The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  “What sort of gesture does she want?”

  “Anything—a word, a hug, any sort of gesture. Some one little act that acknowledges her role in his life.”

  Joanne made a bleak gesture with her hands. “But again, that’s the way these kids are.”

  I shook my head helplessly. “And that’s the way Sue is.”

  Then, like dark little shreds of cloud that run before a storm, ominous changes began to occur in Mike’s behavior. The first was the day after my conversation with Joanne when, with Sue still away, I cooked hamburgers for Liam, Mike, and me. When I walked out of the kitchen to call Liam, Mike walked in and fed Liam’s dinner to the cat.

  Difficult call. Was he wanting to pick a fight with Liam? With me? He’ll often portion out some of his own dinner for the animals, hiding it in a napkin if we let him and then delivering it upstairs. There’s no control on his part when it comes to the animals and I just gently said, “Wrong thing to do, Mike. Liam will be hungry,” Then I tried to lead into the subject of school. “How’s your new class going?”

  “Okay.”

  “The teacher?”

  “I like Mrs. Vandenburg,” he said slowly.

  “The other children in your class?”

  He almost spit the words. “The kids are stupid.”

  The next day Mike wet his bed and was just a tad more difficult getting up in the morning. Then, early that afternoon, Sue arrived home. I briefed her on what Joanne had said, and both of us watched him get off the school bus.

  “He looks okay.”

  But a half hour or so later, when we had a talk with him about his schedule that night—he had to get his homework done before dinner because of a Boy Scout meeting—his response was all out of proportion: “I’m not going to that fucking Boy Scout meeting.”

  Shortly after that little scene, Mike was blasting the TV in the living room when Henry had an incoming phone call. When Sue asked him to turn the TV off, a really tremendous scene ensued—screaming, kicking, “This is a free country; I can do what I want.” When Sue tried to get him out of the room, there was more kicking and screaming and, “You fucking asshole, you fucking bitch.” Outside he picked up a piece of cedar shingle and jabbed himself twice in the face by his left eye, yelling, screaming, threatening to run out on the road and throw himself in front of a car.

  Later, he tried to act like nothing had happened and did his homework on his own after dinner.

  Yet no Boy Scouts.

  And Sue was awfully quiet.

  Two days later he wet his bed and was very difficult to get up and into the shower. He raised his voice. “I’m tired. Why are you always getting me up? “Then he added something new: “I don’t want to go to school.”

  I told Sue, “I have to get him up earlier. He uses up so much time, the bus comes before he’s eaten anything.”

  “Sure,” she said, then just walked away.

  The next day he was very difficult in the afternoon. He kicked a hole in the living room wall when neither of us was around, and when Sue asked him why, he screamed at her, “I hate you, you fucking bitch. I hate you. I hate all of you.”

  But the day after was Saturday, and Mike went with me for a long ride, performing errands in the pickup truck. Along the way we got his favorite doughnuts and then several hours later stopped again, this time at Burger King for lunch. He appeared tired and listless, exhausted after his week, although later on that afternoon he perked up and helped me clear brush.

  Sue and I tried to have a serious talk with Mike.

  “Mike,” Sue said, her hands flat on the table, “you can’t behave like this. It’s entirely unacceptable. I know you’re having problems at school, but there’s little I or Rich or Mrs. Vandenburg can do about the other kids liking you or not liking you. This is something that only you control. You have to act pleasant and friendly, and if they make fun of you, then you have to just let it go, shrug it off, and not let it make you sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” he screamed.

  “Okay, okay.”

  Later, he smashed one of the big windows in the living room and the following days continued his downward spiral. On the next Monday Mike wet his bed and gave us a fractious, roiling twenty-four hours. He took my utility knife from my toolbox, feigned innocence, and effectively stopped me from hanging Sheetrock. Hours of discussion with him did no good. He pretended to look for it, told us he had put it in four or five different places. But by bedtime he still hadn’t produced it.

  Then on that Tuesday almost mid-May now, Sue went to BOCES to have a talk with Mike’s teacher. Later at night, with Mike sound asleep and the house darkened and quiet, she led me out to the screened-in porch to talk.

  “He is sick, Rich.”

  I looked away, out over the starlit orchards, and felt like slipping far off into the glimmering dark like a shadow on the night wind. Events were out of my control, and Sue was speaking like a robot, in a flat, unemotional, metallic monotone.

  She shook her head slowly back and forth as if dumbly searching for something. “According to Mrs. Vandenburg, Mike wasn’t being picked on any more or any less than anyone else who comes into the class, and many of the children even made an extra effort to be friendly. But he’s still making really childish remarks, and he’s not settling down. In fact, he’s getting worse— using filthy language, stealing things. The school has even had complaints from the bus driver that Mike is threatening the other children—a handicapped girl in a wheelchair, for one— threatening that he’s going to cut her up with a knife!”

  She raised her eyes, looking for mine in the half-light. “Rich, this kid runs in cycles. He’s childlike and charming, then he’s vicious, mindless, and mean. His emotions are on a roller coaster. I’ve tried, both of us have tried, to sort him out, solve one problem after another for him, and in the process we’ve both become emotionally attached. But you get little of that back—none of that back. If we keep him, we’ll probably see another good few months come about after yet another struggle, but I’m convinced that inevitably we will down-cycle again. Meanwhile, the house is back to being a war zone. Since he came here you’ve replaced maybe thirty or forty windows, I don’t know how many holes you’ve fixed in the walls, we’ve seen dishes go—lamps, toys, alarm clocks by the score. He’s started fires, and we’ve had to put up with screaming and the foulest language imaginable. He’s still wetting the bed, he lies, and he’s getting stronger, a lot stronger.”

  “Sue, I don’t think he’s mean.”

  She raised her voice. “Breaking windows in my house is mean. Calling me a fucking bitch is mean. Threatening to stab a handicapped little girl in a wheelchair is mean.”

  I sighed. She was right. “And?”

  “And I’ve talked to Joanne. We’ve set a tentative extraction date for the twenty-second of next month, June. That’s about the length of time Harbour needs to get him placed into a teenage group residence.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, unless there’s some sort of miracle, that’s it.”

  I should have seen it coming, but I was still stunned.

  Sue softened and reached out her hand. “Rich, I know you care a lot. So do I. But he doesn’t care for us. He doesn’t think of us as parents. He never will.”

  Samuel Johnson said, “When a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrateth his attention wonderfully.”

  That’s the way I felt. Suddenly, everything I did or didn’t do was somehow related to a particular box on the calendar. It was difficult to imagine walking past his room without him in it.

  I tried to put the thought of Mike away from me for a day, and early in a red dawn shoved off to pick Frank up from Norwich. The day rose into a gloriously sunny morning as I drove over the state line into Bennington, then north on Route 7, stopping for breakfast at a little restaurant in a tiny town ten miles or so south of Rutland. Starched white tablecloths, fine china plates, delicious blueberry waffles with
real maple syrup, and three cups of coffee. Four dollars twenty-five cents and a “come again.”

  I rolled through the back gate of Norwich at about ten-thirty. The upper parade ground seemed forlorn and scruffy with thousands of boxes, stereos, computers, and piles of clothing being loaded into cars from Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Most of the cadets were in camouflage field uniforms, swarming in and out of buildings, checking out. I managed to park in front of Bravo Company and went up to Franks room. Not there, his roommate shrugged, so I walked down the “hill” and spotted him a couple of hundred yards away, walking up. I’d recognize that deliberate, shoulder-forward walk anywhere. He had a big smile on his face when he reached me.

  “You’re early, Dad. I haven’t finished.”

  “Take your time. I’m going to take a nap in the sun.”

  And I did, with Frank shaking me awake at about twelve. “I’m all loaded. Let’s go home.”

  Then down Route 12, through Randolf, Bethel, and a dozen other small towns, until sixty miles later we popped up onto Route 4 for the long, sweeping downhill run into Rutland. As we made the turn I looked up on Pico. A thousand feet above us there were still broad fields of snow.

  “We’re letting Mike go,” I said to Frank.

  Frank shrugged his shoulders, but he must have been thinking about it, because after we got gas in Rutland he asked me, blank-faced, “Have you ever told Mike a Broken-Paw story, Dad?”

  Mike knew. I don’t know how. I’m certain nobody had told him. Joanne, in particular, stressed keeping our own counsel until the day was close at hand, and to be honest, she was hoping for that miracle, too. But somehow, Mike knew or at least suspected. I suppose he could sense a certain withdrawal, the detached looks. He had, after all, been through this twelve times before.

  But he was still nervous and frightened, suddenly walking on eggshells.

  And he was very, very quiet.

  The thing that bothered me most was not knowing what would happen to him. Would he be all right? Would somebody even know or care what he liked to eat? Would he ever have a dog around him? I will think of him for the rest of my life with the dogs. The dogs in his room at night, nuzzling him while he slept, loping around him in the hay meadow, slipping around his feet in the living room.

  I met Sue in the hallway. “Sue,” I said, choked up, “I don’t care about the windows.”

  Sue started crying and pushed past me.

  Back up to Vermont, this time with Sue, to attend Henry’s formal graduation from Norwich. We left Mike at home, watched by Frank.

  Another beautiful day, the graduating cadets in their dress-blue uniforms, a speech from the chief of staff of the army: “Just get up in the morning and make one good thing happen that day” Henry received high honors for his marks. Then cannons firing, the cadets’ covers in the air.

  Afterward we had lunch with Henry and his fiancée Peggy in the dining hall, all cadet blue and gold with the senior officers walking from table to table.

  “Almost five years, Henry, but it seems like six months ago that you, Brendan, and I made the drive up in February to take a first look at this place. It was winter carnival time, with the huge snow sculptures on the upper parade ground. You watched the companies falling in to march to noon meal, and you said then that this would always be your place.”

  “It will always be my place,” he grinned back.

  “Are things shaping up for you?” Sue asked.

  Henry raised his eyebrows. “Yes, I’m on the list for the Vermont state police. There’s only two hundred seventy troopers in the entire state, and they had a couple of thousand applicants for the ten openings. But I made the list.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know. Sometime in the next few months I have to report up here for a physical, then orals, then there’s a couple of months of background investigation. They’ll be sending an investigator down to the house, too, in a month or two.”

  Peggy laughed. “I hope Mike isn’t cursing and smashing windows when the trooper pulls into the parking lot.”

  “Little chance of that,” Sue said tersely.

  When we made the turn onto Route 4, I looked up at Pico and the snow was gone. We were driving into June.

  The day after we got home from Henry’s graduation I found the old leather box high up in my closet. I took it down, opened it on the bed, and spent half an hour or so sorting out the thick stacks of yellow papers, lost in the memory of the boys, younger, listening at night to the Broken-Paw stories. Sometimes I wrote them down and then read the stories. Sometimes I made them up, told them, and then wrote them down. Sometimes I just wrote them and tucked them away in the box.

  Richard was blasé, a little bit too old when I started, Henry and Frank interested, Brendan and Liam most interested. Until he was eleven or twelve, Liam would often jump on my bed at night and ask, “How about another Broken-Paw story, Dad?”

  It was something I had never started with Mike. Somehow it was too personal, too intertwined with the image of the five small boys on the mountain and, to be honest, very much out of mind these past few years.

  But now that Frank had mentioned them, I seemed compelled in a mawkish, morose way to tell Mike at least one of the Broken-Paw stories. It was as if I felt I could press a little bit more of us into him before he left.

  “Mike.”

  “Yes.”

  “How would you like me to tell you a story?”

  Later he sat on the bed for a long time and then asked, “I don’t understand why Uncle Nigel didn’t shoot Broken-Paw or why Broken-Paw didn’t eat Uncle Nigel up.”

  “Well,” I said, “Uncle Nigel couldn’t shoot Broken-Paw anyway. He’s a magic bear, very strong medicine, and he was almost two hundred years old at that point. Besides, once Nigel understood what Broken-Paw was doing—once he understood that the only reason there were any wild spots left in the mountains at all was because Broken-Paw was guarding the Painted Mask Caves—the last thing Nigel would have done was shoot Broken-Paw. Nigel loved the mountains, loved the wild spots. And as far as Broken-Paw went, once he realized Nigel wanted to protect the caves as much as he did, the last thing he’d ever do is harm him.”

  “But who were these two medicine men, Widdersop and Obedience, who fought over the caves?”

  “Ah, and that’s another story—the story of how Broken-Paw was born and orphaned on the Coxinkill in seventeen fifty-seven.”

  “Orphaned?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why does Broken-Paw always help members of this family?”

  “Well, we’re related to Uncle Nigel, and we think the same way he does about things.”

  “Is Broken-Paw real?”

  “What do you think, Mike?”

  He furrowed up his forehead and put his lower lip over his top one, thinking. “You wouldn’t have told me this story if it wasn’t real, would you?”

  I just looked at him.

  “Since I’m with this family, could I call Broken-Paw to help me if I was in trouble?”

  “Mike, if you climb up past the lakes to the top of the mountain where the cherry trees are and look north, what do you see?

  “I see the Catskills.”

  “Right, you see the whole range—you see Blue Mountain and Panther and Slide, you see Platte Cove and North Mountain and South Mountain, you see Wittenberg and Terrace and dozens of others. Your thoughts would travel right in a straight line to wherever he is.”

  “I’d be too afraid,” he said quietly, “to ask him to help me.”

  Joanne picked Mike up from school today to see Betty Smith, a therapist in New Paltz. Later, he did his homework on his own.

  The next morning he cleaned out my wallet. Sue called the school and got the money back. Luckily I didn’t have much cash, just twenty-one dollars. Mike went and got the money from his jacket when asked, and then said he thought it was two dollars, not twenty-one. I recalled that Mike was standing next to me when I opened my wallet
at about seven in the morning and gave Liam two dollars for lunch money. Then I put my wallet on my dresser and went downstairs. Mike then must have gone to the wallet and taken the two bills out. It’s rather sad. I think he just wanted to imitate Liam.

  But am I just making more excuses?

  He burned a hole in his mattress cover, too. Where had he gotten the matches or the lighter? I searched thoroughly but couldn’t find anything. He was uncommunicative, and I gave up. Since today is Saturday, I tried to make it a pleasant day for him—TV, video games—and he acted happy, ate well, and went to bed okay

  The next day started out well when Mike went to church and behaved okay, then played on the computer, spent a short time on the bike, watched some movies that Sue got out, and had a good supper hour when we all ate together, chatting away. But at bedtime there was an explosion of the first magnitude. The trivial cause was Sue carrying his cat into his room at bedtime when he wanted to. Toys broken, a window smashed with his fist, cat litter thrown all around his room, screaming, curses, threats of suicide, trying to punch Sue, his books thrown through his bedroom window. This went on for almost two hours. When restraining him didn’t work, the two of us put him in the shower. That was a tremendous struggle all its own, but finally we could leave him alone in there, and he stayed under the running water for twenty minutes talking to himself (although he did proceed to empty all of the shampoo and conditioner down the drain in a final gesture of protest). When he came out, he was calm. No significant injuries. His hand was not cut from putting it through the glass, but he’d lost a piece of skin on the inside of his arm about the size of a silver dollar. I think I did that when I was holding him. Sue ducked all of the punches, but I got a piece of glass driven into the sole of my foot, which I extracted with a razor blade and tweezers.

  Sue cried again and started counting off the days until the twenty-second of next month. I was sick at heart, agreeing with her now—he was getting stronger and there was a lot of breakable stuff around. It would have been different if we could have seen these hurricanes coming, but we couldn’t. On the upside, I had my emotions in check. I was becoming more detached, I guess, but also because Mike looked like a completely different individual by the end of the fight. His entire body was wealed red with hives and his eyes were swollen closed.