my way out of the ward, I stopped at the nurses’ desk to get Kevin’s chart. Because he was institutionalized, I was obliged to record all my activities with him on a running chart. I took the chart and went across the hall to the staff room. Sitting down at the table, I opened it and began to write.
Kevin appeared in the doorway. I was alone in the staff room. I sat at the table amid the chaos of dirty coffee mugs and notebooks of staff activities and tons and tons of loose paper. He simply came to the door and stood until I became aware of someone watching me and looked up.
The ravages of the previous day showed on him. His face was swollen all up one side. He had bruises everywhere. I smiled when I saw him. ‘Hi.’
He said nothing.
I looked down at the chart, back at him. The silence between us was fragile, the way silences often are after arguments, in the aftermath of great anger. Except, for me at least, there had been no argument, no anger.
Kevin stared at me.
I fingered the pen I had been writing with.
The silence breathed between us.
‘Can I sit down?’ he asked me.
I nodded and indicated a chair across the table from me. He came into the staff room, pulled out the chair and sat down.
Again the great, lengthening stillness, like cotton over a tender sore. I bent and began to write again. Kevin came to the staff room to see me after I had left him in his room. He sat in a chair rather than on the floor. He does not appear to be afraid.
Out beyond the room were the noises of the ward. Aides and other kids moved around. Nurses chatted. I lived in mortal terror that someone would walk in on us, demand to know what Kevin was doing in an off-limits place like the staff room and destroy the fellowship between us which was so carefully weaving itself back together in the silence.
Kevin crossed his arms on the table and laid his head down.
‘Is the Thorazine still making you sleepy?’ I asked.
He nodded.
I went back to writing.
‘You know what he did to me once?’ he said, as much to the silence as to me.
‘No. What?’ I didn’t even know what he was talking about.
‘I used not to eat my oatmeal. It was the only thing in the whole world I used not to eat. My mom, she used to make it for breakfast. Every day she made it. Then he’d tell me to eat it. He’d make me sit at the table and stay there until I ate every bit. And if I fussed, he went and got more.’
I said nothing, not daring to.
‘If I didn’t eat it and I had to go to school or something, he’d save it for lunch for me. And once, this one time, the oatmeal got to be about two days old. It made me sick to look at it.’
He paused, drew a breath. I was so scared someone was going to interrupt us.
‘He grabbed my hair and pulled it until I opened my mouth. Then he stuffed it in. Well, I sicked it all up again, right there at the table. I couldn’t help it. It had mold growing on it. It was awful. But you know what he made me do? He made me eat the sick.’
I continued to write.
‘It was the only thing I never liked to eat. I ate everything else. I made a special point to eat everything else. But I guess it didn’t matter very much.’
‘It must have made you awfully mad,’ I said and looked up. Perspiration had made huge stains on his shirt.
‘He made me mad all right. He made me want to kill him.’ Kevin looked at me. His eyes narrowed. ‘And I will someday. When I get out of here. He won’t be able to tell me what to do then. And if he does, I’ll carve his body into little bits.’
‘And so,’ said Charity, reclining back on my couch and putting her feet up on the arm, ‘you know what happened next? Well, we got to sleep outside on the porch, me and Sandy did. And so we took our blankets out there and we got to sleep.’
‘You slept on the porch in November?’
‘Yup. Camping out, we was. Just like on TV. Mom let me do it ’cause Sandy was with me. Sandy’s twelve. So my mom said it was okay.’
‘Wasn’t it a little chilly?’
‘Gosh no. We had lots of blankets.’ Charity lay all the way back on the couch and kicked her feet up. For a few moments she bicycled in the air. ‘And the next morning we got up and baked pancakes, me and Sandy. Sandy’s twelve. She can touch the stove.’
‘I see.’ Actually I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine when Charity was finding time to do all these things, since she seemed to have moved in with me over the past few weeks. When I would come home from work, there was Charity, hunched up on my doorstep, still dressed in her school clothes. She would stay until supper and eat with me, if I’d let her. Then down in front of the television she’d go. Or if I was writing, she would stand in back of my chair, feet on the rung, and read over my shoulder, all the while making my desk chair sway. She couldn’t read worth a hill of beans, so mostly she just shouted out letters she recognized. B! R! H! would come the constant chant behind me while I tried to concentrate on wording a technical paper about bilingualism and psychogenic language problems. Charity would stay until I chucked her out every night. On weekends I was even luckier. One Saturday she arrived at 6:15 in the morning.
Charity’s family seemed quite pleased with the arrangement. I must admit, if I’d had Charity I probably would have too. In the beginning I demanded that she have permission and could prove it before she could stay. But that was hopeless. The family had no phone and the couple of times I had bothered to pile her in the car and drive her home for consent, no one there had even missed her. I suspect they’d realized she’d found a place to go and someone to feed her and were satisfied to let her milk the situation for all it was worth. I was irked by the imposition; it was like having acquired a stray cat. But as with cats, I was too soft to ignore her and send her home hungry.
Truth was, of course, that Charity’s family was full of problems of their own, not the least of them, Charity herself. They lived well below the poverty level in a small dingy place down by the river. I had met Charity’s mother only once when I had brought Charity home. She was a young woman but she looked ancient. Her body was riddled with the stigmata of a rough life, and I suspected they went clear through to her heart. The house was constantly jammed with relatives, and they all seemed to live there on a more or less permanent basis. While Charity had no father, there was no lack of males in her home, but their exact position in the household was something I never knew for sure.
Charity herself continued to be a personal challenge to me. A master of the unintentional put-down, Charity had done more to devastate my ego in three months than most kids had in a lifetime. I have no doubt that if I had encountered Charity earlier in my career, I would have become a medical technologist like my mother wanted.
Still she had an innate charm about her. She would be standing there on my doorstep complaining loudly or would be struggling with some mishap, like the time she had polished her fingernails and then couldn’t get her mittens off, and I’d think to myself, what’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be an authority! Sixty pounds
