by Laurie Gough
“These steps are still here,” said Quinn to Stephan, knowing that Stephan is interested in this sort of thing — he’s a member of a tribe that could be known as “explorers of the undiscovered country of the nearby.” I noticed Quinn’s mood had perked up. I also noticed he was tightly clutching something that looked like a little stick in his fist. This was a behaviour he was still doing a lot, holding on to pebbles and sticks, not wanting to let things go. Then it hit me: he’d probably picked the stick up back where he’d thrown his bike into the bush. It was an OCD bargain — I won’t backtrack this time but I’ll hold on to this stick. That way, Grandpa can still come back.
When we got to our favourite swimming rock beside the lake, Stephan rolled up his sleeve, stuck his arm in the water, and swished it around. “Nope. Won’t be swimming today.” The sky was a milky blue and a breeze floated softly off the water. The quiet all around us seemed like a pause before winter’s frozen iron teeth would start to bite.
“Quinn,” I said, when we were all sitting on the rock. “What do you think about throwing that stick into the water?”
Quinn shook his head and scooted back a couple of feet, as if he were afraid I’d grab the stick out of his hand. “No!” His face was resolute and frightened.
“It might feel really good. You’d be setting it free,” I offered. I threw a crumpled leaf into the water. “See? Now that leaf gets to go for a ride around the lake, on its own little journey.”
He kept shaking his head, clutching the stick tighter. “Quinn,” said Stephan, taking his phone out of his pocket. “I want to show you a picture.” He started clicking through photos. When he found what he was looking for, he said, “I can see you’re having a hard time letting your grandpa go. That’s why you don’t want to let go of things, like that stick.” Quinn didn’t say anything but I could tell he was listening. “See this picture?” Quinn leaned over to study Stephan’s phone. “It’s a bench in the woods. When my dad died we bought this special bench and put it in the woods overlooking a lake. We put a plaque on the bench with my dad’s name on it. Now when I want to talk to my dad, I go for a walk in the woods to that bench. I sit down on it and tell him things. I tell him about my girlfriend, what’s going on in the world, the price of gas now, that kind of thing.”
“Really?” asked Quinn, still looking at the picture.
“Yep, I go every so often, just to chat, at least once a season.” Quinn seemed to be opening a little. I could see he was contemplating what Stephan had said, wondering perhaps why Stephan didn’t ask his dad to come back.
Finally, I said, “You could just toss that stick in the lake and say goodbye to it. Or what about breaking it in half and just throwing part of it away?”
Quinn shook his head. After twenty minutes or so of Stephan and my trying to convince him, Quinn interrupted to say, “Okay, I’ll do it! But I won’t throw it in the water. I’ll bury it right here and then come back for it sometime.”
We cheered for him as he dug a place for the little stick. I guess this is as good as it gets today, I thought. Stephan seemed overjoyed, but he didn’t know what I knew, that burying the stick still allowed for a way to undo what he’d done, to come and find it another day if he had to. Setting it free into the water was irreversible: it meant letting go.
Quinn was almost his old self again that evening. It seemed that what had happened at the lake had affected him, worn away some of the turtle shell he’d built around himself. He even announced that he was going to school the next day, a Friday. I couldn’t believe it.
The next morning he’d changed his mind about school, but did say he’d like to try going just for the half-hour lunch recess so he could play soccer. Stephan, Quinn, and I rode our bikes up to the school. We got to the edge of the playground, to the top of a little bike path in the trees, just as the recess bell sounded. Soon, Quinn saw his friends rushing outside and starting to kick the ball around. He took a deep breath and said, “I’m doing this!” then ran to the field to join them. Stephan and I hung back in the trees, quietly astounded he’d actually gone through with it.
“Aren’t his friends going to find it weird that he missed this whole week of school and now just shows up for recess?” asked Stephan.
“They’re boys. Boys don’t ask questions like that. They just want to play soccer. Girls would be more curious. Hey, look!” I pointed at the field, where Quinn suddenly had control of the ball and was racing toward the net. “He’s playing like the old Quinn!” We both watched in wonder. The playground came breathing to life in saturated greens and blues. I couldn’t believe the happiness that bloomed inside me when I heard his friends shout, “Quinn, pass! Quinn, over here!” The half-hour recess felt like an unexpected act of grace tossed down from the sky. On the little soccer pitch filled with sweaty ten-year-old boys, life was the way it always had been. No OCD bullies allowed.
“Geez, when I was a kid,” said Stephan, “we didn’t play soccer like these kids do now. We didn’t do any of that fancy footwork. We just kicked the ball.”
I agreed and it felt good to be discussing something other than OCD for a change. When the bell rang, Quinn didn’t return right away. Ten minutes later he showed up with a half-eaten piece of pizza. “Pizza day,” he said as he chewed. “I thought I’d go inside and get mine.”
I looked at him with a crooked smile. “And your friends, what did they think about you just showing up like that for recess?”
He popped the last of the pizza into his mouth and brushed the tomato sauce from his cheek. “They said I was lucky to skip school and just come for soccer and pizza.” He giggled. The three of us rode our bikes back home laughing.
That afternoon I picked my friend Chantal up from the airport. We were having a girls’ night that evening at another friend’s house. Chantal and her family had temporarily moved out west and now she had a few days free to visit on her own. We went to lunch in Ottawa at a vegetarian restaurant we loved called The Green Door. I’d emailed her about Quinn but I didn’t think she’d understood. When I started to give examples of what Quinn’s OCD looked like — he has to hop across the living room floor on one foot, or unroll the car window to stick his head out and start asking his grandpa to come back — she started laughing, howling actually. I immediately recognized it as nervous hysteria. I myself had fallen victim to this many times in my life in uncomfortable situations. Watching Chantal laugh got me laughing hysterically, too. The two of us just kept laughing like baboons in the restaurant as everyone around us looked on in dismay. “This is my life now,” I kept saying between gasps. “This is my life.”
It was lucky timing I’d had the break of a girls’ night on Friday, because what happened on Saturday night flew up straight from hell and landed in our living room.
Rob was out, having volunteered to work the sound equipment at the community centre, so Quinn and I were alone that evening. I thought we could watch Portlandia on my iPad while we sat together on the couch. Just as the show got going, Quinn shut his eyes. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I can’t open my eyes. If I open them, Grandpa won’t come back.”
“Quinn, that’s the OCD bully. You can do it. You can open your eyes.”
“I can’t!” he shouted.
His long-lashed eyes stayed closed. “But how can you watch the show? We could make popcorn, too. Just open your eyes.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes I keep my eyes open without blinking. This at least feels better.”
“Oh, God, Quinn. I didn’t know you kept your eyes open without blinking.”
“I only did it once.”
“That’s really bad for your eyes. Don’t do it again, please.”
“Okay,” he said quietly.
I spent the next hour pleading with him to open his eyes, trying everything I could think of, even watching funny videos on YouTube and laughing out loud, saying, �
�That’s hilarious! Oh, my God, I can’t believe that just happened! You have to see this!” He kept his eyes closed the entire time. It must have been an incredible strength of will, even harder than forgoing dessert.
Finally, just as I was about to give up, he opened his eyes for the briefest of moments and looked at me, revealing two gleaming, red-rimmed eyes full of fear. Then he closed them again. He didn’t open them again for the rest of the night. He brushed his teeth with his eyes closed, swallowed his remedies with water, and knocked into walls before finally climbing up the ladder to his bunk bed, where he flopped down, defeated and miserable. I climbed up onto the bed next to him and gathered him in my arms. I sang him “Moon River” and “Hush, Little Baby” and every song I could think of that I used to sing to him when he was little. After singing I whispered, “I just want you to get better, Quinn. I love you so much.” I started sobbing, saying over and over again that I loved him and I wanted him back. He cried, too. I was holding him so hard, the sad lost echo of my son. I kept telling him how much I loved him until he fell asleep.
As he slept I thought back to another time I’d held him, back to when he was less than a week old. We were lying in bed together in the early morning winter light. I remember thinking this was the first time the sun had come out since his birth and its snow-bright rays were flooding through the window above us. I noticed Quinn’s eyes were suddenly wide open, and they seemed to be in utter awe of his surroundings. I moved closer, so my forehead was touching his tiny one. I was entranced. He seemed to be taking in both me and the world for the very first time and I was there to witness it. I realized this was his first look at life and he was enraptured. The surge of love and sensation I felt was nearly unbearable. I was there for the moment when the world opened itself up to Quinn, or he opened up to it, which simultaneously meant the world opened itself up to me. All that time in the womb, I thought, and he had no idea that any of this was waiting for him out here: the warm sunlight on his cheeks, dancing shadows of the swaying trees, his mother’s eyes staring back at him. The moment was so fragile that I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of it shattering. I’d never felt so deeply connected to another human being, so much so that I was seeing through his eyes, getting a glimpse into another reality, one much more alive and true than the one I normally inhabited. Something inside me had cracked wide open and in an instant I had surfaced into a larger beauty. I will never forget that moment. It’s the moment I hope to savour someday when I’m down to my last few minutes of life.
How can a mother or father ever hold on to the space and time that their child passes through so fleetingly? How to halt time?
CHAPTER 18
What happened the next day, on Sunday, didn’t take on significance until later. At the time, I wasn’t sure what to think. Quinn was no longer keeping his eyes shut like the night before, but he wasn’t talking, either. He’d been shrouded in a dome of silence all morning. I thought it was because it was one of his days where he told himself he had to erase his sentences and say all the words backward, and those days were too taxing on his brain. Around noon, I called him for lunch but I couldn’t find him. I thought perhaps he was upstairs with Rob doing the ERP exercises. But Rob was alone. I went back downstairs and checked again in his bedroom. I noticed his window was open, a breeze playing at the curtain. I realized he’d climbed out his window. I went outside. When I got there I noticed how wild and overgrown my garden had become. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been neglecting it. That’s when I heard the singing. I looked around but couldn’t see its source. I started walking down our laneway. The singing got louder. I kept walking. Now I could clearly hear Quinn singing but couldn’t see him anywhere. When I got to the end of our laneway, I looked up. Quinn was at the very top of our pine tree. It was the same white pine he’d been climbing earlier in the fall at sunset to ask my dad to come back. When he saw me he stopped singing and called out, “Hi, Mummy!” and started climbing down. He jumped off one of the lower branches and landed in front of me. His face was flushed pink. I asked what he’d been doing, saying, “Hey, Quinn, what’s up?”
In a steady strong voice, looking me in the eyes, he said, “I sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to Grandpa and I let him go.”
I stared at him. A blue jay squawked nearby. “You what?”
“I sang the whole song. Then I let him go.” He said this matter-of-factly. He was smiling. There was a calmness in his face I hadn’t seen in weeks. He began walking up the lane, saying he didn’t want to be late for soccer. I stood there watching him as he made his way up the laneway kicking a stone like a soccer ball. I cast my eyes up to the top of the pine tree and heard a faint whistling wind deep in its leaves. Could it be true? I was so tired of false hopes that all I could do was take in the moment and whisper a hushed prayer up into the tree: Please.
He was quiet during the whole drive to the indoor soccer field in Hull. I didn’t see him displaying any OCD on the way there or at soccer itself. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire time. But when soccer was over and we were walking back to the car, he suddenly stopped walking with us. Damn, I thought, he’s stuck. I knew it was too good to be true. Although he was only dressed in shorts and his soccer jersey when he should have been wearing a warm jacket, he still took ten minutes to move forward from his frozen place in the parking lot.
Later, he and I were waiting in the car while Rob picked something up at a grocery store on Rideau Street. He was quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “Mummy, do you think I’m still trying to get Grandpa back?”
I turned around. He was playing with the laces of his soccer cleats but kept glancing up at me. “Um, yes? Maybe? Are you?”
“No. I let him go up in the tree.” He paused. “But now I want something else.” He looked partly excited, partly wary, like he was letting me in on a big secret.
“You want something else? What?”
“To win the Olympics. To win a big race.”
“Huh? What race? When?”
“When I’m older.”
Was he switching obsessions? He obviously still had OCD. Getting stuck in the parking lot confirmed that. What was going on?
“Quinn, it would be fantastic to train to be a runner one day. But that sounds like it’s still your OCD bully telling you that. I’m so happy that you let Grandpa go, that’s such a huge thing you did! And I’m so proud of you! But the OCD still seems to be stuck in your brain a little bit. You have to fight the bully harder than ever. You’re almost there!”
He sighed in a way that only adults should sigh and looked out at the homeless people walking by on Rideau Street. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out where winning the Olympics came from. It seemed so out of the blue, so unlike Quinn to want something like that. My dad was a track runner so there was a vague connection, but still, it was a bizarre.
On Monday his new obsession had grown in power. He lay paralyzed on the couch the entire afternoon because if he spoke or moved a muscle he wouldn’t win the Olympics. I was looking after Anna’s five-year-old son, who kept trying to tickle Quinn and get him to play. It seemed like it could have been therapeutic, like a little puppy trying to spark a reaction, but Quinn just kept lying there, almost comatose. When Anna came to pick up her son and saw Quinn in that state I realized nobody outside of Rob and me had seen him this way. He was so shot through with OCD that it was frightening. Luckily, she’s a therapist so she knew how to react. Or maybe she knew how to react because of the caring person she is. I don’t even remember what she said, only that she tried to talk to Quinn and smile at both of us and tell me she’d help however she could. Her brief visit was like opening a window into our house to let in some fresh air.
Email, October 21, 2013
Hi Tina,
I don’t know how much more I can take. Quinn is in freefall. I told him tonight I’d be happy if a nuclear bomb dropped down on us and we were all killed. In
the stilted way he talks now he said he’d like that, too. This is the kind of thing Rob would never say to Quinn. I can’t believe these things come out of my mouth sometimes. I can’t imagine it’s good for Quinn to hear I feel this way but sometimes it actually shakes him out of his trance. Still, it must be terrible to be a child who makes his mother feel this way, or who makes his mother cry. Some nights I wake up terrified, fear hurricaning through me with primordial force. I think, What will happen tomorrow? And, How bad will this get? I’m taking Quinn to the emergency at the children’s hospital in Ottawa tomorrow. I don’t care if we have to wait there all day. I won’t leave until somebody sees him. This can’t go on. Just when it looks like things are getting better, they get worse than I ever thought they could. I’m also going back to that hypnotherapist the day after tomorrow but I don’t know if she can help. I talked to her the other day on the phone and when I told her about what happened in the tree, she said, “Oh, good, my work on him did that! It happened so quickly! Now he just needs to come one more time to finish up.” I don’t think she knows anything about OCD actually. She sent me this questionnaire asking about his ancestors’ lives, asking if there were any murders and suicides. (There aren’t that I know of but probably back there somewhere!) Did I tell you how she thinks things like OCD are from trauma passed down through our ancestors, going back as far as seven generations? Seriously. She’s convinced that’s where his problem lies. I’m so desperate that I feel like I have to try everything. (I even briefly considered baking Quinn some pot brownies after seeing a video of a mother in California who does this for her son with OCD. It stops his compulsions and makes him laugh, which he normally never does.)