Ask Me Why I Hurt (16 page)

The next day, at HomeBase, the folding tables were laden with serving dishes, a hodgepodge from turkey to casserole. Each table had a homemade gingerbread house as a centerpiece. “Don’t eat those,” Wendy whispered to me, laughing. “We ran out of frosting and had to use caulking to glue the sides together.”

The kids finished carrying out the food, teasing one another with good nature, hailing one another in fake waiter accents, unfurling paper napkins as if they were fancy cloth ones instead. Amy and I volunteered to dish out food. When everyone was served, we filled our own plates. The meal began with a brief prayer, and I bowed my head for my own thanks. It was crowded inside, so we went out onto the porch. Pastor Richardson came out with his wife and introduced us. She was a short lady wearing what appeared to be a wig. She had dressed as if for church, with heavy hose and sensible shoes, and when she sat near me, I smelled a perfume that made me think of grandmothers’ houses and laundry hanging over the line. It was comforting. The night was pleasant, the air just slightly cool. Stars showed in the sky, and the lights of the city caught the tops of nearby palm trees. The warm winter weather in Phoenix was lovely. There was a distant hum of cars.

“Are you still bringing Donald here?” I asked Pastor Richardson.

He nodded, his mouth full.

“Good place.” He cut his food. “He’s been getting all sorts of help. Counseling, job training, classes. He wants to get his high school diploma.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

He chuckled. “He’s got some catching up to do.”

“A whole
lot
of catching up,” his wife added.

“Might take some time, and they said it would be what they call a modified diploma nowadays, you know, for slower folk.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” his wife murmured.

They told me how they had two kids of their own, a son, who had gone to Hampton University, and a daughter, who had gone to the University of Washington, clear up in rainy Seattle. The son had a master’s in social work, and the daughter taught theater, but her real passion was art, and wasn’t the world a funny place? Pastor Richardson’s wife revealed that they’d raised other kids, most of them the children of relatives, but some not related at all. Amy asked how many, and she had to turn to her husband.

“Eight, I believe,” he said, chewing and swallowing.

“That’s not counting the ones who stayed just a bit,” she said.

Kids kept coming out on the porch to talk. Matthew, the skinny blond boy, asked after Jan the way he always did. Donald joined us, stretching his legs down the steps. He was wearing new blue work pants and a heavy shirt. His hair was a little longer, covering the scars. I noticed that out of his dirty overalls and with his hair growing out, he was a handsome young man. He bent his head over his plate and said grace. “This is good,” he said, and quickly cleaned his plate.

A girl came and sat down on the steps below him. She stared at Donald. She had dark brown hair parted in the middle and round brown eyes. She tucked her hands under her legs.

“Donald?” she asked. “Want to go play pool?”

“Sure.” He got up. “But let’s have some pie first.”

I heard him tread heavily inside. The girl happily followed.

“How long do you think he’ll be at your place?” I asked Pastor Richardson.

His wife looked alarmed. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“We don’t want to get rid of him,” Pastor Richardson said quickly, as if I were going to steal Donald away. I felt a moment’s
pang. This couple was treating Donald like a prized, desired child. If only the other adults in his life had treated him the same way.

“Having him around is nice,” his wife said. “And you know he loves to play basketball with his cousins?”

His cousins? I thought happily. Now they are giving him a family.

“I figure God brought him into our lives for a purpose,” Pastor Richardson said. “He left that boy sitting outside our church for a reason.”

“Amen,” I heard his wife say.

I was wondering about Donald’s future. He was a young man now. I didn’t know what the Richardsons were planning for him. How long would they be a resource for him? “Are you planning on keeping him for a time then?” I asked hopefully.

“I don’t see why not,” the pastor said. He stood up, shaking his pants out. “Now, I think Donald had the right idea. Who wants pie?”

After the party was over, Amy and I helped wash up. Amy was wiping down the tables and I was putting away dishes when the pastor and his wife left with Donald. The boy towered over both of them.

“That Pastor Richardson,” Wendy said, watching them leave, “ever since he heard about us, he’s been helping out around here all the time. He even had his church in to paint the kids’ rooms.”

Amy folded the washcloth. “He didn’t tell us that. That’s wonderful.”

I felt a wave of appreciation for the shelter and all the amazing volunteers who dedicated their time to understanding these kids. I suddenly thought about what Juan and Sugar had said about the adult shelter downtown. I had assumed that all shelters were as supportive and safe as HomeBase. Maybe that wasn’t the case.

“What do you know about some of the adult shelters around here?” I asked Wendy. “Like the one downtown.”

Wendy grimaced. “I know that one in four adult men in Phoenix area shelters are registered sex offenders. That should tell you enough.” She wrapped a leftover wedge of pecan pie in foil and
added it to her stack of leftovers. “I’ve heard horror stories from some of the older teenagers. Some have been raped. Boys as well as girls.” That was what Sugar was talking about, I thought. I realized why she and many of the older teenagers avoided the adult shelters. But there were so few beds that opened up in a place like HomeBase.

Matthew caught up to us on our way to the truck. His blond hair glowed in the moonlight, and the light wind billowed his white T-shirt. “Dr. Randy,” he called, trotting up. He handed me several foil-wrapped packages. “We got some extra pie for you.” I expected Amy to tease me about this, because she knew how much I liked pie. Instead she just captured my hand and held it all the way home.

I
t was early spring before the staff at HomeBase was able to get Donald identification. His father in Alabama had been no help. He refused to answer phone calls or letters. Jan told me all about it as we stocked the van one evening, loading medications and checking them off our lists. “Finally they tracked down a birth certificate from a county hospital in Alabama,” she said. “If Pastor Richardson hadn’t taken him in, who knows
what
would have happened to that boy.”

With the identification we were finally able, with effort, to get Donald on the state insurance. As soon as he was approved, I set up appointments for neurological tests for him at the hospital. It was time to get to the bottom of his delays. If Donald suffered from any sort of deteriorating condition or needed treatment, I wanted to know.

I helped him check in one evening at the hospital. He waited on the edge of his hospital bed, looking large and helpless in his blue gown. Mrs. Richardson had given him an old flowered suitcase for his few belongings. I was touched. I had seen kids admitted into a hospital with little more than a paper grocery sack to hold their clothes.

“You’re going to be OK,” I tried to reassure him.

He looked as if he were going to cry. I could see the scars on his scalp through the bright lights where his hair parted. “I want the pastor,” he murmured.

“He had to go to work. He’s coming back once your tests are done.”

“Ain’t going to take no bus,” he whispered.

“What bus?” I asked. Donald didn’t reply. It took me a moment. Donald was afraid I was going to put him on a bus the way his father had. I realized that Pastor Richardson’s leaving him at the hospital had triggered fear in Donald. He had been abandoned before, and he thought he was being abandoned again.

“Pastor Richardson is coming soon.”

“No bus.” He looked as if he were ready to run. His muscles tensed. I could see the panic rising in his eyes. “No bus!”

“Donald, would you like me to stay?”

His eyes slid toward mine. “OK.”

“Let me make a call.”

“No bus.”

“No bus. I’ll be right back.” I stepped out the door to call Amy and tell her I would be late.

I waited with Donald for an hour until Pastor Richardson arrived from work. He would help Donald until the tests were done. He was dusty and shrunken-looking and tired from his drywall business. It wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that I remembered I had promised Amy before that I would come home early. She had something to tell me. I wondered what it was.

When I walked in, I could smell freshly baked cookies. Amy was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. There on the counter was an early pregnancy test.

I felt delight bloom in my heart. “When?”

“We’ll see. I’m guessing November.”

The specialist called us in the next day. Donald had been given an MRI as well as other tests. I met Pastor Richardson and his wife outside Donald’s room. The specialist began talking the way neurologists do, about tests and skills and frontal lobes and executive functions. I could see the pastor was not following anything. I barely understood it all myself.

“Can you cut it down for us?” I asked.

“He has permanent brain damage.”

“He’s always going to be this way?” Pastor Richardson asked.

“Yes and no. The point is we don’t know what he is capable of accomplishing. It’s hard to tell because I don’t think he was given many opportunities
to
learn.”

Pastor Richardson looked at the floor. I wondered what he was thinking. “It was those beatings he got in the head, right? He’d be a normal boy otherwise.” His voice shook with a thread of anger. I had never heard Pastor Richardson sound angry before. His wife took a sharp breath and held her patent leather purse closely.

“We may never know,” the specialist said. “He could have been born this way. If his father was mentally handicapped, maybe that explains why he thought it was OK to beat his son. When I was interviewing Donald, I noted several details that suggested this to be the case. For instance, he told me his father only made food out of cans. A mentally handicapped person often doesn’t know how to cook, so they cover it by eating out of cans or fast-food places. But for whatever the reason, Donald has limitations. Still, he has a lot of strong qualities. His verbal ability is good. He can speak well. He has good impulse control. I think he can learn. He will probably just always be a little slower than other people.”

“Is there any treatment?” I asked.

He consulted Donald’s charts. “Most times these scores are pretty static.” He looked at Mrs. Richardson, who was trying hard to follow him. Her wig was slightly askew. “What I mean is if he exercises his brain, we could improve connections to help him learn faster. But he’s never going to be the proverbial rocket scientist.”

“I’d still like to know if it was those beatings,” Pastor Richardson said. I could tell he was grieving what I was grieving. If Donald
hadn’t been beaten, he might have been whole, and the Donald we knew would have been a young man capable of going off to college. I thought we were probably feeling the same fury toward a father who would beat his son this way and then discard him.

His wife cleared her throat. “The Lord blesses the meek; he doesn’t ask them why they got that way.”

Pastor Richardson gave her a sharp look. “I guess you’re telling me I don’t need to know.”

“I guess I’m saying you got the clay you got to work with. What kind of pot are you going to throw?”

The specialist looked among the three of us. He cleared his voice to make sure we all were listening. “The most important thing that Donald needs is people to watch out for him, to guide him and keep him safe. I can’t predict the future for him.”

“OK,” Pastor Richardson said slowly.

“Let’s see him,” his wife said, and marched to the door.

Donald was sitting bolt upright on the edge of his bed. He was holding the old floral suitcase in his lap. He looked overjoyed. “Pastor Richardson!” he exclaimed. “Mrs. Richardson.”

“You ready to go, son?”