Hush (8 page)

terrific lovemaking.
Almost a decade had slipped away, and the shivers had taken leave along with the

passion. Not that she thought they had a bad marriage, not yet anyway, but they

just didn't have a great one. And that's what Celia wanted, if not the wild

romance of their first evening together, then at least the sweet intimacy of the

morning after. But now, when she needed Jack most of all, when he'd finally

agreed that yes, it was time to have a family, he'd become withdrawn. Making

love to her was a "chore." She cringed all over again when she remembered how

just last weekend he'd grouped their lovemaking right next to duties like

cleaning out the rats from the tank. If that's how he thought about it, no

wonder their sex life was on such a slide. Once a month? Forget it. Christ, at

the rate they were going she'd never get pregnant. She wished they hadn't been

so damn careful about birth control during all those years when they'd

christened every corner of the house with sex. Couldn't they have made just one

mistake? Weren't couples always smiling and saying that little so-and-so had

been a mistake? She wished she had a little mistake running around the house.

Two, even. But no, she had been so damn conscientious about the pill, condoms,

the IUD, her cycle— when she was safe and when she wasn't— and for what? To

prevent what she now wanted most of all. The irony pained her deeply. But she'd

done it for Jack. He was the one who wanted to "plan" a family, and she had

agreed. So they'd planned this and they'd planned that—planned planned planned!—

and the years had passed and now Celia was starting to feel like planned

obsolescence.
*
As she unbolted the front door, Tony rolled up in his new Toyota. She waved,

threw on the lights, and headed back to her office. She hung up her jacket and

plopped her briefcase onto her messy desk, then cruised into the kitchen and

threw together a pot of coffee. She had just turned to leave when Tony walked in

with a file tucked under his arm.
"I trust you had a good weekend."
"Not bad." She wasn't about to share her anxieties about her marriage with him.

"The drought may be killing the plants, but it's great to have Indian summer."
"You mean it's not always like this in Oregon?"
"You are kidding?"
Tony smiled. "I am." He handed her the file. "But there's nothing even remotely

funny about this case. He's supposed to be here at nine-thirty with his

stepfather."
Celia eyed the wall clock. Not quite eight.
He took down a cup and saucer from the shelf right above the sink. "I had to

pick it up at the district office on my way in. They called me at home this

morning. That's why I'm a little late. Evidently, somebody was supposed to get

this over to us on Friday and forgot." He held up the cup. "You need one?"
"No, thanks, one of the kids made me one last year." She retrieved a brown mug

and showed it to him. Her name was misspelled on the front: Seala. "He wasn't

the greatest student."
"It's the thought that counts." Tony lifted the pot to pour her some coffee, and

she found herself softening toward her new boss.
"Anyway, that"— he glanced at the file she now held—"is something you'll want to

look over before the boy gets here. He's a handful, from what I hear, and the

district office thinks you might be able to help him. Who knows,"— he

shrugged—"maybe you can."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence." The softening ceased.
"Well, don't take it the wrong way, but this will really be a test of your art

therapy."
She placed the file on the table and leafed through it. "What do—"
"He doesn't talk. He appears to be an elective mute. When he was enrolled, his

stepfather said he was talking just fine until his mother died. I gather that

was sometime last year. Anyway, he didn't say 'boo' all last week. He's new,

they just moved here."
Tony sat down and looked up at her. "But here's the clincher." He paused to sip

his coffee.
"The clincher?"
"Yes, the clincher. The boy"— Tony paused one more time—"is a biter." He

finished on an overly dramatic note that Celia didn't find at all becoming.
"A biter, really." She made herself sound more relaxed than she actually felt.

"How bad?"
"Bad enough that he sent one of his classmates to the emergency room for six

stitches on his hand."
"Ouch."
"Bad enough that he also bit his teacher when she tried to drag him off the kid.

She ended up with four stitches."
"Maybe he's Hannibal the Cannibal's kid." Bad joke, she immediately told

herself, but Tony didn't seem to mind. She even detected a slight smile as she

slid into a chair across the table from him.
"So let's see"— she positioned the file in front of her—"we have a

seven-year-old boy who's stopped talking for some reason, but uses his mouth to

communicate his anger very well."
Tony lowered his cup and didn't even attempt to conceal his surprise: "Celia,

that's very well put, and that about sums it up. You tell me what a kid who

doesn't talk is actually saying with his artwork, and you might make a believer

out of me yet."
She shook her head as she stood back up. Tony saw but she couldn't have cared

less. She was starting to appreciate Ethan's bold approach to their new boss.
As she exited the kitchen, Tony called after her,
"By the way, Davy Boyce, that's his name."
"And biting's his game," she mumbled.
She rubbed her arms protectively as she walked down the hallway to her office.

If she had been told about this on Friday, she would have worn long sleeves. Any

kind of covering helped when you worked with a biter. She supposed she could put

her jacket back on but the day was already warming up, and it was likely to get

a lot hotter.
The Center had come alive with activity, and she ducked into her office without

running into Ethan. So much the better. She wanted to review the Boyce file and

didn't need any distractions, especially that kind.
She put her briefcase on the floor and pushed aside a stack of drawings. There

wasn't much material on Davy Boyce, just those few pages. "Seven years old ..."—

right; "...motherless"— I'll have to ask about that; "...registered for school a

week ago ..."— okay, he's new, as Tony said. "Elective mute." She stopped

reading and scrunched up her lips to the side of her mouth, an unflattering

expression that she indulged only in private. She reminded herself that boys

might not talk until they were four, unlike girls, who almost invariably started

earlier, but for any child to stop talking entirely, and suddenly, was highly

unusual.
She turned the page and saw the teacher's report. She had written that Boyce's

"...savage assault on his classmate, one of my best pupils, I might add, and a

popular boy, had been completely unprovoked." She said she'd had a difficult

time pulling Boyce off the boy "because he attacked like a pit bull." Celia

considered that descriptive flourish both uncharitable to the child and

completely unnecessary. The teacher then offered a detailed account of how Boyce

bit her when "I pried his jaw off poor William's hand." She concluded her

comments by saying that she found Boyce to be a "thoroughly objectionable boy

who is not welcome back in my classroom under any circumstances."
Celia had never been bitten but knew this was an unsteady claim, not unlike that

of the dog trainer who talks uneasily about his own unscarred record; it's

significant only because it's not expected to stand. She'd learned to keep her

hair short to prevent angry children from grabbing a fistful of it when they

tried to tear off her head, and she long ago stopped wearing earrings to work

because of the dangers they posed, unless they were the clip-on variety; but

biters were just so damn unpredictable.
She'd seen pictures of bite victims in a class on aberrant behavior, and had

learned that the human bite was far more gruesome than she'd ever imagined. It

could be absolutely devastating, and her fear of being bitten had been born in

that class. Of course, seeing The Silence of the Lambs hadn't helped.
She tried to remember a maneuver she'd been taught to get out of a bite. It had

been demonstrated at a two-day training session in self-defense for child care

workers that she'd taken a couple of years ago. She was supposed to have

practiced the move at home, but never had. She remembered the instructor really

well: Renata. Tall, blond, smart and funny, the perfect qualities for someone

teaching that kind of course. Renata had demonstrated a simple method for

freeing themselves from biters but Celia could not remember it. She did recall

that she'd had to bite herself lightly as part of the training. She lifted up

her left arm and did it again. God, does this feel stupid. Now what did we do

next? She was sitting there trying to remind herself of the answer when Ethan

poked his head in the door.
"Really, Celia, most of us start with our nails."
She dropped her arm down and turned bright red. "No, listen, I was trying—"
"Hey, you don't have to explain anything to me— I work here too. But it's only

Monday."
"No," she protested. "Remember the training we took on how to deal with biters?"
"Oh that. What do you want to know?"
"I'm trying to remember how to get out of a bite."
"Why, you planning on counseling Lassie? Here girl, here's the paint, here's the

paper, now take your paw and do your thing."
Celia laughed and her blush faded. "Please, come on. There's a way to get out of

a bite, some kind of thing you do, but for the life of me I can't remember what

it is."
"Move in, roll down."
She snapped her fingers. "That's it. Thanks."
"Anytime. Anything else?"
"Nope, that's it. Why, what did you want?"
Ethan looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone.
"I've got a new one for you."
Celia knew it was time for another round of "Name that Child Charades," a game

mostly of Ethan's doing. Every time they played it she felt guilty. Talk about

dark humor.
He looked down the hall once more, then lay down on the large children's

worktable by the window and started wiggling, with his arms pressed tightly to

his sides. He moved spastically all over the surface before pausing to look up

and smile.
"Got it?"
"I got it," Celia said, still feeling guilty.
"Okay, who?"
"You know who. Stop it." He'd mimicked Mary, a nine-year-old hyperactive. Last

month the Center's consulting psychiatrist had put her on Ritalin as part of a

double blind study. But the staff always knew when she had taken the placebo

because Mary started jiggling, jumping around and, as Ethan had just

demonstrated, wiggling all over the tables and floors. "You always make me feel

guilty."
"I do?" He grinned broadly.
"Yes. You're bad, Ethan." But Celia was also smiling.
"You think so?"
"Yes, I do."
"And how about you, are you bad?" he asked suggestively.
"Sometimes," she responded coyly, "but right now I've got to get through this

file."
"Okay, I can take a hint. Ciao."
Ethan, now making his exit, wiggled once more as Celia watched him depart. She

couldn't help herself— he had the cutest cheeks— and she turned red all over

again.
Move in, roll down. That's right, that's what Renata had said. She had warned

them against trying to muscle their way out of a bite, especially by exerting

pressure upward. She explained that the top part of the jaw was very strong, and

that even a child could use it to apply tremendous force. She had been very

insistent about this.
"And never"— Celia remembered her repeating this point a couple of times—"never

try and pull away from a bite. If you do, you'll leave something behind."
"Like what?" a man had asked.
"Like"— Renata had stopped to smile at them, as if she'd been asked this

question before and took particular delight in giving them the answer—"an ear, a

nose, a finger, a joint, or...your genitals." This had caused the class to offer

a genuine groan. "Just about anything they can sink their teeth into. If it

swings, sways, or sticks out, it's fair game."
"Oh," she added with a mischievous grin, "and breasts. We have lots of little

boob biters out there too." There were more groans.
"Now it's real important," she had gone on to say, "to figure out if you're a

fight or flight person. I'm sure you all remember from Psych 101 that the body

releases adrenaline when you're scared. What I want you to do is try and think

about what you've done when you've been in a scary situation. Is there a pattern

there? Did you stand and fight, or did you run away? This is important to know.

You don't have to tell us, so be honest with yourself."
Celia sat there in her office with Davy Boyce's file in her hands and wondered

about this again. She had never really been sure what she was: a flight person,

or a fighter? She'd stood up to the poacher, even though she'd been scared. But

when she thought about her childhood, she decided she might really be a flight

person. It was easy enough for her to understand why: if you grow up scared,

it's hard to change. And she'd been plenty scared as a child. She knew she'd

matured in many ways, but the frightened little girl she'd been thirty years ago

still hung around inside, flinching before her mother's angry face. It could

crop up without warning: those furious eyes, cheeks red with rage, lips curled

and tight like snakes ready to strike.
"Around and around we go, where we stop nobody knows."
Her mother had sung and smiled and enjoyed the cruel tease, with eyes as alive