Carry the Ocean

by Heidi Cullinan

  I liked the nickname Train Man. I smiled at my friend.

  Then I smiled wider, because when the wind blew, it drew my attention to the trees. The big maple had yellow tips on the ends of some of its leaves. They hadn’t been there when I’d checked that morning. The tree was changing at last.

  I’d known it would, eventually. Everything will change, if you wait long enough.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jeremey

  I’m not sure exactly what David said to Emmet through his door, but whatever it was changed everything.

  They went from near-nuclear war to careful allies in the span of one afternoon. Sure, they still fought, but how they fought was different. It reminded me more of the way Emmet was with Althea, fighting with an understanding beneath it. David, I’d already learned, loved a good argument, so he enjoyed the conflict. I wasn’t sure if it was Emmet’s favorite part, but it hurt nothing that David treated him firmly like an equal.

  In turn, Emmet let David in on his secret codes, and as we started hanging out together, Emmet began problem-solving for David the way he did for me. He was good at imagining modifications to David’s chair or tray. There was some wheelchair called a Tank Chair that David apparently wanted, but it wasn’t appropriate for most quads. Emmet had ideas on how that could be changed. I wasn’t sure they’d work, but David appreciated the effort to help him feel less dependent on others.

  Emmet was fascinated with David’s quadriplegia. He researched it as industriously as he did anything else, and he showed David what quickly became his new favorite place on the Internet: the Mad Spaz Club. It was a website with information and a forum for para and quadriplegics. It had a lot of information about how people with SCIs could have sex. David read those web pages almost every day.

  We started hanging out together in the evenings, and one of those evenings we watched The Blues Brothers together.

  David loved the movie already, but Emmet’s quotes cracked him up. He loved the dancing too, and he was always trying to get Emmet to dance like Elwood Blues to any pop song David played.

  “You gotta dance for me, man. I can’t dance. I’m gonna live vicariously through you now.”

  “You can dance,” Emmet told him. “You can dance with your head and shoulders.”

  They started doing a kind of karaoke routine in the lounge before dinner, Emmet dancing and David head-bobbing and singing. Sometimes they got me to dance too. The other residents loved it, especially Stuart, since he could usually get us to dance to “Happy”.

  One day, though, David and Emmet and I discovered we all shared an obstacle: overstimulation in public places.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” David clarified when I’d expressed surprise over his confession. “But the thing is, when you lose a sense, your others pick up. They also think part of my brain got damaged in the accident too, making it easy to stimulate me. I hear and see too well sometimes. I used to love stock car races, but I can’t handle them now. Way too much input. The smells almost get me more than the sounds, but those are pretty bad.” He shifted his shoulders. “I do pretty well in public most of the time, but I’ve learned I have to mentally prepare and shop when it’s not super busy. Partly so I have room to drive, and partly so I have room for my head.”

  “I can’t handle any store bigger than Wheatsfield.” I leaned into Emmet as I confessed this, feeling ashamed as usual. “I keep trying to make Target work, but I have panic attacks every time.”

  Emmet didn’t push me away, but he tapped two fingers on my leg, which was his code for I love you, but I need my space back. I moved away, and after signing thank you, he rocked as he took his turn to speak. “Stores bother me, but counting helps me be okay. Everywhere can be overstimulating, so when it is, I find something to count. When we have to go somewhere busy, like an airport, I put in earplugs or headphones, and sometimes I wear sunglasses. It makes the light less, plus it makes me look like Elwood Blues.”

  “Headphones?” I thought about it, wondering if it would work for me. I couldn’t quite imagine it. “Isn’t that just a different overstimulation?”

  But David looked thoughtful. “No, it’s controlled stimulation. That’s brilliant, Em. I’m gonna try it. It’s an added bonus of not having to hear people’s pity whispers, either. Now if I could get them to stop making sad eyes at me, I’d be set.”

  Emmet grinned and hummed as he rocked. “You should make your chair more of a jerk chair. Mean bumper stickers and signs.”

  David’s laugh made me startle, but I smiled as he maneuvered his arm into place for an awkward high-five with Emmet. “You’re my man, Train Man.”

  Emmet met David’s hand in more of a carefully applied pressure than a clap, but it counted.

  They spent the rest of the week hunting down rude stickers online, ordering more than David could put on five wheelchairs. His favorite was one with the familiar silhouette of a busty reclining woman straddling the stick figure in a wheelchair, but he also liked If you stare long enough, I might do a trick. He wasn’t sure if the wheelchair figure holding a machine gun or the one tumbling out of its chair drunk were making the final cut, but he got a patch for his backpack that had a wheelchair rider moving so fast he trailed flames. There were at least eight other ones in his various online carts, all of them with the same underlying message of fuck you, don’t pity me.

  One actually said it word for word.

  I enjoyed watching them hatch plans both for surviving public experiences and pissing off David’s hated pitiers, but when I learned they planned to take me along on their adventures and find a way for me to ride out Target, I balked.

  “No. I don’t want to go. I’ll look like an idiot.”

  David wouldn’t give up. “Come on. We’ll be there with you. We’ve got your back. It won’t be as fun if you don’t go.”

  I tried over and over to convince them it was a bad idea, but it was tough when they both were having so much fun and were so sure I could do it. When they saw I was weakening, they got serious about setting me up.

  “We’ll go to Target early on a Sunday morning, when it’s quiet.” Emmet smiled and rocked. “We’ll give you my noise-canceling headphones and sunglasses. You can test out songs. You could do a playlist, or put one on loop.”

  “I vote for loop,” David said. “And honestly, I would say don’t listen to something chill. I’m gonna blast some old-school metal, but I don’t think that will work for you. Go for something upbeat.”

  We were having this conversation in David’s room but with the door open, and Stuart’s Pharrell Williams played in the background as usual. “I could try ‘Happy’, I guess.”

  Emmet laughed and clapped his hands. “Yes. That’s a good idea. I think you should play Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’ song on repeat.”

  “I’ll probably end up hating the song. Of course, as often as Stuart plays it, I’m half there already.”

  “You know, it could work in your favor.” David tilted his head to the side and grinned at me. “You feel safe at The Roosevelt, right? And the song makes you think of The Roosevelt. That might be handy when the panic tries to get its hooks in.”

  It all sounded fine in theory, but whenever I thought about actually walking into Target, ready to fail, I discovered my fear of big box store shopping didn’t require being present to win. Of course, that was also when I learned how much of a friend David had become. Emmet had a difficult time comforting me, and my stress sometimes consternated him enough he had to spend time alone in his room. David, though, was right there with me every step of the freak-out.

  “You might not make it the first time you try. No big deal. But you need to try. You’ve made this too big of a bogeyman in your head. Take it in small bits. Get in the front door and order a coffee at Starbucks and get out. Then go in for toilet paper and leave. Keep adding one item to the list, one day at a
time, until you have to go through the whole store.”

  We were sitting outside behind The Roosevelt, where it was technically a little too chilly, but we both liked sitting in the quiet near the playground. I sat on a long bench with multicolored elementary-sized handprints along the length, my knees drawn to my chest, shoulders hunched. “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to make it. That my public anxiety will keep getting worse and I won’t be able to go out in public with you as your aide.”

  “How the hell will not trying to conquer Target keep that from happening?” When I said nothing, only shrugged and buried my face deeper into my legs, he sighed. “Look. I get the whole terror-of-failure thing. I get it’s not as simple as willing myself a positive outcome. Believe me. The thing with incomplete injuries is sometimes some people get better. For a year we tried surgeries and procedures, hoping for a miracle. I got a few minor ones, but in the end, what you see is what I got. Sometimes, yeah, you try only to find out you can’t ever succeed. But you’ve got to quit thinking if you simply don’t try you’ve saved some possibility of a win. Not trying is the only guaranteed failure.”

  “I’m going to feel so stupid if I fail this one, David. So stupid.”

  “You know I won’t ever think that. Or Emmet. Or anyone here.” He was quiet a moment, then added, “Is this about your mom?”

  I shrugged and averted my gaze. Of course he’d hit it on the head.

  “You’re the one who decides what a good life is. What enough trying is. What happy is.”

  I rested my chin on my knees and stared off toward my family’s house. I couldn’t see it from there, but I saw it crystal clear in my mind’s eye. “I can’t shake my fear she might be right. If I tried more, I’d be fine. I wouldn’t be so limited in life.”

  “Everyone is limited in life. Some people are simply more aware of it than others.” David moved his chair closer and nudged my toes with his elbow. “There’s no rush on trying Target. We’ll go whenever you’re ready. Just don’t stay away because you’re afraid you’ll fail. And remember, Emmet and I will both be there every time you want to try.”

  I wasn’t ready that week, or even the next. But I thought about it all the time.

  When I brought up Emmet and David’s plan to take me to Target with Dr. North, I half-hoped he’d tell me it was a bad idea, but he said exactly the opposite. “If you feel you’re ready for it, I think it’s a fantastic plan. Before you go, however, I’d like to talk about the AWARE strategy with you. I’ve been meaning to bring it up for some time, but I wanted to introduce it at a moment when I thought you’d be more open to it. I think we might have come to that fork in the road.”

  “What’s an AWARE strategy?”

  “It’s an acronym for a technique to walk yourself through panic attacks.”

  I brightened. “To get rid of them? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “You can’t erase your panic attacks. You can control them, but not delete them. They’re part of you. They’re your brain’s reaction to too much stimuli. You must respect panic attacks, not try to make them go away.”

  I didn’t care for that idea at all, and I learned quickly why he hadn’t told me about AWARE before.

  The first A stood for accepting—something I didn’t much care for. When I had a panic attack, I was supposed to accept that it was happening. Not try to stop it, if you can believe that. Only accept that it was happening and that they were normal.

  Whatever.

  Then I was to move on to the W, which was watch and rate. But the worst was the next A: Act. Keep doing what you’re doing.

  “You mean I’m supposed to sit in the middle of the aisle at Target and be the resident freak show?”

  Dr. North raised his eyebrow over his glasses. “The technique asks you to remain where you are as much as possible in an effort to take control. You cannot stop the panic attack, but you can keep it from consuming you. Much like the time when you went with Emmet to Target, you insisted on staying in the store. You were acting then.”

  “I wasn’t able to shop. I can’t ever shop.”

  “Well, it will probably take practice to get that far.”

  I hated this already. “What’s the R and E for?”

  “R stands for repeat A-W-A. Ideally you continue doing whatever you were doing which inspired the attack, though sometimes you have to modify what you’re doing. Often, in fact. Maybe you don’t have to sit in the food court, but you close your eyes in the aisle and practice breathing deeply. Maybe a busy section of the store is what sets you off, so you use A-W-A and repeat them in a quieter part until you feel you have more control. The final letter, E, is to remind you to expect the best, to not make the attack worse by expecting bad outcomes. Try to surf the attack. Ride it, instead of it riding you. Above all, remember success isn’t elimination of occurrences but managing them.”

  “I will never be able to do that.”

  “Yes you can. Expect the best. The brain can change your whole life, for better or for worse, and you can change your brain. You can rewire it. Retrain it.”

  It sounded great, but I have to admit, I wasn’t ready to be AWARE.

  On Halloween, for the first time in ten years, I went trick-or-treating. Emmet, David and I all went with other residents of The Roosevelt, with Tammy and Sally escorting us. We went to the Washingtons’ house, several of their neighbors, and a few houses across the street from the playground. Several residents were overstimulated after that and wanted to go home, but Emmet, David and I got permission to keep going.

  The three of us had dressed up as the Blues brothers, which didn’t quite work since they were two, not three, but David said not to obsess over details and have fun. Without discussing it out loud, when we went off on our own, we headed down my family’s street. We trick-or-treated at a lot of my old neighbors’, and they all smiled and said it was good to see me looking happy. The woman who used to babysit me gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  My parents didn’t have their porch light on, so we didn’t ring their bell, but we stood on the sidewalk in front of it, staring at the darkened doorway.

  “You’re happier than they are, you know that,” David said at last.

  “You have other family,” Emmet added, rocking back and forth as we stood. “Better family.”

  We went to The Roosevelt. David went to his room, and Emmet and I had sex in my bed. He stayed with me after, holding me. I was happy and sleepy, but despite the rosy glow of too much candy and great sex, I kept thinking about my mom and dad’s dark, quiet house. I thought about how many people on our block had given away candy and hugs and smiles though they had no children or theirs were grown. I thought about how happy most people were, even when they didn’t have reason to be.

  I wondered how much of what I feared about shopping at Target and life in general was my anxiety, and how much was the bad habits I’d learned in my parents’ house.

  “I want to try Target tomorrow,” I whispered to Emmet. “I’m scared, but I want to try.”

  Emmet hummed, then bussed my ear awkwardly. “I’ll be with you.”

  I turned in his arms and held him tight, loving him, hoping he would always be a part of my family.

  I had this idea that when I said I was ready to try going to Target, David and Emmet would rush me off immediately in case I changed my mind. It surprised me when Emmet told me to tell Dr. North first and make a plan.

  Dr. North crossed his legs. “Do you want my help to explore AWARE more, or are you here because Emmet told you to ask me?”

  I considered that, wondering which one was the right answer.

  Dr. North raised an eyebrow, which was his way of reminding me there wasn’t a right answer except whichever one was the truth.

  Trouble was, I didn’t know why I was telling him. I stared at my hands in my lap and scraped at the cuticle of
my thumb. “Because he told me, I think, but if you really would have good ideas, I’d like to hear them. I guess I didn’t know I’d need a plan. I thought I’d sort of think about the AWARE thing a little, and see what happened.”

  “Well, I don’t know that you need a plan. But it’s not a bad idea to consider strategy. Why don’t we start with what techniques you’ve used in the past, and what ones you’re thinking of now? And I’d like to talk more about AWARE. I can tell you’re not convinced.”

  Techniques? “Mostly my mom made me go, I freaked out, and she got mad. I guess there was the one time with Emmet and his family, but we didn’t have a plan. I just tried not to get upset, but I did anyway. They were nicer about it than my mom, but I was embarrassed.” I twiddled my thumbs so I’d stop picking at my nails. “Emmet and David think I should use headphones. Play happy music. David says don’t do it all at once. Make it a short trip and then try to make it longer every time.” I frowned. “I guess I already have a plan.”

  “How do you feel about your plan?”

  “Nervous.” I gave up and dug at my cuticles again. “I’m worried I’ll screw it up.”

  “What does screwing it up look like?”

  “Having a panic attack. Embarrassing myself in front of everyone.”

  “Remember, having a panic attack isn’t a failure, and not having one isn’t a success. Success is not letting the attacks run your life.” He let that sink in before he asked his next question. “Do you believe Emmet and David will react the way your mom did?”

  I tucked my thumb into my fist, as it had started to bleed from being picked at. “Maybe not right away. But eventually they might, if I can’t get it right.” The thought of David rolling his eyes in disgust at me made me hollow inside. The thought of Emmet turning away left me cold.

  “What about their behavior has led you to think this is how they’d judge you?”

  I shrugged, not looking up.