Silent Boy (38 page)

‘Since a long time. I know it. But I could do it. Mr Gomez, who was my tutor at the hospital, he gave me tests. He said I read like a tenth grader. He said I could do everything almost that good. Even math.’

‘But that’s still two years behind, Kev. Tenth graders are fifteen and you’re almost eighteen. But it’s not just the work. In fact, it’s almost not the work at all. I think you could do the work, if you tried.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s the other things.’

‘But what other things?’

‘Oh, the going to and from classes. Having to get by on your own. And the other kids. They’d tease you, Kevin, because you’re different. Adolescence is a hard time in a kid’s life, for all kids, and because of it, they aren’t very tolerant. They could make it hell for you without even knowing they were doing it.’

Kevin regarded me. He had gum in his mouth and he chewed it thoughtfully and occasionally pulled part of it out of his mouth in a long string. I think I had hurt his feelings by saying outright that he was different, although both of us knew it. He wanted to refute me, I suspect, but he was too honest with himself.

‘I’m just saying that it would be hard, Kevin, that’s all. Kids would tease you. They do that sort of stuff without even meaning to be cruel. Kids don’t think very much before they act. They’d say you flunked or that you were stupid and that’s why you are so much older. Even if it wasn’t true they’d still say it.’

‘I’ve had hard times before, Torey.’

‘Yes, but this would be different. You’d be all on your own. There’d be no one there to back you up and it would be all your responsibility to keep your act together.’

Still he studied me. Then his shoulders sagged slightly and he looked down at his hands. ‘Don’t you see, Torey? I gotta do it. I got to know I’m real, if I get out of here. Just for once in my life, I got to know for myself.’

I wanted to agree with him but I couldn’t bring myself to. It was more a dream than a plan or even a hope. I suspected he had no idea what an unsheltered place a high school was. ‘It would be so hard, Kev. You’d get hurt in so many ways and so badly. There’s other things you could do instead. Things just as good, if not better. Maybe go to the community college or something.’

‘But it’s
gotta
be hard, Torey, don’t you see that?’

I said nothing.

‘I’ve done hard things before.’

‘Yes, I know you have.’

‘I can do it,’ he said softly. ‘I can do some things even you don’t believe I can. Even you don’t know how much of me there is. I have to do it. You guys aren’t the only ones I got to prove myself to. There’s me. Just once in the while I got to prove it to myself as well.’

T
he one issue which kept returning to my mind was that of Kevin’s mother and stepfather. If he was ever going to leave places like Seven Oaks and Garson Gayer behind, the authorities had to be assured that he was not going to go around breaking people’s arms because of a mis-said word. I found him a predictable youngster. Very little of what Kevin did seemed without reason when I finally got all the information. However, it was apparent that the things that had happened to him in his past continued to influence his present behavior and this made it difficult for anyone to guarantee how safe he was. Knowing why he did something was not the same as knowing if he would or not. And obviously this was going to have an effect on any committee trying to decide if he was fit for freedom or not.

I wasn’t one for playing a waiting game. We didn’t have years and years and years to resolve these issues in therapy. Every week or month Kevin spent in an institutionalized situation took him further away from the ability to adjust satisfactorily in the outer world. After such a lengthy incarceration as he had already had, I was worried by each additional day. In a way, Margaret from Bellefountaine was right. Normal might very well be outside Kevin’s grasp already. The culture shock would be stupendous, and without the benefits of even a partially normal childhood, Kevin did not have many resources upon which to draw.

Kevin himself was not much help when it came to resolving the issue of his parents. If he felt disinclined to talk about something, nothing I did could get him to. If I hadn’t kept coming back to the issue, I don’t know when he ever would have. And when I did, he didn’t have any answers for me or for himself. What are we going to do? I’d ask. How can we learn to cope with those feelings? Kevin would just shrug and occupy himself in other ways.

Yet, in the end it was Kevin who found the missing piece.

In his regular program Kevin finally earned enough tokens overall to exchange for an off-campus pass. He had been coming up on it for some time and had been very excited because it would be the first time he’d been allowed off the Seven Oaks grounds since the runaway five weeks earlier.

His intention was for me to take him to Taco John’s. Kevin adored Mexican food, and I had told him way back when we were running our own behavior-management program that if he hit a master goal and earned enough points, I would take him for a pig-out and he could eat as much as he wanted.

So, pass in hand, he set off with me one August afternoon. It was just the beginning of August, and the nights and the days had run into one, as they do that time of year, without ever cooling down, with the nights so short and the dusks and dawns so long that the heat seems to stretch out over the season like a sleeping lion, powerful but indolent.

We made the journey into the city lazily. Leaving Seven Oaks a little after one in the afternoon, I drove Kevin through the countryside most of the time rather than take the freeway. I think both of us knew that the beginning of the end was nearing for us, whatever way the future went, and there was that unspoken urgency to preserve the small moments of our relationship. Such a long time had passed since Kevin had been out and free that I wanted to make the afternoon good for him, so he would remember it.

We puttered down tree-lined country roads and along the river, sleepy in the August heat. Coming up to a small roadside safari park, I pulled into it and we drove through a large enclosed area filled with local wildlife. There were elk and deer and antelope and a lone moose, as well as smaller animals. In a separate area a bear begged shamelessly for treats, even though a huge, red-lettered sign forbade feeding him. Kevin sat mesmerized, his face against the glass as the bear ambled by, while I told him stories of my childhood, growing up in a gateway town to Yellowstone Park, where bears were part of every child’s life. At the end we stopped and went into the little shop and museum and Kevin squandered his meager spending money on a plastic deer statue and six postcards to put up in his room. That left him with only enough to buy seven-eighths of a candy bar, and so I had to lend him the other three cents.

Farther down the road on the way to the city, I pulled over into a small picnic ground beside the river. I parked the car in the shade and we went walking. Taking my shoes off, I waded in the shallows of the river, where the clear water eddied around the rocks. Kevin watched cautiously from the bank, uncertain of the slippery rocks and the moss and the small things that lived under them, to say nothing of the water itself. He had become quite a good swimmer over the summer, but this was very different water. When at last he felt reassured enough that nothing was going to happen, he took off his shoes and socks and came forward to the water’s edge with the wariness of a young child. Reaching a hand out for my shoulder to steady himself with, he put his toes in. Kevin jumped in surprise at the temperature, and we laughed together and searched for colored stones and stirred up foam in the shallows with willow wands.

So it took us quite a while to reach the city, probably the better part of three hours. I saw rising in the west the tremendous anvil shapes of thunderclouds, and a hot wind had started to blow, gentle but heavy and warm, like some animal’s breath.

The idea to go to Taco John’s was an old one, actually, harking back to the days when Kevin was first in the hospital, perhaps even as far back as the spring at Garson Gayer. There had been a Taco John’s near both places, but the one near the hospital, you could see from the fifth-floor unit. However, Seven Oaks was almost forty miles south of the city. There was no point in going clear up to the vicinity of the hospital, and Garson Gayer was even farther, an additional eight or nine miles. So I decided to turn off the freeway when I saw what looked like a shopping district.

I wasn’t at all familiar with that part of the city. It was way to the south of anywhere my work had taken me. But I did manage to land us in an area full of McDonald’s and Burger Kings, so I reckoned a Taco John’s had to be nearby too.

‘You know,’ said Kevin as we rounded another block, ‘I think I’ve been here before.’

‘Have you? I don’t know this area at all.’

‘Yeah. I think. Yes, a long time ago.’ His brow furrowed as he stared out of the window. ‘Over there. See? If you turn that corner, there’s a laundromat. Go that way and see.’

I went down the street and around the corner. Sure enough, there was a seedy-looking laundromat.

‘Yeah,’ he said, more to himself than to me, ‘yes, now go that way.’

So I turned the next corner. The area was quickly degenerating into very run-down houses and boarded-up storefronts.

‘I remember this. Hey! I know where this is. We used to live near here. I never knew this was where it was, though. But I remember now. I used to walk to school this way. Go up that street. I’ll show you where my old school was.’

Tugging the wheel, I turned us around and took off in the direction Kevin was pointing. In a few moments we were driving past a long, low school building. The playground around it was crowded with aluminum portable classroom units.

‘That’s where I used to go to school,’ Kevin said. ‘Stop the car, okay? I’ll take you up and show you where my classroom was. Okay? Look at those things. They never used to have all those metal buildings everywhere. Just the brick building. But stop the car so I can show you.’

I pulled the car into the parking lot of the school and we got out. Kevin was trotting now, off in the direction of the brick building. He turned down one side of the school and loped along the row of windows.

‘There,’ he said, cupping his hands around his face and pressing them up against the glass. ‘That’s where I went to first grade. Mrs Hutchinson’s room. See? Can you see it, Tor? I wonder if Mrs Hutchinson still teaches here.’

I peered through the window, too, into a rather typical-looking classroom. All the doors and shelves were taped for summer. The desks were upended and the floor glowed with a summer’s polishing.

‘I wonder if Mrs Hutchinson still remembers me,’ Kevin said. ‘I remember her. I liked her. But I wonder if she remembers me.’

Then he turned. ‘Come on,’ he said and touched my arm. ‘I’ll show you where I used to live.’ When I headed for the car, he grabbed my arm. ‘You don’t need the car. It isn’t very far. Let’s just walk.’

Down a little back street we went, Kevin still half loping, still ahead of me, his body launched forward in anticipation. The streets were shabby, and I was uneasy about being afoot in them, even in the daytime. Many of the buildings appeared derelict, and even those which were apparently lived in looked deserted.

We made another turning and came upon a street of little clapboard houses in dreadful disrepair. They all had been painted hideous colors: pink, purple, green. The windows were falling out, the doors were loose on the hinges. Car parts, dismantled wringer washers and the corpses of old stoves and refrigerators littered the front yards. Most of the houses looked as if no one lived in them, although at the far end of the street a very little boy was meandering about. There was a whole pack of mongrel German shepherd-type dogs lounging on the pavement in the sun.

Kevin stopped dead. He did not speak for a minute or two but only stood and stared.

‘There,’ he whispered. ‘That’s my house.’ He pointed to one of the houses with dark green paint peeling off its side.

Slowly he walked toward it. It looked derelict to me but I couldn’t be sure. ‘Momma,’ I heard Kevin whisper very softly under his breath.

‘Kev,’ I said, and touched his shoulder, ‘somebody else may be living there now. Maybe we oughtn’t to go in.’

‘But this is
my
house,’ he replied with certainty.

‘But that was a long time ago, Kevin. Maybe someone else lives there now.’

He brushed me aside. I leaped ahead of him to knock at the door before he pushed it open, but there was no need to worry. The door gave way easily on rotting hinges. Clearly no one had lived here for a long time. We went in, and the screen door clattered shut behind us.

Kevin stopped and looked around. Knowing I was trespassing on someone’s property, I felt vaguely uneasy and wanted out. It wasn’t a very inviting-looking place anyhow. Vagrants had camped in one corner of the main room. Rats and mice and birds had taken the rest of it over for their own, and there was a litter of excrement on the floors. The slam of the screen door had startled up bats, and I could hear them shifting nervously over the chimney.

‘Momma?’ Kevin said again, still softly. There seemed no disparity between his worlds for him. He was aware of me as well as of the long-ago world awakened in his memory. ‘This is the living room,’ he said to me,’ and this is the way to the kitchen and there’s where Momma and Daddy slept. And over there’s me and Carol and Barbara’s room. Except after Ellen came, Momma made me sleep on the couch because there wasn’t enough room in the bed anymore.’