The Ceiling Man

by Patricia Lillie

  I do not think he is funny.

  Nine. Ten.

  Maybe I do stroke Mrs. Lamb. The Ceiling Man says maybe I did it.

  Mrs. Lamb screams and nobody tells her to stop and it hurts.

  “Abby, you are making me seasick,” Ms. Colley says.

  “Now the family must plan a funeral,” Devon says. He writes Funeral on his list. When Devon writes it on his list it is true.

  Mrs. Lamb is dead.

  “We should go,” I say, but no one hears me. My chest and throat are in a knot and my words are trapped and cannot come out.

  Twyla is wrapped in red. She puts on her hat.

  “Abby, hush. You’re hurting our ears,” Ms. Colley says.

  Stella-cat does not scream when I stroke her.

  Twyla does not talk but her head is full of pictures.

  Mrs. Lamb is on the floor.

  “Red head. Hands on ears,” I say, and the words are not stuck in my chest.

  “Uh-oh,” Devon says. “Meltdown alert.” He writes on his list, but I do not know what he writes.

  Twyla’s head is red. My head fills with red. Mrs. Lamb’s head explodes.

  I do not do it.

  I search for the Ceiling Man. He is asleep.

  “What did you do to Mrs. Lamb?” I say. I think maybe I am shouting.

  “Use your indoor voice.” The Ceiling Man is awake. He smiles, but I do not think he is happy.

  I am not happy.

  “You hurt Mrs. Lamb’s head,” I say.

  “You did that.”

  “No. You hit her head. I did not see you, but you did.” Someone else is here. I cannot find him, but he is laughing. I think he is in a box and should not laugh.

  “Little Bunny Foo Foo. . .” The Ceiling Man is singing.

  Gramma Evelyn says, “Hate is a very strong word.”

  “Hopping through the forest. . .”

  Gramma says, “Do not say hate.”

  “Scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head.”

  “Stop.” I hate Little Bunny Foo Foo.

  “Indoor voice, indoor voice, Little Bunny.”

  The Ceiling Man’s smile makes me want to cry. It is not a good smile, and I do not want to talk to him anymore.

  The other man talks, but I cannot understand him. I think maybe he wants me to let him out of his box but I cannot because I do not know where his box is.

  “Abby, do you need to go home?” Ms. Colley says.

  The clock says 2:07. The bus leaves in thirty-three minutes and if I am not in my seat it leaves without me. My mom does not have a car. Her car is wrecked and she should get a new one.

  “Do you know where your mother is?” the Ceiling Man says.

  My mom is not at work. She does not go to work anymore.

  I cannot breathe. I am wrapped in a blanket. It is heavy and scratchy and I hate it.

  Gramma says, “Don’t say hate.”

  “I bet I can find her,” the Ceiling Man says. “Your grandmother too.”

  “Unnnggh.” When I make that noise, my mom says, “Do not grunt at me,” but I cannot stop it. It just comes out.

  The blanket stinks. It smells like dirt and pennies.

  “Unnnggh,” I say.

  “Call her mother,” Ms. Colley says.

  “I’ll call her,” the Ceiling Man says, but I can barely hear him. The other man laughs. The red is gone and my head is full of night.

  • • •

  “ABBY. ABBY.” My mom is here. She makes her voice soft because she knows loud hurts my ears.

  “Abby. Breathe.” My mom is very quiet and far away, and I am not sure she is really here.

  “The blanket is gone,” I say. I can breathe now.

  [20]

  Carole

  WHEN A CHILD GOES APE-CRAZY in the middle of a store, people turn their noses up and act as if the parents are criminally negligent. It gets extra fun when strangers give parenting advice or offer lessons in discipline.

  Abby’s tantrums—or what we thought were tantrums—started when she was three. They were somehow a little more than the typical toddler tantrum. We couldn’t communicate with or comfort her, and attempts to touch or talk to her made things worse.

  She talked late, and we thought her lack of communication skills frustrated her. We tried working on her words. We tried discipline. We tried gentle New Age-y parenting techniques. My library of How To Be a Better Parent Books made me suspect some of her cute quirks, like her obsession with keys and shaking them near the corner of her eyes, could be a sign her tantrums were something other than bad temper.

  We visited doctors and psychologists. For years, all we got was, “Well, it’s not fill in the blank with anything and everything a kid could be tested for, including autism.”

  One egotistical bastard told us that since he couldn’t find anything, maybe we should look into parenting classes. We never went back to him. We’d already been to parenting classes.

  When she was finally diagnosed, there was an element of relief, but the diagnosis didn’t explain everything.

  The verdict on Abby was PDD-NOS.

  The first three letters stand for Pervasive Development Disorder, another term for Autism, but it’s the last three that are important. Not Otherwise Specified.

  Abby met many markers for conditions on the Autism Spectrum, but she didn’t meet enough markers on any single condition to qualify for the label.

  Her symptoms simply add up to Abby.

  When she was in junior high, she showed me a picture of the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

  “That is a spectrum,” she said.

  “It is,” I said.

  “What color am I?”

  It took a second to make the connection and understand what she was asking. “All of them,” I said.

  “I like that.”

  For the next few weeks, she told people, “I am a rainbow.”

  Most thought she was being sweet. I knew she was being literal.

  Having a diagnosis gave us something to work with. We learned a few coping skills, as did Abby. As she got older, we recognized meltdown triggers.

  One is memory overload. She remembered everything. At seventeen, she could tell us the date and reason for the only day of school she missed in third grade, but she lacked the memory filters most people have. To her, past and present were often the same. I suspected her obsession with clocks was an effort to control something she couldn’t process.

  When she was fifteen, I walked into the bathroom after she’d showered and found her dirty clothes and wet towels in the middle of the floor. I told her to pick up her mess. Later, when I asked if she’d done it, she said yes.

  The next time I went into the bathroom, I found the clothes and towels still on the floor. I called her. I made her pick them up. I yelled at her for lying to me.

  “I lied to Ms. Colley,” she said.

  “What?”

  “She asked me if I washed my cup. I said yes.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “No more of that, okay?” I was ready to drop the subject, but Abby wasn’t.

  “I lied to Gramma.”

  She’d told her grandmother no, she didn’t eat the cookies when she did. At least, that’s what I thought she said. She talked so fast she was hard to understand.

  “I lie to Livvy.”

  The tense change was another sign we were headed for trouble.

  “I lie to Tracy.”

  Tracy was her after-school sitter when she was nine.

  She continued, and soon we were back to kindergarten. With each confession, all lies in answer to yes or no questions, she grew more agitated. She relived each remembered sin. An avalanche of memories buried her, and we headed for a meltdown.

  I managed to distract her. We baked cookies or did something else she enjoyed, something that required her to concentrate on what she was doing. I didn’t remember what, but if I asked Abby, s
he would. Over the next few hours, she confessed to more minor transgressions as if they were acts of evil. Most were news to me or, as far as I was concerned, long forgotten trivialities. The meltdown was averted, an accomplishment I do remember.

  Memory overload was a trigger I understood. It’s bad enough when one or two things one would rather forget come back unbidden. An unrestrained and out of context flood of memories would be unbearable.

  Sensory overload was another trigger, and one I could only imagine. After one trip to the ballpark, we never took Abby to another baseball game. The noise, the action, the lights, the crowd—her surroundings burned her like a hot iron. We left before the end of the first inning.

  I kept an Unofficial Meltdown Warning List. Some signs were easy to spot. The Fast Voice—just what it sounded like. Contraction Failure—contractions in speech didn’t come naturally to Abby. They were a learned skill, and when she stopped using them, it was a bad sign. Time Shift—past tense was another learned conversation skill, and when she spoke solely in the present tense, the memory avalanche was on its way. Talking in Circles—she stopped referring to people and things directly and referred to them by relationship. Jim became your husband and Stella, the cat of your husband’s mother. The Grunt—if she grunted at me once, she was mildly pissed, usually at me. More than once and I needed to prepare for a meltdown. There were more. It was a long list and hard to keep track, but Jim and I tried, for her sake and ours.

  The triggers we could watch for and—maybe—protect her from were the good ones. The ones we didn’t see coming, when life up and smacked her in the head, were the ones that broke my heart.

  • • •

  FOR ANYONE WHO considered speed limits and stop signs more than a vague suggestion, the drive from Evelyn’s house to mine took twenty minutes. Fifteen minutes after I hung up the phone, she pulled into my driveway and honked. I grabbed my coat and ran.

  The ride to the school explained how she made it so quickly. I never knew Evelyn—or the Lincoln—could move so fast.

  “You’re going to get a ticket,” I said.

  “Eh. My son’s a cop.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  We hit the school at the height of after-school traffic. School buses, students’ cars, parents—getting through the throng and finding a parking place took as long as the drive. Just as I opened my mouth to suggest I get out and walk, she zipped into a spot. The two students she nearly mowed down used a few words I doubted she’d ever heard.

  I suggested she wait in the car.

  “How long will you be?”

  “It depends on what shape Abby’s in.” As far as I knew, the last time Evelyn saw a serious meltdown, Abby was four or five and it looked like a temper tantrum.

  “How bad can it be? I mean, I know they called you, but—really. She’s a good girl.”

  “Remember when she was little, and she screamed and cried and wouldn’t let us near her?”

  “She doesn’t do that anymore.”

  “Not often, but it could be like that. Or, she might be a big ball of misery. Or anger. I might be able to talk her out of it. We might have to just wait it out. She might already be out of it, at least enough to walk to the car. I’ll know when I see her. Maybe.”

  “But she’s a good girl.”

  “Doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Yippee.

  We checked in at the office. Ms. Colley met us at the classroom door and filled us in. Poor Mrs. Lamb, but I was concerned about my daughter. Abby sat on the floor in the Quiet Corner, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. She rocked at double speed, but it was the sound that got me. Her high-pitched wail hurt my ears. A banshee’s keen, desolate and cold.

  “I just want to give her a hug,” Evelyn said.

  “NO. We can’t touch her.” The words came out sharper than intended, but I didn’t have time to explain meltdown etiquette. I left her with Ms. Colley and went to my daughter.

  • • •

  “ABBY.” HER NAME came out more a breath than a whisper, and she didn’t respond.

  “Abby.” A little louder, barely a whisper. I thought she responded.

  Wishful thinking. Her wail continued.

  I said her name again, and the wailing stopped. She still rocked, her eyes were still closed, but the silence came as a respite, for me if not for Abby.

  Evelyn said something, and Ms. Colley shushed her. I glanced at Ms. Colley. She nodded and ushered Evelyn from the room. Abby jumped at the sound of the door closing, a good sign—reaction to environmental stimuli. She was on her way back.

  “Abby, breathe.” My favorite aunt’s slogan was “Breathe. It’ll get you through anything.” She was long gone, but her words stuck with me. They brought me—and Abby—through many tough times. I wanted to join Abby on the floor and curl up in a ball, but I stayed as still as I could and repeated her name and reminded her to breathe, over and over, until she opened her eyes and looked at me. No eye contact, but a step in the right direction.

  “Hey, kiddo. Welcome back. Breathe.”

  She said something about a blanket. I didn’t get it, but I didn’t care. Stinky blankets were better than red ceilings or worse.

  “Do you want to go home now?”

  She got up without a word.

  Ms. Colley and a tall woman I didn’t know waited in the hall. Abby slumped, head down, drained. Still no eye contact, but Ms. Colley understood. Evelyn didn’t. She swooped, arms out for a hug. Abby jumped back and hit the lockers, a wounded and cornered animal.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said. “It’ll be days before anyone gets a hug.

  Evelyn stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

  The tall woman turned out to be Mrs. Lamb’s substitute.

  “Leave it to my daughter to break you in,” I said. If she turned out to be the permanent replacement, at least she knew what she was getting into. She handed me Abby’s coat and book bag, and I held the coat out to Abby.

  She shook her head and whispered, “Scratchy.”

  I thanked Ms. Colley and the new aide. On our way to the door, I suggested Evelyn get the car and pick us up. “She won’t put her coat on.”

  “But it’s freezing! The car will be cold. Abby, put your coat on.”

  Abby either didn’t hear her or ignored her.

  “Remember when she was little and kept squirming out of her Dr. Denton’s?” As a toddler, night after night Abby shed the one-piece footed pajamas like a snakeskin. In retrospect, it was an early sign of her ASD. At the time, Jim and I found it hilarious. “It’s like that. We’re lucky she’s still dressed.”

  Evelyn put the Lincoln’s heat on full furnace, and we rode home in silence. I snuck peeks at Abby. She’d found a piece of paper and methodically shredded it. I hoped it wasn’t anything important, but if it was, Evelyn shouldn’t have left it in the backseat.

  I hadn’t yet heard a word of criticism from my mother-in-law. Maybe I just wasn’t listening.

  As we pulled in the driveway, it hit me. “Crap,” I said.

  “What now?”

  “I don’t have my keys.” I ran out so fast I forgot to grab them or my purse. “We’re going to have to go find Jim and get his.” First week with no spare, and I locked myself out.

  “I have one,” Evelyn said.

  “What? Why do you—”

  “Jim gave it to me. He was worried Abby might lock herself out.”

  There it was. Implied criticism. Evelyn’s superpower.

  “If I am locked out, I go to Pete and Livvy’s and call Gramma,” Abby said.

  “May I have the key? Please?” I couldn’t mask the irritation in my voice. I didn’t want Evelyn to have the ability to let herself into my house whenever she felt like it. The new locks were meant to keep out invaders. As for Jim not bothering to tell me she had a key, I’d deal with that later, when I had time to be pissed.

  “I’ll unlock t
he door for you.” She had the key, and she wasn’t giving it up.

  Sami barked while Evelyn unlocked the door. Abby put her hands over her ears and sang, more off-key than usual, “To Grandmother’s house we goooooo.”

  “Oh, honey. Do you want to come home with me?” Both the honey and the sugared tone meant she was inviting Abby, and I wasn’t included.

  “No.” Abby went in, and Sami quit barking. At least she was talking.

  “Thank you.” I did appreciate Evelyn’s help and wanted her to know.

  “Anything for Abby.”

  We stood awkwardly outside the door. I was afraid she expected to be invited in. Not that she needed an invite. If I went in, she’d follow. Even if I locked her out, she had a key.

  “Well, if you don’t need anything else. . .”

  “Just quiet. And rest.”

  “I’ll run to the store for you, or make dinner—”

  “We’re good.”

  She got the message.

  As she got into her car, I said, “Thanks again. I really do appreciate your help.”

  “Like I said. Anything for Abby.” Her emphasis on the last word might have been my imagination. Probably not.

  • • •

  I CALLED JIM and asked him to pick up take-out on his way home.

  “Anything special?”

  “I’ll leave it up to you.” I didn’t want to make decisions anymore than I wanted to cook.

  He did well, spaghetti with marinara and all the sides from one of my favorite restaurants. I considered my resolution to eat better and stuck to the salad. The croutons and dressing were delicious.

  While we ate, I filled him in on the day. Abby hadn’t spoken since we came in the door, but with her there, I used code words. Incident. Rough time. Level Red.

  “No red.” Abby covered her plate with a napkin. Red sauce seeped through and stained the white paper. “Not hungry.” She pushed away her plate.

  “How about some salad? I’ll trade you.”

  “Not hungry. I should take my shower now.”

  “Set your timer.” I fought the urge to follow her upstairs. Showers were the only time I left her alone, and the only time I had to talk to Jim without her around.

  “How was your day?”