The Things I Want Most (6 page)

Liam just shrugged his shoulders. “I'll play with him and try to get along. Show him how to do things. Look out for him.”

Sue's mouth dropped open. Then she bowed her head with exaggerated courtesy. “Thank you, Liam.”

I got a lump in my throat as an image of Liam came to mind. When we first moved into this place we were standing together at the break of the hill above the old hay meadow. It was dusk on a clear, cold autumn evening. The maples on the far side had faded from bright orange and red to a dusty ocher, and the darkening sedge in the field was hazy with mist. The sun had been setting west over Shawangunk, and just a few shafts of light remained. One of them reached arrow straight from the top of the mountain ten miles away and lit up a spot in the meadow about three hundred yards away.

I said to Liam quickly, “Can you run out and catch that before it goes?”

The boy ran down the hill in the darkness, through the swampy brush, along the deer run, and far out into the field. In the instant that the light disappeared I saw him there, a far-off,
tiny figure jumping around with his arms raised, twinkling golden in the rushing darkness.

The stars were out when he came back.

“Liam,” I said, “to me you'll always be the last light in the meadow.”

The wedding was only fourteen days away when Joanne drove up with Mike for the weeks preplacement visit and I barely noticed, just waving at the two of them from the back lawn. Brendan and I were awfully busy. The caterers wanted some temporary electrical lines run, so I had been stringing wire earlier that morning and trying to avoid the men from the tent company driving tent stakes when I noticed a pungent smell coming from down below, where a contractor was spreading stone for more parking. The leach field from the septic tank had expired.

When I had talked to him the contractor just shook his head. “If I bring more equipment in to open it up, I'll wipe out your new road and grind up the grass.”

“I can't do that. I have a wedding here in two weeks. How else can I get it done?”

“Well,” the man said, squinting out over the property, “you can let the field set and run a new line from the distribution box, snaking it down along that old lane through the woods.”

“Okay,” I said doubtfully.

“Not okay,” the guy said. “You'd have to find some idiot
who'd dig two hundred feet of trench by hand. I can't get my equipment in there either.”

“Brendan!”

So Brendan and I were digging the trench in about one hundred degrees of August heat when Mike showed up with Sue. I cut a good picture with big rubber boots and blown-out dungarees spattered with a lot of dark, grungy matter that kept other people standing upwind.

Sue and Mike went into the house. Brendan and I went back to our shovels. I'd see Mike at dinner.

About an hour later I felt rain. Surprised, I looked up out of the trench at the sky. There wasn't a cloud in it. Then I turned around. Mike was standing on a pile of dirt, sprinkling me with the garden hose.

“Mike,” I said, “don't do that.”

Then I got the first flavor of the literal mind.

“Sue said I could spray the hose if I wanted to.”

“Yes, but not on us, kid. Spray the lawn or the flowers.”

“I did spray the flowers.”

I stood there in the muddy trench, getting wet down and looking at a child who stood up to my shoulder but was reasoning like a two-year-old. I put a lot of ice into my voice.

“Mike, spray that hose somewhere else.”

A blank look. “Why are you working when I'm here?”

“Mike, spray that hose somewhere else.”

Reluctantly he moved the spray off me and trudged up the hill, dragging the hose.

From far down the trench Brendan chuckled.

All that hot afternoon I shoveled and watched Mike out of the corner of my eye. He stayed with the hose. He sprayed the lawn, the house, chased butterflies with it. He sprayed straight up in the air and stood under it; he sprayed the dogs, the trees, the walk. He sprayed for about six hours straight.

Brendan watched him, too. “He's retarded, Dad.”

I didn't know how to respond to that. I wanted to say “No, he's not,” but the longer Mike played with the hose like a two-year-old that long, hot summer afternoon, the more bizarre the behavior appeared.

After dark and after Brendan and I took the hose away from Mike to wash each other down outside and then took long, hot showers, we sat down for a meal of grilled hamburgers and salads. The serving plates were passed around to Mike first as the guest. He heaped up everything he could until the food overflowed from his plate onto the table, meanwhile talking like a machine gun and just as loud.

“I have a family already. I have a dog and a grandmother. My room is upstairs in the attic. I sleep in the same room as my brother, Tom. We have chickens and a goat.”

“What home, Mike?” Brendan asked, looking at the food mess that surrounded him.

“Mama Johnson and her mother and dad. That's where I really live. But I was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania; that's where I was born. I remember it.”

Sue and I studied each other's reaction. We knew Mike had been born in a trailer park outside Poughkeepsie.

Toward the end of the meal there was one hamburger left on the serving plate and Mike basically hadn't eaten anything. Sue asked me, “Do you want that last hamburger?”

“That's mine,” Mike yelled. Embarrassed, Sue handed him the plate. He took it, put it on top of his other hamburger, and squirted about half the ketchup bottle over it.

Brendan raised his eyebrows at me to say, “See?”

But later on I tried a test. We were sitting around the table drinking coffee, and somehow the subject of restaurants and tipping came up. Sue mentioned fifteen percent, and Mike insisted he could do percentages. It was evident, however, that he couldn't—in fact, hadn't the foggiest idea what they were. So
while Sue was cleaning up I took Mike into the office and closed the door.

“Look, Mike,” I said, “can you write the number one hundred?”

And he did, scrawling it in huge numbers on a piece of paper.

“Good, good. Now, tell me what three percent of one hundred is.”

“Fifteen!”

“No. Now listen carefully …” and I explained that if you have the number one hundred written down you can move a decimal point two places to the left to get one percent. We did it together several times to calculate one percent of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, etc. Then I showed him it works with any number. Then that if you know what one percent is, you can multiply that number by the percentage you want—one percent times fifteen is fifteen percent, etc. We did that together over and over again, and then I put all the papers away.

“Now, in your head, Mike, what's ten percent of four hundred thirty-seven?”

“Forty-three point seven.”

“What's ten percent of eight hundred?”

“Eighty.”

“What's five percent of two hundred?”

“Ten.”

I walked back down to the barroom, where Brendan was reading Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy in a quiet pool of light.

In this, his last summer before college, Brendan seemed to be here more often than not at night. Recently he had become intensely interested in American history, particularly the Civil War period. He seemed to be able to unwind by reading it, and so more and more often in those dwindling summer evenings, I found him downstairs.

Yet he was ever willing to put his head up, smile, and talk with me.

Later, long after he had left for Virginia, I found myself unconsciously drifting down to the barroom in the evening hours and was always foolishly disappointed at finding his place at the long wooden table empty and dark.

I would miss him dreadfully then.

For now, though, he was still here.

“He's not retarded,” I said, gesturing upstairs.

“What about the hose?”

“He talked about the hose.” I shrugged. “It was the first time in his life he was allowed to turn one on. He had seen them before but never, ever was allowed to touch one.”

Brendan considered that, and his features softened. “Well, he's still awfully screwed up, Dad.”

“True,” I said over the top of my glasses. “Now what are you on?”

Brendan thumped the open book. “The battle of Manassas.”

“First or second?”

“Second.”

“Ah,” I grinned, “Stonewall Jackson and the Carnival and Iron Brigade and Ewell loses his leg. Lee triumphs when Long-street goes in, Pope comes to grief and the South goes wild.”

Brendan's eyes lit up. “I'm going to school a few miles from there.”

I was out of contact with Mike for the rest of that first week. We were painting, digging, and then painting again. I also had some travel to do for work, but Sue stayed close to Mike all day every day. Late summer was, for her business, a quiet time. The two of them played board games, Mike helped her in the kitchen, and at night she read to him. I didn't have time to sit
down with him at any more meals or try any further experiments. His attention was totally focused on Sue anyway, and when the week ended I realized it only by the sudden lack of an overloud voice in the background.

Then the wedding avalanched in on us. Henry showed up from Vermont, Richard flew east with his girlfriend, Frank came down from the Adirondacks, my sisters and my brother-in-law arrived, my brother and his wife, my nieces, my mother.

And Sue didn't mention Mike once.

It was a picture-book wedding, the weather glorious, Susanne beautiful. We managed to get all six children in a row for photographs before church: Richard handsome and accomplished, then Susanne, Henry and Frank in their Norwich blue dress uniforms, Brendan and Liam looking relaxed but formal. A few minutes later Susanne held my hand with a dazzling smile all the way to the church.

Sue was determined to sing at her daughter's wedding. She stood up front in a stunning white and gold dress singing “Amazing Grace” as Susanne paused at the head of the aisle, holding my arm.

Then she cried.

Later, at the reception, her brothers stood up in a tall row, men now, serious, hushing the crowd. One by one they passed the microphone and talked about their sister, told everyone there how much they loved her. Then I cried, too.

It was outside after midnight, sitting in the ghostly moonlit debris of the wedding reception, that Sue mentioned Mike for the first time in more than a week. “Do you think we can somehow make that kid a part of this?”

I was smoking a cigar with a glass of wine in my hand. My tie was awry, feet up on another chair.

“Dunno. I still have the awful sinking feeling that we haven't the foggiest idea of what we're getting into. What do you
think will happen when he has to get into a routine, get up and go to school, do chores, and not be the center of undivided attention?”

I saw her eyes in the moonlight. “Rich, you really don't want to do this, do you?”

Whether I wanted to or not, wheels had been turning in the background. Joanne had completed a written report on the week's visit, passed it on to Dutchess County Social Services, which reviewed the intended placement with staff, and in approving it, passed it on to family court and the law guardian, an attorney that, at least in New York State, every foster child has appointed to represent his or her interests. Then, everybody in the loop having concurred, Harbour was given a green light, and Joanne called us with one last note of caution. “Remember, Mike wants this placement very, very badly. But it's almost wholly a peer pressure issue with him. He sees families on TV, and the other children he's in the system with glorify their own families. But he's never had one of his own. Push comes to shove, a child like this hasn't the faintest idea of how to respond over the long haul.”

Two days later Sue drove up and got him.

One of the words used to describe to us the withdrawal of a child controlled by the system from a placement was
extraction
.

Extraction
sounds overly dramatic, much as if a submarine was going to surface offshore in the predawn darkness and launch a black rubber raft. Unfortunately for the children involved, the reality isn't all that far from the mark.

Regardless of whether a child has spent one night in a placement, or a year or ten years or his entire life; regardless of
whether a placement is “home” to the child, the withdrawal is never a “leaving” as families would think of the term, because the child is never, ever coming back. If there are good-byes and moist-eyed grandmothers or anxious parents in attendance, they gather in shared despair, in promises to write, in hurried last-minute hugs or precautions or tears. And often there is not even that, just the “child-care system” cranking the right piece of paperwork onto the right desk, followed by a quick swoop.

Sometimes the children are taken, have to be taken, in the middle of the night. At other times, circumstances might demand that they be yanked away during school or meals.

I have tried to imagine what the experience is like. Who can grow up knowing that the world might turn inside out at any moment and frequently does? Who can live knowing that any little treasured possession—a teddy bear, a game, a set of blocks— might never be seen again unless it is kept within immediate reach?

Mike had been extracted twelve times before Sue parked next to the front door of the children's home on August 27.

Desperately wanting this extraction to be a lot different from the others, she had one last thing to say to me before she left home.

“I have this image of what's going to happen today, and I want to talk to you about it,” she said quietly. “Remember the story of the cat who lived in a mans house in Vermont that had thirteen doors opening on the outside?”