The Boy Who Loved Too Much

by Jennifer Latson

  “I really need something,” he shouted again. His voice cascaded down from the skylights and echoed through the bustling corridor. A mall custodian, carrying a bag of trash past the ATM, looked at the cashier of a nearby newsstand and circled her finger around her ear in the international sign for “crazy.” Clusters of people moved to the other side of the walkway, giving Eli a wide berth.

  “I don’t like your tone, young man,” Gayle said without turning from the ATM screen. “You’re not getting anything if you shout like that.”

  “Awww,” he moaned. He kicked the floor, squeaking rubber against tile. “You’re being mean.”

  Mimi reached a hand toward him.

  “Eli, you’re tired. Let’s go back and rest.”

  “I don’t want to rest,” he yelled, shrugging off her hand. “I just want to get a little something!”

  Mimi pointed out a pair of security guards not far away.

  “Eli, those policemen are going to come talk to you if you don’t quiet down,” she said. But Eli ignored the threat and continued to fume.

  Gayle was withdrawing her money from the machine when Eli suddenly turned to Mimi, lowered his head, and charged at her like a bull, head-butting her in the stomach. The force was enough to shove her backward, almost knocking her off her feet. She inhaled sharply, stumbling to regain her balance.

  “Eli, what are you doing?” Gayle cried. She pulled him toward her. He was flailing, his head still lowered, and blind with anger. He wheeled around at Mimi and hit her again, a hard backhand to the shoulder. Her eyes filled with tears of surprise and pain. She retreated around the corner of the ATM, out of Eli’s sight.

  Gayle grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes, trying to hold his gaze. “Calm down,” she said in a low voice. “What’s gotten into you? You do not hit Mimi. Pull yourself together.”

  She let go of his shoulders and put a hand on his arm as she said this, but he slapped it away, then shoved her forcefully. Gayle stared at him, shocked. He was so solidly built that even if she tried to subdue him, he could overpower her. She had never put much thought into who would win in a fight, but it occurred to her now that he might.

  Just then he kicked her in the shin. He was far enough away that the kick didn’t land squarely, but still she was stunned. She stood paralyzed. Eli turned to find his grandmother but didn’t see her.

  “Hey! Come back here,” he said, jogging around the ATM to find her. She was just on the other side; he nearly collided with her. In a growl, he immediately contradicted himself. “Get away from me!” He spun on his heels, turning his back to her, and hugged his arms across his chest. “Get away from me, you bastard!”

  Gayle shook herself out of her paralysis and took Eli by the arm, pulling him toward the hotel. He yelled all the way. One of the security guards watched them pass, but he only smiled and kept walking in the other direction. Mimi was relieved, because by then Eli was shouting, “Let me out of here! Don’t touch me!” and she worried that, despite her earlier threat, Gayle might be the one the police actually wanted to talk to.

  Eli was still howling when they entered the glass doors that separated the hotel from the mall. Gayle pulled him into an alcove and sat him next to her on a leather-cushioned bench. Anyone entering or leaving the hotel could see him, and anyone anywhere in the building could hear him. But she knew they couldn’t make it across the lobby and up to the room like this. She needed to calm him down.

  She could barely think straight herself, however. She couldn’t remember how much money she’d gotten out of the ATM, or even whether she’d retrieved her debit card. All she could focus on was her son, now flailing at her like a windmill, scratching her bare arms. Mimi leaned over and put a tentative hand on his, but when he pumped his legs to kick her, Gayle shooed her back.

  “Watch out, Mom,” she said. “You’ll get hurt.”

  Mimi stepped back.

  “I think we need some alone time,” Gayle said. “If you want to just wait for us in the room, I’ll be up there when he’s cooled down.”

  Mimi nodded, but she was reluctant to leave them behind. She walked away slowly, then stopped around a corner about twenty yards away. She was out of Gayle and Eli’s sight, but she could hear them and see the faces of people passing by. Some looked at Gayle and Eli askance. Some were parents wearing convention name tags, who shook their heads sympathetically. Some were people with Williams, who clamped their hands over their sensitive ears and hurried past. A few others, with less sensitive ears, gave Eli a long, worried look.

  In the alcove, Gayle was quickly running through her repertoire of tantrum stoppers. She had tried “I’m disappointed and embarrassed.” She had tried “We’re going to have to go home if you keep acting like this.” She had even reused “The police are going to come if you don’t cut it out.” But none of it seemed to have any effect.

  Meanwhile, Mimi considered going back for the lobster grabber if it was the only way to end Eli’s hysterics. But she knew Gayle would object to rewarding his meltdown. Buying him the toy now would teach him that he could hold them hostage with his behavior, as the parents of toddlers everywhere could attest.

  Mimi peeked around the corner and saw that Eli was still enraged. Gayle was holding him by the arm while he punched, slapped, and scratched her. Finally she let go. Eli threw himself down on the floor and rolled onto his back, stomping the marble heavily under his sneakers. His face was flushed red and wet with tears.

  A new passerby appeared; a svelte, delicately featured man wearing a white polo shirt and khakis so light they were almost white. He walked straight toward Gayle and Eli. Gayle grew nervous. This was just what she needed: a stranger intervening.

  “What’s wrong?” the man asked. His manner was confident and disarming, his cologne citrusy, his voice inflected with a thick Spanish accent.

  “Oh, he’s just having kind of a rough time right now,” Gayle said.

  The man nodded. Eli had stopped kicking the floor and was sitting up, watching the stranger with rapt curiosity. The man knelt down to Eli’s level and grasped Eli’s hands firmly.

  “Are you the police?” Eli asked.

  “I’m an angel,” the man said. “God sent me here because he said you needed a little help calming down.”

  Eli was suddenly quiet. Mimi could hear her heart pound.

  “Now, take a deep breath, in and out,” the man said softly.

  Eli obliged. The man pressed Eli’s hands to his heart.

  “You know your mom loves you, and she feels so sad when you’re upset, right?”

  Eli nodded.

  “Do you feel better?” the man asked.

  Eli nodded again. The man stood and said good-bye. Eli was still sniffling, but by now he was sufficiently calm to walk with his mother back to the elevator, where Mimi joined them. In a daze, Gayle led them up to their room on the twenty-third floor. She was too stunned to be angry, and in any case she wasn’t sure who to be angry with: Eli for punching her, or herself for letting a man claiming to be an angel lay hands on her son. She couldn’t decide whether the man was delusional or just magically gifted at soothing troubled kids. Maybe both. But she was mortified that it had taken a stranger, and possibly an insane stranger, to control her son when she couldn’t. After a lifetime of thinking she knew best for Eli, she felt as if she no longer had a clue how to help him.

  Once inside the hotel room, Eli began to wind down from his tantrum. While Gayle examined the half-moon gouges where he had pierced her skin with his fingernails, and Mimi rubbed the tender skin on her shoulder from his backhand slap, Eli’s thoughts turned to floor scrubbing. He had asked Gayle earlier to build him another cardboard-box floor scrubber. She had explained that their hotel room wasn’t stocked with craft supplies, but that she thought she might be able to improvise.

  “Oh, you said you can find something?” he reminded her now with contrived nonchalance. “Like, a scrubber?”

  She extended the handle
of her hard-shelled rolling suitcase and offered it to him. He grabbed the handle and jerked the suitcase back and forth in the quick push-pull movements of a vacuum cleaner, making vrooming noises with his mouth and trailing lines across the thick blue carpet. His intense focus on the imaginary task gave him tunnel vision. He bumped into Mimi, then collided with a wall.

  “Careful, Eli,” Gayle said. “You’re running over everybody.”

  “Hey, move that bed,” he barked at Mimi as he made for the rollaway bed where he slept, next to the king bed Gayle and Mimi were sharing. “I gotta clean the floor.”

  “Eli, I’m not moving that bed,” Mimi said. “You’ll have to clean around it.”

  “Ohhh,” he whined. His brow furrowed as he continued to vacuum furiously, occasionally running over his own feet with the suitcase.

  Gayle lay across the bed while Mimi sat in an armchair by the window, both of them lost in thought and exhausted. For a while the only sound in the room was Eli’s vrooming and the thuds of the suitcase hitting furniture.

  “What did you think of that guy who said he was an angel?” Gayle finally asked her mother. “I probably shouldn’t have let him touch Eli, right? I was just—I didn’t even know what was going on.”

  “But he calmed Eli down,” Mimi offered.

  “He was probably a crazy person,” Gayle said. “And here I am letting him get right up in Eli’s face.”

  She rolled onto her side and looked at Eli.

  “I want to ask you something,” Gayle said to him as he banged the suitcase into a corner. “What do you think about that guy in the white shirt? What do you think he was?”

  “He was a big nurse,” Eli said.

  “A big nurse?” Gayle repeated. He could be right, she thought. The man knew exactly how to soothe a crying child: he applied pressure to Eli’s hands, got down to his level, made eye contact, instructed him to breathe deeply. Maybe he was a nurse—or a counselor, or a teacher. Or perhaps he really was an angel. He had, after all, appeared miraculously out of nowhere and calmed Eli down when nothing else could.

  Across the room, Eli suddenly seemed to realize that he was pretending to vacuum, not scrub, the floor, and that the suitcase was missing a key floor-scrubbing component.

  “I need a hose for my scrubber,” he declared.

  “Eli, this is a hotel,” Mimi said. “You can’t just get a hose here. It’s not like at home, where Uncle Chris gives them to you.”

  “No, I need a hose,” he persisted. “Can you call the front desk?”

  “No, we can’t call the front desk,” Mimi said.

  “I just need a hose!” he cried.

  “Eli, you have to be quiet or the people in the next room will hear you,” Mimi said.

  He pointed a finger at her. “Hey!” he said. “You never do anything nice for me!”

  She frowned, crestfallen.

  “Eli, that’s a mean thing to say to Mimi,” Gayle said.

  He flopped onto the rollaway bed, face-first into the down pillow. He kicked his feet in the air. He had already kicked off his sneakers, and now his gray socks bunched loosely below his ankles, about to fly off.

  “I can’t live like this!” he complained. Gayle rolled her eyes, but Mimi interjected anxiously, “Eli, what’s wrong? Is something hurting you?”

  “You hurt me,” he said. “You hurt my feelings.”

  “No, I mean, is something hurting you? Like your head? Or your tummy?” She turned to Gayle. “Maybe he needs an Advil or something.”

  “He needs a tranquilizer gun,” Gayle said, then clarified: “I need a tranquilizer gun.”

  Eli lifted his face and turned to his mother, leaving a head-size impression in the down pillow. “She never lets me do anything,” he said angrily, now referring to Gayle. “She’s yelling at me.”

  “No, you’re the only one yelling,” Mimi said quietly. “I don’t think you’re being fair.”

  “I hate her,” he said tearfully.

  “Eli, I don’t think you know what ‘hate’ means,” Mimi said.

  “I hate you, Mom,” he said, looking Gayle in the eyes. It was the first time he’d ever uttered those words, and it felt like a punch to the gut, knocking the wind out of her. Getting kicked in the shin had been far less painful.

  Seeing her stricken look, Eli buried his face in the pillow again. He continued to kick the mattress, unwilling to let the aftershocks of his tantrum die away completely, but he toned down the harshness of his language.

  “I’m upset,” he moaned. “I’m just tired! I don’t feel good now.”

  “Do you want me to give you some Advil?” Gayle asked, recovering from her shock.

  “I don’t like Advil!” he shouted.

  Gayle sighed and leaned back against the pillows.

  “What I’m going to do? I’m sick!” Eli yelled.

  “No, you’re not sick,” Mimi assured him. “You’re upset.”

  Gayle rubbed her temples, feeling sick and upset herself. She knew that parenting a teenager was a hard, thankless job, but this was an even greater challenge. This was the surliness of a typical teen mixed with the irrational volatility of a two-year-old. She was starting to understand how other parents had reached the end of their rope. What if this was what the future held: the tantrums of Eli’s toddler years, acted out by a full-grown man? She was already unable to physically restrain him. He could easily hurt himself, or her.

  Just a week or two earlier, she and Mimi had joked that Eli was turning into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: loving and happy one minute, an irascible maniac the next. As soon as his tantrums subsided, he was astonished by his own bad behavior. But while he was in Hyde form, neither he himself nor anyone else could shake him out of it.

  Gayle feared that the Hyde in him was becoming more dominant, and more destructive. At times it was hard to recognize the sweet, endlessly empathetic boy with whom she had spent the last thirteen years.

  While Eli lay moaning on the rollaway bed, flooded with feelings he didn’t fully understand, Gayle closed her eyes, overwhelmed by the enormity and inscrutability of his needs. She was at a loss for how to ease his suffering, as well as her own. His behavior had grown so erratic that logic and reason no longer seemed like useful parenting tools. And where she had once worried only about protecting him, she now had to consider how to protect herself from him. Her love for Eli was boundless, but when it was met with insults and physical abuse, it no longer carried the same rewards it once had, when her love was only ever met with love.

  Nineteen

  Tough Love

  The next morning Eli was his usual bubbly, cheerful self. He woke with the sunrise and sang quietly while he covered the hotel stationery in thick crayon swirls.

  Gayle had not bounced back so quickly. She was a little distant, and Eli could sense it.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said while she applied her makeup in front of the mirror.

  “What are you sorry for?” she asked, curious to see if he understood the effects of his behavior from the night before.

  “I’m sorry you got upset.”

  Gayle sighed, brushing on mascara. He knows I’m not happy, she thought, but he doesn’t know why. She knew it would do no good to lecture him now, though. Mr. Hyde was gone and Dr. Jekyll was back, amiably oblivious to his partner’s offenses.

  For breakfast, Gayle and Mimi brought Eli to the Starbucks in the Sheraton lobby, where Gayle ordered a latte for herself and a slice of coffee cake for Eli. Scanning the café, Gayle recognized a familiar face: Susie, Eli’s crush from music camp. She’d wondered whether Susie would attend the convention. Eli had wondered, too—and hoped she would. The night before they arrived he had asked Gayle, “Is Susie going to be there?”

  “Who?” Gayle had said, feigning ignorance.

  “Susie,” he repeated cheerfully. “The one who said, ‘Go away.’ ”

  Now Susie recognized a family at the table next to the one where Mimi and Eli were sitting, and she greeted
them warmly. Her expression cooled when she walked past Eli; she seemed to have recognized him, too. When he noticed her, however, he nearly jumped out of his seat, smiling and waving.

  “Susie! Susie!! Remember me? Hi! Hey! Susie!”

  Susie didn’t break stride. Her high ponytail swished behind her like a finger wagging.

  “Eli, if someone doesn’t want to say hi to you, you don’t keep trying. Just let her go,” Mimi said, putting a hand over his. He didn’t seem to hear his grandmother, though.

  “Susie, remember me?” he called again at her retreating back. Finally she turned to look at him.

  “Yes,” she said curtly. She turned away again and disappeared around a corner.

  For once, Eli did not seem satisfied with this crisp acknowledgment. His smile faded. His brow furrowed in contemplation. If she remembered him, why hadn’t she greeted him right away?

  Gayle could see the dark cloud moving across his face when she returned with the coffee cake. She took it as a mark of maturity, both encouraging and disheartening, that Eli finally seemed to recognize rejection. A year ago he would have simply chased after Susie, begging for her attention. Now he shifted his focus inward, brooding over the snub. Gayle was unsure how to help him cope with this new form of hurt. She picked an old technique and tried to distract him with the promise of a reward for good behavior.

  “You’re doing so great today,” she said. “I think you’re going to earn a token if you keep it up.”

  He swiveled in his seat to face her. Despite his newfound angst, the old technique still worked. He smiled, knowing that earning enough tokens meant Gayle would make a handle for the cardboard-box floor scrubber she had built for him at home.

  “I want to earn the handle, Mom!”

  * * *

  GAYLE DROPPED ELI OFF AGAIN in the cacophonous conference room full of teenagers. They were going on another field trip, this time to see the Blue Man Group. Eli was excited because he had been told there would be drumming and dancing, although he was having a hard time understanding why the performers would be blue. He’d asked Gayle an endless string of questions about it. To clarify, she showed him a YouTube clip of the group, but he still seemed anxious, apparently concerned that he, too, would be painted blue.