A team of specialists subjected him to a battery of tests, examinations, and diagnostic imaging, including electroencephalograms, CAT scans and MRIs of the brain. Hakan physically struggled and fought with some of the best technicians and psychiatric, neurologic, and psychological professionals in the region during the tests and interviews lasting hours and stretching over several days. By week’s end, Carlos found himself and a rather angelic appearing Hakan at the focal point at a meeting with experts. They chatted amicably, drank apple juice and coffee, and ate pastries and doughnuts. At the end of the coffee klatch, they opined, “He’s not very vocal, is he?”
Later, Carlos told Enola that was about the most intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful comment he heard made during the entire meeting with medical, psychiatric, and psychological doctors and specialists. Still, he thought he owed it to Hakan to take him to absorb the sights and sounds in the most populous city in the country. He wanted him to experience the same positive vibes he had undergone as a university student several years ago when he was first studying for his degree in social work in Toronto.
He took him to the largest mall in the city, the Eaton Centre, a supersized shopping mall downtown he often visited when he was a student since the campus of his alma mater, York University, stood in an industrial landscape, and the mall featured several restaurants and cafes that served reasonably tasty and affordable food and coffee. In fact, the food court in the basement was also a place where he managed to complete a significant portion of his homework when he was still a student at York University.
So he brought Hakan to the food court, which had been renovated, expanded, and upgraded, expecting that they would have some time to check out and peruse the shops and stores a little later. Since he needed to use the washroom badly, he then escorted him to the public restrooms. Hakan gestured that he wanted him to wait outside the doorway. So, despite some personal misgivings, Carlos stood outside the door to the men’s washroom, which was huge and had a capacity for several dozen men standing at the urinals and sitting on the toilets in their cubicles and stalls.
Still, to assuage his own worries, he reassured himself he was capable of taking care of him. That much was true, Carlos told himself, even though he was only a child, an elementary school student allegedly possessing a learning disorder.
Carlos stood at the open door to the men’s washroom waiting for him. He waited while he glanced at the headlines in the newspaper. Someone noticed smoke seeping from the women’s washroom. He assumed some young woman, holed up in a stall, sitting on a toilet seat cover, was taking puffs on her cigarette on the sly, unable to smoke openly because of numerous by-laws and prohibitions on smoking. Then the fire alarm rang.
The noise alerting occupants of a fire buzzed through the vast and cavernous shopping mall at dozens of locations at an incredibly loud sound level. The largest mall in the nation was evacuated at nearly the busiest time of the year because the fire alarm was activated. First, he went into the men’s washroom, despite the security guards’ warnings to evacuate the building.
He checked every stall, but Hakan was not hiding, concealed, or lost amidst these glistening toilets. He was about to return to the woman’s washroom and tell the security guard his son might be stuck inside a stall when Hakan suddenly appeared at his side. Hakan leaned against his thigh and gripped his hand, gazing up with large round eyes, which looked mournful with those exquisite, curly eyelashes.
Gripping Hakan’s hand tightly, he took him back to the hotel room several blocks away. Upset and trembling uncontrollably, Carlos hyperventilated and started to feel a heaviness and a weight pressing in his chest. He worried he suffered a heart attack and considered taking a taxicab to the emergency department of Mount Sinai hospital, but Hakan smiled as they fell asleep watching a classic Charlie Chaplin movie on television, although Carlos originally hoped to set aside some time for both of them to read.
The next day Carlos took him to the beach. He did not anticipate any harm or trouble occurring on the lakeshore, but he accompanied Hakan to the quietest part of the crowded city beach. On that hot sunny day, Hakan swam like a beaver in the cold chill waters of the lake. He swam far from the shoreline of the lake in water far above his head. The lifeguard gave up chasing him in her rowboat because he demonstrated such speed and proficiency as a swimmer. He swam the breaststroke, the butterfly, the backstroke, the front crawl. Then, between swimming styles, he dove beneath the waves and disappeared for minutes at a time under the lake surface only to re-emerge from the water dozen of meters away, grinning and laughing. Carlos had never seen Hakan so happy. Hakan disappeared beneath the water for so long a lifeguard thought he had drowned. For a long while, he swam with his head bobbing just above the waves, as he treaded through the water like a beaver. He swam with exceptional skill, but another lifeguard attempted to steer him back towards the shores and away from deeper water and turbulent waves.
Hakan spotted a little girl, who had wandered from her pregnant mother and was caught by a rogue wave and flung and carried out by the undertow. He swam to intercept her and gripped her. The little girl panicked and initially scratched his back as she clung to him and he swam back towards the shoreline of Woodbine Beach. He held the other hand of the small girl, who feared she was doomed after straying far from the shore, as she panicked and struggled, splashing and thrashing the cold water with own frenetic version of the dog paddle. Swimming with her on his back, Hakan led and escorted the little girl back to shore, while her mother, holding her round belly, squinting against the fierce sunshine, stood anxiously at the edge of the broad beach.
When Carlos saw him rescuing that little girl, he could not help thinking of the beavers he occasionally observed swimming through the waterways around Beaverbrooke. The little girl cried as she waded and crawled along the shore and Hakan helped her to her feet. The pregnant mother ran towards her daughter, picked her up, and bounced her. As she approached Carlos, he tried to warn his son against swimming out to far from shore.
“Your boy saved my daughter.”
Carlos shrugged; he had become somewhat jaded to the antics of his own adopted son, for better or worse. The mother, who wore a revealing bikini, looked quite attractive, and Carlos could not resist gazing the length of her body. Her belly was large and round with her baby. Tears welled in her eyes. “Your boy saved my daughter’s life.”
“He’s quite a skilled swimmer.”
“When I saw him rescuing my little girl, I couldn’t help thinking of the otters I see on the nature documentaries on television, since otters hold paws, like people hold hands, as they nap or sleep.”
“My son reminded you of an otter?”
“The two of them together, I mean. Listen, I’m just grateful he saved my daughter. What’s his name?”
Carlos coyly squinted against the brilliance of the sunshine, poked the beach sand with his bare, gnarly toes, and gave her a peculiar look. “Why do you need to know his name?”
