Which happened almost immediately. “Oh,” she yelped. “Oh! Oh! What’s that?” And her pole bent and she took two involuntary steps forward but Bryce was right there and he held her and showed her how to begin to crank the reel and bring the fish in.
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a natural!”
She struggled with the crank and looked over at me and I said, “You can do this, Haley-Bird.” So she leaned back against Bryce and he put one arm around her waist and eased her into the chair and then strapped her into the white leather harness and stood the pole in the pole stand and stepped away and said, “Attagirl!” And Haley leaned back and cranked and cranked and cranked until pretty soon there was a thrashing dark thing alongside the side of the boat and Bryce reached down with a big net and scooped the fish into the boat and water flew from it in a silver sheen and Haley looked at it, this flopping flippered thing, and Bryce said, “You got yourself a big blue! Good job!” He knelt down and pulled the hook from the fish’s mouth and then tossed the fish onto the ice.
We fished all afternoon. At the end of the day, after we came back into the dock, I took pictures of Bryce and Haley and the fish. Then I took a picture of Bryce holding his baby upside down by the ankles, as if Ignatius were a fish Bryce had been lucky enough to catch out on the big dark sea. And again I thought, Chase would have loved this. And again I tried to put that thought away.
• • •
AT NIGHT WE SLEPT as if we had not slept for months. We ate lunch in town at a place that overlooked the harbor and we took a tour of the oldest house on the island. We went to the whaling museum and stood slack-jawed under the hanging skeleton of a baleen whale and Haley intently studied the pictures of men in boats, men fated to be lost at sea, as if she knew that this, above all else, was what a man could expect. We window-shopped through Nantucket’s cobbled streets and Haley took pictures of things that interested her: doorways, and street benches, and the shadow from a sign cast across the road. She bought a stuffed horse in one of the shops and I took her into a drugstore with an old-fashioned soda fountain so she could eat a toasted-cheese sandwich and drink a chocolate milk shake at the long marble counter. At night we walked along the beach and listened to the boom and rush-shush of the waves and looked up at the stars and pretended that we never had to go home.
AFTER WE GOT BACK, I drove up on Saturdays to see Chase. I would park in the visitors’ lot behind the building and climb the three concrete steps to an area that looked like a small loading dock, where a black urn filled with wilting red geraniums had been used by many people as an ashtray. A box hung on the brick face of the building next to the door and in the box was a telephone. I would dial a number and wait a long time while the phone rang and rang until someone answered and told me to wait right there, someone would be down to get me. I would stand on the loading dock and wait. It was always hot. Across the parking lot was a shed crowded with heavy equipment and the air smelled of diesel exhaust and earth.
In the beginning, I would bring him a soda and a candy bar and stand the soda next to the candy bar like offerings on the wobbly table in the visitors’ room. The keys would rattle and I’d hear the bolt slide back on the door between the visitors’ room and the unseen world that Chase now occupied and then the nurse would encourage him to come into the room and he’d take two steps into the room and look at the table for the soda and the candy bar. He was wearing street clothes now. The hospital had wanted him to wear pajamas even though no one else did, because it helped the staff to remember that he was the one on fall precautions and seizure precautions, but I objected to this and said the pajamas made it clear that Chase was different than everyone else and singled him out as vulnerable to the tough kids and he already had enough trouble with that.
The nurse would settle into the chair by the door and Chase would drink the soda if I opened it for him. He’d stay as long as it took for him to finish his drink. I began to bring him hamburgers and French fries and thick milk shakes that took a long time to eat.
One day, he sat at the wobbly table with his hamburger wrapper spread flat on the table top and his box of fries lying flat on a yellow paper napkin that I’d unfolded and treated as a plate. His hands shook when he tried to bring the hamburger to his mouth and the slice of tomato slid onto his shirt and hung there while he ate and then fell to his lap. I reached for the pile of napkins and reached for his lap but he kicked at me and the nurse said, “Chase,” and I stepped back.
“Who is this?” the nurse said. “Is this your mother?”
Chase said, “My mother’s clothes. My mother’s glasses. Not my mother.”
“This is your mother,” the nurse said. “Who else would come to see you every Saturday?”
“Chase,” I said. “Chase. I’m your mom.”
He wiped his hands on his pants and stood up and began to walk up and down, up and down, in front of me. “Making movies now,” he said, and looked at me with a weird smile on his face. “Out there.” He said something else I couldn’t understand. Then he said, “Giant insects. It’s going to be good.”
“Do you know where you are?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Prison,” he said. “This is a jail for juvenile delinquents.”
“I can understand why you feel like it’s a prison,” I said. “But it’s a hospital.”
“Murderers. Here. I have to resurrect everyone.”
“They’re trying to help you,” I said. “You had to move because the insurance company wouldn’t pay for you anymore at Memorial. Do you understand? It wasn’t my idea to bring you here. I didn’t have any choice.”
He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. Then he crossed the room in two strides and kicked me as hard as he could. I twisted away and jumped up and the nurse jumped up and she put her palm on the small of Chase’s back and steered him away, back onto the ward.
I THOUGHT ABOUT ZIP and I thought about Zip and I thought about Zip. Everyone had thought that they knew him. I had thought that I knew him. And I felt certain that he was not a liar, that he had believed in the plain truth of everything he’d said. But the things he’d told me didn’t really hold up: he’d said he could fix any car engine he saw, but couldn’t fix my car; he’d said he was an expert marksman, but I never saw him handle a weapon; he’d said he quit school because his parents stopped paying, but his mother told me that she had spent her days at a factory for a big department store, bagging dresses and coats she’d never be able to afford, and all so she could pay that loan, month after month, until Zip was through.
At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I sat and sorted through old family pictures and felt that, instead of excavating a mysterious past, I was being turned inside out by things I didn’t know. I had photos of family ancestors on Zip’s mother’s side, big-bosomed women in fancy dresses with high necklines ruffled in lace, big men with large, light eyes wearing dark suits and small hats. But Zip’s father’s side remained more or less a blank. The only time I ever saw Joseph was in the picture from his wedding, where he stood next to Mary and cut into his wedding cake; he wore his uniform because he was just back from the war.
I studied these pictures as if I could find traces of Chase, traces of Zip, behind the carefully composed faces, the beautiful clothes, Mary’s family’s obvious prosperity, Joseph’s family obscured by mystery. I thought that no one should imagine having a child until they’ve seen the story told by the family photo album. One night I called Zip’s cousin and asked her if anyone in the family was known to be a little strange, a little different, a little eccentric, a little odd.
She laughed when she heard my questions. “Do you mean was anyone crazy?” she said.
“That’s a hard thing to ask,” I said. “Just out of the blue.”
“Let me think,” she said. I listened to silence and then she said, “The only one I can think of was an uncle who really kept to himself. I always thought it was a cultural thing, something left over from the old ways, but
it could have been something else. Nobody ever saw him except once or twice a year when there’d be some kind of get-together. And when he came to those, he kept to himself, as if he expected you to come up to him. I always thought he was trying to hold court so I avoided him. I remember him being mostly alone and he died alone in his house and no one found him for a week or more. That was a sad thing.”
She paused.
“The family’s big on grudges,” she said at last. “Little things set them off and they keep it up for generations. Two of the sisters lived in this town; they lived half a mile apart and they didn’t speak to each other for their entire adult lives. More than sixty years. I heard someone say the whole thing started because one wouldn’t do a favor for the other. It was something simple, too, like mailing a letter because she was going that way anyway. They were a mysterious bunch because of things like that. I don’t think anyone ever came out and said any of them was crazy, though. But who knows? Times were different then. No one talked about such things. The families tried to keep this hidden because having someone who was crazy in your house, well, that was a shameful thing.”
I BEGAN TO THINK I could only believe things I could corroborate. I didn’t trust myself as a witness. It seemed to me that I had bought into Zip’s view so deeply that my own vision made me blind. Now, when I looked back, my entire life with Zip was nothing I’d thought it was. It was not just an unsettled feeling that came upon me when I realized this, but instead I felt unmoored, unbound, undone. I had been married for a long time to a man I thought I knew better than I knew anyone else in the world but who, it turned out, I had not known at all.
It’s a common place for divorced people to say that the person they once loved turned into a stranger before them. I suppose that may be true; when we fall out of love, the familiar grows extraordinary and then strange, as if all the equations we’ve been working from suddenly add up to a different set of numbers. But this is not what I’m describing. The more I looked for credible witness to the things that Zip assured me were true, the more the man vanished. The very fact of him disappeared like smoke.
Remembering a favorite story of his, I decided to try to find out if a drummer who pointed a .38 at a woman who was dating a keyboardist had missed and hit Zip. It seemed to me that this was the sort of story that would have had a public life; surely it could not have happened without a written mention somewhere. So I looked through online records of his hometown newspaper and, when those didn’t yield anything, I contacted the county library and told them I was trying to find out anything I could about a shooting among members of a rock-and-roll band, maybe in their hometown, maybe just somewhere nearby. The librarian who responded was very sorry but she couldn’t find anything in the newspapers in their holdings for ten years on either side of those dates. She suggested I try the historical society. Before I did that, I picked up the phone and called Zip’s mother and asked her to tell me whatever she knew about the time Zip was shot.
There was a long silence.
“Zip was never shot,” said Mary. “Not that I know of.”
“Never shot in the groin at a band meeting by the drummer of his band?” I said. “Never spent six months in the hospital learning to walk again?”
“He went in when he was in junior high school for a couple of days for his adenoids,” she said, “but he was fine.” She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what he told you,” she said, “but he was never in the hospital for six months.”
I hung up and crossed the kitchen to the window and stood and looked out at the street. The neighbor’s yellow dog padded by, followed a minute later by our neighbor, who glanced at my garden, saw me, and waved. I waved back. When she was gone, I watched the breeze work through the leaves in the crepe myrtle. Everything was strange.
DAYS AT UMSTEAD PASSED, one like another, until Chase had been there for months. There was no hope of school. At the treatment team meetings, they told me it wasn’t safe for Chase to leave the unit with the boys under twelve to mix with the other teens in the classroom. I pointed out that Chase was entitled to an education. The psychiatrist leaned back in his chair and then leaned forward and fixed me with a steady look and pointed out that Umstead was no place for Chase. He wanted to know what I was doing to find an appropriate placement for him.
Every day, two orderlies walked Chase down from his room in the children’s unit and out to a waiting hospital van. Some days he went quietly. Other days, he fell to the ground and thrashed or he tried to bolt and run, perhaps down the long broken asphalt road that led from the hospital back into the center of town. The orderlies got him into the van. They sat one on each side of him while the van traveled three blocks to Murdoch Center. At Murdoch, he went to the BART unit and, with the help of the teacher, played a few computer games in one of the classrooms. Then he had lunch. After lunch, again flanked by the orderlies, he returned to Umstead and spent his afternoons drowsing on the sofa in the dayroom. Someone checked on him every fifteen minutes and each time noted that he was asleep.
May asked me to bring some items from home that might interest him and I packed a plastic box with plastic figures of Batman and Spider-Man and one Thursday drove with them up to the hospital and met her in the waiting area downstairs near the front door. She made an inventory of the things in the box and then told me if I didn’t tell anyone, she’d take me back along the long hallway on the unit to see Chase’s room. We entered through the blank locked door of the visitors’ room and found ourselves on a long green hallway with rooms opening off of it, each the size of a large cell, perhaps eight feet by ten feet. Each held a metal bedstead with a thin mattress made up with sheets, a flat pillow, a single blanket. There was a large bathroom with toilets without stalls, showers without curtains. Nothing could be done that wasn’t under surveillance at all times. Chase’s room was down on the right. He stood in the room and swung his arms, his back to the door. When he heard us he turned and left the room. His room held his bed and his clothes piled on two shelves that were built into a recess in the wall; a third shelf held a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a comb.
May held the plastic box with the action figures inside.
The nurse brought Chase back.
“Chase,” she said. “See what your mother has brought you?”
He didn’t look at the box or at us but crossed to the window and stood with his back to us.
May put the box on the shelf next to his pants. “The staff will work with him with these,” she said. “Some play therapy,” she said doubtfully.
They increased his Clozaril and increased it again and he began to drift through his days in a wordless state where he said nothing comprehensible and seemed not to comprehend anyone around him. When I saw him in the visitors’ room, he nodded off like a heroin addict and spittle ran from his mouth and the nurse with him began to carry a rag so that she could wipe up his drool. His shirts were wet with it. His gait was increasingly unsteady. His hands shook. At first the acute-care-unit psychiatrist cared for him but after a month or six weeks he was switched to a psychiatrist who specialized in more long-term cases. I wondered if this meant hopeless. We met in a room off one of the waiting rooms and Dr. A told me he was working hard to make sense of Chase’s case and he hoped to find some answers soon.
These were the warm days of late summer, when the air seemed dusty and yellow and leaves hung exhausted in the trees. The room was brown and yellow like the air outside and the light of the sky and paint peeled from the wall next to the door where an old leak had once stained the wall a deep ocher.
“Have you had any luck in finding him a placement?” he asked.
I shook my head. “He was accepted at BART but they don’t have a bed,” I said.
“Do they have any idea when they might have a bed?”
“They won’t say. Maybe sometime within the next year.”
“It would be better for him if he were in a place where people could really meet his needs,” Dr. A said.
“We can’t do that here. All we can do is what we would do for someone without a developmental disability but that is not in Chase’s best interest.”
“I know,” I said. I explained that the people from Orange-Person-Chatham were still looking for a placement. I explained that I had written to the man who supervised the man who over-saw all of the hospitals and facilities in the system and when he didn’t reply, I’d called his office and asked to set up an appointment with him. The woman who answered told me she was not going to do that. When I hung up, I contacted the Governor’s Advocacy Council for Persons with Disabilities and explained Chase’s situation to them. It took weeks for me to hear from them, but finally they wrote and said that Chase’s case was far too difficult for them to take on so they would take a pass on it. I wrote again and told them they should be ashamed of themselves for refusing to help Chase because they thought it might be too hard. The program assistant saw my letter and approached one of the attorneys, who agreed, grudgingly, to look into things for Chase. She had his case for three weeks but did nothing before she left to take another job. After that, no one did anything while they searched for a new attorney and it had been many weeks with no help on the case. I’d called Carolina Legal Assistance for Exceptional Children and they asked me if I wanted to sue. When I said I wanted to find a solution that did not involve a lawsuit because I was worried that a lawsuit would guarantee nothing but a long stay for Chase at Umstead, the attorney advised me to call back when I was serious about a suit. I wrote to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services but she ignored me. I called Leonard Button twice a week and asked for his assistance. He played mind-numbing games. I called Linda at Orange-Person-Chatham and could hear the catch in her voice when she heard from me, her discomfort with the fact that she had nothing new to tell me. Someone in her office heard from Leonard Button by e-mail; he wrote to tell them that, at the moment, I did not seem litigious, and so all was well. I explained to Dr. A that I would become litigious when I was certain that I’d exhausted all possibilities, but that I knew a lawsuit would take years to resolve and when I saw Chase languishing at Umstead, I knew we did not have years. We had to find a way to solve the problem now.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 30