But I didn't. I just nodded. "I'm going to have a screaming contest. We're going to see how much noise we can make."

"Sounds like a perfectly horrible idea," Betty-John grinned. "The kids will love it." I wanted to tell her the rest, but she shrugged me off. "I don't have the time right now, Jim."

"I really want you to hear this, B-Jay. I think there's the possibility of a breakthrough here."

"Jim, I mean it. I don't have time." She shoved me away. "I trust you. Go and teach the kids to scream."

So I did.

After dinner, I walked the kids over to the main hall. We were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts. The heat of the day still lingered and it was a warm, slightly muggy evening.

Inside my head, I was experiencing a bit of stage fright. Second thoughts. Maybe I wasn't qualified to do this; but then, I argued with myself, if I'm not qualified to do this, nobody is.

The hell with it. Let's just do it and find out.

We pushed into the well-lit hall. Alec and Holly and Tommy and me.

There were only two or three of the older kids to assist me, Little Ivy and Trisha and Mike; everybody else would be at the Directors' meeting; but these three were experienced. We shouldn't have any real trouble. I took them aside and explained to them briefly what I was going to do and what they should watch out for. "You're probably going to need some boxes of tissue. Some of the kids will start crying. I'm going to explain to them that it's all right to cry. The way you win this game is by seeing how much screaming and crying you can do. So don't try to help them or comfort them. Let them just all have a good scream and if they cry, they cry. They'll be fine. You'll know if someone's in real trouble."

I stepped to the center of the room. The children quickly formed themselves into a large circle. The games always started with a big circle.

"Okay," I said to them, "tonight's game is about noise. All kinds of noise. Big noise, little noise, happy noise, even unhappy noise. So, let's start by practicing. Let's see how much noise we can make. Let's see who can scream the loudest." And we were off.

The kids began to scream like banshees and wild Indians and air raid sirens.

Little Ivy grinned at me above the uproar. The little monsters loved the idea. Everybody else was always telling them to keep quiet; here was a grown-up telling them to roar like a madhouse. Most of them did.

"You must be talking to my deaf ear!" I shouted. I had to holler to make myself heard. "I can't hear you!"

That upped the level of noise by at least ten decibels.

"I almost heard something that time-but Alec wasn't shouting." I waited till the noise level began to ebb a bit and went down on one knee in front of him. "You don't have to shout if you don't want," I said. "But Bear can't make any noise without your help, so would you shout for Bear?"

He shook his head. "Not even for Bear?"

Alec looked very uncomfortable. I didn't want to push him too hard, but I did so want him to make a noise, any kind of noise at all.

"Tell you what," I said, deliberately casual. "You ask Bear if he wants you to make a noise. And if he does, then you make a noise. And if he doesn't, you don't have to. Okay?"

Alec nodded.

"Go ahead. Ask Bear."

Alec turned away and bent his face down to Bear's neck hole. I waited, but he didn't turn back. Well, maybe Bear was a slow talker.

"All right," I straightened and spoke again to the rest of the children. "That was a good warm-up. Now, let's do it for real. Now, let's make some real noise. Let's have them hear us in the big house."

This time, they put their hearts into it. Once they realized it was all right to shriek their lungs out, they began to be willing to really let loose. I noticed that the paint had shaken off some of the walls and the bark was starting to blister on some of the trees outside.

I waved my arm in a big circle as if I was winding them up and they kept up the noise as long as they could. Their faces were shiny and red. All of them were very excited now. They were jumping up and down and screaming as hard as they could. Good. I needed them to reach that peak just before exhaustion. One more good scream ought to do it.

"Okay, this is it. This is the last one," I said. "Let's make it count."

When I looked back in Alec's direction, I noticed that he had his mouth open and he was screaming as hard as he could. At first, I thought it was good. I'd finally gotten him to make a sound.

Theen I realized that he had dropped Bear on the floor before him, he was screaming out of sheer panic.

Uh-oh

Instinctively, I grabbed him in a gigantic hug. I pulled him close m me and let him scream into my chest. He was rigid-and he couldn't stop screaming. He just raged and raged and raged. He couldn't hear me and he couldn't stop.

The other children were slowing down now, turning and looking at Alec and me. They were puzzled, uncertain. Was this part of the game or not? I made a signal to Little Ivy, I waggled my fingers in a circle in the air-have them make some more noise-and I walked out of the room, carrying the still screaming Alcc. I strode across the dark lawn to the big swimming pool, kicking off my shoes as I walked, and then stepped right off the edge and into the deep end, Alec and all.

We came up gasping. I was still holding him with my right arm and dog-paddling and treading water like crazy. Alec still wanted to scream, but he had been caught totally off guard and he was coughing and spitting out water.

"That was good, Alec. That was very good. I love you, sweetheart. You did that just right. You just have to remember to stop screaming too."

He glowered at me, but I just hugged him and kissed him close. Anger was real. Anger was good. It was much better than indifference. Anger, at least, was alive. I headed for the shallow end and the stairs.

We came back into the big room, both dripping wet, me Iaughing, Alec trying to retreat into himself and not succeeding. He wanted to be angry at the same time. And he didn't want to let go of me. And he wanted to scream again, but he didn't want to be walked into the pool again.

Little Ivy was already wrapping towels around the both of us. This was not the first time one or another of the kids had gotten the swimming pool treatment. The proximity of the pool was one of the main reasons why we held the games in the main hall.

We stripped Alec's wet clothes off of him and had him sit down, wrapped up in three big warm towels. Somewhere there were terry cloth robes, but Little Ivy couldn't find any of them, and it was more important that we continue with the game.

I had all the children sit on the floor now, still in a large circle and Little Ivy dialed the lights down low for a spooky effect. I pulled Alec into the safety of my lap.

Okay," I said. "Now, for this part of the game, we have to think of the saddest things in the world. I'll start. The saddest thing in the world is good old Wag going without any supper. Isn't that sad?"

Some of the children nodded and looked serious. They thought that was very sad. A lot of them liked old Wag.

"Can anyone think of anything sadder?" I asked.

One of the little girls raised her hand. "What about everybody going without any supper?"

"Oh, that's a good one," I said. "That's much sadder. Is there anything sadder than that?"

One of the older boys, said, "How about everybody going without supper because there isn't any food?"

"And nobody knows where Mommy is," added one of the smaller boys, Toby-Joy Christopher.

I had to be careful with this exercise, I didn't want them accelerating into the next stage before they'd finished with sadness. I said quickly, "Oh my, yes, that's terribly sad. Oh, goodness, that's so sad, I want to cry." And I pretended to weep into my hands. Alec looked up at me oddly.