusion of normal family amenities; parceling out words as if they were gold coins; staring at you mute when asked to pick up after themselves or perhaps disappearing at odd times; often prompted special worry on our part in the past. In our day-to-day dealings with those two boys it wasn't hard to get the impression that they believed family life, and Sue and I in particular, were just a phase, something to be endured until they were old enough in Henry's case to become a harrier pilot for the Marine Corps or an FBI agent, and in Frank's case a photographer for
National Geographic
or the
Smithsonian Magazine
in some backcountry somewhere. And while we could accept their future vision of themselves as good—goals and striving and concentration were very good, although I did have severe doubts about harriers—what about the first part? What about family? If that's what they believed, would it ever be possible to change their minds, to explain to these two dense guys that family is the only endgame in town? Could they even understand anything like that? In fact, was there any real feeling or attachment on their part at all? Suppose, we sometimes wondered, something really serious happened to us or to the family? Would they even care or respond?