“It’s safe to say that Haley’s been under a lot of stress for the last few years,” the elementary school guidance counselor said. “She’s really a great kid and she’s had to cope with an awful lot. There was a divorce and a move and her brother’s disabilities, which have been significant and ongoing. It sounds like we might be better off getting her tested now, just to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. These things you see in class might be stress related. But what if they’re not?”
“We can test her or you can test her,” said the middle school guidance counselor. “If we test her, you’ll have to wait until fall, since there won’t be any way to get this on the school psychologist’s schedule between now and the first week in June. If you test her, maybe you can get it done over the summer and we can come back for a meeting in the fall and work on developing a concrete plan, if that’s what we need to do.”
“And in the meantime?” I said.
“You should check her homework and we will sign her planner to make sure she’s got her assignments written down. But it’s going to be up to you to make sure that the work gets turned in. Otherwise, she’s going to fail sixth grade.”
AFTER DINNER, HALEY picked up the dishes from the table and I stood at the sink and rinsed them before putting them in the dishwasher. She stood at the end of the counter and watched me and then crossed behind me to the old green wicker chair and sat down and crossed her arms over her waist.
“Can we play cards when you’re done?” she said.
I nodded. “What do you want to play?”
“Rummy.”
“Oh, god,” I said. “You’ll have to teach me again.”
“It’s easy.”
“I know. I just can’t remember how it goes.”
“I’ll show you.”
“Did you do your homework?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I did it,” she said and looked away from me.
“What was it?”
“Math and language arts.”
“But what did you have to do?”
“I had to read for my reading journal and then do a worksheet.”
“Can I see?”
Her face closed. “Fine,” she said. She pushed one foot out in front of her and frowned at her arms. “Can I ask you something?”
I nodded.
She studied the floor and picked at a piece of loose wicker under the chair arm.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“What?”
“You’ll break the chair.”
“It’s already broken.”
“I know,” I said. “But more. You’ll break it more.”
She stopped snapping the loose wicker and shifted in her seat and the chair creaked. I wiped the pan I’d cooked the chicken in and then folded the dish towel over the edge of the sink. The refrigerator hummed behind me.
“How come you stayed home from work with Chase when he came home from the hospital but you didn’t stay home with me when I was sick?”
The winter before, Haley had been home with something that looked like the flu and later looked like mono and finally had no name. It took her six weeks to feel better.
“Because I couldn’t,” I said. “I wanted to but I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I only get so many days off from work and I’d used them all up when you got sick,” I said.
“That’s stupid.”
“But it’s the way it works,” I said. “If I took more days than that off, they wouldn’t have paid me.”
She looked away from me.
“I did the best I could,” I said. “I went to work late and I came home at lunchtime every day. I know it wasn’t enough but it was all I could do. And I’m sorry that that was all I could do. I wish things were different. You have no idea how much I wish things were different. But they aren’t. I have to go to work and earn a living and I can’t be everywhere everyone needs me to be at once. But I am sorry. I wish I could have been with you every day. Do you understand?”
She shrugged.
“Haley,” I said. “I love you and I never want anything bad to happen to you.”
“I liked it better when Chase was here.”
“I know,” I said. “Me, too.”
WHEN THE MAN from Raleigh called, it was nearly ten and Haley had gone to bed. I was sitting in the half dark of the living room telling myself that I could read a book if I just paid a little more attention to it. The house was still and cool. I had the windows open, for it was early June and the nights could still be mild and pleasant. The telephone sliced through the quiet.
He introduced himself in a huge voice and asked me if I was the parent of the boy who was about to be released from Memorial. When I said I was, he asked how I expected him to help me. I asked him if there wasn’t something his office could do to find a place for Chase to go.
“Already done,” he yelled into the phone. “He’s going to John Umstead Hospital tomorrow. I arranged for the transfer myself.”
“Chase has developmental disabilities,” I said. “I don’t believe that John Umstead Hospital can or should provide long-term care for him.”
“This is what we do,” he said loudly.
“I might be wrong about this,” I said, “but haven’t there been lawsuits about housing people with developmental disabilities in state psychiatric hospitals? Isn’t it against the law?”
“In these circumstances, it’s understood that we will provide the best possible care for your son while we continue to work to identify an appropriate placement for him,” he yelled. “What does your area mental-health unit say about this?”
“They’ve been working on this since Chase first went into the hospital. They haven’t been able to identify an appropriate placement,” I said.
“Have you even been to any facilities?” he shouted.
“There are only two places in the entire state where the operators were willing to consider Chase. I visited one and she rejected the application as soon as she got it, telling me that Chase is too complex and too much in need of services for her to be able to take him. The other unit told me they would reject Chase if he applied. They suggested that we make an application to the BART unit and we did that, but the BART unit has no beds.”
“What office do you work with?”
“Orange-Person-Chatham,” I replied.
“And they haven’t been able to do better than this? It’s up to them to find a place for him.”
“They can’t find what doesn’t exist,” I said. “I feel confident that they’ve given it every effort. I’m turning to you because we’ve come up empty, Chase still needs care, and he’s about to be released from Memorial without a place to go.”
“He’s going to Umstead,” the man shouted. “I said that already.”
“Umstead is not an appropriate placement for him,” I said. “You know that as well as I do.”
“It’s intended for the short-term,” he said.
“I don’t see how it will be short-term if the state doesn’t have facilities to offer him.”
He sighed. “Chase is an outlier,” he said. “You can’t expect the system to work easily or well for an outlier case.”
“I’m very concerned about his placement at John Umstead Hospital because the hospital doesn’t treat children with developmental disabilities,” I said.
“You say the BART people would take him if they had a bed?”
“That’s what I understand.”
“How about this, then?” he said. “Let’s get your son over to Umstead and then have the BART people consult on his care over there. Come over, put treatment plans in place, whatever will be most helpful. If they’re on the ground, day one, is that going to do it for you?”
“Do you have any other suggestions?”
“Look,” he yelled, “look. Of course we’re going to keep searching for a place for him that would be better long-term. And a bed is s
upposed to come available at BART at some point in the next year. In the meantime, let’s get him settled at Umstead and then get the Murdoch people over there and go from there.”
When we hung up, I stood in the kitchen and rubbed my eyes with my fists. Behind my lids, I saw stars and universes and whole galaxies explode.
THE NEXT DAY, the staff got together and decided to throw Chase a going-away party with pizza and cake. One of the residents took Polaroids of all of the nurses and therapists and glued the pictures to sheets of construction paper. Each person wrote something to Chase on his or her page and the resident bound the pages together with yarn from the arts-and-crafts supply box. When I got there, the nurses were sitting at the table in the dayroom where everyone ate lunch and Chase paced in front of the nurses’ station. He had cake on his shirt. The chief nurse pulled a slice of pizza out of the wax paper – lined box and tried to hand it to me; when I said no, she put the slice down and cut a slab of cake and put it on a paper plate ringed with pictures of flowers and balloons. I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “sit down anyway.”
The nurses told stories about Chase just as if he could understand them; one told me how he’d nicknamed Chase “Manhattan” because Chase always talked about moving to New York City and having a penthouse apartment in the sky. This nurse was called Big Butchie and had grown up in upstate New York several hours from the town where we had lived when Chase was young; we both commented on the snow and the cold. He’d given Chase a small stuffed mouse to keep in his pocket and had named the mouse Little Butchie for him. “Just in case he gets scared,” he told me. “You understand.”
“The thing about Chase,” Sam said, “is that he’s so cool. He’s like the arbiter of cool. Like he pays attention to cool and nothing else. Was he always like that?”
I nodded. “Always,” I said.
Chase walked past the table in the dayroom and turned away from us into his room. He stood at the window with his back to us. Dr. B handed me a clipboard with a form clamped on it and pointed to the lines where I would have to sign. He tore off the bottom copy and handed it to me.
Sam had pulled Chase’s clothes out of his storage closet and packed them in plastic bags with drawstring tops that had the hospital name stamped on the side, and the words Patient Belongings. These were lined up in a neat row behind the nurses’ station.
“I don’t know when the ambulance is scheduled,” said Dr. B. “This afternoon, I think.”
Sam looked at his watch. “We just called them and they’re supposed to be on their way.”
“How will this work?” I said.
“When they get here, we’ll take him out through the ambulance bay. We have enough staff to escort him downstairs,” said Sam. “And we gave him some Thorazine and some Ativan, to help him stay calm.”
He explained that I should take Chase’s things down to my car and then bring the car around to the ambulance bay and meet us there. He called for a cart and said he’d go with me and wait by the hospital front door with Chase’s bags while I brought the car around. After that, I needed to go directly to the ambulance bay so I could follow the ambulance up to Butner.
Someone said something and Dr. B looked at me and said, “Are you ready?” Then he said, “That was the ambulance driver. He says they’re about fifteen to twenty minutes out.”
The orderly with the cart buzzed at the front door and the nurse buzzed him in. She was eating a slice of cake behind the nurses’ station. I thanked Dr. B and he smiled and said, “I wish we could have done more. It’s been a difficult case. I wish we’d had a better outcome.”
We shook hands and I looked over his shoulder at Chase, who stood with his back to us and stared out the window.
“Does he know he’s going?”
“Yes,” said Dr. B. “We had the party for him and he seemed to understand.”
Sam had loaded the cart with Chase’s bags and was waiting by the front door. “Are you ready?” he asked.
Downstairs, I got the car and paid the parking attendant and drove up to Neurosciences and Sam helped me load the bags into the trunk. “I think I got everything,” he said. “You can call and tell me if anything’s missing.”
I looked at the clothes and jacket and papers and art projects done by other people with Chase’s scrawl on them and the big pillow from his bed and the extra blankets and finally found his bear and reached in and pulled it out.
“You know where the ambulances come in,” said Sam. “Right?” He looked at me.
“Around the back.”
“You just drive over there and we’ll bring him down.”
I nodded.
“Good luck with everything,” said Sam.
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
I waited in the car after I parked. Two ambulances stood in the bay. The one farthest away was empty and being readied to leave and two paramedics tossed things in the back and one stepped up on the bumper and looked at something inside and then dropped to the pavement and pulled the doors shut. The ambulance closer to me had both of its rear doors open and the driver stood by the passenger-side door and spoke to someone on his cell phone. When he was finished, he snapped the phone shut and put it in his shirt pocket. I got out of my car and walked over to the ambulance and stood there with my arms folded across my chest and waited. The air smelled of exhaust. When the breeze came up, you could smell the hot grease from the Wendy’s inside the hospital. I watched the paramedics in the ambulance step down from the back of the vehicle and watch the hospital doors with great attention. One of them turned to me and said, “Are you the mother?”
I nodded.
“It’ll take us about forty-five minutes to get there,” she said.
One of the nurses from Five South walked up to me from behind and called my name. She was carrying a case of chocolate Boost. “We thought we should send this with him,” she said. “It’s paid for and we don’t need it for anyone else.” She followed me to my car, where I took the Boost from her and slid the case onto the backseat.
“Well,” she said, “good luck to you.”
“Did you see Chase?” I asked. “How is he doing?”
She looked past me and worked at a smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re bringing him down. They had to get a few extra people to help but I think it’s going fine now.”
I walked up and down in front of the hospital doors and then went to stand by the doors where gurneys are pushed through in an emergency. I could see the back hall of the emergency room, its pale walls, its yellow light. Behind me, the ambulance driver answered the staticky sound of his dispatcher and then hopped out of the ambulance cab and leaned against the door.
Someone was screaming and then they were through the doors, six of them surrounding Chase with their hands on his arms and shoulders and waist, and Chase was thrashing and turning and screaming the same thing over and over again. “I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong.” He flailed blindly at the men who surrounded him, throwing his fists and kicking out and the men stepped neatly backward to avoid his blows and at the same time kept their hands on him and called to one another to look out, look out. And someone called his name and I saw that these were not just men but that Sam was among them and Big Butchie and the young resident who always called Chase “Dude” and two of the male nurses from Five South and then a man I didn’t know at all but who wore a hospital security uniform. Six of them in all and in the middle Chase turning and pummeling the air and screaming finally, “No! No! No! No!”
I turned away when they tried to wrestle him into the ambulance, turned and leaned over and sobbed, and the young resident came over while the others banged and clattered and yelled and said things like, Hold him, easy now, steady, and then Sam said that he’d ride up with him and he got in the ambulance first, and after that Chase screamed and screamed without words and I bent and wept and the doctor put his arm around me and said
, “It’s okay, it’s not that bad, I’ve seen worse, it’s okay.” I looked at him, at his flat white face and his frightened eyes and yet I allowed myself to be comforted, although there was no comfort in that moment and there is none in the remembering.
I FOLLOWED THE AMBULANCE up I-85 through Durham and then north across Falls Lake, and then down through the center of Butner, where there was a firehouse and a public safety office, a store that sold hunting gear, a bank, two gas stations—one out of business—and a public park where rusty iron picnic grills studded the weedy lawn. Sometimes I could see Sam in the ambulance’s rear window. I could not see Chase. When we got to John Umstead Hospital, we turned onto a service road that ran up to a set of double doors at the rear of a newer building marked Admissions. Beyond it were the residents’ units, red brick buildings that looked like barracks. I parked behind and tried to follow Chase inside but a nurse stopped me at the door and said, “You need to park your car out front and we’ll call you when we’re ready.”
I asked to see him. I explained that he was very frightened. I held his bear in front of me. “I need to give him this,” I said.
The nurse looked doubtful. “Just for a minute, then,” she said. I followed her inside.
Chase shuffled around a small hallway, his face white and haunted. I walked up to him. “I’ve got your bear,” I said. “Here’s Brown Bear.”
He took it and stared at me and then began to chew on the bear’s nose.
The nurse came up to me and told me I needed to wait outside until they decided whether or not they would admit Chase.
“It’s a transfer,” I said. “That’s already been decided.”
She looked at her clipboard. “I have no record of that,” she said, “so our doctor is going to have to take a look at him.”
“I spoke to Raleigh yesterday,” I said. “They assured me that Chase would be taken here and we’d get people from Murdoch Center over here right away.”
The nurse looked skeptical. “Our doctor needs to decide,” she repeated. “There’s a family waiting area out front that you can use after you park your car. Be sure to park in the visitor spaces in the lot across the street.”
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 27