A Safe Place for Joey (15 page)

“That’s nice, Ben.” And it
was – both what she said and the place itself. The house was big and rambling with weathered grey shingles and a wide porch that wrapped around three sides. There were wicker chairs and a glider on the porch, and the steps and railing were lined with window boxes filled with red geraniums.

“This is me and Jessie and Danny. I told you about him, remember.”

The picture showed three handsome
blond kids in their bathing suits, fishing off the boathouse.

“And this is me and MacArthur.”

It was a wonderful picture. The dog sat beside Ben on the front seat of a boat looking straight ahead, with Ben relaxed and confident behind the wheel.

“What kind of boat did you say it was, Ben?”

“A Garwood. Granny’s had it a long time, but I wasn’t allowed to take it out myself
till last year. See. The sides are mahogany, and the hinges and stuff are real brass. It’s a really special boat to her, so you have to have a pretty good idea where the shoals are and how to use all the gears and get it back in the boathouse right before she trusts you with it.”

“I can see why you like it there,” I said.

“This is the last picture. See, this is the new speedboat. Dad
got it last summer, and that’s him driving.”

The same dark intense man I had seen in the car was again leaning intently over a wheel.

“I didn’t bring a picture of Mom because I knew you’d seen her.”

I still held the picture of Ben’s father. “Does your dad like the river, too?”

Ben shrugged. “Some. He doesn’t come up that much. He says he can only take so much of it at a
time. Besides, he’s real busy – he says we couldn’t afford the river and stuff if he spent his summers loafing around like us.”

I handed the picture back and waited.

Ben piled the snapshots together, making sure he got them in a certain order, probably so he could put them back in the album correctly. He put a rubber band around them and tucked them in the back pocket of his jeans.

“Would you like an envelope?” I asked.

Ben shook his head. “Mom gets nervous if anybody g-g-gets into her stuff. I’ll just keep them in my p-p-pocket till I put ’em b-b-back.”

It hadn’t been easy for Ben to bring the pictures, and I also knew it had been important to him to show me that part of his life. I thanked him for it.

“Pay yourself fifty for each picture,” I said.
“Now let’s get back to the testing. I know some of it’s hard and boring. But it really helps later on.

“Now please take a look at this.”

I laid the Peabody Picture Vocabulary book in front of Ben. The Peabody is a test of receptive, not expressive, language. It measures how much you understand rather than how well you say it. It consists of a book of black and white pictures, four
to a page. The examiner simply says a word, and the child points to the picture described by the word. I did not intend to use it as a global intelligence test, but I did want to see if there was a difference between Ben’s score on this test and his rather low vocabulary score on the WISC-R, which involves expression and also retrieval of information to a much greater extent. The Peabody takes only
about ten minutes, and I had a feeling Ben would enjoy it.

If anything, I underestimated. Ben whizzed through the test, readily identifying such words as rodent, salutation, patriarch, ingenious. I felt sure that when I scored it, Ben would place well above his chronological age.

“Pay three hundred seventy-five. Let’s see what we have left now. Some drawings, Raven Progressive Matrices,
and sentence completion.”

I handed Ben a piece of paper and a pencil. “Now I want you to do a bunch of different drawings. First, please draw your best picture of a house.”

“I told you, remember? That I’m not so good at drawing.”

“I remember. I’m not too great myself. Just make it the best you can.”

I have taken several courses, read many books, and had supervised training
by a psychologist in both the administration of the WISC-R and the interpretation of drawings. But still, I use great caution in my interpretations, particularly of drawings. I do believe that they are necessary pieces of the puzzle, and in my conferences with Phil Golden he examines the pictures carefully and I value what he tells me. But drawings should be considered in context with all else
that is known about the child. Some children love to draw and can communicate ideas and feelings through drawings that they would never be able to express otherwise. Other children are uncomfortable with paper and pencil, and this should also be taken into account.

Ben’s drawings reflected his constricted emotions. The house he drew was approximately one square inch in all, resting on the
bottom of the paper, surrounded by white emptiness. The windows were few and barred, and the door was tightly locked. There was an attached garage with three cars and a motorcycle.

“Now, please draw a tree – the best you can,” I said.

Ben drew quickly, producing a small, faintly drawn tree with sketchy sticks for branches. He shaded in the tree trunk, anxiety growing, while the pulse
in his temple beat at a rapid pace.

“Now draw a person doing something.”

“I can’t do p-p-people, p-p-p-par-par-tic … you know what I mean – doing things.”

“I know. That’s okay. My people don’t come out the way I want them to, either.”

Quickly, almost as if to get it over with, Ben sketched a figure a half-inch tall perched on a line, hands over his head. “He’s diving,”
Ben volunteered.

“Good,” I said. “Now draw a picture of a woman doing something.”

Ben had given up complaining. He drew a seated figure with something that looked like a balloon instead of a head. “She’s getting her hair done,” Ben explained.

“Last picture, Ben. Draw a picture of your family doing something.”

“Oh, jeez.” Ben’s pain was real. “I don’t know anything they
can be doing.” He stared grimly and silently at the paper, and then finally picked it up, folded it in half, and then folded it again. Then he spread it out on the desk, smoothing the paper till it lay flat, divided it into quarters, and then carefully penciled in the crease marks. He numbered the squares – 1, 2, 3, 4. “Well, I’ll put D-D-Dad up here,” he said, drawing what for Ben was a large figure.
But he erased it before it was half done. “No, I know. I’ll make him driving his car.” And Ben drew a long, low car with a figure hunched over the wheel, and then blacked in both car and man.

“Mom can be reading,” he said, and drew a small figure with long, perfectly even hair, holding a book, perched on the edge of a chair.

“Now Jess can be down here. I’ll make her jumping rope.”
Ben drew a girl with a big smile and ribbons in her hair, holding a jump rope.

“Now there’s just me left. I’ll be at the river.” He drew two parallel lines across box 4. “The river’s a lot b-b-bigger than that, you know.” I nodded as Ben added a tiny sailboat near the edge of the page. He added a circle on the top edge of the boat and blacked it again. “You can’t see the rest of me,” he
said. “It’s inside the b-b-boat. There’s just my head there, my s-s-stupid head.” Then he carefully added a bird above the boat. “There’s always at least one gull out there,” he said.

“All right. Thank you, Ben. Pay yourself six hundred, and then I’ll ask you some questions about the pictures.”

Ben’s answers were short and the stutter was there, but he was obviously trying to tell
me all that he could.

When we got to the last picture, he lingered over it, touching the picture of the boat with his finger. “I wish I could draw it b-better, so you could see what it’s like. I don’t know why it is, but you feel good up there, out on the water. I mean all the time you just feel happy.” Ben smiled at me – and I wished I had a picture of him just like that.

I stood
up and got my Polaroid and said, “Tell me some more,” and snapped a picture as he talked. I always take a picture of each child I see, to help me remember. Many children come back years later for help in choosing the right boarding school or college. Without a picture, I often have difficulty placing a child. But when I can see their faces, I remember each one in detail.

I’d put the picture-taking
off with Ben; somehow it had seemed too intimate a gesture until now. The picture showed a smiling, handsome, seemingly untroubled boy – one that I had rarely seen in person.

We were almost done. Only the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices Test and the Freeman Sentence Completion Test were left.

Ben enjoyed the Raven, as I had thought he would. The Raven Standard Progressive Matrices
is an untimed test of designs, each of which has a missing segment. The test is used to measure conceptual thoughts in a perceptual field. The pictures are somewhat like visual analogies and range from clear perceptual problems to those of an abstract nature. Ben scored in the 95th percentile, again confirming his intelligence and good visual perception but leaving other questions unanswered.

I had the Freeman Sentence Completion on the clipboard, ready to write down Ben’s endings to the sentences I read. But before I could start, Ben suddenly pushed the box of markers almost roughly across the desk.

“I couldn’t d-d-draw it – that picture you wanted me to draw. I tried, but I didn’t really know what to d-draw. See, the b-birds, and being sc-sc-scared, kind of got all mixed
up in my mind. I don’t know. It got worse at school this year – the k-k-kids made fun of me and I couldn’t talk about it to anyone and everybody was always so m-mad. I began to dream about the river. At first I had to make myself do it on purpose, but then it began to come just b-b-by itself. All I had to do was just close my eyes for a second and I’d be at the river. I mean I could open my eyes
and still be there. When they started to yell at me, or if I was supposed to take a t-t-t … like an exam, I’d just close my eyes for that one second and then I wasn’t in school anymore. Instead I’d be out sailing, or swimming with Danny, or taking Mac out for a ride. I’d be doing something different all the time, but the birds were always there. Like they really are in the summer. Way up there,
gliding along – just a few flaps – and then they’d just sail along. It looked so easy.

“That’s how it began. And then I b-b-began to think how maybe flying and not being scared went together. How if you could fly you wouldn’t ever be scared. And I didn’t think it would be so b-b-bad if I couldn’t read good, or get good marks, if I didn’t get scared. Like, even if everybody else m-m-m … I
can’t say it … minded, there, I wouldn’t. I mean it wouldn’t be so important to me.”

I sat without moving, hoping Ben couldn’t hear my heart thudding away, praying that we wouldn’t be interrupted. Ben understood himself better than anyone else. If I could just listen long enough, hard enough, he would explain it to me.

“I didn’t p-plan it all out,” he said. “It just sort of happened.
See, first I just started walking around the railing on the back porch, just putting one foot in front of the other and b-balancing with my arms. The porch is kind of high up, and I was a little scared at first – but I got pretty good at it, and I was getting so I didn’t feel hardly scared at all. But then ole Jessie found out and she always wants to do whatever I’m doing, and I got worried she’d
f-f-f …” Ben shook his head in frustration.

“Fall,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t fill in words, but unable to stop myself.

Ben nodded. “So I had to stop. But I missed being up high, being able to do it and not feel scared – and somehow it got mixed in with thinking about the birds.

“It wasn’t that I really planned to fly. At least I don’t think I did, or anyway not much. But I
liked thinking about it and the feeling – being up so high, all alone, nobody b-bothering me – and so I started climbing out the dormers in the attic onto the slate roof and then walking and balancing around the edge of it. Nobody ever saw me. Our house is way back from the road and there’s lots of trees around it, and Mom’s never outside. I didn’t d-do it on weekends. I guess I was sc-scared Dad
might come home then and I knew he’d be really mad. Then the more I walked around out there, the more I began thinking about the birds and wondering how they did it.

“The only d-d-d-dumb thing I did was sneaking out that ole pajama top of Dad’s. But it had these great big s-s-s-sleeves, and I liked to f-f-flap, and I could balance real g-g-good in my bare feet. But I shouldn’t have gotten
his d-d-dumb pajamas. I wasn’t really going to j-j-j-jump off the roof, though – honest. I just liked thinking about it.”

“Have you told Dr. Golden?” I asked.

“No. Mom’s always sitting there. I haven’t told anybody b-but Jessie. And you.”

I could hear the Mercedes pull into the driveway. There was no beep, but its hum was familiar now. “I don’t know what to pay for that, Ben.
It’s like it’s too much for chips.”

Ben nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I have enough chips already.”

Ben knew as well as I did that our time was up, but still he finished counting his piles of chips. “Two thousand and thirty-five. Can I add it up?”

I pushed the file folder toward Ben, open to the inside back cover. Ben wrote the figure carefully underneath the previous
total and added them together, counting softly under his breath.

“Eight thousand one hundred and five.”

“Good work.” I handed him the Matchbox catalog.

“I already know which one I want,” he said, leafing quickly till he came to the little airplane. “This one, right here.”

I circled the plane with a red pen and wrote “B.B.A.” underneath it. I always write the child’s initials
so I will remember who ordered what.

The motor still hummed in the driveway, and I looked up to say good-bye to Ben. “As soon as I get it, I’ll call you and you can come back, pick it up, and we’ll go over your test scores then, too.”

But Ben wasn’t listening. He was still looking at the picture of the plane – or that’s what I thought he was looking at. But instead he pointed to the
initials I had just written.

“Did you always know?” he asked. “That they called me that? B.B.?”

I nodded.