“Bernard’s right. It was just after Bret’s tenth birthday. Frank bought Bret a magic kit, and I thought, This is going to be it. Bret loved it. He was such a smart little boy. He didn’t have to talk to perform the tricks, but the other kids started to admire him. He came out of his shell.”
“He started talking because of that?”
“No. Sam wasn’t coming out of his shell yet, and Bret wouldn’t leave him behind.”
“That’s when I came into the picture,” Bernard said. “Regina brought them over to my studio.”
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“He’s a martial artist,” Regina said, smiling. “He teaches aikido.”
“Sam and Bret became experts in aikido?”
“No, Bret never tried it,” Bernard said, “he just watched. And Sam didn’t stay with it, but he made a start, and it improved his self-confidence.”
“And his trust extended to Bernard,” Regina said.
“That was a giant step forward. A lot of what we tried to do all along was build their trust, to help them feel safe.”
Not an easy task, I thought, given their experiences.
“The next thing we tried was a computer,” she continued. “A friend of mine had an Apple II+. She let the boys play on it. They absolutely loved it. They did their first ‘talking’ by writing things on the computer.”
“They weren’t writing before then?”
“No, they were writing in school — school assignments. Well… unless the teacher assigned anything personal, I should say. But if it was a history lesson, or an essay on another country — whenever they didn’t have to tell about themselves or their families — they completed it. Got A’s, usually.”
“What about answering questions in class?”
“The teachers soon learned that they just wouldn’t do it. In fact, the other kids started to sort of band around the boys, to protect them from adults. They’d learn the boys’ sign language, speak for them. We had to sit them all down and ask them to stop making it easier for the boys to be silent.”
“The boys were well behaved otherwise?”
“Yes,” Regina said. “Sam got in trouble once or twice defending Bret from bullies. But that went on before their fathers were murdered. They were both good students, earning A’s, studying quietly. Teachers didn’t find it hard to cope with that.”
“Were they in the same classroom? I thought Sam was older.”
“Yes, he is, but Bret skipped a grade. When he started talking again, he did even better. They both finished high school early.”
“So they started communicating with a computer, you said.”
“Yes. On the first day they used that old Apple, Bret wrote a note to me: ‘Can we do this again?’ It was the first time he had communicated directly with me in English. I was thrilled. So I typed a message back to him. I asked if Sam wanted to come back, too. I expected Bret to answer for him, but he looked at Sam and motioned to him to come over to the keyboard. Sam typed, ‘Yes, I like it.’ It was all I could do not to start crying.”
“How long before they started speaking?”
“Not too long after that. About three months later, as I recall. Francine bought them computers. They each said, ‘Thank you.’ Aloud. She
“And they just started talking after that?”
“No. It was still very gradual from there. Sam talked to Bernard before he talked to me.”
I looked at Bernard, who had taken a chair nearby.
“He asked me to teach him to dance,” Bernard said. “Regina wouldn’t believe me at first.”
“Oh, only because you tease me about so many other things!”
He smiled. “Once I convinced her that it was the truth, she was mad that he hadn’t talked to her first.”
“You are such a liar,” she said. “I was thrilled. Besides, Bret walked into my office the next day and said, ‘Sam has a girlfriend.’ ”
Bernard laughed. “She’s not telling the whole truth. What Bret said was, ‘Sam has a girlfriend, but she’s not as pretty as you are.’ ”
It was too dark to actually see the blush on her face, but I could hear the embarrassment in her voice when she said, “Don’t you have a comet to discover or something?”
“He had a crush on you?” I asked.
“Not really. Bret was just feeling a little lonely, I think. Sam wanted to start talking to other people — the girl he wanted to dance with. Bret was a little younger, a little more reluctant to step out of this cocoon they had built around themselves. Once he saw that Sam wasn’t just going to abandon him, though, I think he was all right.”
“You still saw them after they started speaking?”
“For a time, yes. And we stayed in touch.”
“Did they ever talk to you about what happened when their fathers died?”
“No,” she said, then frowned. “Well, one day Bret stopped by, just before they moved. He was upset, shaky. I asked him what was wrong. He told me that while they were packing things for the move, Sam had cut his hand,
