I WAS SURPRISED by the persistent heat of September but decided to take advantage of it. One day, three weeks after the start of school, I packed up the car and buckled Chase and Haley into their seats and in the early morning drove east to the beach, past Raleigh and on into rural North Carolina, past the flat fields that flooded when it rained and disappeared under water during hurricanes, until all that was left of towns and farms were rooftops pitching up out of the water. But there was no rain on that sunny morning and we drove past cornfields and cotton fields and fields full of a tall broad-leafed plant that I suddenly realized must be tobacco, and then I recognized the high tobacco sheds whose tin roofs flashed white hot in the morning sun. Chase was about to turn eleven, Haley was almost seven, and I was without work. Chase had pulled a knife on me the night before, in the kitchen, threatening to kill me or kill himself. I didn’t know it but that would be the refrain of the fall that still stretched out unknown before me: Chase would cry for the knife that would allow him to cut the pain out of his chest. This time, the first time, I went through the kitchen and took all the knives and scissors and anything else that looked sharp and put them in the drawer of my dresser, under a pile of sweaters I expected never to wear again, and checked the calendar; our first appointment with TEACCH was still two weeks away.
I drove fast and watched the fields and tobacco barns slide by. We pulled off for gas and cold drinks at a country store. Men lined up on stools at a lunch counter in the back of the place while another man pushed piles of greasy yellow eggs around on a griddle. Back on the road, we passed signs for boiled peanuts and fireworks. The highway fell off into a two-lane and then we came up and over a bridge and there we were. We could see the ocean behind the beach houses and a long line of low dunes and a big sign that said WELCOME TO ATLANTIC BEACH and, right next to that the hotel where I’d booked a room. As soon as we got out of the car, I had Chase and Haley walk across the hot parking lot and stand next to the sign and then took their picture so they would have a souvenir of their first North Carolina beach trip, so I’d have something that said we were a normal family, doing the things that normal families do. I had had enough of extremes by then. I had long before learned that it wasn’t necessary to go looking for trouble, that trouble had a way of finding me. I joked with friends that I’d been born under a bad star and they laughed but they didn’t know that part of me really believed this.
We spread our blankets and towels in the clean white sand just above the high-water line, where crispy seaweed coiled like hair, ornamented with stones and broken shells and shells still intact and bits of wood gone pale and gray from the pounding currents of the surf. I stroked sunblock into Chase’s skin, moving over his back and his shoulders and then palming the lotion in my hand as I made long strokes down his arms and rubbed the lotion on his chest. He giggled and stood still while I covered his legs and the tops of his feet and the tops of his ears and then spread the lotion over his nose and his cheeks.
“You look like a raccoon in reverse,” I said and smiled.
“Can I go?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I have to do Haley, too.”
While I smoothed lotion onto Haley’s skin, Chase pulled his blue boogie board from the edge of the blanket and flipped it up in the air and flipped sand over the blanket, and over my legs, where I now rubbed a slippery-slide of sunblock.
“Chase,” I said, and used my warning voice. “Be careful.”
“Can I go?” he said again and danced up and down on the sand next to the beach towels and kicked sand into the basket where I’d packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch.
“Hang on,” I said. I stood up. “Haley. Haley. Are you coming?”
She got to her feet and I fastened the cord to her boogie board around her wrist and then told Chase to stand still so I could do the same for him. He jiggled in the sand and laughed and when I closed the Velcro around his wrist, he ran down the beach to the water’s edge and waded knee-deep into the surf. He turned around and looked back at me and by that time I was in the water up to my calves, expecting the sharp shock of the cold water of the northern lakes.
“Wow,” I said. “It’s almost like bathwater.”
Chase plunged through the waves and I yelled, “Not too far, Chase. Don’t go too far.” And he slid and dove through the waves like a sleek animal at last in his element but he didn’t go too far. He dragged his board behind him and as soon as he was out past the surf, he fell chest first onto it and paddled about.
Haley leaned belly first onto her board and tipped off. She tried again and again.
“Here,” I said. “Wait. Use it like a paddleboard.” And I held the board while she grabbed the board’s prow and then hauled herself up so that only her legs dangled in the water.
“Now kick,” I said. I held the sides of the board. “Kick kick kick,” I said. Holding her board on each side and stepping carefully through the low waves, I navigated our way out past the breakers, where Haley could float in deep blue water that rolled but did not crash.
“There,” I said. I dipped myself in whole and then fell back and floated so I could stare up at the sky. A biplane chugged by dragging an advertisement for a swimsuit sale and even that felt miraculous on this day.
“Look up,” I said. “See the plane?”
Haley looked up and lost her grip on the board. She went under and came up, her golden hair wet now and sleek against her head. She spluttered and clung to the board, her mouth drawn into a wide grin but she wasn’t laughing. She turned her head hard from side to side and opened her eyes, and blinked and blinked, as if she had forgotten where she was.
“Come on,” I said. “Try again. You’ve got to keep trying.”
I held the board again and Haley hoisted herself on and Chase came up beside us and bounced up and down. “Did you see me?” he said. “Did you see me ride that wave? Man! It was cool! Watch me! I’m going again!”
He plunged away through the water and threw himself belly first on his boogie board just at the point where the waves began to rise before their big fall and then the wave took him and propelled him toward the shore and when he came to a stop he stumbled up and out of the white foam and looked back at me and raised his hand over his head in a victory salute and yipped, “Whoo-hoo!”
Haley balanced on her board next to me.
“Did you see Chase?” I said. “Did you see what Chase did?”
She nodded and started to slip off her board, so I grabbed her and lifted her back into place.
“Do you want to do that?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
We floated around for a while and Chase rode his board. When Haley got tired of her board, she dragged it up onto the beach and abandoned it next to our blanket. I rubbed her down with a towel and then draped it over her shoulders and gave her a juice box to drink. But this wasn’t a northern beach, where children need to be wrapped up as soon as they get wet; this was a southern beach and she dropped the towel and finished her drink and then ran back to the surf. I followed and the two of us waded again out through the churning waves until we could float and paddle in relative calm. Chase stayed in the surf, riding his board, as if he had some wildness in him that only the breaking waves could match.
WHEN WE HAD PULLED into the hotel parking lot, Chase had spotted the amusement park across the road. Jungle Land. A trio of African animals—an elephant, a giraffe, an enormous gorilla—each as tall as a small house, stood out front. As soon as he was done pounding himself through the surf, he made a play for us to spend our evening there. Haley chimed in. Our hotel room faced the ocean and had a balcony where we could sit outside and listen to the waves breaking on the beach but we could see Jungle Land every time we left our room to go to the restaurant or to our car. I figured Jungle Land was inevitable through proximity, that we raised the desire for Jungle Land every time Jungle Land came into view, and that, in some ways, Jungle Land probably didn’t even exist outside of Ch
ase’s desire to visit it; it was a mirage of childhood and who was I to argue?
We bought admission tickets that gave us access to everything and rode a miniature train done up in festive colors that took us all around Jungle Land, past every ride, so Chase and Haley could decide where to go first. They settled on bumper cars. From there, we made our way to miniature golf. The rides were small and on the mild side. We rode a roller coaster where the track was shaped like a deep saucer that had been partially melted in a microwave; it didn’t rise more than twelve feet in the air; the thrill came from the way the track stood you nearly on your side as you whirled around its spiral, swooping low and then straightening out and rising again only to fall once more.
Haley took my hand and dragged me toward a ride where a central pole supported a kind of steel disc from which hung swings on long chains; when the ride got going, the swings would fly up and out, just like the cow in Chase’s tornado. Haley loved her swing in our backyard in the Midwest and I had often watched her tipping up into the sunlight that spread across the lawn and then flying backward into the shadow under our neighbor’s maple trees. The evening had taken on an elegiac tone for me, as if I could, by swooping through the air on rides and good intention alone, make up for the fact that Zip was gone and we were, the three of us, firmly on our own and far away from anything that felt like home.
“Please,” she said. “Mom, please?”
“Yes,” I said, “you bet. Let’s go.”
Chase wanted to ride the train again so we settled him in the first car, which loaded and unloaded its passengers at the foot of the big swings. The workers on the ride buckled Haley into her swing. I stood off to the side to watch. The swings were little wooden frames into which each rider was firmly strapped. The ride began with a hum and then the typical carnival music; lights under the steel disc bloomed, bright red and green and yellow. Haley hung onto the chains of her swing and gradually she was lifted higher and higher and turned faster and faster until she flew through the night well above my head. My stomach flopped when I saw this but I held onto the rail and watched and thought, hang on hang on hang on, don’t fall don’t fall don’t fall. It was as if I had become so accustomed to catastrophe that I assumed catastrophe was a given, something that would appear with regularity, like mail, and with unchangeable finality, like weather.
It had been growing dark for a while and at first I thought this was merely what night at a North Carolina beach looked like: dense and close, the sky bereft of stars. But it suddenly seemed too dark for the time of day, which was not much past seven, and almost as soon as I realized that, the first drops plopped down around us, heavy and hard in the manner of rain that’s about to turn into a real downpour. I turned around and looked for Chase and saw the train heading straight for the station. I crossed the pavement and leaned down and unbuckled him as soon as his train car pulled up to the discharge zone.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to get your sister.”
“It’s raining.”
“I know that,” I said. “Come on, Chase. Let’s go get Haley.”
By this time the rain had begun to pelt down and the workers had stopped the swing ride and all the others had gotten off and run for cover but Haley dangled too high above the pavement to get down. A woman ran up to her and began to fiddle with her belt; she stepped aside when I got there and said, “I just wanted to help.” I thanked her but thought of how Haley had looked, hanging there under the dim steel disc alone in the rain and I lifted her out and we ran for cover in the Jungle Land Saloon. But there were too many people and we stood under the droopy ledge on which the sign was nailed and continued to get wet so I took Chase and Haley by the hands and ran for our hotel room. Rain blew in sheets across the road and a line of cars climbed up out of the Jungle Land parking lot. Ahead of us, the sea had turned oily and black and the sky dark and flat. The wind picked up and thunder boomed over us and lightning flashed and flamed back into darkness.
Chase and Haley loved this. This was better than any ride. The hotel’s restaurant had closed for the night so, after I gave the kids warm showers and dried them off and got them into clean, dry clothes, we made a picnic out of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine, and bags of corn chips and potato chips, and Snickers bars, and cans of lemonade. Chase stood at the sliding door in front of our balcony and watched the storm out over the ocean. He counted the time between thunder and lightning and tried to guess how far away the storm was and notified us when he had lost sight of the lights of a ship at sea. It rained until midnight, a steady, driving, thunderous rain, and the world fell away from us; we were just three in our cocoon on a rainy night at the beach, safe and whole and sound. I lay in the middle of the bed, with Chase’s head resting on one shoulder and Haley’s on the other, and I imagined a future defined by this moment, as if we had found a way to leave all of our troubles behind.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, WHILE we were swimming, Chase’s face froze in place, the surf churning around him, his eyes rolling up until the whites showed. His eyelids fluttered and his lips twitched and his jaw clenched and unclenched subtly, surely, muscles tightening and releasing, tightening and releasing.
“Chase!” I yelled. “Chase! Chase!” I called his name, and again, and then again, and again. He didn’t answer. I slipped my arms under his shoulders and pulled him from the surf and then took him by the arm and pulled him up to the beach blanket where Haley was drinking a Capri Sun. We sat there, both of us breathing heavily and Chase shivered and I put a towel around his shoulders and no one argued when I said it was getting late and probably time to think about driving home.
AFTER WE GOT BACK to Chapel Hill, I took Chase to a neurologist and described the length of the episode. It had not been the first that day but it had been the longest of the day and the only one in the water, the only one that really terrified me. Then I described what Chase’s teachers had reported from school. He’d spent two weeks in the fifth grade at his new school in a regular classroom—after all, he’d spent his elementary school years in regular classrooms when we lived in the Midwest—but by the end of the second week, the school had called and demanded that I come in and observe Chase in class and talk about an alternative placement. I’d visited the class on a rainy day. When I came in with my dripping umbrella and tried to stand quietly in the back of the room, the other fifth graders turned in their seats and someone said loudly, “Who’s that lady?” Chase never looked my way. He didn’t look anybody’s way. He had a worksheet on his desk but he didn’t look at that, nor did he look at the blackboard or the teacher or out the window. He just looked away, his face expressionless and staring.
When he was moved to the special ed room, which was really a cheerful trailer out behind the school, his teacher called me up to describe times when Chase would stare off into space and drool, or his speech would become slow and slurred, or his eyelids would appear heavy as he stared. It was hard to teach Chase because of this. Sometimes, she said, his elbows would almost slip off the table. Sometimes, she said, he could be redirected through repeated questions, but sometimes he could not. These things happened a lot, she said, and she wanted to know what I planned to do about it.
The neurologist was a tall man with a long face. He listened carefully. He noted that children with autism often have behaviors that might look like seizures when they are not seizures. He explained how behaviors could look like medical conditions. He mused aloud on this theme for a time. Wasn’t it possible that what I had seen was not a seizure at all but perhaps merely a new twist in the way Chase’s autism made itself known? Could I recall other times when this behavior had happened, but when Chase clearly was also aware of his surroundings? He told me that he himself had seen any number of cases when parents and teachers had insisted that a child was having seizures when really what he was having were staring spells. “The children,” he said, “were playing a new game. The staring was a kind of self-stimulation behavior that met the child’s internal n
eeds.”
I explained again that this was not a behavior, that Chase was not a behavior, that if Chase had autism, it was a kind of autism so odd that everyone called it atypical. I kept my voice even. I wanted this neurologist to understand that I understood his theory but I had one of my own.
“Perhaps the best way for us to be confident that Chase is engaging in self-stimulation behaviors is a negative EEG,” the neurologist suggested at last. He looked at me sorrowfully, as if I had forced him to order this test against his will. His nurse came in a few minutes later with a small device that looked like an oversized Walkman, a handful of blue and red wires, a couple of straps, and a roll of white gauze. She asked about school and Chase’s favorite subject while she pulled on her latex gloves and vigorously went after various points on his skull with a cotton ball saturated with rubbing alcohol. His hair stood on end in little tufts and she glued an electrode at the base of each tuft. He flinched every single time the glue hit his skin. I reminded him that it was just glue and couldn’t hurt him and said things like, “Hang in there, buddy,” or “Almost done.” I promised him a stop at a fast-food restaurant, his choice, for lunch.
When all of the electrodes were in place, the nurse hung the recording device around his shoulder and pinned the straps to his shirt. Then she bundled the wires and ran a piece of tape around them and wrapped his head in white gauze, around and around the sides in a cap that eventually covered his whole skull, and then down and under his chin and around his neck, to hold the whole thing in place. He looked like he’d had a terrible accident. But he smiled and reached up and patted the gauze gingerly, as if he expected something to hurt. “I don’t have to go to school today, right?” he said. “Nope,” I said. “Not tomorrow, either.” People gave Chase’s headgear frank appraisal when we rode the shuttle back to our car, but they’d quickly compose their faces into attitudes of general sympathy and concern if I caught their eyes.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 20