I know he’s probably talking about the “monster in the woods” incident with Jason and Kylie, though I don’t know about anything else bad that happened this week.
“And I’ve been thinking . . . well, I’m not sure where to start here. But I’ve been thinking about the difference between truth and honesty.”
He pauses and takes a sip from the water bottle he’s holding.
“To do a job like this one, you have to know how to tell a story. Here’s the story of how your life could be different if you let me help you. Here’s the story of what I can do to make your struggles a little less difficult.”
He pauses again, and for a minute he looks like he’s lost his train of thought.
“I don’t offer guarantees; I don’t do magic. I tell the story that you need to hear in the current moment, and I’m always one hundred percent honest, even if I’m not telling the one hundred percent truth. You know what I mean?”
“Scott,” says Janelle. Her voice is gentle, like when she talks to Hayden. “Have you been drinking?”
For a second I don’t know what she means, like I don’t realize she means drinking drinking. But then Scott laughs in a goofy way and sways a little without moving his feet, and I think she’s probably right.
“Maybe a little,” Scott says. “Water bottle full of vodka. I heard somewhere that that’s a good way to do it . . . It may be true that you’re here because you want to be, but if you’re not one hundred percent committed, and if you’re not being honest with each other . . . wait a second, I had a point here.”
And then I get a little bit scared because I think this might be my fault. Because that was my winning secret, the one that got me the extra point for the Building Store: that my parents have alcohol hidden in our cabin, and that sometimes they drink it, even though they’re not supposed to. And I mentioned Evian bottles specifically.
“I have reason to believe,” he says, and he’s not looking anywhere near me, which is a relief, “that some of us have been playing a little fast and loose with the rules, when it comes to contraband and so forth.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not too hung up on the actual details. Do you get that? I don’t care if you have a drink once in a while. It’s just . . . it’s about trust.”
“Maybe we should head back to camp,” my mom says.
Scott nods. “Yeah, in a minute. Just let me get this out, okay? I’ve never really had any kind of a family, not since I was young, anyway. And . . . just what are we doing here, you know? What are we to each other? Are we all on the same team? Are we . . . can we at least pretend to be some kind of a family?”
And then his face wrinkles up, and he goes to put his hand over his eyes, except he’s got one arm in a sling and the other one is holding the bottle of alcohol. And I’m so afraid all of a sudden. I’m so afraid that he’s going to cry and it’s all because he’s covering up for me. He’s making sure I don’t get in trouble.
“Okay, Scott,” says Tom. He’s been holding Hayden, but he sets him down and walks over to Scott. Janelle follows, almost running, and pulls Scott into a hug.
“It’s going to be okay,” I hear her say.
“I should go,” Scott says. His voice is all wobbly with tears. “I should leave camp. I don’t deserve to be here, after acting like this.”
“Now that’s not true,” Janelle says. She pats Scott on the back and then lets go of the hug, turning back to face the group. I notice the way that the group is divided now, with the three of them on one side of the campfire and the rest of us on the other, flames crackling and rising in between us.
“I think we can all agree that we’re not seeing Scott at his best right now, but I, for one, am not about to judge him for it,” Janelle continues. And I’ll confess that I’m one of the rule-breakers he’s talking about. Last week, I took my car keys from the office, and after curfew I snuck out of my cabin like a teenager, drove down the driveway with my lights off, and went out to a convenience store, where I bought a bottle of wine and a pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.”
“That’s not fair!” says Tilly. My parents both lean forward at the same time to shush her.
“Anyone else want to speak up?” Janelle asks. “Let’s not forget that we’re here by choice. We all made the decision to tie our fate to this man, and that’s not something to take lightly. Two weeks ago, this man was seriously injured saving my son’s life, and I’m not about to throw that all away because he made a mistake today.”
“Yeah,” says my mom. She squeezes my shoulder and then pulls away from our little family group and walks over to join Tom, Scott, and Janelle. “I’ll go next,” she says. And pretty soon, we’re all lining up to talk about all the things we’ve done wrong.
chapter 27
Alexandra
April 2011: Washington, DC
The doorbell rings, and you look around. Neat enough. You open the door, step back, and there he is: Scott Bean, in your house.
He’s taller than you remember, and skinnier. You feel shy as he gives you a hug. For a moment, you wonder what the hell you’re doing. This first meeting is just between you and him—there’s no one else home. Maybe this was a stupid thing to do. What do you know about this guy, really? Not a lot, even with all the time Josh has spent Googling him, looking for cracks in the armor.
Josh is skeptical about this plan, but then Josh is skeptical about a lot of things. He’s done enough research to be sure that Scott isn’t an ex-con or a sex offender, and that there aren’t any former clients suing him for fraudulent parenting advice, or whatever. And once you got Josh to agree to listen to the CDs on his way to and from work for a week, he grudgingly agreed that Scott had some good points, and that a consultation with him might not be completely worthless.
So you won the argument, and now Scott Bean is here. You’ve been planning this for weeks, so you’d better let him in and ask for his jacket. Sit him down and offer the healthful, carefully thought-out snacks you’ve prepared.
Luckily, he’s got that easy warmth you’d almost forgotten existed, that ability to put people at ease. “So,” he says, settling into an armchair. “Tell me about Tilly.” And you do.
He’d asked you in advance to put together a “narrative history” of Tilly’s issues, nothing formal, just a few notes about key events in the journey from birth to diagnosis and beyond. The story of how you got here, he’d said, to put it another way. So you’ve got your anecdotes lined up.
You begin: when Tilly was eighteen months old, you enrolled in a parent-child music class. You were pregnant with Iris and wanted to have a little special time with Tilly before the new baby came. The classes were very sweet, overpriced, and clearly more for the adults than for the toddlers. The teacher would play a CD (available for twelve dollars and now burned indelibly into your brain), and the “caregivers”—moms, babysitters, and occasional stay-at-home dads—would lead their little ones in dancing, shaking maracas, and waving colorful scarves in the air. Everyone took it very seriously; everyone seemed to be terribly in love with their children and not the least bit panicky about the empty hours that stretched ahead after class was over.
What’s notable to you now is that it was one of the first chances you had to watch Tilly with other kids her own age. She was . . . the same, and not the same. Here, in a room full of one-year-olds, you began your secret note-taking. She was on target with all her milestones, a little bit advanced verbally, certainly as curious and adorable as any one of the others. But she balked at the structure of the class, refusing to take part in activities if something else caught her eye. She couldn’t seem to be taught not to put the instruments in her mouth. Bubbles and parachutes didn’t fill her with glee; instead, she preferred playing with the shoes that all the moms and kids took off before class started. Later, when you’d go through autism checklists you found online, you’d do this same sort of tallying: she fits thi
s criterion, but not that one; her motor skills aren’t great, but she gives hugs and kisses; she melts down when she’s frustrated, but she doesn’t mind looking you in the eye. And the thing that was always so heartbreaking was how close she came to fitting into the category of “normal.”
At the end of each session, the teacher would turn the lights off and play a slow song, a uniquely haunting version of “Shenandoah.” Caregivers would scoop their charges into their laps and settle them in to sway and cuddle. It reminded you of high school dances, of that last desperate slow song before the lights went up. And here you were, without a partner. Because you had given birth to an adventurer. And there was no way she was going to submit to five minutes of quiet hugging when there were dusty rec-center corners to explore.
She’s always been a little bit confounding, in all the best and worst ways. If she hadn’t been your first, you might have let yourself wonder sooner. Another story: once at a friend’s wedding, you were talking to a very nice woman—you can’t remember who she was now; bride’s aunt?—and as you were trying to explain something about the enigma that was Tilly, you mentioned that she had taught herself to read before the age of three.
“Reading before she was three?” The woman burst into laughter and put her hand on your arm. “Oh, honey, that’s not good.”
Scott interrupts here. “Wait—explain that to me. Why isn’t it good?”
“It’s not that it’s bad, in and of itself,” you say. It’s important to you that he get this. You and Josh have returned to this discussion, over and over again. It was a transformative moment, like a superhero origin story, or maybe the opposite of one. It signals a change in your understanding of who your daughter was and what type of parent she needed you to be. It’s when you first understood that “extraordinary” can have more than one meaning. “But it suggests that something’s not proceeding typically, in terms of development, you know?”
He’s nodding, and you’re relieved. “Right,” he says. “It means things may be uneven. If she’s off the charts in one direction . . .”
Good. He’s got it. It was easy for you and Josh to focus on all the ways she was ahead of the game, racing past the achievements of other toddlers. But you weren’t doing any of you any favors until you started paying attention to the ways she wasn’t.
Scott listens, occasionally nodding or interrupting to ask for clarification. You tell him the long saga of Tilly’s school life, the ongoing problems of tics and tantrums. You explain that if Tilly wants your attention, it is nearly impossible not to give it to her. That normal forms of discipline have little effect. That you don’t intend to turn everything into a power struggle; it just seems to happen. You tell him that when someone doesn’t quite get Tilly, or approaches her with the wrong set of intentions, things can go terribly, terribly wrong. You’ve had more than one babysitter call you in tears.
“And what about Iris?” Scott asks. “How is she affected by all this?”
You have stories about this, too. When Iris was three years old, she had a favorite element. She chose carbon (for reasons that remain impenetrable to you), so that when her big sister told people that her favorite element was mercury, Iris would be able to chime in, too.
Iris adores Tilly, but she’s also beginning to be embarrassed by her. “That’s where my sister sits,” you overheard her telling a friend a few weeks ago, explaining a cluster of crumbs on the dining room rug, “and sometimes she eats with her fingers.”
You’ve tried hard not to define Iris by the ways she’s different from Tilly, but you haven’t always succeeded. Once, when Iris was about four, she said something clever and you called her “my smart girl.” “No,” she corrected you, her little voice stretching out the vowels. “I’m not your smart girl. Tilly is.”
Iris is complicated and fascinating. But she has the luxury of being an ordinary mystery, in the curious, endearing way that all children are. Potential waiting to be unlocked, consciousness unspooling from nothing to something. A bud gathered up taut, working hard at growing itself. You may know that this particular bud is going to open to reveal a rose or a daisy, and that it will develop in a way that’s consistent with every other rose or daisy since the beginning of time. But there are endless variables: warmth or coolness of color, number of petals, placement of thorns. You don’t know which rose, out of all the possible roses in the past and future of the world, this one will turn out to be.
Tilly is a flower, too, of course—but you already feel like you’re using the wrong metaphor. What terms could you possibly use to describe her to someone, if you had to use images instead of terminology? Imagine, maybe, what it would be like to take care of a child who’d been born with wings. Is it a blessing or a curse, or somehow a little of each?
“And how about you?” Scott Bean asks. “How are you doing?” Kind. He is very kind. And you don’t think he’s pretending.
You find that you’re a little less willing to talk about yourself. You’ve been listening to Scott’s CD series in your car again; you’re midway through your second go-around. The disc that’s currently running is about “self-talk” and mantras, and while you’ve found it helpful, you’re not quite ready to spill out your actual feelings for this man to examine.
“I want to die” is not an unusual bit of self-talk for you, but you wish you could get rid of it, because you suspect you’re just being dramatic. You and despair are on . . . friendly terms, but there are a number of reasons why you think you’ll probably never kill yourself, and one is that you’re too dedicated to keeping track of minutiae. Every life has as many lasts as firsts, and if you knew the date of your death, you’d feel compelled to make note of them: The last time you yell at one of your children. The last time you sing a song out loud. The last time you hold a baby. The last time you go on vacation. The last time you cry as if your heart might break.
In any case, this isn’t (quite) a therapy session, and you’re not going to spell out your every neurosis. Instead, you tell him that there are times when you feel like you can hold everything together, but just barely. You tell him that you need help, but you’re not sure how to ask for it, and that you don’t even know what sort of help you need.
Revealing even this much is a risk. Your words in the air, their pitch of desperation. Label me, you might as well say. Give me a checklist. Show me how to fix it.
But Scott won’t let you be embarrassed. “The first thing you need to know,” he says, “is that you’re not alone.” He leans forward, takes hold of your hand for a moment. “Do you believe me?” he asks.
You know what the right answer is, but you pause for a minute, waiting to see if it’s true. “Yes,” you say, surprising yourself. “I do.”
“Good,” he says. “That’s the beginning. That’s the most important part.”
He sets up a time and date to come back and meet the rest of the family. He gives you homework, and you promise to do it, like the eager schoolgirl you are: yes, you’ll look at these handouts on environmental toxins and behavior; yes, you’ll try eliminating dairy from Tilly’s diet; yes, you’ll arrange for a night out with Josh.
“Before we meet next time,” he says, just before he goes, “I want you to think about these two things: happiness and purpose. What do those things mean to you? And do you believe I can help you fulfill them?”
“I . . .” you say, and you’re not even sure where the sentence is heading, but he stops you anyway.
“Not now,” he says. “Next time.” He opens your front door, and he’s gone.
You feel exultant, almost light-headed. What is it, exactly, this vital warmth, this bird in your chest taking flight? How can you give it a name? You might call it joy and relief; you might call it fellowship and communion. Faith, with its edge of magic, its unspeakable certainty, has always eluded you. The beauty of prayer: sending messages out into the universe and believing they’ll be heard.
How must it be to have that kind of singular, compelling purpose? A life labeled with both a direction and a goal? You’ve never realized that maybe it’s not something that just happens. You’ve never realized that it may be something you can actually choose.
chapter 28
Iris
June 24, 2012: New Hampshire
On Sunday morning, before the new GCs arrive, Tilly, Ryan, Candy, and I have a talk about Project Werewolf. You might think we’d give it up after last week, after we got in trouble and everything. But if there’s something special about being in the CF, like Scott keeps saying, then there must be something special about being in the CK. (That means Core Kids. Tilly made it up.) When new kids show up, thinking that we’re like the housekeeping staff or something, we need to show them we’re powerful, and that’s what the Werewolf story does.
Like Scott said at Saturday Campfire, sometimes you need to tell a story, even if it’s not one hundred percent true.
We’re changing our strategy, though, this time around. We’re not going to tell the new kids anything. We’re just going to set out the evidence and let them figure it out for themselves.
The nicest part about Sundays is that there’s usually a little time after lunch, while the new campers are getting unpacked and whatever, when we all get to go back to our cabins and just hang out together as a family. Today, my mom goes to take a shower, and my dad sits down on the couch with a book. I remember suddenly how much he used to like to read the newspaper; that’s something none of us have seen in a while.
I sit down next to him and lean my head back on the couch cushion, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. “Hey,” I say. “I think we completely missed Father’s Day.”
He looks over at me and squinches his eyes, like he’s trying to remember. “You know, I think you’re right,” he says. “No big deal. We have enough Mother’s Days to balance it all out.”
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