Brother Odd

CHAPTER 17

ON THE WAY TO THE MOTHER SUPERIOR'S office, I passed the large recreation room, where a dozen nuns were supervising the children at play.

Some of the kids have severe physical disabilities combined with mild mental retardation. They like board games, card games, dolls, toy soldiers. They decorate cupcakes themselves and help make fudge, and they enjoy arts and crafts. They like to have stories read to them, and they want to learn to read, and most of them do learn.

The others have either mild or severe physical disabilities but greater mental retardation than the first group. Some of these, like Justine in Room 32, seem not to be much with us, though most of them have an inner life that expresses itself overtly when least expected.

The betweeners-not as detached as Justine, not as involved as those who want to read-like to work with clay, string beads to make their own jewelry, play with stuffed animals, and perform small tasks that help the sisters. They enjoy hearing stories, too; the stories may be simpler, but the magic of stories remains potent for them.

What all of them like, regardless of their limits, is affection. At a touch, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, at any indication that you value them, respect them, believe in them, they shine.

Later in the day, in either of the two rehabilitation rooms, they will take physical therapy to gain strength, improve agility. Those struggling to communicate will get speech therapy. For some, rehab is actually task instruction, during which they learn to dress themselves, to tell time, to make change and manage small allowances.

Special cases will move on from St. Bart's, be paired with assistance dogs or caregivers, graduate to a supported independence when they are eighteen or older. Because many of these kids are so severely disabled, however, the world will never welcome them, and this place is their home for life.

Fewer of the residents are adults than you might think. These children have been dealt terrible blows, most of them while not yet delivered from their mothers' wombs, others by violence before they were three. They are fragile. For them, twenty years is longevity.

You might think that watching them struggle through various kinds of rehab would be heartbreaking, considering that they are often destined to die young. But there is no heartbreak here. Their small triumphs thrill them as much as winning a marathon might thrill you. They know moments of unadulterated joy, they know wonder, and they have hope. Their spirits won't be chained. In my months among them, I have never heard one child complain.

As medical science has advanced, such institutions as St. Bart's have fewer kids damaged by severe cerebral palsy, by toxoplasmosis, by well-understood chromosomal abnormalities. Their beds are taken these days by the offspring of women who preferred not to give up cocaine or ecstasy, or hallucinogens, for nine boring months, who played dice with the devil. Other children here were badly beaten-skulls cracked, brains damaged-by their drunken fathers, by their mothers' meth-rotted boyfriends.

With so many new cells and lightless pits required, Hell must be going through a construction boom these days.

Some will accuse me of being judgmental. Thank you. And proud of it. You wreck a kid's life, I have no pity for you.

There are doctors who advocate killing these children at birth, with lethal injections, or who would let them die later by declining to treat their infections, allowing simple illnesses to become catastrophic.

More cells. More lightless pits.

Maybe my lack of compassion for these abusers of children- and other failures of mine-means I won't see Stormy on the Other Side, that the fire I face will be consuming rather than purifying. But at least if I wind up in that palpable dark where having no cable TV is the least of the inconveniences, I will have the pleasure of seeking you out if you have beaten a child. I will know just what to do with you, and I will have eternity to do it.

In the recreation room on that snowy morning, perhaps with Hell coming to meet us in the hours ahead, the children laughed and talked and gave themselves to make-believe.

At the piano in the corner sat a ten-year-old boy named Walter. He was a crack baby and a meth baby and a Wild Turkey baby and a God-knows-what baby. He could not speak and rarely made eye contact. He couldn't learn to dress himself. After hearing a melody just once, he could play it note-perfect, with passion and nuance. Although he had lost so much else, this gift of talent had survived.

He played softly, beautifully, lost in the music. I think it was Mozart. I'm too ignorant to know for sure.

While Walter made music, while the children played and laughed, bodachs crawled the room. The three last night had become seven.