The Things I Want Most (31 page)

Mike admitted taking it, said he was sorry, but wouldn't tell Frank where it was. I don't think he could—I think that he had dropped it down the well or otherwise put it out of reach. So now Mike had an immense problem because he couldn't return it, Frank wouldn't let it go, and we wouldn't interfere in what was going on between them.

Now whenever Frank came home, the first thing he did was loom over Mike and demand the knife back.

“Dad, Frank is very mad at me.”

“Well, you stole his knife and won't tell him where it is.”

“You should make him stop. I'm afraid. He's mean.”

“Mean enough to take you fishing and have his fishing knife stolen?”

“I told him I'm sorry, but he won't stop. He's mean.”

I'm not big on biblical references, but I remembered one that was used on someone else under identical circumstances and, anticipating this conversation, spent the time to find it. I was determined to do a very hard thing.

“Mike, get the Bible down.”

He walked over to my bookshelf and took down the old Pilgrim Edition of King James.

“Mike, there's something in Jeremiah.”

“ ‘… thou art gone backward: therefore I will stretch out my hand against thee and destroy thee; I am weary with repenting.' ”

“Mike, do you know what that means?”

“It means Frank is going to destroy me?”

“It means that even God loses patience with people who would do wrong and think they can make things right by apologizing”

Mike wet his bed again, and we called him on it.

“Mike, this is getting old. Your room smells like the elephant
house at the zoo. I think we're going to get you up in the middle of the night to go, and we want you to stop drinking water before you go to bed.”

Hooded eyes and a set face. “I have to have a drink before I go to bed.”

“No, you don't. Now get in the shower.”

But while he was in there he put a toothbrush down the sink drain, then wadded up toilet paper and forced it down on top of it. I had to disassemble the drain, take the sink away from the wall.

When he got off the school bus, I had him bow down and apologize to the sink.

“Dad, this is really stupid,” he said.

“Not as stupid,” I said gratingly, “as stopping up the drain.”

Sue and I packed Mike up for respite with some very mixed feelings. We still had a hard time believing that sending a child away so the parents could have free time was the right thing to do.

In fact, we were on the point of calling Harbour and pleading a sickness or an emergency or something when Mike's attitude stopped us. He was indifferent and matter-of-fact about the weekend. Not a big deal, he seemed to be saying.

He didn't say good-bye to Sue or even pet one of the dogs on the way out.

The respite couple's home was about five miles from our place. Mike wouldn't look back as he slowly walked away with the husband. I kept watching, hoping he'd turn around and wave, but he never did.

When I got home, Sue was waiting for me. “How did he act?”

I shrugged. “He couldn't have cared less.”

“Well,” she said, slowly shaking her head, “I just don't understand.”

“You can't be on target one hundred percent of the time, Sue.”

“What are we going to do this weekend?”

“I don't know”

Sue got up, walked into her office, and slammed the door.

And suddenly it was awfully quiet in the house.

Then, at about 7:30, the phone rang in Sue's office and she picked it up. There was a tremulous, stuttering voice at the other end, then tears. “This is Mike. Are you doing anything special? Can I come home?”

“What's wrong?”

“I want to come home” More tears, lots of tears.

Sue stuttered herself. “Ten minutes, Mike. We'll be there.”

We jumped in the truck and scooted down to the village. Mike was waiting in the kitchen with his bag between his legs, ignoring everybody else while he waited for us.

In speaking to the wife, we found out there wasn't any particular problem. She thought perhaps he was bored. She didn't even know he had called until we showed up.

Mike didn't have anything specific to say either except, “I just want to go home.”

So we went home.

Later, Sue looked at me with tears in her eyes. “He got us again, didn't he?”

I thought out loud, “What's Harbour going to say?”

Sue grimaced. “What I care about is not pushing the fact that he's a foster child into his face ever again.”

It was mid-June now, and Henry got Mike up early with the dogs. We got the first bad report we'd had recently from school:
apparently Mike had said no when he was told to put something away. But he did his homework on his own. We had more or less a potluck dinner, and he went to bed without a lot of grousing.

Then Henry got him back up at 11:00
P.M.
to see an enormous bullfrog he found outside the back door. Mike caught it and put it in his room in a bucket with some water, then went back to sleep.

I found out about it when at two o'clock I heard the strangest sounds coming out of Mike's room.

“Mike, my God, that's the biggest frog I ever saw. Where did you get it?”

“Henry found it for me.”

“Yes,” I said, groggy and still amazed at the size of the thing. “How nice of him to find one that can sing.”

Mike and Sue had been very close ever since the attempted respite—heads together, whispering, talking, quietly laughing— but this morning we saw something else. When Sue gently reminded Mike of the time, the stultifying blank face came back, and with it, the same old poisonous words.

We never seem to lose our vulnerability. No matter how many times Mike demonstrates his ability to switch instantly from sunshine and light into a pocked and vicious persona, we're always and every time surprised.

But being surprised doesn't mean we always react the same way, and this morning Sue responded like a cobra touched with a lit cigarette. She didn't act patient, hurt, shocked, or reasoning. Instead, she instantly went ballistic and wall-eyed, chased him down and cornered him in his room, then, shaking him, screamed, “You will not call me those filthy names any longer, ever again. If you do, that disgusting mouth is getting washed out with soap.”

Then Mike switched back, the look on his face saying he'd been bushwhacked. (“Hey, you're not supposed to get that mad that fast.”)

“Calm down, please calm down,” he said, obviously worried.

I watched the entire show, and when she stalked back out of his room asked, “What happened with you?”

“I dunno,” she snapped. “It hit a nerve this time.”

“Well,” and it was a compliment, although a very wary one, “at least you didn't play the game.”

“Huh?” she said indignantly, straightening her skirt.

Although these scenes with Mike were getting much more infrequent, they still followed the same rigid routine, like a dance he took us through. There were facial expressions, then words—lots of words—then kicking and hitting odd things, then screaming. It was a set, scripted procedure that took an hour or more, a perfidious pirouette. But Sue short-circuited him this time, and you could see confusion written all over his face.

“You didn't let him work you. After you exploded, Mike looked like a matador who waved his cape, but the bull went straight for his legs instead.”

“Mom, I'm sorry,” Mike said, peeking out of his room.

But Sue continued to seethe, refusing to talk to him in the car and making him sit three or four pews in front of her in church. Yet she was watching him and noticed that when the collection came he reached into his pocket, pulled out one grimy, wadded-up dollar of his allowance, and put it in the basket.

“Damn,” she spit later, not knowing whether to keep her mad on or not.

But then she said something very interesting. “He goes nuts when we push him into some forward movement, whether it's a schedule he has to keep or organizing his own time to achieve some goal. He hates plans that he has to follow. He doesn't like
to deal with the future—it's as if he's afraid of the future, any sort of future.”

In the afternoon we all went over to Susanne's for dinner. Susanne and David, Sue and I, Mike, Liam, Frank, and Brendan. Lovely dinner, very nice table set.

During coffee and after Mike walked outside to play, David sat back and looked at me. “What a difference,” he said, chuckling. “I remember last fall. Trying to eat with Mike was like eating with a cave ape who was seeing fire for the first time. He'd never shut up or stop snatching at things.”

I laughed at that, but then sat up straight. David was right. The emotional churning, the words, the fights, and Mike's relentless window demolition had obscured some substantial social progress. Tonight was his umpteenth family dinner, and somewhere on the time line of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and a hundred other sit-downs, he'd acquired some social skill. Tonight he was composed and gracious—“Please pass the salad … yes, no … thank you”—ate very well, took modest portions, had seconds, handled his knife and fork with aplomb, helped clean up after dessert, thanked Susanne, and listened to the adult conversation. In fact, he joined in the conversation. A vast difference.

David stood up. “Want to take the coffee outside?”

Out on the porch it was dusk, orange, hazy, and hot. The traffic on the state route gone for the moment, the only noise the distant slam of a screen door down the street.

Then Mike joined us. “What's that sound?”

There was a faint chime of musical notes, and David listened for a moment, then said mischievously, “Ice cream truck!”

“What's an ice cream truck?”

“Aha.”

We all piled into my pickup and tried to find it in the
spread-out network of roads. Finally we did track it down, and Mike bought Susanne a bubblegum-flavored ice cream bar.

Susanne said, trying to force a smile—she doesn't eat ice cream and hates the taste of bubblegum, “Why,
thank
you, Mike.”

Later Mike was asleep
on
Susanne's couch, Brendan and Frank had taken off, Sue and Susanne were still chatting in the kitchen, and David and I returned to the porch.

“Mike is really starting to fit in,” David said.

I looked through the doorway to where he was sleeping now in a quiet pool of light, a comic book open on his chest and Susanne's cat curled up under one arm.

David smiled again. “You don't have second thoughts?”

“Yes,” I said helplessly.

“How so?”

“Well,” I explained, “we're not changing our minds, of course, but we're beginning to wonder if our life will ever settle down with him in it. There was another scene this morning. We haven't had one for weeks, but there it was the moment we asked him to get moving. Sue squashed him like a bug, which is something new, and Mike was instantly contrite, but the fact remains that living with Mike is like having yourself permanently wired to a black box that zaps you with a zillion volts of electricity from time to time.”

Seeing the puzzled look on his face, I tried to explain myself. “Dave, these scenes were the only device available to Mike when he wanted to get something or resist whatever it was he feared. There were no adults in his world who could be depended on to protect him. Now he's here with us, and on balance there's less in his life to be afraid of than there was before, so there are fewer scenes. But there still are scenes, so there's some one more thing that he feels compelled to push away at. And David, I don't think it's something we're ever going to be able to fix.”

“What is it?”

“Something we just couldn't avoid. And
we
is not just Mom and me. It
is
us two, but it's also the boys, it's the social workers who took a chance on him, it's The Harbour Program, it's Susanne, and maybe, in a unique and special way, it's you.”

“Me?”

“Look, Dave, Mike has been structured by the system for almost his entire life. He's never had to worry about the future. It was just presented to him, and he either fought it or went along. But now we expect him to think through the major elements of any task and then go out and put them together for himself. And it's not just major life decisions. It's the simple matter of getting ready for church in the morning or putting aside some time to do his room.”

David shrugged. “He seems happy.”

“David, most of the time Mike
is
very happy. He has his animals, his bike, his fishing pole. He has us leaving him alone, he has his room, the rest of the family—you, in particular—and he's come to love all of that. But he's been trained to be a spectator, and whenever we insist he get out of the bleachers and onto the field to do something for himself, he blows up. He zaps us with that zillion volts.”

David flinched a little bit. “That sounds pretty childish.”

Sue had walked out onto the darkened porch. “Dave, Mike might be twelve, but believe me, in a lot of ways he's twelve going on five.”

David shook his head and looked back and forth between the two of us. “Lots of kids can't come up with any goals.”

I huffed and scratched my back up against the doorpost.

“And that's the other tail on this issue. Mike's got his feet in two camps. He's here with us, but he's also controlled by the system, and he knows it. He knows that if he does overcome his fears and invest in any plan, it could all vanish in an instant.”

David put his hands up. “What do you do?”

“I don't know.”

David thought for a long moment, smiled again, and then, ever the optimist about people, said, “Hey, look at it this way: a child so difficult now may just turn out to be a very, very special guy later on in life.”