The Things I Want Most (9 page)

“But he's been with us for over two weeks, and he's never assaulted anybody.”

The teacher looked down at his desk and drummed his fingers on the table. “Does he talk nonstop at home, the same way he does at school?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Miniter, the longer he's like that at home, the more disturbed he really is. He's struggling to hold it together, and the longer he struggles, the higher the pressure builds. So you can think of this beginning period with him as a honeymoon. Believe me, it will be over all too soon. Meanwhile, of course, he's not holding it together in school, and we have to do what we have to do.”

“Honeymoon? What I've been going through with him is a honeymoon?”

“Mrs. Miniter, to be perfectly honest, you don't know what you're dealing with. You've had six normal, healthy children. Mike is not normal, not healthy. He can't function in any sort of social setting where he is not the sole center of attention. In fact, I'm really surprised that the system would place him in a home like yours. You and your husband are completely untrained. He can hurt himself; he can hurt you. If that happens, The Harbour Program has a lot to answer for.”

“What can we do?”

“Have you had any instruction in how to properly restrain children?”

“No,” Sue answered doubtfully.

“Well, I'm organizing some classes after school hours. Normally, they would be open only to professionals, but I'll see what I can do to get you admitted.”

Later on at home, Sue and I discussed her interview with Mike's teacher.

“Sue, I don't care what you say, this is macabre. You're overreacting. If the longer you just talk and don't assault people at home is proof of how sick you are, then the most disturbed person in the world must be Mother Teresa. I don't believe he can't function in a social setting. I think he just doesn't want to. I do know that if you or I tied up this boy, we'd be arrested and
charged with child abuse. Why can't three grown adults handle four children without roping them?”

“Rich, you're making it sound all wrong, and I'm not overreacting. This man knows these children, and we should at least understand how to deal with him physically if something happens. God knows what I've been doing isn't working—he's not settling down. Maybe he is sick.”

I was incredulous. “You're actually worried? Frightened?”

Sue looked at me and smiled. “No, I'm not frightened, but I didn't tell you everything. For instance, after they restrained him, all he would do was scream, ‘Let me fucking go,' at the top of his lungs, and he did that for over an hour.”

“I don't care. I still don't agree with it.”

In fact, that was the first real testimony to Mike's normalcy that I had heard. If somebody tied me to a chair, I'd be whooping and hollering, too.

“Well, I do,” Sue persisted. “By the way, I'm keeping him home tomorrow. I decided I want to take him with me when I visit my mother. I want to see what she thinks. Besides, I can't leave him here with you—it just wouldn't work.”

Sue was going up to spend a long weekend with her mother in Old Forge, New York, in the Adirondacks.

Sarcastically I said, “Oh, I see, despite what you learned today, you're going to be alone in a car with him for four long hours without your child-restraint training.”

Sue gave me the gimlet eye. “Okay, you're right, I don't agree with everything that teacher said about his being a danger to us. When I'm not worn out from having to listen to him, I still have the feeling that Mike is basically a very kind, generous person. But still, that man's the professional, he has all the experience. There's got to be something to what he says.”

“Don't be too sure.”

“Shut up.”

Later on that evening, I heard Mike ask Sue if he could telephone the Johnsons and speak to “Mom” and “Dad” and “Grandma.”

Sue said okay, and he dialed from the living room phone. I was listening from the next room.

“Hello,” he said into the phone, “Grandma, this is Mike.”

There was a pause while he was listening, and then he repeated, “Mike.”

Then again, “Mike, this is Mike. Do you remember me?”

“Mike.”

“Mike,” he finally said in a low voice, but I knew the phone was dead.

He walked past in the hallway and went into the office where Sue was. I heard him telling Sue in his loudspeaker voice all about a long conversation with “Grandma” Johnson, how she was going to buy him a present for Christmas.

I felt like banging my head into the wall.

I caught him in the hallway just before bed. He had the dogs with him and, true to form, tried to duck around me with his eyes averted.

Moved by something, I said, “Hold on,” and grabbed his thin arm.

“Look at me, Mike.”

Those wide, blue blank eyes slowly came up. “Mike, if anyone ever ties you to a chair again, I don't want you to tell Sue. Tell me, instead. Get to a phone and call me at work.”

No response.

“Mike, do you understand? Do you?” I shook him.

“Let me go, that hurts. Why should I call you, anyway?”

“Because I'm going to tie them to a goddamn chair, and believe me, I make better knots.”

The eyes looked away again.

After he went on about his business, I questioned myself. Was it the right thing to say? Was I just screwing things up by being a bull about this?

That night he said good night to me for the first time.

Sue and the Noise left for Old Forge while I was at work on Friday morning. Sunday afternoon they were back, with Sue looking relaxed and happy, and Mike oddly quiet.

“What happened? Did you have his voice box surgically removed?”

“We had a good time. My mother enjoyed having him. We took a canoe trip, we went to the Enchanted Forest, but it was closed, so we shopped, saw my sister, ate out, had a busy weekend.”

“But Mike?”

“Different.”

“How?”

“Quiet, just like you see him now. Well, semiquiet, and he did some listening for a change”

“Okay, come across,”

Sue grinned. “I finally decided who the adult was in this relationship. I told him to shut up. We were an hour up the road when I realized that I wasn't going to make it with him shouting in my ear the whole time. So I lost my temper and screamed at him.”

“Lost your temper?”

“More like turned into a screaming, cursing, snarling maniac. I mean, I really lost it.”

“And he shut up?”

She grinned again, but sadly this time. “More or less. I scared the hell out of him. Anyway, he settled down and began to talk to me like a reasonable little person. I could actually have a conversation.”

“And?” I prompted her with my hand.

“Big gaps. He's been talking so much and saying so much of absolutely nothing about himself over the past few weeks that I didn't realize what he doesn't understand. In a strange way he's incredibly naive. I think that's a big part of his problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Sue, “after I yelled at him I told him he could sleep in the car, meaning that it was a long trip and he could nap on the way up. But about a half hour later he asked me where I was going to sleep over the weekend and I said, in my mother's house, of course.”

“Okay …” I shrugged.

“Rich, he then asked how far the car was going to be from the house.”

“So what?”

Sue leaned forward. “Don't you see what I mean? He thought I was telling him that I'd be in the house over the weekend, but that he'd be sleeping outside in the car.”

“That's silly.”

“But, Rich,” Sue said, “that's the point. Despite this demanding verbal smoke screen of his, what he expects to do is whatever an adult tells him to do. Literally. Live in the corner of a trailer like an animal, submit to the most degrading treatment, even sleep outside in the car in the dark in a strange place—and you know what he's like in the dark.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah … and more. This kid believes in Santa Claus.”

I laughed. “Sue, he'll be twelve years old.”

“Rich, the Enchanted Forest was closed, but we saw a big figure of Santa Claus through the gate. Mike talked about Santa Claus on and off all weekend. He believes in him—not in a half-believing, wishful sort of way, but as an article of faith.”

“Santa Claus?”

“And probably the Easter Bunny.”

That was unsettling. “What else does he believe in?”

“God knows. He's been in that system for a long time. What else do you learn in a family that you can't learn in an institution? Things we take for granted that our children understand. The fact that you have to go shopping every week, that people work at other jobs besides looking after you. Things you don't even think about, like an older brother telling you Santa Claus isn't real.”

“Well, if you can't itemize them, how are you going to fill in the blanks?”

Sue shrugged. “Maybe some of them you can't. Probably he has to do it by himself, for the most part. But he's smart. I think the reason he runs on at the mouth is he understands he doesn't know a lot and he's desperate to cover that up. Remember? Joanne said something like that—it's a defense mechanism.

“The problem is, you can't engage the brain while the mouth is in motion. If he's talking, he's not learning.”

“So what are you going to do if he starts up again?”

“You know we wouldn't let one of our own children play machine-gun mouth. I've just been feeling too sorry for the little shit. That's over. He starts again and I throttle him. Look at it this way: we're bigger and stronger. If we could have forced him into a car to sleep outside in the dark, we can force him into a reality check every now and then.”

“That's it?”

“No. I have to find him something else to do besides follow me around like a two-year-old. Get him out with some normal folks.”

“How?”

“I have an idea.”

From the street below we could hear the screams and the thick heavy thud of blows being landed. Looking up to the
second-floor windows, we watched the silhouettes of thirty or so people fighting.

I turned to her. “Sue, these are not normal folks.”

It was Liam's karate class. One of us came down here twice a week, first to drop him off and then again to pick him up.

I continued protesting, “Do you think this is a good plan? Mike is really weak physically, and he has a big problem getting along with people and following directions. Some of these guys in here are thirty years old and weigh a couple hundred pounds.”

“Hey, it's a social setting, isn't it? Good practice.”

“Did you tell The Harbour Program about this? They're going to find out. I think their idea of a social setting is more like a family dinner or a movie out.”

“Look,” Sue snapped, “here comes Liam. You get him and walk back to the car. I want to talk to the instructor.”

“No. I want an answer to one question first.”

Sue put one hand on her hip. “What?”

“How are you going to tell the teacher who wants you to restrain him that you're sending him to karate lessons instead?”

There is some witching, translucent quality to a crisp autumn that blurs the oranges and reds and collapses the distance of sound. The ring of a hammer on a neighbor's roof from across the valley, the slam of a screen door, or the reedy call of a far-off child seems to carry forever. I hadn't much trouble hearing the two boys argue down at the far edge of the grass. I could even hear the rustle and snap of their black uniforms. I could count the draw of their breath.

And I could tell Liam was angry.

For a few days now Mike had seemed both cowed by Sue's new assertiveness and in awe of his new karate class. He was still clinging and demanding. He still wanted his spare time filled up with busy little activities organized by adults, but he was happier, even acquiescent, and he was also very, very quiet.

In fact, this short break had given Sue and me just enough time to breathe long, ragged sighs of relief and pat each other on the back. “Hey, do we know how to handle kids, or what? After five boys, a little waif like this isn't going to teach us anything. Now we can start to do something with this kid.”

And in truth Mike seemed pliable and defenseless without that magazine-fed mouth of his. He even got to us in a big way
with an artless, revealing little conversation, although at the time, I remember wishing I had never heard it.

He was waiting for the school bus early in the morning, hair brushed, skin clean, dressed in freshly ironed clothes. Pathetically, he still insisted on wearing the tattered name tag from the first day of school, weeks before.

Now he fussed with the tag, read it again, and looked up at me.

“Do you know how I know what my name is?”

I chuckled, “Yeah, it's on the tag.”

“No,” he said in his loud voice, “I know what my name is because my sister told me.”

“Told you.”

“Yep. I remember her shaking me and shaking me and saying, ‘Wake up, Mike; wake up, Mike.' ”

Not understanding, I asked, “Well, did you wake up?”

“Later on I did. In the hospital, I think. I don't remember that good.”

Then the school bus beeped outside and he dashed for the door.

As I watched the bus pull out of the drive, I got very angry. Twelve times in eleven years, a new house, new adults, a new school, new friends, a new life, and it had all started with being shaken out of unconsciousness.

“No wonder,” Sue said when I repeated it to her, “he needs that name tag.”

But today was different. He was much less vulnerable. I could hear it in the edge of his voice.