The Things I Want Most (29 page)

Sue cried again and started counting off the days until the twenty-second of next month. I was sick at heart, agreeing with her now—he was getting stronger and there was a lot of breakable stuff around. It would have been different if we could have seen these hurricanes coming, but we couldn't. On the upside, I had my emotions in check. I was becoming more detached, I guess, but also because Mike looked like a completely different
individual by the end of the fight. His entire body was wealed red with hives and his eyes were swollen closed.

The next day he wet his bed, I replaced the glass, Sue field-dayed his room, found several sheets and pairs of badly soiled underpants in a toy box, and moved his bed around. But he seemed to like the attention, was happy at dinner, did his homework on his own, and went to bed okay.

The day after that he went with Sue to Kingston for one of a series of educational evaluations. Later, I picked him up at school for his session with the therapist. We had a few minutes before the appointment, so we walked down to the bridge over the Wallkill River in New Paltz to the site of the old Indian village. Then we stopped at the library on the way home, and Mike checked out the
Aladdin
tape. That night he went with Sue to the mission at our church, the first of five evening masses in a row, each with a different theme.

The next day he was very easy to get up and actually tried to be pleasant, even going off to school in a positive mood. Everyone else was out at dinnertime, so I made him French toast and he ate at the bar, apparently without a care in the world, just chatting away.

The next morning he did wet his bed but still got up okay and even ventured a conversational remark: “I don't like to talk in the morning.” Even after he tried to dodge the shower and I turned him around, he didn't make a scene. Later, he was pleasant with Sue.

Then that night he went again to the mission with Sue, a healing mass this time, where with Sue he was anointed and the congregation sang to him. Then he had his picture taken with the visiting priest and other children.

“Why did you have that done?” I asked her.

“Don't know,” she said abruptly.

“Sue?”

“No, nothing has changed.”

On Friday he was up okay and off to school. He had a fight with Liam that night—minor stuff, but it was Brendan's twentieth birthday and there was a party in the barroom. Susanne and David came over and Mike later happily participated.

When David was alone with Sue and me having coffee, he sat hunched over with his back stiff, reaching forward with his face, searching for the right words.

I saw him struggling and asked, “What's wrong, David?”

“Don't do it.”

Sue answered him long before I could have gotten any words into motion. “You're a different person, David, a better person. We don't really mean anything to Mike, not really, and we never will. We're not his parents and he doesn't ever want us to be his parents. If I hear him call me Sue once more I'm going to throw up.” Then she dropped her coffee cup and almost ran upstairs to be alone.

Joanne called and said Mike would be placed at St. Finbar's. She described the facility as a collection of residential cottages set in spacious grounds. There was staff on duty in all the residences, and they had their own school. We could visit him there if we chose, probably even take him home for a weekend now and then.

Sue got me off the computer at about ten that night.

“I called Steve Lender. He does a lot of work for the state.” I recognized the name. Steve was a psychologist and a tax client of Sue's.” I asked him about St. Finbar's.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, stroking her chin, “he knows Mike, too. His advice was to keep him out of there. Most of the boys are a lot older, and psychologically even older yet. Many even come
there out of alternative sentencing programs after committing serious crimes.”

“And?”

“And there's been drugs, violence, homosexual rape. Steve even said the staff has been assaulted on occasion.”

“Are you changing your mind?”

“No,” she said, tracing patterns in the tabletop with one finger and not looking at me. “No, Rich, I've had enough.”

“Then it's not our call, Sue.”

It was Saturday and he wanted to sleep until he got up on his own. We said okay, but then finally woke him at two in the afternoon. Interestingly, his behavior was not unlike when awakened on a school morning. We'd seen this before. Being tired had little or nothing to do with his getting out of bed. He always clings to sleep, resents being pulled out of it.

Later in the day we went to the library, then Mike took a long walk with Sue and me over the mountain at dark, talking a mile a minute. He carried a book to identify wildflowers but kept looking at us strangely, as if seeing us for the first time.

Or maybe the last.

Then it was Memorial Day, and because he seemed particularly open, with no attitude, Sue had a long, serious conversation with Mike. She told him what he so evidently suspected—that his stay here was being evaluated with a probable removal in the cards at the end of school. This was because of his behavior— that it did not appear we could help him further. He started to tremble but was articulate and thoughtful in response, saying that what he wanted to do was to go live with his sister and brother and the Johnsons. Sue told him that if he did manage to dampen his behavior here over the next couple of weeks, she would fight for his goal.

In the afternoon Mike asked to go food shopping with me,
and in the few minutes before we left he pored over his fancy cake cookbook. On the way to town he announced he wanted to make a Black Forest cake and produced a list of ingredients. After we returned he spent a couple of hours making the cake and served it with great fanfare after dinner. Then silently and until sunset he kicked around a soccer ball with Liam.

And after dark he was ready for magic.

I was standing on the back lawn, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee, when Mike walked out of the lighted barroom.

His face was a white blur in the darkness. “Do you think Broken-Paw would really help me?” And for the first time ever, perhaps because he could let some defenses down when I couldn't see his face, he sounded desperate.

“Help you with what, Mike?”

“Just help me?”

I put my arm out and gathered him in. He was trembling. “Mike, who did you make that cake for tonight?”

The words were muffled. “For Sue.”

I held him a while longer. “You're all screwed up, kid. But you can figure some things out, can't you?”

We stood there a while longer, with Mike softly breathing against my chest. Then he asked again, “What about Broken-Paw?”

“Well,” I said, trying to get my throat unstuck, “we've tried everything else.”

A half hour later we were in the thickets just off the country lane, hundreds of yards away from and hidden from the house. I had built a small fire and had Mike strip off his shirt.

“If wishing him to help you doesn't work, Mike, then we can call him with this ceremony.”

“Will we see him?” Mike asked.

“No,” I said, “he doesn't know you all that well. But you can tell he's here when you feel a cooler wind moving around. First you have to blacken your face to show him you're sorry and you need help.”

I smeared some soot over his face.

“Then we need smoke.” I covered the tiny fire with wet leaves and Mike's face disappeared in the soft, luminescent blue cloud. We were all alone in the dark, hidden from each other, unable to see even the blackness around us.

“Mike.”

“Yes.” He was stammering.

“Call him.”

Silence.

“Mike.”

“I'm here.”

“Call him.”

A low voice. “Broken-Paw.”

“Again.”

“Broken-Paw.”

“Now, wait.”

We waited for a long while until it must have been an hour, an hour and a half after sunset, and I could hear the night breeze moving up the hillside, drifting through the thicket.

“I feel it,” Mike said in the barest whisper.

“Feel what?”

His voice was breathless. “I feel the breeze. Is he here?”

“Ask him.”

A long silence from the other side of the drifting pale smoke, and then I heard the faintest whisper. “Help me stay home.”

The wind grew stronger, and the smoke whisked itself off and away. I could see Mike again in the moonlight, the embers of the fire reflecting in a soft, pale green glow on his chin, his cheeks, deepening the dark of his eyes.

“How do I know he heard me?”

I couldn't control myself well enough to speak at first, but finally, long, long minutes later, I said, “You'll meet something wild, an animal or something, that will help you do what you have to do. “That sounded safe. Two days didn't go by that Mike didn't come up with a toad or a lizard or a chipmunk. But I also said a long prayer that this bizarre therapy would help him find the strength to get a little bit better, or at least stronger, if he was to go.

And sensing that Sue was balanced on a knife edge, I was also hoping against hope that Mike could do the one little thing that would topple her back over in his direction.

But it was only the next afternoon when I heard Mike start one of his awful, horrible scenes again.

I was upstairs, working at my computer, reformatting a prospect list Sue had come up with, when things started getting knocked over downstairs and there was screaming, more screaming, and then more screaming yet. I couldn't make out the words, but I knew Mike's voice, and I knew Sue was down in the barroom, trying to eat an early dinner before a client arrived.

And then the screaming stopped.

I was almost ill, hunched over the keyboard, sorry—so very, very sorry. Yet finally, unable to just sit there, I forced myself to get up and go downstairs.

When I walked into the barroom, nobody was angry or upset. Instead, Liam was off in one corner watching Sue as she held a softly sobbing Mike in her arms and stroked his hair, kissed the top of his head, and murmured over and over again, “Everything will be all right, honey, everything will be all right.”

Stunned, I could only prod at Liam sideways with an elbow and ask, “What's going on?”

Liam gave me a disgusted look back. “I don't know, Dad. We were outside on the lawn kicking the soccer ball, and a bee landed on Mike's hand. He tried to flick it off, but his hand
went into his eye and the bee stung him. Then he ran in here like a little baby, screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy, help me,' and ever since then she's just been holding him.”

Sue found me in the kitchen the next day. “Joanne called, and I told her St. Finbar's is out. So she told me the only alternative for Mike is a temporary placement in Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital until something else opens up.”

“Yes? And …?” I said slowly, watching her eyes, knowing what was coming and afraid I'd smile.

“And,” she snapped, “I'm not going to accept that.”

Frank walked through just then. “I heard Mike calling you two Mom and Dad. What's up?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It's only a gesture.”

The next afternoon, when David had his head under the hood of my truck working on the engine, he quizzed me. “I understand Mike is sticking around?”

“Yeah,” I joked, “we can't let him leave until he works off the glass bill he owes us.”

“No, seriously,” David asked, “what happened?”

I put my hands out helplessly. “Quite a number of things happened. First, he went to a mass for the sick, was anointed, and the parish prayed for him to get well.”

“Yeah …”

“And then he woke up and realized he was on the way out of here.”

“Okay …”

“And then a bee stung him and he forgot for a moment that he wasn't allowed to show how much he's come to need Mom. But …” I stopped.

“But what?” David asked, sliding down off the fender, grabbing a rag, and starting to wipe at his hands. “But what?”

“But what I like to think really happened was that in the
year seventeen fifty-seven an evil Indian shaman and a good Indian shaman fought each other for the hearts of their people. The evil one poisoned the good man, but before the good man died he cast his power into a badly injured bear cub, whom he named Broken-Paw …”

“Okay, okay, forget about it,” David said, laughing. “I'll ask Susanne.”

“Wow! This has been some week for you guys.”

Joanne was bright and bouncy, but it was hard for us to smile back. The close involvement of Harbour in our lives had the ability to annoy us infinitely from time to time. Joanne was a friend and tremendously supportive, but as experienced parents, it was sometimes wearing to have a third party forever popping up. And it was not simply these weekly sessions; it was the detailed daily logs that had to be kept, the records of counseling sessions and the review of the treatment plan. It was the cluster meetings, the organized outings, the coordination of school and pickup. It was making sure the house was deadly clean on Wednesday afternoons, and above all, it was the fact that sometimes we just didn't want to relive and rehash our struggles with Mike constantly.

Sometimes we wanted to put it behind us, sometimes we wanted a little space, sometimes we just wanted to be left alone.

Like today.

Still, both of us kept a good face on until Joanne raised an old issue, a program requirement we thought we'd long since circumvented. “Sue, Rich,” she said quietly, “please take this the
right way—you've done marvelously, better than anyone would have thought …”

“
But?”
I asked, wondering what was coming.