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

‘No one knows why. They don’t really seem to be tantrums. I don’t know. He just has them. We give him a shot, put him in seclusion for a while and he gets over them eventually. They never last long. And he can go a long time between them.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said and leaned back in the chair. I didn’t see at all.

After another cup of coffee, I returned to the ward. A number of aides had collected around the desk there watching me as I came through the double doors.

‘He does that,’ one young woman said to me. That response seemed to explain everything to everyone.

‘May I go in and see him?’ I asked. I was beginning to feel restless and a little irritable without knowing exactly why. I didn’t have the patience to stand there and chat with them.

One of the people broke away and went over to the seclusion-room door. She peered through the window for a moment and returned. ‘Yeah, I guess so. If you want. He’s just laying in there.’

The room was incredibly small, although perhaps not so small as it felt. Kevin didn’t move when I came in. He lay face down on the floor, his face hidden in crossed arms. I stood over him a moment and did nothing.

While I was standing there, my mind was almost blank. I just stared at him without having any really conscious thoughts going through my head at all. He was a big kid. Naked except for his underpants, I could see how thin he was. His skin was sallow and waxy. He’d clearly been an abused child. I could see all the familiar little scars that lamp cords and lighted cigarets leave. They were all over his back and down his legs like the tracks of some small vermin.

I didn’t love the kid. I didn’t even really like him. He was too old. I didn’t know what to do with adolescents. He was too far gone for my type of magic. I traded in a certain kind of innocence, in the belief that adults, just by being adults, could make things better. But he was too old. He already knew that wasn’t true and that left us without anything, just two ordinary people.

Kevin stirred. He looked up at me. There grew between us a long silence.

‘Did you think I was trying to trick you?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry, if you did. If I upset you in there, I’m sorry because I didn’t mean to.’

Kevin looked away. Still on his stomach, he brought his crossed arms closer and rested his chin on them.

‘It must have seemed that way,’ I said. ‘It must have seemed like I was trying to catch you unawares and trick you. I wasn’t really. I was just trying to help, to make it so you weren’t so scared.’

He raised his head to look at me.

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

Kevin turned around and sat up. He gazed at me. I was still standing near the door, but the room was so small that we were scarcely more than a foot or two apart. He seemed oddly relaxed. The fear had fallen momentarily away from him and while he sat with his arms around his knees, it was a natural position. But perhaps that was just because of the tranquilizer.

‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘I need to get back to the clinic where I work.’

Kevin’s face puckered. He gestured.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow, all right?’ I turned and opened the door. Kevin rose as I let myself out. ‘Good-bye for now.’

He came to the door, and it was hard shutting it on him. He put his face to the window and remained there, watching me. Even as I left the ward and let the two broad doors swing shut behind me, when I looked back I was able to see Kevin’s face still pressed against the glass of the tiny window in the seclusion-room door.

Chapter Six (#ulink_4b7ba998-86fd-5973-b34f-0bffc3ca2e20)

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.