Silent Boy: He was a frightened boy who refused to speak – until a teacher's love broke through the silence. Torey Hayden
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started to rock again. I could hear his breath coming shallowly, the fear rattling up through his throat.
‘Only that first word. That word. How does it start? Come on. Get that word.’
Kevin was taking me seriously. He was going to try. Bringing his other hand down, he ran it along the perimeter of the book, then stopped it to steady the page. Cautiously, as if the book might leap up and nip him, he bent over it until he was hunched almost double. In the gloom under the table, that movement obscured what little light we did have on the page.
He took another deep breath. All the while I kept urging, kept talking to keep the silence at bay. I didn’t want him to hear the silence and know it was stronger than I was.
A third big breath, shakier this time. He lifted his hand and wiped the sweat off on his shirt front. A wet stain had been left where his finger was on the page. Frantically he tried to erase it, and when he couldn’t, he glanced over at me to see what my reaction was. Then he put his hand back over it to cover it.
He needed another minute to rock. It was not easy to do in his hunched position and the whole table shook.
‘Let’s go. Let’s have a try.’
He opened his mouth. No sound, not even a breath.
Seconds drew into minutes. He closed his mouth again.
My constant patter continued. Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go. Let’s try.
Again Kevin began taking breaths in preparation. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s as he would get ready to try and then lose courage. He started to tap the word with a finger, and that small steady, penetrating sound soon filled up the space around us.
‘Have a go. Come on, Kev, you can do it. I know you can. This is just the way it happens, give it a try.’
A funny noise joined the cacophony of taps and tries. Kevin’s teeth were chattering. At first I had to sit back a little to identify the sound, and that made him look over at me. I could see them chatter. I smiled. Kevin lurched back over the book again with determination. He had begun to believe me. He was going to get that word.
Sweat beaded on his upper lip. His hands shook. Big, dark circles dampened his shirt under his arms and down the center of his back, and the smell was incredible. Still he opened and closed his mouth in abortive tries. He made big, wide circles with it, as if trying to stretch it into working order.
Minute after minute after minute was filled with his grimaces and with my nonstop patter until I felt like we were caught in a time vortex. Kevin undoubtedly thought we were caught in hell. The cords of his neck were taut. Veins stood out at his temples. His face was crimson.
I could hear the mechanical respirations of the black-and-white clock on the wall. Leaning out from under the table, I looked up at it. Twenty–three minutes had passed.
The aide would be returning soon. In an attempt to startle Kevin out of this nonproductive cycle he’d gotten trapped in, I whacked the floor with the flat of my hand. Often enough that worked with other children and we would leap right over the first word. But not this time. Startled, Kevin only bumped his head on the underside of the tabletop. Rubbing it tenderly, he bent forward and attacked the word anew. He brought a hand to his mouth and tried to force his lips into the shape of the word. The word was ‘every’ and soon it required both hands to stretch his lips back into the shape of an e. Sweat dropped from his face down onto the page. The ever-present sound of his teeth chattering echoed in our enclosure.
I slid back out from under the table and sat up straight, rubbing the tense muscles in my back. The thirty minutes were nearly over and we weren’t going to have success. If he hadn’t been trying so desperately, I don’t think I would have felt as disheartened as I did, but it was apparent Kevin cared. Unfortunately, caring wasn’t enough.
‘Well, we’ll call it a day, shall we?’ I said and reached in for the book. ‘It’s not such a big matter that it didn’t work out this time. That happens lots. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
He looked at me. Tears puddled up and then ran down over his cheeks.
Puzzled, I drove back to the clinic after the session. Kevin appeared to be trying so hard. Very rarely had I had a kid who had tried like that right from the beginning. It made him enjoyable to work with because it was the two of us together against the problem. However, I was not so naïve as not to wonder why. Why would he appear to want to talk again so willingly, if he were able to speak, but was refusing to do so? That didn’t make very good sense. What was his exact problem? How did his lack of speech tie in? Did his fears cause his inability to talk? Or did his failure to speak cause the fears? Or were they even related? Perhaps what nagged at me most was the uncertainty that Kevin could, indeed, talk. If he couldn’t, that clearly would account for why he didn’t. And it probably would account as well for why he was trying so hard, if he believed I could give him a power he did not possess. The lack of information on this boy who had been in and out of institutions for so many years was appalling. Was it possible Kevin had never spoken normally? Could he have been deprived of speech through some accident or organic factor? Was I trying to force him to do something he was physically or mentally incapable of doing? Had he some sort of insidious mental illness like schizophrenia which had stolen speech from him, as it sometimes does?
There were so many questions about this boy. Questions without answers.
‘Someone phoned for you,’ Jeff said when I arrived back in my office at the clinic. He was bent over The New England Journal of Medicine and did not bother to look up.
‘Who was it? Did you answer it?’ I asked. Jeff was loath to answer the phone under most circumstances. A child psychiatrist in his last years of training, Jeff shared a closet-sized office with me, which used to house rats and pigeons when the former occupant, Dr Kirk, was into his rats-and-pigeons phase. The room still smelled a little like a rodent-infested aviary. There were no windows, which did not help the smell any, but we were hardly cut off from the outside. Instead, we had three telephones between the two of us, all with different numbers. His, mine and ours. I had no idea why there were three since the room was too small to accommodate another desk and Dr Kirk, for all his cleverness, had not been training a zoological answering service. But there it was, that third phone, residing on a chair between our two desks, and an odd assortment of calls still came in over it. Consequently, the room was usually alive with ringing. Jeff, if he could help it, never answered any of the three.
I began taking off my jacket. ‘I said, Jeff, did you answer it?’
‘Yes.’ His article must have been awfully riveting.
‘Well, who was it? What did they want?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked up at last. ‘They hung up.’
My silence was adequate reply.
‘I did too ask! Don’t look at me like that.’
I dropped my box of materials on the desk and slumped into my chair. All along my back the muscles were sore. I hadn’t realized at the time how much I’d been empathizing with Kevin’s distress. For several moments I just sat, letting the muscles relax, not really thinking at all. My eyes rose up the wall in front of me to the confusion of things on my bulletin board. It was kind of a portrait of my mind turned inside out – kids’ drawings, a button in Welsh protesting nuclear energy, four photographs, my calendar with all its visual proof that I did not need a case like Kevin’s, my rotation schedule sheet, a few brightly colored leaves, caught falling from the trees to fulfill that old superstition about good luck for twelve leaves caught in autumn, a gigantic poster of a Cheshire cat, the framed poem in childish hand by one of my former students. Kevin sat at the very back of my mind, pushed there by nothingness. I had meant to ask Jeff’s ideas on the case but I was momentarily drained. I just sat.
Then