“Mom,” he said. He looked very serious. “I have to tell you.”
“What?” I said. I was taking dishes out of the dishwasher and wiping them dry before I put them away. I knew what was coming.
“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 intoned. “You can’t make a tornado at home, Mom,” he said. “Do you see any Gulf air around here?” He looked around as if waiting for something to appear. “We don’t have mountains here,” he said.
“I know, Chase. We don’t live in Kansas. I am not the Wicked Witch of the West. But I know how to make a tornado at home.”
We lived in the rural Midwest so we didn’t have the critical part handy. Chase’s aunt sent it and the day her package arrived—a small brown envelope sealed with everyday packing tape—I fetched it from the foyer, where the mailman shoved our mail through the mail slot, where Zip got junk mail addressed to Art Byrd, and tossed it to Chase. “Here’s your tornado,” I said.
“Where?” he said. He turned the envelope over in his hands and shook it and then held it out to me. “Open it,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “Come into the kitchen.”
We cut the envelope open and Chase looked at the black tornado tube that my sister had picked up at her local fancy toy shop. If you fill a single two-liter plastic soda bottle most of the way with water, and use the tube to screw that bottle to a second two-liter plastic soda bottle, and then upend the bottles so the one with the water in it is on top, and you rotate the bottle in quick little swirls, pretty soon, a perfect tornado will form. It’s just the whirl of water as it’s sucked down a drain—another of Chase’s early preoccupations—but it looks exactly like a twister.
At the last minute, before we screwed the two tubes together in a final and absolute way, Chase decided the water alone looked too plain. He added a little glitter of the sort you find in snow globes and a tiny black and white plastic Holstein he’d robbed from his farm animals set. When you activated the tornado, the cow flew through sparkly water. The glittering twister stood out in sharp relief against the empty air inside the bottle, just the way a tornado stands out in sharp relief against the sky.
“Wow, Chase,” I said. “That’s very cool.” I put my arm around his shoulders and hugged him and he leaned his head against me and I allowed myself to feel hope. I liked to tell myself that Chase might have a bumpy childhood but once he was through it, everything was going to be fine. His face was bright when he looked at the tornado in the tube and he spent the rest of the afternoon tilting and twirling the bottle to make the twister appear and I watched him while I finished the dishes and started dinner and the worry in my stomach eased up a little. Chase was a smart boy. He was going to be fine. That tornado proved it.
They held the science fair under the greenish florescent lights of the cafeteria and Chase’s simple tornado, with his complicated yet perfect descriptions of weather systems, seemed small in comparison to the real working batteries that caused lightbulbs to flash white and then off with the flip of a switch or the baking-soda volcanoes made of cornstarch clay that erupted in fantastic displays when someone poured a half cup of white vinegar into the caldera. Chase carefully stood his poster board on the easel stand we’d devised and stood his tornado in the center of the table. The binder with all of his notes in it rested to one side. Whenever anyone approached the table, he’d crow, “Want to see a real tornado?” If the visitor stopped, Chase carefully rotated the bottle and activated the tornado. But not many people stopped to explore his display—nothing exploded here, nothing flashed. He was wearing a New York Yankees baseball shirt and I noticed that his rat-tail had grown so long that perhaps we ought to think about cutting it. But Chase loved having the long tendril curling down his back. He thought it made him cool.
The judges were high school science teachers, drafted for the occasion. They moved around the room, clipboards in hand, and wore yellow ribbons pinned to their lapels that said Judge. I noticed that they stood for a long time before the volcanoes and asked many questions of the children who had made them. One finally made his way to Chase’s exhibit. He read the poster board and he picked up the binder with the facts that Chase had amassed about tornadoes and flipped through the pages. He noted that Chase had supplied a bibliography.
“All right, young man,” he said. “What do you know about tornadoes?”
“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 said.
“That’s fine,” said the judge, holding up one hand. “Now your sign says you have a tornado here. Show me what you can do.”
Chase lifted the bottle and carefully upended it so the water would be on top and then, just as carefully, rotated the top bottle very slowly, until the water picked up internal velocity and the whirlpool effect began. The tornado glittered under the cafeteria lights and the cow spun with the centrifugal force of the funnel cloud, turning and rollicking, spun out to the outer limits and held in place at the same time. The judge didn’t say anything but watched the cow fly through the air with a great solemnity. He didn’t write any notes on his clipboard. When all of the water drained out into the lower bottle and the cow fell unceremoniously to the drain, the judge squatted down so he’d be more or less Chase’s height and all I could see was a messy tangle of gray curls knotted over the back of the judge’s skull like a hat.
“Did you make this tornado?”
“Yes,” said Chase. “I rule tornadoes.”
The judge smiled. “It seems that you do,” he said. “Where did you get the idea for the cow?”
“The Wizard of Oz,” Chase said. “There’s a cow when Dorothy goes up in the twister.”
The judge chuckled. “I remember that,” he said.
“It says moo,” said Chase, grinning and ducking his head. “Do you want to see it again?”
“One time will do it for me,” said the judge. And then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a blue ribbon that said First Prize and pinned it to Chase’s poster board. “You keep at it and you’ll be a great scientist one day.”
FOR HALEY’S THIRD BIRTHDAY, we bought a Fisher-Price racing car, black with yellow trim and a red seat. The day after her birthday, she took it out into the driveway and pushed the pedals and ten minutes later had figured out how to steer left and then right and make the car turn. Zip took her for walks. She drove the car and he rode behind her on his bicycle, riding so slowly that he couldn’t keep the front wheel straight and had to stop and put his feet down so he wouldn’t lose his balance. They made a beautiful picture, Haley in her car, her arms resting on the steering wheel when she came to a stop, and Zip, his long hair falling softly around his shoulders, the breeze lifting it, his hand pushing it out of his face, just the way he had years ago when I saw him walking across the parking lot to the bus.
And yet, if he looked at me across the dinner table or looked up when he was done with the dishes, I didn’t see him at all. His expression was blank and dark and he sat on the back porch and smoked. He didn’t believe there was anything wrong. He couldn’t understand why I was unhappy. I asked him to talk to me. He said he could not. He said it was as if he knew what he wanted to say but he could not get it out, that somewhere between his brain and his mouth, he lost the ability to say anything at all. It took him ten minutes to tell me that. I waited to see if he would come inside but when he did not, I wandered into the living room and read a book for class and felt the house shudder with loneliness. And beyond the loneliness was a kind of anger that had no limits: I worked hard and supported us and then I came home and still had to plan meals, cook dinner, clean the house, and organize the kids’ rooms, and plan
for their clothing purchases, and organize birthdays and holidays, and track the school calendar, and look after the pets, and handle the household bills, and arrange for sitters and doctor’s appointments and dentist’s appointments, and for refills on Chase’s medication, and for the monthly drives to the state university, where he was seen by a child psychiatrist.
We went to see a marriage counselor. I sat on the sofa but Zip sat across from me in a chair upholstered in cloth the color of eggplant, under a reading lamp that cast a shadow on his face. The marriage counselor thought we were there because I was angry about housework. She asked us to talk about our home responsibilities. She gave us an assignment: for our next session, we were to bring in lists of everything we did to manage the house and the family. The next week, I pulled mine from my bag: it was two pages long. Zip didn’t have one. He said he had forgotten to do it. He said he’d have it next time. He said he always remembered things but for some reason had forgotten this. He sat in his purple chair and felt very distant from me, and I realized he was baffled. He didn’t understand why we were there.
After the session, the therapist asked to see me alone for a few minutes. She told me she could not help us. Zip was beyond her reach.
“He needs psychiatric assessment,” she said. “It’s like he’s not there, it’s like there’s no one home. Do you understand what I’m telling you? He’s not being passive-aggressive. He isn’t there. I’m afraid he has a serious psychiatric illness and he needs treatment. At the very least, he needs to be seen by someone. I’ll give you a referral.”
“What?” I said.
She repeated herself. “This kind of thing can be shocking,” she said. “It’s hard on the families. But he needs to see a psychiatrist. He needs an evaluation.”
Outside, Zip leaned against our car and smoked. When he saw me, he opened the passenger-side door and sat down. I realized I was always driving, always planning, always saying how things were going to be. He was quiet on the ride home and it didn’t surprise me when he refused to seek medical treatment.
ONE MORNING, CHASE and Haley and I raked until we’d raked every leaf we could find into a giant pile; all around us, you could hear other rakes moving swiftly and steadily across lawns and the air was full of the smell of leaf fires burning but, unlike our neighbors, we didn’t seek to make short work of our chore. Instead, we wanted to make the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen, a colossus of a leaf pile, the Empire State Building of leaf piles. Chase had been asking about it all morning. When we were through, we had a sizable accomplishment; the thing mounded to four feet in the center. Chase dropped his rake and grabbed Haley’s hand and said, “Let’s jump!” And he and Haley walked backward until they were at the perfect spot to get a running start and I counted them down and at one they ran and leapt into the leaves, and threw leaves into the air, and began rolling and swimming until they were completely submerged and only their two faces came up through the leaves, like divers emerging from some beautiful shadowy deep, and they lay on their backs, swimmers, my family, floating in the giant pile, grinning at me.
WINTER FELT PARTICULARLY DARK that year. A raw wet wind blew in from the west and we had little snow, just dark days where the sky lowered over our heads and ice made glassy patches on the back steps and Zip stood outside in his old coat and smoked and smoked. At night the stars hung above us, distant and not much gazed upon; it was too cold to stand in the yard and look for Orion’s Belt or Cassiopeia. We went to sleep at night with the wind and we woke in the morning with the wind and in between, the wind blew.
One cold midwestern morning, the snow that had fallen overnight drifted softly against the trees. A woodpecker drilled against the neighbors’ dead silver maple. I stood at the foot of my bed and folded laundry and listened to the woodpecker and felt a draft through the old window. I heard Chase’s voice, clear, high-pitched, arguing, and then his father’s lower voice, flat, sonorous, but it too rose in pitch, and then someone ran and someone else ran after him, and there came a terrible thumping from the kitchen. By the time I got downstairs, Chase was on the floor between Zip’s legs, held up only by his father’s hands around his neck, and Zip was shaking him as hard as he could. I shouted Zip’s name but there was no answer.
Chase’s arms were limp, his hands batting weakly against the floor.
“Stop it, stop it, you’ll kill him,” I shrieked but my own voice was only so much sound from a far distance; it did nothing, stopped no one. And then I pushed Zip as hard as I could and he fell to the floor and I stood over Chase and screamed at Zip to get out. When he was in the driveway, staring away from us into the snowy backyard and reaching for his cigarettes, I locked the doors.
I got the marriage counselor on the phone and with my heart pounding and my breath heaving explained what had happened and asked her what she thought I should do.
She was a white-haired, rosy-cheeked German woman in her early sixties, who wore stretchy activewear—pants and warm-up jackets—with small animals appliquéd on the front. Often, she was just finishing a little nibble of something when I saw her, and she’d lick the last of it, whatever it was, from her fingers before she wheezed out her standard opening, which was, “Now, let us begin.”
“Did you strike your spouse?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry but he was trying to kill our son.”
“And where is he now?”
I looked out the cold kitchen windows. I couldn’t see Zip. Snow lay heavily on the black branches of the evergreens at the rear of the yard, weighing them down until the branches were bowed and touching the ground. “I don’t know,” I said. “He was in the driveway. Now he’s gone.”
“You must never, ever strike your spouse,” she said firmly.
“He was trying to kill our son,” I repeated.
“That is of no matter,” she said. “I want you to make a contract with me right now, that you will never, ever strike your spouse again. We must have these ground rules straight.”
“Look,” I said. “You don’t believe me.”
“It doesn’t matter whether or not I believe you,” she said. Her voice sounded singsongy, irritatingly mild and friendly. “We must agree.”
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. I’ll never strike my spouse again.”
“If you feel that you or the children are in physical danger, call the sheriff,” she said.
“My son would be dead by the time they got here,” I said.
She ignored me. “And where is your spouse now?”
I looked out the windows in the front and the back, I unlocked the doors, I settled Chase in front of the TV with a Thomas the Tank Engine video, I checked on Haley. After a while, I stood on the front steps and waited while my slippers filled up with snow, studying the footsteps that led away from me down the street.
IN EARLY SPRING, I came home from work and found Chase twirling on the swing in the backyard. It was a cold day but the ground had begun to thaw and great patches of bare mud erupted where there used to be ice. The snowdrops were up; we’d have daffodils in another month. Chase wore his blue down jacket with the red and yellow chevrons and a hat pulled down over his ears. He sat on the swing and with his toes pushed off against the packed dirt until he’d wound the chains into a tight braid and then he pushed off again and the swing twirled while the chains spun apart. Thin clouds stood in a high, frail line over the evergreens at the back of our yard. I stood on the back porch and watched him and then crunched over the cold grass toward him and he looked at me and said, “No Mommy! No Mommy! No Mommy!” I stopped and waited and then took a step forward and he kicked in my direction and began to scream.
I stepped back and breathed and then turned and walked back to the porch.
Chase pushed off from the ground again with his toes and turned and turned and turned until he’d turned the swing’s chains tight. Then he lifted his feet and let go of the ground and again let the swing spin free. He was talking to himself.
I
put my briefcase and the stack of books I needed to read that weekend down on the back steps and began to cross the lawn.
“Chase,” I called. “Hey Chase.”
He spun and didn’t lift his head.
The ground was squishy underfoot and water spread out under each of my steps as if each footfall pressed a saturated sponge. I realized I was probably ruining the only pair of decent shoes I had to wear to work. The blue tarp our neighbors spread over their stacked firewood had come undone and rattled a little bit in the breeze and the trees creaked the way they do in early spring.
“Hey Chase,” I said.
This time he looked up. “No!” he roared. “No you!”
“What?”
He began to kick in my direction. “No you! No you! No!” His voice rose in pitch and he flailed his arms. “Stay away!” he commanded. “You stay away!”
Inside, I would find a note from his teacher that explained that Chase was sure that a girl who walked home down the same streets that Chase walked along had poisoned him. Apparently, she kept poison pellets in a jar of marbles. Attached to the note was a disciplinary action form; Chase had been sent to the principal’s office for fighting with a boy who, he claimed, had punched him in the eye and caused him to go blind. But I didn’t know this yet.
“Chase, honey,” I said.
He raised his little fists at me. “Stay away! Stay away! Stay away!”
I stepped back over the wet ground and crossed the driveway and sat heavily on the back steps. Inside, Zip had made coffee and was getting ready to go to work. He’d taken a job at a big-box store and now worked nights on the loading dock. I still had dinner to make and Haley needed a bath. Chase needed a bath, too. The steps were cold but not uncomfortable and I buttoned my coat up to my throat. Zip opened the door behind me.
“He’s been on that swing since he came home from school,” he said. “He won’t come inside.”
“Where’s Haley?”
“She’s watching The Lion King.”
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 17