Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

As he talks, he rhythmically punches the end of each sentence—something we told him makes for good public speaking—and he says that his passage tells us to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and that neighbor doesn’t just mean the person living next door but “all the people we know and meet in our life.”

  He pauses. Adjusts the pages. Then, up comes his index finger. It’s not clear if it’s accusatory or just keeping time, like a metronome. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to love their neighbors as themselves,” he says, pointing matter-of-factly to the crowd. “People can be angry or jealous or mean or hateful or rude or scared and that can keep them from treating their neighbor with love and understanding.” He flips a page. “Sometimes people are scared of people who are not like them. They can be mean and ignore them sometimes.” His voice goes soft as he says this last sentence, like he’s talking to himself, in an empty room, and then he looks up, almost surprised to see the full house. “That would make you scared or sad if someone treated you that way, wouldn’t it?”

  Now he’s talking right to them, everyone at once, his index finger pointing out each word.

  “I feel like I’m a special person because God made me special.” He nods. His lips purse. “God gave me strength and courage and a big heart.”

  He looks out for a long minute. We see his eyes moving across the faces, studying some as they grimace with suppressed emotion, others as they speak with their nods. He’s clearly trying to connect, to all of them at once. Then he turns back to the speech for a line that we know he feels most strongly.

  “God wants us to treat everyone in our life like they’re special, too.”

  If you ask people years later what they remember from the speech, their memories tend to stop with that line.

  The few who recall that Owen went on to talk about his dinnertime prayers and how he “prayed that God would take care of Granny and Lizzy and make them all better”—tend to be in the Kennedy family, who had been struggling with their matriarch’s lung cancer for the past year, and the cancer that Cornelia’s sister, Lizzy, was battling at the time of the bar mitzvah.

  A handful who remember he ended his speech with “My prayers always start with the word hope—I like the word hope,” tend to be from my side, who know that the word hatikva means hope in Hebrew. That’s the song—the Israeli national anthem—he then played on the piano to finish the service, looking up from the sheet music and across the eyes of the guests, like he did when he recited Hebrew.

  Memory is like that. A hook—some powerful association or moment of changed perspective—that helps keep it locked in tight, fresh for retrieval, years hence.

  Which is why no one in attendance that day will forget the way one very unique young man told them how all of us should be treated, in the eyes of God, as though we are special.

  At a reception after the service, Paul O’Neill and Cedric Jennings ask pointed questions about Owen and what autistic kids are capable of. I tell them a bit about the sidekicks and heroes. O’Neill laughs—“I suppose I was a sidekick to President Bush, but I’m not sure if he was hero or villain.” The church-bred Cedric wonders if Owen would ever consider becoming a preacher.

  My mother, Shirl, a former concert pianist and schoolteacher—whose second husband also died of cancer, just a few years after my father—has long felt that a dark cloud was following her. She couldn’t help but see Owen’s struggle as part of that, of that cloud settling over us now, and struggled to see him as anything other than damaged and diminished. After the service, she seems strangely unmoored, joyous. Something about Owen defining “special,” then playing a song called “Hope,” while looking directly at her, helped her see him anew. “He was really something up there,” she whispers, taking me aside as the crowd moves toward the temple’s reception hall. She looks intently into my eyes, as though searching for cues. “Really, Ronald, I wouldn’t have believed it.” She doesn’t talk to me this way—ever.

  A bit later, my oldest friend from childhood, also takes me aside. “Is Shirl okay? She’s not her usual self, you know, missing stuff.” He was right, the first to notice the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

  Later, visiting her in an assisted-living apartment, I would think often of that moment, and how her hard judgments—born, like any, from formative experiences and selected memory—may have been loosened by the illness, freeing her, in a way, to see with new eyes.

  That, after all, was what had been happening naturally and forcefully, day by day, year to year, inside our home: the judgments Cornelia and I once housed—widely accepted suppositions about those with so-called “intellectual disabilities”—were being dislodged, often against our will, and replaced with a much deeper understanding.

  Now it’s happening as a group affair. The lightness we’ve sometimes felt, the lifting of burdens—like on the night with Iago, or the discovery of Owen’s sketchbook—now seems to warm the temple’s banquet hall, detectable in the glistening eyes of friends, the rosiness in their cheeks, the way they hug Owen.

  And, to our surprise, in the way he hugs them back.

  Walt wakes up on Saturday morning, the first week of May, with a plan.

  Cornelia and I are away for a few days in Utah—I’m giving a speech and we are celebrating our seventeenth anniversary. As a full-blooded ninth grader, in the springtime of his young life, it’s a golden weekend.

  And—as we find out some time later—he’s committed to make the most of it. He’s really stretching his legs these days. Works hard at school—Sidwell’s an intense place—but he’s got his guys, his gang. His friends are hugely important to him; they’re his brethren. He loves his real brother, but that’s not always easy. It’s hard to connect with him. Walt hoped it might get easier when he and Owen got older, but it really hasn’t. We tell him just about every-thing concerning Owen, and he’s forthcoming about lots of things; more than most kids tell their parents, but there’s plenty that goes on that we’re sure we miss. We go to everything all the other parents do—the school assemblies, PTA nights, the football games. Cornelia even runs quite a bit of it, a display that we’re like everyone else, only more so. But we’re so busy with Owen, Walt can slip away sometimes. He’s always been an independent guy. He can take care of things.

  Eugenia, the Ecuadorian cleaning lady who is staying with them for the weekend, is up early. Breakfast is ready when Walt and Owen get downstairs to the kitchen.

  Walt’s got it all planned, a grand scheme. They’ll get Nathan, a good kid, Owen’s age, who lives next door, and they’ll all go see a movie. Eugenia can drive. Nathan—the child of our first friends from the Georgetown days—is really the only typical kid in DC that Owen’s friendly with, as much as Owen can be a friend. By virtue of this, Nathan is welcomed into our house like a reigning hero and he actually has a lot in common with Walt—good guy, pretty good athlete, funny, people like him. And he’s really nice to Owen.

  In Walt’s plan, that’s what this day is about: being really nice to Owen. The key, as usual, will be a movie, and Owen is very much into the new one from Disney—Home on the Range. The thing I said at the bar mitzvah, about Owen giving up Disney for Batman and more of the teenage stuff: wishful thinking. There are some exceptions, which is good, but Disney still rules. Owen’s already seen this one three times, and something about it really speaks to him. Singing the songs all the time. Crazy about it.

  As they down bowls of cereal, Walt explains what’s up to Owen—“How would you like to see Home on the Range with me and Nathan?” Owen is over the moon. “Yes, Walter!”

  Eugenia drives them that afternoon, and it’s a lot of fun having Nathan along. Fun for Owen, too. The movie’s okay—not one of Disney’s best. They’re all enjoyable enough, though. It’s not like it’s a struggle to watch. And Owen, of course, loves them, which is a great thing. It gives you a way to talk to him, hang with him, just like normal brothers. It just has to be about Disney.

  After they get home and Owen goes to the basement, W
alt follows him down.

  The whole day was really planned for this moment.

  “Was that fun, Ow?”

  “It was great. I love that movie!”

  “Me, too. Listen, I need your help with something.”

  Owen gets a look of anticipation, then puzzlement. Walt never asks Owen for help. Ever. Why would he?

  “You see, I might be having some friends over tonight, and I don’t want Mom and Dad to find out, you know, when they come home.”

  Owen nods slowly. “What should I do?”

  “Not tell them,” Walt says. “We okay with that? You’re not lying to them. There’s just no reason they need to know.”

  Owen stands perfectly still for a few seconds and then nods. He gets it.

  “Thanks, buddy. I really appreciate that.”

  Walt can manage things. That’s his specialty. And he’s managing just fine at the beginning of the party. He told Eugenia he was having some friends over and everyone was told to go right to the basement.

  Owen is mostly staying up in our room on the third floor, where Walt’s set him up with pizza and his movies. And no one needs to go upstairs; the basement can hold plenty of people. Or so Walt figures, until about ten o’clock, when the seniors from the football team stop by—someone texted a guy who knew Walt—then a lot of their friends come, and people flood out into the backyard, rotating in and out to cool off because the basement’s jammed, with people crushed into the den and the laundry room, with the Ping-Pong table, under which are a bunch of boxes of leftover liquor from the bar mitzvah. We overbought, so there’s quite a bit of it—vodka and gin, mostly. And, boy, does it go fast with eighty kids, maybe ninety now. Everything goes fast, it seems, until Walt and his two best buddies are shampooing the rug at three in the morning. Scrubbing, laughing. Not even all that drunk. What an amazing night.

  Walt feels fine the next day, though he slept maybe an hour, and he’s ready—as charming as a guy can be—when he chats with Eugenia, who slept on the living room couch.

  “You had many friends over, yes?” she asks.

  “I invited a few and more came than I thought.”

  She looks at him. “You were a good boy, Walter?” she says.

  “Más o menos,” he says, with a shrug and smile. “What can I say, Eugenia. I have a lot of friends.”

  When we come home that Sunday evening, Walt makes sure he greets us, all smiles. Eugenia slips out quickly, offering a sheepish smile and little else. Walt doesn’t make eye contact with her, but he watches her go. He owes her, big.

  A few days pass, and he’s home free. It’s amazing what a party like this will do to the social standing of a ninth grader. Seniors are coming up to him in the hall: “Hey…great party.” He just nods. Right. No problem. Things were fine before, but they just got that much better.

  Then, sitting on his bed on Tuesday night, instant messaging a buddy about the party, it dawns on him. He’s going to need to replace all that vodka and gin. We’re definitely not drinkers. We might not notice it’s gone for a couple of weeks, maybe longer. Stuff sits under that Ping-Pong table collecting dust—Christmas ornaments, boxes of books, photo albums—for years, sometimes.

  But the chill—somehow not even thinking about replacing that liquor—makes him flinch. He’s not in the clear. Not yet. He’s not sure how much Owen saw, but he definitely could see everyone in the backyard from our bedroom window. He gets up and saunters into Owen’s room. “Hey, buddy.”

  Owen’s at his desk flipping through an animation book. He looks up.

  Walt’s cheery—“Everything good!?”

  Owen looks back. “Yes.”

  And they just look at each other. “Okay, just checking.” In a second Walt’s back on his bed, door shut, thinking hard, with quite a bit at stake, about how Owen’s mind really works. At least, compared to a normal kid, how he doesn’t seem to catalog things to report to parents, something kids start to do pretty young, when they’re describing how they feel and watch their parents’ expressions change. Then, a little later, it’s grows into How was school today? and What did you do at your friend’s house? And after a while you start to figure what they’d be interested in hearing about and what—especially when you get to be a teenager—you actually want to tell them.

  None of that, really, goes on with Owen, Walt figures, except when he reports back about, maybe, a Disney movie he’s seen—what happened with the characters—and we’re all over that, like some kind of big celebration. Other than that, Owen really doesn’t seem to consider what the parental units will want to hear, including that there were eighty kids in the basement and all over the backyard a few days ago.

  Just as long as we don’t get suspicious and ask him, Walt’s good. Because the little guy can’t lie. Walt thinks about this and how truly weird it is, just like Jim Carrey in that movie Liar Liar, where he gets hit with a spell and everything he says is true. It’s kind of beautiful in its way—and why that bar mitzvah speech just crushed everyone. Not being able to lie, just like in that movie, it’d be a nightmare. But Walt thought all that through, too. That’s why he was very clear when he talked to Owen after they saw Home on the Range. Mom and Dad didn’t need to know about the party. That’s all. It wasn’t a lie.

  On Saturday, I notice that my bike is not in the backyard shed and ask, “Walt, where’s my bike?”

  Walt who’s stepping out of the kitchen into the backyard, stops to think, but only for a second. He explains that one of his buddies came over and borrowed it. I tell him he better go get it back. “No problem, Dad. I’ll call him right now.”

  But then I find the bike a few houses away in some bushes.

  Walt overhears this news from his bedroom—I tell Cornelia in the front hall, just within earshot. His mind is racing. Got to get to Owen. But to tell him what? The last thing he wants to do is talk to Owen about the party from seven days ago, to try to reinforce his edict of silence. It’s not like Owen forgot about the party. He remembers what he wore ten years ago on a Tuesday.

  The clock ticks, fear burns, and Walt starts thinking about how nice it would be to have a brother who was on his team, his partner. Some brothers fight, he’s seen that, but they’re still pretty much on the same side—the kid team versus the parent team. That goes deep, never changes really, and they watch each other’s backs. He loves Owen. He’d literally kill someone if they messed with the little guy. But it’d be sweet to have just a regular brother right now. And he feels shitty for thinking it.

  Then his brain freezes. “Owen, can you come and talk to me and Mom in the den?” It’s me calling Owen up from the basement.

  Walt ever so gently slips out of his bedroom to the top step and sits, quiet as a mouse. He can hear everything in the den, just one floor down and around the bend. I talk to Owen like I’m working a source. “Hey, buddy, sit down, I have to ask you something.”

  Walt listens with all his might. There’s a pause.

  “Did Walt have a party here Saturday night?”

  Nothing.

  “Owie,” Mom says. “You can tell us the truth.”

  Nothing.

  Walt pumps his fist. But he’s not breathing. He’s talking, telepathically, to Owen: That’s my bro. Hold out, Owie.

  There’s a long pause. It may be over. Owen may be free.

  No, no. “Okay, Owen, forget about a party. We don’t care about that,” I say.

  Walt’s trying to figure the next move: Where the hell is Dad going with this?

  “So here’s my question: were there any girls in the house Saturday night?”

  It’s silent again. Walt cranks up the brother-in-arms telepathy: Don’t fall for it, Owen. Party and girls are the same thing. Party equals girls. He’s trying to trick you.

  “Yes,” Owen says, his voice tentative. Walt knows there’s a look with that voice, where Owen looks for cues—probably looking at my face.

  “That’s great, Owen,” I say, all cheery. “Lots of girls?”
>
  “Yes! Lots of them!”

  “Roughly, how many?”

  “Forty-one.”

  Cornelia notices the white bloom of a dogwood—a nice addition, she thinks, to the sorry patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street.

  Her car idles by the curb. She thought this morning’s appointment was at nine-thirty—it’s at ten—so she has half an hour to kill before meeting a couple of members of Team Owen at an office in downtown Silver Spring.

  Just as well. She doesn’t know what she’s going to say anyway. On her calendar, today’s appointment is marked “progress report,” but there’s no real progress to report.

  She sits in her car and thinks about how she’s come to hate this time of the year. Everyone else is finishing a school year, looking forward to the summer, and next year, maybe, tearing open some thick envelope of acceptance, planning the glorious up ahead, with all the damn cherry blossoms blooming everywhere you look. For the Suskinds, it’s a time of crisis, every year, of whether Owen’s in the wrong school or if it’s the right school and he’s about to be thrown out of it.

  The school where he spends his days is not serving his needs. There seem to be no others in the area that would. We’ve looked at so many now, as far afield as Baltimore and Annapolis. She’s here to discuss school options with Suzie Blattner—who not only tutors kids like Owen, but is also an educational consultant—and Bill Stixrud, Owen’s longtime testing specialist. She flips through his most recent neuropsychological assessment—a comprehensive report she’s been using in this latest round of school visits. He’s slipping in all subjects and in overall cognitive attainment. A lot of the schools demand some effort at measuring IQ, though they know it’s problematic with autistic kids. He’s hovering right near 75, the threshold for retarded. His peaks—visual aptitude, word analogies, which are up in the 90th percentile—are called splinter skills. There should be a law against tagging these kids with IQ scores, which get them chucked into the discard bin for the rest of their lives. She starts to stew on it. What’s the IQ score for that bar mitzvah speech? Or inventing a language out of thirty hours of memorized Disney movies? What’s the score for that?