Читать книгу Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 11

He had arrived in the small white room ahead of me the next day. The aide was standing outside the door when I came and he opened it for me. Kevin was already under the table.

I could hear him. ‘Haa,’ he was going, ‘haa, haa, haa.’ It was a breathy sound, not quite a whisper. It sounded like an engine coughing to life.

I bent down and moved a chair aside. Kevin started, looking up at me with great dark eyes. He did not smile his customary goofy grin and I felt like a trespasser. So I asked permission to come down and join him. He moved over to make room for me but then he turned his head away and continued with the sounds. I slid under the table and replaced the chair.

‘Haa.

‘Haa. Haa.

‘Haaaaaaaaa.’

As on the other days, Kevin was self-motivated. I didn’t need to be there at all. Haaa. Haa. Haaaa. There was a determined urgency to him this day. He was going to do it.

‘Haa. Ha. Haaa. Haaa. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

He swayed.

Haa was not a good thing to have to keep saying over and over again. His intense work on the sound was causing him to hyperventilate. It made him sway with dizziness and occasionally he was forced to pause and let his head clear. I wondered as I watched him if he knew his breathing was making him feel like that or if he just thought it was the fear.

The fear was with us. Like a living thing, it sat upon his shoulders. He trembled. Sweat flowed in rivulets down through his hair and over his ravaged skin.

‘Haaaaa. Ha. Ha. Ha.’ Still there was no real sound to it, although it was very nearly a whisper.

The minutes passed. I sat, too, with my arms hugging my knees, my chin atop them. Haa, Kevin kept saying. My bad knee grew sore from sitting so long like that without moving but I was afraid to move.

‘Haaaaaaa. Haaa. Haa, haa.’

Over and over he repeated that one sound. He seemed to need to hear himself say it because he kept his head cocked to one side. He would say the sound and then his eyes would narrow in concentration as if he was appraising the quality of it. I wondered if he had forgotten what his own voice sounded like. Or how it felt to speak.

‘Haaa. Haa, haa, haa, haa, haa, haa.’

A deep breath.

‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaa.’ The sound became a real whisper for the first time and the breathiness went out of it. Kevin jerked up, hit his head on the table. He cocked his head again. ‘Haaaaaaaaaaa,’ he went in a whisper. ‘Hooo, haaa, ho.’ His brows knit. ‘Ho,’ he whispered again and listened to the quality of the sound.

Now it was all whispers. He continued to repeat the sound, varying the vowels. ‘Haaa, ho, heeee, huh, haaaaaaaaaaa.’ Then back to the breathy ha, ha, ha, ha before returning to the softer whispered noises. He could hear the difference. With an expression of intense concentration, he tried the two, the sound and the whisper, side by side. Back and forth between the two he went.

He was like a piano tuner tuning a fine instrument. Hugging my knees very tightly, I tried to make myself as small and unobtrusive as possible. This was not my place. I had nothing to do with what Kevin was accomplishing. I was, if anything, an interloper into this private interaction Kevin was having with himself. But at the same time, I was utterly fascinated. It was like being in someone’s mind, as if I had been given the privilege of actually being inside someone else, of seeing another person relating to himself in that personal, intimate way we discourse with ourselves.

‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaa. HaaaaAAAAAaa.’ His voice broke through. It startled him and he froze, every muscle going tense. Sweat dripped off his chin onto his shirt. Silence roared around us.

‘HaaAAA?’ he said tentatively and froze again. ‘HAA?’

‘HAAAA,’ in a real voice. ‘HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.’

Kevin’s muscles remained tense, the outline of them rippling along under his T-shirt, standing out like Roman columns in his neck. But his concentration did not break. ‘Haa,’ he said aloud, listening to the sound. His voice was gravelly and hoarse from nonuse. ‘Ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha,’ he said in short bursts. Intense concentration kept his features puckered.

‘Ha. Ha. Ha. Ho. Ho. Ho. Ha. Ha.’ He sounded like a machine gun, shooting the words out in sharp staccato. ‘Huh. Huh. Huh. Ho. Ho. Hee. Hee. Hee. Ha.’

I stayed small and silent. I did not know if he had forgotten me or not, but it did not seem like the moment to call attention to my presence.

‘Huh. Huh. Huh. Huh. Hup. Hup. Haa. Haap. Haap. Haap.’ He experimented with new sounds.

All of a sudden the life went out of him. He gave a great sigh of weariness and dropped his head down on his knees in exhaustion. Then, like a tree falling, he just tumbled over onto his side and lay in a heap. Again he sighed.

I watched him.

He was exhausted. Every last bit of energy drained out of him. I was feeling a great camaraderie with him just then. His success did not have anything to do with me, but I felt very privileged that he had let me share it. I was smiling, without even being aware of it.

‘That was hard work, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You must be dead tired.’

‘Ho,’ he said, and I could hear him repeat the sound a couple of times. ‘Ho, ho. I …,’ he said, ‘I, I didn’t … ho … I didn’t think I was going to do it. Whew. Whooooow.’ His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to do that again,’ he said softly from under his arms. ‘I thought I never could do it.’

On Sunday afternoon I had Charity over. It was the first time we had seen one another since the open house. I had planned to make a kite with her and take her down to the field at the bottom of the road to fly it. The wind was excellent for kite flying, and it was a beautiful autumn afternoon.

Charity was unimpressed.

‘What’s this for?’ she asked as she came into the kitchen. I had sticks and newspapers lying spread out on the table. I explained carefully, trying to make my own enthusiasm for the project contagious. I loved making kites, and it had grown to be a passsion when I had had my classroom.

‘What do you want to do that for?’ she asked earnestly. ‘You can buy kites at the store. You don’t have to make ’em, you know.’

‘It’s fun.’

‘Oh.’

I bribed her with a chocolate-chip cookie, and we set about cutting and gluing and tying tails. Charity was a little scruffier looking than she had been on the night of the open house. Although her hair was in braids, they obviously had been slept in, causing long strands of hair to escape. Toast crumbs and bits of jam clung to the hair by her face. Her forehead was still patched up with Band-Aids, one across the other in an X, like a pirate’s crossbones. She wore a faded T-shirt with an even more faded kitten on it and, up on the right-hand shoulder, a huge, glittery dime-store brooch. It had a big hunk of blue glass in the middle, surrounded by rhinestones. I commented on it.

‘Oh this?’ Charity asked, and went a little cross-eyed trying to see it. ‘My big sister Sandy bought it for me. See, she gave it to me. It’s an emerald.’

‘I thought emeralds were green. Maybe it’s a sapphire.’

‘Nope. It’s an emerald. A blue emerald. They’re betterer than green emeralds. Green ones are common. These’re rare!’

‘Well, yes, I’d agree with that,’ I said.

‘It’s real too.’

‘Really?’

‘Yup. It’s worth at least a million dollars probably. Only I’d never sell it. Sandy gave it to me and it’s a real, genuine blue emerald.’

‘Do you have other sisters, Charity?’

‘Oh yeah. I got Sandy, she’s twelve. And Cheryl, she’s ten. And Diana, she’s eight.’

‘Diana? I thought Diana was your Big Sister from the program.’

‘This is another Diana. This one’s my real, genuine sister. For real.’

‘I see. And that’s all? Are you the youngest?’

She nodded decisively. ‘Yep. I’m the very youngest.

When they got me, they stopped. ’Cause I’m the very best. They didn’t want any more after me.’

I could understand that. For a moment I became absorbed in getting paper to stick to the side of the kite, then I looked over. ‘Hey, wait a minute, Charity. I thought you said you were eight. If you’re eight, how come Diana’s eight?’

Charity looked flustered, but only for a fleeting moment. She smacked her forehead with one hand. ‘Oh, I goofed. Silly me. Diana’s nine. I forgot.’

‘Oh. I thought perhaps you were twins,’ I said, thanking God for not making two of Charity.

‘Yeah! That’s right! I forgot. We’re twins.’

‘But I thought you just said –’

‘Well, see, Diana’s the oldest twin and I’m the youngest.’

‘I thought you said she was nine, though. And you’re eight.’

‘Well, yeah, I did,’ she said, looking at me as if I were the one who was losing her marbles.

‘Are you sure you know what twins are, Charity?’

‘Of course I do. Do you think I’m stupid? I just forgot. I got a lot on my mind and I just forgot. Diana’s just the oldest twin and I’m the youngest. First her and then me. So that’s why she’s nine. And I’m going to be nine pretty soon too.’

‘Oh? When?’

‘Next August.’

‘But, Charity, it’s October now.’

‘Yeah, see what I mean? Any day now I’ll be nine.’

Clearly this was a conversation best to be dropped.

Later we walked down to the field to fly the kite. The wind was good and even Charity’s part of the kite held up well, despite its patches. Charity ran when I told her to run and stopped when I told her to stop and let the string out when instructed. When the kite was finally airborne, she sank gratefully into the grass and sprawled out. I sat down next to her.

She looked over. ‘How come we’re doing this?’

‘Because it’s fun.’

‘Oh,’ she said, quite interested. ‘When does the fun part start?’

‘This is the fun part, Charity.’

‘Oh, it is?’ Her forehead wrinkled. ‘You do this for fun?’

I was a little disenchanted with this kid. After all, it was my Sunday afternoon too. ‘Yes, I do this for fun. And I’m having it. Why aren’t you?’

Charity looked startled. ‘Well, I guess maybe I am,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t know it.’ And for the first time since she’d arrived, she fell silent.

Both of us lay in the grass and watched the kite. Charity rose after a while and walked around the field before coming back and settling down with me again. She chattered on constantly.

At the end of the day when I was preparing to take her home, she fished something out of her pocket.

‘Here.’

It was an unidentifiable wad about three inches across.

‘I brung this for you,’ she said.

I took it and thanked her. There was a piece of thin paper around it which I attempted to unwrap. Inside was a squishy, gummy-looking lump. ‘What is it?’ I inquired politely.

‘A piece of cake. Last Wednesday this girl had a birthday at school and she brang us all some cake. I saved it for you.’

‘Oh.’ That made me feel obliged to eat it and so I took a bite and tried to look like it was scrumptious.

‘I ate a little bit of it. Just there at the edge. But I saved you the most.’ She was smiling sweetly, her empty tooth sockets all showing.

‘Well, thank you, Charity, that’s awfully thoughtful of you.’

‘Oh, that’s okay,’ she replied and shrugged. ‘I tried to give it to our dog but he spit it out.’