“I think my body is trying to kill me,” he said to the little hen in his hands. “I don’t know why it would do that.”
I stood rooted to the ground as waves of terror shuddered down my spine. Why would he say that? What was that supposed to mean? Could I have heard him wrong? I watched him carefully stretch the bird’s fragile wings, revealing new amber and black pinfeathers. Then he lifted her juvenile body up to his face, stared into her beady bird-eyes, and touched the tip of his nose to her beak.
“But you make me feel better, Frightful. Plus your feathers are silky. Like the flour in Mom’s bins that she doesn’t know I like to play with.”
Frightful turned her head to the side, gazing at him, eyeball to eyeball.
“Do you understand?” Andrew asked.
“Crawww-cruk-cruk.”
Yes. I’m here for you.
She answered him like a mother hen would her chicks, in a low quiet voice. Andrew tucked the little bird into his shirt and stared out onto the lawn. Chirping protests came from somewhere near his belly and he patted the little lump, saying, “It’s okay. I’m here, too.”
The chirping stopped.
I remained motionless, my breath caught somewhere between inhale and exhale, still not sure I’d heard him correctly. It was clear, however, that he was telling Frightful his secrets, secrets he had never shared with me, at least in a way that I could understand. Did he really believe the chicken understood him? Or even stranger yet, did they actually understand one another? From my vantage point, it looked like they had an instinctual relationship I couldn’t comprehend. Jon had even commented a few nights before that it seemed like they spoke some secret language—a language that we could never access, but had clearly opened a window into Andrew’s mind.
Andrew hopped down from the stump, bounding across the side lawn calling, “Chi-KENS! Back-ACK!”
Five cheeping raptors scrabbled around his ankles, running past him into the front yard. Andrew chased after them, his Darth Vader cape licking at his heels, causing me to stare at his retreating figure in disbelief. He looked fine to me. His loping gait was a little awkward, his skinny arms and legs those of a geeky little boy who had yet to show the promise of the man he would become. I was sure I had heard him wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time I was confused and baffled by something he said.
Even so, I crept over to the stump, wishing those terrifying words would somehow be forgotten, leave my mind and float away. Because the truth was, the day Andrew was born, I had known my life had somehow taken a sharp left hand turn. My world wasn’t black and white anymore. I was swimming in a sea of grey, and now I was drowning in confusion, trying to decipher just how this child of mine saw the world. After hearing him say those words, I feared his world was nothing but pain.
T-Rex stood on the stump, abandoned, covered in splintery bark and lime-colored moss. T-Rex had been Andrew’s first friend, the first creature he talked to. But Frightful was entirely different. She talked back. She had a way of making my little boy’s body soften and his eyes focus. She drew the words from his mouth in a smooth, even flow, revealing a part of him we had never seen before. When speaking to Frightful, Andrew came up with extraordinary insights, things most eight-year-olds would never be able to put to words. Now I was left guessing what he meant when he told his chicken his body was trying to kill him.
From my hiding spot in the woods, I could see him playing with the chickens on the front slope of lawn—five little birds climbing into his lap, hoping for a bit of the cracked corn in his pockets. Frightful sat on his shoulder, pecking at bits of grass in his hair.
“Fright-feee!” Andrew called, and the chicken called back with a series of chirps.
She hopped around his shoulder and stepped into his waiting hand. Andrew walked to the raised planter box next to the driveway with Frightful tucked safely in the crook of his elbow. A few mature tail feathers poked out the back in various directions, making her look like a toilet brush. I watched as the remaining hens chatted and chirped their way across the lawn, followed by Hannah, then our dog Sawyer, who carried a mud-drenched ball that had come out of Hannah’s gardening bucket. I watched my two children from a distance—brother and sister, friends, companions. One was tall and lean, rigid and mysterious, with a riotous bush of flaming hair and ice blue eyes. The other was petite, soft, bubbly, an engaging little girl with blond curls and eyes that varied between olive and a deep shade of grey. Two children who Jon and I believed couldn’t possibly have come from the same gene pool.
Hannah’s chattering floated through the air—a negotiation to hold the little bird.
“No, Hannah. She likes me best,” Andrew grumped, clearly irritated she would ask such a question.
I emptied a mud-filled bucket and walked towards them, sensing an argument on the way. Hannah shrugged, crouched low and poked a stick at something in the dirt below the planter. I slowed my step, turning my face to the pale sun and fragile blue sky. I felt the first twinge of angst at the thought of the school year to come. I wasn’t ready to see my little tribe of special needs moms quite yet. I wanted to stay in my current state of denial, a place where the word ‘autism’ was never uttered, a place where all people were quirky and strange in their own unique way.
I handed Hannah the empty bucket and leaned against the planter next to Andrew. Hannah began scooping dirt onto my shoes, patting the mounds into little cakes. Frightful’s slim body was nestled in the narrow space between Andrew’s crossed legs, pecking at a fistful of weeds he had crammed into a paper cup.
“Eat your greens, Chick-a-dee. They’re good for you.”
The little bird tilted her head as if he had just told her something interesting. He held a single blade of grass to her beak. “Go on. It’s good.”
She stood, turned her head to the side, regarding him patiently, not blinking.
I ruffled Andrew’s hair. “Maybe you could eat a few of those greens yourself,” I said, noting that he needed a haircut before school started. Third grade, I was told, was going to be an academic nightmare, made especially so for Andrew and any other child with special needs.
“Not interested,” he said, crouching down to avoid my touch.
“How about I cut your hair this time? I won’t use the clippers. Only scissors.”
“Still not interested.”
I noticed his body had gone from soft and relaxed, to the familiar rigid posture, as if he were ready to bolt at any second. I moved a few inches away from him, giving him his personal space.
“You could use a haircut, Frightful,” he said, pulling a puff of baby fuzz from a wing.
He started to hum, a hint of a smile tipping the edge of his lips. Frightful stood motionless, still gazing into his face, beak forward, eyes looking left and right. Andrew stared back in wordless communication. I watched this exchange between my son and his chicken, wondering what it was she said to him to make him respond in such a profound way. It left me aching with envy—craving that type of intimacy from him.
Andrew turned his body towards me, keeping his eyes fixed on Frightful. “She is my lady friend. She knows me,” he said.
I knew it was the truth. And I also knew exactly what he was telling me. She was the one who kept his secrets.
“I know she does, sweetheart. I’m glad you found each other.” I reached out to touch my son, but sensing him pull away, I smoothed my hand across Frightful’s back instead.
Hannah finished making dirt mountains out of my feet and wandered off. I stood next to Andrew, thinking about his conversation in the woods, feeling like I had swallowed a boulder. I started to ask him what he meant when he said he thought his body was trying to kill him. But when I looked at him, I saw he was smiling, content, caressing the chicken in his lap, chatting about all the adventures he had planned for the two of them. I stopped, certain I had heard him wrong.
As memories often do, the details of that summer day on the lawn were swallowed up by my everyday life. In earl
y November, I was pacing Andrew’s room once again, waiting for the thermometer to beep. T-Rex glared at me from the windowsill with his oversized head, and all I wanted to do was swipe the toothy grin off his nubbly face. One look at Andrew’s face that morning told me there were new ulcers on the inside of his lips in addition to the inferno ravaging his body. Andrew had already missed fifteen days of third grade, and the school work, as I’d feared, was a nightmare. My fragile hold on control was unraveling quickly.
In addition, Andrew had tried to bring Frightful to school in a paper grocery sack, resulting in a phone call from the front desk reminding me that livestock was not allowed in a public school. I reminded them that chickens were poultry, not livestock. That didn’t go over well. After much negotiating, Andrew finally agreed to bring T-Rex instead, claiming he was a Jurassic chicken anyway. That incident alone guaranteed my relationship with his teacher would be uneasy at best. Between chickens, dinosaurs, and sporadic attendance, he wasn’t making any progress, so I tried working with him at home.
One evening, I sat with Andrew at the kitchen counter, determined he would learn to count.
“If you just put your finger in front of each M&M, then you can eat it after we count the number,” I said, offering up a form of bribery that was common around our home.
Andrew looked at me—not really at me—more like his eyes darted towards my face before landing somewhere on my shoulder. T-Rex stood on the counter across from Andrew, his green toothy head turned to the side, eyeballing me with his yellow painted lizard-eyes.
I avoided the raptor’s pointed gaze.
“Can we try it?”
“I like the orange ones,” Andrew replied.
I took his pointer finger in my hand, guiding it to each piece of candy. “One, two, three, four,” he said, echoing my whispered words.
“Good! Now you try it,” I said, willing him to repeat the words we had just recited together.
He studied the candy carefully, moving his finger up and down the line. His answer came a long ten seconds later. “Six.”
“No! You just said it a minute ago. How many pieces of candy?!” I jabbed my finger at each one, frustration oozing into my words. He stared back at me, a blank look on his face.
I swiped the M&M’s back into an empty bag and tossed it onto the counter. Andrew patted my face with a sticky palm, saying, “T-Rex doesn’t like candy, anyway.”
My frustration evaporated as he continued to pat my face and gaze into my eyes—something he rarely did.
I pressed his warm hand to my cheek. “Counting is hard, buddy, isn’t it?”
He nodded. I reached for the colorful candies, spilling them onto the counter.
“Let’s eat them all for that dinosaur of yours.”
Once Andrew was back at school, I redoubled my efforts to help him fit in. Lacking any other place to use my talents, I joined the elusive tribe of ‘parents of special needs kids.’ We were the ones who volunteered for every class party to quietly orchestrate our child’s behavior so they wouldn’t stand out among their peers. We hung around the fringes of school, offering help to those poor teachers who just didn’t get it. We thought we were somehow superior to regular parents—we just knew more.
Without divulging the secret diagnosis attached to our child, we circled one another with knowing smiles and encouraging comments.
“Tommy has really made progress,” I heard from a parent commenting on the child who always rolled out of his chair and wandered around the room.
“Yes. And Jackson has stopped picking his nose,” Tommy’s mom snapped back.
Colored Skittles littered a tray in the corner where Andrew sat. His scowl said: Get. Me. Outta. Here. I knew exactly how he felt; I didn’t like being lumped in with the special education crowd, either. I secretly wanted to be a part of the Parking Lot Club—the group of parents who stood outside the school chatting about their kids’ soccer teams, ballet lessons, and birthday parties. There was still a part of me that thought I could force it to happen for Andrew if I worked just a little harder at making him fit in.
At home, our days flowed smoothly, as long as we followed our prescribed routine. After Jon left for work each morning, Andrew and Frightful would sit on the front porch, deep in conversation. Hannah was never included, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. Instead, she insisted on selecting and laying out her brother’s clothes for school. Each morning, she created an unstuffed scarecrow on the floor, starting with his shoes, a sock crammed in each toe, underwear, then pants and T-shirt, inside out, with no tags. Both kids assumed this was the natural order of things, but I knew it was quite different from most sibling relationships. No matter how hard I tried to stop the two of them from relating to one another in this way, it never worked.
One evening, after finishing a new logo for a client, I told Jon about the Parking Lot moms. “I don’t really fit in with the other parents at school,” I lamented.
“You don’t need them,” he said. “You have your work, your clients, and our whole family lives in the area.” When he saw the look on my face, he added, “What I meant was, it really doesn’t matter what any of them think.”
But it did matter to me. I wanted to fit in with the cool crowd. And most of all, I needed somebody besides Jon, who could understand all the anxious feelings that were building up inside me. Later that night, when I heard the cluck of a chicken come from somewhere downstairs and the admonishment of Hannah parenting her older brother, I decided to form a club of my own.
Chapter 6
We called ourselves the Breakfast Club. We were a new tribe of special needs moms hand-plucked from several local elementary schools. I started with Tommy’s mom, sensing from our many encounters that she was a kindred spirit, and the two of us branched out from there. It was a clandestine recruitment, as we were actually watching other kids to see if we thought they might be lumped in the same category as our own. Then we would find out who the moms were and perform a one-way interview unbeknownst to them. We ended up with a group of six fantastic women, each full of keen advice and a listening ear.
We sat around our coffee tables, sharing stories with one another, hoping to glean bits and pieces of wisdom each time we met. We set the ground rules right away: No Bitching—about husbands, school, other people, or other people’s kids. But it was very hard to do, since we were a bunch of freaked-out moms who were trying to figure out how to navigate the unfamiliar world of special needs parenting. We all desperately wanted to feel included, valued, somehow compensated for the gaping wound our child’s label had inflicted on our hearts. In the end, when we established who we really were, we became a powerful little posse of truth-tellers.
On one such Tuesday morning, I dared to drop my pretense of perfection and admit that all was not right in my world. “My son talks to a chicken,” I said, forking the remnants of an omelet.
Nobody blinked. Their kids did all sorts of unusual things, and my telling them that Andrew spoke to his chicken was not that special.
“I mean, that’s the only thing he talks to. And, well, during the summer I thought I heard him tell the chicken his body was trying to kill him.” Embarrassed, I quickly added, “But I think I heard him wrong.”
This morsel of truth got a few raised eyebrows. Tommy’s mom, who was sitting next to me, choked on her egg, spraying tiny bits of yellow across the table.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping at the table. “Why in the world would he say that?”
I told the group about Andrew’s repeated fevers, the specialists we had seen and even the modern-day woo-woo healer we consulted. When I described his gaping ulcers and his sudden pain and nausea, the breakfast became unappetizing.
“Autism is a piece of cake compared to this,” I said, only half joking.
From the stunned looks on their faces, I realized it was the first time I had described Andrew’s illness to someone who was not a doctor. I’d been carrying around a terrible fear that to speak about it would
somehow make it even more real. And then where would I be? Trapped inside my panicked, powerless self?
“How long has this been happening?” one of the women asked.
“Since he was in preschool. At least that was the first time I noticed the ulcers.”
I remembered the day I drove him home after he kicked the clown. I had asked him about the blister on his lip and he hadn’t even noticed it was there. Thinking it unimportant, I didn’t mention it to Jon, and truthfully, I hadn’t thought of it again until that moment.
Only days after meeting with my breakfast group, Jon and I carried a limp, fevered, nine-year-old Andrew into the Immunology clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital. By this point, Andrew had seen more specialists than I could remember, and we were on a first-name basis with much of the staff at Children’s. We had been waiting six weeks for this appointment with Dr. Torgerson, and I was hoping this Immunologist would finally have some answers rather than more questions. I secretly wanted him to be a genie, to grant me my single wish—to take away Andrew’s pain and transform him into something new.
Dr. Torgerson was a kind looking man with gold-rimmed glasses and bow tie. He didn’t look like a genie. I noticed a picture of his family tucked into the backside of his name badge—three young kids pig-piled on his lap, his wife’s arms wrapped around his shoulders. He introduced himself to Andrew, touching him gently on the shoulder.
Andrew reached out, gripping his arm. “I think my body is trying to kill me.”
A familiar feeling of terror washed over me. Dr. Torgerson’s face registered surprise for a brief moment before quickly being replaced by a look of compassion. Andrew’s body relaxed—a softening of the muscles in his face, a look of gratitude. This man understands me, his eyes said when he turned to Jon and me.
The Chicken Who Saved Us Page 5