The Things I Want Most (7 page)

“Yeah,” I said, “vaguely Robert Heinlein, I think.”

“Yes,” Sue said. “During the winter the cat would go to a door and meow to be let out. The man would open it, and the cat, seeing the cold and snow outside, would walk to another door.”

“Right, I remember now. The cat was always looking for the door into summer.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Yes,” I said, forcing my memory, “stupid blind persistence won out. The cat kept it up long enough that eventually a door opened and it was summertime outside.”

“Right,” Sue said. “I think these children are the same way. Some children are born into the right season. But others aren't, so they have to keep stubbornly going from door to door until they find the door into summer, into the place they really want to be.”

“So?”

“So,” she said, “when this particular door opens for him, I want it to be really sunny outside.”

“Whew,” I said, “am I that bad?”

“Sometimes.”

Stacked up under the vaulted portico was a sad, tiny pile of boxes and bags. Inside, Mike was patiently sitting on a chair in the reception area, already being ignored by the odd staff member bustling through. After Sue took Mike's hand and told the receptionist who she was, Kathy came down briefly to say a few polite words, Mike scrawled his name into the log at the reception desk, and then the front door of the children's home banged shut behind them.

Done!

Later, Sue said she stood there a long time staring at Mike's pathetic collection before she could actually bring herself to put hands on it. She remembered what Joanne had said, that these children rarely had more than what could be quickly bundled into the backseat of a compact car, but she hadn't really believed it.

We used to think that our five sons and one daughter hadn't had much in the way of personal gear. But Mike had only the
sneakers he was wearing, a photo album with a couple dozen pictures in it, artwork from school, one stuffed animal, and some clothes.

“Mike, pick this up and lets get the hell out of here.”

Forty-five minutes later I raised my head from a book. There was a noise in the house, a loud voice rocketing from room to room. “I remember this,” Mike was shouting. “I remember this, too”

When he slammed into the living room, I stood up to say hello with a smile on my face. I remembered Sue's little story and had even prepared a welcoming speech.

But before I could get a single word out, Mike whirled around me like a ball swung on a cord and disappeared into the next room.

So I closed my mouth.

Sue breezed in, looking harried.

“Did you say hello to Mike?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, give me a hand carrying his things in.”

Liam had the old library for his bedroom then, a very large, light, and airy room with tall windows overlooking the hay meadow in back. It was adjacent to our bedroom, inside our apartment area on the second floor, and since we wanted to keep Mike on the same level with us, Sue and I asked Liam if he could share. “For a little while,” he said.

Sue had gotten Mike a dresser and a bed, hung a bulletin board up, and bought matching Jurassic Park sheets, quilt, and pillowcases. There was even a big Jurassic Park poster on the wall by his bed and a plastic model of Tyrannosaurus rex sitting on his nightstand.

“I can't believe I have Jurassic Park sheets,” he was saying when I walked in with his bags. Then he pointedly stopped talking and turned his back. Sue's expression said, “Relax. He
has to get used to you.” But I was miffed anyway and trudged downstairs to the barroom, where I poured myself a cup of coffee.

It was just the four of us around the big table in the barroom that first evening—Liam, Sue, Mike, and I.

Remembering what had happened with food during his visit, Sue carefully portioned his dinner onto a plate and handed it to the boy. Then, once we all settled ourselves, she started to say grace.

But before she managed two words, Mike abruptly faced her and started to talk in his jangling, overloud voice. And talk.

The three of us sat there embarrassed for a few minutes before we realized it wasn't going to stop. Mike's facial tic was working overtime, and he stayed facing Sue and only Sue. When he did manage to get some food up to his mouth, he chewed with exaggerated lip-smacking movements. Several times he rubbed his hand over his forehead without first wiping his fingers on the napkin, so by the time we were halfway through, his face and hair were streaked with barbecue sauce.

“I have a real family. I know all about families,” he said. “Mom Alice Johnson and Dave Johnson my dad and my brother and sister, Tommy and Jane, and my little new baby sister Connie, and Grandma. Connie is a crack baby, and we just adopted her. We have a dog named Squiggles and ten goats and ten chickens, and my room is up in the attic, but I have to share it with Tom. I'm going to live there all the time later on and I'm happy there and probably I'm going to have a horse. Grandma is buying me a present for my birthday and for Christmas. Dave Johnson, my dad, works for the post office every day, and sometimes he takes me with him except for the time I had a problem and had to go to Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital, and then they put me in Poughkeepsie, and then they put me in the children's home, and so I didn't get to ride with Dad, but I
have a real family. I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania, so I know all about Pennsylvania, and Grandma is going to buy me a present.”

And on and on it went. After ten minutes my ears started to hurt. All of this had the relentless ring of permanence.

“I can do this thing,” Sue said later when we were having a cup of tea alone in the kitchen. She had been reading the exasperated expression on my face.

“What is it we want to do?”

Sue didn't answer right away. Instead, she stared down as if she were a gypsy fortune-teller reading the answer in the bottom of the cup. “Give this kid a shot at a normal life,” she finally said. “No, that's wrong. What we want to do is get out of his way and let him work out his own shot at a normal life.”

“Well, somehow, we've got to slow him up. You'll never be able to communicate with him otherwise. At least we have to turn the volume down, or I'll be wearing ear protection at the dinner table. Five minutes after he started I was wishing for a nice quiet chain saw or maybe a leaf blower.”

But Sue didn't laugh. She just stared back into her tea.

“I can do this thing, Rich.”

“Okay, okay”

Looking for something intelligent to say, I asked, “What about the Johnsons? There seems to be a considerable bond there, with the grandmother, too.”

Sue scrunched up her face. “That's one of the real mysteries about Mike. I spoke to Mrs. Johnson, and she was very emphatic about wanting to stay in contact. But there's something in that relationship we don't understand, something nobody will talk about. Kathy said they wouldn't visit unless she pushed them a bit. Even then, months and months would go by. Then Joanne said that adoption by the Johnsons wasn't an option, that family court had said no and refused to reopen the issue. Something happened way back when.”

“Yeah,” I cracked, “they tried to have a peaceful dinner.”

We never did find out why family court had said that adopting Mike wasn't an option for the Johnsons. In New York it is a criminal offense (one defined in the mental health law) to reveal the treatment or circumstances of a foster child to individuals not concerned with his or her treatment. In practice, child-care workers seemed to us to manifest this proscription as a reluctance to reveal anything except on a “need-to-know” basis. By law we were allowed only that one first look at Mike's file, although later we were furnished with relevant extracts such as a summary of his placements, his birth record, and so forth.

I looked up then, and Mike was standing in the archway.

He had the two dogs with him, Pupsy and Teddy Bear, and one of them was nuzzling Mike's hand while the other was looking up at him expectantly. A nice picture, but it was all wrong—so wrong I could almost hear the “Twilight Zone” theme music in the background.

Our dogs don't like strangers. No exceptions. They just are very uncomfortable around new people, although they're both essentially good-natured and adapt very well to the coming and going of guests. Teddy Bear is a big black Lab mix who spends a lot of time sleeping in the sun on the back lawn, where he can keep half an eye on the hay meadow, hoping for a wood-chuck, and will usually just run off and bark at new people from a distance. Pupsy is smaller and also a mixed breed—looks like a blend of Doberman and something else black—and she almost never barks. Extremely shy, she'll usually slink away and hide the first time she sees someone new. Years ago she wandered onto the property we used to own on Mountain Road in Rosendale and the boys adopted her. It looked then like she had been severely abused, and she's always stayed nervous.

The one point the dogs are trained very well on is staying
out of the barroom, and they never try to follow anyone downstairs.

Asking myself the question “How did he get both of them to follow him down?”

I said as gently as I could, “Mike, we don't allow the dogs in the barroom.”

Mike ignored what I said and spoke to Sue. “What do I do now, Sue?”

Sue smiled at him. “What you do is take the dogs upstairs like you were told, Mike. Then we'll find something to do together.”

“What?”

I repeated myself. “Mike, take the dogs upstairs.”

For the first time he looked directly at me and spoke. “You're not my boss, Rich.” His eyes were big and blue and looked completely guileless.

I started to rumble, and Sue gave me the little going-away hand gesture that meant, “Easy, take it easy.”

“Come on, Mike, I'll go upstairs with you,” Sue said.

I remembered that the home had said Mike didn't do well with peer groups; in fact, that he did poorly in any sort of social setting. He did best with only one person at a time—the reports from the children's home were firm on this point.

But that didn't explain the dogs' behavior, which I was still thinking about when Liam came downstairs later and sat next to me. “Dad, this kid is nuts.”

“No,” I said dryly.

Liam shook my shoulder. “He was upstairs arranging his pillows on his bed. First he put one pillow on top of the other, and then he switched them. Then he switched them again and then again. He kept doing that for about ten minutes before he made moaning sounds and started to pull his hair.”

I shrugged. “Everybody gets a little tense at pillow-arrangement time.”

Liam looked at me for a long moment and then got up. “I know he's emotionally disturbed, but sometimes I think you and Mom are nuts, too.”

“Liam,” I said, looking up at him, trying to speak seriously and work out a badly organized thought at the same time, “I really don't know what emotionally disturbed means. After all, emotion is a type of disturbance, and it's usually good. If nothing moved your feelings, you'd be a zombie. It's a dumb label that seems to get tossed around pretty casually, but I think people are trying to describe someone so traumatized by past experience that he's forever affected by it. Like a person who survives a shipping disaster but gets the shakes when he hears a foghorn. Families were Mike's big past disaster, so maybe just being with a family again gives him the shivers. Then, too, he knows everybody has said he can't make it in a family, so maybe he feels a lot of pressure to perform.”

Liam held his hands out. “But this family is all right.”

“How could he know that?”

Liam shrugged and walked back upstairs.

Mike cries in his sleep.

Why hadn't we noticed that on his visit that week?

We heard muffled cries and walked into the bedroom at midnight. Mike had the covers over his head and was crying out in a loud voice. His knees were up under his belly, and his arms were folded under his chest. Thinking it was some sort of game, I pulled the covers off, but he was really asleep.

We tried to straighten him out so he could rest more comfortably, but it was impossible to move him. His sheets were soaked, not with urine but with perspiration.

Finally, Sue just sat down next to him and rubbed his back for about twenty minutes. Little by little the cries petered down to a whimper.

But at about four in the morning, we heard them start up again.

Sue is justifiably smug about reveille. The children's home stressed the impossibility of getting Mike up in the morning, and they were right. But after the first week she found that if she goes in there with the two dogs, he doesn't give her any problem. She just has them jump up on his bed.

“Come on, Mike,” she'll say, “let these dogs outside, they have to go.” And then Mike gets up and runs to the front door.

But later there is always a shower argument, and then the noise starts again.

“I don't have to take a shower.”

“Mike, you wet your bed last night, so you have to take a shower.”

“I don't have tooo …”

“Mike!”

“I don't have tooo …”

Mike is afraid of the dark. Not just leery or nervous. Terrified.

And not just of the dark, either—he's afraid of shadows and quiet rooms. If the light is off in the downstairs foyer in the daytime, he won't set foot into the half-lit entranceway and try to reach the bathroom door.

When we set him up with his paints and a model on the workbench in the cellar, he followed us right back out.

Sue said, “Mike, I thought you wanted to paint your dinosaur model.”

“You help me, Sue”

“No, I have to make dinner. You're a good artist. I know you can do it by yourself.”

“No, you help me.”

I didn't understand. Later I realized there are banks of fluorescent lights in the cellar, but in the far distance lie shadows and hidden areas.