The Boy Who Loved Too Much

by Jennifer Latson

  On the last leg of their trip, Gayle stopped for lunch at a Cracker Barrel. She reminded Eli before they had even left the car that he would be expected not to hug anyone inside. He wouldn’t ask the waitstaff for favors. He wouldn’t beg to turn the ceiling fans on or off. He wouldn’t bother the waiter, or anyone sitting nearby, with inappropriate questions. He wouldn’t erupt into song.

  “OK, Mom!” Eli shouted from the backseat. Once inside, he gave the waitress a vigorous handshake but not a hug. He asked about the ceiling fans, but only once. He sang portions of the Lion King soundtrack, but quietly. So, to reward him for his good behavior, Gayle let him pick out a small toy from the Cracker Barrel store. He chose a pinwheel in the shape of a flower.

  They were on their way to the register when Eli noticed a game called Sharky’s Diner, the object of which was to fish plastic food out of a plastic shark’s mouth before its “CHOMPING ACTION JAWS!” snapped shut. Eli asked for this, too, but the game was $19.99. Gayle said no and got in line.

  “But, Mom, I want Sharky Dinner!” he whined, his voice rising frantically. “Just one? PLEASE?”

  He tugged on Gayle’s shirt, stomping emphatically. She stared straight ahead, ignoring him.

  A boy about Eli’s age stood quietly in line with his father just in front of them. He turned his head and gave Eli an astonished look. Gayle registered how the scene must have appeared through his eyes: a twelve-year-old boy holding a flower-petal pinwheel, stomping his feet, and crying over “Sharky Dinner.” Gayle’s face flushed. She grabbed Eli’s arm and looked him in the eye.

  “You’re not going to get anything if you keep acting like this,” she said.

  A saleswoman materialized from nowhere and asked Eli, in the soft tones usually reserved for toddlers, “You like the shark, huh?”

  “Yeah! You can buy it for me?” he asked, smiling through his tears.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” the woman said, her eyes widening in surprise. “But that’s a nice pinwheel, too.”

  “I want the shark,” Eli moaned imploringly.

  By now everyone in the store had looked up from the scented candles and saltwater taffy. All eyes were on Eli as he cried and scuffed his sneakers on the rug. Gayle was mortified. In a single fluid movement she steered Eli out of line, dropped the pinwheel back in its stand, and pulled her son out the door. It happened so quickly that Eli was buckled into the backseat before he realized he hadn’t gotten the shark or the pinwheel.

  Gayle pulled out of the parking lot, and Cracker Barrel disappeared behind the trees. Eli wailed and kicked the passenger seat wildly. His face was red and flushed with tears. He sat surrounded by a pile of toys, all once as appealing to him as the shark. A few fell to the floor from the force of his kicking. But eventually he stopped flailing and wiped away the tears. He seemed to recover all at once, as if he’d simply flipped the off switch on his tantrum.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said with genuine remorse.

  Gayle wondered whether he understood the correlation between his tantrum and its consequences. Now that he had cooled down, she asked him why he didn’t get the pinwheel. He couldn’t answer.

  “Were you being loud in the store?” she prompted.

  “Yeah,” he said, hanging his head.

  “Were you listening to what I told you?”

  “No, Mom! I wasn’t listening.”

  “And did you ask that woman to buy you something?”

  “Yeah!” His head popped back up and he smiled again, displaying gleaming rows of braces. “Sharky Dinner!”

  “Why did you ask her that?” Gayle asked. She had begun to think that no punishment would ever correct Eli’s behavior, since even when he replayed scenes like this in his mind he couldn’t see where he’d gone wrong. Apart from his toddler-like tendency to respond to frustration with tantrums, the more worrisome problem was that he couldn’t see a reason not to ask for, or accept, a gift from someone he’d never met. “Do you know her? Do we ask strangers to buy us things?”

  “No,” Eli said, sensing that this was the correct answer. But he had forgotten the lesson an hour later when Gayle came up with a role-playing exercise to pass the time on the road. She told Eli to pretend she was a stranger he met in a store. She gave the word “stranger” an ominous inflection, dark and dangerous.

  “What would you say if you met me for the first time? If you didn’t know me?” she asked.

  “Hi, stranger!” Eli said. In his lilting voice, the word carried no weight at all.

  “Hi, little boy,” she said, her voice lower than usual and just slightly sinister. “What’s your name?”

  “Eli! Can we go to the store?”

  “Oh!” Gayle’s expression registered a flicker of surprise. Either Eli didn’t understand that they were role-playing or this was exactly what he’d say to a sinister stranger. She suspected it was the latter.

  “I don’t go to the store with strangers,” she tried. Again the word hung heavy with implied warning.

  “I do!” he said. He smiled earnestly, enjoying the game.

  Eleven

  Eli Goes to Camp

  On the rural fringe of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gayle followed a handwritten sign for Whispering Trails camp. It led her down a gravel road, through dense woods, and finally to a clearing surrounded by cabins.

  For most of the summer the campground was home to sessions for children and adults with a variety of disabilities, including spina bifida, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and autism. The bathrooms and shower stalls were all wheelchair-accessible, and a shed housed shiny red tricycles, some of them big enough for adults. This week’s camp, however, was just for kids with Williams.

  It was a muggy afternoon. The air in the campground was thick and sweet with the smell of cut grass and bug spray. Gayle parked in a dirt lot and, with Eli in tow, followed a path to a low, modern building overlooking a pond and a wooden dock lined with canoes. Inside they found the camp’s cafeteria and a performance space where a group of camp counselors played guitars and bongos among mismatched couches and beanbag chairs. It was chaotic and loud—not so much from the acoustic musical performance as from the delighted squeals of a handful of children dancing rapturously while their parents, exhausted by travel, looked on.

  Eli walked up to the nearest guitar player.

  “Hi, I’m Eli!” he announced, waving his hand in the man’s face. The man, in his twenties with long brown hair tied into a low ponytail, smiled and nodded but kept strumming the guitar.

  Eli pointed at him, trying to get his attention.

  “Oh, what time are you going to light the campfire?” Eli asked.

  Without pausing his playing, the man looked over his shoulder at the other guitarists. “Can we sing a song about campfires?” he asked. “Eli likes campfires.”

  The man was a music therapist named Louie Morand, whose main gig was working with juvenile offenders in an urban detention center. The hardest part of his day job was getting street-tough kids to open up and let themselves be vulnerable. “It’s a different environment,” Louie later explained, comparing the Williams camp to juvenile detention. “Kind of the exact opposite environment.”

  The campers formed a bouncing circle around Louie and the other musicians. A tall, lanky girl with Coke-bottle glasses twirled in dizzying spirals. A tiny peanut of a boy banged a tambourine against his palm. Eli grabbed a shaker from a pile of instruments and waved it wildly, flailing his body along with it. His face grew beet red and his smile ecstatic; the chattering of his shaker nearly drowned out the acoustic guitars. Louie chanted, “Go, Eli! Go, Eli!” The tall girl and the tiny boy joined in the chant.

  Gayle was encouraged to see how easily and instantly Eli had been included. For the first time in a long time she relaxed the muscle that was normally tensed and ready to pull him out of an awkward encounter. It was clear from the start that in this environment he’d be unlikely to elicit the disdain, mockery, or bewildered stares she usually tried to fend
off. For once his behavior was no different from anyone else’s.

  Gayle had always hoped his musicality would build bridges at his regular school as well. Eli loved chorus, and it had seemed at first like his best chance at finding his niche. His booming voice carried every song; it was always on pitch, always the loudest of the group. But the school’s music director didn’t seem to appreciate Eli’s boisterous singing style.

  The previous year, just before the school’s holiday concert, Gayle got a call from Eli’s special-education teacher, who asked whether Eli was afraid to go onstage.

  “Would he be too embarrassed?” the teacher asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Gayle said. “He loves being onstage. He’s not embarrassed by anything.”

  “Hmm,” the teacher said. “That’s what I thought.” She told Gayle she had just heard from the music director that Eli didn’t want to perform in the concert. It didn’t sound like Eli to her, so she wanted to call to double-check. She hung up the phone, met with the director, and called Gayle back, explaining that now he was saying Eli didn’t know the material they’d be performing.

  Gayle was infuriated. Eli had been practicing the Christmas songs every night for weeks. Gayle thought he sounded great. And no matter how he sounded or how well he had memorized the songs, she thought, he had every right to be onstage with the rest of his class.

  She gave the teacher some choice words to share with the music director. The teacher paraphrased, but ultimately the director relented. Eli was in the show.

  In the concert, his voice was loud and rich with vibrato. He raised his right hand as he sang, cupping the air and lifting it toward the ceiling the way he’d seen Pavarotti do it in YouTube videos. He does get a little overexcited, Gayle thought, watching her son steal the spotlight. Maybe that’s what the music director didn’t want—for him to overshadow the other kids.

  But no one else seemed to mind. After the show, other parents told Gayle how much they had enjoyed Eli’s performance.

  “He’s got flair,” one said.

  Later, Eli’s teacher tried to smooth things over with Gayle, who was still fuming over the episode.

  “Not everyone’s trained in inclusion,” the teacher said, using the special-ed buzzword to explain the music director’s mistake.

  Gayle did not find this explanation satisfactory. In the twenty-first century, you don’t know that you should try to include everyone? she thought. That’s not special training. That’s being human.

  * * *

  ELI AND GAYLE MADE THEIR way to the Algonquin Cabin, where they’d be spending the next five days along with three other boys and their mothers. When they walked in, one of the boys, a ten-year-old named Eric, was performing energetic karate chops in the middle of the room, leaping into the air and then landing heavily, slicing the air with a guttural “Yah!”

  Eric’s mother called him over to where she stood tucking sheets around a plasticized mattress. In reply, he chopped the air defiantly. His mother shook her head.

  “It’s like he has no self-control,” she lamented.

  “I know the feeling,” said Gayle. Eli, meanwhile, noticed the overhead ceiling fan and shrieked with glee.

  “I love this cabin!” he shouted, bolting past Eric to the center of the room, where he gawked at the ceiling. “It’s so beautiful!”

  The cabin was lined with wooden bunks in facing rows separated by windows with red gingham curtains. The three other pairs of mothers and sons had arrived earlier and piled their luggage on the bunks they’d claimed. Gayle set her bags down on the beds opposite those taken by Eric and his mother. Eric had marked his bed with the blue stuffed monster he carried wherever he went—unless he was karate chopping. One bed over, a woman who introduced herself as Amy sorted through a pile of clothes to find a change of shirt for her son, eleven-year-old Duncan.

  On the far end of Eli and Gayle’s row were eleven-year-old Mark and his mother, Kathleen, both Whispering Trails veterans. Kathleen crossed the cabin to introduce herself to Gayle and then to Eli, who said a quick hello without looking away from the fan.

  “Oh, he has the typical interests,” Kathleen observed. “Fans, vacuums, spinners?”

  Gayle nodded.

  “The first year we were here, we tried to hide the vacuums,” Kathleen said. “All the campers were obsessed. They’d run off and we’d find them in the cabins, vacuuming.”

  While they talked, Eli sang a bar of the Lion King song “Hakuna Matata.”

  “When I was a young warthog,” he bellowed, still staring at the ceiling fan.

  “When I was a young wartHOG!” Mark bellowed back. Eli finally lowered his chin and looked at his bunkmate. Without pausing to introduce themselves, they fell instantly into the easy rapport of a lounge act.

  “It’s my problem-free . . .” Eli sang, and pointed to Mark.

  “. . . philosophy,” Mark went on. “Hakuna Matata!” The boys both doubled over with laughter.

  Their unfettered exuberance warmed Gayle’s heart and reassured her that coming here had been the right choice. Eli was free to be himself without adjusting to fit someone else’s standards. Gayle was free from the burden of explaining his actions. If he ran off to vacuum, no one would ask why. And he wouldn’t be alone. This feeling of freedom was exactly what she had wished for when she signed him up for camp.

  It was only an hour or two later that Gayle remembered the adage about being careful what you wish for. She was making Eli’s bed when Eli wandered out the cabin door, following Mark and Eric up the hill toward the cafeteria. She looked up to find him gone.

  “Where did Eli go?” she asked with a hint of panic.

  “They’re walking up to dinner,” Kathleen answered breezily. Seeing Gayle’s face go white, she added, “They’re pretty safe around here.”

  “Oh, I know,” Gayle said quickly, but it didn’t stop her from dropping the sheets onto the bed and reaching for her purse. Eli had almost never been out of her sight; now he was roaming the Michigan wilderness with kids he’d just met. Her heart raced and she moved toward the door, trying not to run. But before she could escape, Kathleen launched into an explanation of camp procedure, the daily schedule, how the kids would be sorted into groups by age.

  “There are five or six kids in each group, labeled by color. I think Eli’s in the red group with Mark. What does it say on your schedule?”

  Gayle didn’t answer. Her eyes remained fixed on the window, where she spotted Eli disappearing up the path to the main lodge. She edged toward the door while Kathleen spoke.

  “I’m just going to head up,” she said, pointing out the window with an apologetic look. Kathleen’s eyebrows rose. Gayle was suddenly self-conscious of how overprotective she appeared to be.

  Kathleen seemed to read her mind. “Everyone’s a little uptight their first time here,” she said soothingly.

  “Tomorrow I’ll be better,” Gayle promised. She smiled sheepishly.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Kathleen said, nodding.

  “I’m a single parent,” Gayle added. “It’s always just us. I guess I keep him on a short leash.”

  “Sure, of course,” Kathleen said. “It’s all right.”

  By now Gayle was at the cabin door; she opened it and speed walked toward the cafeteria. She rejoined Eli just as he swooped in for a hug from a young, curvaceous woman, one of the camp counselors. Gayle’s real-world instincts kicked in again, and she pried him away from the woman.

  * * *

  WHILE THE OTHER MOTHERS ALLOWED their children to tear through the cabins like hyperactive tornadoes, hugging whomever they wanted, Gayle kept pulling Eli to her side, admonishing him to quiet down, to keep his hands to himself, to stop harassing the counselors. She was astonished by the laxity of the other mothers. They, in turn, were surprised by her vigilance.

  One of Gayle’s bunkmates—Duncan’s mother, Amy—urged Gayle to think of camp as a break from the real world, a vacation from the constant supervision that Will
iams normally required. During the day, she told Gayle, most parents left their kids with the counselors and went into town.

  “From 8:30 to lunchtime, you can do whatever you want,” Amy said. “We go to Starbucks or go shopping.”

  “Wow, three hours of free time?” Gayle said. “I haven’t had that in . . . twelve years.” She smiled, but somehow the prospect didn’t strike her as a relief. It took all her willpower to leave Eli behind and head to Starbucks the next morning. She ordered a latte, then stopped at Meijer for more bug spray and some snacks for Eli.

  But when the checkout line moved slowly, she grew restless. She leafed through Us Weekly without looking at it. She told herself it was the caffeine making her jittery, but still she raced back to camp, returning well before lunchtime.

  Watching other mothers relax, giving their children relatively free rein, Gayle wondered whether she was being too uptight—or whether Eli was more of a handful than the rest of the kids.

  Each day the campers went through a circuit of different sessions. They sang, danced, and drummed, in turn; they played xylophones and recorders; and, of course, they made crafts. The campers earned a plastic bead for completing a session successfully, which meant keeping their hands to themselves, paying attention, following instructions, and respecting personal boundaries. They strung the beads proudly on the lanyards that bore their name tags. But by the end of the first day Eli had accrued noticeably fewer beads than the other campers in his group.