“They changed their minds,” said Boyd, and although he wasn’t known, by the counselors or the boys, for his gentleness, he was almost gentle then. “It’s over, St. Francis. It’s not going to happen.” He reached out a hand toward him, but he ducked, and Boyd shook his head and began walking off.
“Wait,” he called, recovering himself and running as well as he could through the snow after Boyd. “Let me try again,” he said. “Tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll try again.” He could feel the old hysteria descending upon him, could feel inside him the vestiges of the boy who would throw fits and shout, who could still a room with his screams.
But Boyd shook his head again. “It doesn’t work like that, St. Francis,” he said, and then he stopped and looked directly at him. “Look,” he said, “in a few years you’ll be out of here. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. And then you’ll be an adult and you’ll be able to do whatever you want. You just have to get through these years.” And then he turned again, definitively, and stalked away from him.
“How?” he yelled after Boyd. “Boyd, tell me how! How, Boyd, how?” forgetting that he was to call him “sir,” and not “Boyd.”
That night he had his first tantrum in years, and although the punishment here was the same, more or less, as it had been at the monastery, the release, the sense of flight it had once given him, was not: now he was someone who knew better, whose screams would change nothing, and all his shouting did was bring him back to himself, so that everything, every hurt, every insult, felt sharper and brighter and stickier and more resonant than ever before.
He would never, never know what he had done wrong that weekend at the Learys’. He would never know if it had been something he could control, or something he couldn’t. And of all the things from the monastery, from the home, that he worked to scrub over, he worked hardest at forgetting that weekend, at forgetting the special shame of allowing himself to believe that he might be someone he knew he wasn’t.
But now, of course, with the court date six weeks, five weeks, four weeks away, he thought of it constantly. With Willem gone, and no one to monitor his hours and activities, he stayed up until the sun began lightening the sky, cleaning, scrubbing with a toothbrush the space beneath the refrigerator, bleaching each skinny grout-canal between the bathtub wall tiles. He cleaned so he wouldn’t cut himself, because he was cutting himself so much that even he knew how crazy, how destructive he was being; even he was scared of himself, as much by what he was doing as by his inability to control it. He had begun a new method of balancing the edge of the blade on his skin and then pressing down, as deep as he could, so that when he withdrew the razor—stuck like an ax head into a tree stump—there was half a second in which he could pull apart the two sides of flesh and see only a clean white gouge, like a side of fatted bacon, before the blood began rushing in to pool within the cut. He felt dizzy, as if his body was pumped with helium; food tasted like rot to him, and he stopped eating unless he had to. He stayed at the office until the night shift of cleaners began moving through the hallways, noisy as mice, and then stayed awake at home; he woke with his heart thudding so fast that he had to gulp air to calm himself. It was only work, and Willem’s calls, that forced him into normalcy, or he’d have never left the house, would have cut himself until he could have loosed whole pyramids of flesh from his arms and flushed them down the drain. He had a vision in which he carved away at himself—first arms, then legs, then chest and neck and face—until he was only bones, a skeleton who moved and sighed and breathed and tottered through life on its porous, brittle stalks.
He was back to seeing Andy every six weeks, and had delayed his most recent visit twice, because he dreaded what Andy might say. But finally, a little less than four weeks before the court date, he went uptown and sat in one of the examining rooms until Andy peered in to say he was running late.
“Take your time,” he said.
Andy studied him, squinting a bit. “I won’t be long,” he said, finally, and then was gone.
A few minutes later, his nurse Callie came in. “Hi, Jude,” she said. “Doctor wants me to get your weight; do you mind stepping on the scale?”
He didn’t want to, but he knew it wasn’t Callie’s fault or decision, and so he dragged himself off the table, and onto the scale, and didn’t look at the number as Callie wrote it down in his chart, and thanked him, and left the room.
“So,” Andy said after he’d come in, studying his chart. “What should we talk about first, your extreme weight loss or your excessive cutting?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. “Why do you think I’ve been cutting myself excessively?”
“I can always tell,” Andy said. “You get sort of—sort of bluish under the eyes. You’re probably not even conscious of it. And you’re wearing your sweater over the gown. Whenever it’s bad, you do that.”
“Oh,” he said. He hadn’t been aware.
They were quiet, and Andy pulled his stool close to the table and asked, “When’s the date?”
“February fifteenth.”
“Ah,” said Andy. “Soon.”
“Yes.”
“What’re you worried about?”
“I’m worried—” he began, and then stopped, and tried again. “I’m worried that if Harold finds out what I really am, he won’t want to—” He stopped. “And I don’t know which is worse: him finding out before, which means this definitely won’t happen, or him finding out after, and realizing I’ve deceived him.” He sighed; he hadn’t been able to articulate this until now, but having done so, he knew that this was his fear.
“Jude,” Andy said, carefully, “what do you think is so bad about yourself that he wouldn’t want to adopt you?”
“Andy,” he pled, “don’t make me say it.”
“But I honestly don’t know!”