The Legend of Safehaven

by R. A. Comunale

“I will come and play for you, Tio Benny. My music will make you better.”

  What the hell you doin’ in bed, Honky? Thought you were tougher than that!

  Sheeit, the way you took that ol’ mamasan’s head off, you should be joggin’ by now.

  He tried to focus on the voice in the darkened room. The shadows seemed even darker as they took shape.

  Bandana? Bandana! But I thought you were…

  Dead? Yeah, man, I am. But you ain’t, least not yet. You gonna let a lotta folks down, you keep lying on yo’ ass like that. The lady here, too bad I never got to meet her befo’. She’s gonna be pissed off, too.

  Suddenly the darkness brightened, and the air filled with the scent of mock orange blossoms.

  My dearest Ben. I loved you in our brief life, and I will love you after death. But you have much to do.

  The music of the Pani Mloda filled his ears and his soul.

  The old floor nurse made her rounds of the cubicles in the stroke intensive-care unit then stopped by the secretary’s desk.

  “Millie, I thought flowers weren’t allowed in here.”

  The secretary looked up at her.

  “They aren’t, Ms. Pratt. Why?”

  The battle-hardened nurse took the young girl by the arm and led her to cubicle three. The scent of orange blossoms wafted toward them.

  The night air was still on the mountain, and even the wolves seemed subdued. The six residents of Safehaven sat around the dinner table as usual, but the normal, give-and-take conversation didn’t seem appropriate. Finally Freddie broke the silence by asking Galen the question everyone wanted to ask.

  “Tio, what happened to Ben? What made him so sick?”

  “His heart betrayed him. No, not love, but turbulence. Ben’s heart started to beat funny. The heart is a four-cylinder engine and, just like a car motor, its cylinders have to contract in sequence to squeeze blood through our bodies in just the right way. The two smaller chambers of Ben’s heart, the atria, started to act independently from their big brothers, the ventricles. That created a disturbance in the flow of blood, which allowed some of it to harden into clots.

  “Those clots are like bullets, and when they form, they can break off and travel up into the brain, disrupting the blood flow to critical areas. That’s why Ben became paralyzed.”

  “Will he have permanent damage?”

  Tonio wore his worried look well, Galen thought.

  “We don’t know yet, Tonio. Sometimes, when the food and oxygen supply is cut off too long, chemical changes happen that cause the death of brain tissue. We’re trying an experimental drug on Ben. It’s called a Lazaroid, to try to block that chemical destruction. Now we have to wait and see.”

  Carmelita looked puzzled.

  “Tio, why is it called a Lazaroid?”

  Galen smiled.

  Of course, she wants to know the meaning behind the word.

  “Do you remember Lazarus in the Bible?”

  Her face lit up in understanding.

  Edison looked at the others.

  “Nancy and I were talking this over earlier. We’d like to have Ben stay here when he’s discharged from the hospital. He has no one at home. Lachlan and Diana have offered to help out, but we think it would be too much of a strain on her. We have the room, and the mountain air will do him good.”

  He waited. One by one, the children nodded agreement. Then he looked at Galen, who shut his eyes and nodded as well.

  He lay in the bed, feeling his right hand opening and closing. Feeling the pillow on the right side of his face. Feeling his tongue move, but with lingering numbness, like a visit to a dentist would produce. But his mind dredged up thoughts he had not harbored in years.

  Ben, you’re just like your old man. You couldn’t stand school. You couldn’t apply yourself. You couldn’t discipline your mind. Just like old Jerzy, you always craved action. And it cost you your daughter.

  Tears welled up as he remembered…

  * * *

  “She’s a beautiful little girl, Officer Castle, but … well … you see…”

  The doctor had no good way of telling Miriam’s father.

  “We think she may be autistic.”

  Sophie Zamek had become mother to her granddaughter the way she had been mother to her son. It was she who noticed the detached manner of the child, when Miriam was almost two.

  “Ben, I took her to the doctor. He wants to talk with you.”

  He accompanied his mother and his daughter, the woman still wearing widow’s black, the young girl in a red-and-blue-colored jumpsuit, trailing the uniformed Ben, as he entered the doctor’s office. He listened, but most of what the white-coated man had to say made no sense. What was wrong with his daughter? Nothing!

  He couldn’t see anything wrong with her.

  Miriam sat in the play area of the waiting room. Lights reflecting off the ceiling fan cast a kaleidoscope of colored shapes on the light tan rug. Seemingly fixated on the moving shadows, the girl sat and watched the multihued variations, and she began to rock back and forth.

  Ben sat down next to her on the carpeted floor.

  “Miriam, show Daddy how you can play. Show Nana and the nice doctor how you play, please, Miriam.”

  His voice was rising, desperate to hear his daughter call him Daddy. The doll-size reminder of Irene appeared to ignore him, as he picked her up and held her in his arms.

  “Miriam, my little Miri, Daddy loves you, Daddy loves you!”

  The little doll’s eyes remained fixed, but not on him.

  * * *

  He watched Miri grow up and his mother grow old. The strong Warsaw lady eventually could no longer handle the energies of a girl with the pervasive developmental disorder of autism entering adolescence.

  He used up his savings and insurance benefits for special therapies, none of which helped her to interact with other people. She seemed intractable within a world of her own. She was one of the soulless ones.

  Then, on a starlight night in late August, in Miri’s sixteenth year, Jerzy Zamek came to reclaim his Sophie. Ben was alone once more, now facing the terrible decision of whether to try to raise his daughter on his own or place her in a facility for those with her condition.

  What haunted him most was that Miri suddenly looked directly at him as he left her with the attendant of the home. Those hazel eyes pierced him to his very core, as he kissed her and whispered, “Daddy loves you.”

  He thrashed in his bed, and his voice howled in agony.

  “Daddy didn’t mean to leave you!”

  * * *

  “The hospital is discharging Ben.”

  Galen had just sat down in the living room with Edison and Nancy, who were sipping tea in the quiet of the evening. The children, their homework completed, were preparing for bed. The next day was a Saturday, but rules were rules: Homework assigned must be finished.

  Nancy nodded.

  “The back guest bedroom is set up and aired out. Are we picking him up in the morning?”

  Edison joined in.

  “I’ve set up the van to take a wheelchair in the back. Does he need any other adaptive devices?”

  Galen shook his head.

  “He’s moving very well now. His speech seems to be just about normal. It looks like the clot-busting and Lazaroids did the trick. But he’s definitely showing signs of depression. Has Lachlan had any luck tracing the whereabouts of his daughter?”

  They said no.

  Just then Carmelita and Tonio, both in pajamas, literally dragged a similarly clothed Freddie into the living room.

  “Tell him, Freddie,” Carmelita growled at her younger brother, who was starting to tower over her.

  “Tio Galen, I … uh … I did some research and came up with this.”

  The boy offered him a piece of paper then backed off sheepishly.

  Galen examined the paper and handed it to Edison.

  “St. Ignatius Home,” Edison noted. “Isn’t that a custodial home for children
and adults with developmental and mental disorders?”

  Galen nodded.

  “I’ll call them in the morning, before we head over to the hospital.”

  Saturday morning entered with the cool crispness of late fall. Galen was on the phone, as the five others filed into the dining room for breakfast.

  “This is Dr. Galen. Do you have an inpatient by the name of Miriam Castle? Yes? Good. I’ll be coming by later today. Her father has been ill, and we needed to contact her. She’s what? I see. I’ll come by this afternoon.”

  He replaced the phone and walked slowly to the table. The others saw the frowning concern on his face.

  “Stranger and stranger,” he muttered, as he took his seat. “Ben’s daughter, Miriam—she’s autistic.”

  It was quiet in the van, as they drove down the mountain road toward the Douglass home. They would form a caravan—patrol car and minivan—to the hospital, an honor guard to bring the old trooper to his new living quarters.

  Galen turned back toward the children.

  “You heard me say that Ben’s daughter is autistic. I’ll explain more to you later, after I see her at St. Ignatius. For now, though, I don’t want you to say anything to Ben or the Douglasses—and that includes Faisal. I want to see for myself what’s going on. With everything that’s happened, I don’t want to stir up an emotional hornet’s nest for Ben. Promise?”

  Edison added, “That includes you, Freddie.”

  Ben was dressed in the civilian clothes that Lachlan had picked up for him. He wasn’t used to the loose-fitting, pale-blue shirt or the khaki trousers and the flat, rubber-soled shoes. Where were his boots and uniform?

  Diana picked out that shirt, he thought. Shows what a good woman notices!

  He wanted to walk out of the hospital, but the nurse in charge must have taken classes in bullying from his old sergeant. It was her way—the wheelchair—or no way.

  The unit secretary gave him the envelope with his discharge instructions, and the attendant wheeled him to the pickup site the hospital staff had nicknamed “The Loading Doc.”

  “Tio Benny, Tio Benny!”

  Four children and one wolf-dog crowded around Ben, as five adults endeavored to help him into the police cruiser.

  “Ben, think you can ride in the back seat?”

  Lachlan looked at the man who was more father than senior partner to him.

  “Hell, yes, boy! I see you drove Old Betsy. Are we going on patrol now?”

  Lachlan gave a worried look to Galen. An unspoken question crossed the divide between the doctor and the police officer: Was Ben in his right mind? Ben spotted it and laughed.

  “Think I’m nuts, eh? Okay, where are we headed to, my apartment?”

  Nancy spoke first.

  “Ben, we’d like you to be our guest at Safehaven, until you get your sea legs back. How does that sound?”

  She hoped his pride wouldn’t be insulted at the implication that he needed recuperation.

  Edison added, “You’ll certainly be more active than the old goat who lives there now.”

  Galen frowned at him and turned to Ben.

  “I don’t know why Edison just insulted himself, but we all would like you as our guest.”

  Some of Ben’s old bravado energized his next words.

  “Hell, if it’s for free, how can I turn you down?”

  For the first time he sat in the back of his police cruiser.

  How appropriate, I’m a prisoner—a prisoner of my own body!

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Galen. I called earlier about Miriam Castle.”

  He shook hands with the home administrator and offered his credentials. The younger man nodded.

  “We know who you are, Dr. Galen. No need for that. What can we do for you? You mentioned Miriam’s father being ill. We wondered why he didn’t show up for his weekly visit.”

  “He’s had a stroke. Fortunately it was the kind that we could do something about. But none of us knew he had a daughter. What’s the story?”

  Jesse Orth was a native Pennsylvanian who had worked at St. Ignatius since high school. He had risen to the rank of administrator and now knew each of his charges personally.

  “Miriam has one of the more severe forms of autism,” he explained. “She has almost no verbal skills despite attempts at repetition training. But there is something interesting about her. Please, come with me to her room. Right now she’s with the group in the sunroom area, so I can show you something without upsetting her.”

  Galen followed the tall, heavyset man down a hallway marked EAST WING. The area was clean but sparsely decorated and devoid of any meaningful wall hangings. They arrived at an open door marked 3E and stepped inside a dormitory-sized room containing standard, institutional, blond-oak furniture with a desk and chair on one side and a very low-to-the-floor, single bed on the other. Galen was struck by what adorned the walls. They were covered with drawings, done with a mix of charcoal and watercolor and pastel, all of Ben and photographic in quality: his face, full length in uniform, from the side, from the front, and at different ages. And one was of a woman dressed in white wearing a tiara of mock orange blossoms.

  Orth pointed to the picture of the lady.

  “She did that one just this week. I don’t know where that face came from. No one like that has ever visited her. Fact is, only her father has ever come to see her.”

  They walked to the sunroom. Galen saw them standing or sitting—mostly men and boys, alone in a crowd, but that was the nature of the illness. Each resided in his own world. Some stared at the rainbows cast by sunlight coming through the skylight glass in the ceiling. Others sat pushing and pulling at toy blocks on the floor.

  Among the few girls and women, one sat on the floor, a lump of modeling clay before her. Her hands moved seemingly independent of her eyes—kneading, twisting, shaping.

  Galen watched, mesmerized at the movement of the delicate-featured girl, her hands nearly a blur of activity. Then he saw her creation and was startled. She had brought out of the clay a lifelike image: a full-bodied, seated wolf.

  “Mr. Orth, her father is recuperating with us at our place on the mountain. He needs to heal in many ways. After he settles in, would it be possible to have Miriam join him?”

  Orth eyed the old doctor. He had heard about what this man and his friends had done for the young Middle Eastern boy. Such news circulated fast through the endless mountains of Central Pennsylvania.

  Maybe they could pull another rabbit/hat trick.

  “Yes, Dr. Galen, I think we could arrange that. Just let us know when you’re ready for her.”

  He hesitated a second, and then, almost embarrassed, he asked Galen a question.

  “I understand that you and your friends call your home Safehaven. Why?”

  Galen smiled.

  “It’s a long story, Mr. Orth. Let’s just say we call it that because that’s what it is.”

  As he drove home, Galen mulled over what he had seen that afternoon. No question Miriam was autistic, but she was one of those rare forms—what the French would call an idiot savant—an artist of high quality. Yet how could her brain produce such works, when it was so genetically or chemically or traumatically different from so-called normal people?

  He remembered Manu Kumar, a young boy from India, one of his last patients before retiring, with his doe eyes and vacant smile. Manu was the son of a diplomat. He, too, was what his countrymen called a soulless one. The boy was a perpetual-motion machine, arms waving like the Avenging Kali, pushing away any stethoscope or hands that attempted to examine him. And yet, when left alone, his movements adopted a panther-like grace. Galen had thought he moved like a dancer, and he wondered now if that might be Manu’s talent.

  Galen realized his mind was wandering, as he swerved to reenter the right-hand lane of the highway.

  Better keep your mind on the road.

  He made one stop on the way back home. His beloved red Jeep was loaded by the time he drove up the curving
mountain road and pulled into the house driveway.

  “One more thing, and then we shall see what we shall see,” he said to himself, as he lumbered into the house.

  Ben’s presence made seven at the dinner table that evening, with him enjoying the place of honor at its head. The other adults and children sat on either side of the maple table Edison had made after the kids had moved in.

  “Ben, we have a little ritual here,” Edison said.

  “Yes, and any guest has to join in—unless he doesn’t want to,” Nancy quipped.

  “What they’re saying, Ben, is that you’ll have to sing for your supper—figuratively, that is,” Galen concluded.

  The old trooper looked confused, until Tonio explained, “We eat, and then we gripe, boast, complain, whatever, about what happened during the day.”

  Nancy served a citrus-and-almond salad, followed by chilled potato soup, and then to applause she brought out thick slices of roast beef sautéed in garlic butter with mushrooms and stuffed tomatoes. She wowed them again with fresh-baked focacchia—Italian tomato bread—and then a treat she made only for special occasions: crème brûlée.

  “Don’t worry, Ben,” Edison joked. “The way Nancy cooks, there’s no fat. Even the garlic butter doesn’t have butter.”

  The children cleared the dishes then returned to the table.

  Ben looked at them and wondered, Why do this for me?

  He laughed nervously.

  “I don’t sing too good, folks. All I know is some Polish folk songs, but I doubt you’d be interested in those. What can I say? Thank you, really.”

  “I’d like to hear those songs, Tio Benny,” Carmelita said. “But I guess what we’re all interested in is you. We’d like to know how you feel—are you having any problems? Is there anything we can do to help you?”

  He blushed. He hadn’t expected a question like that from the girl. Then he remembered: He had missed his visit to Miri. The lopsided grin he had worn as protection against the world started to fall in sadness. He caught himself quickly, hoping they hadn’t noticed.

  “That’s very nice,” he said, regaining himself. “I can’t believe how fast things have gotten better. I thought I was never going to talk or move right again. Whatever you did…” and he looked at Galen, “whatever was done, sure seems to have turned the corner for me.”