The Boy Who Loved Too Much

by Jennifer Latson

  “It sounds good, right, Mike?” Eli shouted over the roar of the motor.

  The Tennant 5400 had recently been repaired after its motor started acting up, which Eli had recognized instantly because the noise it made was not quite right. Now it was back at the right timbre and pitch, to Eli’s relief. Mike wasn’t sure how long the fix would last, though. It was an old piece of equipment, likely to wear out before too much longer.

  “You got a new battery?” Eli asked.

  “No, but I’m sure we’ll need a new one soon. This one’s about four years old.”

  Eli’s attention span had grown since middle school. He was less easily distracted from the task at hand. His greatest impediment now was his strength, which gave out after he’d cleaned about two-thirds of the cafeteria floor. He dragged his feet, sneakers squeaking on the wet linoleum; his smile became a grimace. Finally he stepped out of the way and Mike took over. But his stamina was improving. Every Friday he got a little farther.

  “When can I clean the kitchen?” he asked hopefully. Mike had promised him that once he was able to clean the entire cafeteria, he could move on to the kitchen. It was a tighter space, and required navigating around islands, but Eli was dying to scrub it because it had real floor tiles, not just linoleum.

  “Maybe by the end of the year,” Mike said. “You’re really getting good at this.”

  * * *

  GAYLE WISHED SHE COULD SAY she’d noticed a gradual change in Eli’s behavior, perhaps corresponding to the various strategies she and his therapists had tried over the years: the token system and the social stories, the time-outs and the revoked privileges, the praise and the tough love. But it seemed to have happened almost overnight: the tantrums subsided, the hugging diminished, and Eli emerged as a more mature, reserved version of his former self. Whatever had prompted the change, it seemed to have come from within him. Just as all of Gayle’s efforts to teach him to walk and talk had amounted to nothing until one day he was suddenly ready, this newfound restraint seemed to be a developmental stage that he had reached on his own, in his own time. It’s not that her strategies hadn’t helped. It’s just that they percolated until he knew what to do with them. And one day they clicked.

  It might not have been a coincidence that the click coincided with Eli’s first year of high school. Maybe, just as Eli had believed he would magically transform into a teenager overnight, sprouting a mustache the moment he turned thirteen, he saw high school as a place where no one threw tantrums, or gawked at ceiling fans, or hugged everyone in sight. Maybe he believed this so firmly that he’d simply willed himself to mature.

  Or maybe it was the medicine. Eli’s psychiatrist had once again tweaked his combination of anxiety and ADHD drugs over the summer, which could partly explain his improved impulse control.

  Either way, Eli had become calmer and more composed. His conversational skills had improved. He listened to what other people said and offered topical responses, rather than hijacking the conversation to spew facts about fans and floor scrubbers. Most importantly, he greeted his classmates with a handshake or a high-five, or even just a “Hello.”

  Part of the credit for his transformation went to his new teacher, Alicia Losada, who headed the life skills class in which Eli spent most of his school day. A seasoned special-education teacher with three decades in the classroom, she kept Eli on track with discipline backed by genuine warmth and caring. As his middle school teachers could attest, he had always responded badly to correction from people who were frustrated or annoyed with him. He preferred to win them over, of course, but if he sensed that he couldn’t, he might head-butt them instead. With Ms. Losada, he was highly motivated to please, to reward her faith in him by behaving as she wanted him to.

  She set high standards for him, as she did for all her students. She considered behavioral issues her top concern as a teacher of special-needs kids. In ten years, she reasoned, the average person who met Eli or one of his classmates would have no idea whether he could read a chapter book, but they’d judge him instantly if he intruded on their personal space. Like Gayle, Ms. Losada was a pragmatist who recognized that, in an ideal world, everyone her students encountered would tolerate their differences and treat them with compassion. But since that was unlikely to happen in real life, she strove to help them to fit in with the world as it existed.

  Still, she wasn’t as worried about Eli’s behavior as Gayle had been. His occasional displays of affection didn’t bother her, since every high school student displayed affection sometimes. Because Eli’s hugging had been a problem in the past, she still had to talk to him whenever he did it, and to make a note of it in his records, which she shared with Gayle. If not for that, she wouldn’t have given it a second thought. She once confided in Gayle that Eli’s middle school reports, especially the one documenting forty counts of “inappropriate touching” in a single day, had given her pause—but only because she was so surprised by how little trouble he’d caused when he began his freshman year.

  It was almost Thanksgiving now, but she’d had to confront Eli about his behavior only once, and that had been in the first week of school. A number of high schoolers volunteered in a peer-mentoring program called Best Buddies, which partnered them with special-needs students. One volunteer, a blond girl Eli adored, was in the life skills class one day when Eli ambush-hugged her, wrapping his arms around her from behind. One of the older boys in the class, a high-functioning senior who had taken Eli under his wing, told him, “Eli, you can’t do that. It’s not appropriate.”

  Eli, embarrassed, lashed out at the older boy. He chased him around the room, yelling, “Don’t tell me what to do!” Ms. Losada pulled Eli aside and ushered him into a small room behind the cubbies where the students stored their coats and bags. She didn’t call it a time-out room, describing it simply as a quiet place where students could collect themselves.

  “Eli,” she said, “you know we don’t hug people without their permission. That’s one of the rules here.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do!” he yelled, his face red and tears streaming down his cheeks. “Get out of here! You’re fired!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said calmly. “You can’t fire me. I’m here for you because I care about you. And I want to see you do well.”

  He turned away from her, crossed his arms, and sulked for another few minutes. Then he wiped his tears on his sleeve.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Not long after, he told her that he loved her. Now he said so daily.

  * * *

  ELI’S PARTNER IN THE BEST Buddies program was a bright, charismatic junior named Scott. Around Halloween, a nearby school had hosted a fund-raising walk for the Best Buddies program, and Gayle and Eli joined Scott, Ms. Losada, and some of Eli’s classmates there. The school’s parking lot had been transformed into a fairground, with an orange bounce house and booths for face painting and pumpkin decorating. After greeting Ms. Losada and a gaggle of students, Gayle noticed the registration tent.

  “Oh, I have to go register us,” she said, mostly to Eli, who she assumed would accompany her.

  “You can go,” Ms. Losada said, her voice a teacherly reminder that part of making Eli more independent required Gayle to allow him more independence. “He’ll be fine here.”

  Feeling chastened, Gayle headed for the tent alone. She had been trying to give Eli more space, but it still didn’t come naturally. This was another of the daily tests in stepping back that she had not quite passed.

  When she returned from registration, Scott and the pack of girls who formed his entourage had coalesced around Eli: a textbook example of the social opportunities that emerge when your mother isn’t hovering close by. Eli beamed at the attention. Gayle, eager to prove to herself and Ms. Losada that she had learned her lesson, maintained a respectful distance—not quite out of earshot, but far enough away that Eli could easily ignore her. A year ago she would have rushed to his side, most likely to peel him off of whomever he wa
s hugging. But now he seemed comfortable, not overstimulated, and capable of interacting with a group of peers on his own. He wasn’t manically greeting or hugging everyone. He was just chatting about school with a girl named Meghan.

  When a Selena Gomez song came on, Scott pointed toward the speakers and said playfully, “Eli, that’s my girlfriend singing.”

  Eli turned to look where Scott was pointing and waved to a girl standing near the speakers. She waved back tentatively.

  “No,” Scott said. “I meant Selena Gomez is my girlfriend.”

  Eli turned again to face the girl by the speakers. “Hi, Selena Gomez!” he yelled. The girl cocked her head; Scott and the others laughed. Eli smiled, pleased to have made a joke, even if unintentionally.

  When the walk started, Eli jogged a little to keep up with Scott and the girls, but then turned and looked at Gayle with Ms. Losada a few paces behind. He slowed to hang back with them.

  “Go ahead! Walk with your friends!” Gayle said, shooing him away.

  “But what about you, Mom?”

  “I’m going to walk back here. You go ahead.”

  He turned and skipped forward. “Hey, guys!” he shouted. “Wait up! Wait for me!”

  He maneuvered next to the girl he’d been talking to earlier. Snippets of their conversation drifted back toward Gayle.

  “So, Meghan, how old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m fourteen,” she said.

  “Me too! I’m fourteen!” he said excitedly. When she didn’t reply, he tried another line of questioning.

  “Meghan, what are you doing tonight?” he asked.

  “I’ll be at home,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Hanging out with my parents.”

  “Not going to a party?”

  “Nope.”

  “I was invited to a party, but I have to work,” interjected Scott, who had a part-time job at Dairy Queen. “So I can’t go to the party.”

  “Can I come to the party?” Eli asked.

  “Well, it’s not my party. It’s my friend’s party,” Scott said.

  “So I’m not invited?” Eli asked.

  Scott laughed. Eli stared at him with an expectant half smile.

  “Oh, you don’t know him, Eli,” Scott said tactfully.

  Still just shy of five feet tall, Eli stood chest-high to Scott and nearly a head shorter than Meghan. Eli’s doctor had already warned Gayle that Eli was nearly done growing; the dark facial hair she helped him shave twice a week signaled the end of an early puberty.

  “He might get another inch if he’s lucky, but that’s about it,” the doctor had said.

  From behind them, Gayle could see a patch of gray hair forming near the crown of Eli’s head. It looked almost white compared with the rest of his thick, dark hair—a reminder that people with Williams go gray much earlier than normal. It was hard enough for Gayle to think of Eli as a teenager, and the sight of his graying hair unsettled her. He seemed so much younger than his classmates, but somehow also aged beyond his years.

  * * *

  GAYLE WAS EVEN MORE EXCITED and nervous than Eli was when Scott asked him to lunch at Ruby Tuesday one weekend a few weeks after the Best Buddies walk. They had already gone to the movies together. Gayle had dropped Eli off at the theater with a ticket for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and ten dollars for snacks. When she picked him up, his face was smeared with chocolate. She pulled a napkin from her purse and wiped him clean while Scott told her they had both enjoyed the movie and had no trouble other than that Eli had gotten so excited, he occasionally squealed with delight. Eli glowed for the rest of the day, boasting to anyone who would listen: “I hung out with my friend today. He’s a really cool guy.”

  Gayle wasn’t sure if the feeling was mutual or whether Scott would feel that he had fulfilled his obligation to Eli, and that would be that. So she was thrilled when he called to ask about lunch. It meant he was getting something out of their time together besides fodder for the community service section of his college application.

  Still, going to a restaurant required more advanced social skills than sitting through a movie, and she couldn’t picture Eli making it through a meal without disaster of some variety. She knew he would want to visit the salad bar; she usually got his salad for him. Images of dropped plates and strewn toppings flashed through her head. In addition to the mechanics of mealtime, there were also the subtleties of small talk to contend with.

  “What are you going to talk to Scott about?” she asked as the lunch date approached.

  “School,” Eli said. “And exams.”

  “Not about floor scrubbers?”

  “No, Mom!” he said in a tone that conveyed, “Duh.”

  When Scott met them outside the restaurant, Gayle tried to act casual but couldn’t stop giving instructions and warnings.

  “He’s going to need help with the salad bar,” she told Scott.

  “OK, got it,” he said, smiling politely.

  “And sometimes he eats too fast,” she said. “You have to kind of watch him so he doesn’t choke.”

  “Got it.”

  “And he might not be able to cut his food. You might have to help him with that.”

  “Got it.”

  Gayle finally broke off, although there was more she wanted to add. Scott and Eli retreated into the restaurant, while she went to a nearby Panera Bread and ate lunch alone. When she thought back on her list of instructions, she wanted to kick herself: Scott probably doesn’t find Eli annoying at all. It’s his crazy mother who’s the problem.

  She picked at her own salad, trying to sort out her feelings. On the one hand, she felt immensely proud. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, even a year earlier, for Eli to be out on his own, doing something social with a friend. Even if Scott might not have befriended him outside the Best Buddies program, the fact that Eli could interact with him meaningfully, without smothering him with hugs and compliments, was an accomplishment beyond Gayle’s past expectations. She was filled with new hope for Eli’s future and the prospect that he might be capable of more than she had ever thought possible.

  On the other hand, she felt a twinge of sadness and loss, as if she were mourning the boy who couldn’t go anywhere without his mother. It was the bittersweet feeling that comes to all parents with the realization that their baby is no longer a baby. But for Gayle it marked a transition she hadn’t been sure she’d ever see.

  Now the signs were hard to miss. Sometimes Eli could be as surly as a typical teenager, fighting her intense involvement in his life. When he came home from school one afternoon, she asked him what he had eaten for lunch.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “You don’t know?” she asked. “It was three hours ago.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You don’t know or you don’t want to tell me?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s none of your business, Mom!” he said indignantly.

  Watching him walk into Ruby Tuesday with his buddy, she’d been struck by how sure of himself he seemed. Now she wondered if she had grown too attached to the earlier, defenseless version of her son. Had she become too dependent on him, even as she feared that he depended too much on her? And, if so, had she held him back from the things he could have done if she hadn’t been standing in the way, trying to shield him from the world?

  Eli’s transition to life skills training in high school had saddened her some, even though she’d pushed for it. She had heard that kids with Williams syndrome tended to plateau academically around middle school. And she appreciated that Eli’s quality of life would improve most by learning those skills of daily living the rest of us take for granted: being able to bathe himself, feed himself, clothe himself, and get around without the constant assistance of his mother. Still, the idea of Eli studying a bus schedule and learning how to shop for groceries depressed her. Partly she lamented that this wou
ld be the focus of his high school experience, and partly that he needed these skills because she wouldn’t always be around to provide for him.

  So far, high school had been harder for her than for Eli, who had embraced its challenges as steps on the path to adulthood. He loved being able to eat lunch in the cafeteria without an aide hovering close by. He loved cooking in his life skills class, loved doing laundry. He especially loved his weekly turn with the floor scrubber. When one of his doctors asked, during a checkup, how high school was going, Eli answered, “It’s my new life. It’s my dream come true.”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE VISITED THE WSA Facebook page, which she still did daily, Gayle saw parents of kindergartners who weren’t talking yet asking, “Should we try Hooked on Phonics?” Parents of elementary schoolers asked, “Which math program works best for our kids?” It was as if they believed there was a single secret technique that would unlock their children’s potential. They’ll talk when they’re ready to talk, Gayle thought when she read their posts. They’ll learn when they’re ready to learn. You can’t stop them from having a developmental disability.

  But she didn’t judge the parents for trying. It wasn’t so long ago that she herself had been searching for the magic bullet. I thought I was going to outsmart Williams syndrome, too, she recalled. Now I’m grateful if Eli can put his shirt on right side out.

  Eli didn’t seem to have a clear grasp yet of what his future held, exactly. Seeing his schoolmates get their learner’s permits, he had asked Gayle when he would be able to drive. She didn’t want to dash his hopes, so she simply said, “Driving might make you nervous right now. Let’s wait awhile.” He hadn’t asked again. He wasn’t as interested in driving as he was in floor scrubbing, anyway.

  Apart from a new set of skills and aspirations, Eli had also acquired a new vocabulary in high school. When he described something as “sexy” for the first time, Gayle asked him what the word meant. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.