A Safe Place for Joey (29 page)

“Try to find something that he’s good at – a place where he can excel easily. This will convince him more than any words that he really is a bright, capable person.

“And have fun with him. Go fishing, or swimming, or watch a ball game
or a movie, or eat a hot dog, or tell a few jokes.

“See, other than June, Charlie is the most wonderful thing that will ever happen to you. You belong to each other. He’s yours, you’re his, and you hold an excitement for each other that can’t be duplicated.

“I’d probably be saying this even if Charlie were blind, deaf, and dumb, because children, including other people’s children,
give me enormous pleasure.

“But Charlie is attractive, and he’s bright and loving; he’s a lot like you in lots of ways – and he’s yours. You’re going to have a wonderful time.”

Finally I stopped.

Mr. Hammond was smiling at me. I had never seen him smile before. “I think you like your work as much as I like mine,” he said. “Good-bye, and thank you.”

He turned to go and then
turned back.

“About that school, the one my classmate’s boy attends. I think that in all probability its enrollment is full, considering that it’s already the middle of the year. Probably no openings. I doubt that there is any point in even applying.”

“No point at all,” I agreed, and returned Mr. Hammond’s smile in spite of myself.

During the winter months Charlie and I continued
our attack on spelling and decoding skills. He had mastered the basics of sound-symbol relationships – the sounds of consonants, blends, vowels. Now I included digraphs and reviewed the meanings of closed, open, and silent
e
syllables. I taught him how to recognize and read and spell the four other types of syllables: the vowel team, such as p
ai
l or d
ay
, t
ea
or s
ee
, p
ie
, t
oe
; the
r
controller
syllable; the diphthong syllable, like
oi
or
au
in
oi
l and
Au
gust; and the consonant
le
syllable, like bu
bble
, cra
ckle
.

The seven syllables made sense to Charlie. They gave organization to a previously mysterious mass. He learned to locate the vowels in the word, mark them, decide which type of syllable they formed, and then read it – or sometimes write it. Words that did not follow the
rules were still designated
red words
and written on cards and memorized, but Charlie was amazed at how few he had to memorize now that he had the tools to break words into syllables, figure them out, and put them back together.

At school Charlie was holding his own. His grades for the second trimester were up to “Satisfactory” in all subjects except spelling and written expression. Even
more important, Mrs. Yager felt that Charlie was really trying hard and that he deserved a lot of praise.

The school’s biggest concern about Charlie was that he still hadn’t established any close relationships or made a group of friends. His poor physical coordination was a handicap, and his lack of social awareness was embarrassing.

Somehow Charlie clapped too loudly or in the wrong
places during plays in the auditorium. He laughed at things that didn’t seem funny to the other children. He interrupted during class or forgot where he was supposed to stand when he lined up at gym. He tripped on his way to the stage when it was time for his class to sing at the March concert. Fourth graders are self-conscious anyway, and being around Charlie made them more so. But Mrs. Yager
tried to help Charlie learn the social amenities, and so did his mom.

I also tried to help Charlie understand the meaning of gestures, facial expressions, and various tones of voice, and how to get along with people. Once in a while I made up open-ended stories for Charlie to complete or did a little role playing.

“All right, Charlie,” I said, “let’s say you’re giving a birthday party.
My name’s George. I just moved here, but you invited me anyway ’cause I’m in your class and you’re a nice guy. Now say this is your living room, this is the front door, you’re inside with a couple of other kids. Here I come.” I crashed through the door past Charlie and the other kids, looked around, and yelled, “Where’s the cake? I thought you said it was your birthday?”

“Nobody’s that dumb,”
Charlie said in disgust.

“Dumb? Whadda you mean?” I said, still being George.

“Come on, Mary. Nobody just yells for cake.”

“Oh. What should George have done?”

“Just have waited. The cake comes at the end.”

I smiled at him. “You’re right,” I replied, thinking but not saying anything about his mother’s complaint about Charlie asking the salesman for a drink when they
went shopping. “When you’re at somebody else’s place, you wait for them to offer the cake or whatever.

“Also, I think George could have said hello, at least to you, before he did anything else.”

And all the while I was working with Charlie and talking to the school and his mother, I waited silently but impatiently for a sign that there were changes at home. Was Mr. Hammond studying
his lists or was he actually doing something?

The first hint came not from Mr. Hammond or Charlie’s mother or teacher, but from Charlie himself. All of a sudden, Charlie was doing things. He told me that he had gotten out all his old Lego sets and was making all sorts of things. He had to take money out of his savings account to buy more complicated designs. From Lego he moved to mobiles;
he had half a dozen swaying from his ceiling.

As winter gave way to spring, Charlie’s building erupted into the outdoors. Charlie and his friend Sam were building a clubhouse on weekends – a two-story clubhouse in Charlie’s backyard. Charlie drew me a floor plan, and I was amazed at his understanding of space. I was even more amazed when he brought me a photograph, for now Charlie was involved
in photography. He said he had gotten a small camera, and now he was walking the neighbor’s dog to earn enough money to keep him in film. Charlie certainly seemed to be expanding his world, but whether this was because of Mr. Hammond or not was hard to tell. I could have asked, but some reticence held me back. Whatever was happening in Charlie’s world was good and did not include me. I wanted
to be careful not to interrupt the chemistry of whatever it was that was evolving. But still, all that wood for the clubhouse and that camera had to come from somewhere.

April slipped into May, and now all Charlie could talk about was the upcoming class trip. The two small fourth grades were going to the Museum of Natural History. The big excitement was not the museum, however, but the fact
that they were going by regular public transportation instead of by chartered bus. Many of these girls and boys had never been on a bus or subway. Their mothers spent hours each day carpooling their children to school, piano lessons, guitar lessons, karate class, dancing class, hockey games, and swim meets. After much discussion, parents agreed that travel by bus and subway would be a “learning
experience” and signed letters of permission.

The day before the trip Charlie had it all memorized. “See, we’ll walk to the bus stop, everybody’s going to have a buddy and we’ll walk in pairs, and each class will take a different bus across the bridge. Then we’re going to take the express – that’s what the subway’s called – to One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street, and then change to the local
and take that to Eightieth Street, and then walk to the museum. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Charlie was so excited. “You certainly sound like you’re ready.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “we’ve been studying it at school. I just hope I don’t get carsick or get a girl for a buddy.”

“How’d it go, Charlie? Did you have fun?” I asked when he came in after the
trip.

“You wouldn’t believe. Wait’ll I tell you what happened.” Charlie’s eyes were shining through his glasses, and a cowlick of hair stood straight up at the crest of his head.

“First of all, I drew Rick Tower for a buddy and he’s practically the most popular kid in our class, and he even said it was interesting when I was telling him about Mr. Ammann, you know, the guy who designed
the bridge. Dad and I had just finished reading an article about him.

“And the subway was cool. There was this man who’d made the bottom of his shoes out of newspaper, and one girl had her hair cut like an Indian and coloured pink.”

“Sounds different, anyway,” I said, loving it, especially reading about Mr. Ammann with his dad.

“Yeah. Well, and then we got to the museum. I’d
already been there with Mom and Dad. But the dinosaurs are really neat, especially that Riceratrops.”

“Triceratops?”

“Yeah, that’s the one – and the other one with the little front legs and great big head. Tyrasoranus Rex – something like that. You know.”

I nodded.

“The Indian room was pretty neat, too. Then we had lunch in a special lunchroom and afterward got to buy stuff
in the gift shop. I got some postcards of Africa and some stamps for Dad’s collection and a little pink stone for Mom.”

“That was thoughtful of you, Charlie. Buying presents.”

“Yeah. Well, wait till you hear the bad part. I guess Rick got tired of walking with me, and on the way back to the subway he just moved up and started walking along with these two other kids who are really his
friends.

“I felt really bad, so I just sort of took Mom’s present out to look at while I was walking. I knew she’d really like it and that made me feel better, but then this big kid knocked into me and I dropped the stone and I couldn’t find it.”

“Oh, Charlie. What happened?”

“Well, I kept on looking for it, and then all of a sudden I realized that I was all alone. Well, not
alone exactly. There were lots of people – but my class was gone.

“I started running. It was only supposed to be a couple of blocks to the subway, and I thought I could catch up, but I guess I must’ve made a wrong turn or something and boy, did I ever begin to sweat.”

“I don’t blame you, Charlie,” I said. “All alone in New York City in the afternoon, night coming up.”

Charlie
nodded. “But you know. I just decided I had to get a plan. And once I decided that, it kinda calmed me down. My first plan was to get directions to the local at Eightieth, but I ran into this creepy guy when I went into a store to ask for help, so I just decided, man, I better get out of there. I found a phone booth and the operator called Mom, but nobody was home. That was because Mrs. Yager had
called her, and she and Dad
and
the police were out looking for me. I didn’t know that then.

“Anyway, I didn’t know Dad’s work number, but I remembered the name – Cartan Chemicals – and the operator got it. And I asked for Dad and his secretary told me how Dad was already out looking for me and to stay where I was. I had to go out and look at the street signs – Amsterdam Avenue and Seventy-fifth
Street – so I could tell her where I was. Boy, was I glad I knew how to figure out Amsterdam. Anyway, she said Dad was calling in every twenty minutes for news and for me to just stay there and he’d come get me. And he did. He and Mom drove right up to the phone booth in our station wagon. Mom was all upset and crying, but you know what Dad said? He said I’d handled myself well.”

Charlie
sat up a little straighter behind the desk. “I got this feeling that he was really kind of proud of me.”

“I bet he was, Charlie. Getting lost can happen to anyone. What you do about it is what’s important,” I said. I had a very clear feeling that Mr. Hammond didn’t need lists anymore.

Jim Hammond figured more and more prominently in Charlie’s conversations. Their latest project was
videotaping. They’d gone together to buy a VCR and a video camera, and they were out taping something every weekend – animals at the zoo, kids skateboarding. It turned out that Rick Tower was really into video, too, and now Charlie and Rick were figuring out how to make a space movie using his Lego people.

Most important of all, Charlie told me that his dad had talked to him about Jason.

“See,” Charlie said, “I always thought the reason Dad acted so mad at me was because he wished I’d died instead of Jason. He was only four, but they have all these pictures of him and only a couple of me and he looks so good, and I’m such a … well, I used to be such a mess … anybody’d rather have Jason than me. But Dad said no, it wasn’t like that. He wished he could have us both and he’d
probably seemed mad, but anyway, he said I’m more important to him and Mom than ever now that they don’t have Jason. It’s like they still miss him some, but they love me, too.”

The fourth-grade science fair was coming up. It was a big deal at Chapel. The fifth grade had a social studies exhibit; the sixth grade had an academic Olympic decathlon; but the fourth grades capped their school
year with an all-day science fair.

The fourth grades, sixty boys and girls in all, took over the whole gymnasium. The two janitors and groundsmen carried in sixty desks and arranged them in a U in the middle of the gym, and then covered them with red cloths that grew a little more faded with each year. I had attended a half dozen or more science fairs, and the setup was always the same.

But it was all new to Charlie. Each fourth grader created a project for the fair. It had to be related to something that had been studied during the year. Originality was stressed, and Mrs. Yager stretched the limits of science to accommodate enthusiasm as much as she could.

Charlie knew from the beginning what his project was going to be. No event during the year meant more to him
or had a bigger impact on his life than the trip to the museum, so Charlie was going to make a model of a dinosaur. Mrs. Yager approved the project, and Charlie agonized over which species to select, finally settling on the huge Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Charlie worked fervently on his dinosaur, racing through his homework to get to the basement, where he was fashioning “Rex” out of coat hangers
and wire and green plastic garbage bags, with touches of leather from an old purse of his mom’s to add reality.