Saving Jason (6 page)

T
he Kid and I had a tough weekend. Saturday, after his yoga class, we went for a run in the park. He liked doing wind sprints down Poet’s Walk. I’m no sprinter; I flamed out early. The Kid kept going, burning up energy that his body would otherwise use to torment him with sleeplessness, twitches, cramps, and even small seizures.

I took a seat on a bench and listened to a man in his sixties playing acoustic guitar like John Fahey. A moment later, when the song ended, I realized that I hadn’t seen my son for almost a full minute. An eternity in parent time. I jumped up and looked around madly, but it was too late. The Kid was gone. The next fifteen minutes shaved a decade off the years remaining to me and cost me a couple of handfuls of torn-out hair that I could not afford to lose.

I found him. The Kid was halfway up the face of a giant rock, stuck to it like a gecko on a beach cottage wall. He was high enough off the ground that I had to stretch to pluck him off and he didn’t like it. He thrashed and his foot connected with my head, which was not the same as being deliberately kicked, but it hurt just the same. He had to skip his usual ice cream treat and we walked home thoroughly disgusted with each other. I blamed Frederick Law Olmsted for leaving such a dangerous rock lying around where anybody could get into trouble.

Sunday night, I burned the Kid’s grilled cheese sandwich. Not exactly burned. Blackened. I scraped off the charcoal and put the sandwich on his plate—damaged side down—with a dozen microwaved French fries, four green beans, and a small mound of ketchup. A balanced meal.

The Kid could smell that something was wrong, but I was hoping that he would smother everything with enough of the red sauce to kill
the taste of everything else—including the burnt bread. It didn’t work. He took one bite, began his regimen of ten chews per bite, and started to gag.

My first reaction, and I hated myself for it, was on the order of “Oh, puh-lease, just cut out the big drama.” But it was immediately apparent that his gagging, spitting, and heaving was not an act. He was in distress. The fact that the sandwich was not damaging him in any way was a side issue. I stuck my finger in his mouth and began to dig out the sodden mass, holding his cheeks with my other hand to keep him from clamping his sharp teeth down on my finger. I was successful in getting most of the bread and cheese out, but his tongue was still covered with black crumbs and he choked and coughed. I grabbed his water glass and held it to his lips.

“Come on, Kid. Just rinse your mouth. You’ll feel better.” I almost added “Trust me,” which under the circumstances would have been the height of absurdity.

He pushed the water away and the glass flew past my shoulder, emptying its contents down the front of my shirt. The Kid spun away from me and ran for the bathroom. Without thinking, I ran after him. If I had thought, I would have let him go. He wasn’t going to hurt himself in there, and he might have been on track to rinse out with mouthwash, which would have been much more effective at killing the taste of burnt carbon. Instead, I jumped up and tried to head him off by circling around the table in the other direction. He saw me coming at him from an unexpected direction and must have assumed that I was chasing him—which, in a way, I was. He began screaming in terror.

I stopped. My body didn’t want to, but I let the brain take charge. My body wanted to pick him up and hug him to me until the demons left him. But that never worked, and I had received the bites, scratches, kicks, and punches that came as a result of that approach. I let my arms drop to my sides and squatted down to show a less threatening profile. That didn’t work, either. The Kid kept screaming and ran into his room, slamming the door behind him.

“Kid? Son? Are you okay?” I called softly as I edged toward his door.

There was an explosion of banging noises from inside the room. I hoped that he was only kicking something, rather than hitting it with more delicate parts of his body. He was capable of banging his head on something until he bled, and though he had not done it once while living with me, I was always prepared for the worst. At least he was no longer choking and threatening to vomit. The attack passed. The room was quiet.

I heard my phone chirp. It was back on the table. I ignored it.

“Kid? I screwed up your sandwich. I’m sorry. Can I make you another one? I’ll do it right this time.” I had been scrolling pages on my iPad, reading whatever snippets came up that related to penny stocks. I had not been watching the cast-iron pan. The acrid scent of burnt toast was my first clue that I was destroying the Kid’s dinner. I had compounded my error by having been too impatient and pigheaded to make him another. Perfection as a parent was a goal, not a condition, and one that seemed to recede with each new trial the Kid handed me. Rather than earning an A in Single Parenting 101, I was sliding deeper every day into the realization that I would have been better off taking the class pass-fail.

The phone chirped again. I hated that Apple thought I needed a second notification when I did not immediately pick up a text. Did their engineers not consider that there might be something more important in my life than decoding the latest SMS missive from the virtual world? There was probably something in Settings that would allow me to change the notification system, but as there was not a teenager living in my house, I had no chance of finding it.

“Kid. I’m going to open your door. I won’t come in unless you tell me it’s okay, but I just want to see that you’re safe.” I waited for a reply. Nothing. But he didn’t say no. I opened the door.

He was curled up on his bed, knees practically touching his forehead, rocking slightly and vocalizing in a stream of soft grunts, moans, and vowel sounds that might have been meant as words—as though
interpreted by the lead singer in a death metal band. But he was all right. No blood showing. No cuts or red marks. If there was damage to furniture or fittings, I would find it the next day.

“Can I get you anything?” No response. “How about I read to you?” No response. That was a good sign. He wasn’t escalating at the sound of my voice. That meant I could keep trying to reach him. “I’m going to come in and sit on your bed with you. Is that okay?” No response. Excellent. I was making progress.

There was no possibility of touching him. A comforting hand on his back would have thrown him into a full-out tantrum. I could offer only my presence. I calmed myself and hoped that the Kid would somehow sense it and be able to feed on it. It may have worked, or it may have been that this latest paroxysm had run its course, but he did grow calmer. The grunting stopped. The violent rocking became a gentle sway. His fingers were beating out his odd, repetitive cadence—stimming. And his vocalizations became a single, soft word. I leaned in to hear him, taking the risk of retaliation for imposing myself into his space. He continued to ignore me. The word became clearer. I heard his whisper.

“Mamma.”

There was no word that I could imagine that would have cut as deep. The Kid and I had not spoken of my ex-wife or her death—murder—in months. He dictated what we talked about by ignoring me when I began speaking on a subject that did not interest him. His shadow, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia who worked with my son after school five days a week, had much better luck with getting him to address uncomfortable issues, but I knew—because she had told me so—that on the subject of his mother, he was intractable. But it was unfair in the extreme to lay the blame solely on the Kid for our mutual failure to discuss such a difficult and emotionally complicated issue. My feelings on the subject were a knotted mare’s nest of contradictions that I would take almost any journey to avoid
examining. There was guilt over the circumstances of her murder, though I had no hand in it directly. Anger, too, but remaining angry at a dead person is one of the shorter paths to depression. But I had not been able to put aside my hurt or resentment, nor my justified fury at her treatment of our son.

“Mamma,” he whispered again.

I did not want to have this conversation. Not then. Not ever. I did not want his pain on my conscience. I didn’t think I could handle it. It was too much. My mother died when I was no older than my son and I could not remember a single conversation with my father about her. There must have been some, but I did not remember them and that was just the way I wanted it. Angie was not the world’s worst mother, but she would have made most people’s short list. Leave her and her memory in the past. The Kid had enough other problems, and so did I. Why couldn’t we just leave this one alone?

“Mamma.”

“Oh, son, your father really doesn’t want to do this. I am so sorry. I wish I could. For you. I would do almost anything for you, but I can’t do this.”

Something in my voice or my words must have reached him because he stopped rocking. His fingers continued to move, but his body was relaxing. He began to uncurl.

“Your whirl,” he said.

“What? Sorry, Kid. I didn’t get that.”

His voice was flat, but he gave equal emphasis to both words. “Your. Whirl.”

I was lost. “Your. Whirl,” I repeated.

He nodded—so forcefully that I thought he might strain his neck. “Your. Whirl. Mamma.”

It made no sense. When I first got out of prison and found my son living in a locked room at his grandmother’s house in Louisiana, he spoke only in odd snippets of taglines from radio and television
commercials. Was this some throwback? He rarely did it anymore. His normal verbal skills were nowhere near mainstream for a seven-year-old boy, but he had come a very long way.

“Your. Whirl. Mamma.” Saying the words aloud didn’t help.

“Now!” he yelled, and curled back into a fetal ball.

“No, no, it’s okay. I’m trying to understand. Tell me again.”

He was fighting for control, his fingers flying. He suddenly threw himself over and leapt out of bed. “Your. Whirl.” He marched out into the living room, where he had more room to pace. He strode furiously from his door to the center of the room, then to the front door, then back to where he’d started. He did this circuit three times as I stood in his doorway, watching and waiting for a clue. The parade-ground pacing was one of his tricks for achieving self-discipline, for getting his demons back in their dens. His battle was exhausting him, but he was winning. When he stopped in front of me, he was breathing hard, but focused, no longer frightened.

“Your. Whirl. Mamma.”

“Okay,” I said. “Show me.” Maybe I could get him to draw something for me that would help.

He walked to the telephone—the landline that I occasionally used for sending a fax or to make a call when my cell phone was charging. “Your whirl. Mamma.”

Your World. Delivered.
The telephone. He wanted to call his Mamma. Impossible. I must have still had it wrong. The Kid knew what
dead
meant. He knew that his mother was dead. That there was no chance of calling her. He was cracking up. I had never read of a behavioral tic like that, but one thing I had learned—autism is always surprising.

“Kid. You can’t call your Mamma. She’s gone. You know that.” I stopped. He was shaking his head in a vehement
NO!
I had it wrong somehow.

“Mamma. Mamma. Mamma.” He picked up the handset and held it out to me. “Mamma.”

Angie had referred to herself as Mamma, but only in the third
person. Her mother was also Mamma. And she was most definitely alive. She called once a week and kept the Kid on the phone for long sessions, entertaining him by reading books or car magazines, hoping for a few words from him before he disconnected. He never said good-bye. He rarely said hello.

“You want to call your grandmother? Have I finally got this figured out?”

He nodded once.

“Okay. We can do that.” I took the phone and dialed from memory. Muscle memory. I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize the number, but my index finger remembered.

Mamma blamed me for her daughter’s death. So did I, for that matter, but her anger was beyond reason. I felt for her and wished peace for and with her. Her daughter had disappointed her in many ways, but blood was all in her world. Angie’s brother, Tino, had brokered a kind of détente between us. Mamma had agreed. Refraining from yelling accusations at me was a small price to pay for the opportunity to talk with her only grandson once a week.

“Jason?” she answered. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. But the Kid is having a hard day and wants to talk to you. Is this a good time?”

The Kid was watching me out of the corner of his eye. If it wasn’t a good time for her to talk, I was going to have a time explaining it to him.

“But he’s all right? He’s not hurt?”

“No, ma’am.” I had stopped calling her Mamma after Angie was killed. “He’s okay.” An explanation that he had freaked out over a burnt sandwich and reacted as though I was poisoning him would have left more questions than answers. And he
was
okay. “Just a bit shaky. Can I give him the phone?”

“Let me just turn off my kettle. Yes, give my little one the phone.”

I handed it over. The Kid took it and flopped down on the rug, folding himself into a cross-legged sukhasana pose. He could hold it
for hours. I backed away to give him some privacy. He didn’t really understand the concept yet, but I did.

The offending sandwich was on the table with cold French fries and colder green beans. I took it all into the kitchen and dumped it in the trash. Then got a sponge and cleaned up the spilled water and the black crumbs that littered the table, chairs, and floor. The Kid usually lasted fifteen or twenty minutes on the phone before his inner clock ticked over and he hung up. I found my cell phone and hit the speed dialer for the Athena take-out number. I ordered him his usual and treated myself to a cheeseburger deluxe. They said they were a little backed up, but would be over with the order in twenty minutes. Perfect.

I opened up my message folder. There was a single text. It came from FBI Special Agent Marcus Brady.

It would be a gross and unlikely deception to say that Brady and I were friends. I was sure that if he ever caught me in some blatantly illegal act, he would cart me off to the Metropolitan Correctional Center and feel that he had done a good day’s work. But my assistance had served his career. And he had done the same for me. It was a loveless marriage of convenience that often worked out much better for both sides than the buddy-buddy bromances you see in most cop movies.