The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  She moved him through his paces, walk, trot, walk, trot, and forced him into the corners where he preferred not to go while I stood on the side and watched for things that might spook him, a blowing plastic trash bag coming on the breeze across the field, a bird that might suddenly fly up and out of the long grass, anything at all. But the ring was still and no birds flew and the grass rustled but nothing came across the pasture, not even leaves. I breathed and watched her ride and felt myself settle a little. She had a crop and when he didn’t do what she asked of him, she put it to him and got his attention and he did as he was told. But he didn’t move easily from walk to trot, and he didn’t move easily back to walk again, and he fought her at the corners, and he fought her when she changed directions, and he fought her when she asked him to halt. His eyes rolled and popped a little whenever she gave him directions, and he blew and flattened his ears. So she held him and finally he stood still; she sat back hard with a grim look on her face. After a time, she leaned forward and said something to him and he pricked his ears forward and she patted him on the neck and then gently tapped him with her heels and he set off at a walk.

  Over the black trees beyond the pond, a lone hawk sailed on a long open span of air and I watched it rise and lower on outstretched wings and then rise and lower again, not flying by intention but being taken by the wind in ever-widening circles until it was gone into the horizon.

  Haley took Lightning to a trot and when he was trotting well and she had him in the far corner, she put her leg to him and asked him for a canter. This was a gait that was new to her and one that she and Lightning were trying to learn together. When she squeezed him, he turned his body halfway sideways as if to look back at her and then straightened himself out and flung himself forward just as he put his head down and arched his back. She sat hard and hauled on the reins and her body slipped to one side and she stuck and stayed on and then he stopped and breathed plumes of smoke and I saw the bluish white of his eye and his flat ears. Then Haley put her heel to him and hit him with the crop and said, “Canter.” I watched with my stomach dropping while Lightning put his head down and bucked again and Haley lost her balance. She lost her stirrups and grabbed his mane and he could feel her dislodged and in that felt proud of himself, for he stopped again. She sat for a longer time this time and then found her stirrups and shortened her reins and pressed him forward into a walk. When he had come down the long side of the ring, she asked him to trot. He shuffled along and tossed his head and she kept him at an even pace until she got to the far corner and then she called for a canter again and whipped him with the crop. I stopped breathing. He took three steps in canter and then threw his head down and flung it up again and bucked in four short hops. She held him and held him and did not come off, but when he finally stopped and stood blowing under the afternoon sky, she swung her leg over and jumped down. She ran her stirrups up and took him by the bridle and then yelled to me to open the gate. She passed me and I could see that she’d been crying and her mouth was set in a line as straight as a hyphen and she didn’t look at me as she led him through the gate. “I hate Lightning,” she said fiercely.

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

  But she never quit riding, not even the difficult horses. It was as if her struggle to control them stood in for something bigger that Haley had yet to master, a road she felt herself to be on, and often alone. In the beginning, it was all she could do to get on. As time passed, her voice grew clear and strong when she gave commands and she rode hard over high jumps, and the horses turned to her hand and felt her on their backs as someone who knew she was in charge.

  ONE MONDAY EVENING I wheeled the trash barrel out to the curb. I walked back over the grass to pick up the blue plastic recycling tub and put it down in the gutter next to the trash barrel and then stood at the top of the driveway and looked back at the garden I’d planted with Chase and Haley, the cherry tree and the redbud and the candy lilies Chase had picked out, and Haley’s iris and the dry brown bones of the butterfly bush that in summer sent purple blooms like fat tubers out at the end of its branches, and the roses that in winter were still green but green as if green could hibernate and turn with the seasons into sleep. The front windows behind the garden were warm yellow squares and the front door stood open where I’d left it, with only the glass of the storm door between the view of our front hallway and the sofa in the living room beyond and me. Anyone who passed by and looked inside would see what I saw, the back of a chair, a lamp, a picture on the far wall. That passerby would see something that looked entirely quiet, entirely serene, as if nothing about us were different, as if nothing in this family had been disrupted to the core. I walked down the driveway and leaned against the hood of my old blue car and turned my face up to the stars. There was no moon that night and the stars were bright and filled me with the idea of hope. I watched them for a while, and watched the spaciousness of the sky and the distance between light and here, and then a plane came along, high above me, and made its way below the galaxies, its lights blinking softly as if to signal that it was of this world and no other, just as I seemed to be, and I breathed and breathed and said to no one at all, or no one to whom I had ever spoken before, “Help him. Please. Help him.”

  IN THE FIRST WEEK of June, Dr. B called me at work and told me that he’d had the last conversation he was able to have with the representative of my insurance company and they had decided that Chase no longer required acute care and should be discharged from the hospital to another care facility immediately. Today. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Dr. B had argued that no such facility had been identified but he explained that he really didn’t have a leg to stand on, for Five South was not in the business of providing long-term care and he knew the insurance company would not go for it. Not surprisingly, they hadn’t, just as they had not gone for the description of Chase’s symptoms or his need for medical management or the fact that he still thought he was a rock-and-roll singer who had himself long since abandoned his band to go do political work of an unspecified nature in the jungles of Central America. Dr. B had explained that we still didn’t know if the Clozaril was going to have any beneficial effect but he’d been forced to agree that there was nothing left to try, that Chase was on the drug of last resort, and if it didn’t work, it remained the case that he’d need long-term care somewhere else. The insurance company representative was unmoved by the argument that long-term care for someone acutely psychotic did not seem to exist and Dr. B wasn’t able to make the argument that his unit should provide it in the absence of other possibilities. He’d tried to make the case that Chase continued to be unstable and in need of crisis-level care, but the insurance company made an alternate determination. Chase, in their view, still needed care, but not care at the acute level.

  “What do I do?” I asked Dr. B.

  “You have the right to appeal this decision,” he said. “But you should be aware that the meter is running while you wait for the results of the appeal, and if the appeal is unsuccessful, you’ll be financially responsible for every single day Chase remains in the hospital until that decision is reached. They have a procedure they follow,” he said, “and I don’t think they’ll hear the appeal for forty-five days.”

  “I want to file an appeal,” I said. Then I said, “How can this be? What do they expect us to do?”

  “He’ll have to move to John Umstead Hospital,” said Dr. B. “That’s a state hospital. They’ll have to take him.”

  I waited but he didn’t say anything more. I felt the words John Umstead reverberate through me. No one had mentioned the possibility of the big state hospital in Butner before. No one had prepared me for the fact that this could happen to Chase.

  “How can they do this?”

  Dr. B cleared his throat. “Because they can,” he said. “This is how the system works. All you can do is appeal.”

  “How will we move him?” I asked at last. “Do you expect me to dr
ive him?” I turned the phone cord between my fingers and looked out of my office window across the green lawn of the university. A car screeched its brakes on the road. People walked up and down in front of stores as if this were an ordinary day.

  Finally Dr. B said, “Usually, the patient will be transported by the sheriff’s office. He’ll be handcuffed and they’ll take him down and out through the ambulance bay.”

  “No,” I said. “We can’t do that.”

  “They’re trained to deal with people who might need to be restrained,” said Dr. B.

  “Chase is not a criminal,” I said.

  “It’s the usual way,” Dr. B said.

  “But Chase is terrified of death squads and executioners. He thinks he’s in a concentration camp and government agents are out to get him,” I said.

  Dr. B was silent for a time. Then he said, “We might be able to get an ambulance to take him. You’ll have to pay for it. Your insurance company probably won’t see it as medically necessary.”

  “That will be better,” I said.

  “You should get a letter by certified mail today or tomorrow. It will tell you that Chase’s care has been decertified and that the insurance company will no longer pay. They’ll give you the exact time you will become the responsible party. Chase needs to be moved by that time. It will probably be tomorrow. We’ll start the transport paperwork here today.”

  “How are we going to prepare him?”

  “I don’t know that we can prepare him.”

  “Do you want to tell him or should I?” I said.

  “We’ll tell him,” he said. “One of the nurses will start talking about it with him this afternoon.”

  I nodded and then realized he couldn’t see me. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  I CALLED JIM at Murdoch Center and explained that Chase was about to be moved to John Umstead. I said that he needed a bed right away. Jim said Chase hadn’t yet been approved for admission. Even if he had been accepted, they had no way of securing a bed for him. There were twelve beds on the unit and someone who needed to be in one filled each of those beds right now.

  “Isn’t there something that could be turned into a bed?” I said. “How about that observation room at the front of the unit? It has a bed and a dresser.”

  Jim sighed. “That’s a therapeutically necessary room,” he said. “We use that in the event that someone is suicidal or needs twenty-four-hour observation. It makes it possible for us to keep from sending people back to the hospital. We don’t use it a lot,” he said, “but we need to have it available at all times.”

  “Let’s say Chase is approved,” I said. “Where does he fall on your waiting list?”

  “Our waiting list?” said Jim. “Well,” he said. “Right now, today, Chase is pretty much it. When there’s a bed, he’ll be first in line for it.”

  “What should I do?” I said.

  Jim waited. I listened to him wait.

  At last he said I should call the man who oversees all the hospitals and care facilities for the state division of health and human services. He named him and told me he worked in Raleigh and then said, “You understand? He’s not only responsible for the developmental-disability sites but also runs the mental-health facilities and the substance-abuse facilities and the system of group homes and area mental-health units. If anyone knows of a facility that can take Chase, he’d be the one.”

  He rustled something on the other end of the line. “Here’s his number,” he said.

  I couldn’t get through but left a message explaining Chase’s situation. The woman who answered the phone listened and wrote things down and asked questions so I knew she was trying to get the story straight. When I hung up, I called Linda, who had gone with me to see the PATH program in the winter; I asked her if she had any new ideas about where we could take Chase. She said she’d been working on nothing else ever since she got word that Chase was to be released from the hospital but that nothing new had emerged. “I just don’t know what to tell you,” she said. Then she said it again.

  “Who else can I call?”

  She considered this for a minute. “Unless you call Raleigh, I don’t know what else to tell you to do.”

  “I already did that,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “You called the head of the division?”

  “This afternoon,” I said.

  “That was mighty bold.”

  I blinked. “Was that wrong?” I said. “I don’t know what else to do. Not unless you know how to help me.”

  “No no,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. That was a good thing to do. But boy. I don’t know too many parents who would just pick up the phone and call that man.”

  “It’s his job, isn’t it?” I said.

  Linda laughed. “Well,” she said, “yes. I guess it is his job.”

  SEVERAL DAYS EARLIER, I’d gotten a call from the guidance counselor at the middle school. She told me that she and Haley’s teachers had met; they’d looked at her progress over the course of the year and decided that she was in real danger of failing sixth grade. We needed to meet. So that afternoon I went to Haley’s school. I was the first one to the conference room and I sat on the far side of the table and waited for Haley’s teachers to arrive. The bell rang and the hallway outside the guidance office filled with kids who bumped along and talked and jostled and walked away. I drummed my fingers on the table and then sat back and stopped drumming. There were drawings pinned to the bulletin boards of children with smiling faces, blue paper with red Magic Marker, or green paper with black ink. The hallway grew louder and then stilled and then there were no children anywhere except for a girl who sat on a chair with her earth science book on her lap.

  Haley’s math teacher was the first to arrive, and then her guidance counselor from the elementary school, who’d come over to explain to the middle school what she’d seen in Haley in the past. The exceptional children’s coordinator came next, and Haley’s current guidance counselor, and then her language arts teacher and her science teacher.

  “We’re here to talk about Haley’s academic progress,” said the current guidance counselor. “I think we all agree that Haley isn’t achieving to potential. Or do we need to discuss that?”

  The math teacher shook his head. “I think that’s accurate,” he said. “I see a smart girl who isn’t doing well, mostly because she doesn’t turn her homework in or doesn’t keep track of assignments or doesn’t seem to be paying attention in class. Is that what the rest of you see?”

  The language arts teacher and the science teacher nodded.

  “It’s hard to understand,” the science teacher said. “She’ll be going along fine and then all of a sudden, she’ll stop doing her work.”

  “Haley does her work,” I said. “I see her homework.”

  “Do you check it every night?”

  I shook my head. “I used to do that but when it was always done, I decided I didn’t need to check it as often.”

  “Maybe you need to start checking it again,” the language arts teacher said.

  “I can see that it’s done,” I said.

  “It’s not getting turned in,” said the math teacher. “She might be doing it. We just never see it.”

  “Is there some strategy we can use to help her remember to turn it in?” I said hopefully. “Something that happens the same way in each of her classes that we can agree on today?”

  The math teacher looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know what that would be.”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of system? A reminder? A note on the board that she looks for?”

  The language arts teacher frowned. “I can’t do that,” she said.

  The math teacher shook his head. “The problem is,” he said, “if we did that for Haley, we’d have to do it for all of the kids in the classroom. And we’ve got twenty-six kids and just can’t do something special for everyone.”

  “If you put a note on the board, where everyone could see
it, then maybe everyone would benefit from it. It wouldn’t have to be something special for Haley. It could be something for all of the kids.”

  “That’s just not going to happen,” said the math teacher.

  “But what have you done to help her be more successful in your classes?”

  The language arts teacher looked down at a piece of paper in front of her and began to read items that sounded like they’d come from a college textbook on how to teach. “We look for ways to increase her ownership of her own education,” she read. “We seat her in close proximity to the teacher’s desk. We seek to bolster her self-esteem.”

  “How?”

  The teacher looked uncomfortable.

  “I just wondered if you could give me a specific example,” I said.

  No one spoke.

  Haley’s elementary school guidance counselor looked carefully at the wall behind the teachers’ heads. “This isn’t the first time Haley’s had academic difficulties,” she said. “When she was in elementary school, she had difficulty paying attention and staying on task and getting some of the bigger projects done that she needed to get done. Do you remember?” she said and looked at me. “We all thought that it was because of her brother and once you got things with her brother sorted out, things would be easier for her. But it doesn’t sound like that’s happened. I wonder if maybe we might have missed something.”

  The middle school guidance counselor looked at me. “Did Haley’s brother go here?”

  “Chase,” I said. “Do you know him?”

  The guidance counselor blanched and recovered. “Of course I knew him,” she said. “We all knew him. How’s he doing? He had that terrible injury and he didn’t really come back to school after that, did he?”

  “He came back for a few weeks in the fall but then he was admitted to the hospital and he’s still there,” I said.

  “He’s still there? Is it the neck injury still?”

  “No,” I said. “He had a psychotic break and he isn’t really getting better.”

  The room was still. The chairs outside in the hallway were empty now and the secretary pushed back from her desk and stood up and walked over to a revolving rack with slots behind plastic windows for pamphlets and began to sort fresh copies into the different slots.