The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  “And now?” I asked and listened to the psychiatrist breathe slowly on the other end of the phone and wasn’t surprised when he told me that now, of course, now, given everything I described, now it was impossible to resist and he thought that childhood schizophrenia probably was the thing that Chase had had from the very beginning, even taking into account the seizure issue that might also have had some behavioral manifestations.

  AND ALL THE WHILE, Chase staggered around Umstead with drool hanging in drippy strings from his lower lip, a towel laid open and flat across his chest when he dozed in the dayroom chair. He slept and slept and slept and slept. After our visits, I walked back through the long halls of the hospital and thought it was entirely possible that Chase would die there.

  THE STATE REPRESENTATIVE called me several times. She commiserated and told me she was doing all that she could, but that turned out to be little more than telling me that she was a grandmother herself so she understood how painful this situation must be for me.

  “I’m a taxpayer,” I said. “Chase is a citizen of this state. The state is required to provide appropriate care for people like Chase. That’s not just my opinion,” I said. “That’s the law. The state psychiatric hospital is not an appropriate place for Chase. They want him out of there as much as I do. They aren’t trying to keep him. If I could bring him home, I would. But I can’t. It’s just not possible. And it’s certainly not in anyone’s best interests.”

  “And there’s no movement on the bed at BART?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  She was silent. “Community-based care,” she began.

  “Is a great idea, in theory,” I interrupted. “But what happens when they won’t take people like my son? Where is he supposed to go? So far, my only experience of community-based care is that it seems to be a strategy to deny services to the people with the greatest and most complex needs.”

  “I think . . .”

  “You can’t blame the providers,” I raged. “Financially, it’s not in their best interest to take someone like Chase. They can’t make a profit with a case like him. You have to look at it from their perspective. He’s going to be a financial black hole for them. Of course they don’t want him.”

  She sighed. “I’ll call Raleigh in the morning,” she said. “I’ll set up a meeting and let you know what comes of that.”

  WHEN I WENT TO work, my boss asked me if I’d found a place for Chase. When I shook my head, he said, “Have you talked to our friend across campus?” I shook my head again. I didn’t know how to explain how presumptuous I felt, asking that man for help. I knew that everyone said he was the most powerful man in the state, that three governors were indebted to him, that John Edwards had had to get his okay before he got into politics. I’d heard those stories. I knew they were true. But I could not imagine that he would take an interest in me or in Chase. So I told my boss I hadn’t approached him because I wouldn’t know what to say to him and had no idea if he could help, even if I asked. My boss’s eyes widened a little when I said this and then he smiled gently. “You ought to give it a try,” he said. “You might be surprised, if you just ask.”

  ONE SATURDAY, CHASE COULDN’T hold his head up and could barely speak. The nurse tried to make him comfortable in the visitors’ room but he slid on the sofa and seemed barely conscious, his face pale and fragile and slack, spittle hanging from his chin. A technician dabbed at his face with a plain white towel.

  “It’s the medicine,” the nurse said. “It can have this sort of side effect.”

  She flipped through the pages of Chase’s chart. “It’s right here,” she said at a last. “Dr. A ordered an increase in Clozaril and they started that on Wednesday. The side effects can be worse right after the dosage is increased.”

  Drool threaded from Chase’s lips and we watched the technician wipe his chin. I waited for a while but Chase never grew more alert. Instead, he stared at the wall behind me. Every so often, his lips twitched, as if he was trying to form a word but had lost whatever it is that is in us that allows us to speak.

  PATRICK WANTED TO KNOW if I’d made any progress on Chase’s placement. I sighed. I sat in my office at work and turned my chair toward the window while we spoke. I explained that the people in Raleigh thought that Chase was an outlier and therefore seemed to be treating his case as if it was not really their problem.

  “Stick to your guns,” he said. “I saw a family have to take a boy home this week who should never have gone home. He was so disabled that he had to be housed on a unit all by himself, with twenty-four-hour nursing care and staff support. The mother couldn’t find a placement for him. She’d sit at the table and weep. We pressured her. I’m sorry to say it but it’s true. We pushed her because we wanted to discharge him. We didn’t want him here. He was severely developmentally disabled and he really didn’t belong here. So we pushed and she caved. Maybe she didn’t know that she didn’t have to release him, that we couldn’t discharge him without her consent.”

  “I can’t bring Chase home,” I said. My voice rose. “How would I do that? I can’t care for him. I don’t have twenty-four-hour nursing staff here.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m telling you this so you don’t even try.”

  After we hung up, I looked out the window in my office. College students walked along Franklin Street with their backpacks and baseball caps, and soft brown leaves sailed one by one down from the oaks on McCorkle Place. It was a bright sunny day toward the middle of October. I watched the students for a while and then I swiveled my chair around so I could face my computer. I scrolled through my files until I found the letter I’d sent to the man who supervised the man who oversaw all of the hospitals and facilities for people like Chase in the state. I printed a copy and lifted the fresh copy out of the printer and read it again and then read it again. Then I stood up and left my office and walked across campus to a small white house. Would-be kings had stood in this spot with less desperation than I felt. When I went inside, the lobby was cool and dim and silent. I knocked on the assistant’s door and explained why I was there and held the letter in front of me and turned it in my hands as I spoke and she asked me to leave it and said he’d be out for a few days but if I came at the end of the week, she thought he could see me then.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “It’s a very good letter,” he said. “Very well written. Very thoughtful. Gives one the whole picture.” He’d invited me to come in and sit down and I sat in a chair across from him. His curly white hair was carefully combed and he wore a pristine navy blue suit with a crisp white shirt. He had my letter on the desk in front of him. There were plants in the window behind him and a large framed photograph on his desk of his wife and his four boys when the boys were still young. The boys were dressed in pale summer jackets and ties and lined up according to height, each smiling, all of their hair blowing a little as if the picture had been taken on a breezy day.

  “This man over at the Department of Health and Human Services,” he said. “He won’t answer you?”

  “No,” I said. “I called and asked to set up a meeting with him and his assistant said she would not do that.”

  “Do you know if he’s from this state?”

  “Michigan,” I said.

  “Well, that’s why,” he said. His face darkened. “He doesn’t understand that this is not the way we do things here. We take care of our own in this state.” He leaned back a little in his chair and looked at me. “Now,” he said. “How can I be of help?”

  “I’ve done everything I can,” I said. “I’ve talked to everyone who will talk to me and I’ve had meetings with anyone who will have a meeting with me and I’ve done everything the state has asked me to do, but I haven’t been able to budge anyone in Raleigh. I just want to get Chase the help he needs and a lawsuit takes too much time and doesn’t seem like the best way to get everyone to work together to find a solution. But I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall.” I stopped and too
k a breath. “I wondered if you had some advice for me,” I said. “I thought you could suggest some strategy I haven’t tried.”

  “Well,” he said. His voice was kind, immediate, clear. He smiled encouragingly at me. “Would you like me to make a call?”

  I felt the air rush out of me. “Yes, yes,” I babbled, “if that wouldn’t take up too much of your time.”

  He waved that off. “Today’s Friday,” he said. “I believe the secretary of Health and Human Services is in Mexico on vacation but I have her number and I’ll give her a call there. Let’s see what we can find out by early next week.”

  On Monday, he called and told me that it took a day or so but the secretary had returned his call on Sunday and they’d had a talk about Chase.

  “She’s going to get with her people when she gets back this week,” he said. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  I could barely speak so I nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me,” he said. “I haven’t done anything.”

  A week passed. I made no phone calls. I visited Chase. I played cards with Haley in the evening after dinner. We got her Halloween costume ready. She was going to be a goddess of fire and had a long red dress, shot with gold, and a flame headdress. I remembered the year that Melissa had made costumes for Chase and Haley, when Chase was a swamp monster in a huge papier-mâché mask, and Haley was a centaur, with a long Mylar tail. Her hooves were painted yogurt cups. Chase loved Halloween. When we lived in the Midwest, we made a graveyard every year with cardboard tombstones his father cut out of empty cartons and carefully lettered with elaborate inscriptions. A ghost hung from our lightpost and we carved jack-o’-lanterns and one year I carved tiny faces into turnips that we hung in the apple tree, each turnip filled with a votive candle, each face a spark of light.

  On Tuesday, the phone on my desk rang. The person on the other end identified herself as the social worker at Murdoch who worked with incoming clients. “I understand Chase will be joining us this week, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day,” she said. “I need you to answer a few questions and you’ll have to sign some forms.”

  “What?” I said. “You mean because of Chase’s day visits?”

  “Oh, no,” said the social worker. “He’s at Umstead Hospital? And he’ll be moving here? At least that’s what I was told.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She paused and then spoke slowly. “It’s my understanding that a bed has come available for Chase and he’ll be moving to the BART unit within the next day or two. Do you think you can be available for a treatment team meeting on Thursday? I think that’s the day this will happen. I just don’t think we can be ready by tomorrow so it’s probably best to plan on Thursday.”

  “Yes,” I said. I took a deep breath. “What time?”

  “Well, you’ll need to go to the hospital and sign his discharge papers first and pick up his belongings. He’ll come over here from there. I guess we’ll have the meeting around two. Is that okay?”

  “Two will be fine,” I said. “Two is perfect.”

  “All right then,” she said. “I’m just making a note that you and I have spoken and you think two will work for you. You can call me and change that if the timetable doesn’t work with the Umstead staff. In the meantime, do you have a fax number? I’m going to fax some documents that you’ll need to sign and date. You can bring them with you to the meeting on Thursday. You’ll be signing releases for medical information. We try to gather as complete a picture of the client’s medical history as we can. We want to have all of those records in one place, on-site. So, let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me where he was born and who his pediatrician was when he came home from the hospital?”

  I began. I listed his hospital and then all of the pediatricians and developmentalists and neurologists and neurosurgeons and psychiatrists and psychologists and occupational therapists and speech therapists and geneticists and pediatric cardiologists Chase had ever seen, a long line of names that spooled out from my memory in uncertain starts and stops, each name leading to another name, each place to a memory, those failed MRIs, the undiagnosed seizure disorder, the trips to the ER by ambulance with light cutting through the night, the school meetings and long evaluations and uncertain conclusions, and the gradual but unmistakable changes, the deterioration, the mysterious encephalopathy described by another doctor, unnameable, unquantifiable, unmistakable, uncurable, and running alongside all of that the years and years where I told myself that if I just tried harder and found the right doctor and the right treatment and the right medication and the right situation that I could help Chase improve, even when he was at all times slowly losing ground, so that each time something went wrong I told myself that we just needed to get Chase back and we could and this would be the time. I flipped through my Rolodex and wiped my eyes and gave her addresses and names and she said she’d send me release forms for each of these and I said, “Yes, that’s fine, all right.”

  When she hung up, I put my face in my hands. Outside, a group of school children screamed and ate their lunch on the lawn.

  I WALKED ACROSS CAMPUS to thank him but his assistant said he was going to be visiting lawmakers in Raleigh that day. On Wednesday I ran into him on the brick path that ran alongside Old East. “I understand everything’s been set right,” he said. “Is that true?”

  I took both of his hands in mine. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  He smiled and squeezed my hands. “I just did what was right,” he said. “This is not the way we treat people in this state. It’s very hard on the families and I understand that. I’m just glad to hear that all is well. We’ll get your boy back. We’re going to turn his light back on. You keep me posted,” he said. “I want to hear how he does.”

  Linda called. “How did you do it?” she said. When I started to explain she interrupted me and said, “You’re not supposed to know this, but it was the governor himself who called Murdoch. He called on Tuesday and he said that Chase would be living there as of Wednesday or he’d know why. That’s what we heard. And then they opened that bed that they needed to open.”

  “It’s really amazing,” I said. I paused. “I am worried about one thing,” I said. “I hate that this might be at the expense of another family. I don’t want Chase to get services by someone else losing his.”

  “No,” Linda said firmly. “From what I’ve heard, the other family is happy with how things worked out. From what I’ve heard, this helped them, too.”

  ON THURSDAY I DROVE to Umstead and parked on the crumbly asphalt in the visitors’ lot across from the children’s unit and locked my purse in the trunk of my car. At the top of the steps, I put my finger on the buzzer and someone buzzed and I opened the door. I signed the visitors’ log and told the woman behind the sliding-glass window that I was there to see Patrick.

  Chase had gone to BART in the morning, just as he usually did, and when he was gone, the nurses packed his belongings into plastic grocery bags and while I waited for Patrick, an orderly brought the bags down and set them on the floor. There weren’t many. When Patrick came along, he had one of the hospital teachers with him, who asked me to help her falsify Chase’s education plan. He’d never gone to school at Umstead so they had never completed the document but he could not go to another state facility with paperwork that was incomplete; the hospital would get in trouble. All I had to do was sign. We were sitting at a picnic table out in front of the hospital and I thought about all the services Chase had not gotten at Umstead but reminded myself that it didn’t matter.

  “Just show me where,” I said.

  When all the forms were signed, Patrick helped me put the bags with Chase’s belongings into the trunk. Then he stood on the dusty lawn in front of the hospital and watched me while I drove away and I waved as I turned out of the lot and headed toward town. It was less than a mile to Murdoch Center, but it lay at the end of a long road with many turnings and a landscape far diff
erent than any I had ever imagined.

  HALEY TOOK AN OLD halter from its place on a nail and walked out from the barn along the dirt path to the lower pasture. A white horse grazed under an oak tree. When she was close, she stepped softly in the long, green grass and came up to the horse on his near side and with one gesture dropped the lead rope around his neck and the horse lifted his head and looked at her but didn’t try to move away. She pulled the halter up over the horse’s head and then clipped the lead rope to the ring under the horse’s throat and walked the horse back through the pasture.

  She put the white horse in cross ties in the schooling barn and brushed him with a currycomb. She leaned into his shoulder and lifted his foreleg and examined his hoof and used a pick to clean out the mud. She cleaned each hoof in turn and then positioned a dark green saddle blanket across his back. She hoisted the saddle on top of that and rubbed the horse’s belly before she reached under and took the loose end of the girth and brought it up and cinched it on the near side. The horse swished his tail and gave her the stink eye but she talked to him and he settled and she patted his neck and rubbed his nose. She lifted the bridle from a hook on the wall and hung it over one arm and put the reins over the horse’s head, unhooked the cross ties, and unfastened the halter and let it drop to the barn floor. She lifted the bridle until the bit came up to the horse’s mouth and she pressed and he took the bit and she pulled his ears through the crown and then the rest of the bridle slipped into place and she fastened the throatlatch.