Silent Boy (13 page)

Then he turned the page of the sketchbook over and began another drawing. I came up beside him to see what he was making. Beneath his hand the long, lean line of a body formed. The red pencils came up and blood spilled down. The blue pencil etched in the long, spidery fingers of the mesentery as it grasped at exposed organs. When the silver pencils started, I could see the gleam of slime along the tender coils of intestine.

I sat too amazed at what was happening to him to do anything other than just watch it. He clutched at the sketchpad, drawing in rapid, accurate strokes. His body was bent over the paper in frenzied tension, his face feverish with involvement. Releasing the picture became desperately important.

‘I’m gonna kill him. I’ve gotta,’ Kevin whispered under his breath. ‘I’m gonna get a knife and murder him.’

‘That might not be the best way of solving things, Kevin,’ I said. ‘Look what would happen to
you
, if you did …’

‘Yes, I know,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ll go to prison. I’ll get life, probably. It’s premeditated murder. I’d probably get life.’ He looked up over the sketchpad at me. ‘But I don’t care. It’d be worth it to me. And what the heck? I’ve already been locked up half my life. And I haven’t even ever done anything.’

T
hen the impossible happened.

Because of a conference being held in town that week, I had notified Garson Gayer that I would have to come in earlier than my usual 9:30 to 10:30 slot to see Kevin. So on Monday I arrived in the bitterly cold half-darkness of a December morning. I had intended to flop down in Dana’s office for a chat and a cup of coffee first, because I hadn’t seen much of her lately and because the night before an old boyfriend had turned up and we had stayed up until four in the morning talking and drinking plonk in commemoration of times gone by. So I was half dead with want of sleep and had decided only the evil potion Dana brewed specially was going to make me human again.

‘Hey! There she is! Dana, there’s Torey!’ shouted one of the secretaries from behind the glass of the reception area. The other woman came out and looked at me.

I had no idea what was going on.

‘Torey’s here,’ I heard someone down the hall say and two aides appeared. Then Dana materialized.

‘Well congratulations to you,’ she said, and her face broke into smiles. When my expression remained blank, she smiled all the harder. ‘Didn’t they tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Kevin talked.’

Kevin
had
talked. Not just a word or two. He talked. As if seven years of silence had not happened, Kevin had casually responded to a comment Dana had made to him on Sunday afternoon. It was soon apparent that was no isolated incident. He answered everything put to him and by evening he was speaking spontaneously, volunteering his own thoughts to the staff and the other children.

Dana was ecstatic. Indeed, the entire Garson Gayer staff was in a holiday mood.
Kevin talked!
And they greeted me like a returning hero.

Kevin talked? The whole occurrence caught me completely by surprise. This made no sense at all to me. After all these months of silence during which I had tried so desperately to get him to talk to other people, why had he chosen now? What had made him suddenly change his mind? This really was an extraordinary thing, completely unexpected to me. And because it was so totally unexpected, it left me unsettled. The whole deal had an uneasy, slightly sinister overtone for me.

But how could I say that to Dana? Or the staff? They toasted me with strong-smelling coffee and sticky Danishes. They thought it had all been my doing; they called me the Miracle Worker. I sputtered over the coffee and said it had taken me as much by surprise as it had everyone else, that I hadn’t expected it either. I said that I feared I had had very little to do with it. But even in my own ears it sounded like false modesty, when in fact it was nothing other than brutal truth.

I stayed long enough with Dana and the others to be pleasant but then excused myself to go down to the small white room. Kevin wasn’t due for quite some time because I had come so early, but I had to get away from the staff. His talking had had very little to do with me, I suspected, at least in the way they were interpreting it, and I was uneasy having them believe I was as much in control of things as that. Indeed, there in the small white room, it occurred to me that I was quite out of control with Kevin. Putting my box on the table, I went to stand in front of the window and stare out into the courtyard. I dug my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans. Kevin was now doing things I didn’t even anticipate. He had gained his own steam. I might have given him the push initially but now he was running under his own power and in his own direction. And it dawned on me that I was not necessarily even keeping up.

Outside the morning had brightened. Our stretch of gray, changeless days had broken around Thanksgiving, and now it was more as it typically was at this time of year, the days brilliant, the nights cold, the trees standing in naked splendor against a sky so sharply blue it looked brittle. I stood, hands still in my pockets, and watched the dead leaves whirl around the foot of the cottonwood. What was happening? It was like putting a puzzle together with so many pieces still loose that one didn’t know what the picture was supposed to be and then suddenly discovering that half the pieces were for some other puzzle entirely. What was going on? And why?

Kevin was as pleased with himself as Dana was with him. He came into the room boldly, a smirk across his face. Like a benign king, he dismissed the aide with a wave of one arm. Coming over to the window, he hoisted himself up on the radiator. I was still standing there, so he was quite close to me, physically.

‘I guess everybody told you,’ he said. Then he got down and went over to the box on the table. Opening it, he took out one of the sketchpads and an ordinary lead pencil. He closed the box and returned to the radiator.

‘Yes, they told me.’

‘I kind of wanted to tell you myself. But I knew they’d get to you before I did.’ He began to draw.

‘Well, everyone’s excited. It’s understandable. You know how it must be for them …’ I stopped the conversation half-finished because I ran out of things to say.

Kevin glanced up briefly when I said no more. He gave me another one of those smirky smiles and then returned to his drawing. There was no fear with him whatsoever. Outgrown and shed, it had been left behind by an entirely new person. I would not have recognized him as that frightened, rocking boy under the table only three months earlier. But in a way, I had been much more comfortable with Zoo-boy.

‘So, are you proud of me?’ Kevin asked. ‘That I finally talked like you wanted?’

‘Was it hard?’ I asked.

He lifted his head, turned, gazed out the window for a moment. Then he nodded. ‘Yes, it was hard. I knew I could do it. You know what I mean? I’d been thinking about it a lot lately. But actually doing it was hard.’

I nodded. For some unknown reason I was feeling strange. It was a physical sensation, very weird. The hairs along the back of my neck were prickling. I was feeling defensive too, as if this change in Kevin were not to my acclaim but rather my fault.

‘So,’ he said again, ‘are you proud of me? It’s what you wanted out of me, isn’t it?’

I regarded him, trying to see in him what I was not seeing. Yes, I
had
wanted it. Once. I wasn’t so sure that I wanted it now.

Kevin was watching me too. He was bent low over his sketchpad, pencil still poised, but he was watching me, searching, no doubt, for the very same sort of information in my face that I was trying to find in his. We were intimate strangers, each of us having believed we knew the other far better than either of us did.

‘Why did you do it, Kev?’ I asked. ‘Why did you decide to talk now?’

‘Because you wanted me to.’

I shook my head.

His lip twitched. He looked down at the pad. ‘Well, because I thought it was time to.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I knew if I didn’t talk, they’d never let me out of here. And I knew if I never got out of here, I …’

‘Could never kill him?’

The silence between us was granite hard. If I had reached out, I’m sure I could have touched it.

Then he nodded. ‘Yes. I could never kill him.’

As the days went by, one after the other, I watched Kevin’s hate come unmasked. I realized that in most part it was my fault that it was happening. This small white room was safe. These sixty minutes were time out. I continued, as I had from the beginning, to have a most unusual sort of relationship with Kevin. He talked to me, almost as if I were part of him and that while he was telling these things to me, it was more as if he was simply revealing them to himself. In a way, I felt almost invisible. I had no identity as a person to Kevin, other than as a reflection of himself.

Yet, for me, this experience was beginning to take on the proportions of a horror story, like some dark novel penned in the deepest part of the night. Was he dangerous like this? That was a very real question. I had to ask myself that over and over again in the days and weeks that followed. Kevin’s murders and violence provided a mordant backdrop to the Christmas season.

I wasn’t in control of Kevin. I knew that. Would he take it into his head to actually experiment with what he drew in pictures? Would he accidentally displace some of this rage on an unsuspecting aide or nurse? Or another child? Or me? Would he suddenly overcome his petrifying fear of leaving the building, the way he had his fear of talking, and decide to run away? Like so many of his other fears, might he trade it in for action? Did he know that if he stepped outside the Garson Gayer building, he might not be able to contain his murderous rage?

These types of thoughts were with me constantly. Would he? Could he? I didn’t know. That was the horror of it. I honestly did not know. I think I now understood how Frankenstein must have felt.

Yet, despite those uncertainties, I was hesitant to say too much to the rest of the staff beyond an occasional note in the chart. I had no real evidence that Kevin might be dangerous. Drawings and verbalized feelings were not enough. In fact, they alone would be viewed as a very acceptable way of working out such emotions. Every person at one time or another has such feelings anyway, and with Kevin’s background, it was reasonable to expect him to have cause for rather more than an average amount. So his drawings were no cause in and of themselves to believe he would carry such things out.

But then who was I to judge? They were pretty dynamic emotions he was venting. What if he truly was dangerous? What if he went out and hurt someone seriously? How could I ever justify it to myself, if I had suspected and yet never properly alerted anyone to the possibility?

It was an agonizing time for me. Warily, I watched what I had created and I grew more and more weary with the burden of it. I think the worst was that the Christmas season was in full swing and it was impossible for me to balance the two. All my frustrations with Kevin I wanted to vent on the inanities of the season. I wanted to leap out of my car and mug the ding-a-ling Santas on the street corners. I wanted to bash in the stupid speaker in the elevator up to my office with its nonstop carols. Most of all, I wanted to scream. I wanted to stand on the street corner in the middle of all the shoppers and just scream. Scream what, I don’t know, but screaming appealed to me a lot in those weeks.

If Kevin wasn’t bad enough on his own, Charity was adding her little bit of fuel to the fire. She had gone from visiting me frequently to visiting me continuously. Not only did this deprive me of what small bit of solitude I had, especially at Christmastime, it also made any likely association with men virtually impossible. The few fellows who braved meeting her on the doorstep were usually impaled shortly with those dreadful off-the-wall remarks only Charity seemed capable of making. Or worse, they got stories full of typical Charity-like exaggeration about my previous liaisons. Before long, Charity managed to completely clear the deck, and it was just the two of us alone.

One night after an especially grueling day, not only with Kevin but with a kid named Fletcher Forbes, who had a vacuum-cleaner fetish and had just trapped me into an hour’s intimate discussion about attachments and dust bags and the personal lives of Hoovers, I came home to be greeted by Charity sitting on my front steps. The day, so bright and sunny, had turned into a rather typical December night, and by the time I finished work, it was already dark, the wind blowing up fallen leaves in blustery gusts. Charity sat huddled in the lee of the porch.

‘Whew,’ she said when I climbed out of the car. ‘I thought you were never getting home. Where were you anyhow? How come you’re so late?’

Nerves and sheer tiredness left me without a lot of desire to cope. All I wanted was peace and quiet. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘How come you were late?’

‘I was at the store getting groceries.’

‘Oh good. What we having for supper?’

I fumbled with the keys, looking for the one to the house while I balanced the grocery bag.

‘I said, what we having for supper?’ she asked again. ‘Something good, I hope. Pizza? Did you get us pizzas?’

‘Who said you were eating with me? What are you doing here anyway? It’s got to be twenty degrees out here. You’ll catch your death one of these days.’