And it was over. The silence of an abandoned house in an August rainstorm was able to communicate to Kevin what I in all my months with him could not. His ghosts at last lay down.
Between us we never spoke of that afternoon, not then as we drove back to Seven Oaks, not later in our continuing sessions. Not ever. I did discuss the occurrence at length with Bill Smith and particularly with Dr Rosenthal but between Kevin and me it was never cloaked in the insubstantial fabric of words. It didn’t need to be. We had shared it. And that had been enough.
Bill Smith and I continued to search for an alternative placement for Kevin. In a couple of weeks Kevin’s eighteenth birthday would pass and Bill did not feel that Seven Oaks was the best place for Kevin to remain. Not only were most of the boys there much younger but they were also a different type than Kevin. Because Kevin was so desperate to exercise new-found social skills and make friends, Bill feared he would be taken advantage of by some of the more savvy boys or worse, in an attempt to gain their friendship, he would learn their tricks and we would have traded one set of unacceptable behaviors for another.
I had known Bill was out beating the bushes for another spot, some alternative to a more restrictive environment, because all of us now felt Kevin ought to be given a chance to prove himself. Yet, at nearly eighteen, he was not a good candidate for fostering, mostly because few families would be willing to tackle a kid that age and with his background.
But Bill found one. Mr and Mrs Burchell, they were, a nice-appearing couple, sweet in manner, both rather shy. They weren’t very old, in their late twenties or so. They’d been married a couple of years but had no children of their own. When they arrived, we sat around in Bill’s office chatting and drinking lemonade. When I asked them why they had decided to foster and why in particular to foster adolescents with problems, Mrs Burchell said they wanted to do something meaningful for society. They had both been fortunate themselves to have had loving and happy childhoods and they wanted to extend themselves to those less fortunate.
It sounded corny, the way they said it, and I must have had an expression on my face that told them that because they both apologized profusely for not being able to say it well. I laughed and Bill Smith told them not to mind me, that I’d been too long in the business to look any other way. I was still chuckling and had to apologize, myself, saying that words counted for naught anyway. Action was everything.
I hadn’t seen Kevin between the time I was informed about the existence of the Burchells and their arrival. He had been in woodworking class and wasn’t free until four o’clock. The whole affair caught me off balance because Bill had never mentioned any impending fostering possibilities. No doubt he did not want to raise my hopes any more than Kevin’s. So I didn’t really have a chance to adjust to this abrupt turn of good fortune. The Burchells seemed nice, but I was too uninformed to be much of a judge.
Kevin came into the room, his face wreathed in smiles. He had been told in the morning apparently and now was totally unable to contain his enthusiasm. Mom and Dad. He wanted to call them Mom and Dad right then and there, these people who were perhaps only a decade older than he was himself. However, the old Kevin wasn’t too far away either. The excitement overcame him, and when Bill asked him a question, he ducked his head and wouldn’t answer.
I was sitting next to him and I kicked him with the side of my shoe. I hissed through clamped teeth. A smile to the Burchells. ‘Kevin’s a little shy sometimes. But he gets over it. Don’t you, Kevin?’ I said, and kicked him again.
All in all, the interview went quite well. Kevin did manage to find his voice eventually, after we waited long enough, and the Burchells seemed genuinely interested in taking him. At the end, Kevin and I left together and the Burchells stayed with Bill.
‘I’m going to have a family,’ Kevin whispered to me as we walked down the hallway. Then as we got outside, he erupted into joy. ‘Whoopeee! I’m going to have a family after all!’
I laughed. I meant to tell him not to get too high of hopes just in case the worst happened. But I couldn’t. When I saw his face, there was no way I could be that heartless.
So after a week of sheer frenzy for Kevin while the Burchells made their minds up, all Kevin could think about was ‘his family.’ Finally, it was agreed that he would go to spend Labor Day weekend with them as a trial run. This put Kevin beside himself. All we could do was talk about what to take, what to wear and what he might be doing. He had grandiose plans for those four days. Among them was swimming. Kevin had become a passably good swimmer by now, his one monumental accomplishment in everyone’s eyes, and he was desperate to show the Burchells, even though I tried to explain that perhaps they would not appreciate the immensity of the achievement for him. But he didn’t care. Would there be a pool? Could he take his swimming trunks? Would they come watch him? And on and on and on, ad nauseam.
When Labor Day weekend finally arrived, however, there I was with Bill, standing in the gravel driveway as the Burchells’ battered old station wagon with Kevin and his brown suitcase in back finally pulled out of sight around the corner of the Seven Oaks gate. And I could have cried.
Over the latter two months of the summer I saw very little of Charity. We had had the barbecue at the Thatchers’ and then I had taken her camping, and there was a Big Brothers/Big Sisters picnic, but after that, I saw less and less of her. She had begun spending weekends out on the reservation with her mother’s family and then pretty soon it was weeks out there and weekends in town and at last, she was out there all the time.
On August fifteenth, Charity turned ten. I’d promised I would take her shopping for a birthday gift when she got back from the reservation, and over the Labor Day weekend, she appeared on my doorstep for the first time in weeks.
‘You wanna go buy me a birthday present today?’ she hollered in through the screen door when she found it locked.
I was in the other part of the house, cleaning out closets, a job I detested heartily. Consequently, it almost never got done. But I had finally given in because I couldn’t open any of them without endangering my life.
‘Can you go today?’ she asked when I let her in. She followed me back to the bedroom. ‘Will you take me? You know what I want? I want a dress. I want a disco dress. You know, one of them’s that’s all shiny.’
‘A disco dress?’ I raised an eyebrow as I settled back down to sort through the junk hauled out from the floor of the closet. When I was ten, I had wanted a horse, a pup tent and a Davy Crockett hat.
‘Yeah. You know. Like they got in Friday Night Fever.’
‘I think you mean Saturday Night Fever.’
‘Yeah, well, whenever it is. I want one of them.’
‘You plan to go disco dancing?’
She shrugged. ‘You never know. I might.’
‘Yes, that’s probably true.’
‘So, would you? I seen one. Down at Salvador’s Boutique. It’s in the window.’
‘Char, that’s a big ladies’ place. No sizes for kids.’
‘Well, could we go look at it at least? Could we? You and me ain’t done nothing together lately. So couldn’t you just take me around to look? Please?’
I sighed. It was not a good day for it. Being a holiday weekend and a Saturday as well, the city would be a madhouse downtown. Worse, I was wearing an ancient, very ragged pair of cutoffs and a T-shirt and that meant I would have to change, my least favorite pastime.
‘Please? Haven’t you even missed me one little bit this summer? I ain’t hardly been over at all.’
‘Well, okay, I guess. If you help me put all this stuff away in the closet first.’
‘Sure!’ she chirped and grabbed an armful. With one swing it landed on the closet floor in a heap.
Instead of hassling in the traffic, we caught the 43 bus and then walked from the courthouse. In an unexpected show of affection, Charity took my hand.
You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked when I’d looked down.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Good,’ she replied with a smile. ‘Some grown-ups do, you know. They get embarrassed holding hands with you because they think they’re too big for it.’
‘I see.’
We wandered in and out through all the people on the streets, past B. Dalton’s, past Woolworth’s and the city’s huge main department store, down around the corner and toward Salvador’s Boutique.
‘You know what?’ Charity said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Guess. Guess what’s going to happen to me.’
‘I don’t know. You’re going to turn into a green monster and take a rocket off to Mars? Is that it?’
‘Nooo! You’re silly. No, I’m gonna move.’
‘You are?’ I was genuinely surprised.
‘Yup. Next weekend. My uncle Myron is coming up from Bitter Creek and he’s helping us take all our stuff back down there. We’re gonna live with him and Aunt Lila and their kids for a while. And I got lots of other family there too.’
‘Wow. That’s big news.’
‘You know where I’m going to go to school? At St Xavier’s mission school. I seen it. Ransome goes there. So does Jennifer. So does Tara. It’s real neat. It’s got a whole new gym built on it. I’ll be in Tara’s class probably, because she’s going to be in fourth grade too.’
‘Well, that’s super. It sounds like you’re really looking forward to it.’
‘Yeah, I am,’ Charity replied. ‘It’ll be nicer than here. My grandfather lives near there and I like him a lot. And I got lots of other family. And Jennifer’s got a donkey. She said I could ride it sometimes. So it’ll be better than living here, I think.’
We had reached Salvador’s Boutique. We stopped and gazed in the window. There was a dress there, all right. A really incredible concoction of passionate orange sequins and sleazy shimmer cloth. It looked like what a cheap tart would buy.
‘See! That’s it. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Will you buy it for my birthday? That’s what I want.’
‘Charity, that’s for grown-up ladies.’
‘Well, I’m getting grown up. I’m ten already. And lookit, I’m almost getting breasts.’ She smashed her T-shirt against her chest.
I said nothing because there was nothing there to say anything about.
‘Oh, please, Torey? Please-please-please? Please? Couldn’t I just try it on? Please?’ She wriggled and squirmed until she looked like she needed to use the bathroom. ‘Oh, please? Please-please-please-please?’
I was bending down to peer into the window for a better look at the thing. It really was incredible. ‘Look, Charity, you can’t even see the price tag on it. That means they’ve hidden it so you won’t know how much it costs. And that means that it must not be worth what it costs or they wouldn’t have hidden it.’
‘Please?’
I looked at her. ‘Oh, come on,’ I replied and jerked her into the shop.
What a fool I felt like, asking to see the garish dress. The woman obviously thought it was for me, and when I, all 140 pounds of me, asked for a size 3, I could see her wince. Looking over my shoulder to make sure no one I knew was in the shop, I snatched the dress from her and shoved Charity ahead of me into one of the small fitting rooms.
Charity whipped off her clothes and within seconds was shimmying into the blinding orange disco dress. Even a size 3 was way too big for her, despite her pudginess. The string shoulder straps dropped the bodice of the dress clear below her nipples. The waist was on Charity’s hips, what hips she had. The skirt came almost to her ankles.
Thoughtfully, Charity looked at herself in the mirror. ‘Well, it is a little big, isn’t it?’ she said, woefully.
I nodded, not daring to open my mouth. She looked hysterically funny, and I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing.
‘It’s pretty though, isn’t it?’
She stood there in front of the mirror and studied her image. A slight smile was on her lips, her eyes were dark and clouded with the secret beauty of her dreams. She touched the dress lovingly, and I could detect just the faintest movement of her hips, as if the music had already begun.
I wondered what she saw. For me there was only a little girl, barefoot and dusky skinned, the outline of her cotton underpants showing through the sleazy material. Her long black hair had been caught back in two uneven pigtails and, although she had lost a lot of weight, her cheeks were still chubby and her elbows were dimpled like a two-year-old’s. But I wondered what she saw, standing there, gazing at the image in the mirror. The brilliant orange dress glimmered even in the wan fitting-room light.
I smiled at her and she looked at my image in the mirror. ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, it is.’
Gently she ran her fingers over the material.
‘How much is it, Charity?’ I asked, reaching for the tag. The dress cost $15.98, a great deal more than I had intended to spend for her birthday. Charity knew it. She looked at me, she looked at the dress and then back to her image in the mirror. Then without saying anything, she bent over to take it off.
‘Hey, wait a minute, babe. Come here.’
She straightened up and moved over to where I could reach her from where I was sitting. I ran a hand along the material. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I suppose I could buy it for you. This once. Maybe a birthday present and a goodbye gift combined.’
Hope had gone out of her face. ‘It’s too big,’ she said forlornly.
Turning her around so that she could see herself in the mirror, I moved behind her. I pulled on the straps and that hoisted the bodice up under her chin. ‘Maybe if I took the straps up for you,’ I said softly. It was still hopelessly too long, but once again Charity’s eyes were clouding with visions of that inner world I could not see. The faint smile returned.
‘It is so beautiful, Torey. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I ever seen in my whole life.’
‘Yes, and it makes you beautiful, too, doesn’t it?’
She nodded.
We said no more. Carefully she slipped the dress off and smoothed it out in my lap. Before putting her shorts back on, she paused and studied my face.
‘Are you going to miss me when I go?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I will.’
‘You won’t forget me, will you?’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Say, cross your heart and hope to die if you ever forget me. Say it, okay?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ I repeated.
‘No, no. You didn’t cross your heart when you did it. Do it again. Like this.’ She demonstrated. I did it. ‘Okay, cross my heart and hope to die if I ever forget you, too, Torey Hayden. Because you really are my best friend. Of anybody, you really are my best.’ Then she bent and pulled on her shorts. ‘Tor, can I ask you something else?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, when the time comes, can I kiss you good-bye?’
‘Certainly.’
Gently she leaned forward and kissed me then. ‘In case I don’t see you when I go.’
She must have known. I never did see Charity again after that day. We went home, I fixed us lunch and she took her orange dress out of the box. Afterwards she put it on and I pinned the straps. I stitched them with white thread because I had no orange, and then she danced for me to ABBA while I sat on the floor of my closet and cleaned. And the last I saw of her was that sunny Saturday afternoon when she disappeared with the shimmering disco dress tucked under one arm, its beauty as lusty as a Las Vegas sunset.