“By director you mean Martha King?”
She sounded surprised. “Yeah. Her. I haven’t heard her name in ages. I wonder how she’s doing. Nice lady.”
“She wasn’t there that long. Maybe three, four years before they closed?”
“That sounds about right. They closed not long after Dennis died. Honestly, I think it hurt her, but she didn’t mention it.”
“She gave the boys some kind of treatment, right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know much about it. It seemed to help some of them.”
“But not Dennis?”
“No. Not Dennis.”
14
“You’re fighting it,” Martha told Dennis.
Hours had passed, and Dennis was a snot-nosed mess. Martha felt frustrated. Dennis was one of the hardest boys she had ever tried to crack. She had been using the rug, which was for her worst cases. But even when Dennis was finally reduced to begging and pleading, she could see in his eyes that it was not real.
Like now.
She held a baby bottle in one hand. This was one of her techniques. The child needed to accept the bottle—accept the feeding. Once they suckled, their eyes soft and warm, she knew they would be open to accepting a new mother and father. She could send them confidently on to a new foster or adoptive home, but always with a warning to the parents: If the child became oppositional or defiant again, the parents could return them for more holding time.
The boys knew this. They, too, were warned.
Dennis lay, collapsed, across her lap, his shirt soaking wet from sweat and saliva. He let her put the nipple past his wet lips. She watched as the bottle dripped milk into his slack mouth. He looked up at her, and she could see herself in his eyes. She was tired from hours of struggle. Holding time was exhausting.
He spit the nipple out.
She yanked the bottle away, furious. She took a deep breath.
It wasn’t good to get angry. She stopped the treatment, but she could see the victory in his eyes. He believed he had won.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” she said. It wasn’t his fault he was disordered and incapable of love.
He looked up at her, the thoughts stirring in his eyes.
“I will not give up on you,” she said.
Martha King believed in holding time. She had studied at the clinics in Colorado, under the approval of the state medical board. The method had been lauded by Nobel Laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen and praised on mainstream news programs such as theTodayshow.
Her favorite book, always on her shelf, the pages dog-eared, wasHolding Timeby a child psychiatrist named Martha G. Welch. “Rejection begins as the child tries to escape your embrace, your gaze, or your words,” Welch wrote. “The child may spit, kick, writhe, butt, scream, turn purple with rage—or his sad crying may break your heart.”
Martha King believed that the foundation of all disorders was rage. Break through the rage and you achieved order. “If you use holding time regularly,” Welch wrote, “chances are you won’t have much need for punishment.”
Welch believed that holding time cured everything from autism to hyperactivity. For believers, holding time was the magic cure-all for the nearly half million kids in foster care growing more troubled by the year. And in no place was the cure more needed than in places like Brightwood, which were overrun with gross immorality and dishonest, deceitful boys.
Martha King was especially eager to try the cure on the increasing number of homosexual boys sent to the center.
Winter came, and a van appeared in the parking lot. The boys gathered on the porch to watch.
The weather was raw, and the air was filled with the sound of seagulls blown in from the storms. The seagulls landed on the roof of Brightwood and covered it with bird shit.
“Boys, welcome our new residents,” Martha called. She was bundled into a warm jacket, her teased hair coiling in the wind.
The new boys left the transport van. The social worker at the front, who looked exhausted, handed over their files with a cold hand. Staff unloaded their belongings from the back. A few of the boys had suitcases, but most used garbage bags.
