The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  It was horrible. This wasn’t what Harbour had been talking about all these months. Was it? Besides, Harbour knew what we wanted in a child—they had certainly asked us enough times. We wanted, certainly Sue wanted, a child who could be gently coached into something like a normal life. And it certainly wasn’t, I thought sadly, a girl.

  “Sue, why would they even show us something like this?”

  To my immense relief Sue seemed to throw up her hands, too. “Joanne said he was an attractive boy, and I know these kids need help, but there are limits—we can’t deal with something like this. No. Not this—I don’t want this.” She sighed. “I might feel different if there was even one tiny shred of evidence to suggest this kid wants to be helped. But it’s just not there.”

  I took off my glasses, rubbed my face, and stood up. The file was scattered around the room in odd piles. We had pulled it apart and divided sections of it up between us.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s put the stuff back.”

  Sue nodded and stood up to help.

  “Rich, what’s this?”

  Sue was holding a single sheet of blue paper I hadn’t seen. Apparently it had slipped out of the file when we took it apart and dropped to the floor. The paper was a sloppily photocopied form labeled across the top, “The Things I Want Most.” There were three lines below it numbered one, two, and three. Over and around those lines was a child’s sprawling, smudgy handwriting.

  With a very uncomfortable feeling I remembered that in the entire file there had been nothing from the boy himself—no direct quotes, no transcripts, no letters—and I was grateful for the lack, glad that I hadn’t that sort of connection with this child, even in a thirdhand way. So when I realized what Sue was holding, I said quickly, “Forget about it, put it back. You don’t want to read that.”

  Sue almost did slip it back into the stacks of reports, but then shook her head.

  Instead she walked over to the desk lamp and, after a moment or two of hesitation, I joined her.

  Sue got it first, with the look of dismay caught in amber pushing aside the piqued curiosity on her face, and then she slowly, raggedly caught her breath. But it was more difficult for me to puzzle out. I had to trace my fingertips again and again over the ragged pencil marks before I realized it said:

  The Things I Want Most

  A Family

  A Fishing Pole

  A Family

  Just then Joanne Dalbo, the family specialist assigned to work with us, opened the door balancing two cups of coffee in one hand.

  “Hey, how did you guys make out?”

  Then she saw the strained look on our faces and asked, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  Sue just turned away and walked over to the window with her arms crossed over her chest.

  When Joanne raised her eyebrows in question, I looked back over at Sue. I could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was making up her mind, and a single word popped out of my mouth.

  Curiously, I then recalled an odd fact. Whenever a black box is retrieved from the scene of an airplane wreck, the last bit of speech recorded by the pilot before he hits the ground is often that very same word.

  Joanne put the coffee down on the desk and then placed her hands on her hips. Attractive, slim, with dark hair and eyes, she was a bright, soft-spoken family specialist working for Harbour while she studied in her spare time for an advanced degree in English literature, and she had a profound interest in careful and precise speech. Now she seemed puzzled and a little bit hurt. “Shit” she repeated. “What does shit mean?”

  It took us weeks to get to meet Mike. It was Joanne’s job to schedule an initial meeting, but she was put off by the Catholic Children’s Home, where he was living.

  Programs like Harbour have to struggle with all the complexities of child-care placement, including the issue of access to children in a complicated, multilayered system that involves many organizations with variable, often arbitrary, and constantly changing rules and procedures. The Catholic Children’s Home was no exception. And, of course, it’s difficult to have a good working relationship with an agency or institution you have never encountered before.

  In Mike’s case, he had been referred to Harbour by the very children’s home that had him now, but two issues, one very human and one quite frightening, were complicating access. The first was that, despite having referred many children to Harbour, the children’s home was now somewhat doubtful of the program because Harbour had accepted none of them. But the other was the fact that in the time that had elapsed between their referral and Harbours contact, Mike had tried to hang himself.

  The act was labeled as “not a serious suicide attempt,” I suppose because he didn’t succeed, but the home had decided it was better to hold Harbour at arm’s length while he “restabilized.”

  Meanwhile, we learned some additional facts. We learned that unlike most children in The Harbour Program, integration back into his biological family wasn’t an option. He had been freed for adoption, and family court was determined there be no further parental contact.

  We also found out that he did have a visiting “resource.” It seems an older brother and sister were adopted by a local family three years earlier and that this family had taken Mike into their home as well. Unfortunately, the results were fairly horrific—uncontrollable tantrums, violent behavior, sleeplessness—and eventually he was removed for psychiatric evaluation to Rock-land State Hospital. Following that admittance he was placed in the Catholic Children’s Home in Rhinebeck and the family’s application for adoption denied. But they still visited him from time to time, taking him for weekends and some holidays.

  This last point only seemed to stiffen Sue’s now-iron resolve to meet the author of that pathetic note. In her mind’s eye, or perhaps her mother’s heart, she could picture the despair of this child as he watched his brother and sister get on with their lives while he was routinely rejected in the most profound way.

  “How can they pick him up and then just cart him back? How many times has he stood there in the parking lot of the children’s home and waved good-bye to his brother and sister?”

  In the days that followed, Sue developed a long list of other sad images. I’d see them emerge at mealtimes, while driving in the car, or when visiting friends. In the middle of talking about something completely different she’d suddenly declare, “Mike isn’t sleeping, I just know it.” “They haven’t told him anything about us yet, and he’s just as upset and hopeless as he ever was.” “He isn’t eating. What kind of food do they have there, anyway?” “Who’s talking to the doctor about his medication?”

  “Sue,” I’d protest, “we haven’t even met this child, and anyway, the children’s home is top drawer, everybody says that. They’re not neglecting him. Calm down. Things will sort themselves out.”

  But one night she woke me up out of a deep sleep. “For God’s sake,” she said, “I don’t think anybody reads to him.”

  Groggy and confused, I said, “Reads to who, Sue? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Mike,” she said back. “I know nobody is reading to him.”

  The next day at work I telephoned Joanne. “Look,” I said, “I think we have a problem here. Every day that passes without a meeting has Sue worrying more and more about that boy. You’ve got to goose these people along. Can’t you even get us in there to see him for a few minutes so that she can get this out of her system?”

  Joanne sighed. “I know,” she said. “Sue’s been calling me continuously, and I’ve been calling them, but the home keeps putting me off.”

  “Well,” I said, “they’re the legal guardians. They can do what they want, I guess, but do what you can, would you? By this time next week Sue’s going to be up there in the middle of the night dragging a ladder from window to window.”

  A few minutes later the phone rang back.

  “Rich,” said Joanne, “I just connected with something you said,”


  “What?”

  “Guardianship. The home is not really the legal guardian; the Dutchess County Department of Social Services is. In fact there’s a caseworker assigned, a woman named Gerri. I’ve spoken to her before. Maybe I should call her now.”

  Then she paused before adding, “Rich, I’m worried about Sue. We know that you, and especially Sue, can be great advocates for a child; that’s half the reason we want you guys in the program. But Sue is beginning to seem like an emotional type of person who can quickly blow very hot, and so I’ve got to repeat what I know everybody in Harbour has told you: this is a long-term program and it’s best that your emotional dial get set to zero. Some of these kids, and Mike is certainly an extreme example of this, have been in and out of so many placements that they’re desensitized. Mike might go through the motions, but it will be a long time, if ever, before he could return the same sort of concern Sue is capable of—a long time before he can bond to you guys. Should you decide to take Mike, you’re going to have to face the fact that you’re not going to get much of anything back for a great while.”

  Sage advice. She knew what could happen. But I dismissed it because after twenty-seven years of marriage I knew that there wasn’t much chance of changing Sue, and I was convinced Mike wouldn’t end up with us. The file was just far too daunting, and I believed that Sue was ignoring all of that while constructing a model of this child in her mind that would be dashed to pieces when they actually met—that when she saw with her own eyes what he actually was, she had to understand that we couldn’t have something like that in the house. Our guests would leave, and we depended on that income. Her business wouldn’t allow that sort of investment of time, nor would our obligations to our own children.

  “Hey,” I cracked, “virtue is its own reward.” I felt guilty, deceptive, in wanting to avoid this child.

  Joanne laughed gently, and I could picture her shaking her head. “Okay, you guys. Here we go.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  are you taking petey?

  We met Mike at the children’s home. I had envisioned an Army Reserve Center without the jeeps parked in front. Instead I saw a converted nineteenth-century Hudson Valley mansion, a sprawling multistory Tudor with slate roofs and stained-glass mullioned windows set down in carefully landscaped grounds.

  And for some reason, that made me very edgy.

  Inside was quiet—too quiet—and the interior matched the plush facade. We were ushered into a library room on the ground level with a bank of French doors opening on a bluestone patio that was shaded from the bright summer sun by awnings. The library was lined with oak paneling and hung with dark burgundy draperies. There are supposed to be eighty kids in here, I puzzled. Why isn’t there any noise? There wasn’t even a picture of a child on the wall.

  Eerie. It reminded me of something. What?

  Sue and I sat at the polished wide oval table in the center of the room along with Joanne and the group leader for Mike’s team at the home, a straightforward, soft-spoken young man named Kevin.

  Kevin spoke first. He wore a shy, awkward smile, not wanting to disappoint us, trying to choose his words carefully.

  “Look,” he said reluctantly, “I have to confess that I find it hard to agree with the purpose of this meeting. I want all of my children to have a home and a family. But Mike is difficult. He can be very charming when he wants to, but he goes through cycles, weeks sometimes, where he’s difficult, almost impossible to deal with. Just getting him out of bed in the morning can take an hour or two. Getting him back to bed at night can take even longer. He needs structure, a lot of structure.”

  That struck home. Structure was a key word in the Harbour training. Some of these kids had never had a regular bedtime, mealtime, or bathtime.

  Yet that made me question the sort of structure our own children had had from us. Was it enough? Was there any to speak of? Years before we had built a house on Mountain Road in Rosendale, New York, twenty-five miles north of where we were now. It was a very secluded, wooded location up, as the name implies, on a mountain named Shawangunk. The six children had regular mealtimes and bedtimes, their clothes were washed and their lunches made every morning, but we also practiced something Sue called “benign neglect,” and that meant in great measure the children working out their own lives. Susanne, the only girl, played with her go-cart and baby carriage on the front lawn or with an immense Barbie doll collection in her room. If she left the property, it was to walk down the road to her grandmother’s. Richard, the eldest, after an initial period when he explored the woods alone, either gravitated to his room where he read, also walked or biked down the road to his grandmother’s, and often traveled much farther down to visit friends from school. But the three middle boys, Henry, Frank, and Brendan, ran wild together on Shawangunk. Almost from the time they could walk they were in the woods together, and we never worried very much about them, although a few incidents still manage to dredge up a hefty feeling of guilt.

  One of these was the lost locomotive.

  The three boys came back one day and said they had found an old railroad engine in the woods. I didn’t believe a word of it. I had hunted much of the mountain for years and didn’t remember anything at all like that.

  But Henry, Frank, and Brendan led me right to it. Standing on a set of rusting rails where it had been abandoned just after the second world war was a cannibalized diesel locomotive, the small type that would be called a yard engine. It must have been used for logging. At one time there had been a narrow-gauge railway along the top of Shawangunk, but the land had long since reverted to hardwood and the roadbed was abandoned.

  I was shocked. Not because I hadn’t seen it before, but because it was miles from the house. Henry then was about ten, Frank eight, and Brendan six years old. I remembered peering down at them and saying, “You kids shouldn’t wander this far from home.” But the look I got back from all three would bother me for years. It was a sliding, sidelong appraisal that seemed to say, “You haven’t the foggiest idea of what we’ve been up to and where we’ve been, and now that we’ve told you one thing, what do you do? You go and turn adult on us. Soooo, I don’t think well be telling you anything else anytime soon.”

  “Don’t give me that look,” I threatened.

  “Sure, Dad,” the three of them chimed back, smirking at each other.

  And that was about the quality of the structure I had supplied for my own children.

  Sitting there at the conference table with Joanne, Sue, and Kevin, listening to a lecture on structure, I said to myself, Richard, even if through some wild chance Sue wants to go further with this mad idea, you’re the last person a kid like this needs. You can’t do this! Not you!

  I turned to Sue and tried to get her attention, wanting to pull her outside where I could say all of this. But she was intent on Kevin, facing him with much the same look on her face as those three boys years ago in the woods.

  Then I looked over at Joanne for help, but she refused to make eye contact. She had been through enough of these meetings that she could read the nuances like a book, and she knew I was getting even more hinky.

  The four of us sat there with our own agendas. Sue wanted to rescue somebody, Kevin wanted to protect his charge from a situation he believed primed for failure, I wanted to be anywhere else, and Joanne, certain in her belief that Harbour offered this child one last shot at something like a normal life, was hoping against hope that the potential mother wouldn’t tear this poor counselor’s head off or the father go AWOL.

  I got up to leave the room and breathe some fresh air.

  “Rich, where are you going? Rich!”

  “To find the goddamned men’s room.”

  But I continued on outside and looked around again. Still no kids in sight, just a hushed campus atmosphere with an occasional adult walking purposefully on the grounds, holding a stack of books and papers. Eighty children? The overhead had to be stupendous. I remembered the numbers I had learned: 40,000 childr
en in the New York State child-care system alone, 400,000 nationwide.

  It was then that I realized what this beautiful setting reminded me of—the naval hospital overlooking the Pacific at San Diego. Different architecture but the same theme: quiet, hushed, almost luxurious, set down with lots of light and soothing green space. This was where you took the wounded and maimed, those in pain and gangrenous, crying in shock. This was where you cleaned them up, patched them up, and sent them back out again.

  Prior to being introduced to Harbour, I had known that the child-care system existed, but not really why Fundamentally I believed, still believe in fact, that the government or the court system has no role in a family Perhaps a priest, maybe even a friend, but not courts or judges or lawyers. Before being introduced to Harbour, I had even dismissed the people working in the system as “feel-gooders”—drones who couldn’t or wouldn’t do something productive with their lives.

  But standing there amid those soft beautiful grounds on that warm early-summer day, nervous and jittery, doubting myself, I started to understand what this all was about. The big why made sense if you just thought of these children as casualties rather than as children or clients or cases. Although that understanding did not mean I felt competent enough to deal with one of these walking wounded.

  I wasn’t a doctor or a therapist or a social worker. I was a private person who didn’t want to bother anybody else or, really, bother with anybody else outside my family and close friends. If anything, I had been swept along up to this point by Sue’s vehemence and by a desire to have her understand she didn’t have any role—we didn’t have any role to play here. It was true I was touched by the boy’s scribbled note and by the stories of other children. But was I moved?

  Images of the horror stories we had heard in Harbours training sessions started blurring through my thoughts like a tape spinning faster and faster. It started with an adult beating a three-year-old child into a coma. Then it flashed into all the other horror stories we had heard in the last couple of months: the rapes, the burnings, the starvation, the murders. I remembered the nonchalance with which caseworkers recited the facts: “Lisa was four when her mother’s boyfriend began raping her. Whenever she complained, he would have his German shepherd attack.” “Paul was right. They did kill his baby sister—it wasn’t an accidental scalding. When the pathologist examined the body, he found that the soles of the baby’s feet weren’t blistered—she had been trying to push herself up out of the boiling water while they held her down.” “John doesn’t talk. We don’t know where he came from. A garbage man heard him crying in a Dumpster.”