The Way of the Wolf Read online

  Dawson pointed at me. “It was h-him,” he said. “I was just talking to him, and he kicked me in the balls!”

  I glanced around at the other kids, but all of their eyes were wide, and I realized that none of them were going to speak up for me. I looked at Mrs. Connors. “That's a lie,” I said calmly. “Dawson asked me if I had any money, and I said no. Then I asked him why he wanted to know, and he said if I had any, I had to give it to him. Then he grabbed me by the shirt and acted like he was going to hit me, so I got him with my knee.”

  Mrs. Connors stood there for a moment, just looking at me, while Dawson protested that I was lying. She looked at Jerry and the girls, but all of them seemed to find more interesting things to look at on the floor or the tabletop.

  “Jerry, tell me the truth. Did Noah start it, or did Dawson?”

  Jerry let out a sigh, as if resigning himself to trouble to come. “Dawson started it,” he said. “It was just like Noah said. Dawson always takes our money, whenever we get any.”

  “It's true,” Molly said, and I looked at her, surprised that she was speaking up. “He even took the money you gave me last week, for helping in the kitchen.” She got up out of her chair and came to stand beside me.

  Mrs. Connors nodded, as if she had suspected something like this was happening, but hadn’t known for sure. She turned to Dawson. “Mr. Dawson,” she said, “I want you to go to your room and begin packing your things. When dinner is ready, I will let you know and you can come to eat, but then you go back and finish packing. I've told you before, I will not abide a thief in this house. You know the rules; starting trouble means you go back to the group home. I'll call your caseworker, now, so she'll be here to get you this evening.” She turned and strode out of the room, making it plain that she had given her final word on the subject.

  Dawson had gotten back on his feet, staring after her in shock. He looked at me, and I was certain that if looks could kill, I probably would've been vaporized. I looked back at him, straight into his eyes, and once again I wondered why I wasn't afraid. We held each other's gaze for a few seconds, and then Dawson seemed to deflate, and turned and walked out the door.

  The other older boy was still standing beside his table. He looked at me, turned and looked at the door where Dawson had just disappeared, and then walked over and stuck out a hand. “I'm Jimmy,” he said. “Jimmy Miller.”

  “Noah,” I said, shaking his hand. “Why did Dawson look so upset?”

  Jimmy grinned, and Jerry started to laugh. “Mrs. C is gonna send him back to the group home. You know what that is?” Jimmy asked me. I shook my head. “Well, it's really just like a great big place for kids like us, who got nowhere to go, but they use it for the kids who are always starting trouble. In the system, we call it kid prison, on account of they got guards there, like in prison. You get locked in at night, just like when you're in jail. Dawson's been there twice, already, and they say if you go there three times, that's it and you don't leave until you're eighteen.”

  I looked at the doorway, and then back at Jimmy. “Then he shouldn't have been trying to steal money from everyone.”

  Jimmy's eyes were wide as he looked at me, and Jerry chuckled again. “Remind me to stay on your good side,” Jerry said. “I've got a feeling you're the wrong one to tangle with.”

  Jimmy, Jerry and Molly introduced me to the other three girls, whose names were Kimmy, Lizzie and Gina. Lizzie was Jerry's sister, and she was a year younger than him. The seven of us pulled chairs up around one of the tables, and sat down to talk, but that was when Mrs. Connors announced that dinner was ready.

  “We eat in here,” Molly said, “but we gotta go down to the kitchen to get our plates. Just follow us.”

  I did, following along right behind Molly and Lizzie. The rest of them lined up behind me, and I saw Dawson coming down the hall to fall in at the tail end of the line. We went back to the living room, and then turned to the right to go into the kitchen.

  There were eight trays, the kind you see in school cafeterias. Each one had a slot for silverware, and there was a cup of what I guessed was Kool-Aid or something like it for each of us. Like the other kids, I picked up my tray and carried it right back to the room with the tables.

  The seven of us who would be remaining there all gathered around one table, while Dawson sat at another by himself. I positioned myself where I could watch him, just to be sure he wasn't going to try to sneak up on me, but it wasn't me he was glaring at. It was Jimmy. I figured out that the room Jerry and I shared was probably for younger boys, like us, and suspected that Jimmy might be close enough to Dawson's age that they were sharing a room for older boys, as well. If that were the case, then I thought that Jimmy might be in for a rough night.

  The food wasn't bad. That first night, we had lasagna and garlic bread, with Jell-O and store-bought brownies for dessert. It was actually pretty good, and the Kool-Aid stuff wasn't bad, either. The seven of us talked as we ate, and I told Jimmy what my concerns were, but he shrugged.

  “Dawson don't scare me,” he said, “but Mrs. Connors, she don't waste any time. She probably called his caseworker as soon as she walked out of here before, so they'll be here to get him before too long.”

  Jerry nodded. “Yeah, they don't just sit around,” he said. “When one of us gets in trouble, the caseworkers kinda get yelled at, too, so they stay on top of us pretty well. Who did you get?”

  I shrugged. “I don't know,” I said. “There was a lady named Ms. Gamble, and a man named Mr. Hogan. They're the ones who brought me here.”

  Jimmy's eyes bugged out. “You got Ms. Gamble? Holy cow, man, she's hot!”

  Hot? I called up the memory of Ms. Gamble, and looked her over in my mental eye. In doing so, I realized that Jimmy was right. Ms. Gamble was the kind of woman that people on TV always said were very pretty. It occurred to me that she was probably even prettier than my mother, and I had always thought my mother was beautiful. It struck me as odd that I was suddenly able to think of someone else as being prettier than her. I didn't understand what was happening, but I was pretty sure that such a thought would've been alien to me even a few hours earlier.

  Somewhere during the time when we were eating, Jerry spilled the beans about why I was there, and everyone stared at me. Molly looked at me, and I saw tears in her eyes.

  “What's wrong, Molly?” I asked.

  Her eyes got wide as she looked at me. “I just feel terrible for you,” she said. “I can't imagine why you're not crying your own eyes out. At least I know my mom and dad are still out there, even if I got taken away from them. Someday, I might get to go home, but you won't. Why aren't you crying?”

  I shrugged. “I don't know,” I said. “Just don't feel like it, I guess.”

  From that moment on, it was pretty obvious that the others thought I was kind of strange. I didn't know what it was that they thought was wrong with me, because a part of me didn't realize that there was something wrong with the fact that I wasn't showing any displays of grief. I couldn't have expressed it at the time, but the fact was that I simply wasn't feeling any emotions, at all.

  That was only the beginning. Over the next few days, I talked to a number of people about what had happened, but at seven years old, I really didn't understand all the implications of what I was going through. I was introduced to a man named Mr. Albertson, who Ms. Gamble said was my lawyer, and at first I thought that I was in some kind of trouble. After all, in all the movies and TV shows I had seen, that's when people needed lawyers, but then she explained that his job was to make sure that I was protected, not put in jail.

  I also met a doctor. Ms. Gamble, who I knew by now was my official caseworker, took me to see Dr. Stewart, but it wasn't until sometime later that I realized he was a child psychologist. He asked me an awful lot of questions about what had happened that night, and I noticed that he sometimes seemed concerned about the way I answered.

  “Noah,” he said on one occasion, “you were there, just outsi
de the room and watching, when your father killed your mother and then himself. Doesn't it worry you that you don't seem to be terribly upset about it?”

  I looked at him. “No,” I said. “Why? Should it?”

  “Well, let me ask you this, did you love your parents?”

  I sat there for several seconds, and thought about this question. Had I loved them? That was an interesting concept, because to be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the answer should be. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know.”

  Later that day, Ms. Gamble told me that Dr. Stewart had suggested that I might need to go to some sort of special hospital, a place for people who had been through what she called extreme trauma. I didn't know what trauma was, but I didn't think I'd been through any.

  “Do you think I need to go to a hospital?” I asked her.

  Ms. Gamble looked at me, and I could see in her eyes that she cared about me, even if I wasn't sure what that really meant. “I don't know,” she said. “Noah, I've known you for a few weeks now, and I haven't seen you shed a single tear over what happened. Sweetie, that's not normal.” She sighed. “But does it mean you should be in the hospital? I just don't know. You don't seem to be acting out, you're not causing trouble or anything. I'm just not sure what to say.”

  I had to go see Dr. Stewart once a week, and Ms. Gamble told me that if I did go to the hospital, it wouldn't be right away. I thought about it, and decided that I should be ready for it in case he brought it up. He did, the very next week.

  “Noah,” he began, “it worries me that you don't seem to be showing any sign of emotion. That's not a normal condition, especially for someone as young as you. Now, don't misunderstand me, this isn't your fault, it's not that you've done anything wrong. This goes back to what happened, not to anything you did.” He paused for a moment, and licked his lips as he looked at me. “Noah, I'm thinking about sending you to a hospital, a place where there are a lot of people who have been through terrible things. Sometimes, when we go through something bad, like you did, it can have negative effects on our personalities. Sometimes, those effects go away on their own after a while, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes, they need a little help, and that's what this hospital is all about.”

  When Ms. Gamble had mentioned the hospital the week before, I had talked it over with the other kids at the home. Jimmy, who was almost 13, had been in the system for a couple of years already. He told me about several people he had met who had been sent to the places they referred to as hospitals.

  “The funny thing about it,” he said, “was that most of 'em I never saw again. There was only one who ever came back, and they had him on so much dope he didn't even know what day it was.”

  Susan, one of the girls at the home, told me that her sister had been placed in the system the same time she was. Her sister was older, and apparently had been pretty upset about it all, so she got sent to one of the hospitals. When she came back, she was on medication that made her smile a lot, but she didn't act like herself.

  I didn't want medication, and I didn't want to be locked up somewhere. Unfortunately, Dr. Stewart was making it clear that if I couldn't act the way he considered normal, then I was headed for one or the other, and possibly both. The only way I could think of to avoid that fate was to give him what he wanted.

  I continued to stare into his eyes for a few more seconds, and then I let my lower lip begin to tremble. By slightly squeezing the muscles around my eyeballs, something I didn't even know I could do until a couple of days earlier, I made a tear come out of my right eye and slide down my cheek.

  “But—but if I cry, everyone will think I'm a big baby,” I said, and then I let the tears begin to flow steadily. If I had to explain exactly how I did it, I probably couldn't, but flexing those little muscles seemed to be a trigger for my tear ducts. Tears began to stream steadily down my cheeks, and I began to sob as I told Dr. Stuart all about that horrible night, once again.

  It worked. Within a few moments, Dr. Stuart was telling me how wonderful it was that we had had a breakthrough, that I had finally allowed the emotions to surface. I continued to cry softly until it was time to leave, and then I had to maintain the act a little longer for Ms. Gamble. She told me how proud she was that I had finally let my feelings show, that it was a good thing, and that now the healing could begin.

  I nodded, and thanked her. When we got back to the home, I went straight to my room and lay back on my bunk, just thinking about what I had done. It was the first time I had ever pretended to have feelings that I didn't even understand, and I had managed to pull it off. Jerry came in and found me, and talked me into going down to the day room, where we ate, and where all the other kids were waiting for me.

  “So?” Molly asked. “How was it?”

  I shrugged. “They won't be sending me to the hospital,” I said. “I did it just the way we practiced, and it worked. Dr. Stuart says I had a breakthrough; Ms. Gamble says everything will be fine now.”

  Molly nodded. “That's what you gotta do,” she said. “You can't let your guard down with these people; you gotta keep them thinking like they're in control, but you gotta make them do what you want.”

  I learned a lot from Molly.

  THREE

  THE NEXT FEW weeks went by pretty quickly. I was still in school, still going to Douglas Elementary. I wondered why I was allowed to continue in my class, when Molly hadn't been, and she explained that she’d been given a special tutor. She went to an office somewhere, instead of to a regular school. I didn't worry about it, mostly because I didn't know how to worry about anything.

  At school, I had become something of a loner. The friends I had had before were all keeping their distance, as if what had happened was something that might be contagious, something they could catch from me and take home to their own families. I knew that was ridiculous, but I didn't let it get to me, because I didn't have anything in common with those kids, not anymore. I was a state kid, now, and to most kids, being a state kid meant you had done something terrible. I even heard rumors that said it was me that killed my parents, rather than my father. When one of the sixth-grade boys actually asked me about it, I simply looked at him and shrugged.

  I shrugged because I figured there was no point trying to tell them what really happened, since the kids were all going to believe whatever they wanted to believe, anyway. The next day, I overheard several kids talking about how my shrug was taken as a confession. From then on, pretty much everyone was scared of me. I wasn't terribly surprised when Ms. Gamble told me that I was being transferred to a different school, just a couple of weeks later.

  To get to the new school, I had to go all the way across town. That wasn't as ominous as it would sound today, because it wasn't that big a town, but when you're seven years old, it seems like quite a journey. It was the same school that Jerry and Lizzie and some other state kids went to, so at least I would have a few friends there.

  Still, the word spread, and before long everyone at my new school knew what had happened to me, and to my family. I didn't really care, but I learned quickly that it was necessary for me to seem to get upset whenever the subject came up. I found that if I allowed a few tears to fall, and said, “I just can't talk about that,” most people were more than content to let it go. The few kids who decided to push the issue and pick on me learned rather quickly that I wasn't going to put up with being pushed too far.

  On the other hand, I was becoming quite adept at staying out of trouble. Since it was almost always the tragedy surrounding my parents that caused the fights I was in, school administrators and caseworkers were always quick to let it go with simply cautioning me to keep my temper under control. Those first few weeks saw more fights than I would've liked, but looking back, I chalk it up to learning my role as Pinocchio.

  Pinocchio? I guess that's sort of a private joke that I tell myself. See, that night, when I watched my parents die, something inside my head just blew out. I don't know what you’d call it, I don't k
now how to explain it. I've consulted doctors at different times over the years since then, and I've been diagnosed with everything from schizophrenic personality disorder to histrionic affect disorder. One doctor thought I might be autistic, while another actually speculated that I might be suffering from extreme early onset Alzheimer's disease.

  The problem was that I had absolutely no emotion. I did not get angry, I did not get sad, I never felt happiness or excitement. There would be moments in which I would feel a certain level of pleasure, but I liken it to the way a dog or cat can experience pleasure from the touch of a human. It doesn't in any way mean that the animal has any human attributes, and there are animal behaviorists who actually question whether animals can experience any kind of true emotion at all. What we may take as anger or fear in an animal could be nothing more than a chemical reaction in the brain that stimulates some kind of activity that is designed to increase the animal's chances of survival.

  That was a pretty fair description of me. I didn't feel anger or fear, I simply recognized certain situations as requiring some sort of activity on my part to help ensure my survival. Included in that survival, at least from my point of view, was a need to keep people from understanding just how nonhuman I felt inside.

  The only one who seemed to have any real understanding of what I was feeling was Molly. Ironically, she became an incredibly good friend in a very short time, and she was unbelievably intelligent for an eight-year-old girl. We'd been back around each other for only a few days when it dawned on me that I hadn't even bothered to ask her why she was in the foster system.

  “My dad,” she said with a shrug. “I got this high IQ, they say, I'm supposed to be real smart. The school, they wanted to put me in some advanced classes, but they cost money that we didn't have. My dad kept getting mad whenever the school would start pushing us, and one day he and my mom got into a big fight about it. Mom said he wasn't giving me the support I needed, and he said I wasn't really as smart as they let on or I'd figure out some way to make us all rich. I said I probably could, if he'd listen, and he got mad and hit me. Mom called the police, and by the time everything settled down, they were both in all kinds of trouble and I was here.”