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 8

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?’