Linda looked away from me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Someone told me they thought there was going to be an opening here in the next couple of months, but I don’t know where Chase will be on the list. Someone might be ahead of him. There are children who’ve been waiting for years.” Her voice grew softer. “Really,” she said, “I don’t even know if Chase will be on that list. They have a review board. They will have to decide.”
Inside, it smelled like disinfectant and vegetable soup. Tania turned us toward the PATH unit. The floors gleamed and cheerful paintings of sailboats and children with dogs or bunches of balloons hung behind sheets of acrylic that had been screwed into the cement-block walls. Tania threw open the doors of the classroom and the dining room, the kitchen and the dayroom, and I walked inside of each and looked around and made approving comments. Boxy sofas covered in easy-care vinyl stood under the windows but there were soft fleece throws and colorful pillows covered in durable fabric. Each child had his own room, and each was outfitted to look like home. You could see the things that parents brought to make their children’s lives better—television sets, or rugs imprinted with designs.
I walked behind Tania and she pointed out the facility’s features and described the programs that were intended to lead to higher levels of function, if not to independence. We passed children in the hall, each boy accompanied by an adult, and some of the children looked at us as we walked by and some of them did not. I smiled at the boys who looked at us but they did not respond. As I looked around, I tried to imagine which one of these boys could be Chase’s friend. Even as I did that, I wasn’t thinking of the Chase who stalked the halls of the hospital and muttered about death and Zack de la Rocha; I thought about Chase as he had been, the way I hoped he’d be again. If the boy Chase had been before he got sick came to live at PATH, he would be made miserable by his roommates, for they wore their disabilities openly and were not aware of the way others saw them. The old Chase tried desperately to conceal his differences, studied cool like it was a book of common prayer. He wouldn’t like it here.
Tania led us out to the playground and she spoke in a cheerful voice about how the kids loved to play basketball or swing on the swings. She waved toward a hilltop and said there was a gymnasium on its far side where the boys went to play on Special Olympics teams, if they were interested, or just to shoot baskets, if they were not. There was a swimming pool and a building called the Munchroom, where boys who’d earned enough points could trade their red and yellow and blue tickets for cans of soda and candy bars.
Two boys who could not have been older than eight or nine sat on the swings and listed to one side and stared past us, their feet pressed hard into the dirt below the swing set, and each pressed and released, pressed and released just enough to move the swing a little bit forward and then feel it fall back. A couple of staff members sat at a picnic table and I watched while a woman helped a boy draw a picture. She held her hand gently over his and he watched intently while she moved his hand, crayon caught between his fingers, across the paper until a long green line appeared, and then another, and another. The boy made some sounds that weren’t words and smiled at the paper. He sat pressed close to the woman but he didn’t look at her or at us.
We stood there and watched the boys drifting on the swings or the boys tossing two different plastic basketballs at a Little Tikes basketball hoop or the boy making many lines with his green crayon, each line different than the last, but each also the same, a line where none had been before, guided into place by the hand of his aide. The boys didn’t talk to each other or to us. They made sounds and sometimes laughed but no one had words. I felt my throat close, wrenched by the idea that I would consider this place for Chase. Chase had never been this low-functioning. He had some trouble communicating. He had some impulse-control issues. He couldn’t care for himself or do his schoolwork. He couldn’t stop moving. He’d been grossly psychotic for five months and he was not getting better. But he was Chase. He loved rock-and-roll and spaghetti and meatballs and pets. He wanted friends and to learn how to drive a car. He did not belong here.
At the same time, there didn’t seem to be any other place for Chase in the whole state.
The aide who’d been holding the boy’s hand gently let it drop to the paper, where it lay without movement, and he stared at it as if it were a thing apart from him. She turned her wrist so she could check her watch, and then stood up and announced that it was time to go inside. Tania explained that all the boys were on a strict schedule. We watched them file through a door held open by an aide and disappear into the dayroom. When they were gone, Tania took us to a conference room where we sat around a long table and she explained the population that the PATH unit served. She wanted to know if we had questions. I shook my head woodenly. She asked if we had Chase’s application with us. Linda reached down and unsnapped her briefcase and pulled out a thick stack of papers and handed it over. Tania explained that the review board would probably meet in April and before they did, they would send the team to see Chase in the hospital. She flipped through the first few pages of the application as she talked and then something caught her eye and she stopped talking and began to read. We waited silently. In the room next door, a boy made loud cries and I could hear someone talking to him and the sound of furniture as it slid across the slick floor. Tania looked up.
“Don’t mind that,” she said. “Some of our little fellas can get very wound up. It’s normal. It’s natural.”
She glanced back at the page in front of her and then looked at me.
“Chase is fifteen?” She calculated for a minute. “Really almost fifteen and a half,” she said. “Is that right?”
I nodded.
“You know that kids age out of here at sixteen?” she said. “He would not be able to stay the full two years. We might not be able to get him to where we’d like him to be in one year, and this seems like he might age out before a space comes available.”
She looked at the page again and this time she didn’t look at me when she spoke.
“He’s psychotic?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How psychotic?”
“He hasn’t really responded well to treatment,” I said, “so he’s been in the hospital.”
Tania nodded. “What I meant to ask was this: does the psychosis substantially interfere with his daily functioning?” She smiled at me encouragingly. “We’ve had other kids who had a little bit of trouble in that direction, nothing very serious, most of them didn’t really even need medication for this but we’ve had some that did. But we’ve been successful with them, pretty much across the board. Their psychoses, if you want to call it that, really didn’t get in the way of the things they had to do, day to day. This program is very goal directed, very intensive. It would be hard for someone who isn’t really . . .” she stopped and searched for the right word. “It would be hard for someone with a more significant level of psychotic symptoms,” she said at last.
No one said anything. I watched three boys walk past our window on their way to the PATH unit van, each with his aide, each held by the hand.
“Chase is psychotic,” I said at last. “I think a doctor would describe his symptoms as severe. Significant. Something like that.” I stopped and watched Tania lick her index finger and turn more pages in the application.
“Do you think we shouldn’t apply?” I said finally.
Tania looked up. “Oh, no,” she said. She shook her head and her tufts of hair bounced a little. “That’s not what I’m saying at all,” she said. “That decision is entirely up to the review board and I have no say in any of this whatsoever. Not one bit. All I can tell you is that we’re going to process Chase’s application and Jim and Sandy are going to come and see Chase in the hospital and we’ll probably get that set up in the next couple of weeks. I just want to give you some things to think about is all. I just want to be sure you have the whole picture and know what this place is all about. This can be
a big decision for a family.”
I nodded and looked away. She stopped flipping through Chase’s application and sat quietly next to Linda. Not long after that, we all stood up and said good-bye and Tania walked with us as far as the front door, where she told me to be sure and call if I had any questions.
SIXTEEN
When Chase and Haley and I left the Midwest for North Carolina, we fled like a family escaping a haunted house. We packed up the truck and we packed up the car and Zip agreed to drive the truck south along the interstate behind us, and then over the mountains into Virginia and then North Carolina, where I’d learned there were programs that might help Chase. The kids and I climbed into my old blue car and even though it was four in the afternoon, I said, “Let’s go. We can make Ohio before dark.” I wanted to put miles and miles between us and that small town, miles and miles between us and the dead marriage, miles and miles between us and the family that failed, and the only way to do that was to get moving. So I drove hard and fast and got us out of there. I didn’t even want to look in my rearview mirror, in case whatever it was had made good time and was gaining on us. But it wasn’t some ghost that packed itself up in the box of children’s books in the truck that followed us. It was a nameless thing, this thing that was whatever was wrong with Zip and Chase, the thing that was milder in Zip that had bloomed in Chase. I didn’t realize what it was I was trying to run from then because I hadn’t yet seen it at its worst, I hadn’t seen Chase at sixteen. When I ran from the Midwest, I thought if I took the kids south and we started over, I could leave what we’d been through behind.
We drove until six and then pulled over at the hotel just over the border in Ohio where I’d reserved a room for us. Zip waited, idling the truck engine, while I went into the office and got a key. The place smelled damp and boggy and I didn’t feel optimistic about the room. When I opened the door and Chase and Haley pushed past me and threw themselves on the bed, I smelled stale smoke and something dank and wet and, below that, the faint aroma of urine.
“Come with me,” I snapped. “Don’t touch anything. We aren’t staying.”
I put the kids back in the car and buckled them up and told Chase to please, please, just sit still, and I locked the car doors and walked across the dark parking lot to the truck, where Zip leaned and smoked. He turned to look at me as I approached and I called, “Can you drive some more?”
“What?” he said. He flicked the cigarette into the drainage ditch beside the parking lot. A damp breeze blew his dark hair across his face. Across the street, a Big Boy and a Dunkin’ Donuts began to glow brighter in the dusk.
“I want to get out of here,” I said. “The room’s disgusting. Besides. We can make another three or four hours before we stop. The kids will sleep. We can get them McDonald’s and keep going.”
“Fine by me,” he said.
I could tell he wasn’t going to argue with anything I said on this trip. I might have said, Let’s take the kids and drive off a cliff, and he would have smoked and stared and then said, Fine by me.
We drove in formation, the truck lumbering along behind my car. Haley’s head drooped and nodded until she fell asleep with her giraffe in her lap. Chase sat strapped into his seat and banged his cars together, again and again and again. We played music and he sang along with Bono, his voice high and clear, with a pitch so true it reminded me of Zip, when he’d sung with the Strangers, when the other guys teased him and called him Broadway Zip.
We passed through an enormous flat land, with a huge dark blue sky the color of the blue of a Maxfield Parrish painting. And then the color began to fade with the light and I told Chase to be on the lookout for stars. He saw an airplane moving along the horizon and he said, “There’s one.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Watch for some more.”
Chase twisted against the door, peering up at the sky, his small face bright with expectation. “I see stars, Mom,” he said. “I can see lots of stars.”
“That’s good, Chase,” I said. “Why don’t you count them?”
He began, “One, two, three . . .”
“Why don’t you count them to yourself?” I said. “Inside your head?”
He was quiet for a minute and then I heard a tiny whisper as he counted the lights on barns and the headlights on cars that drove along the roads parallel to the big interstate. I glanced again and again in the rearview mirror. Zip followed us with the truck but I couldn’t see into the cab at all; just the dark of the windshield.
IT TOOK US THREE days to drive to Chapel Hill. This meant that we had to spend two nights on the road: the first night, when we had gone as far as we could go, the second night at a planned stop in West Virginia. We rolled in road-weary from careening through the mountain passes, where the road swept in big undulating spirals around and down steep hillsides and then along big grass ramps built by highway crews for runaway trucks.
I’d rented a room at a Holiday Inn Express near Charleston, and before we checked in, I pulled in next to a drive-through window and picked up white paper sacks full of burgers and fries and shakes. At the hotel, I signed in with the clerk and Zip pulled around to our room, parking the truck near a strip of grass. Then we went upstairs and crowded together in our one hotel room as if we had not already lost one another, as if Zip did not have a ticket to fly back to his apartment in the Midwest when the week was out. We ate our hamburgers and lay down on the beds and spent our last night listening to each other breathe in the dark.
We drove into Chapel Hill on an August day when the temperature topped out at 104 and unloaded the truck into a second-floor apartment I couldn’t really afford. At the end of the week, we drove Zip to the airport, where he kissed each of us in turn and then walked down the Jetway to the plane. In those days, you could still go to the gate and we stood at the glass and waited until the plane took off. Chase and Haley swore they could see their father at the window, right up until the moment the jet lifted into the sky, but I wasn’t looking. I stood there, alone with the kids, and wondered what it is you do when you have finally gotten away.
Our apartment was in a brand-new complex that stood raw and sterile and freshly painted yellow under a high bright sky. We had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a view of the pool. On the third day I drove the kids to their new school and we got out of the car and looked into the classrooms through the dusty windows while cicadas buzzed in the trees over our heads.
“See,” I said. “This is a good school. This is going to be great.”
I’d come south for a weekend and rented the apartment in a hurry. Then I had driven around and taken pictures of the places the kids would see when we lived here. Our new front door. Their new school. The pool at the apartment complex. A grocery store. I ran out of ideas after that, not knowing what they would miss the most from the Midwest, what they would most want to see in their new home in the South, but I had the pictures developed at a one-hour place and then slid them into photo albums I’d picked up, one for Chase, one for Haley. I labeled each one, We Move to North Carolina!
On the plane trip home, I had these photo albums tucked into my carry-on bag. I hoisted the bag into the overhead and settled into my seat. Two rows in front of me and across the aisle to my left, a child screamed and screamed and thrashed and kicked the backs of the seats and flung himself from side to side. His mother wept and two flight attendants called to a third and together they looked at the child and I heard one of them say, “We might have to ask you to get off the plane.” This brought fresh tears from the woman who was the child’s mother but who stared helplessly at the child—it was a boy, about three, his face purple with rage he couldn’t express—and could not reach him. I watched the boy and saw Chase, thrashing at birthday parties and on school outings, in grocery stores and on our kitchen floor. I thought of all the people who had not helped Chase. I looked at the woman and saw myself, helpless, hopeless. Then I stood up and walked up to the flight attendant and she grudgingly took her attention f
rom the boy and turned to me with an annoyed expression.
“Do you have a blanket?” I said.
“If you would just take your seat,” she said, but I interrupted.
“Not for me,” I said. “For the boy.” I nodded at the child. “If you can drape a blanket over him so that he can’t see anything, he might settle down. Just lightly. Don’t tuck it in. He has to feel free.”
The flight attendants let the child thrash while one of them fetched a blanket. They gave the blanket to the dark-haired mother, who stood up and shook it from its wrappings and looked at me.
“Over his head,” I said. “Just lightly. He has to be able to breathe.”
She leaned over her son and spread the blanket over him, as if she had found him lying on his side in bed with no covers, but then gently spread the blanket over his head until he was completely covered. The surprise of darkness stopped his screams. A few minutes later, he lay still on the seats. His mother carefully lifted the edge of the blanket and slipped the boy a stuffed bear. When we were ready for takeoff, the boy sat wrapped in his blanket, some of it still shielding his face. He looked exhausted and old.
Later, the flight attendant asked me how I knew what to do. She explained the mother had brought her son to North Carolina for evaluation and she was just learning what was going to be needed. I felt foolish casting myself as some kind of expert when I was not that, when all I had was years with Chase.
“I was just thinking about that little boy,” I said. “Everything seemed to be too much for him.”
“Well,” said the flight attendant. “We would never have tried that blanket trick. I’m going to have to remember that.”
During the snack service, she brought me extra packs of pretzels and I slipped them into my purse, thinking how much the tiny bags would amuse Chase and Haley. And then I closed my eyes and thought again of the way a sheet of glass stands between the disabled and the rest of us, so that we see the disability alone and react to that, if we react to anything at all, if we do not turn our faces away. We do not see the person who is just like us, struggling inside.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 19