Monarch Manor

by Maureen Leurck

Amelia collapsed down into her mother’s lap, face still in her hands, as Mary ran a hand over her head.

  “It must be our secret,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 26

  ERIN

  “To finally getting a night out together.” Luke lifted his wineglass in the air, burgundy liquid sloshing inside, and clinked it against my glass. The Friday night crowd at Brissago, an upscale-but-still-comfortable steak restaurant known for thick cuts of filet mignon and enormous double-stuffed baked potatoes, roared around us, and I had to lean in to hear him.

  “With the price of babysitting these days, we’ll be lucky if we don’t have to take out a second—make that third—mortgage after tonight.” I shook my head. Our neighbor’s fifteen-year-old daughter was babysitting, but we made sure to make the reservations late enough so the twins were in bed before we left. All she really had to do was sit on the couch and text us if the house burned down. Or if Will woke up.

  “Well, it’s worth it. I feel like your mind is . . . elsewhere these days,” Luke said. He set his wineglass down and put his palms on the white tablecloth.

  I nodded slightly as I looked down at the bread basket overflowing with warm pretzel rolls. “Maybe I have been a little distracted. I’m sorry.”

  He gave me a quick look before tearing off a piece of the pretzel bread and spreading a pat of butter on it. “Don’t apologize. I’m just saying it’s been hard to pin you down, mentally. You’ve been knee-deep in the mystery of your relatives. And obviously there’s a lot going on with Will.” He raised his eyebrows.

  I clasped my hands in front of me. “Look, researching Amelia and John has given me something that I can’t quite name. Something other than just worrying about Will’s latest therapies or the new trigger for his meltdowns. It’s something I care about, something for me.” I took a long breath in and tried to push down the frustration bubbling up at the inadequacy of my explanation.

  He folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “I know. I’m happy you’ve found a hobby.” I raised my eyebrows and he held his hands up in defense. “Poor word choice. An interest? Whatever is the proper term.”

  “Right. And I understand what you’re saying. There’s only so much I can give, and I have been focused on this a lot.” I sighed. I didn’t need to add what we were both thinking: that I was leaving again tomorrow and taking a day trip up to Wisconsin, to see if there were any archived documents for the Bloomfield School for the Deaf and Dumb that John may have attended. I had never left the twins as much as I had while searching for Amelia and John, but I kept telling myself that it was worth it, that this was bigger than all of us

  Luke took a long sip of wine and then set his glass down carefully, considering it as he spoke. “I hope you find what you’re looking for soon so we can get back to our normal lives,” he said.

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, desperately holding back the words I wanted to say: There is no normal life.

  Earlier in the week, I had taken the twins to the park. Charlotte ran all around, jumping up to the monkey bars and sailing down the slide. Will wanted only to sit in the swing—the bucket swing made for toddlers. His long legs dangled out of the leg slots and almost touched the ground. Soon there were a few toddlers and their moms waiting around the swingset, hoping for a turn. I could feel those other moms staring at me, thinking, He’s much too old to be sitting in that swing. Why doesn’t he get out and let another kid have a turn?

  I remained calm, even as he started to tantrum when we had to leave. He lay on the ground and thrashed his body, screaming like a hungry infant. I picked him up, struggling under the weight of his limp body as I hissed at Charlotte to stay close. I had tried to duck each of his swinging fists, but one connected with my face and my sunglasses flew off, shattering on the ground. I left them there and continued toward the car.

  During the entire incident, my face was neutral, pleasant. Like a mannequin. I wanted to tell the other mothers who stared at us to look away and not to help. Offering assistance would only upset him more.

  Nothing to see here. Move along. Go about your day.

  Don’t look at him.

  Forget you ever saw us.

  Just five years before, when I was in the hospital after the twins were born, I couldn’t stop showing them off. Nurses stopped in the room just to catch a glimpse of the full-term twins they heard were born on the floor. I proudly held them in my arms, relishing the attention.

  “Look at my beautiful babies. Have you ever seen such gorgeous infants?”

  “Look at them.”

  “Have you thought any more about Lakewood?” I said carefully. We had tried to have a discussion several times on the topic but always seemed to get interrupted by one of the twins or a late-night work call, so we had never talked about it in a serious way. Not to mention, my stomach dropped every time I thought of the zeros on the tuition bill. I reached a hand up and touched the silver earring dangling from my ear, twirling it with a shaking hand.

  Luke looked down at the table, slowly running his hand over the white fabric. “Does it really matter what I think? We can’t afford it. It’s not an option.”

  I leaned forward. “How can you dismiss it that quickly? I know it’s a lot of money, but maybe we can work something out. Like selling the house and living in our car.” I laughed and it shattered into a million pieces, broken by the silence between us. I took a sip of wine and stared at him, wanting him to laugh, join me in this, tell me things would be okay.

  He sighed and looked up, his lips pressed together. “He’s a great kid. And he’s going to get there someday. He’s only five. Who knows what he can do?”

  I dug my nails into my palm. “I totally agree. But we can’t keep living like this—he, I—can’t keep on this way. The stress, and the meltdowns, and waiting every second for another call from school to tell me that he spent another day crying . . . that takes a toll.”

  “Just the other day, I read an article about a kid who didn’t speak until he was six years old and now he’s a vice president at a major corporation.” He leaned forward. “That could be Will. And it feels like if we pull him out of school at this age, he won’t even achieve his potential.”

  My cheeks burned with rage. “Really? You think I don’t think he has potential? What do you think I’ve spent the last three years of my life doing? All I have done during that time is try to find a way to help him. Autism is my life, Luke. Believe me when I say I want more than anyone for Will to be the best that he can be.” I noticed other diners around us staring at us, nudging one another and raising their eyebrows.

  Luke didn’t say anything and stared at his wineglass. After several long minutes, he said, “Maybe we should talk about this another time. A better time.”

  “When would that be?” I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for a response, but he never answered me. We ate our dinner in near silence, murmuring answers to the waiter and staring at our phones. My insides burned with rage at his words. How could he not see everything that I had done? How was he so unwilling to consider an option that might truly help?

  I allowed the rage to build, even though I knew that a few short weeks ago I had felt the same. I knew the journey wasn’t a straight line, but I was the unofficial general of an army I had no business leading, and I felt as if I had the responsibilities of leading the battle, I should also have the respect of being allowed to make decisions. Or at least my opinions should weigh more heavily than they apparently did.

  After a silent ride home, I paid the babysitter while Luke went upstairs. After I closed the front door, I sat back down on the couch, a reality show on television, while I steeled myself for another fight before bed. When I was ready, I went upstairs, but I saw that our bed was untouched, still hastily made from when I threw the covers over it ten seconds before the sitter came. I tiptoed across the hallway and pushed open Will’s door. There, on his bed, was Luke, still dressed in his clothes from dinner.

  Will was
scrunched into the fetal position, with Luke next to him, an arm over his body. I could hear deep breathing from both, the sleep heavy and deep. My anger bubbled away at the sight of them together. I knew that Luke wanted the best for Will and was just as lost as I was. We had the same goal and no idea how to reach it. I gently closed the door, my throat constricting.

  My bed seemed too big, too empty in that moment, so I went into Charlotte’s room and curled up against her just as Luke did to Will. Although unlike them, I stayed awake, watching the moon outside of Charlotte’s window move through the sky, waiting for the first dusting of morning sunlight, awaiting my next drive to Wisconsin.

  * * *

  The sunlight illuminated the wooden WELCOME TO WISCONSIN sign on I-94 outside of my car window. I had left earlier in the morning, when it was still dark, and the twins and Luke were still fast asleep. I had stepped outside, a momentary shock running through my bones at the early-morning chill, and I ran back inside and grabbed a wool hat from the bin next to the front door that served as our mudroom. Our slanted wooden front porch had creaked and groaned with each step of my UGG boots, no matter how much I tried to tiptoe, and a layer of overnight frost dusted my car in the driveway. I tried to use the ice scraper on the coating of frost on my windshield, but it didn’t budge and the dry scraping sound made me cringe. I turned on the car and fired up the defroster and waited for the windshield to clear. I thought of the first winter we spent in the house, when we got a record number of inches of snow, and no garage to park our cars, when Luke repeatedly said, “Please tell me this is part of the old-house charm you love so much.”

  By the time I reached the Wisconsin-Illinois state line, the sun was finally rising above the trees, giving an orange glow to the cornfields and signs along the highway. An hour after I crossed the state line, I exited the highway toward the Milwaukee Public Museum. The parking lot was empty, and I stopped in front of the closed guardhouse. Moments later, the glint of a blue Prius appeared in my rearview mirror and Gerry waved. He got out of his car, wrapping his arms around his waist as his breath came out in puffs, and unlocked the chain. His friend at the museum, a Jeremiah Peabody (“He just sounds like a historian. I bet he wears fedoras and smokes a pipe,” I had said to Luke when I first heard his name), had agreed to open the museum to us before the public so we could research the school in Bloomfield.

  As Gerry pulled in front of me, I heard a roar and saw my mother’s rosy cheeks behind me, her ruddy complexion a deeper shade of red than usual. Gerry motioned for us to follow him into a door on the side of the building marked Employees, a piece of paper with a key code in his hand. My mother and I waited behind him as he punched the numbers in, the keypad beeping with a warning sound.

  “Oh, shoot,” he said as he tried it again, to no avail. I noticed that his eyes seemed bloodshot and that he looked more rumpled than usual, with his glasses dusty and his cheeks drawn.

  “My turn,” my mother said, snatching the paper from his hand, after we exchanged a glance upon his third failed try. She squinted at the keypad, punched in the numbers, and it beeped triumphantly. A small green light turned on, and we heard it unclick.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked Gerry as we walked inside.

  He rubbed his chin quickly. “Oh yes. I was just up late doing some research. For work. With my friend.”

  My mother smiled broadly as she patted him on the shoulder. “Good for you. I bet she’s a real catch.” I hid a laugh as I wondered if it was Haley, the pretty librarian from Lake Geneva.

  I hope it was, Gerry. You deserve some fun, too, I thought.

  His face flushed and he adjusted his glasses. “Oh. No, it wasn’t . . .”

  “Sure it wasn’t,” my mother said as she winked at him.

  I smiled as Gerry blushed harder and pointed down the hallway. As we followed behind him, my mother nudged my arm and I nodded. It warmed my heart to think of lonely Gerry, with only his historical artifacts to keep him company at night, finding love with someone else who loved something just as much as he did. I wondered what Luke and I loved like that anymore. Sure, our children. But what else did we have in common, that we both loved? Going out to dinner, cooking, going to concerts, all had been things we loved but hardly did anymore. Now sometimes it seemed like we were trapped in the prison of everyday chaos and special needs, rather than choosing to spend our lives together. I once read a statistic that nearly 80 percent of parents who have a child with autism end up divorced, their marriages cracking and buckling under the enormous weight of special needs. I thought of the night before, at the weighted silence and different beds.

  Gerry led us to a dark wood-paneled office, comfortably decorated with a sagging brown corduroy couch against one wall and a black and metal modern-looking desk against the other. On top of the desk were haphazard stacks of paper decorated with numerous coffee rings. Nothing seemed to be in any sort of order, but I felt that it likely made sense to the inhabitant, like peeking into someone’s mind, mid-thought.

  “Dr. Peabody isn’t the tidiest of curators, but he’s an amazing researcher,” Gerry said after seeing my face.

  “No doubt,” my mother said with a nod. “When I was still teaching, my office was the same. Students would come in, survey the hot mess inside, and then slowly back away. It worked like a charm and I spent most of my office hours in peace.” She sat down on the corduroy couch. “So where do we start?” She looked at me. “We have dinner reservations at The Edgewater on Lake Mendota tonight.”

  I eased into the couch next to her as Gerry began to check the piles of paper on the desk.

  “Where are you, where are you,” he muttered to himself. He turned to a stack of binders on the corner of the desk. “A-ha! The Bloomfield School for the Deaf and Dumb. Here we are.” He left one on the table and handed one to my mother and one to me.

  I opened mine, which was filled with pictures in plastic pages. The first page was pictures of classrooms, or what I assumed were classrooms. The children all sat on the floor, without seemingly any organization. They had books in front of them, also placed on the floor, with a teacher up front, staring unsmiling into the camera. A date on the bottom left read: 1907.

  “He wasn’t even born yet. He wouldn’t have been here then,” I whispered to myself. I tried to turn the page, but my hand faltered, and I again looked at the children. If Will had been born a hundred years earlier, would he have been sent to this place? Would I, if I lived back then, have let him go? Would I have had a choice?

  I swallowed hard, my throat wanting to close as my nose grew tingly with the tears beginning to form. I had so many choices for him, it sometimes felt like an impasse, like too many cars going down a narrow highway, a bottleneck forming. And the cars were all escaping a hurricane that threatened to decimate everything. But I had choices. We had choices, although they never felt like good ones. Yet as I finally turned the page on the children, I thought, At least he will always have us.

  The next two pages were images of the outside of the building, a tall redbrick structure with what looked like a bell tower in the middle. It actually somewhat resembled my high school, an innocuous-looking building that housed rowdy teenagers and tired teachers. The third page was a picture of the sleeping quarters. Rows upon rows of metal beds with sterile white sheets and white pillows lined the room. The beds were pristine, each one made with the sheet tightly covering the mattress. There were no stuffed animals, or well-loved blankets tucked away. It looked like a hospital.

  My mother murmured next to me, and I leaned over and peered at her binder. She ran a finger down a list of names, the top of the page reading: Discharge List. There were five columns: Name, Age, Name of Guardian, Admission Date, and Discharge Date. The first line read: Peter McKilip, 7, Daniel McKilip, 9/01/09, 5/3/20.

  “So that kid was there for eleven years?” I said. My mother looked at me grimly and nodded. I thought of sleeping in those sterile beds, of sitting on the floor of the “classroom,” for ele
ven years. “What happened to him after? Maybe he went back to his family?” I said hopefully.

  Gerry made a noise from Dr. Peabody’s chair and sat back, the chair creaking. “Not likely. The home was for children. Once they became adults, they probably moved somewhere else.”

  “Okay, but then why do some of these kiddos not have discharge dates?” my mother said. She held the binder up, splayed out, like a chorus singer. “Here’s one: Dorothea Tobias, age ten, admission date of October 25, 1915. Discharge date: blank.” She lifted her eyes to Gerry.

  He cleared his throat. “From what I understand—granted, I only know about these places from what my colleagues have told me—is if there is no discharge date listed, the child”—he looked nervously at me and set his binder down on the desk in front of him—“was never discharged.”

  “And that means?” I sat back slowly, the realization coming over me like water filling up a vase. “That they died there?”

  Gerry’s silence confirmed my thought.

  “Awful,” my mother murmured. I could see her scanning the list, looking for those missing dates.

  “Of course, that doesn’t mean anything nefarious happened. This was a long time ago, when, unfortunately, children died from all sorts of preventable things. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, tetanus, the flu, scarlet fever.” He lifted his hands. “Times were different.”

  “In many ways,” I said as I shook my head, thinking of Will. “What’s in your binder, Gerry?”

  He lifted it back onto his lap. “Staff reports, mostly, nothing that would be useful to us—at least not at this point.” He paused. “Josepha, now there’s a name you don’t see every day,” he said with a laugh. He looked up. “I went to school with a girl named Cola, so I suppose there’s no telling when parents choose a name. Try growing up as a kid with the name Gerry.” He looked up over his glasses at us.

  My mother laughed. “ ‘Mary Ellen’ sounds like I should be in the convent, so I hear ya.”