As I fall asleep, I’m thinking that fireworks are shaped like Koosh balls, with all those stringy lines shooting out. I’m thinking about little sparks dripping down the sky like liquid, and smoke left behind when it’s all over. What a weird thing, I think, that this is how we celebrate our nation’s birthday: to go sit outside in the dark and watch things explode in the sky. And how weird that our parents thought our lives would be better if we moved to a place where we can’t see it happen at all.
chapter 32
Tilly
Date and Location Unknown
In the land of Washington, DC, under the reign of Bo the Obama dog and Butterstick the baby panda, houses were made of bricks, and the best kind of family was the kind that contained a mother, a father, and two little girls. In one such house, in one such family, the daughters were named Tilly and Iris. And they were happy.
The world was full of mysteries. There were parks for dogs and classes for babies. The Washington Monument changed colors partway up and had red lights in the top that looked like eyes. Parents would yell out “Exorcist steps!” without explanation whenever they drove past a particular gas station in Georgetown. There was a TV show about a store that sold cupcakes, but no one ever went there because the lines were too long, because there was a TV show about it.
Parents were indecisive but powerful. Children were the most important people in the world. In those days, babies were rocked to sleep by mothers who murmured songs by Green Day and Oasis. The life of each child, the very fact of his or her existence, was celebrated yearly with baked goods and gifts. Sometimes a special sticker would be affixed to his or her clothing.
Goody bag technology was at an all-time high.
There were many things that didn’t make sense. Children were supposed to tell the truth, unless the truth was that the man on the bus was fat or that fathers were loved a little bit more than mothers. Grown-ups contradicted themselves frequently.
There were secret meetings held by subversive societies that met underneath the dining room table. They planned missions called Operation Wide Awake and Operation Midnight Feast. There was a popular belief that sometimes mothers could see out of the backs of their heads. There was a rumor that fathers sometimes had psychic powers.
Christmas began the day after Thanksgiving with a mysterious and ominous event known as Black Friday and continued until early January, when fathers would drag dead fir trees outside to the curb, leaving behind a trail of needles that felt like shards of glass when they poked your feet through your socks.
It was a land of giants. There were presidents as tall as three grown men. There was a place you could go to have your picture taken, sitting in Albert Einstein’s lap.
In all this land, in all this wonder, there was only one thing that anyone could possibly say was a problem. And that was that once you left, it was impossible to find your way back.
chapter 33
Iris
July 8, 2012: New Hampshire
Four days after the Fourth of July, when it’s time for the new Guest Campers to arrive, there’s only one family that shows up. I hear my mom talking about it with Janelle; apparently, there were two other families scheduled to come, but they both canceled at the last minute. They each had different excuses—one family said their kid was sick and the other said that the dad’s aunt had died or something—but Scott’s wondering if maybe it’s not really a coincidence, especially since it happened so soon after the thing with Candy.
The family that does come are called the Finchers. When they arrive on Sunday, we’re all there, waiting for them on the lawn, like always. The car pulls up, and we all go over to say hi and offer to help with their luggage, but they don’t get out of the car right away. The mom’s looking at something on her cell phone, and when Scott goes over to open her door, she puts up a “one minute” finger to him.
He smiles politely and waits, making faces at the kids in the backseat—looks like a boy and a girl, maybe seven and nine—until she’s done. Then he helps her out of the car and holds out his hand like he’s waiting for her to give him something.
“Phone-free zone,” he says pleasantly. “I’ll take that.”
She looks annoyed and starts to say something, but then her husband says, “Hon,” in this warning voice, and she closes her mouth. She takes a minute to close whatever app she was using and turn the power off. Then she smiles tightly and hands the phone, which has this ugly green case with rhinestone shamrocks on it, over to Scott.
“Here you go,” she says. “I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.” She looks around at the other grown-ups nearby, but none of them seems to want to be part of her joke.
Tilly, though, is totally oblivious to the fact that a joke has even been made. “That’s okay,” she says to the mom. “You’ll like it here better, anyway.”
• • •
Right away, everything seems kind of strange and lopsided. We’re used to having a more even mix of Core Family and Guest Campers, and a lot of the activities are for bigger groups. So now it’s like we’re all just hovering around this little group of people, focusing all our attention on them. And the mom really isn’t very nice. Her name is Frances, but she wants all the kids to call her Ms. Frances. I guess it isn’t that weird, but it’s not the way we do things here. Which Scott tells her, but she won’t budge, so finally he says that he wants her to be comfortable, and since we have a more “intimate” group this week, we can let some of the rules slide. It isn’t until I’m thinking about it afterward that I realize: this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone have an argument with Scott and win.
• • •
It’s not a very good week. Tilly and I are still on extra-chore duty, and the signs we have to wear around our necks don’t seem particularly funny anymore. Plus, until the Goughs left, it hadn’t really occurred to me that any of us could just leave. Now that my brain knows it’s a possibility, I seem to be thinking about it all the time.
On Wednesday, we’re on our way to the dining hall for lunch, when the Fincher boy, Sam, comes running up and says, “There’s something wrong with Henny Penny!”
He goes running back toward the chicken yard, with me and Scott and a bunch of other people following. When we get there, I can see that Henny Penny’s just lying on the ground, not moving. And I don’t want to start crying, in front of all these people, but if Henny Penny’s dead, I just don’t know if I can handle it. Tilly already looks like she’s about to cry, and so does Sam Fincher, which is weird, because he’s only known her for like three days, so what does he have to be upset about?
We all gather around in a circle while Scott moves toward her and gently picks her up. I don’t know what we’re waiting for, because it’s not like he’s a veterinarian. Or a magician. But he holds the chicken in his hands, warming and stroking her feathers. He’s whispering something I can’t quite hear; I think he might just be saying, “You’re okay.” We’re all quiet; even Hayden stops whimpering when his dad picks him up. And then Scott closes his eyes, and his lips are moving, like he’s praying or saying some kind of wizard spell. For a second, he pulls Henny Penny close to his chest and then, all of a sudden, he raises his arms and tosses her into the air. I gasp, and I hear a couple of other people making little noises, too, because what is he doing? Is he just throwing her on the ground? But he’s not. I don’t know if he knows this is what’s going to happen, or if he’s just hoping, but as soon as Henny Penny’s body moves away from Scott’s hands, her eyes open and she makes a surprised little clucking noise. For a minute, she’s still falling, and I’m worried that she’s going to get hurt again when she hits the dirt, but just before her feet touch down, she starts to flap her wings. And she’s flying.
Scott’s grinning like crazy, and it’s such a relief to see him happy, and to know that Henny Penny’s okay. A few people start laughing, and I hear someone ask, “How’d he do that?”
I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn around, and it’s my mom. She folds me up in a hug, and then Tilly comes over and throws herself against us, and somehow, instead of falling over, we end up in a group hug. After a minute, my dad comes over and says, “Here are all my favorite girls,” in that dorky dad way.
Eventually, people start to go back to whatever they were doing before the Henny Penny scare. My family is the last bunch of people to keep standing there in the chicken yard.
“Hey, you know what this reminds me of?” says Tilly. “Danny, the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl. You know that part where Danny and his father want to poach some pheasants, so they grind up sleeping pills and put them into raisins? And then the pheasants eat them and fall out of the trees because they’re so sleepy.”
There’s a pause, and then my mom asks, “You think Scott drugged a chicken?”
My dad starts laughing and shaking his head. “I wouldn’t put it past him,” he says.
My mom hits him lightly on the arm and says, “Shh. Don’t say things like that.”
“Why?” asks my dad in a stage whisper. “You think his spies are listening?”
“Maybe the chickens will tell him,” says Tilly, in her usual way-louder-than-a-whisper voice.
• • •
On Thursday, I’m sitting next to Scott at lunch and I ask him, “So are we still playing Werewolf tomorrow? It’ll be just me and Tilly and the Fincher kids.”
Scott smiles. “I don’t see why not,” he says. “No minimum player requirements for Werewolf. It’s a different game every time, right?”
“Right,” I say. For some reason that makes me think about what happened the week that Lincoln was here, when I told Scott about the penis thing and he accused me of lying. I still feel kind of weird about that. But I guess there isn’t really anything to say.
I notice that Scott isn’t eating; he’s just picking at something on the table next to his plate. I look at it and see that it’s one of these stickers that the Fincher girl likes to plaster all over everything.
“Does that remind you of Jesse?” I ask, before I have time to wonder if it’s a good idea.
But Scott just looks at me blankly, like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“Jesse?” he asks.
“Your brother,” I say. “The one who died.”
Scott wrinkles his forehead and smiles at me. He’s looking at me like I’m some kind of puzzle. “I don’t know who you’re thinking of, kiddo,” he says, “but it’s not me.” He shakes his head. “I don’t have a brother. I never did.”
chapter 34
Alexandra
January 2012: Washington, DC
It’s been a long time since you’ve worried about getting a call from Tilly’s school, so you’re not particularly alarmed when you see the school’s number pop up on your cell phone screen. You figure it’s probably one of the administrators, wanting to set a date for her next IEP.
Instead, it’s the head of the middle school, who wants to “give you a heads-up about an incident that happened this afternoon.”
Tilly’s class had been on a field trip, or rather, on their way to a field trip; more specifically, they were in a van on the Beltway. Tilly got into a disagreement with a classmate and was reprimanded (unfairly, she believed) by a teacher. She then unbuckled her seat belt and succeeded in opening the door of the moving vehicle.
No one was hurt; a teacher’s aide with quick reflexes was able to grab her and wrestle her back into her seat, which gave the driver enough time to pull onto the shoulder. But it was scary for everyone in the car. Tilly will be facing three days’ suspension, and the school would like you and Josh to come in to discuss a possible “safety plan” for Tilly, to prevent anything similar from happening in the future.
The thing is, you’ve been thinking lately that everything’s going okay. Maybe not in a big-picture, larger sense, but in a day-to-day time-to-breathe kind of way. Lately, your weekly phone consults with Scott Bean—you’ve been doing these for several months, and Josh doesn’t even complain about the money you’re spending, because he can see they’re helping—have been focused more on questions like “How can I get her to start her homework without a battle?” and less on things like “What do I do when she makes sexual jokes about her dad?”
This “incident” isn’t something you process all at once. During the phone call, you’re more puzzled than anything else, trying to understand the logistics of what happened. Later, when you pick her up, you’re angry, and your mind is busy with setting consequences and asking her what she’d been thinking.
At home, after dinner, as you’re going about the evening business of loading the dishwasher and supervising homework, you begin to have flashes of the different ways this day might have ended. But it’s not until you hug her at bedtime that you begin to shake.
She’s not little anymore. She’s going to be thirteen on her next birthday; it’s an age when plenty of kids are entrusted with the freedom to leave home without a parent, to walk to a friend’s house, to take a city bus to school. But again (and again and again), you have to remember that Tilly is not the same as “plenty of kids.”
You and Josh have a fight that night; of course you do. It starts when the two of you are still up in Tilly’s room, getting her ready to go to sleep. You’re both trying to get at the heart of what happened today, and to ensure that it won’t happen again, but your strategies are taking you in different directions. Josh is gently prodding her about her feelings; you’re using scare tactics, talking about exactly what happens to a body that goes flying out of a car at fifty-five miles per hour. You know this may not be the best approach, and you can admit that you’re freaking out a little, but fuck it. This is important. You simply cannot let this day end without making sure your daughter understands the full impact of what she did today.
Josh is shooting looks at you—quizzical and then borderline aghast—and finally, as your voice gets tight and you’re telling Tilly that you couldn’t bear to lose her, he shushes you. The two of you have a brief, unsatisfying conversation through gestures and facial expressions, and then you kiss Tilly, pull up her blanket, and storm down the stairs.
He takes a few more minutes; you can’t hear what he and Tilly are saying, but you can hear his soft, reassuring tone. By the time he comes back down, you’re fuming. You don’t really trust yourself; that’s part of it. You don’t trust your own instincts, especially when it comes to parenting and especially when it comes to Tilly. But he’s not the only one who gets to talk. He’s not the only one who gets to decide what’s okay to say.
“You’re an asshole,” you say, with no preliminaries. You’re whisper-shouting because you know that Tilly’s still awake, and she has sharp ears.
“You know what?” he says. “Fuck you. Just . . . fuck you.”
And that’s as insightful as the discussion ever gets. Later, after you’ve stormed back up the stairs—Josh remains in the living room, where he’ll probably fall asleep on the couch—and cried pitifully about a number of far-ranging things that may or may not have any relevance to the current situation, you wonder how it is that the two of you have never learned how to argue like adults, like thoughtful people who care about each other and know they’ll come out stronger on the other side. You’re the one who started it, this time around. Did you think you were going to get anything useful out of it? Because all you’ve done tonight is buy yourself an empty bed and an awkward morning still to come.
• • •
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like either of you managed to get through to Tilly; it’s less than a week before the next call. A conflict with her P.E. teacher this time, and a winding stairway with a steep drop down the middle; she made a move like she was going to climb over the railing.
Everyone—teachers, classroom assistants, counselors—is working hard to make sure sh
e’s supervised at all times. But she doesn’t have a one-on-one aide, and there are eight other kids in her class, each with his or her own set of issues. You don’t have any idea what you’re going to do if the school decides that they can’t manage her anymore.
There really aren’t a lot of other options, once your child has been removed from a special-ed school. Well, there are other options, but they’re grim. There are places that call themselves “centers” instead of “schools.” There are “residence programs” for children you can’t handle at home. There are psychiatric wards. There are real, honest-to-God padded rooms.
And there’s homeschooling. The idea fills you with terror, but maybe it shouldn’t. It’s important work; it’s not that different from deciding to stay home with your kids when they were tiny. You’ve known for a long time that sitting in a classroom might not be the way Tilly learns best, and you’d be able to tailor her studies to incorporate her interests. You could go on field trips: Washington is a city full of midsized “big people,” and you still haven’t found time to visit most of them. Jefferson and Lincoln, obviously: both nineteen feet tall, though one is standing and one is sitting, a distinction Tilly takes very seriously. If the marble Lincoln happened to rise up one day, stop slouching in that chair and walk down the steps of his odd neo-Grecian temple, exactly how tall would he be? Well, maybe you and Tilly could figure it out. A math project that meets both her interests and a seventh grade curriculum.
And there are tons of others. There’s the new MLK memorial (thirty feet high, emerging in relief from his Stone of Hope) and FDR, oversized but not particularly tall, sitting in his ambiguous wheelchair-like seat. There’s a twelve-foot Einstein, sprawling on a bench down by the mall. And a quick search turns up a few you’ve never even heard of, like a seventeen-foot-tall statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in Lincoln Park.
Harmony Page 23