Silence

“You should take this job,” Kari says. She’s staying with them for a week. She’d been thinking about staying longer, hence looking at this job, but another opportunity came up, pretty much a dream job by her dream school, and he doesn’t blame her. Really.

Taylor would like her to stay, though. But he’s not going to say that. She came because of his treatment, and she felt bad, and he’s not going to do anything more. He’s fine.

He’s currently poking at his food before taking each bite, but he’s fine.

“What job?”

“It’s helping out with a Deaf boy, about my age, a year younger.”

“Why did you even apply?”

“She wanted someone close to his age, to like, be a companion. She said he doesn’t need help help, just socialization. Easy, right?”

“Sounds like you.”

“Could sound like you.”

He pretends not to notice his mom watching his fork. He takes another bite to please her, feels it heavy in his mouth. “Not hardly.”

“It’s just hanging out with a kid. Easy money. Taylor, you need a job. You need to get out.”

He thinks he liked her better when she was a kid and way too nice and shy for her own good. He doesn’t like that she blossomed in the last few years, away from him. That’s not why, he knows that. And he’s glad that she’s so confident now. She’s going to do things, and she deserves that.

“Don’t pressure him, Kari,” their mom says. “He’s taking some time to just relax right now.”

“Maybe if he was actually doing something. Join a soccer team, or something, you--” She realizes what she said and he can see her frantically reeling the words back in. “I don’t know. But sitting around at home can’t be good for you.”

“Sitting around at home is basically what the doctor ordered.”

“Being productive raises serotonin. It’s literally good for your brain.”

“But part of this is being too stressed. We don’t want to add one more stressor.”

They go on like that for awhile, before realizing what they’re doing. They both look over at him, pushing food around on his plate. “I’m not hungry,” he says.

His mom wants to tell him to eat something, but the last therapist was adamant about not doing that. No pressure, especially not around food. “Okay. But no running unless you eat something else, even just a piece of fruit.”

“I know.” That was her compromise. He would go running for hours at a time. Exercise addiction, his therapist called it. Yeah, it felt like an addiction, both the good and the bad. Hence, the doctor’s order of sitting around at home.

“And don’t try running in place in your room,” Kari says. “I’ll hear it.”

He doesn’t know what to do if it’s not moving or pretending to eat, so he just lies in bed. He thinks about the job Kari mentioned. He’s not social, not anymore. He doesn’t have any compassionate ambitions, doesn’t know how he would behave around a disabled kid. Kari’s a natural at that, he’s whatever the opposite of a natural is.

But he wants to go out. He doesn’t want to be stuck here feeling miserable. At least getting out means an excuse to avoid eating. It means getting to run, maybe the kid even likes playing. How disabled was he again?

Kai gets up and looks at his calendar. It’s a school day, he sets it up before he goes to bed, or his mom does, so he knows. He goes to stand in front of his calendar for the day, looking at it. He likes looking at it. He remembers when he didn’t have it, and sometimes it feels frustrating, stifling, to have things planned out, but then he thinks of how it would be if it wasn’t. He couldn’t ask what’s next, he couldn’t tell people what he wanted to be next. He likes knowing things. Knowing things is safe.

He goes down to make himself breakfast and draw. He draws hands, like he does sometimes. He remembers there was something important about them, but he can’t remember what. He draws hands opening up like a door, with something on the other side.

He feels the vibrations of his mom’s feet. He’s never too preoccupied to notice people. Well, he tries not to be. She touches his shoulder, then taps his face lightly to tell him to look at her. She used to grab his face, but he doesn’t like that, so she stopped, and now she just does this. She smiles and waves and her mouth moves. He smiles and waves back. She points to the sink and nods. It’s his job to do the dishes. He looks over and she gestures to the clean sink then nods again. Oh, yes, he did them yesterday. He nods back. She smiles again and turns to make her own food. She moved her mouth most of the time.

He remembers that that means something. He remembers that you move your mouth to communicate. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t want to even if he did, but he remembers that it means something.

He doesn’t want to know, though. He goes back to his drawing. He presses his bare feet to the floor, feeling his mother’s movements.

She taps his shoulder and points to the clock. He looks at it. He can’t tell time, but he knows the big hand and the little hand, and he knows he has to go to school.

She drives him there, and he taps his feet and looks outside. It seems big, sometimes. Not to school, necessarily. But when they go to different places, he feels scared, because a new place means new people means people who don’t know him and he doesn’t know and he doesn’t know what will happen and then bad things happen. He’s not stupid, part of him knows that’s not true, but once in awhile, it is.

At school, he goes to his special education classroom. He’s figured out that’s what it is, though he doesn’t have those words. It’s smaller, and he stays there all day, and the other kids there don’t move their mouths, or don’t walk, or act different than other kids outside his classroom. Most of the kids go to different classrooms for some time during the day. He doesn’t, and he likes that, he wants to stay in one place, where he knows things and he’s with his teacher.

His teacher smiles and waves to him and moves his mouth, and Kai does the same, but without moving his mouth.

They play a game matching pictures. Some of the pictures are just lines, some are real pictures. He gets frustrated because the teachers want them to match a line to a picture and that’s not right, but he does really good at it, anyway. He knows the right pictures. They show him small pictures of lines, and shapes that he sees around town--red sign, blue light person--and they have to act out what you do--stop, walk.

Sometimes he gets frustrated because the tasks are too easy, but then sometimes they make him do extra talking, so he pretends it’s not as easy as it is. He doesn’t want to talk.

Sometimes they just let him draw, though. They usually let him for at least some of the time, which he likes, even though sometimes they try to ask what the pictures mean, try to talk to him that way. They’re just pictures. Sometimes, he gets annoyed because of that, don’t ruin something he loves, and sometimes he wants so badly to be heard. He does use his pictures to talk, sometimes, yeah.

For part of the day, he works on speech. They still do that, even though he has said he is not going to talk. He doesn’t fight them anymore--when he was younger, he would scream and hit and throw things, but now he mostly just looks at them. They move their mouths and their hands and sometimes they show him pictures of things, but he just looks at them and stays in his own head until they stop.

His mom picks him up after school, and when he gets home, he takes the picture for the art museum from his schedule and carries it to where she's working downstairs in the bakery she owns.

She glances at it. "Oh, honey, it’s supposed to rain,” she says.

He waits patiently, not hearing or understanding her words.

“Could rain stop him?” the customer she's helping asks with a laugh. They know him by now. Many of the customers are regulars and know the Deaf boy.

“I don’t know how you manage,” another one says. “Letting him go, and just keeping him under control.”

“He’s not mentally disabled, and he’s a teenager,” his mom tells them. “He wants independence, and he should be able to get it.”

Kai waits patiently, understanding none of the conversation. He knows his mom has to talk to the customers, though, and sometimes he has to wait. Finally, she sighs and nods, freeing him. He grins and rushes to put the art museum picture on his schedule before dashing out the door.

Those are the places his mom lets him go on his own. He used to run all over, but he kept getting in trouble, so now he can go to those places on his own, as long as he has his bracelet and watch and shows her the picture and puts it at the time he’ll be back. He’s happy with this. He’s happy with the same two places, they’re safe, and he knows them, and the people know him.

His mom bought him a year pass to the art museum. All he has to do is show it to the person working and they let him in. He likes to go there sometimes and look at the art, especially when they get new art.

But mostly he likes the park. He likes to run. When he was little, he ran all the time. He would get so full of thoughts and feelings and he couldn’t get it out so he ran away. He still does that. When he ran away, he could escape to his world, where people didn’t talk and tie his hands and he could be quiet by himself. Even when he felt better, he would stay there, because of that.