The Things I Want Most (30 page)

Joanne sort of slid her head sideways and said with a rush, “But, now that we're past this crisis, we have to insist on respite.”

I stared stupidly at Joanne for a moment or two, then lamely joked, “Good! Send us to the Bahamas for a week or two.”

Joanne smiled back, but it was perfunctory, dismissive, and flat. “Rich, it is part of the program, and it's time.”

I looked over at Sue. She was coiling and uncoiling in her seat.

Harbour had twisted our arms with respite before, but we'd always managed to wiggle out of it. Respites are weekends, even weeks away for the child that The Harbour Program organizes to give the child and parents a break from the routine. Although we'd acted as respite parents ourselves, in almost a year we'd never had to send Mike away

“Don't worry about Mike,” Joanne said defensively. “These kids almost always enjoy a respite as much as the parents do.”

“Joanne,” Sue answered back at last, her words clipped and brittle, “our relationship has changed over the past week or so, really changed. I don't think he's the same Mike. I think he'll take this the wrong way. I think he's pretty vulnerable right now, so let it go. Maybe later, maybe during the summer.”

But Joanne was determined to put our objections aside. “I know he's calling you Mom and Dad, I know you're closer, I know you feel we've passed a big milestone, but he's been through a rough time and needs a break. Besides, this is still just a placement for him. He knows it; all our kids know it. They're used to being shuffled around.”

Inwardly I was grinding my teeth over the words “just a placement” “our kids,” and then, irrationally and emotionally, I thought,
What's this we stuff? Where were you when he was shitting
on the toilet seat cover and smashing windows?
Afraid I would actually say something out loud, I looked away.

Sue could hear me mumbling, and she kept looking back and forth between Joanne and me as Joanne hunched forward in her seat, pressing the issue. “Sue, respite was explained in your training sessions. It's something you two agreed to, something that's as much for your benefit as his, and it's long past due. You guys need a break, too. Past needing a break, in fact. Both of you are too wrung out—far too wrung out.”

Sue opened her mouth again, but closed it when Joanne put her hand down firmly on the table. “Sue, this is a program, and I know that some parts of it are more comfortable than others, but all the parts are there for a reason, and that is what makes the program work.”

When Sue sighed and sat back, stymied, not knowing what else to say, I got up and walked out.

Mike wet his bed again, and we've decided that it's time for a reversal of policy here. There were just too many corners to Mike's behavior, and we were slowly being taught the futility of trying to catalog them all.

Mike had been wetting his bed on and off for almost ten months, and we'd been consistently supportive and understanding on the issue. But now we wondered if it was to some degree deliberate, an old and odd implement of control for Mike that he couldn't quite let go. On more than one occasion we'd observed Mike forcing himself to drink large amounts of water just before bedtime, or even getting up at night to do so, and we're not going to be terribly understanding much longer.

Whenever Mike had acted up over this past year, various social workers and therapists seemed compelled to spend a lot of time theorizing with us. We'd been told, for example, that Mike
was demonstrating repressed anger over his childhood; insecurity with a new school, with new friends, with a guest moving out whom he'd become attached to; or that he was responding to the aftershocks of no medication, of puberty of changing diet, of rivalry with our sons or of overlarge expectations, limited expectations, fear of failure, fear of success, low self-esteem, unrealistic self-esteem, and so on.

But while all this may have been true, psychiatrists Mike had to see from time to time usually took a much broader view. I suppose because they're medical doctors they tended to focus not on specific behaviors, but rather on broad changes in his overall condition. Was he gaining weight? Was he growing? Was the pattern of his behavior generally better or worse? Was he doing better in school, in social settings, at home? Was he dangerous? Then, if the answer to most of these questions was positive, they tended to snap their notebooks shut, pat us on the back, say, “Don't worry,” and walk out of the room.

I saw this phenomenon again when Mike had to make a periodic visit to one of these doctors. After the psychiatrist examined Mike, he called me in and asked if I had any questions. I said yes and then recited the latest list of issues and incidents that we were discussing with Harbour and the therapist, and asked if he could help us with them.

But the doctor just sat back and grinned. “What,” he asked, chuckling, “makes you think that you can develop a rational response to each and every irrational act?”

“Huh?”

“Mr. Miniter,” the doctor said, leaning forward, “is Mike healthier than he was a few months ago?
You tell me
.”

I thought about it. “Yeah, I guess so.”

The doctor nodded. “I guess so, too. In fact, I know he's a lot healthier, and I know he's going to get healthier yet. But that doesn't mean I can tell you how to respond to every bit
of stupidity, temper, or anger he's going to display from this point on.”

“I guess I see what you're saying,” I said slowly, but really not seeing it.

“Look,” the doctor said, chuckling again, “you and I, I will assume, are healthy, normal people, but both of us still do dumb things from time to time. Much less so than Mike, of course, but we still do things we have trouble explaining.”

“You're not saying we should forget about therapy and just accept Mike's behavior?”

“No,” he said deliberately. “Therapy calls Mike on his behavior. It checks him and makes him think about what he's doing and wants to do. But don't get lost in the minutiae. Just keep doing whatever it is you are doing, and if you're going to worry about anything at all, simply worry about whether or not you're producing a child who as an adult can function within the range of normal human confusion.”

I grinned back. “Like I am now?”

The doctor laughed. “Like you are now.”

From time to time a lone beaver will stroll out onto the old country lane and spend half an hour or so studying the backyard, looking for a way around.

The lane is really an old wagon road leading off the mountain. How old, I don't know. It was overgrown and choked with trees when we moved here, and in putting in the parking lot I had the heavy equipment operator run his machine along it for a thousand feet or so until the road disappeared into the swamp.

Later we cut the grass that sprang up, and Brendan and I built a small bridge off it, over the tiny stream that ran down one side. The lane then became our foot route to the orchard and the mountain.

But we hadn't given the history of this old road much thought until one spring I discovered that the route had stone culverts draining the water from the west side east into a drainage ditch around the hay meadow and then, in exploring further, that it emerges again on the other side of the swamp, where it crosses the larger stream on the north side of our little valley with a fieldstone bridge—in particular, two huge slabs of rough, hand-quarried granite.

When I studied a topographic map I discovered a little more. What remains of this old road follows the natural contour of the mountain as the newer, shorter roads, cut into and through the hills, do not. So, in the days before earth-moving equipment, the old road must have been a route, maybe the first route, across and down the mountain. Another fact that leaped out at me from the map is that in shadowing the contour, the ancient path crosses and crisscrosses, follows downhill the network of rivulets, streams, and ferny seeps that become the Black Creek, opening on the Hudson River, fifteen miles away.

It's natural, therefore, for the beavers to try to pass the house because it appears they've followed this old abandoned road all the way up from the mouth of the creek. In speaking to neighbors farther downhill I could trace their progress. In the 1960s there were no beaver anywhere along the waterway. Then, in the '70s, a few appeared ten miles down along the state route, a few years later higher, then in the late '80s, they were making trouble in the orchard ponds two-thirds of the way up the mountain. Finally we, almost at the top and almost at the end of the water, noticed them felling trees in 1990, one less than four hundred yards from where we had built the footbridge.

But I didn't understand who else they were bringing with them until Mike took me to see a lunatic show at dusk.

I watched Mike start walking down the country lane and called out to him.

“Mike, where are you going?”

He turned around, exasperated. “Nowhere.”

“Are you going into the orchards?”

“No. I'm going to watch the ducks land.”

“What?”

“I'm going to see the ducks land. “Then he turned his back and started walking away again.

“Mike.”

“What?”

“I think I'll come with you.”

Mike slouched like he was being put upon, but waited for me to catch up and then impatiently led the way down the lane, over the small footbridge, into the orchard, along the east edge of the apple trees, and inside the brush by the big old oak that nestled an ancient deer stand high up in its huge, spreading branches.

This is the back way to the beaver pond
, I thought to myself.
You're not going to see any ducks back here, kid. It's way too thick
.

Then I asked, “Where are the dogs?”

“The dogs don't like the ducks,” he said tersely, trying to cut off further conversation.

Even more puzzled, I followed along behind Mike, step by step, as he picked his way through the thorns until we came to the long, snaking dam and within it, the weed-choked pond. The water had the husks of a hundred, two hundred trees rising up out of it. Trees killed by the rising water, leafless, the maze of their dry dead branches reaching up into the darkening sky like the supplicating arms of sinners lost.

An eerie place when night is creeping out of the shadows.

But Mike soundlessly squatted down now, and I joined him.

A few minutes later a beaver silently streamed by fifty feet out in the pond, just its heavy head above the mirrored black water. Then another.

Okay
, I said to myself,
we're watching beaver. What was this about ducks? There aren't any ducks here
.

Then they came crashing in.

I heard them before I saw anything. Their high-pitched quack-quack distant at first, and then right overhead. How many, I don't know—there were lots. I could hear them circling above the wood, gathering, calling to each other.

“What are they going to do?” I asked Mike.

But he hissed at me to be quiet and looked up with a smile as the first few ducks started down.

There was no way for a wood duck to stretch its wings and sail down through that tangle of dead branches high up in the air without breaking bones, so they simply folded their wings and dropped like stones, crashing through, breaking off dead twigs and tree limbs, and in the process tumbling upside down, backward, and sideways through the trees and into the water, where they hit in great splashes. Then, once the first few were down, they called back up into the sky above the dead trees, as if encouraging others in that insane drop out of the night sky.

It was an uproarious, mad two minutes. Ducks everywhere crashing, spinning, bouncing through, shrieking quacks back, splashing in, and then indignantly trying to avoid the next wave of bodies and broken-off branches hurtling down.

Mike laughed.

He stood and laughed and laughed. His arms up high, he stepped forward and slipped into the mucky water but still stood laughing, twigs showering down, ducks falling everywhere now, quacking, popping back up out of the water shaking their heads, swimming off.

And then it stopped. Silence again in the now-dark pond, just the odd subdued quack of ruffled ducks far off, paddling through the brushy water in the gloom.

Mike was leaning against the dam, holding his sides, with tears streaming down his face.

“Mike, does this happen every night?”

“Every night,” he said, shaking his head. “Those crazy ducks do this every night.”

I suppose I looked concerned, or at least reluctant to speak, when I had to remind Mike about respite, because he gave me a deep, searching look back and said, “It's all right, I don't mind going.”

In the morning his sheets were dry, but Sue washed them out of force of habit, and he got really upset when he found out! Later, Sue had him clean up his room and remake his bed. He did a neat job. I got home from work about four and lay down on his bed. Then I pretended I was him. “I hate this family. I'm a slave around here. I do all the work in this house. I'm not getting up. I'm tired, I want to leave, I've only had ten hours' sleep.”

Mike's face turned red, very angry, but then he laughed and came over and punched me in the belly. Hard!

Another issue that we'd been hard put to address with Mike was petty theft. Coins, a tool, a poster from one of the other boys' rooms, Liam's watch—the list went on and on. An odd collection of missing personal miscellany that, for the most part, turned up in Mike's room or schoolbag.

We'd spoken to him about it many times, and he'd continually apologized, but we'd never made it the issue of the moment. But now events had forced our hand, or rather his. Because this time he had stolen exactly the wrong thing from exactly the wrong person.

Frank had taken Mike fishing, and Mike had admired Frank's knife—the same fishing knife he's had since he was ten years old. After they returned home, Mike had slipped into Frank's closet and taken the knife. Several hours later Frank found out, got very upset, and tore Mike's room apart.