Kitabı oku: «Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence», sayfa 2
‘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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