The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (6 page)

A
S
G
ARRISON GREW
, it only emphasized the ways in which Grant’s early years had been out of step. By the time Garrison was just fifteen months old, it began to dawn on me that he was much easier than Grant had been, even at that early age. It was the fall of 2003, and as Garrison was toddling around, I noticed there were certain ways he behaved—and listened—that made it clearer that Grant was different.

As I had with Gehrig and Gabby, I instituted a rule that no matter where we were or what we were doing, if I said, “Freeze!” they had to stop and stand in place quietly. Grant had always been immune to “Freeze!” and I assumed it meant I was losing my touch as a parent. Maybe I was simply stretched too thin. But then Garrison came along and crushed that theory.

As soon as I said “Freeze!” to Garrison, he got it. He just stopped and froze. He didn’t question me. He just stood in place, and seemed to know it was for his own good. Meanwhile, Grant would keep running around. And around. And around. While he ran around, he also made a point of touching whatever he could possibly get his hands on. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare—a kid putting his hands on literally everything, putting himself potentially in harm’s way and also messing things up in the house. It seemed that no amount of childproofing was sufficient when Grant was around.

Grant also couldn’t handle even a little bit of teasing by his older siblings. Kids tease—it’s what they do. But Grant reacted to it as if it were a lifethreatening event. He would run and hide behind the large curtains in our kitchen and stay there forever. If the kids ratcheted it up a notch, he would go into a highpitched frenzy, at times almost tearing the curtains from the ceiling. Needless to say, it would ruin everyone’s day.

While I noticed differences like this, I didn’t make too much of them. Grant was proving himself to be his own person, I thought. Sure, he was harder to control than his siblings, but still he was an incredibly kind and generous child.

Complicating things in that fall of 2003 was the fact that there was only
a year left on Curt’s contract, and we knew our time was up with the Diamondbacks. A trade was going to happen sooner or later, but the Diamondbacks management could not make any decisions without Curt’s sayso. Curt had something called a notrade clause in his contract, which stipulated that the management could not trade him without his consent. We’d heard whispers of a deal with the New York Yankees, which I would have been fine with because that meant going back to my beloved East Coast. Even if we were traded to the Yankees, we would still be able to live in Philly. We had just sold our house in Philadelphia and bought a new one with the plan to live there after Curt retired. Moving to the Yankees would have allowed us to start living there sooner rather than later.

On November 23, we had a big event at our house for the SHADE Foundation that I’d been working on for months. It didn’t matter that it was my birthday—I worked all day. The party went well. The house was beautiful, and we had tables with candles set up out by the pool. One of the forty or so guests was Jerry Colangelo, who at the time was the owner of the Diamondbacks. He had been incredibly supportive of the SHADE Foundation from the beginning, and in addition to being a generous donor, he was instrumental in getting other people in Arizona signed on to help. However, that night at the party something about him kept distracting me. Throughout the night, he and Curt kept disappearing and talking secretively.

“What’s going on?” I finally said, poking my nose into Curt’s office, where they were talking alone. The two of them just smiled mischievously.

“I’m trading you,” Mr. Colangelo joked, and Curt found this hilarious. Ha, ha, ha. They were like two little bad boys plotting something that they might get in trouble for.

Despite this strange behavior on their part, by the end of the night we had raised two hundred thousand dollars, which meant we could build at least twenty more shade covers, a huge number for us. When it was all over, everyone left except the twelve people who had been most involved in helping
me plan the event. I stood on a chair in my kitchen and thanked them all. Then my husband stood on the chair.

“We’re getting traded to the Red Sox!” he announced.

My jaw dropped.
“The Red Sox?”
I yelled.
“Where the hell did that come from?”

The answer was simple: At the party, Mr. Colangelo had asked Curt’s permission to trade us, Curt agreed, and then Mr. Colangelo told him that they had already begun working on a deal to trade us to the Red Sox. He couldn’t have timed it any better.

Ordinarily this kind of decision would not have been announced or decided at a charity dinner, but Curt has never been one to do things in an ordinary kind of way. He didn’t have agents, and in his contract decisions he represented himself with a little help from me. When Curt and I finally spoke after the last of the guests had left, he told me that Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, general manager Theo Epstein, and assistant general manager Jed Hoyer were coming to talk to us—the next day!

To add to the chaos, I was getting ready to cook my first Thanksgiving dinner. It was going to be a full house: my parents, my brother Michael with his wife Shelby and their new daughter, Delaney, and Curt’s cousin Clarence and his family would all be joining us.

On Monday morning, the call came that the Boston management wanted to visit with us. We were taken aback by the TV trucks stationed outside our house, and the group of journalists waiting for an answer or comment. We hadn’t expected that. We didn’t exactly have the best setup for privacy, either—just a fence on one side of our Ushaped house. The only way to get from our bedroom and office to the kitchen and family room was down a long hallway of nothing but windows. Every move we made was on display for everyone to see.

Late that afternoon we received a letter from the Red Sox saying how excited they were to meet us. Ready or not, our next journey was about to
begin. Curt asked my mother to watch the kids and he took me to the Red Lobster so we could talk privately about what we thought of moving to Boston and what we would ask for in a contract, since we would be handling it ourselves. Lobster seemed like the right meal for considering a move to New England.

The next day, Tuesday, as my brother and his family pulled up to our house, so did the Red Sox executives, as well as Larry Lucchino’s wife, Stacey, who came to answer any questions I might have. The circus was about to begin. The men presented Curt with a very wellthoughtout plan, with charts and visuals illustrating why he’d be such a perfect fit. They had data that supported why Curt would have so much success in Fenway Park. Touching my heart, they even had a folder with a plan for how they’d help us further our campaigns for ALS and the SHADE Foundation. We thanked them for coming and said we would meet them on Wednesday.

We met with them for hours on Wednesday. It was intense. Curt and I would bring up the things we wanted, and they would mention the things they needed. Then they would go to our basement and talk, and we would go to our office and talk. It was crazy, looking back on it. Curt and I were a team, bouncing ideas off one another and trying different approaches. If we were going to force our family to move once again, we needed to make sure it was worth it in every way for the kids and for us.

I have to say, while pretty much every athlete has an agent these days, there is an advantage to doing your own negotiating. When you’re representing yourself, team owners aren’t going to say, “Your client isn’t worth that much, he has a bad attitude, and his ERA has sucked for the past two years,” because they’re not negotiating with an agent—they’re negotiating with you. What came out of both sides was nice, although we had some heated moments.

Often there’s a power play that happens between agent and owner, and sometimes comments are taken out of context or repeated differently to the
client. There’s no chance of this when you’re sitting right there in front of the people you’re negotiating with. Along the same lines, we never would have been negotiating in our living room if there’d been an agent involved. I had deliberately invited them into our home for the negotiations so that all the trophies and magazine covers—including the World Series trophy from the 2001 win with the Diamondbacks—would be in front of their eyes, like dangling meat in front of a tiger.

At the end of Wednesday, the negotiations weren’t completed. Larry and Stacey departed for Thanksgiving in San Diego. That left Theo and Jed. These two men with no family in Arizona were destined to spend Thanksgiving in a hotel room. But there was no way we were going to let that happen. Curt insisted they eat dinner with us, or the deal was off.

Naturally news of this meal with Red Sox management made its way to the sports media, which my mom found incredibly amusing. “I have been cooking Thanksgiving for thirty years,” she said. “You cook one, and it’s in every newspaper.”

“Great,” I thought to myself. “Now, if the deal falls through, the whole Red Sox Nation will blame it on my first attempt at cooking turkey.”

Jed and Theo showed up for dinner. We ate, and then got right back into the contract negotiations. The grownups were watching football. There were kids running around all over the place. Things were business as usual in the Schilling house, as far as the kids knew. Curt and I kept breaking away from everyone to work out the deal with them.

Now we were getting to the money part. That was sticky and uncomfortable. We realized that a certain number they put out there was a lot of money, but it was a low number compared to what comparable players were paid. It was tempting, but we realized that if Curt accepted less than what he was aiming for, it would affect other players who had earned that money. When players go through negotiations, they compare other players’ salaries with their time in the big leagues and accomplishments. It sets the bar for what players can ask for.

Unfortunately, they didn’t go for our number. When Theo and Jed left that night, we believed it was over. We couldn’t reach an agreement. Sadly, Curt and I had already hooked ourselves into the adventure of moving to Boston. But we were millions away. They’d offered $10 million for the 2004 season, but the market said Curt was worth $14 million.

The kids required an altogether different set of negotiations. They felt they had total notrade clauses. They had their friends, they had the beginnings of roots and routines that they all loved. Moving would be an especially big challenge for Grant because, unlike the other three, he thrived on familiarity and routine. Without those comforts, he often freaked out.

So we broke out the big guns: snow days! The kids instantly gave up their notrade clauses upon realizing that the weather could actually keep them out of school.

With our kids on board, we gave it one more shot on Friday afternoon. Larry returned to Arizona for this meeting. Curt and I were on the phone with our lawyer and we came up with $12 million and a $2 million bonus if they won the World Series. That would bridge our gap. It was our last shot.

Larry interjected, “We can’t go above ten million.”

That’s when I spoke up. “Hey, I don’t have a problem going to New York,” I said. “We’re not signing a contract for ten million dollars.” I had to stand up and say that. While we believed Boston was a good fit, Curt’s career was the lifeblood of our family; everything we did was about the best place to play baseball for us.

We broke once again. When we got back together, the deal was done: $12 million and a $2 million World Series bonus. Everyone got on the phone and called someone. The press conference was set up for that night. We were traded to Boston and introduced to Red Sox Nation. Life would never be the same again.

In all these negotiations, of course, there were always lingering questions
in the back of my mind about how the kids would react to such a dramatic change. They’d accepted the snow days, but I knew Grant was less than enthusiastic for reasons the other kids never thought of. Above all, his attachments to his teacher and friends were unusually strong for a kid his age. This was going to be a challenge.

four

A Control Problem Comes to Boston

O
NCE AGAIN WE WERE MAKING A BIG MOVE
. T
HIS TIME IT WAS
with four kids. As usual, we had to act quickly. Curt left for spring training in early 2004, moving to Florida for seven weeks with my dad. Meanwhile, my mom and I stayed behind and packed up the house.

This was the first time we’d had to pick up and leave since Gehrig, Gabby, and Grant had gotten a bit older, and this made the process of saying good-bye a lot harder. During the move to Arizona, all three had been young enough that relocating was a relatively tearfree ordeal. Now, though Garrison was still young, the others had all developed friendships and routines in Arizona that would make this a much more difficult transition.

It would be hardest for Grant because of his aversion to changes in people or environment—not to mention trying new things. Our new home posed unique, Grantrelated challenges for us, too. For example, our house in Arizona was very open and had very few doors, which made it easy to explain to Grant which doors he could and could not go through. Our house in Boston had as many doors on one floor as there were in the entire Arizona house. Knowing
that it would be more difficult to keep Grant from wandering and exploring on his own scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t childproof fast enough.

There wasn’t a lot of time for us to fuss over finding the home of our dreams—we just needed a house big enough for all of us, and one where we could have some privacy. We’d been warned that some Red Sox fans could be very aggressive about approaching players and their families, and we wanted to have at least a bit of a buffer from that.

With Grant, though, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain that buffer in public. He gave me a hard time no matter where we were, and when we were out, it called attention to us. For some reason, he was more difficult with me than he was with Curt, my parents, or babysitters. Even though Garrison was younger, it was Grant I worried more about if we were away from home.