The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes

by Randi Davenport

  The instructor stood in the center of the ring and squinted at the riders from beneath the visor of her baseball cap and called for a trot. Haley moved Willy easily from a walk and posted easily and casually, waiting, and waiting, and then here it was, the word, Canter. At that, she kicked with her outside leg and drove with her seat and rocketed past me without a look, the sound of her horse’s hooves thundering in the dust, her hair blowing out behind her. Just like that, she circled and circled and circled the ring. Willy blew and snorted and Haley kept her leg on him in the corners and his tail flew out behind him like a banner, and beyond the ring, two horses thundered up the pasture, turning and nipping, and turning again. The instructor’s dog raced out from the barn, chasing the swallows that flew up and out from the dim rafters, and the girls in the ring kept cantering until the instructor called for a walk. She had them line up in the middle of the ring as she described the jump course to them. Haley sat her horse and watched while Helen rode the course and watched again as Elsie rode.

  When it was her turn, she turned Willy to the rail and picked up a trot and drove him to the first jump and Willy cleared it easily and she cantered him to the next jump, which was really three jumps in a row, where Willy took one stride in between each of the three and Haley lifted her seat and kept her hands up his neck. She turned him back to a fence made of lattice and when he was over that, to the cross rails, and then to a jump painted with blue and green stripes, and a pink fence with plastic flowers hanging from the sides in buckets, and then crossed the ring and came around and took a red fence, and then came in a straight line to the last jump, a blue fence over bales of hay. When she was finished with the course, she rode back to her place in line, and Willy stood swishing his long, beautiful tail and Haley turned and said something to Elsie, who laughed and shook her head. Haley leaned forward and patted Willy’s neck and he turned his head to look out at the pasture, where the other horses stood, and then she sat back in her saddle but dropped her stirrups and let her legs hang. She always wore a T-shirt with her riding pants and on this day wore a bright blue T-shirt with the Superman insignia on front. I sat on a bench beside the ring and she looked over at me and grinned.

  When her lesson was over and she’d ridden with the other girls under the turning trees and along the back pasture into the woods and up the road to cool the horses off, I walked down to the barn and watched Haley lift the saddle from Willy’s back.

  “How big was that last fence?” I said.

  She bent down and picked up a cross tie and clipped it to Willy’s halter. “Two feet,” she said.

  “I thought it looked big.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Mom,” she said.

  “I know. But I’m still allowed to be nervous, aren’t I?”

  “You don’t have to be,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “I know. But two feet’s a pretty big fence.”

  She looked at me and smiled. “Mom,” she said. “It’s okay. I like it. I’m not scared.”

  Willy snorted and Haley found the blue plastic bin filled with horse treats and came back to him with a hand full of grain. He lipped it from her open palm and shifted his weight. She leaned over him with her brush and worked, moving the brush in steady overlapping circles over his back and shoulders while he snuffled and stood, one hoof lifted delicately, as if he was poised to walk.

  After she put Willy in his stall, we drove back into town. The road ran out before us and as we came around a curve I slowed and then swerved to avoid a pack of orange- and yellow- and red-suited bicyclists who bunched along the shoulder of the road. Dozens of turkey vultures circled in a big spiral overhead and Haley watched them.

  “So can we go to Franklin Street or not?” she said. “I need some more hair dye.” She acted like this was no big deal but I remembered what it was like to want something that would seem to make things right when nothing else would do, in the days when everything looked like it was in my control. I thought of Haley on horseback, her hands far up Willy’s neck as she came up to the first big jump, how much it seemed that she had mastered, and yet, because of Chase, how far she would always still have to go. If she wanted to dye her hair blue and ride her horse to the stars, I would let her, if these were the things she needed to know that she could manage the world into which she’d been born.

  “I guess so,” I said. “After lunch.”

  She pushed buttons on the CD player until a song she liked came on and rode beside me, looking out the window. Farmland dipped away from the road, brown cows standing in short shade under low trees.

  AT FIRST, CHASE HAD class in the morning while the BART staff reduced his medication. His Clozaril levels were near toxic when he was admitted and he sat in the dayroom with the TV on, his head lolling on his chest, spit hanging from his chin, a towel spread flat on his chest. He’d grown and grown and was now almost six feet seven, but weighed 165 pounds. They taught him the token system and taught him that he would have chores to do just like everyone else, and the first one would be to empty the dishwasher before his group had dinner, and they assigned him to class, where he nodded off over his Jumbo Workbook and dozed with his fingertips resting on the computer keyboard. He spoke to no one but everyone spoke to him. Even before he began to talk again, the staff got him to give everyone high fives when they passed, as if touch was a connection that would tell him he was at home among friends. Halloween was his first day on the unit and he went to a dance and nodded off in a chair while everyone else moved to the “Monster Mash.” I brought a big sheet cake on his birthday in November and a pan of his favorite mashed potatoes but he didn’t eat them. At Thanksgiving, he walked and patted and walked and patted and when they finally got him to sit down for dinner, he ate a slice of turkey and a roll.

  I drove up to see him on a Saturday morning just before Christmas. He was in the dayroom on a blue sofa. Someone had put a blue and green plaid throw around his shoulders to keep him warm and spread a white towel over his chest and when I came in, his chin was dropped to the towel and his eyes were closed.

  “Chase,” I said. “Hey buddy.” I sat down next to him on the sofa and put my hand on his arm and said his name again. He flinched awake at my touch and struggled to open his eyes.

  “Sit up,” I said, and he leaned forward and struggled to get himself upright, raising his thin body from his waist like a hinge opening. He looked at me and his eyes rolled and he blinked and his head lolled and he jerked it upright and opened his eyes wider and tried to say something.

  “It’s okay,” I said, with my hand on his arm. “It’s okay. It’s hard to wake up, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. His mouth worked and his eyes filled with tears and his mouth twisted and worked and worked and he wept and I found some paper towels on the counter across the room and came over and tried to wipe his face. He kicked at me and I stepped back. He turned to me and his eyes were half shut and he tried to open them and sounds began to come out of his mouth and I leaned in and told him I couldn’t understand, he would have to use words, and he leaned his head back and with his eyes closed and his face turned up to the ceiling he cried, “This is basically a home. I don’t want to be here. I just want to come home.”

  When he spoke, his words were like wails and he kept saying this over and over again. “I want to come home. I want to come home.” And as he spoke he wept, and as he wept he tried to keep his head up, and he stared angrily at me when he could keep his eyes open and he fell to one side of the sofa and pushed himself up with the palm of his hand.

  “This is the right place for you right now,” I said. “Chase. Listen to me. You’ve been very sick and you need some help getting yourself back together. That’s what they’re going to do here. It’s a good place for you. It’s not a home. It’s a school. You’ve got a roommate and classes and you’ll make friends here and pretty soon you’ll like it.”

  “No,” he said. “I want to come home. I’m not sick.” His mouth twisted as he said this and he
slipped down on the sofa and didn’t bother trying to push himself back up. Spittle ran from his mouth and I asked him if it was okay to wipe his chin and he looked away and didn’t reply so I wiped his chin and he let me.

  “Not sick like you’re going to throw up,” I said. “Sick in another way. Sometimes your brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to and then you get sick from that.”

  He didn’t answer but patted his thigh and patted his thigh and patted his thigh. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me.

  “Do you remember when you were at John Umstead Hospital?” I said.

  “Umstead’s not a hospital,” he said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “It’s a jail,” he said. “They have an electric chair in the basement. Torture chambers. They killed children there. I saw them do it.” He raised his head and looked at me and then jerked upright.

  “It’s a hospital,” I said. “I can understand why it would feel like a jail.” I stopped. He’d begun crying again and was saying over and over again, “I want to come home, I want to come home, I want to come home.” His eyes were closed and tears ran out through his eyelashes and his head was tipped back so the back of the sofa supported it. I tried to wipe his face but he hit out and I leaned back. I sat next to him and tried to soothe him and tried to comfort him but nothing I did mattered at all. After a while, he stood up and left the room and walked down the hall to his room, where he closed the door firmly behind him. I walked out to my car, where I sat with my forehead pressed against the steering wheel while tears dripped into my lap.

  I told myself that Chase was like someone who’d been in a coma and was beginning to wake up and wouldn’t understand why he was at BART, or what had happened to him. That Saturday, I’d come to see him in the morning because the staff had told me he had his most lucid moments in the morning, an hour or two after he’d taken his Clozaril—that he’d be sleepy but he would also know who he was. They’d begun to taper one of his drugs, an anticonvulsant that sometimes induced psychosis, and they told me they thought Chase was brighter and clearer every day. They said positive things, encouraging things, and kept telling me not to lose hope. The social worker told me that all of the boys on the BART unit were in bad shape when they came in, and the ones coming in from a hospital were often in the worst shape of all, but within a year, they were all transformed by the program and this would happen to Chase, too. She told me not to give up hope. She told me to keep trying. She thought there was even a chance that Chase might recognize me one day. But she didn’t tell me that when he was lucid, he’d be angry. She didn’t tell me what to say to him when he told me that he wanted to come home. His room waited for him, with its neatly labeled boxes containing his model of the solar system, his electric train, his books about weather and castles, his tornado tube, his music collection. The stuffed dog I made for him for Christmas the year he turned one sat on his bed, next to the red wool felt dinosaur I sewed for him on his second birthday. But he could not come home.

  As I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and didn’t bother to wipe my tears, I thought of a day when Chase was fourteen and I found him hitting his sister. By the time I got to them, she was crying and I stepped between them and took his arms by the wrists and told him he had to stop or he would not be able to live with us anymore, that I would be forced to send him away, and he pulled his wrists away from my grip and dropped his arms to his sides and then turned and stalked up the stairs. I regretted it as soon as I said it, for I had no intention of sending Chase away, not then, not ever, but after all the TEACCH methods failed and he still hit his sister, terrific whumps on her back that shuddered through her whole body, I said that I would send him away if I had to, and now I wondered if he thought of this, too, and couldn’t forgive me for making my threat come true. I wanted to take it back and I wanted to explain that no one knew that he would spend a year in the hospital while the doctors argued about what was wrong and then about ways to try and fix it, while he seemed to grow worse with everything they tried. I wanted him to understand that I hadn’t meant it; that even though I threatened it when he was fourteen, I hadn’t sent him away.

  There was a time, not long after Chase went into the hospital, when I looked around our silent and empty house and I thought, Haley and I are like the survivors of a shipwreck. It’s as if we are afloat in a big deep sea on a small raft and we are paddling and we believe we will make it to shore, but we can’t escape the fact that Chase drowned, and Zip was lost, and we are down to two now. In my mind’s eye, I see her watching me from across the raft, looking to me to tell her what we should do. And she should: I’m the mom, I’m supposed to be able to take care of things. So I pick up my paddle and I hand her hers and I tell her we are fine and we will make it to shore. And then I look for the horizon and I push off and tell her that she can rest when she needs to but that I will keep stroking until we wade up through the surf to a sandy beach, until we are safe.

  Behind us, the ocean closes over our loss. And there are only memories then of the boat that went down and the people we loved. There is no single thing that explains what happened to them. There is only silence, moving water, the past.

  A CAR PASSED AND I lifted my head and reached into my purse for a tissue and wiped my eyes and blew my nose. I felt hollow inside, but hollow with a kind of empty pain that would not quit, like someone had amputated my heart and all I could feel was the pain of the place where my heart used to be.

  WEEKS PASSED, THEN MONTHS. I drove up every Saturday to see Chase and we met in the dayroom, or in the conference room, where he could sit at a table and eat his hamburger and French fries while I watched him, or in the classroom across from the kitchen. One day, as he came down the hall toward me, an aide at his side, he turned to the aide and said, “I have no idea who that woman is or why she’s here.” Another time he looked up from his fries and studied me and finally smiled and said, “You’re Aunt Annie, right?” And I shook my head and said, “No, Chase, I’m your mom.” His face darkened then and he rose and walked away from me and I cleaned up the remnants of his meal after the door closed behind him.

  The BART unit was a locked unit and I’d come up for a visit and stand outside the door and knock until someone heard me. Sometimes, I could see Chase as he paced up and down the hallway behind the door; if he saw me when I knocked, he would not come toward me but instead would disappear behind the manager’s station. A few minutes later, an aide would walk toward the door with his keys out and welcome me inside and tell Chase that it was his mother, here to visit with him, and Chase would shake his head but reach for the soda I held out to him.

  On Mother’s Day, he made a card for his mother and the staff encouraged him to give it to me. Reluctantly, he retreated to his room and then brought the card to me. It was a single sheet of paper, laminated, bearing his photo, taken by a staff member with a digital camera while he stood between two desks, his back to a concrete block wall, his face expressionless. Happy Mother’s Day! it read. Love, Chase. He walked over to me with the card and he held it out to me and then he pulled it back and looked at the aide.

  “It’s for my mother,” he said.

  “This is your mother,” said the aide.

  He hesitated.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can keep it if you want.”

  “Give your mother the card, Chase,” said the aide. “You made it for her.”

  He looked at the card and then at me and then very uneasily handed the card to me and I thanked him but he seemed worried that he’d done the wrong thing and then the visit was over.

  AFTER DINNER I DID the dishes and Haley turned the lights on in the living room and sat on the sofa under their yellow glow and looked through the open doorway to the kitchen. She watched me load the dishwasher before she turned to the drawer in the end table and pulled out a deck of cards. She slipped the cards out of their box and into her palm and fanned the cards and selected the two jokers and set them to one side. She p
ut her feet on the coffee table and leaned back against the sofa and watched me. She dropped her feet to the floor and put the stack of cards on the table in front of her and split the deck in two and shuffled the cards and then shuffled them again. At summer camp she had learned how to make the shuffled cards arc and fly together and she did that now, and did it again.

  “Are you ready?” she said.

  “Almost. What do you want to play?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rummy? Poker? Crazy eights?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We don’t have any chips for poker. We could use pennies.”

  “I know.”

  “Is your homework done?”

  “Mom.”

  “I need to check it before we play.”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Your teachers asked me to do this. I have to do this. If you turn your homework in, I don’t have to do this. It’s really up to you.”

  She slapped the cards down on the table and stood up. “Fine,” she said. She crossed the room and I heard her feet on the stairs and then I heard her bedroom door slam. I squeezed the sponge under water at the kitchen faucet and wiped the counters. I rinsed the last plate and put it in the dishwasher and then put dish detergent into the dishwasher and closed the dishwasher and pressed start. I heard Nirvana, and the familiar thump of the bass line through the floor. I folded the dish towel and lay it over the counter and then leaned against the counter and waited. After a time, I turned out the lights in the kitchen and stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up and saw Haley’s door outlined in light.

  On Saturday morning, Haley dropped two blueberry waffles into the toaster and leaned against the counter and looked at me.

  “Can we go to the CD place today?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I have to go see your brother.”