by Jim Kokoris
“My motor is always running,” she would say. “Always.”
While she wasn’t a lot of things, what she really wasn’t was Mary, my poor stressed-out, always exhausted, always overwhelmed, and increasingly depressed and bitter wife. The constant demands of Ethan had turned our home into a tense and sad battlefield, and my months with Rita were an escape. When Rita and I bumped elbows at the elliptical station, I was going through my own particularly bitter phase. Ethan was becoming impossible, and my affair, I concluded later, was probably an attempt to even the score with life. Driving to our liaisons, I would rationalize/justify what I was doing: I had not asked for Ethan. This never-ending burden was given to me, so I deserved some pleasure. And I was sticking it out at home, when other men surely would have cut and run. At the very least, I had this coming. In fact, my times with Rita, stolen afternoons when Mary thought I was at the gym, was really for the best since they rejuvenated me, helped me cope.
It was bullshit, but I bought it for a while. It was also very out of character for me. Up until then, I only had eyes for Mary.
I broke things off with Rita one rainy June afternoon. We had just completed the act, when Mary called me. I didn’t answer, but seeing her name on my phone with Rita lying naked next to me shook me to my senses. Mary didn’t deserve this. Things were bad enough. Neither, for that matter, did Rita, who, at her core, was a decent person.
I dressed quickly, went home, and impulsively confessed all to Mary. A few hours later I was back at the hotel, but this time, alone. I stayed in room 112, right across from the ice machine, for three months until I found an affordable and depressing one-bedroom condo next to the Stone Avenue train station and just a few blocks from home.
It was there that I began my quest to set things right. I actually went to church for a long string of Sundays, actually said confession to a priest (I used the word adultery there), and was overly helpful with Ethan, frequently taking him on days that Mary was supposed to have him. On Friday nights, I came by and took out the garbage and the recycling bins; on Saturday mornings, I cut the grass, edged the bushes. I also attended support groups for parents of special-needs children so I could learn coping mechanisms other than cheating on your spouse. In between these acts of contrition, I wrote letter after letter apologizing to Mary, emphasizing, in no particular order, my stupidity and my love. She never acknowledged any of those letters.
Over time, I made progress, baby steps first, then more recently big-boy steps. Mary and I began having breakfast with Ethan, and we took him for walks in the evening after dinner. A few weeks back I sent her flowers on her birthday, and she surprisingly thanked me with a brief voice mail when she knew I was out. But progress was still slow, and time was slipping away; I wanted my wife back.
She was more than worth the effort: Mary was the quiet girl who stood off in the corner at parties taking it all in; the smart girl who graduated second in her class at law school; the hard-to-figure-out girl who secretly read trashy romance novels; the no-frills girl who, other than a pair of “lucky” half-moon earrings, didn’t wear or even like jewelry; the dark-eyed, olive-skinned pretty girl who looked wonderful first thing in the morning, and even better late at night.
Smart and a little mysterious, funny and plenty tough, she had been my sweet-sweetie since senior year at the U of I, been my trusted partner in life, and I had torched it all with low-wattage Rita.
Rita. Why she was calling me now, I had no idea. We hadn’t spoken in close to two years. But there was her number on my phone, and there was her breathless message, pleading and urgent, on my voice mail: “John, I need to talk to you. Please call.”
I replayed the message one more time, put the phone down, considered, then decided to sigh. A moment later I heard a stir and glanced over at the other bed. Ethan was finally awake, studying me with large brown eyes from under a mess of blankets.
“Top of the morning,” I said.
My phone buzzed again. Rita again.
“Do. Now?” Ethan asked.
I stared at my buzzing phone. “Funny, I was about to ask you the very same thing.”
* * *
At the parents support group, we referred to bad days with our children as “survive and advance.” Days that you did anything you could just to get by. Days that the anger and frustration and hopelessness overwhelmed you. Days that you felt sorry for no one but yourself, when you contemplated terrible acts, when you just plain flat-out hated the world and went so far as to wish bad things on other people just so they could be as miserable as you. Endless days.
My day in the outskirts of Indianapolis with Ethan was full-fledged survive and advance. He was agitated, the trip finally taking a toll, and I was distracted, worried about Rita, Karen, and our schedule: I was no longer sure we were going to get to Charleston on time.
Things started turning ugly as soon as he got up. Before we even sat down for breakfast at the hotel, he launched into Question Mode, repeatedly and with increasing frequency, asking the same question. “Do. Next? Do. Next? Do. Next? Do. Next?” When our food came, he refused to eat anything, even pickles. To make matters worse, we soon heard a rumble of thunder. This was not good, not good at all. When it came to storms, he was absolutely inconsolable. Nothing could calm him. So he moaned and wept and made a not-so-small spectacle of himself until I finally abandoned breakfast and decided to take him swimming.
Wrong move. The pool was in an enclosed glass dome in which we could hear every single drop of rain and see every single flash of lighting. Ethan sat in a chair off to the side, rocking back and forth, crying, while I, slightly freezing, stubbornly stood in the water and tried to coax him in.
“Come on in, dude-man. It’s nice inside the water. It’s very nice inside.”
“Do. Now?”
“We’re swimming now.”
“No!”
“Yes. It will be fun once you come in.”
“No!”
“Come on, buddy. I think I see Stinky Bear over in the corner. Let’s go over and find him. I think he’s passing gas.”
“Shut. Up. Idiot!”
“Come on.” I splashed the water. “Don’t be afraid of the storm. The storm is an idiot. Idiot storm!”
“No! Do. Now?”
“We’re swimming now.” I went underwater to prove my point. “See?” I said as I reemerged. “A lot of fun!”
“Do. Next?”
There was a bang of thunder and, for a moment, I thought the dome shook. Ethan screamed, and I kind of screamed.
“Jesus!” I said. “Wow.”
“Home!”
“No, no home. Swimming. The storm is almost over!”
He sunk low in his seat and wept some more. I tried to splash him, but the water fell short.
“Last chance to swim. Come on! Get in. I know you’ll like it.”
“Home!” He kicked his feet up in the air.
Clearly, this was going nowhere. “Okay, fine.” I dog-paddled over to the side and hoisted myself out.
When I approached him, he jumped up from his chair and started to hit me. Fortunately, since it was only eight thirty, the pool was empty. So, the ensuing scene, my grabbing his wrists and dragging him back to the chairs while he continued to kick and scream, was witnessed by no one.
We sat until he had sufficiently calmed down, then made our way back to the room, taking the stairs to the third floor because Ethan suddenly remembered he was terrified of elevators, even though we had taken one down just minutes before.
As soon as we were back in the room, I lay on the bed in my wet bathing suit, closed my eyes, and attempted to catch my breath.
Ethan immediately tried to sit on top of me. “Do. Now?”
“Ethan, no! Get off. Please. No. Sit next to me, here.” I gently pushed him off, but he climbed right back on.
So we stayed like that, father and son, in our bathing suits, his forehead pressed against my cheek. Ten years earlier, I might have gone into a rage, mig
ht have broken down and wept, but time and experience had taught me that if I just held on a little longer, things would pass. So we lay there and listened to the wind and thunder, our hearts beating together, waiting for things to pass.
* * *
I decided to leave for Kentucky an hour later. Ethan was still agitated, and it continued to rain, so barring a fire, earthquake, or terrorist attack on the Marriott Courtyard, things couldn’t get much worse. I gave him a quick bath, ran an electronic razor over his face, and off we went.
Stinky Bear did most of the driving while sitting on my lap. He kept up a persistent and, I hoped, engaging chatter as we headed south in the rain.
“Hey, Daddy-o, do we really need to listen to this?” Stinky asked in his falsetto voice. I had put on one of Ethan’s Christmas carol CDs, and Bing Crosby was singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “Christmas carols in the summer is a little weird.”
“This is the music we listen to when we drive, you know that,” I said in my John Nichols voice.
“You enable him. You need to stretch him.”
“We listen to Christmas carols, that’s what we do.”
We drove for a minute, the music filling the car. “When you think about it, this song, ‘Rudolph,’ it’s really about bullying,” Stinky said. “Donner, Blitzen, the other reindeers, they called him names, wouldn’t let him play in other reindeer games. And where is Santa in all of this? And they only accept him when they need him? Bunch of pricks. If I were Rudolph, I would have said, ‘Screw off, Santa. I’m taking my nose somewhere else.’”
“You know, I never thought about that.”
“Well, you got a lot on your mind.”
Ethan looked on skeptically from the backseat, where I had made him sit as punishment for his behavior.
“How about this rain?” I asked Stinky.
“Yeah, pretty B-A-D—bad! But my gas is badder. Boy, I got some real stinkers coming soon. Stay tuned! They’re coming!”
“Can’t wait.”
I checked the rearview mirror again. Ethan was intently staring at the back of my head, trying to decide, I’m sure, whether to accept my olive branch of a performance or continue acting up.
“I tell you, Dad, in retrospect, I’m not sure what you were thinking when you decided to make this trip,” Stinky said.
“I really don’t know what I was thinking either,” I admitted.
“You thought you were William Least Heat-Moon, didn’t you? You were going to take some kind of interesting, life-changing trip into America. See small towns, meet real characters, see mountains and streams, gain wisdom and insight. Have a real writer’s experience, and then maybe write about it, didn’t you? Break your twenty-year writer’s block by seeing America. A special trip with your special-needs son. Right? A heartbreaking best seller for sure. Real life Rain Man.”
“It crossed my mind, yes.”
“Instead you’re on a journey to hell, stuck in a car all day with Ethan and three teddy bears who you’re beginning to think are alive and you’re about to go crazy.”
“I’m not about to go crazy. Everything is okay. The storm will end. We will stop for lunch.”
Ethan seized on that word. “Lunch!”
I fell quiet, but it was already too late; the pickles-Sprite launch sequence had been activated.
“I starving. Lunch. Now. Eat. Now.”
“Ethan, it’s too early. Let’s drive for a while.”
“No! Eat! I starving. Starving!”
“You should have had breakfast. We need to drive now.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Eat!”
“Listen to your father!” Stinky Bear said. “Listen to him. He’s going crazy!”
“Shut. Up. Idiot!” Ethan said.
“You, shut up!” Stinky Bear said.
We drove for a few minutes in a miraculous burst of silence. Then he played his trump card.
“Poo-poo.”
I didn’t say anything. Though he might have been bluffing, there was a chance he wasn’t; he hadn’t gone that morning. This could, at least, partially explain his mood.
“Poo-poo.”
“Don’t start that.” I drove faster.
“Poo-poo. Poo-poo bad!”
“Jesus, God…”
“Poo-poo bad! Now! Now! Now!”
I glanced backward, caught a glimpse of his face, and recognized his poo-poo-is-rounding-third-and-heading-for-home grimace.
“Oh God. Okay! We’ll stop!” I flipped on my blinker even though the next exit was a while off.
“Now!” He hit-slapped me on the back of the head.
“Hey! Knock it off!” I was about to retaliate, threaten some kind of pickle or Sprite sanctions, when Karen called.
“Daddy?”
“Thank you, God! Listen, talk to him, will you? Please! He has to go to the bathroom. Just talk to him for a few minutes, calm him down, distract him. We’re driving.”
“I don’t want to talk to him right now.”
“You have to talk to him! He might go in his pants. He’s done that before.” I put the phone on speaker.
“Hi, Karen!” I yelled.
“Hi, Ethan,” Karen said. Her voice was soft, dull, resigned.
“Karen!” Ethan stopped stomping his feet. “Where. Are. You?”
“In a hotel. In South Carolina.”
“Where. Mom. Be?”
“She’s in the room next to me. Daddy?”
“Where. Mindy. Be?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Poo-poo. Bad.”
“Hold it, and Dad will stop.”
“What. Eat. Today?”
“Nothing, Ethan. I had nothing to eat today,” Karen said. She was doing a poor job of hiding her irritation, and this angered me. She only had to deal with him for a few minutes—that was all I was asking, a few minutes.
“Could you make more of an effort?” I said. “This isn’t the time to mail it in.”
“Can we talk now?”
We finally came to an exit, which I took at fifty miles per hour. “Actually, no. He has to take a crap. I’ll call you back.”
“Daddy?”
“I’ll call you back.” I ended the call and threw the phone off to the side.
* * *
After a long poo-poo break at a Cracker Barrel; and after I asked the elderly church-lady-looking waitress if they served alcohol; and after the elderly church-lady-looking waitress reacted like I had just asked her to breastfeed us; and after we ordered and ate fried chicken and fried ham with French fries; and after Ethan put my credit card in his mouth right before giving it to the elderly church-lady-looking waitress who reacted like I had just handed her a severed body part; and after we made a series of unscheduled pee-pee-Sprite-let’s-play-catch-with-the-orange-Nerf-football, let’s-take-the-pickles-off-of-the-McDonald’s cheeseburgers and befriend them (“Hey there, Mr. Pickle, what you knowin’?”); and after Ethan whined and pinched me hundreds if not thousands of times, he fell mercifully asleep in the back seat.
I turned off “Jingle Bells”. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said aloud.
“Yes, you can, old man,” Stinky Bear told me. “Yes, you can. Just hold on.”
“This is a big mistake. I don’t think I can do this.”
“You can do it. Just take the next step. You’ve been doing this for nineteen years, old man, nineteen years.”
* * *
Mary suspected that something was wrong with Ethan around nine months. He didn’t sit up, and he didn’t reach or grab for things. Absorbed in my job, teaching two AP English courses, finishing my book, and contending with two young daughters, initially I paid little attention to her concerns. It wasn’t until our pediatrician recommended some tests be taken, including the MRI, that I took notice.
The tests results surpassed our worst fears: global brain damage brought on by a rare chromosome disorder. His primary diagnosis was Trisomy 9
Mosaicism syndrome which meant the ninth chromosome appears three times rather than twice in some cells of the body. (Later he would later also be classified as mildly autistic.) At that time, specifics didn’t mean much to me. All I knew was that my only son, my youngest baby, would never be normal.
Instantly, our lives transformed into an exhaustive string of sleepless nights and stressful days, punctuated by an array of neurologists, therapists, and geneticist meetings. Mary was constantly doing research, constantly looking for information on his conditions, hoping for some good news, for some light. I, on the other hand, stumbled through, in denial, overwhelmed and disbelieving. Things like this happened to other people.
The first three years were probably the worst, since every missed milestone was cause for sadness and stress. He didn’t walk, he didn’t talk. He didn’t play with any toys. He just cried and stared at us with helpless, accusing eyes.
Ethan took his first steps when he was three and a half, a glorious day in the Nichols house. It was Valentine’s Day, but more important, an overachieving Illini team was beating a Bobby Knight–led Indiana at Indiana, when I glanced away from the TV to see Ethan smiling while he pulled himself up from the couch and then proceeded to let go.
“Daddy,” Karen whispered.
We were in the family room, and we all just stared in wonder as he took a few drunken steps. Finally, after he had managed a smooth landing, sitting softly down in the middle of the floor, Mindy broke the silence by saying, “Hey, Ethan, go get me a Coke.”
The War Years came next—years when the air raid sirens blared, when you grabbed a helmet and jumped into a trench the second you entered the house, when smiles and laughter were rationed like sugar and bits of chocolate. Really sucky years. This was when he was about five and six. This was when the mood swings began.
There was simply no predicting him. The smallest thing—an unclosed dresser drawer, an errant thread hanging from your sweater, a ringing phone—could send him into a rage. Bedtime became a terror; he never wanted to sleep. Consequently, we took to locking him in his room at night. When he broke the lock, we fixed it; when he broke it a third time, I held the door shut until he grew tired of pulling on it. This could take up to an hour every night.