Silent Boy (39 page)

We walked through the house. Kevin scrutinized everything with the thoroughness of a real estate agent, looking at the walls and the floors and the door lintels, as if seeing them for the first time. Having no memories, all I saw was the bird nest in the kitchen cupboard and the pile of rags and food cans, left by vagrants. I heard no sounds other than that of sleepy bats shifting position in the corners.

Kevin had small memories to illustrate each room. ‘Our toilet never worked. Sometimes I had to pee out the bedroom window and once the neighbor saw me and she said she was going to call the police if I peed on her house. Gosh, how could I pee on her house? See how far it is? Even my dad couldn’t pee that far. But I was always scared anyway that I was going to, by accident or something, so I started sticking my rear out the window like Carol did.’ Kevin stuck his head through the broken window. ‘We used to save up till we had to go real bad and then see if we could drill a hole in the dirt. But,’ he said rather forlornly, ‘I guess you can’t see any now.’

Then he pulled his head in and turned to me with a smile. ‘Me and Carol, when we were little we used to play Chinamen at night. We used to stick both our legs into one side of our pajama bottoms and push our eyelids up like this and hop around going “Ah so! Ah so!” till Momma would come in and tell us we were going to get the shit whipped out of us if we didn’t get into bed. And so me and Carol would get into bed and we’d lay real quiet under the covers and every once in a while I’d hear her whisper, “Ah so!” in a real high, squeaky voice and I’d whisper “Ah so!” back and we’d pull the covers over us and pretend we were in the mountains of China.’

He smiled at me again. ‘Carol, she was real funny. She could always make me laugh. And I still think of that, of us playing Chinamen. It makes me feel good even now to remember us doing that.’

I was overcome with admiration for him, listening as he went through the house, picking up the bits and pieces of times long past. He had managed not only to survive, but, as Ransome put it, to live. For all the gruesome trauma in Kevin’s childhood, he had been happy too.

Then in the living room he paused, his lower lip pushed out over his upper in a thoughtful expression. He stared at the floor. With the toe of one shoe he rubbed away the debris on the wooden floorboards. Regarding the spot, he knelt and brushed back the dust.

‘Come here, Torey,’ he said. ‘Come here and look.’

I came over to where he was and stood over him.

‘See? This is blood. A bloodstain. Here. Can you see? Come down here and look at it.’

I remained standing for a moment.

‘Come here. Come down here and see it.’

I knelt.

‘Feel it.’

I was hesitant. I didn’t know what it was he had found. The area was filthy with years of disuse. Bird droppings, rat trails, bat excreta covered the floorboards. I wasn’t too keen to touch whatever it was Kevin had located. However, he was very insistent.

‘Feel it. Feel it, Torey. It’s Carol’s blood.’

So I felt the spot, running my fingers over the rough old wood and feeling no more than the grain of it. I could see nothing either. The floor was all spots and dirt and debris, one bit looking very much like any other bit to me.

Outside it began to rain. The sound momentarily drowned out everything, even the heartbeat in my ears.

Kevin shoved back the dirt from another place on the floor. ‘What’s this?’ he said, mostly to himself. ‘Is this blood too?’ He raised his head and scanned the area around him.

‘I think it’s just a spot, Kevin.’

He shook his head.

‘Just a place maybe a bird was or something. Just a spot on the wood.’

He returned to the section he’d made me touch. He bent to examine it. Then he rose and turned away from me. He went over to the window. The glass on the bottom half had been broken out and was boarded over but the glass in the top half was still intact. Kevin wiped the grime off with his hand and looked out. The silence grew around us, sharp and cold, like the blade of a knife, despite the noise of the storm. Yet it was not a dividing silence. Instead, Kevin and I were bound together by it, like hostages.

I shivered.

Turning back to me, Kevin sat down on the edge of the sill. He said nothing.

I was still kneeling, my fingers still against the wood of the floor.

He studied me, my eyes, my face, the length of my arm, my fingers, until his eyes finally came to rest on the bit of floor I was touching. For a long, long time he simply stared at it.

On the windowsill the rain was dribbling through and running down the wall to form a puddle. Finally Kevin noticed it as the water spread toward where he was sitting. He reached his hand out and touched it. Lifting his fingers, he stared at the pattern the water had made on them.

‘They’re gone,’ he said quietly to his hand. A strange expression crossed his face. His forehead puckered and then relaxed and he continued to watch as the rainwater dripped from his fingers. Then he looked across at me. ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Yeah,’ he said and touched the water on the sill again. ‘I guess I sort of knew it was.’

A
nd it was over. The silence of an abandoned house in an August rainstorm was able to communicate to Kevin what I in all my months with him could not. His ghosts at last lay down.

Between us we never spoke of that afternoon, not then as we drove back to Seven Oaks, not later in our continuing sessions. Not ever. I did discuss the occurrence at length with Bill Smith and particularly with Dr Rosenthal but between Kevin and me it was never cloaked in the insubstantial fabric of words. It didn’t need to be. We had shared it. And that had been enough.

Bill Smith and I continued to search for an alternative placement for Kevin. In a couple of weeks Kevin’s eighteenth birthday would pass and Bill did not feel that Seven Oaks was the best place for Kevin to remain. Not only were most of the boys there much younger but they were also a different type than Kevin. Because Kevin was so desperate to exercise new-found social skills and make friends, Bill feared he would be taken advantage of by some of the more savvy boys or worse, in an attempt to gain their friendship, he would learn their tricks and we would have traded one set of unacceptable behaviors for another.

I had known Bill was out beating the bushes for another spot, some alternative to a more restrictive environment, because all of us now felt Kevin ought to be given a chance to prove himself. Yet, at nearly eighteen, he was not a good candidate for fostering, mostly because few families would be willing to tackle a kid that age and with his background.

But Bill found one. Mr and Mrs Burchell, they were, a nice-appearing couple, sweet in manner, both rather shy. They weren’t very old, in their late twenties or so. They’d been married a couple of years but had no children of their own. When they arrived, we sat around in Bill’s office chatting and drinking lemonade. When I asked them why they had decided to foster and why in particular to foster adolescents with problems, Mrs Burchell said they wanted to do something meaningful for society. They had both been fortunate themselves to have had loving and happy childhoods and they wanted to extend themselves to those less fortunate.

It sounded corny, the way they said it, and I must have had an expression on my face that told them that because they both apologized profusely for not being able to say it well. I laughed and Bill Smith told them not to mind me, that I’d been too long in the business to look any other way. I was still chuckling and had to apologize, myself, saying that words counted for naught anyway. Action was everything.

I hadn’t seen Kevin between the time I was informed about the existence of the Burchells and their arrival. He had been in woodworking class and wasn’t free until four o’clock. The whole affair caught me off balance because Bill had never mentioned any impending fostering possibilities. No doubt he did not want to raise my hopes any more than Kevin’s. So I didn’t really have a chance to adjust to this abrupt turn of good fortune. The Burchells seemed nice, but I was too uninformed to be much of a judge.

Kevin came into the room, his face wreathed in smiles. He had been told in the morning apparently and now was totally unable to contain his enthusiasm. Mom and Dad. He wanted to call them Mom and Dad right then and there, these people who were perhaps only a decade older than he was himself. However, the old Kevin wasn’t too far away either. The excitement overcame him, and when Bill asked him a question, he ducked his head and wouldn’t answer.

I was sitting next to him and I kicked him with the side of my shoe. I hissed through clamped teeth. A smile to the Burchells. ‘Kevin’s a little shy sometimes. But he gets over it. Don’t you, Kevin?’ I said, and kicked him again.

All in all, the interview went quite well. Kevin did manage to find his voice eventually, after we waited long enough, and the Burchells seemed genuinely interested in taking him. At the end, Kevin and I left together and the Burchells stayed with Bill.

‘I’m going to have a family,’ Kevin whispered to me as we walked down the hallway. Then as we got outside, he erupted into joy. ‘Whoopeee!
I’m going to have a family after all!
’

I laughed. I meant to tell him not to get too high of hopes just in case the worst happened. But I couldn’t. When I saw his face, there was no way I could be that heartless.

So after a week of sheer frenzy for Kevin while the Burchells made their minds up, all Kevin could think about was ‘his family.’ Finally, it was agreed that he would go to spend Labor Day weekend with them as a trial run. This put Kevin beside himself. All we could do was talk about what to take, what to wear and what he might be doing. He had grandiose plans for those four days. Among them was swimming. Kevin had become a passably good swimmer by now, his one monumental accomplishment in everyone’s eyes, and he was desperate to show the Burchells, even though I tried to explain that perhaps they would not appreciate the immensity of the achievement for him. But he didn’t care. Would there be a pool? Could he take his swimming trunks? Would they come watch him? And on and on and on, ad nauseam.

When Labor Day weekend finally arrived, however, there I was with Bill, standing in the gravel driveway as the Burchells’ battered old station wagon with Kevin and his brown suitcase in back finally pulled out of sight around the corner of the Seven Oaks gate. And I could have cried.

Over the latter two months of the summer I saw very little of Charity. We had had the barbecue at the Thatchers’ and then I had taken her camping, and there was a Big Brothers/Big Sisters picnic, but after that, I saw less and less of her. She had begun spending weekends out on the reservation with her mother’s family and then pretty soon it was weeks out there and weekends in town and at last, she was out there all the time.

On August fifteenth, Charity turned ten. I’d promised I would take her shopping for a birthday gift when she got back from the reservation, and over the Labor Day weekend, she appeared on my doorstep for the first time in weeks.

‘You wanna go buy me a birthday present today?’ she hollered in through the screen door when she found it locked.

I was in the other part of the house, cleaning out closets, a job I detested heartily. Consequently, it almost never got done. But I had finally given in because I couldn’t open any of them without endangering my life.

‘Can you go today?’ she asked when I let her in. She followed me back to the bedroom. ‘Will you take me? You know what I want? I want a dress. I want a disco dress. You know, one of them’s that’s all shiny.’

‘A disco dress?’ I raised an eyebrow as I settled back down to sort through the junk hauled out from the floor of the closet. When I was ten, I had wanted a horse, a pup tent and a Davy Crockett hat.

‘Yeah. You know. Like they got in
Friday Night Fever.
’

‘I think you mean
Saturday Night Fever
.’

‘Yeah, well, whenever it is. I want one of them.’

‘You plan to go disco dancing?’

She shrugged. ‘You never know. I might.’

‘Yes, that’s probably true.’

‘So, would you? I seen one. Down at Salvador’s Boutique. It’s in the window.’

‘Char, that’s a big ladies’ place. No sizes for kids.’

‘Well, could we go look at it at least? Could we? You and me ain’t done nothing together lately. So couldn’t you just take me around to look? Please?’

I sighed. It was not a good day for it. Being a holiday weekend and a Saturday as well, the city would be a madhouse downtown. Worse, I was wearing an ancient, very ragged pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt and that meant I would have to change, my least favorite pastime.

‘
Please?
Haven’t you even missed me one little bit this summer? I ain’t hardly been over at all.’

‘Well, okay, I guess. If you help me put all this stuff away in the closet first.’

‘Sure!’ she chirped and grabbed an armful. With one swing it landed on the closet floor in a heap.

Instead of hassling in the traffic, we caught the 43 bus and then walked from the courthouse. In an unexpected show of affection, Charity took my hand.

You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked when I’d looked down.