The Things I Want Most (26 page)

So, then, why was he here?

Somehow he sailed through the first independent selection committee, through harbour's own screening, and then was handed to sue and me as our first and only file. I suspect the hidden hand of personal interest. I think somebody felt really sorry for mike and took a long, long chance.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why joanne and paula, the director of the harbour program, trundled on down here this afternoon, the day after joanne's latest visit with mike, primed with a “stop pushing mike, keep a low profile, don't rock the boat” lecture.

After a preface, what we got was a blunt caution against any further unilateral action, and then an even blunter reminder about who should be calling the plays. In fact, paula told us that we were to regard harbour, in the matter of mike, as “our employer.”

I suppose this conversation had to happen. When you sum up mike's peculiar status, along with our behavior, it must have equaled extreme organizational discomfort. At our weekly meetings we always told joanne exactly what had happened, but rarely what we were planning. Not necessarily because we didn't want her to know (although, to be honest, that was sometimes the case); it was just that we ourselves often hadn't the foggiest idea of what we were going to do. Yet i could see how that would appear from the other side of the fence: getting
the medication dropped, taking him to the adirondacks, taking him to vermont and what happened there—“i got blown over by a cannon. Wow!”—joanne's initial anxiety over the karate school, putting dogs on his bed, household chores, sue's smugness about shutting him up by yelling back (what she calls “tantrum therapy”), the fact that mike must have told joanne that we took him “hunting” and that we had physically dragged him out of bed morning after morning. All in all, a picture of a self-willed couple more than a tad out of control.

But somehow, i thought today's meeting would have more to do with the school than any other one issue.

I looked over at sue. Under most circumstances paula's remarks would have had the effect of a lit match connecting with an open pan of gasoline. But today she was just radiating sunshine. So i made a self-justifying stab on my own. “you know, paula, mike has gained thirty pounds since he's been with us.”

Paula looked at me, startled, and said, “no, i didn't know that “then she turned to joanne. “you should put that in the report.”

Sue said lightly, starting to get interested for the first time, “a report? is somebody, somewhere up the food chain, interested in mike?”

Paula waved the question away. “It's just what we do from time to time.”

Sue made a low sound in her throat, and i topped off with another comment. “he's getting up in the morning. He wouldn't do that at the children's home.”

“I remember reading that in his file,” paula said. Then she looked at joanne again and joanne scribbled.

Sue finally kicked in behind me, “and he's had a friend— friends, in fact—over for the day. We had been told he couldn't handle that sort of one-to-one relationship.”

“I see.”

“He had been diagnosed with tourette's syndrome, but his facial tic has disappeared.”

“Really?”

I snapped my fingers. “he's helping with family meals.”

“And doing chores.”

“His night crying has stopped.”

“He's writing between the lines.”

“He learned how to play chess.”

“He's taking long walks with the dogs and not hounding us for attention any longer.”

I looked at sue and smirked. “and don't forget, he's wiping his ass now.”

“Yes, there's that,” sue said, smiling sweetly at paula, then carefully punctuated every syllable with her voice like a rasp on slate. “he is wiping his ass.”

Both of us stared across the table at paula with the unspoken question on our lips: after that shot about an employer-employee relationship, what are you prepared to do?

A long, long eye contact, and then paula put up her hands and smiled. “okay. Now look, folks, i'm on your side, because i know you're on mike's. Please don't take anything i said personally. But mike is severely disturbed, and in many ways, you folks are still in the honeymoon stage with him. So we have to understand a couple of things. First, how important it is to maintain the proper services …”

Aha, i thought. It
is
about the school.

“And,” paula continued, “maybe, just maybe, we don't have to shove mike along quite so vigorously.”

“Yes,” sue said, smiling again, “of course.”

We had missed having a big dinner on easter because susanne and david were away and so sue decided to hold it later
in the month. Mike pitched in and peeled potatoes. Then, since we were all still very busy, he decided that he would take a walk. He and the dogs loped up and down the mountain for almost two hours, and he came back tired, relaxed, with red cheeks and windblown hair, and very hungry. He slid into the kitchen and started lifting pot covers. “ah, excellent,” he'd say with one—
clang
. “my favorite,” with another—
clang
.

Sue bumped into him with a heavy, hot pot in her hands. “mike, get the blazes out of here and go wash up,” she said and he ran out.

Roast lamb, potatoes whipped with sour cream, gravy, lots of vegetables, salad, two types of pie, brownies, and rocky road ice cream. Mike was the subject of a lot of well-thought-out ribbing from david, liam, and henry (he had started it by remarking in a hurt tone of voice that last saturday he had had only one-and-a-half hours of tv). but mike seemed to revel in the joshing. He asked for a beer and i said no, then asked for wine and i gave him cranberry juice in a stemmed glass. Later liam asked him if he was drinking wine, and mike said aggrievedly, “no, rich did the cranberry switch on me again.”

Mike ate both brownies and lemon pie for dessert, then quietly played scrabble with david with the table light turned low and everybody else silently reading next to them or chatting, whispering together in the still shadows of the room. Then, at bedtime, he went off happy and sleepy and holding a kitten named calico that theresa, one of our guests, had given him.

Wow, that was almost civilized.

A sunny day. You could stand on the back lawn and see the catskills forty miles off or a hawk start from a tree a mile distant.

I restrung mike's fishing pole with stren fishing line, fixed
the ferrule, and we practiced casting on the grass. Mike was fascinated with the way stren fishing line fluoresces purple in the sunlight but goes clear when it hits the water (so am i, for that matter). he went back to the lakes to fish and stayed there with the dogs almost until dark. I checked on him once with the binoculars and could clearly pick out his figure casting into the big lake, with the two black blobs of teddy bear and pupsy next to him on the grass.

Later he ate dinner at the bar—hamburgers, french fries, salad—and we actually allowed him to watch tv until bedtime, which he did relaxed and sleepy on the couch with a quilt over him. The kid was actually tired, not keyed up or hyper.

On his way to bed he asked me if he could grow a ponytail. I said, “not while i'm drawing a breath.”

Late in the afternoon several days later, mike headed up to the mountain with his bike, and when he didn't return i followed him on brendan's bike. No matter what you do, you think the worst. Maybe he ran down the road out of control and crashed into one of the lakes and drowned? maybe he took a spill and hit his head?

I found him talking to gene coy about a mile or two back. Gene is the farmer next door. Gene was in his truck with his black lab, cinder, sitting next to him on the seat. Mike was telling gene his life story and asking a thousand questions about the dog. “does he help around the house? is he a good guard dog? does he swim? does he poop on the walk? does he get carsick? does he …”

Gene sat in his truck, lean, tanned, saturnine, with graying hair, carefully smoking a cigarette while trying to nod as fast as the questions ran by. Finally, he blurted out, “nice to meet ya, gotta spread calcium, so long,” and got out of there with his
tires spinning gravel and the dog looking back vaguely out of the passenger window, no doubt wondering what all that noise was about.

The next day, mike upped the ante on the school issue—or at least, that's what we thought it was about.

I had to meet someone at 7:00 a.m. In kingston, which is about thirty miles north of our place. It was a recreation day for me, shooting skeet farther up the river at germantown, so i was long gone from the house when sue shuffled into mike's room, still half asleep, dressed in slippers and a robe and sipping her first cup of coffee.

The awful way in which mike's eruptions could astonish us is something we had never gotten used to, particularly since we were forever thinking he'd grow beyond these things. But they were his weapon of choice when he was dissatisfied about something, and the hard fact was that on any night at all mike could go to sleep happy and exhausted and then rear up out of his sheets in the morning like some demon from the pit. Often we couldn't help thinking that something this awful couldn't be emotional, that it was organic brain damage, perhaps from when he was so young and beaten so severely. But we also knew that he'd been examined and cat-scanned and x-rayed and tested time and time again. And the targeted nature of these fights told us that there was a strong element of control involved, that he was actually making decisions. For instance, when he smashed something, ninety percent of the time it was something of his own or a window in his room. And while his behaviors used to be distributed over any and all social settings, they had now narrowed their focus to sue and me or the school, to people acting in a parental role.

Knowing that we'd become the sole target was little consolation, and perhaps most unnerving was the fact that these explosions usually occurred when we were most vulnerable or least expectant.

And apparently sue got it with both barrels this morning. Then, later in the day, she got a call from school. It wasn't over by a long shot—big trouble on the school bus, big trouble in class, lying, shouting, and so on.

On my unsuspecting way home i stopped in town and picked up his bike from the repair shop and the new boy scout equipment he required. Then, when i walked in after four in the afternoon relaxed and smiling, laden down with his parcels, a repetition of the morning began—screaming, smashing more windows—and it went on until late in the evening, with mike having to be restrained any number of times. It ended only when he had depleted every ounce of energy he had and dropped, sobbing, into a corner of his room.

Not for the first time, we wondered if it was right to get in his face and stay in his face, driving him through these cycles. There just didn't seem to be any option, and we told him that over and over again, trying to put as impersonal a face on it as we possibly could: “mike, it's our job as parents to get you up for school, or to see that you do your homework, or that you're dressed and clean and fed, and no matter what you do, no matter what anyone else does, that's what we're going to do. We will never, ever stop.”

Late that night, with mike washed up and changed and slumping on his bed, i tried to think of another way to get through to him and said, “we don't want to fight anymore over getting up in the mornings, but we will. Wouldn't it be better if you got us up, instead? can you come up with a plan?” interestingly, he did come up with a plan, mumbling something about alarm clocks being set for certain times, a better attitude on his part, and so on.

But i didn't have all that much confidence he'd follow through. He still hadn't gotten what he wanted.

Liam got his braces off this afternoon, after two years in them. He asked me if he could have some “real food.”

“What does that mean?”

“Mcdonald's.”

So mike, liam, and i went to mcdonald's for dinner. Mike was upbeat from time to time, saw a kid ride by on a bike and said with a grin, “i have a better bike than that one!” he chattered away over the food, but there was something to his attitude, like a dark mirror flashing through his eyes from time to time. It was making me edgy and nervous. I felt like a twitchy dog who can sense a thunderstorm working up close by. Then i remembered that mike had talked to his sister several times over the phone during the last few days. That was unusual— they usually spoke only once a month or so. Did that have any bearing on his behavior?

When i mentioned this to sue, she recalled that joanne had taken mike to visit his brother and sister at the johnsons' a short time before, and we decided to ask her about mike and his sister's relationship.

What joanne reluctantly described to us was a very sad situation. Although schooling was something of an issue, mike's sister constantly complained about the broader position of herself and her older brother in the johnson family. Apparently they were enrolled in a small, restrictive christian academy, had to come home immediately after school, and then were rarely allowed out unsupervised. Where mike's brother seemed withdrawn and uncommunicative, his sister was rebelling and fantasizing about getting out on her own. Joanne thought it possible that the sister might be passing on this vision to mike in a manner that suggested that, despite being only thirteen, she might escape from the johnsons and come for him.