The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  OVER TIME, WE SETTLED into a new routine. I drove Haley to school in the morning and she sat in the front seat, in the place Chase used to sit, and then I drove to work. At lunchtime I drove over to the unit and saw Chase, or had a grim discussion with one of the nurses or with Dr. B. The nurses tried to keep my spirits up but when that didn’t work, they were simply kind to me. After work, I came home earlier in the afternoon than I used to, as often as I could, walking through our front door at four thirty instead of five or five thirty or six. I didn’t want Haley to be alone for too long after school. I wanted to check on her homework, check and make sure she was still across the room.

  I developed an unreasonable and intense fear that something was going to happen to her. If she went to the movies with a friend and the friend’s mom picked her up, I watched the clock until she came home and in between imagined car crashes and drunk drivers and irresponsible parents who somehow managed to abandon their children’s friends on the side of the road. When the phone rang and Haley came around the corner and said, “Mom, Zoe’s on the phone and she wants me to . . .” I had to take a deep breath and tell myself that this was perfectly normal, it was okay for an eleven-year-old to go out with her friends and her friends’ parents to the mall or the movies. Sometimes I tried to intervene in my own terror by taking Haley and her friends places myself. When summer came, we drove down to the beach, past peeling country churches with signs out front promising visitations and salvations, through dusty green fields baked hot and dry, past vegetable stands and bungalows once painted pink or yellow, now faded. I watched Haley and her friend play along the edge of the surf and then the three of us went in to swim. If I saw Haley more than ten feet from shore, I stood near her on the far side of the surf and told myself to breathe and to relax, but still I watched her in the waves and thought of sharks and tidal waves and rip currents and drownings of all descriptions, where she would be swept from me, far away, out to sea.

  WHEN CHASE WENT INTO the hospital, the CAP workers stopped coming, as did the occupational therapist and the speech therapist, all the regular after-school visitors to our house, and Haley came home alone to eat her snack and spread her homework out on the dining-room table. When Chase had been gone a long, long time, I finally cleaned up his room and packed all of his things away in boxes that were carefully labeled, in case he should ask for something, in case he ever came home. I’d walked by the room for months and refused to go inside, refused to touch anything. But then I repaired the walls he damaged when he stripped the wallpaper border off and repainted his room green because Chase had once told me he wanted a green room. I turned his bed into a daybed and set up an old farm table under the window as a desk and lined up a row of dictionaries, an atlas, an old globe, and told Haley she had a cool new spot to do her homework. I felt a kind of relief in setting Chase’s room to rights, but she still preferred to do her homework on the dining-room table. One day, when I felt the stillness of our house was particularly sad, I asked Haley how she liked coming home to peace and quiet.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it better? Worse? No different? What?”

  She thought about this. Then she said, “I liked it better before.”

  I treated such declarations as anagrams, messages to decode. Did she mean she liked it better when Chase was here—did she mean she missed her brother? Or did she mean that she liked it because there were people around, even if those people weren’t me? Or did she mean that she disliked change, this one, or any other I might devise?

  “I liked it when Chase and Melissa were here,” she said simply, as if my questions were those of a moron. She looked around. “It’s too quiet now,” she said.

  • • •

  ONE WEDNESDAY IN EARLY February, I got to the unit, and Mac and Danny and Melissa were already in the dayroom. Chase circled them in his stocking feet, wearing his weird twisted grin. He had no idea who they were. Melissa had known Chase since he was ten. Mac had worked with Chase for the year before he got sick. Danny was the CAP worker who had come to work with Chase in October, a few weeks before I took him to the hospital. Each of them had called me and had wanted to come visit so one day I asked if I could add a few more family names to the list and the nurse paged through her notebook and found Chase’s page and handed it to me, along with a black ballpoint pen that was chained to the desk like a pen in a bank or a post office, as if this were just a place like other ordinary places. I wrote down the names and then handed the page back to the nurse, who popped the rings on the binder and put the page back in place.

  They bunched together in the middle of the dayroom and watched Chase as he made his wide circle around them, as he glared at them, as he glared suspiciously at me. “Not my mother,” he told Pam. “My mother was kidnapped by terrorists.”

  I suggested that we all go into the unit’s music room, where someone might play the keyboard, where they all might like to sing, and Chase fell in beside Mac and they all followed me down the hall and around the corner to the music room. After everyone was inside, Chase stood in the doorway and looked in at Mac and Danny and Melissa. They stood in a line in front of the treadmill, next to the electric keyboard. “Hey Chase,” I said. “You remember Mac, right?”

  Mac smiled and waved and said, “Yo Chase.”

  “And that’s Danny.”

  Danny waved. “Hi Chase,” he said.

  “And Melissa?”

  “Hey Chase,” said Melissa. She flapped the ends of her scarf at him in a wave.

  “Do you want to come in and hang out?” I said. “Chase?”

  He stood in the doorway, tapping his palm against his thigh. Then he raised his hands to shoulder level, flat and palms down, and began firing lasers. He made laser noises as he fired and narrowed his eyes so he could get a better line on his target.

  “Chase,” I said. “Come on in and hang out.”

  Melissa plunked a couple of notes on the keyboard but it wasn’t plugged in so all we heard was the sound of the key depressing and releasing, a soft thunk-a-thunk.

  “Hey Chase,” she said. “What bands are you listening to?”

  No one on the unit was supposed to have a radio but the nurses discovered that music often calmed Chase when almost nothing else would, so they sometimes unplugged the portable stereo at the nurses’ station and let him listen to it in his room. They said he would sing along when songs he knew came on the radio, and they were amazed at his ability to recall the lyrics.

  Chase was saying something now, but it was under his breath and he turned to someone beside him who was invisible to the rest of us and muttered something and squinted again and fired more lasers at Melissa. Then his face twisted out of its weird expressionless grin and darkened and he slammed his fist against the door, and then he yelled that Melissa was raped and dead and he’d killed her. He pounded the door for emphasis and the door rattled on its hinges. Mac and Danny froze beside me.

  Melissa took a step toward him. “That’s not very nice, Chase,” she said. Her voice was thin and neutral. “If you keep talking like that, I’m going to have to leave. I don’t want to leave. But I’m not going to stay here if you talk to me like that.”

  “Not Melissa!” Chase said. “Not Melissa!”

  “Chase,” said Melissa. “I’m right here in front of you.”

  “Melissa is dead! Dead! Dead!” He shook his fists and then began to kick the door. Sam and another male nurse came up beside him and spoke to him and turned him from the doorway and led him away. We stood in silence. Pam looked into the room and said, “Visit’s over.”

  We rode down in the elevator together.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s hard to know how a visit’s going to go.”

  Melissa looked at me. Her face was white. “Is he always like that?”

  I shook my head. “It depends on the day,” I said.

  Mac shook his head. “I know you said he was sick,” he said. “But I never thought he was going
to be as bad as that.”

  When we got to the ground floor, Mac walked away quickly. Melissa turned to me and said, “I think I won’t visit again for a little while. I’ll try next month and see what that’s like.”

  Danny and I stood in front of the hospital. It was a cold, rainy day and the driveway had filled up with gurgling, chuckling water. The hospital shuttle splashed along the curb as it pulled up to discharge passengers and we stepped back to avoid the spray. I told Danny that Chase’s stay was going to be a lot longer than any of us had first imagined and Danny would probably be better off finding another client. He resisted a little when I told him. He liked Chase. He could see he was going through a bad time of it, but he was going to need a worker when he got out and he would like to be that person. If I thought it was the money, he wanted me to know that that was no problem. He didn’t need this job to earn a living. He could get along just fine without it. He wanted to wait it out.

  “I appreciate what you’ve said,” I told him. “I do. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have as Chase’s CAP worker. But you might have to wait a long time.”

  “I can wait,” said Danny. He set his mouth. “I want to wait,” he said.

  A car rolled up to the curb in front of us and we jumped back. A little wake ran away from its tires and down the hill.

  Danny turned his coat collar up. “I’ll come again next week, if that’s okay.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “I want to come,” Danny said. “I want Chase to know me when he gets out.”

  “I think it’s too far off in the distance to hold you to this,” I said. “All you need to do is call the Autism Society and tell them you would like to work with someone else.”

  Danny shook his head at this suggestion. “I’d really rather not do that,” he said. “I’d really like to wait for Chase.”

  “Look,” I said sharply. “We’re all 99 percent certain that he’s not coming home. Okay? He won’t need a CAP worker because he’s not coming home.”

  Up to that point, I hadn’t said this out loud but as soon as I did, I felt the weight of it, the truth.

  Danny blanched. But after a moment he righted himself and said, “Well, if you’re sure.” He turned his wool hat in his hands. “I’m sorry about Chase,” he said. “I wish things had turned out differently.”

  “I know,” I said softly. “Me, too.”

  NINE

  Eventually, when Chase was four, I made a list of things that made his life difficult, as if these were things that could be quantified and fixed. The list was broken out into categories. Under Fears, I wrote: fear of the dark, fear of window fans, fear of loud sounds (walks around house with fingers in ears at all times), fear of spider webs, fear of the Lady Sword, a figure who came to him in the dark when he tried to sleep and meant him harm, and who I was terrified was his fantasy version of me, the mother who tried to discipline him out of his behaviors. Under Preoccupations I wrote: sirens, construction sites and equipment, railroads and trains. I noted Chase’s unbearable sensitivity to sound and yet his paradoxical insistence on making noise: hooting, yelling, whining, weeping; I mentioned that even when given an answer, he repeated the same question over and over and over again: Why is there a railroad crossing? Why is there a railroad crossing? Why is there a railroad crossing? Why is there track? Why is there track? Why is there track? Why is there track? Under Physical Symptoms, I described an increase in eye-rolling and staring, a decrease in appetite, an increase in energy (if that could even be possible), moony behavior alternating with explosions of maniacal aggression, inability to sleep, inability to take no for an answer. I noted that his day-care teachers thought that he was worse, and we all heard him make unusual statements about intrusions by other children: That little girl tried to take my truck—but she was on the other side of the room; Cassie hit me—but Cassie was on the swings outside. David can control me. He tells me what to do.

  The pediatrician at the Strong Clinic wrote letters to Chase’s pediatrician in town and copied us: His parents had a number of questions and concerns to share with me. They have identified some bruises on his temples which he does not remember sustaining, and they wonder if he is having nighttime unobserved seizure activity. He is still having nightly bedwetting. His behavior ranges from very subdued to explosive in an unpredictable way . . . He is more aggressive at home, more perseverative on a variety of topics such as construction projects, Halloween, and ghosts. He continues to enjoy lining things up . . . he has no identifiable tics, although he does chew his clothing . . .

  Later, even after seeing many different specialists, I wondered if by writing these words down and handing them over, I had turned Chase into a boy made up of lists and issues. When I drove my car across the rolling farmland of the Finger Lakes and watched the sky or gazed out the window as I wiped the kitchen table, I wondered if by naming things I had secured Chase’s future, had whipped it up out of my own anxieties, had taken the normal and transformed it into the abnormal. I don’t think this is uncommon. I think parents of disabled children hold themselves accountable and have a hard time reconciling the fact that nothing could have changed the outcome of their own helpless experience of being a parent to a fragile child.

  But it made me blind to Zip, too. At night, after Chase finally went to bed and silence fell on the house, I went into my study to work and Zip sat down on the sofa and I heard him crack open a beer. He drank each night and often slept on the sofa after I went to bed. When I got up in the morning, I’d cover him up with a blanket and watch him fall more deeply into sleep, at least until Chase got up. I didn’t like Zip’s drinking, didn’t like the way he slurred his words or the way he walked like a man under whose feet the world tilted unpredictably. At such times, I felt so much anger that the whole world receded and I could not feel anything else, could not see anything else, could not hear anything else. At such times, I wondered why he did not help me more. I wondered why everything—the job that earned our bread, the running of the household, the arrangements of doctors’ appointments, the talks with insurance companies, the meals that we ate, the outings that we made—fell to me. It did not occur to me that Zip could not help me more, that he needed help himself. Instead, I’d stand next to him and swallow again and again until my throat ached from trying not to feel what I was feeling. By that time, Chase would have come to the gate that we still kept at the door of his room and would be calling out to me: “I want to get out! I want to get out! Get out!”

  During the summer, we spent our weekends swimming at a beach across the lake and Chase floated a yellow plastic boat on the waves that lapped and chortled against the shore. My dissertation defense was scheduled for August. I’d taught for the last two years at the college in town and the chair had asked me to come back a third time. The writing program was brand-new and still in flux; it was unclear if the college would decide to make it a permanent department or if it would remain a program or if it would remain at all. Each time the chair invited me to teach, she told me that this would be the year the college might take these jobs and convert them to tenure-track jobs. She knew better than to speak of this with certainty but she never failed to mention it, either. Since the job market for English PhDs was the worst it had been in twenty years, and since Zip had a job in town, and since I loved this college because I’d done my undergraduate degree there, it made sense to me to try to stay where we were.

  And I was pregnant again. Zip and I had talked about a second child and we wondered if this was a good idea. After Chase, did we really know what we were doing, what we might be getting ourselves into? We discussed this at some length and it seemed we’d made a decision. Chase was enough; Chase would be it. But Chase began to sing the alphabet song in the bathtub and made me laugh when one day he pointed to himself and said, “That’s my penis, right? Right? My penis goes in the boat, right?” And stuck his penis through the donut hole in the center of the rubber tugboat that rode
the water lapping against his waist. He rolled his eyes in exasperated pleasure when I used a blue cup to pour water over his shoulders and then said, “Give me the red boat.” His voice was firm and clear and commanding. I lifted the boat up and said, “This boat?” He said, fiercely, as if there could be no mistaking his intent, “That boat, Mom. I need that boat.”

  I told myself that nobody knew what was wrong with Chase, if anything really was, and he would probably outgrow all of this, and then we’d regret not having a second child. I interpreted the pediatrician’s words to mean that Chase had symptoms of things but didn’t really have those things. The only thing I knew about autism, for example, was from the television drama St. Elswhere, where one of the fictional doctors had an autistic son and Chase didn’t act anything like the boy on TV. And no one had said he had autism, had they? They said he had things that looked like autism, that looked like PDD, that looked like Tourette’s syndrome, that looked like ADHD, but no one said these things were what was wrong with him. His psychologist didn’t think that he was hallucinating when he said that David controlled him or that a robot voice told him the rules; she thought that these things were Chase’s fantasies. She didn’t think the Lady Sword was a ghost or a delusion. She was troubled by the fact that Chase felt threatened by children who were nowhere near him but she thought this was just part of his compulsive nature. We listened to the psychologist, who was the expert, after all.

  And I had always wanted two children. I thought if we were going to do this, we should do it before I got too old. I’d be thirty-five on my next birthday and I knew the older you got, the more chances you had of delivering a baby who suffered from a really serious problem, like Down syndrome. Now that my dissertation was almost done, we were getting ready to start the next part of our lives. In my mind, this meant that I would teach at a good school and we would have a big house full of kids and our kids’ friends and our friends and their kids and everyone’s pets, and Zip would play music and do work that he liked, and I would write books, and a reporter from the New York Times would come to visit us to write a piece for their Home and Garden section because we were such fantastic artists and had done such fantastic things with the house. There was nothing in my actual life that suggested that any of this was possible. I taught and wrote and took care of Chase. Zip worked at a music store and said nothing at night. There weren’t any jobs for people with brand-new PhDs in English and we lived in an apartment and didn’t even own our own place. But I thought that all we had to do was work hard enough; with a little luck, things would turn out.