Edward Adrift e-2

by Craig Lancaster

  “Do you like it here?” Donna asks me.

  “It’s a very nice town. Do you like it?”

  She doesn’t answer immediately. I look across the street as I wait.

  “I miss Billings,” she says. “I was there a long time, and I had a lot of friends. But there are possibilities here, and Victor has such a good job. I can see a future.”

  Kyle, from behind us, says: “Ha.”

  “You don’t see a future?” I ask Kyle.

  To be honest, I too am a little flummoxed by what Donna said. I’m not sure I trust the idea of seeing a future. I don’t like predictions, and I don’t think they are reliable. I prefer facts.

  “No, all I see are a couple of douches.”

  Donna turns around to face her son. She is twitching. I have seen her this angry before, and I remember hoping that I would never see it again. This is what hope gets you.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not so many days ago, I had a son. He was a good kid. He was sweet and he was kind. But he’s not here anymore. Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Maybe you left him in Billings, you bitch.”

  My left arm shoots out, and my hand grabs Kyle by his coat. This surprises me, as I did not ask my left arm and hand to do any such thing.

  “Let go of me, you fucking freak.”

  Donna slaps Kyle across the face. Hard. The sound of her hand against his skin reverberates (I love the word “reverberates”) through the cold in this empty park.

  Kyle looks at her. He looks shocked, like someone told him something incredible and scary. He looks at me. Donna is twitching beside me. I want to start running and not stop until I am away from here and what just happened.

  And then Kyle starts crying. He cries and he cries and Donna stops twitching, and she reaches for her boy, and he tries to shove her off, but she reaches for him again, and he lets her pull him in. He sobs into her shoulder, and Donna is crying, too. There’s a very small voice inside of me that says I should hug them, but that impulse does not prevail.

  I sit down on a park bench and I watch them.

  I wish I weren’t here, but I also feel like this is where I am supposed to be.

  Those two things, together, make no sense.

  How can I help my friend when I am lost, too?

  — • —

  By Kyle’s own action, he is stuck in his bedroom again, the door closed. Donna says she isn’t sure if Kyle is locked away from the rest of us, or if we’re locked away from him. This is one of the things I like about Donna. She is clearly hurting for her son, and though she can cry and hug him when he needs it, she’s also not one to let him slide when he acts inappropriately and calls her a nasty name like “bitch.” (I’m setting aside, for a moment, the fact that he called me a freak. That hurt my feelings, but I’m trying to remember that none of these things with Kyle are about me. He will have to do something to repair his relationship with me. That much is clear. But that can wait for another time.)

  Donna takes away his Wii and his computer. She tells him that he needs to sit quietly and think about things, and that he can come out when Victor comes home. Together, as a family—and it makes me feel good that Donna includes me in that word, “family”—we will all sit down and talk about Kyle and where we will go from here.

  Even though these are awful circumstances, I’m glad to be part of this. I usually don’t get to help sort out adult situations with other adults. When I think about it rationally, which is what I always try to do, I can see that this is an understandable response, given some of the things I have struggled with, but being left out of things for my own benefit still frustrates me. What few people outside of my friends and family seem to grasp is that I am not too stupid to understand adult problems. I am not stupid at all. I’m developmentally disabled, and so I process information in ways that often don’t make sense to the people they call neurotypical. (I love the word “neurotypical.”)

  There’s something else that people don’t realize. Because of my long association with Dr. Buckley, I have come to know something about rage and how to control it, or at least mitigate it. When I began to see Dr. Buckley, I was consumed with rage, although I didn’t realize it, and I did not know how to let it go or channel it into something constructive. I had been ordered to stay at least five hundred feet away from Garth Brooks and to not send him any more letters of complaint, even though I still contend that he ruined country music. I had been fired from a job—that time for my conduct and not as an involuntary separation. I had been banned from an Albertsons in Billings—not my favorite one, the one on Grand Avenue and Thirteenth Street West, but the one on Sixth Street West—because I had knocked down an old lady, even though I still contend that was not my fault.

  Dr. Buckley helped me overcome all of that. She helped me see that writing my letters of complaint could be a positive action, in that it would allow me to blow off steam in the act of writing. I could then file the letter away without ever sending it. That didn’t make a lot of sense at first, but it really does work. These days, I no longer write a daily letter of complaint, although I will write one if someone genuinely wrongs me. In those cases I even send the letter, and I’ve often seen positive results (in November, for instance, I got ten free pizzas because one that was delivered to my house arrived soggy and I wrote a letter of complaint). When Dr. Buckley and I began working together, I would not have thought it possible that I could write a letter of complaint and not get in trouble for it later.

  In addition to all of that, Dr. Buckley taught me coping strategies for rage and frustration. Sometimes I close my eyes and let the flash of anger pass before I take any action. Sometimes I sleep on things and wake up with a new perspective. And sometimes I even get angry and show it, although not very often. The point is that most reasonable actions, even anger, have their place. It’s just a matter of learning how to judge the situation and the propriety (I love the word “propriety”) of the moment. That, among other things, is what Dr. Buckley has helped me to do. I am not saying I’m perfect at it; no one is perfect. I am saying that I’m better than I was before I started seeing her.

  I know this sounds like bragging. I do not wish to do that. I’m simply trying to say that if Kyle needs my help developing any of these coping strategies, I will be happy to provide it. I’ve had practice.

  — • —

  Donna and I are having coffee at the kitchen table. She is having coffee, anyway. I am having sugar-free hot chocolate, because I don’t like coffee and because Donna didn’t have any chai tea, which I do like. Discovering that was the only good thing to come of my misadventure in Bozeman, although I’m not sure that chai tea was worth a punch in the face from the intemperate young man.

  Donna has a grave look, which I understand. Today has not been easy, nor has it been fun.

  “Edward,” she says. “I want to talk to you about something. I want us to talk about it now so when it comes up tonight when Victor’s home and we all sit down to chat, you won’t be surprised by it.”

  “OK.”

  “I think you’re going to need to go back home.”

  I feel an ache in my stomach.

  “OK. Why?”

  She looks at me, and tears have begun to build up in her eyes. I reach out and catch one on my thumb before it runs down her face. This surprises her. It surprises me, too.

  “I hate to say it,” she says. “I hate it. But this thing is so much bigger and more awful than I imagined, and I think we’re going to need all the time and effort we can muster to save Kyle from whatever’s got hold of him.”

  I agree with what Donna is saying, and I try to communicate this to her by nodding.

  She goes on. “You’re a part of this family, Edward. I want you to know that. When Kyle came home after being expelled, he said he wanted to go back to Billings and visit you, and, honestly, we considered it. We’d still love to do it. But we can’t while he
’s like this. It wouldn’t be fair to you. He’s way, way out of control. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  I nod again. I get it. It still hurts me in my gut, but I think Donna is only making sense. She is a very logical woman.

  “I will do whatever you think helps the most, Donna,” I say.

  Donna sets her head down. She grinds her forehead into her arms, which are crossed on the table. Her shoulders heave. She is crying again.

  I sip my sugar-free hot chocolate and I wait for her to finish.

  I’m going home, but there’s nothing for me there.

  I am adrift. I hate that word.

  — • —

  I’m leaving the bathroom—this medicine continues to make me pee prodigiously (I love the word “prodigiously”)—and passing by the door to Kyle’s room. He cracks it open and speaks to me.

  “Don’t let them make you leave,” he says.

  I look around, afraid that we’ll both be in trouble, but Donna can’t hear him. She’s in the kitchen cutting vegetables for dinner.

  “Kyle, you’re not supposed to be out here.”

  “Screw her.”

  “Kyle.”

  “Why are they making you leave?”

  If he’s managed to eavesdrop enough to know that I will be going home, he should know the answer to his own question. Still, I tell him.

  “Because you’re being bad and they don’t know what to do. I’ll get in the way.”

  For just a moment Kyle looks mad, and I brace myself in anticipation that he will call me another name that hurts my feelings. But he doesn’t do that. He’s just defiant.

  “So what? They’re doing it because they want to punish me. And you’re going to leave because you want to punish me, too.”

  “I don’t want to punish you.”

  “Then why are you leaving?”

  “Because your mom thinks it would be better if I did.”

  “She’s wrong.”

  “She’s very logical, Kyle.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. We’ll have to see what the facts bear out.”

  Donna’s voice calls out from the kitchen. “Edward, can you help me with something real quick?”

  “Close the door,” I tell Kyle.

  “Don’t let them make you leave.”

  “Close it!”

  Kyle, at last, does as he’s told.

  I head for the kitchen.

  I’m flummoxed, to say the least. No, I guess to say the least would be to say nothing at all—another phrase that doesn’t make much sense.

  TECHNICALLY TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2011

  It’s 4:47 a.m.

  My father visited my dreams again. This is not an altogether rare occurrence, especially since he’s been dead, but my recent dreams about him have deviated from the norm in that they’ve been set earlier in my life, when I was just a boy. Most of the time, my father appears in my dreams as I knew him around the time he died, and I am generally around the age I was then or am now. I don’t like to use phrases such as “most of the time” and “generally,” as they provide no precision about the frequency of occurrence, but dreams are hard to enumerate (I love the word “enumerate”) and categorize. Science has proved that all mammals dream, and I certainly am a mammal, but just because I have dreams doesn’t mean I remember all of them when I am awake. Sometimes I can’t remember a single dream. Sometimes I remember only pieces of dreams and it’s hard to make sense of them in the conscious world. And sometimes I remember entire dreams with vividness, as if they were a movie or a TV show I watched. When my father appears in a dream, for better or for worse, I remember it in the latter way.

  This time we were again in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, on that long-ago trip, only it was a blend of that time and a time much earlier, one I’ve only read about in books. My father and I were out in the oil fields, where he oversaw a crew of men who were doing cathodic protection on oil pumps to keep them from corroding. That image is based on something that really happened. While in the field, in my dream, we met up with two men who were traveling in a wagon train, and this is where the dream becomes illogical. They introduced themselves as John Charles Fremont and Charles Preuss, and although this seemed perfectly natural in my dream, as I sit here now, eyes open, I know it is absurd. They were men of the 1840s. Fremont was a man who made important expeditions to the West, seeing many things in this part of the country before any other white man did, and Preuss was his long-suffering cartographer, who hated the very thing he was great at doing.

  In my dream, my father told me that Fremont and Preuss were men who had the courage to set out for frontiers that no one had seen before. The actual truth of the matter is that my father never said any such thing. If he knew anything about Fremont or Preuss, I never heard him talk about them. Furthermore, I know for a fact that my knowledge of both men comes from books and television. The question of how my brain came to blend Cheyenne Wells—which is far south of where Fremont and Preuss traveled—with two early-nineteenth-century explorers is likely to remain a mystery. There is just no logical explanation for it, and I am a person who values logic over all else.

  So now I lie on my back and try to make sense of something that defies conventional order, and this is perhaps the hardest thing anyone can ask me to do. In the time I’ve been on this trip, my father has shown up in my dreams twice, both times we have been in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, and I have been a little boy. I wonder what that means, or if it means anything at all. If I were an oneirologist, which is a person who studies dreams, I might have some basis for understanding this. I am not an oneirologist. And what of Fremont and Preuss? I can’t make sense of that, either. I remember watching a program on their expeditions and thinking that Preuss was the kind of person I would like, because he was very particular about things, just like I am. This quality made him a good cartographer but a bad explorer, and the program noted that Preuss never seemed to grasp the import of the things he saw. For example, Preuss once happily wrote in his journal that some of the men in the traveling party had successfully negotiated with the Indians for some salt, which would make their food taste better. The program I saw noted that Preuss said nothing about the fact that they discovered Lake Tahoe around the same time. The narrator seemed to find this humorous, but, to be honest, I saw Preuss’s side of it. It’s hard to be impressed by big things when the little things are all messed up. He just wanted his salt, just like I want to know why I am adrift and why I’m being shown these things in my dreams.

  There is a deductive device called Occam’s razor. The way it works is that when someone is trying to sort through multiple possible explanations for something, the hypothesis (I love the word “hypothesis”) that makes the fewest assumptions is generally the correct one. In other words, the simplest explanation is the best explanation, until and unless more information emerges that suggests a different reason. I like Occam’s razor for a lot of reasons, but the disdain for assumptions is my favorite part of it.

  I decide to apply Occam’s razor to things. I turn on the bedside light, pull a notebook from my bag, and begin writing.

  1. I came here to help Kyle, but he’s beyond my reach.

  2. I also came here because I was feeling adrift.

  3. I still feel adrift.

  4. My father has visited my dreams twice, and both times he has been with me in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado.

  5. John Charles Fremont and Charles Preuss visited my dreams, and they were explorers who mapped the way for others.

  6. I need to find my way, and it doesn’t seem that anyone can map it for me.

  7. Though I have to leave Boise, I don’t have to go home. I have eight days, including this one, before I leave Billings for Texas.

  8. I’m going elsewhere. I think I will go to Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. Even if my father’s appearance there in my dreams is completely random, I would like to see the town again.

  9. I’m done with the list now.

/>   10. Now.

  11. Shit.

  I’m determined to stop writing, even though the last thing on my list is a curse word and an odd number. I manage to do it—I’m very proud—but I have to snap the pen in half to keep from writing down the number 12.

  I feel better having made a decision about what to do next, but then my mind goes back to Kyle, and I feel bad all over again.

  When Victor came home earlier tonight, all four of us sat at the kitchen table and talked. Victor impressed me. He was disappointed that Kyle called his mom a bitch and me a freak, but he did not yell at the boy. Kyle did all the yelling.

  “You made me come to this stupid place and this stupid school. I never wanted to leave!”

  Victor spoke to his stepson softly. “Kyle, you’re not the first kid who’s moved. I lived in four different cities when I was a kid.”

  “That’s your problem!”

  “No, it’s our problem. What are we going to do about it?”

  “Like you’d give me a choice anyway.”

  Donna spoke. “I think we need to talk to someone together, all of us, as a family.”

  “Him, too?” Kyle pointed at me.

  “Edward is going home.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to be busy here, and because he has to go to Texas to see his mom.”

  “Not for eight days,” I said.

  “Can he stay until then?” Kyle asked.

  “No,” his mother said.

  “Why not?”

  “I just told you. Because we’re going to be busy.”

  “This sucks.”

  Victor pointed at Kyle with his left index finger. “Young man, I’ve warned you…”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Kyle stood up and shoved his chair hard against the table, and then he ran down the hallway to his room and closed the door.

  Victor looked at Donna and then at me. Donna looked at the table. I looked out the sliding glass door to the backyard. The sky was purple and orange, and the leafless trees looked like spindly (I love the word “spindly”) black monsters against the sky. I don’t think I ever noticed how spooky trees can look. I’m noticing a lot of things I’ve never noticed before, and I’m finding that I don’t like all of the things I see.