The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  “It’ll be cool, Chase,” I said. “Really, really cool.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  While they made their way inside, I walked around to the rear of the car and lifted out the blue plastic cooler filled with ice and sodas and set it on the sidewalk. Jason, Melissa’s green-haired boyfriend, came up to me and said, “I’ll take this,” and I thanked him and then got back in the car and drove to the parking lot. I turned off the engine and sat for a few minutes, maybe prayerful, maybe just in a state of hopeful wishing. Then I walked back up the street and waited at the corner for the light to change. We’d planned this party for a long time, mostly to give Chase something good to think about, to point out to him that after all he’d been through, the four surgeries on his cervical spine, there were still things to look forward to. We’d told him this would be a great way to celebrate his fifteenth birthday, now some days away, but I felt uneasy. The incident in the park was just a couple of hours behind us and when we got home, Chase had retreated to his room as if he’d forgotten all about the party while Haley and I packed paper bags with chips and pretzels and plastic cups to take into town. I’d told myself this was a good thing and that he would find some way to be more himself when the time came, but I also worried that Chase at that point was himself, that one thing didn’t stand in for another, that we’d taken a turn and now we’d have to see where this road went.

  The night was mild for November and boys with blue hair and huge nose rings, and girls tattooed with figures from their favorite children’s books, their eyebrows and tongues pierced, had watched me lift the cooler to the curb and had watched Jason take it inside. They wore heavy black shoes with black clothes or faded T-shirts with cartoon characters printed on the front. Their clothes were decorated with things that tied or clipped or snapped, wallet chains dangling at the waist, strings and laces and safety pins and spikes and heavy steel buckles. The girls wore black lipstick and small rhinestone butterfly pins in their purple or fuchsia hair and sat in pairs or threes, fiddling with the laces on their Doc Martens or rifling through purses that contained journals with black cardboard covers clipped together with turquoise gel pens. Boys stood in small groups and joked and swore and watched the girls out of the corners of their eyes, trying to be sure the girls kept their eyes on them. Some of the boys balanced on skateboards or did vertical turns, walking in circles by alternating weight end to end.

  Melissa had worked with Chase for nearly four years, ever since we came south. Together, they practiced folding laundry and emptying the dishwasher and Melissa checked the items off on Chase’s goal sheet. Sometimes she’d drive Chase to a local coffee shop, where he’d order orange juice and sit at a table where he could be surrounded by kids in dark clothes with jet-black hair. Melissa herself wore red retro cat’s-eye glasses. Her ears were pierced with huge, hollow rings of jade that always made me think of the pictures of African women in National Geographic magazine, whose earlobes hung to their shoulders. She had tattoos all over her body: the spider over her heart, the parade of toads and frogs and bears and doll-faced little girls and boys and the Jabberwocky himself crawling up her right leg in a huge spiral, Kali on her left arm, Alice in Wonderland on her right. Her hair changed to match her life story: That Time Melissa Had Blue and Purple Dreds; When Melissa First Colored Her Hair Bright Pink; The Day Jason Told Melissa Her Rainbow Hair Looks Like a Clown Wig. By the time she became Chase’s daily worker, she’d settled down to a little bob that looked like the haircuts favored by Japanese anime characters.

  She was patient and unflappable. Nothing fazed her. She worked with all kinds of disabled kids but usually with the hardest ones, the boys most likely to take their pants off in a mall or poop in the swimming pool, the speechless ones who screamed or rocked or bashed their heads against the wall because they could not make themselves heard or known, the ones who ran away, the ones who got into other people’s cars in the parking lot at the grocery store and would not get out again, the ones who ate only blue food and drove their parents mad with having to dye the mashed potatoes. Melissa cared for them all. These events were humorous, in her view, were the things that made clear that these boys were people, each with his particularly human way of being in the world. She could interpret their behavior as if it were sign language or Braille and insisted that each of these things had an internal logic, a signal or message, something that we could understand if we chose to try.

  Chase wasn’t one of the worst; he and Melissa just seemed to be a good match. He thought she was cool and she helped him with his music. He wanted to be in a rock band but he couldn’t play an instrument. Instead, he sang and kept a microphone on a stand and a small amp in his room, where he could practice. Melissa helped him make posters to hang at school advertising himself as a singer. He listed the bands he liked so the other musicians would know the sort of music he wanted to play: Limp Bizkit and Korn and Rage Against the Machine. He’d named his band already: Children of Artists. He explained that this was because everyone who was in the band would have parents who were artists, like he did. I appreciated his optimistic view of us, the writer who no longer wrote, the musician who now worked on the receiving dock at a discount store five states away. He wanted to know all of the places his father had played, what that had been like, in the old days, Mom, he’d say, when you were with the band. He said these words like there was magic associated with them, so I told him about the smoky clubs his father played and the long hours and the low pay and the long rides home on cold mornings just before the sun came up in a van with a heater that didn’t work and pulling into the driveway shivering and tired. I tried to make it sound awful but Chase believed in it, just as his father had believed in it.

  “And there would be hundreds of people,” he’d say. “Right, Mom? Right?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes there’d be five.”

  “And Dad made records, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And he was on the radio, right?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Cool,” said Chase.

  There was no persuading Chase that his father hadn’t been a rock star. That fall, he downloaded songs from the Internet and Melissa told him stories about her friends who were in bands. One day in early fall, Chase set up his mic and cranked Korn on the stereo. Melissa was downstairs when she heard the sound cut off and then that odd stillness that comes when some sound you expect doesn’t actually make itself known—the stillness of the dead car engine after you turn the key in the ignition, or the TV when the sound drops out, or a radio with dead batteries. By the time she got upstairs, Chase had the microphone cord wrapped around his throat and was pulling as tightly as he could on each end of the cord, as if he could strangle himself. When she got him untangled, she sat him down on his bed and he leaned his head on his hands, his elbows on his knees, and sobbed that he just wanted to die.

  His therapist’s notes from around this time said that Chase reported no suicidal feelings. At school, however, he told the guidance counselor that he had a plan. He explained that he would drink poison or step out in front of a car. Later the counselor told me that the second way was particularly popular among teens. It would look like an accident. That afternoon, she had Chase sign a contract, promising that he would not kill himself without talking to her first.

  I went through the house and removed all of the knives and the household cleaners from under the sink; I took his microphone away and took down blinds that had cords; I took shoelaces and belts, as if I were the warden of a jail, and I went to his room and removed all of the CDs by bands that spoke even distantly of death and darkness. He protested. I told him it was my job to keep him safe and that was what I was going to do. But he slammed the door and screamed at me through the wood and I actually smiled, thinking that this, at least, seemed normal.

  INSIDE, THE TEEN CENTER was one large room, painted black, strung with Christmas lights; a bar ran along one wall, and behind that a
n old white refrigerator papered with signs listing the prices for sodas and bags of chips. A basic platform stage stood next to the front entrance. Behind the main room were two small soundproofed rooms, painted sunshine yellow and lime green, where kids could practice guitars or keyboards—stringless, out of tune, missing cables and cords—and to the right of the main room was a room with couches and arcade games. The pool table was in front of the bar. When we got there, two kids were playing while a third watched; another sat in the room with couches, playing a Game Boy in front of a TV whose sound had been turned down. I put the bowls of chips and snacks on the bar and opened the cooler. The kids at the pool table put down their cues and ambled over and helped themselves.

  Chase ignored this. Someone had left a folding chair in the middle of the room and he sat down and stared at the space where the band would be. His head listed to one side.

  After a while, a few more kids came to the party, boys from our neighborhood whose parents had made them come, and a couple of disabled boys whose mothers I knew from going to mother’s-group meetings, before I gave that up to work—a boy named Christian and two of his friends. Their parents walked their disabled children past the punk kids outside and came down the stairs and stood uncertainly in the doorway of the teen center, wondering if this was a place they could let their kids stay. But some of Chase’s workers came, too—the girls who’d stay with him when I had to work late, and Mac and Danny, two young men who were seniors in college, and Melissa. I pointed out the number of trained professionals in the room and mentioned the band and the parents turned away with relieved faces and told their sons they’d be back in an hour. By the time the band started playing, there were eight kids, including Haley. The rest of the guests were family friends, invited to make sure that someone would show up.

  The band played and the kids watched and the adults stood around with soggy paper cups full of Diet Sprite. Every so often Chase dragged Melissa over to a quiet corner to tell her that there were death threats against him, that the profilers had come for him in the park, and he wasn’t safe. He told her that he was going to live with Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer for Rage Against the Machine. She told him he was perfectly safe and this was his party and he should watch the band. They were friends of hers and called themselves Amish Jihad; they knew about Chase because Melissa had explained him to them and they had agreed to come play at his party. There were three of them: a drummer, a guitar player, and a bass player. When they came in, they rolled their equipment onto the stage and came over to Chase and spoke to him in the loud voices of confident young men and offered high fives and handshakes. “Hey man!” they called. “It’s your birthday! Happy Birthday!” Chase grinned and slapped the hands they offered and said things to them about the equipment that they didn’t understand. They just grinned and said, “Yeah man! That’s cool, dude!” He told them about knowing Zack de la Rocha and they said, “You do? That’s cool, man!” They set up their amplifiers and did their sound check and asked me if they should start. When they opened the show, they said, “It’s somebody’s birthday here tonight and this show is especially dedicated to him! Happy Birthday, Chase!” And then the drummer slapped his sticks, one-two-three-four, and the guitar player hit a big power chord and twisted his body up to the mic like it was too hard to reach and began to sing, words that went with the music but words that no one could really understand.

  Chase stood in front of the band and hopped up and down a few times, the way he did before he was injured, when he tried to turn his bedroom into a mosh pit, but then he sat in his folding chair and gradually leaned so far to one side that I went to see if he needed propping up. He didn’t respond.

  “Chase,” I said. “You okay? You need something?”

  He stirred then and looked at me, but I didn’t see him recognize me.

  “Chase, listen,” I said. “It’s the band. It’s Amish Jihad. Remember how you and Melissa planned for this? How cool is this?”

  He smiled faintly, as if it was something he was remembering to do, and raised his left hand and weakly threw the goat.

  “Attaboy,” I said. “Chase rules.”

  But he sat, motionless, unfocused, disconnected, distant, his face sliding from no expression to too much expression too quickly and too unpredictably, in ways that did not seem attached to what was happening around him. After a while, he stood up and walked away. The band stopped playing when their hour was up and began to tear down and pack up, all the familiar gestures of a rock band, the sounds so much a part of my memory that for a moment I felt homesick for my other life, when I was still with Chase and Haley’s dad, when I believed that only good things would happen, that in going off with him, I’d managed to change my luck, that I myself would be transformed. I stood by the stage and felt helpless. Friends walked up to me and said things like, “Great band,” before they asked if Chase was okay.

  “Maybe the party’s too much for him,” I said, over and over again. “We’ll see how he is in the morning.”

  I saw him from across the room. He stood at a microphone in one of the soundproofed rooms so he could sing, but his face was slack, his eyes wide, and then he drifted over to Christopher and Billings, the boys from our neighborhood whom he persisted in thinking of as his best friends although there was no evidence that much friendship existed at all. But Chase was loyal and they had been friends when they were all eleven and that was enough for him, even though he had long ago slipped away from them or they from him. From across the room, I saw the three of them together, Billings on one side, Christopher on the other, both clowning around like fifteen-year-old boys will. On other occasions, this would have been a beautiful sight, but now Chase stood in the middle, smiling widely, his eyes glassy and without any emotion at all, as if all he needed to do was move his mouth into the curve of a smile for the smile to be true.

  AFTER HALEY AND CHASE went to bed, I lay down and stared at the ceiling. I was worried about Chase, but I was always worried about Chase. I hoped he could get a good night’s sleep. Outside, the wind had picked up and, after a while, I stood and wrapped my robe around myself and found my slippers and stepped outside. A gleaming sliver of moon hung over the western horizon. The sky seemed bright with stars but a few clouds moved and turned the moon dark in their passing and then brightness reappeared. I walked farther into the darkness and listened to the wind move through the crepe myrtles. The night air settled me. I used to joke that after I died I wanted to be cremated and have my ashes shot out into space, where I could drift among the stars forever. Haley went to an art camp one summer; when it came time to silk-screen T-shirts, she made one for me, with a green moon and green stars against a pale background. “Because you like to look up,” she said.

  WHEN CHASE’S SCREAMS WOKE me, I found him shivering in the hallway. His face crumpled when he saw me, and he worked his mouth a little, and then he began to cry and pointed back at his room.

  “Chase,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

  “The executioner was outside my window,” he said. “He was looking in at me.”

  “Your window is on the second story,” I said. “No one can look in at you.”

  “He was,” he said. “He was, he was, he was.” He said something that sounded like, “It was just a head.”

  I walked into his room and looked out the window. “Nobody here, sport,” I said cheerfully. “You’re fine. It was just a dream.”

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  I reached under his pillow. “Where’s your sleep stone?” Years before, I’d given Chase a small polished stone to help him sleep better just the way you give a carsick child a penny to hold. It worked for a while and then, like so many things in Chase’s room, it vanished. I replaced it with an even more powerful sleep stone. Now I told Chase to get in bed and go back to sleep. I told him that as long as I was there, no one would hurt him. I found his old stuffed bear and I tucked it into his arms. I kissed him goodnight. I made a big
deal out of checking the blinds to be sure they were properly closed and hung flat against the window glass.

  “Do you want the light on?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. It was a stupid question; Chase hadn’t ever slept in the dark. On better nights, he could sleep with a bedside lamp turned on. On bad nights, he asked for the overhead light, which was what was on now.

  “You’re fine,” I said again. “You’re perfectly safe. Go to sleep. In the morning you’ll see that everything is fine. Okay?”

  He nodded glumly and then turned on his side and curled up and clutched the bear to his chest.

  I shut the door carefully behind me and then made my way down the hall to Haley’s room. She lay sideways across the bed on her belly with her hair spread out on the pillow, one leg hanging over the edge of the bed, her blankets on the floor. I pushed the door open so that it let a long slant of light into her dark room and picked my way through the toys on the floor over to her bed. I lifted and turned her gently and shook out her sheet and her blanket and spread them over her and then stroked her hair. She tried to push her body up on her hands as if she meant to wake up but I said, “No, shush, go back to sleep. Everything’s okay. Everything’s all right.” She fell back into the pillow and I stood there for a few minutes, just making sure, and I thought, just as I always did, that Haley had too much to bear.

  When I got in bed, I lay awake for a long time, my heart pounding. Whatever this was, it was something new. I tried to think of other times Chase had screamed in the night. For a little while, I amused myself by cursing Mitch, who’d once worked with Chase and whose brief time in our home was marked by viewings of films I’d forbidden Chase to see, like The Matrix or Stephen King’s It, and then by three weeks’ worth of nights where Chase had dreams from which he woke screaming every single night. Mitch had similarly been a whiz at helping Chase reach his goals and at saying seductive things to me; his time with us was very brief and his job had probably pretty much run its course the day he decided the easiest way to get a pizza into the house would be to leave Chase and Haley alone for an hour while he went to pick it up.