Torey Hayden

Silent Boy

He was a frightened boy who

refused to speak – until a teacher’s

love broke through the silence

Dedication

To S. K.

for teaching me to cherish the

brutal privilege of being human

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part II

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty–one

Chapter Twenty–two

Chapter Twenty–three

Chapter Twenty–four

Chapter Twenty–five

Chapter Twenty–six

Chapter Twenty–seven

Chapter Twenty–eight

Chapter Twenty–nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty–one

Part III

Chapter Thirty–two

Chapter Thirty–three

Chapter Thirty–four

Chapter Thirty–five

Chapter Thirty–six

Chapter Thirty–seven

Chapter Thirty–eight

Exclusive sample chapter

About the Author

Torey Hayden

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part I

Chapter One

Zoo-boy. The legs of the table were his cage. With arms up protectively over his head, he rocked. Back and forth, back and forth. An aide tried to prod him into moving out from under the table but she had no luck. Back and forth, back and forth the boy rocked.

I watched from behind the one-way mirror. ‘How old is he?’ I asked the woman on my right.

‘Fifteen.’

Hardly a boy anymore. I leaned close to the glass to see him. ‘How long has he been here?’ I asked.

‘Four years.’

‘Without ever speaking?’

‘Without ever speaking.’ She looked over at me in the eerie gloom of the room behind the mirror. ‘Without ever making a noise at all.’

I continued to watch a little longer. Then I picked up my box of materials and went out into the room on the other side of the mirror. The aide backed off and, when I entered, she willingly left. I could hear the click of a door in the outer corridor and I knew she had gone behind the mirror to watch too. Only Zoo-boy and I were left in the room.

Carefully, I set down my box of materials. I waited a moment to see if he would react to a new person in the room, but he didn’t. So I came closer. I sat down on the floor an arm’s length away from where he had barricaded himself under the table. Still he rocked, his arms and legs curled up around him. I could get no idea of his stature.

‘Kevin?’

No response.

Not sure what to do, I looked around. I was acutely aware of the audience beyond the mirror. They were talking in there, their voices indistinct, no more than an undulating murmur, like wind through cattails on a summer’s afternoon. But I knew the sound for what it was.

The boy didn’t look fifteen. Even wrapped up in a ball like that where I couldn’t get much of a look at him, he didn’t appear that old. Nine, maybe. Or eleven. Not nearly sixteen.

‘Kevin,’ I said again, ‘my name is Torey. Do you remember Miss Wendolowski telling you someone was coming out to work with you? That’s me. I’m Torey and I work with people who have a hard time talking.’

Still he rocked. I wasn’t given even the slightest acknowledgment. All around us hung a heavy, cloying silence embroidered with the rhythmic sound of his body hitting against the linoleum.

I started to talk to him, keeping my voice soft and welcoming, the way one talks to timid puppies. I talked of why I had come, of what I was going to be doing with him, of other children whom I had worked with and had success. I told him about myself. What I said wasn’t important, only the tone was.

No response. He only rocked.

The minutes slipped away. I was running dry of things to say. Such a one-sided conversation was not easy to maintain, but what made it more difficult was not Zoo-boy so much as the ghostly presence of those beyond the mirror. It was too easy to feel stupid talking to oneself when half a dozen people one couldn’t see were watching. Finally, I pulled over my box of materials and sorted out a paperback book, a mystery story about a teenager and his girl friend. I’ll read to you, I told Zoo-boy, until we feel a little more relaxed with one another.

‘Chapter One:The Long Road.’

I read.

And read.

The minutes kept moving around the face of the clock. Occasionally there was the muffled noise of a door opening and closing beyond our little room. They were leaving, one by one. Nothing in here was worth wasting an afternoon to see. I was not a spectacular reader. The story wasn’t riveting. And Zoo-boy only rocked.

I kept on reading. And counting the openings and closings. How many people had been in the room behind the mirror? I couldn’t recall exactly. Six? Or was it seven? And how many had gone out already? Five?

I read on.

Click-click. Another gone.

Click-click. That was seven.

I continued to read. My voice became the only sound in the room. I looked over. Zoo-boy had stopped rocking. Slowly he brought his arms down to see me better. He smiled. He was nobody’s fool. He had been counting too.

He gestured at me, a small movement within the confines of the table and chairs.

‘What?’ I asked, because I couldn’t understand what he was trying to communicate.

He gestured again, more widely this time. Only it wasn’t just a simple motion. Rather, it was a sentence, a paragraph almost, of gestures.

I still couldn’t understand. I moved a chair aside to see him better but I had to ask him to repeat it.

There was something he wanted me to know. The motions were poetic in their gyrating, wreathing urgency. A hand ballet. But they were no sign language I understood, not Ameslan, not the hand alphabet. I couldn’t comprehend at all.

From under the table came a deep sigh. He grimaced at me. Then patiently he repeated his gestures again, more slowly this time, more emphatically, like someone speaking to a rather stupid child. He became frustrated when he could not make me understand.

Finally, he gave up. We sat in silence, staring at one another. The book was still in my hands, so in desperation to fill the time, I asked him if he’d like me to read a little more. Zoo-boy nodded.

I settled back against the wall. ‘Chapter Five: Out of the Cave.’

Zoo-boy pushed the other chair slightly out from the table and reached to touch the cloth of my jeans. I looked up.

He had his mouth open, one hand pulling the lower jaw down. He pointed down his throat. Then dismally, he shook his head.

Chapter Two

For a little over a year I had been working at the clinic as a research psychologist. Most of my professional life had been spent as a teacher. While in education I had held a variety of positions, running the full gamut from teaching a regular first-grade class to teaching graduate-level university students, from working in an open-plan progressive school to working in a locked classroom on the children’s unit of a state mental institution. I loved teaching. I always had; I still did. But then, as years passed, the general philosophies, particularly in special education, began to shift and I grew to feel like a stranger in my own world.

At that point I decided to work on a doctorate in special education. I’m not sure why. I never particularly wanted the degree itself, it would overqualify me and I could never return to the classroom with it. And no other aspect of education appealed to me. I certainly would never make an administrator. But I went ahead and started the doctorate anyway. In the final analysis I suppose it was simply something to do while I tried to decide what direction my life should take next.

In my deep heart of hearts I was hoping that the philosophical pendulum would swing again in education and I could return to the classroom without compromising my own beliefs. However, as I dragged out my studies over four years, the change did not come, and I was faced with the brutal decision either of actually getting the degree and slamming shut the classroom door forever or of leaving the whole thing messily unfinished and trying something new. In the end, I chose the latter route because I just couldn’t confront the thought of never being able to return to teaching in the future. So I moved away from Minneapolis and the university with nothing to show for my four years there.

Throughout my career I had been working on research into a little-known psychological phenomenon known as elective mutism. This is an emotional disturbance occurring primarily in children. The child is physically capable of speaking but for psychological reasons refuses to do so. Most of these youngsters actually do speak somewhere, usually at home with their families, but they are voluntarily mute everywhere else. Over the years I had accrued a large body of data on this problem and developed treatment methods. Thus, when I saw an advertisement for a child psychologist, a research position with some clinical work, it seemed a reasonable solution to the difficulties I was having with my own field.

As the months passed, I found I was happy enough in my work at the clinic, but it was different from teaching. The children were parceled out to me, mostly by virtue of their language or lack of it, since that was my specialty. But they were never my children. In the few hours a week that I saw them, each individually, there was no opportunity for that small, self-contained civilization to develop when the door to the outer world was closed.

The clinic, however, did provide a lot of advantages. It was pleasant to be in the company of adults again for the major part of my working day. It wasn’t so much because I preferred their company but rather for the side benefits. I could wear decent clothes and put on makeup and not worry if some kid was going to spit up on my dry-clean-only blazer or escape the room because I wasn’t wearing my sure-grip track shoes. I could wear my long hair loose without worrying about someone pulling it out of my head. And perhaps best of all, I could wear skirts again. I didn’t need the freedom of movement and washability jeans provided, more to the point, my legs were not covered with bruises from being kicked constantly.

Association with my new colleagues at the clinic was reason enough to take the job. All of them were well educated, experienced, intelligent and expressive. There was always someone to kick an idea around with. In addition, there were other good points. I had magnificent facilities at my disposal, including a large, airy, sunlit therapy room, brand-new toys and equipment, a video recorder that worked, a computer down the hall and a statistician to go with it who spoke genuine English. Moreover, I had recognition for my work. I had a good salary. And I had more free time than I had ever had before. So, all in all, I was happy enough.

Then came Zoo-boy.

I hadn’t especially wanted the case. Right from the beginning the hopelessness shone through. One morning a social worker named Dana Wendolowski from the Garson Gayer Home had phoned the clinic in search of me. We have a boy for you, she told me, and the weary despair was a little too clear in her voice.

His name was Kevin Richter, although no one seemed to call him Kevin. He had earned his nickname because he spent all his waking hours under tables, chairs lined up in front of him and around the perimeter of the table until he was secure behind a protective barrier of wooden legs. There he sat, rocked sometimes, ate, did his schoolwork, watched TV. There he lived in his little self-built cage. Zoo-boy.

But Kevin’s problem went deeper than just an affinity for tables. He did not talk. He made no noise, even when he wept. The files claimed he had talked once upon a time, a long time ago. According to the sketchily drawn past in the Garson Gayer records, Kevin had never spoken at school when he’d attended. He was retained once and then twice because he did not talk to the teachers and no one knew whether or not he was learning. He had talked at home, at least that’s what the report said. And then he’d stopped. First he stopped talking to his stepfather, then a little later to his mother. Supposedly, he continued to speak to his younger sisters but by the time he was committed to the first residential treatment program, at nine, someone noticed Kevin was not speaking at all. No one could say exactly when he stopped talking. One day someone asked, and no one could remember the last time they had heard Kevin. And no one had heard him since.

Far more apparent than his lack of speech were Kevin’s fears. He lived in morbid, gut-wrenching fear of almost everything, his life was consumed by it. He feared highways and door hinges and spirals on notebooks and dogs and darkness and pliers and odd bits of string that might fall on the floor. He was too terrified of water to bathe; too superstitious of being without clothes to change them. And for the last three years Kevin had refused to set foot outside the door of the Garson Gayer residence. He had actually stayed inside all that time. Kevin’s fears had trapped him in a far more secure prison than he could ever have built with tables and chairs.

As the social worker told me these things I braced my forehead on one fist, the receiver of the phone in the crook of my neck. With my other hand I filled the margin of the desk blotter with doodles. The woman’s voice had a hurried desperation to it, as if she knew I would cut her short before she had said everything she needed to say.

Garson Gayer was a new facility, a model progressive institution. They had a full staff, including a resident psychologist, speech therapists, nurses and teachers. Why did they want me? I asked.

She had read about my work. She’d heard I worked with children who did not speak. I wondered aloud, Why, when there was so much wrong with this boy, had they decided to tackle his lack of speech? Well, you have to start somewhere, she replied, and her laugh was hollow. The phone grew quiet for a moment. Truth is, she said, it’s not quite like that. Kevin would be sixteen in mid-September and here it was, already late August. Garson Gayer only took children up through their fifteenth birthdays, so the rules had already been bent for him to allow him to stay this long. The state had custody of Kevin. And so far nothing they’d done for him at Garson Gayer had produced any improvement. If they couldn’t come up with something soon, well … She did not say it. She didn’t have to. We both knew the places boys like Kevin went, who had no family, no money, no hope.

He sounded like a lost cause right from the beginning. He had a lousy past. Very little useful data was recorded in the Garson Gayer file but there was enough to make Kevin’s childhood sound like so many others I had known. School failures, financial difficulties, physical abuse of Kevin and other children in the family, marital troubles, friction between Kevin and his stepfather, alcohol abuse, and perhaps most sinister of all, the fact that Kevin had been voluntarily given into state custody by his mother. What must a kid be like when even his own mother did not want him? Moreover, Kevin had spent seven years already in institutions, more than eight totally mute, and almost sixteen learning to feel comfortable being crazy. If that wasn’t the portrait of a loser, I didn’t know what would be.

I didn’t want this case. As it was, I already had too many children to become involved with one who would obviously be a black hole-a maw to dump time and energy and effort into with no return. And as I sat and listened and drew geometric designs on the blotter, I had an even more shameful thought. This was a private clinic; we usually didn’t get the welfare kids. All I had to do to get rid of this case was mention money in a very serious way. While Garson Gayer would obviously foot the bill for my initial work with Kevin Richter, if I didn’t want the case, well, that would be the easiest way.…

It was tempting. It was a good deal more tempting to refuse this case than I was ready to admit. Yet I couldn’t. I could think such thoughts but I couldn’t make myself act on them. It would have been so different in the schoolroom. Ed or Birk or Lew simply would have rung me from the Special Ed Office and told me, ‘I’ve got a new kid for you.’ And I would have groused because I always groused, and they wouldn’t have noticed because they never did. Then he’d be mine, that loser, that kid with no hope, who couldn’t make it anywhere else, and we’d try there in my room, amidst the battered books and the rummage-sale toys and noisy finches and the stink of unchanged pants, to build another chance. We didn’t succeed very often. Our triumphs, when they did come, were few and small. Sometimes no one else even noticed them. But it didn’t matter. I never thought of not trying, only because I never had the godly privilege of judging if I should. Or if I could. Or if I would. So, while not wanting this case, I took it and agreed to come. Given the option and seeing the odds, I sure wasn’t keen about it. But I did not think that should be my decision.

Because of my classroom experience and my research, I had evolved therapeutic techniques which varied a little from those of my colleagues at the clinic. I preferred to see the more seriously disturbed children daily over a shorter period of time, rather than once a week over many months or years. Also I often went to the child instead of having him come to the clinic, so that we could work in the troubled environment. In the initial sessions, I was very definite about setting up expectations for the child. From the beginning we both knew why I was there and what things we needed to accomplish together. On the other hand, the sessions themselves tended to be casual, unstructured affairs. This approach worked well for me and I was comfortable with it.

My research had yielded a reliable method for treating elective mutes. I set up the expectation that the child would speak, gave him the opportunity to do so and assumed he would. However, I was not sure what I could do for Kevin-under-the-table. While the technique had always worked before, I was concerned about its applicability to him. The most critical question, I thought, as I hung up from talking with the social worker, was whether or not Kevin was an elective mute. Had he ever really talked? To a worried or wishful parent, so many noises could sound like words. By my calculations, he would have been a very young child when anyone last actually heard him speak, and then it had only been his immediate family. Could a five-year-old sister be a trusted judge of speech? Could a mother assess the quality of her preschool son’s words, if she only occasionally heard him talk at home? And there was no evidence at all that anyone who might be considered a reliable judge of normal speech had ever heard him. Kevin wasn’t deaf; that had been checked repeatedly by the various institutions he had been in. He could gesture his basic needs but he did not know true sign language. Someone had tried to teach him at Garson Gayer, but a suspected very low IQ was cited when he didn’t learn. For all intents and purposes, Kevin was noncommunicative. Whether his silence was the result of choice or of circumstances or of disturbance or of some organic occurrence in the brain, no one knew.

So what could I do with him? How could I find out?

That first day in the therapy room had been vaguely reassuring to me. Despite his bizarre behaviors, he was aware enough of his environment to do something as canny as count the people leaving the room behind the mirror. That wasn’t a stupid boy’s actions, whatever his reported IQ. And yet he had let me in on the secret. When the others had left, he stopped rocking and responded to me.

Another thing I knew he could do was read. In fact, according to Kevin’s written schoolwork, he read startlingly well for a boy educated in institutions as if mentally retarded. He could comprehend a written text at a seventh-grade level.

Armed with these scanty bits of information, I decided to plow my way right in, assume he could talk and try to get him to. I settled on a tactic that had worked with other elective mutes: I’d have him read aloud to me from the book we’d started in the mirrored therapy room.

The next morning I returned to Garson Gayer. Gratefully, I accepted an alternative room down near the ward rather than go back to the room with the one-way mirror. The other therapists needed that room, Miss Wendolowski said, and I was quite glad not to have it. Kevin and I did not need the worry of ghosts along with everything else.

The room we got was a bare little affair. It was small. I could pace it in four steps either direction. The only furniture consisted of a table, two chairs and a bookcase with no books in it. There was a vomit-green carpet, the kind that wears like Astroturf. One wall was half windows, a nice feature. A broad radiator ran along the length below the windows and uttered a small reptilian sound. All other walls were bare and painted white, a not-quite-white white, gloss two-thirds of the way up for washability and the rest flat paint. That was an institutional painting habit and I hated it. I always felt as if I were in a discreet cage and, when a teacher, I’d felt obliged to hang the kids’ work up there on the flat part and get it mucky, just for the freedom of it. Here there were no pictures on the walls at all, no posters, nothing, save a black-and-white clock that audibly breathed the minutes. And the pale golden September sunshine.

I arrived before Kevin that morning. An aide escorted me down and then left to fetch him. I stood alone in the small room and waited. Beyond the windows I could see a little girl outside in the courtyard. She looked to be about eight or nine and was confined to a wheelchair. Her movements were spastic and her head lolled to one side. I could hear her crying for someone named Winnie. Over and over again she wailed, her voice high-pitched and keening. It was a lonely sound that made my skin crawl.

The door opened and the aide pushed Kevin in. Then, without entering himself, the aide asked me when we’d be through. Thirty minutes, I replied. He nodded, jangled his keys a moment and seemed ready to say something else. But he didn’t. Instead he closed the door and I heard the key turn in the lock. That startled me. I had no key of my own to let us out and I hadn’t expected to be locked in. A small twinge of panic pinched my stomach and I had to take a deep breath before I could accept the fact and turn to face Kevin.

He stood paralyzed with fear. His eyes darted frantically around the room. I was between him and the table and I could see him weighing the danger of passing me to get to safety.

He was a tall youth. It was the first time I’d had a real look at him, and he was a big boy, nearly a man, although an aura of youngness clung to him. He was at least as tall as I was, but thin and frail looking, like a winter cornstalk. Brown hair fell lank over his forehead. Adolescence had ravaged his skin, leaving him with lumpy features and cheeks smothered in acne. Thick-lensed glasses slid down his nose, in spite of a black elastic strap to keep them in place. His eyes were gray and lifeless as a city puddle. He wore church-box clothes, a hopelessly too-small red-checked flannel shirt and gabardine trousers that barely covered the tops of his socks. He looked more like a cartoonist’s caricature of a boy than a real person.

God, he was ugly.

A moment of hopelessness washed over me as I looked at him. Stepping aside, I allowed room for him to pass. Relief flooded his features and he dived past me and under the table.

The chairs went up, seats facing outward, backs tight against the table. I stood watching while he fashioned his cage. He was not shutting me out. He smiled pleasantly at me and gestured in a friendly manner, and I knew it was not me that he felt so compelled to protect himself from. The disquieting fact was that there was no one else in the room, nothing but the walls and the pale sunlight.

I pondered how to work with him, whether to sit on the floor outside the makeshift barricade, as I had in the mirrored therapy room, or whether to join him under the table. After another moment of indecision, I dropped down on my hands and knees and crawled under the table too. He welcomed me with a pleased smile, moved over to make room, of which there wasn’t much, until we both sat hunched together like gnomes in the semi-darkness.

We were only inches from one another. He smelled rather gamey at that distance, and so I just sat for a few minutes, accustoming myself to the lack of light and the cramped space and the odor. Kevin began to rock slightly, his arms clasped tight around his knees, his chin resting atop. He stared at me without wavering.

Well, now what? I really was feeling awfully pessimistic at just that moment. Leaning out, I pulled my box of materials into the cage with us. Taking off the lid, I searched through it for the book we had been reading.

It’s scary, I said to Kevin as I dug through the junk in the box, to start talking when one has been silent so long. But the easiest way to start is to jump right in.

There were other kids, I said, whom I had worked with, who hadn’t been speaking either. I told Kevin about them, of how they had felt before they’d started talking again, of how scary it was the first time and how sure they’d all been that they couldn’t do it. But they could. Every single child had been able to talk in the end, I said, and nothing bad had happened to any of them for it. There was nothing to be frightened of. They all were, because that was the way it felt in the beginning, but there actually was nothing to fear in the end. It was just a feeling.

I spoke in a slow, easy voice, letting it reek with confidence. I lounged back to the extent one could lounge back while sitting under a table with a large fifteen-year-old, so that he could see how relaxed I was, how certain I was of success.

Opening the book, I feigned great interest in it, looking at all the illustrations and I kept talking, oozing self-assurance like a car salesman. Then I laid the book on the carpet. What we’re going to do, I said to him, is have you read to me. Let’s start here.

Kevin looked at me in alarm.

‘Right here, I think,’ I said. ‘I read those chapters yesterday, so we’ll have you start right here. Chapter Seven: The Tide Goes Out.’

Kevin grabbed my arm and shook his head violently. His eyes were dilated wide with horror.

‘Yes, I know. It’s not something you’re used to doing. But that’s okay. Nothing will happen. And everybody’s a little afraid when they first get started. That’s natural.’ I tried to sound very casual, as if this were a most usual thing. Kevin, however, knew it to be highly unusual. He had the look of a frightened horse, that wild, whites-of-the-eyes expression, with his head turned to one side.

Smoothing the pages out, I pointed to the first word. ‘We’ll start with just this one word, okay? Forget the rest of them. Just look at this one. What is it?’

He rocked a little harder and the table shuddered.

‘Here, look at it. This one word. Give it a try.’

Kevin regarded the page. He still had his frightened-horse look. Bringing a hand up, he rubbed his forehead and then pulled his palm down across his face, dragging it out of shape. Then tentatively, he put one finger under the first word.

Seconds passed.

‘What is that word? Look at it. What is it?’

Kevin took a deep breath.

‘The first word is always the hardest one. After that, it’s a cinch. You’ll see.’

He started to rock again. I could hear his breath coming shallowly, the fear rattling up through his throat.

‘Only that first word. That word. How does it start? Come on. Get that word.’

Kevin was taking me seriously. He was going to try. Bringing his other hand down, he ran it along the perimeter of the book, then stopped it to steady the page. Cautiously, as if the book might leap up and nip him, he bent over it until he was hunched almost double. In the gloom under the table, that movement obscured what little light we did have on the page.

He took another deep breath. All the while I kept urging, kept talking to keep the silence at bay. I didn’t want him to hear the silence and know it was stronger than I was.

A third big breath, shakier this time. He lifted his hand and wiped the sweat off on his shirt front. A wet stain had been left where his finger was on the page. Frantically he tried to erase it, and when he couldn’t, he glanced over at me to see what my reaction was. Then he put his hand back over it to cover it.

He needed another minute to rock. It was not easy to do in his hunched position and the whole table shook.

‘Let’s go. Let’s have a try.’

He opened his mouth. No sound, not even a breath.

Seconds drew into minutes. He closed his mouth again.

My constant patter continued. Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go. Let’s try.

Again Kevin began taking breaths in preparation. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s as he would get ready to try and then lose courage. He started to tap the word with a finger, and that small steady, penetrating sound soon filled up the space around us.

‘Have a go. Come on, Kev, you can do it. I know you can. This is just the way it happens, give it a try.’

A funny noise joined the cacophony of taps and tries. Kevin’s teeth were chattering. At first I had to sit back a little to identify the sound, and that made him look over at me. I could see them chatter. I smiled. Kevin lurched back over the book again with determination. He had begun to believe me. He was going to get that word.

Sweat beaded on his upper lip. His hands shook. Big, dark circles dampened his shirt under his arms and down the center of his back, and the smell was incredible. Still he opened and closed his mouth in abortive tries. He made big, wide circles with it, as if trying to stretch it into working order.

Minute after minute after minute was filled with his grimaces and with my nonstop patter until I felt like we were caught in a time vortex. Kevin undoubtedly thought we were caught in hell. The cords of his neck were taut. Veins stood out at his temples. His face was crimson.

I could hear the mechanical respirations of the black-and-white clock on the wall. Leaning out from under the table, I looked up at it. Twenty–three minutes had passed.

The aide would be returning soon. In an attempt to startle Kevin out of this nonproductive cycle he’d gotten trapped in, I whacked the floor with the flat of my hand. Often enough that worked with other children and we would leap right over the first word. But not this time. Startled, Kevin only bumped his head on the underside of the tabletop. Rubbing it tenderly, he bent forward and attacked the word anew. He brought a hand to his mouth and tried to force his lips into the shape of the word. The word was ‘every’ and soon it required both hands to stretch his lips back into the shape of an e. Sweat dropped from his face down onto the page. The ever-present sound of his teeth chattering echoed in our enclosure.

I slid back out from under the table and sat up straight, rubbing the tense muscles in my back. The thirty minutes were nearly over and we weren’t going to have success. If he hadn’t been trying so desperately, I don’t think I would have felt as disheartened as I did, but it was apparent Kevin cared. Unfortunately, caring wasn’t enough.

‘Well, we’ll call it a day, shall we?’ I said and reached in for the book. ‘It’s not such a big matter that it didn’t work out this time. That happens lots. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

He looked at me. Tears puddled up and then ran down over his cheeks.

Chapter Three

Puzzled, I drove back to the clinic after the session. Kevin appeared to be trying so hard. Very rarely had I had a kid who had tried like that right from the beginning. It made him enjoyable to work with because it was the two of us together against the problem. However, I was not so naïve as not to wonder why. Why would he appear to want to talk again so willingly, if he were able to speak, but was refusing to do so? That didn’t make very good sense. What was his exact problem? How did his lack of speech tie in? Did his fears cause his inability to talk? Or did his failure to speak cause the fears? Or were they even related? Perhaps what nagged at me most was the uncertainty that Kevin could, indeed, talk. If he couldn’t, that clearly would account for why he didn’t. And it probably would account as well for why he was trying so hard, if he believed I could give him a power he did not possess. The lack of information on this boy who had been in and out of institutions for so many years was appalling. Was it possible Kevin had never spoken normally? Could he have been deprived of speech through some accident or organic factor? Was I trying to force him to do something he was physically or mentally incapable of doing? Had he some sort of insidious mental illness like schizophrenia which had stolen speech from him, as it sometimes does?

There were so many questions about this boy. Questions without answers.

‘Someone phoned for you,’ Jeff said when I arrived back in my office at the clinic. He was bent over The New England Journal of Medicine and did not bother to look up.

‘Who was it? Did you answer it?’ I asked. Jeff was loath to answer the phone under most circumstances. A child psychiatrist in his last years of training, Jeff shared a closet-sized office with me, which used to house rats and pigeons when the former occupant, Dr Kirk, was into his rats-and-pigeons phase. The room still smelled a little like a rodent-infested aviary. There were no windows, which did not help the smell any, but we were hardly cut off from the outside. Instead, we had three telephones between the two of us, all with different numbers. His, mine and ours. I had no idea why there were three since the room was too small to accommodate another desk and Dr Kirk, for all his cleverness, had not been training a zoological answering service. But there it was, that third phone, residing on a chair between our two desks, and an odd assortment of calls still came in over it. Consequently, the room was usually alive with ringing. Jeff, if he could help it, never answered any of the three.

I began taking off my jacket. ‘I said, Jeff, did you answer it?’

‘Yes.’ His article must have been awfully riveting.

‘Well, who was it? What did they want?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked up at last. ‘They hung up.’

My silence was adequate reply.

‘I did too ask! Don’t look at me like that.’

I dropped my box of materials on the desk and slumped into my chair. All along my back the muscles were sore. I hadn’t realized at the time how much I’d been empathizing with Kevin’s distress. For several moments I just sat, letting the muscles relax, not really thinking at all. My eyes rose up the wall in front of me to the confusion of things on my bulletin board. It was kind of a portrait of my mind turned inside out – kids’ drawings, a button in Welsh protesting nuclear energy, four photographs, my calendar with all its visual proof that I did not need a case like Kevin’s, my rotation schedule sheet, a few brightly colored leaves, caught falling from the trees to fulfill that old superstition about good luck for twelve leaves caught in autumn, a gigantic poster of a Cheshire cat, the framed poem in childish hand by one of my former students. Kevin sat at the very back of my mind, pushed there by nothingness. I had meant to ask Jeff’s ideas on the case but I was momentarily drained. I just sat.

Then the phone rang, shattering what little sense I had put back into my head.

We had a community program known as Big Brothers/Big Sisters which was designed to provide underprivileged children, especially those from broken homes, with the chance to enjoy a caring relationship with an adult. I had participated in the program before but had given it up when I was teaching because I didn’t have enough time. Now without a class of my own, without my usual daily fix of rascality, I’d decided to rejoin.

The woman was calling to tell me that they had matched me with an eight-year-old Native American girl. She apologized for not being able to get hold of me sooner because that evening they were holding an open house for the new participants. She hoped very much that I’d be able to make it on such short notice.

She was a scruffy-looking little kid, a bit on the chubby side with grimy chipmunk cheeks and two Band-Aids on her forehead. She wore patched blue corduroy pants, a pink-striped polyester top covered in fuzz balls and a red cardigan with the top button buttoned. Her hair was in two long, fist-thick braids. And I suspect she had more teeth missing from her mouth than were in it. So she hissed like a snake when saying S’s and she sprayed.

‘You my Big Sister?’ she asked as I wandered into the room. We both had name tags on. Hers was upside down. I turned my head to read it. Charity Stands-On-Top.

‘Yup. I’m Torey.’

She gave me a big, toothless grin. We sat down together on one of the long benches. I had a glass of cherry Kool-Aid and two cookies in my hands. Charity had obviously been imbibing already because she had a bright red mustache.

‘Is one of them cookies mine?’ she inquired politely. It hadn’t been. I suspect she had probably already had her quota but I gave it to her anyway. Another huge, face-splitting grin.

‘So, well then, what you gonna do with me?’ she asked, and put the cookie whole into her mouth. ‘Where you gonna take me? My other Big Sister, Diana, she used to take me to the movies. You gonna take me to the movies?’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Well, then, I got to have popcorn – buttered popcorn – when I go to the movies. And a big-sized Pepsi. Or maybe Coke. That’d be okay too. And one of them big suckers that lasts long. And a box of jelly Dots. Diana, she used to buy me all of them things. Every time.’

‘I see.’

‘She used to buy me other stuff too. You gonna buy me stuff?’

‘What sort of stuff?’

She shrugged. ‘Just stuff,’ she answered ambiguously and eyed the remainder of my other cookie. ‘Good stuff,’ she continued when I offered no comment and no cookie. ‘You know. Not clothes or anything. I ain’t a poor kid. You don’t have to go buying me no clothes. What I need’s good stuff. Like once, Diana bought me this Tonka truck. You know. One of them real big ones that you can sit on and dig up the yard.’

‘Oh. I see.’

‘Her name was Diana. Did I tell you that? What’s your name again?’

‘Torey.’

‘Oh yeah. I forgot. That’s a weird name. Where’d you get a weird name like that at?’

‘It’s from Victoria.’

‘Oh. That’s an even weirder name.’ Charity looked me over in a very appraising manner and I felt like a piece of livestock at an auction.

‘I thought you’d be prettier,’ she said at last.

Not knowing exactly how to field that one, I just shrugged.

‘You got funny-looking eyes. Why are they that color? Do you wear contact lenses?’

‘No.’

‘Diana did. She was practically blind. And they kept falling out. Once they dropped right out and we had to look all over the floor at Woolworth’s on our hands and knees and then this guy comes in and he goes CRUNCH!’ Charity fell about with laughter. I finished my Kool-Aid.

‘You don’t got much to say, do you?’ she said to me. ‘You got a funny voice. Is that why? Are you embarrassed? Where did you get your funny voice at? Is something wrong with it?’

‘I don’t think so. I was born with it.’

There was a long, long pause while Charity regarded me further. Then she shook her head with resignation. ‘You really aren’t very interesting, are you?’

I could hardly have described Charity that way. Full of cheeky arrogance and a surety about herself that was intimidating, Charity was convinced she owned the world. Five minutes with her and I knew that. I also knew that if Charity had been the first kid I’d ever met, I’d probably not have chosen a career working with children.

I supposed she was a street kid, wiser at eight than I’d be at eighty. She had that streetwise air about her, the confidence that shifting for oneself gives. Yet she was terribly disarming with her chubby cheeks and her Band-Aids and her huge, gaping grin.

‘So,’ she said, her mouth full with a cookie she’d charmed off the refreshments lady, ‘what do you do when you ain’t here?’

‘I work. With kids.’

‘Oh? What kind of kids? Where at? Do I know ’em?’

‘I work at the Sandry Clinic.’

‘Ohhhhhh,’ she replied with a wise nod. ‘Them kind of kids. What’s the matter with your kids? They jump up and down? My brother jumps up and down and he wets the bed. He went to one of them places once. But you know what? It didn’t do no good. He still wets the bed.’

‘That happens sometimes.’

‘So what they like, your kids? What do they do?’

I told her about Kevin. I would hardly have expected myself to, but I did. I told how this boy had lived in a treatment home all these years and how he hadn’t talked in ever so long a time. I told how we sat together under the table and tried to read. The strength of Kevin’s fears came back to me, and I tried to describe to Charity what it had been like being with him when he was so afraid.

Charity was leaning forward, her chin in her hands. She listened carefully. ‘Why do you go to work with him?’ she asked.

‘Because that’s what my job is.’

‘He sounds weird to me.’

‘He is weird. But that’s okay. I don’t mind that.’

‘Can I meet him sometimes? Will you take me to meet him?’

‘Maybe. Someday maybe.’

‘He’d talk to me. I’d say, “Kid, you don’t have to be scared of me. I’m just a little kid.” Then he’d talk to me.’

‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘we don’t even know if he can talk. Maybe we’re trying to make him do something he can’t really do.’

‘How come you don’t know?’

‘Because we don’t know,’ I replied, feeling a little exasperated. ‘That’s how come.’

A look of disdain crossed her face and she leaned back on the bench. ‘You’re silly. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.’

‘What is? Why?’

‘Well, how come if you don’t know, you don’t ask him? How come you don’t just say, “Kid, can you talk?” Then you’d know.’ She smiled affably. ‘How you supposed to know, if you don’t ask?’

Chapter Four

The staff behind the front desk at Garson Gayer were beginning to recognize me. They called Hello to me from behind their glass partition as I came past. When I went in the back room to get a cup of coffee, I could hear one woman tell the other who I was: Zoo-boy’s therapist. Come to try and make him talk, she said, and I could tell from her tone of voice that she didn’t think it would happen. I hung up my jacket and went on down to the small white room. I didn’t even have the secretaries fooled.

Kevin and I had no more success this second try than we had had the day before. The only variation was that the tears came sooner. Over his pimply cheeks, down onto his chin they rolled to drip off onto the book where he would rub them out furiously with his fingers, leaving big smeary blobs on the paper. However, never once did the tears deter him. He kept trying. Long after I was ready to give up, long after the whole enterprise took on a dreary, somewhat perverse mood, Kevin kept trying, kept laboring away to get cooperation out of his voice and his mouth and his heart. And he kept failing.

The hell was not Kevin’s alone. It had fast become mine as well. I felt as trapped in his fears as I did in the table-and-chairs cage. There was an odd, deviant feel to his efforts because, while he tried so hard, futility was draped over us as tangibly as a cloak. I could not shake it off. Like Sisyphus rolling his huge stone to the hilltop, Kevin continued to struggle but with the foregone conclusion that regardless of the effort, the stone would go rolling back down again. That was the perversity of it to me, that he could appear to try so hard and still emanate such hopelessness.

Every muscle in my body grew rigid. I had a headache from clenching my teeth too tightly. My own voice faltered. I had urged and coaxed and cajoled until even coffee could not lubricate my throat enough.

Kevin trembled. His shoulders shook. Even his head shook. I could hear fear-torn breath come through chattering teeth. And all the effort was in vain.

Finally I put my hand over the book. Our time was nearly up. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow, okay?’

He regarded me wistfully. His chin trembled a little more.

‘We’ll get it done, Kevin. Don’t worry.’

But clearly he did.

‘Kevin, I want to ask you something.’

He watched me.

‘Can you talk? I mean, can you? Are you able to?’

His eyes fell. To the carpet. To the book. To his hands. A great silence loomed up which was both divisive, putting infinity between us, and binding. For a boy who said nothing, he certainly left nothing unsaid.

‘Kevin?’

He gestured. I didn’t understand. He gestured again and grimaced, frustration sharpening the movements of his hands. But I was stupid. Disgruntled, he smacked the floor with his fingers, and we sat again in silence.

‘Can you, Kevin?’

His eyes came back to me, back to meet my eyes. He nodded.

‘You can?’

He shrugged.

‘You can, though. You can talk? You can but you don’t? You won’t? Is it something like that?’

An incomplete gesture with one hand and then he dropped it. He shrugged again and stared only at the carpet.

‘Why don’t you then?’

He began to cry, his mouth dragged down in misery. I thought to put my arms around him and comfort him but I didn’t. I shouldn’t. The silence between us told me that much, so I just sat, my hands in my lap. Kevin only wept harder, his big man-sized fingers locking and unlocking. His shoulders shook. But no sound came from him.

On my way back to the clinic from Garson Gayer, I stopped in town to pick up some labels from the printer’s. As I was walking down the street toward the print shop, I passed a drugstore window filled with an array of Halloween decorations for sale. I had gone completely by the store before being pulled back to pause and gaze at the display. Black cats on pumpkins, honeycomb jack-o’-lanterns, glow-in-the-dark skeletons, ghost lapel pins, a book of Pumpkin carols and other Peanuts memorabilia lined the window.

A profound, aching nostalgia flooded me as I stood there. I no longer had any children to buy decorations for, no longer had a reason to make a room gay with orange and black crepe paper. Suddenly my life seemed so empty, cast adrift as I was in an all-adult world.

I could hear the kids. Standing right there on a city street in front of the drugstore, I could hear things like Robbie Cutmar’s gleeful whoops when I had pulled that big, honeycomb pumpkin out of the bag. It had cost me $3.98 in a year when $3.98 was a lot of money to me but it had been such a glorious thing. We made legends about that pumpkin, about where it had come from, about the mysterious things it must have seen when our dingy little classroom was empty for the night. Halloween came and went and still we couldn’t take that pumpkin down. It’d stayed with us in the classroom until almost April, until Tessa had accidentally fallen on it during a seizure and smashed it flat. And yet, for all its glory, that pumpkin wasn’t nearly so splendid as any of these in this window. That was the problem, I thought sadly. I could now afford to buy whichever pumpkin in the window I wanted but there was no place in my life to put it.

The window display proved too attractive. I had to go inside the drugstore to look at the things more carefully. All the while a black-hearted little gremlin sat somewhere inside me and chided me for the irrationality of what I was doing. After all, I had no class now; I might never have one again. I didn’t have any children of my own. I had no excuse to buy things like this for myself. But at the same time I fingered the change in my pocket, counting how much was there beyond what had to be spent at the printer’s.

I succumbed. I got a little package containing two cardboard bats with honeycomb bodies to be attached. With a piece of thread they could fly. Then I picked up a copy of the Pumpkin Carols. I’d always been an ardent Peanuts fan. One of the greatest pleasures of my career had been the last year I’d taught, when the kids had gone together and bought me a Snoopy wristwatch as an end-of-the-year present.

Paging through the songbook, I giggled aloud. Then I turned it over to see the price. One dollar. A whole crummy dollar for four pages and seven songs. What an awful lot of money for something like that. Especially when I did not need it. I put it back.

Aimlessly I wandered around the store and looked at other things, at birthday cards and ball-point pens. I walked through the aisles of shampoos and cotton balls and nail clippers. But I wasn’t being very successful. I could actually hear the kids singing those stupid little songs. But there aren’t any kids now! Still, I could hear them. And without half trying I could see their faces. Whoever said an active imagination is a blessing?

I returned to the display, lifted the songbook, flipped through the pages again. Then like a shoplifter, I slipped the book under my arm so that I would not have to acknowledge to my black-hearted little gremlin that I was doing such a stupid thing as buying it.

Back in the office I tore open the package with the two cardboard bats and punched them out of the sheet. Laying out the directions in case I got desperate enough to resort to them, I began assembling the things. It was no mean feat. A Ph.D. in engineering would have been the most helpful.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Jeff stood in the doorway.

Having stacked three of his medical dictionaries on top of my desk, I was standing on them in an attempt to reach the ceiling. We worked in an old building and the ceilings must have been at least eleven feet high.

‘I’m hanging these bats.’

He shut the door and came across to my desk. Skeptically, he gazed up. ‘Escaped from your belfry at last, did they?’

I made a face at him.

‘Where did you get the idea that we needed bats hanging in here?’

Finally I managed to get one thumbtack into the ceiling and then reached up to tie a thread around it. Even with three massive books under me, I was not tall enough.

‘You’re not intending on hanging any of those over my desk, are you, Hayden? They’re not going over there.’

The thread was refusing to cooperate. Once I did get it around, it pulled the thumbtack out of the ceiling when I tried to tie it. That, along with Jeff’s comments, was serving to stretch my vocabulary into a more colorful vein than I normally used.

Jeff’s interest, however, was definitely aroused. He was leaning over my desk and staring up. ‘Why don’t you make a loop first?’ he asked.

‘Why don’t you move off?’

‘I mean, put the tack in, then make a loop and try to lasso it.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Jeff. I’ll manage fine.’

Jeff went over to his desk and picked up his new edition of The Physician’s Desk Reference and brought it back. He nudged my leg. ‘Here, Hayden, move over. Let me do it.’

Within moments we were both balanced on books atop my desk with cardboard bats swinging from our hands.

I liked Jeff. Everyone liked Jeff. There was something about him which was innately likeable, but it was a mercurial, undefinable quality. He was tall but not particularly handsome, at least not in the classic handsome-doctor way. He was more what you’d call cute, like a boy you’d take home to Mother when you were in high school. His hair was brown and wavy, a few freckles were still left on his nose and he had never had his teeth straightened, so when he smiled, it came out a cheerful, lop-sided grin. He had an unsurpassable sense of humor, brash, zany and somewhat more juvenile than one would expect from a doctor. Secretly, I suspected that was the reason Jeff and I had been sequestered off together. Between the two of us, we pretty much comprised the clinic’s contribution toward New Wave psychiatry. But for all his beguiling boyishness, Jeff was brilliant. Of all the people I had met in my career, I don’t think I had ever come across anyone with as much sheer intelligence as Jeff had. It glowed from him. We all knew Jeff was brilliant, including Jeff himself, which made him rather hard to live with sometimes. But he had the golden touch. And while he wasn’t modest about it, he took it casually, as if it were not something special. That made him likeable, that quality of off-handed genius, and it made the rest of us feel lucky to know him.

We were still standing there, nose to nose, atop books on my desk when Kevin weaseled his way back into my conversation.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Jeff, after telling him about the morning’s experience.

Jeff paused, fingering the paper honeycomb of the bat’s belly. ‘What’s he afraid of? Is he afraid of actually talking, do you think? Of hearing his voice?’ Another small pause and Jeff looked at me. ‘Or of what his voice might say, if he does talk?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Or is he maybe not afraid at all of that? Could it be that he doesn’t want to talk and he’s discovered fear makes a convenient cover? People might not bother you quite so much to do something if they think you’re afraid of it. They no longer blame you and make you responsible.’ Jeff then stretched up and tied the thread into place. The bat flew between us.

‘I don’t know. He’s different from my other elective mutes. I don’t know what’s going on with him. I don’t know what he’s thinking.’

Jeff gave me an easy, very casual sort of grin. ‘No. But then do we ever know that?’

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