The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  THE READER OF THE EEG noted that he checked seventy-two separate instances but saw nothing that looked like unusual electrical activity in the brain. After that, the attending ordered basic metabolic studies, to see if something might be out of whack chemically, but these came back without findings, too.

  I GOT READY TO drive Haley to school in the morning and early daylight spread around us. Our driveway sat in front of our house, next to a garden I’d planted with the kids almost as soon as we moved in. We had dogwood and crepe myrtle and cherry, and roses and daylilies and iris, and camellia and Chinese beautyberry and a tall maple that turned red each fall. I wanted this house to be the house of Chase and Haley’s childhoods, the place they remembered first. I did not want to erase the house we’d left in the Midwest, not exactly, and I knew I couldn’t do that in any case. That we are what we bring forward from the past is a fact that is inescapable and true, but I wanted Chase and Haley to make a distinction between then and now and to remember that when we lived here, I made for them a home, a place at peace, and in so doing, corrected, as best I could, the things that hadn’t gone so well before.

  Haley walked up around the garden to the car and brushed past the glossy dark green leaves of the camellia and started to get in the backseat, her usual spot, but I leaned across the front seat and popped the passenger-side door open and told her she could sit in front, in Chase’s spot, until he came home. She hoisted her backpack and carried it around the back of the car and got in front next to me and stood the backpack on the floor behind her knees and then tucked her hair behind her ears.

  We drove, just the two of us in our silent car, past packs of cheerful children walking in colorful crowds with their mothers. Some of the women had dogs on leashes and the dogs padded happily alongside the children. I watched the children and I watched the dogs and I watched the road roll out under us and just out of the corner of my eye, I watched Haley.

  “There’s Megan,” Haley said. “And Trev.” She turned in her seat and waved as we drove past and then she faced front again. “They didn’t see me,” she said.

  “Are those kids from your class?”

  She shook her head no. “I just walk home with them sometimes.”

  The crossing guard waved to us, just as he did every morning, and then we turned left onto the road that ran in front of the school, with its old cow pasture and its borderland of McMansions on one side, the long scrubby lawn of the school on the other. I eased into the kiss-and-go line behind a long line of cars and Haley stared out the window.

  “Haley?”

  She glanced at me.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Do you have your homework?”

  “Mom.”

  “You have to be sure to turn it in,” I said.

  “I will.”

  “I’ll be home early this afternoon,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “You told me already.”

  “Well,” I said. “Okay then.”

  I kissed her and she got out of the car and slung her backpack over one shoulder and headed for the door. “I love you,” I said. All around her, kids ran from the cars, but Haley sauntered as if the world needed to come to her, as if she set the pace. I watched her as I pulled away and thought again how much like her father she was, from her strong, lean shape to the way that Chase’s sudden absence revealed that she was many things but most of all, she was a mystery to me.

  WHEN WE MOVED SOUTH, I’d taken a job at a local university as executive director of a center for undergraduate excellence. All day long, I thought about bright kids and the things faculty could do to help them excel. This job had many challenges but perhaps the biggest one was this: students came to my office and talked to me about their hopes and dreams and asked me questions as if I had answers.

  My office was just across campus from the hospital, so at lunch-time I could go over and see Chase. On his first day, Pam, the nurse we’d met the night before, had somehow convinced him to sit at the lunch table with the other patients. He had a seat at the end, with an empty seat across, and he sat with his arms wrapped around his waist leaning forward, his attention on something not on the table or past the table, his neck strangely straight and still. He shifted a little and then sat with his elbows propped on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands and stared at the edge of the table. The girls who’d walked up and down the hallway when he was admitted sat to his right. The bony girl ate only two tiny spoonfuls of the vanilla ice cream on her lunch tray and the other, a pudgy blond girl with dull skin and very shiny eyes who wore low-slung jeans and a striped shirt, leaned into her and said something and the thin girl smiled and looked at Chase and then looked away. The pudgy girl ate her lunch slowly, with elaborate ease, and watched Chase and then looked at the other girl and laughed. Lunch was some sort of Sloppy Joe – style of sandwich, hamburger and tomato sauce spilled across a bun, a bowl of peas, ice cream, and a flabby piece of cake with sad white icing and one droopy chocolate squiggle. Chase ignored all of it. I sat down across from him and began to talk in my cheerful emergency-worker voice: “Chase, look, it’s lunch! Let’s see what we’ve got here! That looks pretty good, buddy, don’t you think?”

  Pam picked up his tray. “If you want to visit, let’s go to one of the other tables,” she said. “It’ll be more private.”

  “That’ll be fine,” I said. “Come on, Chase. Let’s go sit over here.”

  He stood up and fell in beside me as we walked to a small table pushed up against the wall. He sat down across from me and stared at me.

  “How’re you doing, sport?” I asked. I reached over and touched his arm. “This is okay, right? This is going to be okay?”

  He wrapped his arms around his waist and leaned forward.

  “I’m going to California,” he said. His mouth twisted.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to California,” he repeated.

  “Chase,” I said. “Buddy. You know that’s not true.”

  He tensed up. “I’m going to live with Zack,” he said. “Zack de la Rocha.” He nodded vigorously and then came the terrible smile, without mirth or joy, a grimace of a grin.

  He stood up and began to pace up and down the dayroom between the nurses’ station and the windows, swinging his arms in wide arcs, speaking to no one. A boy who was done with his lunch stood across the unit with the telephone against his ear and he watched Chase as Chase walked up and down, up and down, and I watched the boy watching Chase for a minute and then looked back at my son. Every so often he’d look darkly at me and then flick his fingers in my direction. I picked up the cellophane pouch containing Chase’s plastic flatware.

  “Do you want me to open this for you?” I held the packet out to him as he passed close to the table but he walked on as if I did not exist, until the nurses spoke to him. They cajoled him to sit down. He briefly stared at me and then turned and walked into his room, where he stood at the window and stared down into the roadway below. Behind me, the kids at the lunch table picked up their trays and slid them back onto the cafeteria cart and then drifted toward the classroom.

  Pam picked up Chase’s tray. “We’ll save this for him, in case he gets hungry later,” she said. She waited for me to say something but when I didn’t, she said, “Maybe you’d like to try to visit another time? Maybe tomorrow? After he’s had a chance to settle in?”

  After that, I was outside and heard the lock turn on the world inside and made my way down the long silent white hallway on my way back to the car.

  AT NIGHT, THAT FIRST WEEK, Haley and I ate our dinner and after the table was cleared, I did the dishes and she did her homework. If we finished when there was still enough time, we set up the Sorry! board and played until bedtime. At first I took it easy on her and didn’t knock her men off the board but after she gave me a fierce look and ruthlessly knocked my men back to start, I decided to step it up a bit. Sti
ll, she beat me every time.

  Card games were even worse. I told her that even though she was only ten, she had a future as a card sharp in Vegas and she cackled with glee and dealt herself winning hands again and again and again. She also played chess well, and I never could beat her at checkers and that was not for lack of trying. There was something exact, almost mathematical, in Haley’s ability to look down at a board and strategize moves, tally the odds, make what otherwise looked like an intuitive move. I asked her how she did it and she said it was easy. She couldn’t understand what baffled me and marched her men forward and piled up kings and came back at me from the rear and took all of my pieces. She kept a poker face until I said something and then she would grin, her eyes flashing, and take another one of my men.

  After Haley was in bed, I turned on the TV and watched without changing the channel and without checking the listings. I took comfort in the murmurings of strange voices. Sometimes, I even stopped thinking of Chase, or of what seemed to be happening with Chase. It was the moment that I thought of Chase again that I realized that I had stopped thinking of him. At such times, I tried to understand how renewed presence could emphasize absence so acutely. I didn’t know if it was better to try to hold Chase constantly in my thoughts, which was clearly impossible, or if it might be better to allow myself to forget, when the act of forgetting felt like an act of betrayal, if not something even worse.

  THE NEXT SATURDAY, I brought Haley to the hospital with me so she could see for herself that the doctors were taking good care of Chase. I brought some more clothes for him and the nurse took these from me and dropped them behind the nurses’ station where they could be inventoried. A dark-haired boy who would have looked like a high school jock if it weren’t for his brooding and bruised expression and his wrists wrapped in fresh white gauze sat in one of the blue vinyl chairs in the dayroom and stared out the window for a while and then asked when he could turn on the television. We sat at a table under the windows that looked into the terrace area. I asked if we could go out there, but Pam told me that Chase hadn’t earned the points to use the outdoor area yet.

  “He’s in his room,” she said. “I’ll go get him.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Did he have a good night?”

  “I wasn’t on,” said Pam. “I don’t know.” She paused. “I think so,” she said. She looked at me and smiled. “He’ll be fine. Don’t worry. What does he like to eat for breakfast?”

  “Cereal,” I said. “Pop-Tarts. You know. Nothing special.”

  In the morning before school, Chase often liked to stroll out of the house on the walk leading from the driveway to our front door wearing his T-shirt and pajama bottoms, socks on but no shoes, swinging his arms and pacing up and down. If he was in a good mood, he’d crow like a rooster; other times, he made the sound of the gargoyles in his favorite book, which also sounded like a rooster crowing, except the sound he made was somewhat louder and more sharply screechy. I’d lean out the door and yell at him to put shoes on his feet so he wouldn’t wear holes in his socks, but all of his socks had holes in them anyway. The morning had a feeling, a softness of air when I opened the door to call to him, the dark pines across the street, the way the air smelled like North Carolina. The morning had Chase, grinning at me and crowing.

  “I’m just asking because he didn’t eat anything this morning,” said Pam. “We thought maybe it was because there wasn’t anything he liked on his tray.”

  “Try Pop-Tarts,” I said. “He likes Pop-Tarts. Or maybe frozen waffles,” I said. “Something like that.”

  “How much help does he need with things like the shower?”

  “Someone will have to teach him,” I said, “and then someone will have to supervise him while he showers, to make sure he washes.”

  “So he’s not independent?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s not independent.”

  She paused as if she had to consider what it was she had to say. Then she stepped away from me. “I’ll go get Chase,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything when he saw us. Haley sat across from me and picked up a puzzle and hunched forward, her thin shoulders curved like the wings of a bird; she worked for a while on a long stretch of dark water below a boat on an otherwise bright blue sea.

  “Do you want to play Uno?” I said. “Chase?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “I’ll play,” Haley said. She picked up her puzzle and began to break it into pieces over the box, the dark water disappearing into fragments, the bow of the boat breaking apart.

  “Chase, we can be on the same team,” I said. I dragged another chair back to the table where Haley was waiting. “You can sit here,” I said. “I’ll be your partner.”

  Pam looked up from her work behind the nurses’ station. “Chase,” she said. “Sit down with your mother.” She paused and waited for him to respond. “Sit down with your mother,” she said again.

  He sat and looked at the pile of cards in front of us.

  “Draw to see who goes first,” Haley said. She looked at Chase. He sat with his hands in his lap. Then he reached forward to the pile and pulled a card. Haley drew her card. They compared. Haley won the draw.

  She dealt the cards and I fanned Chase’s cards into a hand with everything organized by color first, and then numbers within colors, and held the hand for him, where he could see it if he looked.

  Haley studied her cards before she played one, and then, quickly, two more, in a quick run. She looked up and grinned at Chase but he looked at the floor at his feet, his chin held in his hands, his elbows on his knees.

  “Chase,” I said. “Your turn.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Look at your cards,” I said. “Here. Just point to the one you want to play.”

  He turned and looked at the cards and pointed to a yellow six.

  “You’ve got to play a red or a four,” I said. “That’s what’s on the pile.”

  He pointed at a red card. His hands shook with tremors.

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s good.” He watched me discard his red nine on the pile. Haley dropped a blue nine and a yellow nine on the pile and looked at Chase. He pointed to the yellow six.

  “Right,” I said. “Good idea.”

  When the unit’s front door buzzer sounded, Chase stood up fast and warily and his chair fell over. The nurses looked up. Haley put her cards down and looked at me. I stood up and put my hand on Chase’s arm and said his name. He ignored me and looked at the front door and when the nurse opened it, he backed away from me and then away from the man who leaned over the counter to sign the log and then turned to face the dayroom. The man was maybe fifty years old and wore worn-out tennis shoes and dark blue trousers and a shirt crossed with pale plaid. He carried a white paper sack and a gray cardboard drink carrier with two tall paper cups balanced in the cup holders. He looked around the dayroom and headed for the lunch table. Chase began to step away from me.

  “Chase,” I said.

  He shook his head and his breath caught in his throat and his face twisted and he began to cry as he walked quickly to his room. Haley didn’t say anything. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I followed Chase to his room.

  Chase had wedged himself in the corner on the far side of the room and had pulled the desk in front of him. His face was white even though the room was eye-blinding bright with afternoon sun and I crossed to turn the knob that would flatten the blinds.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s a profiler,” he said. “He’s a profiler.”

  “He’s just a guy who’s here to visit his kid,” I said. “Chase.”

  He shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “He’s a profiler. He manages the death squad. He’s going to kill me.”

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s Brown Bear.” I picked up his bear and held it out to him and he grabbed it and clutched it and began to chew on the bear’s snout.

&n
bsp; “It’s just some guy, Chase,” I said.

  Pam came into the room. “What’s the matter, Chase?”

  He chewed on his bear and didn’t speak.

  “Is your daughter still outside?” Pam said. I nodded.

  “You can’t leave her alone here,” Pam said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “We’ll look after Chase,” she said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of him.”

  As soon as she saw me, Haley stood up. I picked up the cards and straightened them and put them in their box and stroked her head. The unit was quiet. I signed out and the nurse opened the front door for us. She smiled at me and said, “Try not to worry. Try to have a good day.”

  I looked at Haley. “I’m sorry this didn’t turn out so well,” I said. “Your brother’s just having a hard time. Maybe we can come back tomorrow.”

  “No, thank you,” said Haley. She walked beside me and her face was serious and still. Without looking, she reached over and took my hand and we walked to the elevators and she held my hand until she could push the button for down. She waited quietly.

  “Maybe on Thursday?” I said gently, but she shook her head.

  “No, thank you,” she said again. “I’d rather not.”

  “That’s okay,” I said softly. “Maybe another day.”

  We waited for the elevator. Haley let go of my hand and walked over to the window and looked down at the street below.

  “Mom,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I go over to Bonnie’s house this week?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “I’ll look into it. We’ll try to work it out.”

  “I don’t think you want me to.”

  “I want you to,” I said. “I just need to figure out how.”

  She kept her back to me and stared out the window. I could hear the elevators moving in the elevator shafts but otherwise it was very quiet.

  “Never mind,” Haley said at last. Her voice was small, bitter.

  “Haley,” I said. “I’ll try. Things with your brother are a little uncertain right now. It makes it hard to plan.”