CHASE WAS BORN on a Tuesday in late November, just shy of Thanksgiving. After labor failed, they draped me and anesthetized me and angled mirrors so I could see the moment when the doctor, after a pull and a tug and a twist and a twist again, lifted Chase free of the cord; I watched the doctor turn him through the cord wrapped around his neck and shoulder the way you might untangle the knot of a necktie. He was bluish pink and did not cry but squeezed his eyes shut and said “Ack.” They cleaned him up and brought him to me and I reached up to him and he cracked his eyes open and looked at me, his eyes glittery dark crescents under the brilliant lamps of the OR. I swore he could recognize me. “Hey Chase,” I said. “It’s good to see you. Hey Chase. Hey.”
My master’s thesis was due in two weeks and my feminist lit professors gave me a one-week extension on my final seminar paper because I’d had a C-section. They had explained to me when I was pregnant that they otherwise expected me to be back in class right after the birth. “This is what we did,” one said. “This is what you have to be prepared to do.” When I announced the pregnancy, one of them had called me into her office and asked me if I had thought at all about not having this baby. “In terms of your career,” she said, “this is not the best timing.”
We put Chase in a baby carriage in the kitchen and Zip set my typewriter up at the kitchen table and I sat in a chair with a pillow across my incision and retyped the pages of my stories on the special formatted paper the graduate school demanded for the submission of theses and dissertations. When I got tired, I lay on the sofa with Chase on my stomach and felt his weight and his wiggles. At night, Zip typed what I could not, working slowly, because these were not his words, and he did not know the endings.
I spent the winter reading and holding Chase in my arms. I loved his weight in my lap and I loved the way he gazed up at me and grinned his gummy toothless grin. I loved the way he kicked his feet when he lay nestled in blankets in his baby seat, and I loved the way he cried and peed and puked and pooped, the way he grinned at me, as if we had some special secret. I carried him around in a Snugli and walked him in his carriage and all the while, I felt the conviction that no matter what happened, I would never let anything bad happen to him, that I would stand between him and everything painful in the world.
In the summer, when my exams were over, I took him to the lake and dipped his toes in the water and held him so he could see the schools of minnows that sometimes came right up to the shore, slim fish darting like silver needles as they turned and turned and turned again in the clear, shallow water.
When Chase was thirteen months old, his pediatrician sent a social worker and an occupational therapist from the local cerebral palsy agency to our house to observe Chase once a month for six months. Everyone agreed that something might be wrong but no one knew what that something might be. Chase had kept his Moro reflex, that exaggerated startle response that newborns have in the first weeks of life, and he had not hit his developmental benchmarks. At his first birthday, when the doctor told me that Chase had global developmental delay, he said that this was probably completely normal, that some kids just reach things more slowly than others, that we’d just keep an eye on things, see what happened. He didn’t seem alarmed so I was not alarmed. We didn’t have the Internet in those days so I could not start reading every online article I could find about global developmental delay. I didn’t even go to the library. The pediatrician asked me if anyone in my family had ever been labeled slow and I told him I didn’t think so, unless maybe my cousin, whom I vaguely remembered the adults talking about as if he might be a half-wit when I was a girl. But he’d grown up just fine, had graduated from college, had gone to work in an executive position with a telecommunications company—surely this couldn’t be what the pediatrician meant.
The social worker had a degree in psychology, runs in her baggy brown stockings, battered shoes so down at the heels that there were barely any heels left, and wild, thin black hair that stood quill-like away from her pale gray scalp. I thought she looked like an escaped mental patient. She checked to see if there was Appropriate Mother-Infant Bonding. Check. The occupational therapist had me sit tailor-style on the floor behind Chase, ready to catch him should he tumble to one side when she rolled a red and white ball to him. He was supposed to acknowledge the ball and reach for it. Half a Check. They both tried to get him to wave bye-bye. No Check. They asked me if he had any words yet and I mentioned his love for the sound ba-ba-ba-ba-ba which had begun when he was seven months old and continued without variation. No Check.
The whole thing took about an hour and when they were through we stood in a shaft of dusty sunlight by my front door while I held Chase on my hip and he beamed and beamed and they explained that they thought the pediatrician was right, there was something a little bit off, but they couldn’t say what. They said they’d be back next month. They said tracking Chase this way gave us the greatest chance of figuring out what, if anything, was wrong, and the greatest chance of knowing what to do about it.
At the end of six months, after six visits, six assessments of Appropriate Mother-Infant Bonding, six rolls of the red and white ball, six times playing with blocks that Chase was supposed to use to build a tower but which he generally ignored, after six times looking at picture books where Chase failed to say kitty when he saw the picture of the cat, after six afternoons where the visits dredged up in me the terrible fear that something might really be wrong with Chase, although I couldn’t see what—after six months of this, the social worker and the occupational therapist made their report. They explained that something was wrong but they didn’t know its name.
Chase’s pediatrician frowned as he read the report and said in a way that made me realize that he felt the opposite, “This is helpful, don’t you think?” He waited for me to say something but all I said was, “What do we do now?”
Mostly we waited and played with Chase. Zip worked at the music store and I finished my classes and worked on my dissertation. When Chase was eighteen months old, we took him to London for part of one summer. Zip and Chase went to different playgrounds in the city while I did research at the British Library. When we went to museums on weekends, the Italian tourists were horrified that we kept Chase in a harness attached to a leash whenever he was not in his stroller, but Chase never walked, except finally, one day, just before we got on the plane, he got up and ran, and from that point forward was nothing but a blur, hurtling from one dangerous thing to the next; he ignored our cries of stop! so much that I had him tested to see if he might be deaf.
He loved the steps in the children’s gallery at the Museum of Natural History in South Kensington that lit up in colors when he stepped on them and years later insisted that he remembered these. He loved the steps at the Tower of London, too, and the sewer grates, and then wouldn’t look at anything but steps or sewer grates, even when we went to the zoo in Regent’s Park, which we left with me in tears and Zip carrying Chase, who thrashed and screamed and twisted and bent and beat his heels against his father’s thighs and arched his back and flailed and tried to get away. We’d made the mistake of trying to interest him in a display of bears, rather than a drain at the bottom of a set of steps.
CHASE SAT ON THE paper-covered table at the pediatrician’s office and pulled at the paper and grinned when it crinkled and crackled. He looked me in the eye and did it again. I said, “Chase, please.” He swung around and dropped his legs over the side and began tapping the heels of his sneakers together, so the lights embedded in the rubber would flash red and red and red.
The pediatrician sat on a rolling stool and watched him.
“We can see that Chase isn’t developing in a typical way,” he said. “That’s clear by now, right?” His voice sounded almost pleading.
I wasn’t so sure. At three, Chase was still a package of mysteries to us but I thought that was because we were new parents and neither of us had spent time around babies or toddlers. The very act of pinning a diaper in place ha
d seemed to us to be a great achievement. And nothing about Chase seemed wrong, no matter what people told us. He smiled and he seemed happy.
“Yes,” said Zip. He sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Okay.”
I thought about his day-care teachers, who kept sending notes about Chase’s inability to do the things the other kids did. I watched him kick his feet and then jump down and try to leave the room. Zip lifted him into the air and Chase struggled against him and, when he could not break free, began to turn and try to push himself away from his father with both hands, with the soles of his feet.
“All right,” I said. “Yes.”
“Good,” said the doctor. “We’re agreed. Chase will go up to the Developmental Disabilities Clinic at Strong Children’s Hospital in Rochester. No one is saying Chase is developmentally disabled. He’s such an odd mix of things that it’s hard to say what’s going on. But they’ve got whole teams of people who do nothing but look at children like Chase. They are the best people to help us figure this out.”
As we headed for the door, the pediatrician stopped us. “I can’t tell you what the outcome might be,” he said. “I can only tell you that Chase is healthy and he has some skills and he keeps acquiring new ones. Even if he isn’t quite on the time line, he’s not losing skills. That’s the thing we really worry about,” he said. “When we see a child disintegrate, that’s when we know we’ve got something very serious going on.”
WE TRIED TO STAY in the room with Chase when they began the tests but the team felt we distracted him and so directed us to sit in chairs behind a one-way mirror. We could watch Chase but Chase couldn’t see us. The team psychologist asked him to sit at a low brown wood table and manipulate some shapes. The idea was to place the shapes in the right spots on the board, a square into a square, a triangle into a triangle, a circle into a circle. The psychologist sat next to Chase and said cheerful and encouraging things and every time he tried one of the shapes on the board, I leaned forward and whispered under my breath, “Come on, Chase. You can do this, Chase.”
A week later, when we returned, the clinic’s pediatrician showed us all of the places where Chase didn’t test the way a three-year-old should. In some places, he didn’t even test the way a one-year-old should. They’d given up trying to determine his IQ; there was so much scatter on the test that it was impossible to interpret the results. His attention seemed to be severely impaired. He lacked skills that a three-year-old should have—dressing himself and brushing his teeth, for example—but he knew the alphabet and he knew his numbers and he liked to talk. The doctor told us it was simply not possible to say what was wrong. He preferred to think that whatever it was would make itself clear in time. Certainly, Chase had very interesting features of ADHD and Tourette’s syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorder or PDD (the autistic syndromes), all overlapping as if they made up an unusual diagram at whose very center we found Chase. But no one thing stood out, no one thing made itself manifest. And he didn’t want us to raise a syndrome. He wanted us to raise our child. He told us to go home and enjoy Chase and he’d see us back in six months.
EIGHT
One Saturday morning, after Chase had been on Five South for three months, I took Haley to her first riding lesson. On our way to the barn, we passed stands of dark pines and cold pastures and a cow barn with a long slope of firm mud that leveled off in a brackish black pond. It was winter and the trees were still bare but, in time, dogwoods would bloom white against the black trees, and redbuds would purple the sides of the road.
The barn sat down in a hollow between two fields, just down the road from a country church and across the way from a ranch house where, the year before, a man had killed his daughter, his daughter’s best friend, and her two-year-old boy. Fences lined the driveway and a splotchy gray pony grazed in the pasture beside the barn. A riding ring lay in front of the barn. The lesson before Haley’s was coming to an end and the three girls on the ponies in the ring had turned them to the center and sat gingerly patting the ponies’ shoulders. One reached forward and rubbed the mane between her pony’s ears and then swung her leg over the saddle and climbed down. Just across the field, two turkey vultures turned circles in the bright blue sky.
I walked beside Haley to the tack room, where she picked out a helmet and put it on. She wouldn’t let me check the chinstrap but told me it was fine. The other girls in the beginner lesson were already mounted up when we got back to the ring. The woman who owned the barn stood in the center and held the reins of a palomino pony named Ed. His mane fell over his eyes and he stood with his head down, swishing his pale blond tail and shifting his weight from hoof to hoof.
Haley walked into the ring and I followed her. She stopped and stood still. She looked at the pony. She didn’t move.
“Just go over and mount up,” I said.
She pressed against my leg a little and then turned away.
“No, thank you,” she said.
The others moved out from the center of the ring and began to plod along the rail. Their ponies walked with their heads down; the girls had loose reins on them and the ponies walked slowly and blinked in the sunlight.
“Haley,” I said. “You’ve been looking forward to this.”
She watched her pony.
“Are you getting on?” said the woman who owned the barn.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “Come on.”
Haley shrank against me.
“Haley,” I said. “Look. Just get on.”
She moved as if to walk back to the gate. I stepped in front of her and leaned down and looked her in the eye.
“Listen,” I said. “I have never in your life told you that you have to do something, no if, ands, or buts, but this is different. You have to get on that pony.”
She shook her head.
“Haley,” I said. “If you don’t get on that pony, you are going to go home and hate yourself, not because you were scared but because you gave up and didn’t try. You aren’t going to be able to live with that. You can get down if you don’t like it and you never have to get on a horse again, but you have to get up there and try.” I straightened a little bit. “Don’t let your fear get the best of you,” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me but eased off my leg and cautiously walked over to Ed. She carefully stepped up on the mounting block and the instructor showed her how to gather her reins in her left hand, put her left foot in the stirrup, and swing her right leg over the saddle. Then she was up, and even without her command Ed trudged over and got in line behind the other two ponies and slowly the three girls circled the ring. The wind blew through the ponies’ tails and rustled in last year’s leaves. After a while, a man came by with an armload of wood and started a fire in an old rusty barrel and we warmed our hands over the flames while the girls rode. Pieces of white ash spun up into the blue sky and heat hung like a quivering veil over the fire. Haley looked straight ahead and held herself still and Ed ambled along behind the other ponies and the woman told Haley to put her heels down and sit up straight. After a time, the girls turned their ponies and went the other way and Haley turned Ed. At the end of the lesson, she carefully lifted herself and put her leg over Ed’s back and jumped down. She walked across the ring and her shoes made puffs of dust in the dirt as she walked.
“How was it?” I said.
She stood in front of me and looked at me in her grave, quiet way. “I want to do this again,” she said.
“Really? You had fun?”
She nodded, solemn, swift.
“Okay,” I said. “We can come next week.”
“Hey Haley,” yelled the woman who owned the barn. “Come get your horse. You’ve still got to put him away.” Haley walked back to the center of the ring and the woman showed her how to hold Ed with her arm slung through the reins and then how to lead him back to the barn. She stepped away and Haley did what the woman had just done and took Ed by the bridle and tugged and then tugged harder and finally Ed move
d out and Haley walked him back to the barn.
WE DROVE UP TO the local crafts store in the afternoons after school and Haley drifted up and down the bright white aisles and touched packages of tiny buttons shaped like flowers or decals in the shapes of seashells or patches with that obnoxious sunny yellow smiley face or pale green unicorns. She bought select items with the money she had earned petsitting the neighbor’s dog. Gradually, she transformed her Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie into something that was more a work of folk art than a garment to wear. I stitched patches from her favorite bands onto a piece of polka-dot fabric and then stitched that to the back of the hoodie. Haley banded the arms of the sweatshirt with tiny daisy-shaped brads and took apart her leather bracelet and hammered the studs into the shoulders of the sweatshirt. Jack Skellington’s face disappeared under patches of roses and smiley faces and pins of tiny mice and ladybugs. She never left the house without the sweatshirt, and each week its design grew more intricate and elaborate.
Everyone knew that she was Chase’s sister. She sometimes protected herself, her shy mermaid heart, by posing like a street urchin in dark black clothing and tights ripped out at the knees. And she protected Chase by turning the focus of the world away from him and toward her crazy jeans, which she covered in quotes from Nirvana songs, or lines from poems that she thought were cool, or the name of her father’s band, over and over again, in repeating lines, as if she could conjure him out of longing.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 10