Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence

I assured her I was fine.

She smiled hesitantly. ‘Guess what we found Kevin doing last night?’

I shook my head.

‘One of the aides went into his room unexpectedly and Kevin didn’t hear him. Kevin was standing in front of his mirror. He was working his mouth. Con – that’s the-aide – said he thought Kevin was trying to talk. You know. He was pushing his lips into shapes of words. He wasn’t making any sounds or anything but he was trying to form words with his lips.’ She smiled at me, paused, studied my face. She had her typing clasped against her breast like a shield. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it? Do you think it is? A good sign, I mean? That he wants to talk? That you might get him to?’

I returned her smile. There was anxiety in her voice. She’d been at Garson Gayer only two years – less than half the time Kevin had been there – and I could already hear the need for miracles gnawing at her. She’d invested a lot of herself in this brutal business, this job where there was always too much to do and too little to do it with. And I could hear it was weighing hard on a farm girl from Tennessee.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think it’s probably a good sign.’

‘Con came right down and told me. He told me what he’d seen and I very nearly called you. I wanted to. I was so excited. And I wanted you to know you were helping him.’

I worked my way down to the therapy room, balancing my cup of coffee on top of my box of materials and struggling to find the key in my pocket. It was a brilliant autumn day outside and when I opened the door to the small room, I was stunned by the piercing sunlight. It illuminated all the little dust motes floating through the air.

Dana’s report of Kevin’s making faces in the mirror was intriguing to me. It was hard to tell if it was much of a sign or not. I didn’t want to put much emphasis on it in my own mind because there was no way of knowing what he had been doing. Just making faces at himself maybe. Or perhaps really practicing. Who knows. But I filed the observation away in the back of my head. So little was known about this silent kid that I appreciated every small notation.

I’d arrived with a new-hatched scheme that morning. Instead of laboring over the dreary story book we’d been using, I thought I’d have Kevin read from the Pumpkin Carol book. We could relax with that. I’d read him some; we could laugh over them; he could try one. It sounded pretty easy.

Kevin appeared at 9:30 on the dot. The aide opened the door and Kevin scuttled in, half walking, half crawling with his knees bent and his arms stiff at his sides. Once the aide retreated, Kevin dived past me for the safety of the table.

Pulling out a chair, I dropped down to the floor, too, and came under the table. Quickly Kevin grabbed the chair and set it up, back against the table, seat facing out, in the way he seemed to find most reassuring. There we were together in the daylight darkness. The dust motes continued gliding down through shafts of sunlight only a few feet away and yet they were a world removed from our murky hideout under the table.

Carefully, I brought the Peanuts carol book out of the box of materials and showed it to Kevin. Paging through the songs, I tried to explain how they had come about. He listened politely but I could tell he didn’t get it. My account was lame, and humor dies under scrutiny.

Then he reached past me for the box. Opening it again, he took out the mystery story and thumbed through it for the page we had been warring with.

‘I thought we might do this one instead. I think we need a change,’ I said.

He regarded me a long moment, and I had no clue as to what was going on in his head. His eyes narrowed. The other book remained in his hands.

‘Don’t you want to try these? These are funny, see? They go to the tunes of Christmas carols. You know.’ And I was suddenly stricken with the thought that perhaps he didn’t know. Maybe his life had been institutionalized beyond a world containing Christmas carols. ‘Do you want me to read you one?’ My voice was beginning to sound a little pathetic even in my own ears. The whole morning was falling flat.

Kevin shook his head. Spreading the mystery story open on the carpet, he leaned over it. He brought a hand up and pushed his lips back to make an e. I heard the familiar breaths in preparation. Then he launched full-tilt into war. Kevin shook, chattered, sweated and physically tried to make his mouth into the shape of the word. He rubbed his throat upward to push the word out. He stretched his neck, as if about to gag. Nothing worked.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I got another idea. Come here. Come out from under there a little bit. I need more room.’

I crawled out from under the table. Standing up, I offered him one of the chairs. ‘Come here.’

Kevin crawled to the edge of the table but not out from under it. I could not lure him farther. So, taking the chair, I sat in it myself. He was sitting, feet under him, about even with my knees. I bent over and put my hands on his throat.

‘You know what I think we need? Some exercise. I think you’re so tense that your muscles are all tight. We need you to relax so that it will be easier for your throat to speak.’

He shook beneath my fingers. And crikey, he was an ugly kid. I had sort of gotten used to that, but looking at him eyeball to eyeball, it was difficult to miss.

‘Open your mouth. Wide.’

Sweat beaded up but he opened his mouth slightly.

‘Big! Like this.’ I demonstrated with a great big gape. ‘I want you to do exactly what I do. And I’m going to keep my hands against your voice box there to see how your muscles are doing. Relax. Relax, Kevin, I won’t do anything to hurt you.’

I made the exercises up on the spot. I had never used anything like them before nor was I certain where to feel for the voice box. However, where my hands were seemed to be a likely enough place. We both had our mouths wide open like preying sharks. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for a mouthwash commercial.

The whole thing was an incredible con game. Maybe most of psychology is. It wasn’t a lie, really. While I maybe didn’t actually have any special exercises, I reckoned any sort of exercise ought to help. And while I had no real idea where the voice box was, I still could feel tense muscles, and if he could relax, that surely would be a help. So, it wasn’t really a lie, just a sort of middle-sized humbug. And probably nothing was wrong with that. But it was a little sobering to consider when one was sitting with one’s hands around a kid’s throat.

‘Relax, Kev. You’re all tense. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Trust me. Relax. Here, put your hands on my throat. Feel what the muscles are like? Feel how relaxed? Here, now, touch yours. See the difference? We want to make yours feel like mine.’

So there we sat with our hands round one another’s throats, as if we were in mortal combat. In a way, I suppose we were. I had him open his mouth wide and move it around and around. He had to take deep breaths, hold them, let them out slowly. He waggled his head from side to side, felt my muscles, felt his, felt mine again, waggled some more to relax. All the time I kept talking confidently, like I did this every day, and I kept changing the exercises rapidly so that he had to concentrate to keep up.

‘Okay, Kevin, now with your mouth open like that, breathe out real slowly, like this.’ I demonstrated, putting enough pressure into my breath to make a very softly whispered ‘haaa’ sound. Kevin, who had one hand around my throat and one around his own, also breathed out slowly. But there was no sound.

‘Good. Do it again a little harder. Feel those muscles relax. That’s what we’re trying to do, relax those muscles there. Get down in your diaphragm, use that more. Do it again.’ A bit of a lie there to distract him from the sound. I demonstrated, putting on a big show of using my diaphragm.

This time the sound was audible when he tried, but he was so caught up in what we were doing that he did not notice it. Quickly I tried to distract him further by letting him compare the muscles in our throats again. Were they the same? Yes. Good. Do it again.

I continued to breathe a whisper into the ‘haaa,’ each time a little louder but still soft enough that it was as much a breath as a whisper. I wanted the gradations in loudness to be virtually undetectable.

Kevin kept up with me, imitating the same gradations of sound. His brow was furrowed in concentration. He had ceased shaking. In fact, both of us were so absorbed in the act of making our breaths comparable that I don’t believe either one of us remembered at that instant why we were doing it.

‘Okay, harder now. Feel your stomach so you can see if your diaphragm’s pushing. Like this. Haaaa. ’A definite whisper.

‘Haa—,’ went Kevin and then he caught what I had done. His whisper died midbreath. His face reddened, his eyes bulged. I still had him by the throat but he abruptly broke my grip. Back under the table he went.

I leaned down to peer at him. ‘Hey? Come out of there. Come on. You were doing fine. Let’s try again.’

Kevin was way back under there, rolled up in a ball as he had been on the very first day.

I slid off the chair and came down under the table too. Touching his shoulder, I smiled at him. ‘You were doing just super. Did you know that? You were really doing a great job. Let’s give it another go.’

Beneath my fingertips I felt muscles rockhard with tension, then there was a little tremble and Kevin exploded. Bang! Like a volcano he went off, leaping up on his feet and knocking the table backward off his shoulders. Chairs toppled. My box and all its contents flew. Around and around the room Kevin tore. He banged into walls, scrabbled over furniture, tripped and stumbled to his feet again.

Startled, I leaped up too. He was a great big kid and he made a frightening sight in that wild state. It was at that moment that I realized exactly how little I knew Kevin-under-the-table. He might as well have been an animal, like my dog at home, whose problems I could only guess at because our worlds were so different and we could not communicate much of anything to one another.

Back and forth Kevin went, the crablike scuttle still evident in his gait. He was screaming, at least he would have been screaming, if he’d made any noise to go along with it. His mouth was wide open and he grimaced violently but all that came out were staccato puffs of air. Tears washed over his cheeks. Snot ran down into his mouth.

Suddenly the door opened behind me and the aide stepped in. He muttered under his breath when he saw us and slammed the door again. Within seconds four men converged on us like a division of the Marines. They marched in, tackled Kevin and threw him spread-eagle to the floor. Behind them came a nurse. She had a hypodermic needle in hand. While the men restrained Kevin, she whipped down his trousers and administered the shot.

All the while, Kevin struggled. Thin and wiry as he was, he fought a good fight, and it took all four men to hold him down.

Unused to being rescued from my crises, I just stood there, struck dumb with surprise. I hadn’t realized Kevin and I were so much out of control. He had been upset, sure, but we’d stayed in the confines of the room. He wasn’t hurting me, or me, him. And he wasn’t doing anything that should cause deployment of the Marines and the psychotropic tranquilizers.

Kevin was taken up to one of the seclusion rooms at the far end of the ward. It was a tiny room with a thick wooden door and long green things, which looked like futon mattresses, hanging from the walls. A padded cell. The only window was a small grate in the door. Kevin had been stripped to his underpants so that he would not hurt himself and was now flinging himself back and forth against the padding.

I went up to the ward and stood there, watching him for a few moments. Then I went down to Dana Wendolowski’s office.

Dana gave me a sympathetic smile when I came in. ‘I heard,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry about it. He does that sometimes.’

‘He does?’ No one had told me that.