Pat looked stunned. Ken reached out to squeeze her hand.
“He needs love, Pat,” Denteen said. “He has love to give. A lot of love.”
Ken looked at Pat. Pat looked at Ken.
“So,” Denteen said, “when would you like to meet him?”
They met him the following afternoon, and he seemed fine. A little shy, maybe, but fine. Super-polite, that’s what Pat thought. May I this and may I that, please, thank you, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. He was adorable. Big for his age — that was a surprise. They’d expected a lovable little urchin, the kind of kid Norman Rockwell might have portrayed in the barber’s chair atop a stack of phone books, but Anthony was big, already the size of a teenager — big-headed, big in the shoulders, and big in the rear. Tall too. At nine, he was already as tall as Pat and probably outweighed her. What won them over, though, was his smile. He turned his smile on them that first day in Denteen’s office — a blooming angelic smile that showed off his dimples and the perfection of his tiny white glistening teeth — and Pat felt something give way inside her. At the end of the meeting she hugged him to her breast.
The smile was a regular feature of those first few months — the months of the trial period. Anthony smiled at breakfast, at dinner, smiled when he helped Ken rake the leaves from the gutters or tidy up the yard, smiled in his sleep. He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal — the day that he was theirs and they were his — Anthony’s smile vanished. The change was abrupt and it came without warning.
“Scooter,” Ken called to him one afternoon, “you want to help me take those old newspapers to the recycling center and then maybe stop in at Baskin and Robbins?”
Anthony was upstairs in his room, the room they’d decorated with posters of ballplayers and airplanes. He didn’t answer.
“Scooter?”
Silence.
Puzzled, Ken ascended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he became aware of an odd sound emanating from Anthony’s room — a low hum, as of an appliance kicking in. He paused to knock at the door and the sound began to take on resonance, to swell and shrink again, a thousand muted voices speaking in unison. “Anthony?” he called, pushing open the door.
Anthony was seated naked in the middle of his bed, wearing a set of headphones Ken had never seen before. The headphones were attached to a tape player the size of a suitcase. Ken had never seen the tape player before either. And the walls — gone were the dazzling sunstruck posters of Fernando Valenzuela, P-38s, and Mitsubishi Zeroes, replaced now by black-and-white photos of insects — torn, he saw, from library books. The books lay scattered across the floor, gutted, their spines broken.
For a long moment, Ken merely stood there in the doorway, the sizzling pulse of that many-voiced hum leaking out of Anthony’s headphones to throb in his gut, his chest, his bones. It was as if he’d stumbled upon some ancient rite in the Australian Outback, as if he’d stepped out of his real life in the real world and into some cheap horror movie about demonic possession and people whose eyes lit up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Anthony was seated in the lotus position, his own eyes tightly closed. He didn’t seem to be aware of Ken. The buzzing was excruciating. After a moment, Ken backed out of the room and gently shut the door.
At dinner that evening, Anthony gave them their first taste of his why-don’t-you-get-off-my-back look, a look that was to become habitual. His hair stood up jaggedly, drawn up into needlelike points — he must have greased it, Ken realized — and he slouched as if there were an invisible piano strapped to his shoulders. Ken didn’t know where to begin — with the scowl, the nudity, the desecration of library books, the tape player and its mysterious origins (had he borrowed it — perhaps from school? a friend?). Pat knew nothing. She served chicken croquettes, biscuits with honey, and baked beans, Anthony’s favorite meal. She was at the stove, her back to them, when Ken cleared his throat.
“Anthony,” he said, “is there anything wrong? Anything you want to tell us?”
Anthony shot him a contemptuous look. He said nothing. Pat glanced over her shoulder.
“About the library books…”
“You were spying on me,” Anthony snarled.
Pat turned away from the stove, stirring spoon in hand. “What do you mean? Ken? What’s this all about?”
“I wasn’t spying, I—” Ken faltered. He felt the anger rising in him. “All right,” he said, “where’d you get the tape player?”
Anthony wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked past Ken to his adoptive mother. “I stole it,” he said.
Suddenly Ken was on his feet. “Stole it?” he roared. “Don’t you know what that means, library books and now, now stealing?”
Anthony was a statue, big-headed and serene. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.
The scene at the library was humiliating. Clearly, the books had been willfully destroyed. Mrs. Tutwillow was outraged. And no matter how. hard Ken squeezed his arm, Anthony remained pokerfaced and unrepentant. “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he sneered, “because I’m not.” Ken gave her a check for $112.32, to cover the cost of replacing the books, plus shipping and handling. At Steve’s Stereo Shoppe, the man behind the counter — Steve, presumably — agreed not to press charges, but he had a real problem with offering the returned unit to the public as new goods, if Ken knew what he meant. Since he’d have to sell it used now, he wondered if Ken had the $87.50 it was going to cost him to mark it down. Of course, if Ken didn’t want to cooperate, he’d have no recourse but to report the incident to the police. Ken cooperated.
At home, after he’d ripped the offending photos from the walls and sent Anthony to his room, he phoned Denteen. “Ken, listen. I know you’re upset,” Denteen crooned, his voice as soothing as a shot of whiskey, “but the kid’s life has been real hell, believe me, and you’ve got to realize that he’s going to need some time to adjust.” He paused. “Why don’t you get him a dog or something?”
“A dog?”
“Yeah. Something for him to be responsible for for a change. He’s been a ward — I mean, an adoptee — all this time, with people caring for him, and maybe it’s that he feels like a burden or something. With a dog or a cat he could do the giving.”
A dog. The idea of it sprang to sudden life and Ken was a boy himself again, roaming the hills and stubble fields of Wisconsin, Skippy at his side. A dog. Yes. Of course.
“And listen,” Denteen was saying, “if you think you’re going to need professional help with this, the man to go to is Maurice Barebaum. He’s one of the top child psychologists in the state, if not the country.” There was a hiss of shuffling papers, the flap of Rolodex cards. “I’ve got his number right here.”
“I don’t want a dog,” Anthony insisted, and he gave them a strained, histrionic look.
We’re onstage, Ken was thinking, that’s what it is. He looked at Pat, seated on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and then at his son, this stranger with the staved-in eyes and tallowy arms who’d somehow won the role.
“But it would be so nice,” Pat said, drawing a picture in the air, “you’d have a little friend.”
Anthony was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red and blue letters that spelled out MEGADETH. On the reverse was the full-color representation of a stupendous bumblebee. “Oh, come off it, Pat,” he sang, a keening edge to his voice, “that’s so stupid. Dogs are so slobbery and shitty.”