“So, what do you think?” he asked, blowing on his cup.
Layne shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m worried about him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m just worried. He seems so awkward to me, still.”
Guilt. He could see it in her eyes. She felt guilty about going back to work and leaving her son with his father when what he needed was a mother.
“Look. Layne. We’ll get through this. Okay, I’ve lost some time with him, but there’s lots of time left. He’s just turned five years old. Over the next year we’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll go back to work. I’ll take on a second job if I have to, and we can hire a professional to work with him full time, or maybe you can take a leave of absence and stay home with him yourself. I’ll do whatever you want me to do to help Dylan get better.” He meant it; he would have done anything. He was carrying more than a little guilt of his own.
“Well,” she said, sipping her coffee, dropping the little red stirring stick in the trash, “let’s wait and see. Maybe it’s not so bad.”
* * *
When Dr. Zubek called them back into her office for the final consult they braced themselves. When she sat down behind her desk and opened the folder she turned into a professional again. She looked stern.
“So, Mr. Brannigan, am I to understand that you were the primary caregiver for this child over the last”—she glanced at the folder—“year?”
“Uh, yeah. I, uh, quit my job and stayed with him pretty much all the time.”
“And did you follow the prescribed therapy routine?” Her face was dead serious, and her tone was almost accusatory.
“Well, mostly, yeah. Not exactly. I may have been a little slack now and then, but things can get, you know . . . hectic, at our house.”
“Well, I’d like to know what you did. What Dylan did all day. What sort of activities was he involved in routinely?”
He had to think about it pretty hard. It felt like an IRS audit—Mr. Brannigan, can you justify yourself?
“Well, he spent a lot of time helping me. You know, projects. Work. Mostly carpenter work, but a little of everything. He was just sort of my sidekick, you know? You have to watch Dylan pretty close, and the easiest way was to keep him up under me, doing whatever I was doing.” He was starting to sweat. He glanced at Layne, but her face was completely blank.
“I see,” Dr. Zubek said, and turned a page in the folder, studying it. “Well, the reason I’m asking is that, comparing his initial test results to what I’ve seen here today, he’s shown startling improvement in nearly every category.”
Mick looked up at her in stunned disbelief. He thought maybe he’d misunderstood, but Dr. Zubek was smiling. Slowly, he turned to Layne. She turned to him in the same instant, with the same shocked expression. She reached out and squeezed his hand, and there were tears in her eyes.
“He’s better?” Mick asked, shock still apparent on his face.
“Oh yes, considerably. You’ve done a remarkable job with him. Frankly, I was wondering if the initial assessment was in error.” She lifted a chart from his file and stared at it. “According to this file he had speech difficulties, he was reclusive, excessively impulsive and sometimes combative. He had problems with gross motor skills, tactile problems . . . Does he still hate to wear clothes?”
Layne cleared her throat and found her voice. “Well, he does take longer than the other children to get dressed, and he still hates socks—he says they itch him—but he doesn’t strip in public anymore, no.”
Dr. Zubek made a note on the chart. “So he still has some minor tactile issues, and I noticed he’s still easily distractible, owing I think to his auditory acuity. But everything else—his gross motor skills, his interaction with adults and other children, his strength and agility, perception . . . Frankly, Mrs. Brannigan, this kid knocked my socks off.”
Layne opened her mouth and drew a breath, but she couldn’t talk. She was choking up. Her eyes pooled. Not Mick. He was tough.
“So, is it okay for him to go to kindergarten?” Mick asked, as soon as he was sure he could control his voice. Starting school had, after all, been the whole point.
“He’ll do great,” Dr. Zubek said, smiling for the first time, closing the folder. “And I have to tell you, Mr. Brannigan, after seeing your results, I’m thinking of putting a carpenter’s corner in the gym.”
41
* * *
Ghost crabs.
LAYNE took off from work the last week of the summer so she could spend time with her children before they went back to school. They made plans to borrow a pop-up camper from a friend and take the kids to the beach, so Layne spent all day Saturday washing and packing while Mick put a hitch on the Explorer and went to pick up the camper. The kids were psyched about going to the beach. They all were. After the things the therapist said about Dylan, Mick and Layne felt like celebrating. A great weight had been lifted from them.
They couldn’t leave until after church on Sunday because Layne’s backup couldn’t make it and she had to teach the four-year-old Sunday school class. By Saturday night everything they needed for the trip was packed and ready to go. Layne snuggled up to Mick on the couch while the kids piled in the floor to watch a video.
“I wish you’d go to church with us tomorrow,” she said casually. It caught him a little off guard. Normally they played this game on Sunday morning. “You’re not going downtown in the morning, and it’s important for the kids to see their parents together in church once in a while, don’t you think?”
He was thinking about it when Ben interrupted, asking if he could split an apple with Toad. He came back a minute later with an apple and a paring knife, and plopped down next to his sister. There had been a time, not that long ago, when Ben and Toad couldn’t split an apple without an argument because one of them always got the smaller half, but Mick had taught them a simple principle he’d learned from his own brother when he was a kid.
“I’ll cut, you pick,” Ben said, slicing.
Toad just nodded, hesitated for a second and took the half she judged to be slightly bigger. Mick had to smile. Childish simplicity was usually foolproof.
“I tell you what,” he told Layne. “I’ll go to your church if you’ll go to mine.”
She raised her head off his shoulder and stared at him.
“Your church? What are you talking about?”
He hadn’t said much about the Beal Street Mission, mostly because he wanted to make up his own mind about things without feeling like he was being pushed.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain, but I haven’t just been taking pictures downtown on Sunday mornings. I mean, I have been taking pictures, but . . . there’s this mission.”
So he told her all about it. He talked quietly, and for a long time, about Beal Street Mission, about what he did there and how it made him feel needed. She listened, fascinated, and then sat for a long time thinking about what he’d said.
Finally, she said, “That’s wonderful, Mick. I’m so glad you found that place, and I’m thrilled you feel the way you do about it. But . . . your children need you, too. They need their father with them on Sunday morning.”
He nodded, watching Ben and Toad finish off their apple. “I know,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. We belong together, and I’ll be happy to go with you on one condition—once a month I want all of us to go to my church. You can pick which Sunday.”
* * *
They’d been to Huntington Beach once before, on the Atlantic coast just south of Myrtle Beach. It was a beautiful, quiet place, and there were all sorts of things to do. The campground was separated from a two-mile stretch of deserted beach by a strip of mangroves a hundred yards deep. On the inland side of the campground a shallow bay curled around and formed a huge salt marsh, thick stands of saw grass cut into little islands by narrow wandering passes of dark, brackish water. At low tide, islands of black mud rose up all slimy and slick and covered with crowd
s of oyster shells like jagged little cities. The salt marsh, where the edge of the ocean pulsed in and out twice a day, was a natural hatchery for fish and shrimp and alligators and birds.
The park service had built boardwalks out into the marsh, and at low tide Mick and Layne would take the kids cast-netting for shrimp off the end of the boardwalk. Herons and egrets stalked the shallows around the edges of the saw-grass islands feeding on minnows, and once or twice a bald eagle cruised right over their heads, hunting. Mick got some great pictures.
Ben and Toad got the hang of cast-netting right away, spinning a weighted four-foot nylon net through the air so it opened like an umbrella on the way down. They caught a few shrimp with nearly every cast. They tried boiling them but they were kind of small and a lot of trouble, so they mostly used them for bait.
On one end of the beach, next to the channel where the tide pushed in and out of the salt marsh, a long rock jetty jutted out a couple hundred yards into the ocean. Sometimes in the early morning Mick would get the kids up and take them down there to fish for spots and bluefish while Layne slept in. They caught a lot of baby sand sharks, but the kids didn’t really care what they caught so long as they caught something. Around nine o’clock, they’d all troop back to the camper, where Layne would already have a big breakfast cooking.
Twice a day, morning and afternoon, Layne and Mick would follow the kids down a sandy path through the mangroves and over the dunes to the beach, where they would tear into the surf and get wild and happy. They rode boogie boards down the waves and came out spitting saltwater, hiking up bathing suits and grinning like they’d won something. Even Layne managed to relax on the beach for once, now that Dylan could swim. The last time they were there she had made Dylan wear a life jacket and stood knee-deep in the surf with her hands on her hips yelling at him to stay in the edge of the water where the undertow couldn’t drag him away. Now that he’d proven himself to be a strong swimmer she relaxed and let him go a little.
When he wasn’t boogie-boarding, Dylan liked to comb the beach for sharks’ teeth, little jet-black things shaped like rose thorns. Most of them were so small Mick’s eyes couldn’t find them, but Dylan could spot them every time. He had eyes like an eagle. By the time they left he had filled up a medicine bottle with those things.
They took a tour of an old Spanish fort one evening and the kids sat hugging their knees for an hour, spellbound while Ranger Bob told ghost stories in the moonlit stone ruins. Afterward, they all went for a walk on the beach. Layne loved the beach at night. The kids were horsing around, chasing each other, playing tag, being kids. The sea was calm and a low moon silvered the tops of lazy little waves that crawled over their feet while Layne and Mick walked barefoot together in the edge of the ocean. They came upon a whole group of children, eight or nine at least, accompanied by two fathers. The kids all had flashlights and were running pell-mell up and down the beach with plastic buckets. Ben, Toad and Dylan fell in with them, running, laughing, waving flashlights around.
After a while Toad came running up with a boy in tow. He was a head taller than her, and Mick didn’t like the way he was looking at her.
“Look what I got!” she said, holding out a plastic bucket. The boy leaned close and shined his flashlight into the bucket so they could see. In the bucket was a pale white crab about the size and shape of a chicken egg. His claws were tucked in against his sides and his little stemmed eyes stared up at them.
“It’s a ghost crab,” she said. “They’re all over the place, and they’re a blast to catch!”
“Come on, Clarissa,” the boy said, tugging at her arm. “Let’s go catch another one.”
Mick watched them run off and merge with the gaggle of wild kids; then he turned to Layne.
“Did he just call her Clarissa?” he asked.
Layne nodded, smiling. “Uh-huh.”
“She never lets anybody call her that, except you. Who told him her name was Clarissa?”
Layne took his arm, chuckling, looking at him like she always did when she knew something he didn’t. “She did, I’m sure.”
“Oh. Oh, no.” It was always like that. Just when he thought he had a handle on this child-rearing thing, the next monster reared its head.
The kids were having a ball. They’d spot a ghost crab skittering sideways across the sand and give chase like a pack of hounds, flashlights whipping this way and that. Those crabs were quick. They’d change direction in an instant and zip through the crowd of bare feet while the kids hopped and danced out of the way, screaming. Finally, three or four of the lights would focus on the bewildered crab all at once and he’d freeze. Then one of the kids would rush in and scoop him up in an ice cream bucket.
There was something completely pointless and absolutely wonderful about it. It was one of those random pearly nights when a bunch of kids ran around burning energy because they could, because they had a limitless supply of it, because they were children and every moment was worth celebrating for its own sake. They had their priorities straight.
Right in the middle of the great ghost crab hunt, Layne’s cell phone rang. It surprised Mick. He had forgotten he was carrying it in his pocket. Layne’s mother was not well, and Layne had been trying to call her, leaving messages. Mick turned away from the pack of screaming kids and walked a few yards up the beach to answer it, thinking it was his mother-in-law calling back.
But it wasn’t her. He stood apart from the crowd for a few minutes, ankle deep in the surf, listening. Right when he hung up the phone and slipped it into his pocket he felt a hand on the back of his neck, and Layne was there.
“Was that Mom?” she asked.
“Aubrey,” he said, watching the twinkling lights of an oil tanker out on the horizon.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said quietly. “Something is definitely not wrong. He called to tell me he heard from Ecklund.”
“Who?” She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed herself against him. She was cold.
“A.J. Ecklund. The guy from the High Museum. The one we sent the portfolio to.”
“Really? What did he say?” She said this cautiously, staring at him in the moonlight.
He still couldn’t believe what he’d heard, but Mick repeated it anyway as best he could.
“He said they’re putting together an exhibition in the spring. Something about the ‘New South.’ Six or seven photographers on exhibit for two months. He wants me in it.”
Her eyes went wide and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are you serious? The High Museum?” She was starting to bounce.
He nodded, numb. “Yeah, ain’t that a kick? Ecklund said they still needed representation from street level, whatever that means, and that my pictures were ‘gut-wrenchingly real, starkly beautiful.’ That’s what Aubrey told me, anyway.”
Layne started squealing and jumped on him. She almost knocked him down in the surf, but he fought to keep his feet because he knew what saltwater would do to her cell phone.
“It’s all just tentative so far,” Mick said, pausing, still unable to get his mind around it. “Ecklund said he has to get it past the committee, but he’s pretty sure it’ll happen. He’s the chairman of the committee.”
They stood there together for a long time, quiet, their arms wrapped around each other, enjoying the moment. Sometimes the best communication came without words. Mick could see several ships now, pale lights twinkling out on the sea. The moon glinted off the wave tops and the stars shined like new. Children screamed with laughter, and flashlights danced on the beach. He swiped his bare foot across the wet sand, and in its wake, even there, bits of phosphorescence sparked for an instant. Everywhere, there was light.
When they grew tired of the game the children stopped running and set all the ghost crabs free. Later, after the other kids had gone on up the beach and it was just the five of them again, the Brannigans shared the stars. They lay on their backs on the beach pointing out constellations, letting the sea
breeze wash over them and listening to the waves rumble ashore. Mick only knew a handful of constellations, and when he ran out of those the kids started making up their own.
Toad found the outline of a sailfrog among the stars.
Before Dylan fell asleep on Mick’s chest he pointed out a dog constellation, complete with tail. He named it Andy.
Ben put his fingertips together to form a square the size of a pencil eraser, at arms length. “Did you know there are a thousand galaxies in this square?” he said, peering oneeyed through the hole between his fingertips. Mick had no doubt he was right.
Layne, warm against him with her head on his shoulder, whispered, “Don’t go back to work, Mick. Stay home. Take pictures. Raise kids.”
In that moment something welled up inside of him again, like it had that morning up in the steel, and busted out like a surprised bird. There still weren’t any words, but this time he knew it wasn’t a question, it was a thank you—simple, and yet too complicated for words. The thought gathered itself and flew out precisely aimed, not at the stars or the horizon, but at God, whose smile he had learned to see, sometimes, in the eyes of children and other bits of light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, last, and always, I thank God.
I would also like to thank:
My wife and sons, who provided the opportunity for this story to be written (not to mention some of the fodder).
Larry McDonald, Bill Dodd, and Peter Beering, who shared their photographic insights and expertise. The blunders are entirely mine.
My sister-in-law, Becky Baker, who gave me reams of indispensable background information on sensory integration dysfunction. Any resemblance to Dr. Lethal is entirely coincidental.
Bobby Johnston, for his insights on the homeless community and an illuminating tour of the monastery.
Paul Leslie, for one of the finer insights in the book.
Summer of Light Page 29