Finally she looked up and said, “I’ve been twenty-five years in this business. I started out working for the Lighthouse, where they take some of the worst offenders and lock them up. They call that rehabilitation. I think they probably need a place like that. But I decided to go out on my own and start a business that I thought would meet a need that was going begging. Where were the residential facilities for children with things like PDD who also have some psychiatric disorder? Do you know how many of these kids are obsessive-compulsive? ADD? Manic-depressive? Do you have any idea the havoc this wreaks on a family? The parents are exhausted. The siblings are overlooked. They need to get these kids out of their homes but they don’t deserve to be sent to a place like the Lighthouse. We’ve been up and running for nineteen months. We’re all set up for Medicaid here. We take private insurance, if you have the kind of plan that will pay for this kind of care. Don’t be surprised if yours doesn’t. Most don’t. I like to think of us as having a vision about the kinds of clients we can serve. I like to believe that we’re small enough where we can still be flexible when we need to be, where we aren’t too hidebound by our own rules. But I can tell you, just after looking at your son’s application, that we aren’t going to be able to take him here.”
She paused. “I feel for you. I really do. But we don’t have the kind of services he needs. We don’t have the medical care, for one thing, or the security for another. We have a neurologist who we can call if we need to but to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know if he will have ever seen a case like Chase. He’s older. He works with us as something of a favor because he and I go way back. We don’t have the therapeutic day programs that Chase’s going to need. We’re going to have those someday but the plain truth is we haven’t got them now. And we certainly don’t have the staff for someone who isn’t close to being fully independent, which most of our kids are. Your son is very complex and has very complex needs. But I don’t need to tell you that. I think you know that already. We’ll keep his application on file. But you can tell your social worker that we turned him down and she’s going to have to keep looking. And to be honest, I don’t think you’re going to find anything. If I were you, I’d be worried. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what’s available in this state and I have no idea what you’re going to do.”
I DROVE HOME and the skies began to clear. It had rained all day, until water ran in flat undulating sheets across the county highways and the smell of the loamy fields rose up around the car. I listened to the thunk of the wipers and watched water drain along the edges of the windshield. The side yard had flooded the way it always did in a heavy rain and when I pulled into the driveway, I could see a light on in the kitchen. I imagined someone waiting for me inside, someone to make dinner and stroke my hair and tell me that everything was going to be all right. But the front door rattled vacantly when I opened it and the house was cold and dim.
ONE AFTERNOON JUST BEFORE spring, I came up to Five South to see Chase. He walked past me in hard pushing strides, turned, and marched back the other way.
“Hey Chase,” I said, but he just glared at me, let loose a few lasers, and walked away. He was tapping his hand against his leg. When he came to a ceiling vent, he stopped and squinted up at it. The hospital had the heat on and if you stood under the vents, you could hear the sound of the blowers. Chase listened for a minute and then began tapping again. Then he paused and turned to Pam, who was entering information into a spreadsheet on the nursing station computer. He leaned over the counter so she could hear him.
“Why is that woman here?” he said, and waved in my general direction. His voice was loud and agitated and angry. “I don’t know who she is.”
“That’s your mother, Chase,” said Pam, in the mildest voice imaginable. “She’s here to visit with you.”
“My mother was kidnapped by terrorists,” said Chase. “That is not my mother.” He looked at me. “You are not my mother,” he yelled.
“Chase, you know that’s your mother,” said Pam. “You know her. You know she comes to visit you.” She looked over at me to see if I could hear this exchange and I shrugged to let her know I could. She gave me a sad, drowning look in return. I didn’t blame her. After a while, none of us knew what to say or do.
You would think I would have been used to this by now. Chase almost always did the same things when I saw him: he fired lasers, he tapped his hand against his leg, he made words but no sounds and moved his mouth constantly, he told anyone who would listen that I was not his mother. But each time I came up to the unit, I came with the hope that this day would be different. Maybe the drug would have taken effect. Maybe the psychosis would have lifted on its own accord. Maybe Chase would look across the room and see me and know who I was.
Dr. B came through the front door, saw me, and said, “Good. You’re here. I wanted to try and catch you.”
I followed him into the library. We didn’t sit down.
“Chase has not responded well to this drug,” he said. “In certain ways, I think it has activated his symptoms. And Chase has not responded well to the other drugs we’ve tried. I had high hopes for all of them, especially those in the newer classes of antipsychotics. They are often very effective in difficult cases and you get good results right away. But we have not had that outcome with Chase.” He paused. “I’d like you to consider a trial of Clozaril. It’s a relatively new antipsychotic and it has been extraordinarily effective in some very difficult cases. But it has some nasty side effects so you need to be fully informed before you give your consent.” He held a sheaf of paper out to me. “I’d like you to read this and let me know what you think. Once you’ve read, we can talk more. I don’t want you to rush into this. You need to take your time and make sure you’re comfortable with the decision.”
Just outside the door, the hospital teacher piled a stack of books on the counter next to the sink in the dayroom. Catherine was close to my age. Whenever we spoke, she tried to give me optimistic accounts of Chase’s time in class. She said things like, Today Chase Sat for Three Minutes While I Read to Him. Or, Today Chase Made an Incoherent Comment When the Other Students Were Discussing Current Events but Perhaps This Is Evidence That He Wishes to Communicate. She waved at me through the glass and I looked over Dr. B’s shoulder and smiled in return. She crossed the floor to the doorway in three steps and said, “If this is a good time, I’d like to speak with you.”
Dr. B gave her a calm look. “We’ll be just a minute,” he said.
“I’ll wait,” said Catherine.
He gestured at me with the sheaf of papers again and I took the pages from him and glanced down.
Patient Information: Clozaril. Pronounced: KLOH-zah-ril. Generic Name: Clozapine
“What kind of side effects?” I asked.
His expression never changed. “Some are mild,” he said. “Things like drooling, sedation, constipation, dizziness, weight gain. We worry the most about a kind of very serious disorder of the white blood cells, but that’s rare and we do blood work every week to monitor the patient.” He paused and gave me a level look. “It’s called agranulocytosis. It’s very serious. It can be fatal. Researchers were unaware of the risk when this drug first came onto the market and a number of patients died. It was pulled back and then reintroduced with a national registry of users. Very, very few patients develop this disorder now, and almost no one dies of it anymore. In some ways, Clozaril is the gold standard for the treatment of all psychotic patients, but its use is reserved for those who are the most seriously ill and who have failed at trials of at least three traditional antipsychotics.” He stopped and rubbed his nose and then started again. “Chase has been on five different antipsychotics since November,” he said. “He has not responded to treatment. He is eligible for this drug. We will draw blood every week and watch for the precipitous drop in white blood cells that signals the onset of the blood disorder. Hopefully, that will never happen and he’ll respond and do well. We will discontinue the
drug immediately at the first sign of trouble.”
I rolled the papers into a baton as he spoke. Chase strode by the library, his gaze trained on something beyond the walls, the ceiling, the floor. He tapped his leg and muttered and disappeared from view. In another minute I saw one of the nurses start down the hall after him. “Chase,” he called. “Chase. We need to come back to the dayroom.” I walked over to the doorway and saw Chase standing in the room of one of the boys who’d come in over the weekend. Everyone on the unit had turned toward Chase when the nurse began calling his name, each head angled in the same direction, each face still and watchful. The kids in the dayroom fell silent.
Chase was talking in a loud voice. “Hey man,” he said. “Hey man, hey man. I’m Zack. Zack. Zack. You wanna join a band, man? Hey. What do you play?” Beyond him, I could see the boy in the room, standing still, in the way of someone afraid.
The nurse touched Chase’s arm. “Let’s leave David alone now,” he said. “There you go. Turn this way. Chase. Turn this way.”
He curled one hand around Chase’s arm and used the other to apply pressure in the center of his back, like a door swinging on a pivot, until Chase turned and allowed himself to be walked back past the nurses’ station through the dayroom and past the classrooms to his own room. He kept talking, loudly calling for the arrest of those who were holding him here, in this jail, against his will, until he’d crossed into his room and could stand at the windows and begin to press buttons.
I watched him and twisted the papers in my hands. Then I turned back to the library.
“You need to be comfortable with this decision,” said Dr. B softly. “It involves some risk.” He waited. When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Clozaril is an excellent drug with a strong track record among the most severely ill patients. If you plan to try it, this is the very safest, most controlled setting in which to try it.” He paused. “But you need to be sure,” he said at last. “Read the patient information and then give me a call.”
“Is there anything else we could try?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. I’m sorry. This is what’s left.”
CATHERINE STOPPED ME AS soon as I left the library. “I need to talk with you about end-of-grade tests,” she said. “While it’s early to be talking about this, it’s not as early as you think. He’s in eighth grade. He’s going to need to take the end-of-year writing test and that’s supposed to be administered in March. This is the end of February.”
I stared at her.
“Then we have the regular end-of-grade tests,” she said. “Those come in May. If Chase is still here, we need to make arrangements for him to take them.”
“You’re joking,” I said. “Right?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not joking. He’s on the hospital school census and we need to make arrangements for him to meet state requirements.”
“How’s he doing in class?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “To be truthful, I honestly don’t know. He doesn’t seem to be able to read. Did he ever read?”
“At the ninth-grade level,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t think he can read at all now. Here,” she said, and flipped open one of the folders. “This is an example of his writing. This is what he produced when he first got here. He hasn’t written anything for a long while now.” She handed me a sheet of paper that had a few lines of the same sort of inscrutable symbols Chase had written on the walls of his room.
“It’s not language, you see,” said Catherine. “You can tell that it’s not any sort of language at all.”
“Isn’t there some form of medical exemption?” I asked.
Catherine shook her head. “No,” she said. “He’s enrolled in the hospital school, as we’re required to do by law, and therefore, by law, he must take the end-of-grade exams.”
“But he’s not on this planet,” I said. “He’s incoherent 100 percent of the time. He doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t know where he is. He’s hallucinating.” I took a breath. “Are you telling me that there is no exemption whatsoever? What if he’d been in a coma for the last six months and was still in a coma? Would he have to take the end-of-grades while he was in a coma?”
Catherine sighed. “Unfortunately,” she said, “yes. The law does not provide for exemptions, exceptions, just because you have a medical situation.”
“You’re aware of how insane that sounds,” I said.
She flushed. “Yes,” she said, “but it’s the law.”
FOURTEEN
In the second grade, Chase became obsessed with tornadoes. He read everything in the local library about tornadoes and Zip bought him a video that showed twisters touching down and barns flying into splinters, garage doors floating like stiff paper through the dusky air. The narrator of the video spoke in firm, somber tones: Tornadoes form when warm Gulf air meets the cooler air that comes down onto the plains states from the Rocky Mountains to create supercells, giant thunderheads that, when conditions are right, spawn the funnel clouds we call twisters . . . Chase watched this video over and over and over again, each time with the rapt attention and pleasure of someone who has waited for the film for a long time. He wanted to chase tornadoes just like storm chasers do and one afternoon, as black clouds churned and rolled in the west and wind began to bend the tops of the cedars, I heard a weather alert for big thunderstorms on the radio. I told Chase to go get in the car. We were going to chase this storm.
I was relieved when Chase developed an interest in the weather. It seemed much healthier than his interest in the Lady Sword who came to him at night or the children in his class who were trying to attack him or the ghost that lived in our house.
Now Chase buckled up and we pulled out of the driveway as the first raindrops began to falter against the roof. Zip and Haley waved from the back porch. We drove west out of our town, out onto the long flat highway toward the thunderstorms. I kept to the open highway where it cut through sugar-beet fields and fields of feed corn, out across the flat straight plains of the Midwest, where the sky was a line just above the horizon and the thunderheads bellied out like sails and billowed darkly, and white laundry on backyard clotheslines behind farmhouses whipped into the gusts of wind and stood straight out on poles and then the poles came down and the sheets and towels and bleached white shirts and socks flapped and blew away. It began to rain, slowly at first and then more urgently, until it was hard to see. Trees bent and shuddered. Branches came down around us and skidded across the road. I eased over onto the shoulder and flicked the flashers on and hoped I wasn’t about to put the car in a drainage ditch. We listened to the rain pound the roof and hood and then came hail the size of peas, skittering and flying across the hood of the car and over our heads and rattling into the crispy dry grass along the edge of the highway.
As soon as we turned onto the country highway and the rain slashed down in earnest, I knew I’d made a big mistake. I’d seen plenty of Midwestern thunderstorms by that time and knew they were fierce; we’d outrun one coming home from Lake Michigan the summer before and I’d never seen a sky turn such an eerie shade of purplish green, as if everything above us was bruised inside the clouds. The darkness came on fast and we drove east on Route 46 at five in the afternoon in light that looked like midnight. Now I turned the windshield wipers to high and the rain sluiced in gray sheets over the glass and Chase stared out the window and said, “Look at that, Mom! Look at that!” Then he turned to me. “Why are we stopping?”
“I can’t see to drive, sweetie,” I said. “There’s too much rain.”
“No,” he said. “We should go.”
“We just need to wait until the rain eases up a little. I can’t really see the road to drive.”
“No,” said Chase. “We need to go.”
“Keep still,” I said, forcing myself to keep my voice light. I suddenly realized the very real possibility that Chase might try to get out of the ca
r. I could see him twirling away from me down the road, no longer safe, suddenly lost, gone for good. Thunder crashed overhead and dazzling lightning fissured across the sky.
“We can see really well from here,” I said. “It’s really great. Look up. Watch the sky.”
Chase leaned forward and turned his face up to the clouds. “Look at all that rain,” he said, marveling. “Wow, Mom,” he said. “Would you look at that?” He reached for the door handle. “Let’s get out,” he said.
“No,” I said sharply. “Sit down. I’ll turn this car around right now.”
He gave me a look but he let go of the door handle and looked out the window. “There’s rain,” he said, “and there’s lightning, right?” And I said, “Yes, and listen for the thunder.” The sky blackened above us and the light around us was dim and watery and the car shivered a little in the wind and Chase said, “The warm air meets the cold air in the upper atmosphere and begins to turn together until a huge funnel is formed and that’s when we have a twister.” He rose up on his knees until he could look out the car’s rear window but he could see nothing but rain sluicing down. The hail had passed and the wind had settled a little and, after a time, the rain began to let up and I said it was time to drive home. “Maybe we’ll see a twister on the way,” I said.
When we pulled into the driveway, Zip was sitting on the back steps, smoking a cigarette. “Dad, Dad!” said Chase as he burst from the car. “We went storm chasing! It was cool!”
WHEN CHASE BROUGHT the sign-up sheet for the science fair home, it seemed only right that we channel all of his interest in storms into a project. I asked him if he wanted to make a tornado for the fair.
He dismissed me with a glance. “That,” he said, “is not possible.”
“Of course it’s possible,” I said. “Want to see how? Want to be the master of your own tornado?”
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 16