The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Read online

  THE BOY WHO LOVED TORNADOES

  THE BOY WHO LOVED TORNADOES

  A Mother’s Story

  Randi Davenport

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2010 by Randi Davenport. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davenport, Randi, [date]

  The boy who loved tornadoes : a mother’s story /

  Randi Davenport.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-611-4

  1. Autism in children—Treatment. 2. Autistic children—

  Care. 3. Parents of autistic children. I. Title.

  RJ506.A9D38 2010

  618.92′85882—dc22

  2009031221

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  FOR

  CHASE

  AND

  HALEY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  EACH OF US HAS A STORY TO TELL; this is mine. It comes from that most imperfect and peculiar of local records: my memory. Because of that, I have changed names and identifying characteristics of some of the people I describe. After all, they probably never imagined the things I remember them saying and doing would ever appear in a book, and they are entitled to their privacy. Changing names is not the same as changing a story. I would give anything to be able to tell a different story. But no matter the identities I disguise, the story remains the same.

  DRAGON

  ONCE IN A FAR AWAY valley there was a prince. The valley smelled like pine trees. There were two streams that ran through the valley. You could smell pine trees all year round in the valley. One day a terrible dragon came and was destroying the valley. A prince was risking his life to kill the dragon. The king sent out knights to help him but they were not doing any good. The valley seemed doomed and after that, the world.

  —Chase, age 9

  PROLOGUE

  IN MY DREAMS, we are whole again.

  I saw an image of the human brain on a science program on television. This brain had been mapped so that different parts lit up when the subject received certain stimuli. I watched as little waves of lightning flashed across this brain, bright white against the scanner’s dark gray background, the palimpsest of every medical imaging device I have ever known, where something unanticipated paints out that which we expect to see.

  The producers were careful to protect the identity of the subject. Despite our maps and scans, some of us still see those who suffer the symptoms of its failures as complicit in the brain’s wandering actions. In the unconscious judgment of those who would assign to the illness of the brain the qualities of a doomed soul, perhaps we see how little we have progressed from the nineteenth-century phrenologists, who measured every bump and lump of the skull as evidence that only a lack of moral character, a paucity of Christian virtue, resided within.

  In my dreams, Chase is whole and Zip is whole and Haley belongs to the family she remembers, as do I. But in the morning, dreams fade. When we go about our days, we still live in a world apart.

  ONE

  THERE WAS NO POSSIBILITY of staying with the others so Chase and Haley and I walked down the hill away from the picnic and along the creek until we came to a concrete footbridge. Haley ran ahead of us but Chase stopped at the edge of the bridge and stared intently at the trail leading into the woods. There were deep shadows under the branches and dark places where the pine needles gave way to mud and soft fluttering ferns of a bright green color. Everything moved a little in the breeze. Over our heads, pale yellow leaves shifted against dark green loblolly pine and blue sky; in front of us, the trail led up to a ridge, where the November sky opened over us like a bell.

  “Chase,” I said. “Come on.”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  On the other side, Haley walked backward up the hill so she could watch what we were doing while she moved away from us.

  “Come on, Chase,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  He looked hard at the path behind me. His head listed a little to one side, as if his neck were a mast on a boat that had heeled over too far in deep water.

  I could hear Haley scuffling through the leaves. She was nearly at the top of the hill and in another moment would follow the trail out of sight.

  “All right,” I said tightly. “Let’s go see the waterfall.”

  Chase relaxed as we started back to the picnic buildings; this way, the path was out in the open and led down to the creek by a gazebo and you could see people playing softball on the next field. The park allowed you to bring in a horse to ride and a big bay with a tiny red-shirted rider delicately picked its way across the creek where the water flattened out into swampy pools. There were dogs wearing bandannas and couples with toddlers. A family dressed in identical tight shorts jostled past us just as we got to the bridge by the gazebo.

  The Haw River Assembly held the picnic every year to recruit volunteers for the annual Haw River Festival, when fourth graders came from schools all over the state to go on nature walks and learn about ecology. I’d come to the picnic because I wanted us to be like other families and pictured us camped in tents at a river site for a week in the spring. I told Chase we’d paddle canoes like Indians and maybe he’d see a milk snake hanging like thick rope from a tree limb. In the evening, Haley would dance to the sound of drums by a big fire and we’d go to sleep while owls called out in the trees.

  Chase refused to eat with the others, who sat outside in the bright sunshine, so we ate by ourselves in the dim living-room area of the recreation center. He kept his head down and crammed bites into his mouth until food fell from his spoon onto his lap, his legs, his little acre of floor. He didn’t look up or speak to us.

  Haley complained about having to eat inside and I made my usual pleading sounds: It’s not that bad, Chase has trouble outside, this is just fine, we’ll sit with everyone else when he’s finished eating.

  She ate her meal in silence and looked away from me. Afterward, Chase did not want to sit in a circle with the others. He did not want to go down to the creek to do some stream watching, did not want to toss a Frisbee with the other kids, did not want to bird-watch, touch a raccoon pelt, sing a song about the river. He stood at the back of the room instead and paced and muttered to himself while Haley tried to appear small and unnoticeable in the chair beside me.

  Chase was fourteen that day, and Haley was ten. Despite my high hopes, and I had many, there was never any possibility of staying with the others. The cant of Chase’s head, the soft slur of his words, the pitch and lean of his walk, his tendency to fall to staring or into convulsions, his preternatural interest in things morbid and otherwordly, his obsessions and monologues, his endless pacing and agitating, his body that served like a drain and took all of the air out of the room, all of the air and all of the energy, and all of the focus and all of the attention—these things made a wall between us and everyone else. It was as if we were on one side of a thick plate-glass window, through which we could clearly see the normal world, forever out of reach.

  Having a disability in the family locks you in a space whose borders the rest of the world cannot see, and which you yourself cannot see until you run smack into its limits. Then there is nothing to do but to fall back to the center of the world. Oth
ers look in at you and wonder why you can’t do anything differently and you share their sentiments. If you are me, you think that all you have to do is keep trying, keep moving, and you can overcome anything. And some days, perhaps, you feel as if you have. But on most days, you know that the only thing that has been overcome is you. For many years, I didn’t realize that you can’t run away from the physical fact of disability. Once it lies in the roadway behind you, even if it causes doctors to shake their heads and experts to frown, even if it cannot be named, it lies forever on the roadway in front of you.

  • • •

  WE FOLLOWED THE TRAIL down to the rocks where the creek spilled over into a waterfall. Haley immediately began pitching stones into the foam but Chase stood a few feet away from me. His eyes cut from the waterfall to a couple sitting on the rocks in front of us. He began to pace and swing his arms.

  I’d kept up a hopeful commentary, as if I could stave off this storm, as if I could by hope and will alone cause Chase to veer in another direction. “Look what a nice day it is,” I’d said. “Look how pretty the trees look. Don’t you just love the color of the sky? A horse! How great! Haley, look at the horse!”

  Now I offered Chase a handful of stones. He didn’t look at me or shake his head. He just stalked up and down the rocks and cut his eyes from this to that. I became aware that he was talking in a low voice but I couldn’t understand what he was saying or if he was talking to me or to his sister or to himself. I tossed a few stones into the creek. “If your father was here, he’d be able to make these stones skip,” I said to Chase, but he looked away from me as if he hadn’t heard me and stared hard at the tumbling water.

  The two people on the rocks in front of us were young, maybe late teens, and sat side by side, facing the creek. The boy had his arm snugly around the girl’s waist; her long red hair spread over his shoulder as she nuzzled his neck. Haley told me she wanted to go out farther on the rocks, jump down to a flat rock that was halfway across the water. I said no. She stopped and said, “Can I go up there?” There was a leg of the trail up above us where some of the family in tight shorts were noisily expressing enthusiasm about the view.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I watched her climb. She leaned into the hill and when the incline became too steep, she put her hands down in the dry leaves and scrambled doggy-style up to the trail.

  “Good job,” I called, and she grinned at me and jumped up and down. But then Chase was at my elbow, patting my arm over and over. When I turned to him, his eyes were wide and dark.

  “Mom, Mom,” he said. “Those are profilers. That’s the FBI. They’re profilers.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Him and her,” he said and gestured at the couple on the rocks. He turned away so they would not overhear him and spoke in a low voice. “They’re profilers. They’re after me.”

  “No,” I said. “No. Chase. That’s just a guy and a girl.”

  “They’re profilers,” he said.

  “Chase,” I said. “That’s not true.”

  He said something I couldn’t understand and then he turned and strode away from me, moving fast. I called to Haley and she yelled back and I said, “Now.”

  She slid and bumped through the leaves and roots and down the slope and ran up to me and we followed Chase. He didn’t slow but kept taking long strides until he reached our car. I hadn’t seen him move that fast in a couple of years. The picnic was still going on and I thought about going back to let someone know that we were in trouble. But Chase was in the car banging the flat of his hand against the dashboard, saying, “Let’s go, let’s go,” and I had been on my own with whatever it was Chase was going to bring our way for years now. There didn’t seem to be anyone to tell. Chase’s voice pitched up and he said, “Come on, come on. We have to get out of here.”

  So I started the car and put it in gear and we were on the move again. This was my answer to everything: keep moving, stay moving, keep pushing, move, move, move. I didn’t know what else to do. As we headed for the park entrance, Chase kept a lookout for the things that were after us. Haley gazed out the window. In the rearview mirror, I could see her. Her face was small and blank.

  OUR FAMILY ONCE had four people: a father, a mother, a boy, a girl. The father and mother fell in love, just like most people do, and they began with a dream of a family, just like everyone begins with a dream of a life, without knowing exactly how that life will turn out, without knowing what their family will be like. They had a son, whom they named Chase, and then they had a daughter, whom they named Haley. The father’s name was James but he’d taken other names in his life as if he were constantly avoiding the truth of being one person and one person alone. I knew him as Zip but after we were married, we began to get mail for someone named Art Byrd. He lived like a man in the witness protection program and watched over his shoulder as if he thought something was gaining on him. He’d been a working rock-and-roll musician and then, when that left him, a music-store manager, and then, when we left that, a house husband, and then, when he had to get a job, a man who worked on the loading dock at a big-box store. By the end of our marriage, he rarely spoke but sat on the back steps of our house and smoked Salem menthols and watched the street with a thousand-yard stare. Eventually, I came to understand that the same thing that would take Chase had taken him.

  I DROVE SLOWLY out of the park, along a road that ran straight past ball fields and picnic tables and an old farm until it dumped us out on a country highway. The sun had gone behind the clouds and Chase was quieter now, although he still looked around fearfully, and occasionally glanced back over his shoulder as best as he could. His ability to turn was incomplete because his neck had been fused and no longer turned like an ordinary neck. Once he asked Haley to look and see if there was anyone behind us. Once he looked at me as if he had no idea who I was. I tried hopelessly to talk him out of his conviction that we were being followed. Haley sat quietly in the back but once she said, in a very exasperated voice, “It was just a guy and a girl on a rock, jeez.” I heard myself in her voice, as if she’d picked up from me what was right to say to her brother.

  Chase’s ability to be stuck on something, a subject, an idea, a thing of minor relevance that was made large in his mind, wasn’t new. At various times in his life he’d been obsessed with window fans, of which he was deathly afraid, and with dinosaurs, trains, railroad-crossing signs, vampires, ghosts, church steeples, tornadoes, severe weather—he watched the Weather Channel in a state of hypervigilance, so we would always be prepared—Crips, action figures, comic books, and music. His interests evolved as he grew so he wasn’t stuck on all of these at the same time, and he wasn’t stuck on all of them with equivalent attention, and as soon as he’d moved from one thing to the next, he left the first thing behind with utter finality.

  Often, it was very hard to tell what was real for Chase and what was his idiosyncratic interpretation of what was real. He called 9-1-1 because he was convinced someone was trying to kidnap his sister. He told me that Crips followed him home from school, threatening to kill him before he could get inside. But pretty soon I realized that Chase’s conviction that Crips existed in our mild suburban-style neighborhood was created by his placement in a class with behaviorally impaired children who felt utterly thwarted in their own power and talked a lot about their connections to West Coast gangs as a way to demonstrate their place in the world.

  These things weren’t right, they weren’t true, but they were loosely associated with things that were real, and became markers not of what was real but what was real to Chase. And until he was almost fifteen, he was willing to entertain the idea that explanations other than his own might be valid. He allowed the cop to explain how important it was to see someone actually try to kidnap your sister before you report that your sister has been kidnapped. He agreed that it was pretty unlikely that LeMarcus and Gabriel were hardened Crips who also happened to have been enrolled in the seventh grade at McDougle Middle School
. But he didn’t let go of these ideas altogether and every so often he would tell me again about the day his sister was almost kidnapped.

  When I heard these things, my guts twisted and I wanted to shake him and say, “Stop it, Chase! Stop it now!” But I didn’t. I just looked at him and said, in as neutral a tone as I could muster, “You know that didn’t happen, Chase.” And then I set about trying to figure out what had caused this particular eruption, as if I could lay my hands on Chase’s fears, his half-understood truths, and wrest them from him once and for all, as if in this act we would come together in an ancient ritual where I was asked not to sacrifice my son but instead was given a way to save him.

  On Monday I’d call his therapist, his psychiatrist, his teacher at school. Maybe he needed a medication change. Maybe something had gone off-kilter in the classroom. Maybe his therapist could shed some light on what FBI profilers meant to Chase. We could put our heads together and work it out. We could change the error of his thinking. We could change the error of our ways.

  TWO

  WE GOT TO THE teen center around six. It was in the basement of the old post office on Franklin Street. I pulled up to the curb and set my hazards to flash and then turned around and told Chase and Haley to go inside with Melissa.

  “If you each take a bag, we can get set up in no time,” I said.

  I got out of the car and handed Haley a bag and handed Melissa two bags. Chase came up to me and patted my arm and said, “There will be hundreds of kids there tonight, right? Right, Mom?”

  “Some,” I said. “I’m sure there will be some kids.”

  “It’s going to be so cool,” Chase said. He hopped up and down a little and patted my arm over and over again. “Right, Mom? Right? It’s going to be really cool. And there will be hundreds of kids there, right?”