Harmony (18 page)

“I think we can all agree that we're not seeing Scott at his best right now, but I, for one, am not about to judge him for it,” Janelle continues. And I'll confess that I'm one of the rule-breakers he's talking about. Last week, I took my car keys from the office, and after curfew I snuck out of my cabin like a teenager, drove down the driveway with my lights off, and went out to a convenience store,
where I bought a bottle of wine and a pack of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.”

“That's not fair!” says Tilly. My parents both lean forward at the same time to shush her.

“Anyone else want to speak up?” Janelle asks. “Let's not forget that we're here by choice. We all made the decision to tie our fate to this man, and that's not something to take lightly. Two weeks ago, this man was seriously injured
saving my son's life
, and I'm not about to throw that all away because he made a mistake today.”

“Yeah,” says my mom. She squeezes my shoulder and then pulls away from our little family group and walks over to join Tom, Scott, and Janelle. “I'll go next,” she says. And pretty soon, we're all lining up to talk about all the things we've done wrong.

The doorbell rings, and you look around. Neat enough. You open the door, step back, and there he is: Scott Bean, in your house.

He's taller than you remember, and skinnier. You feel shy as he gives you a hug. For a moment, you wonder what the hell you're doing. This first meeting is just between you and him—there's no one else home. Maybe this was a stupid thing to do. What do you know about this guy, really? Not a lot, even with all the time Josh has spent Googling him, looking for cracks in the armor.

Josh is skeptical about this plan, but then Josh is skeptical about a lot of things. He's done enough research to be sure that Scott isn't an ex-con or a sex offender, and that there aren't any former clients suing him for fraudulent parenting advice, or whatever. And once you got Josh to agree to listen to the CDs on his way to and from work for a week, he grudgingly agreed that Scott had some good points, and that a consultation with him might not be completely worthless.

So you won the argument, and now Scott Bean is here. You've been planning this for weeks, so you'd better let him in and ask for his jacket. Sit him down and offer the healthful, carefully thought-out snacks you've prepared.

Luckily, he's got that easy warmth you'd almost forgotten existed, that ability to put people at ease. “So,” he says, settling into an armchair. “Tell me about Tilly.” And you do.

He'd asked you in advance to put together a “narrative history” of Tilly's issues, nothing formal, just a few notes about key events in the journey from birth to diagnosis and beyond.
The story of how you got here
, he'd said,
to put it another way.
So you've got your anecdotes lined up.

You begin: when Tilly was eighteen months old, you enrolled in a parent-child music class. You were pregnant with Iris and wanted to have a little special time with Tilly before the new baby came. The classes were very sweet, overpriced, and clearly more for the adults than for the toddlers. The teacher would play a CD (available for twelve dollars and now burned indelibly into your brain), and the “caregivers”—moms, babysitters, and occasional stay-at-home dads—would lead their little ones in dancing, shaking maracas, and waving colorful scarves in the air. Everyone took it very seriously; everyone seemed to be terribly in love with their children and not the least bit panicky about the empty hours that stretched ahead after class was over.

What's notable to you now is that it was one of the first chances you had to watch Tilly with other kids her own age. She was . . . the same, and not the same. Here, in a room full of one-year-olds, you began your secret note-taking. She was on target with all her milestones, a little bit advanced verbally, certainly as curious and adorable as any one of the others. But she balked at the structure of the class, refusing to take part in activities if something else caught her eye. She couldn't seem to be taught not to put the instruments in her mouth. Bubbles and parachutes didn't fill her with glee; instead, she preferred playing with the shoes that all the moms and kids took off before class started. Later, when you'd go through autism checklists you found online, you'd do this same sort of tallying: she fits this criterion, but not that one; her motor skills aren't great, but she
gives hugs and kisses; she melts down when she's frustrated, but she doesn't mind looking you in the eye. And the thing that was always so heartbreaking was how close she came to fitting into the category of “normal.”

At the end of each session, the teacher would turn the lights off and play a slow song, a uniquely haunting version of “Shenandoah.” Caregivers would scoop their charges into their laps and settle them in to sway and cuddle. It reminded you of high school dances, of that last desperate slow song before the lights went up. And here you were, without a partner. Because you had given birth to an adventurer. And there was no way she was going to submit to five minutes of quiet hugging when there were dusty rec-center corners to explore.

She's always been a little bit confounding, in all the best and worst ways. If she hadn't been your first, you might have let yourself wonder sooner. Another story: once at a friend's wedding, you were talking to a very nice woman—you can't remember who she was now; bride's aunt?—and as you were trying to explain something about the enigma that was Tilly, you mentioned that she had taught herself to read before the age of three.

“Reading before she was three?” The woman burst into laughter and put her hand on your arm. “Oh, honey, that's not good.”

Scott interrupts here. “Wait—explain that to me. Why isn't it good?”

“It's not that it's bad, in and of itself,” you say. It's important to you that he get this. You and Josh have returned to this discussion, over and over again. It was a transformative moment, like a superhero origin story, or maybe the opposite of one. It signals a change in your understanding of who your daughter was and what type of parent she needed you to be. It's when you first understood that “extraordinary” can have more than one meaning. “But it suggests that
something's
not proceeding typically, in terms of development, you know?”

He's nodding, and you're relieved. “Right,” he says. “It means things may be uneven. If she's off the charts in one direction . . .”

Good. He's got it. It was easy for you and Josh to focus on all the ways she was ahead of the game, racing past the achievements of other toddlers. But you weren't doing any of you any favors until you started paying attention to the ways she wasn't.

Scott listens, occasionally nodding or interrupting to ask for clarification. You tell him the long saga of Tilly's school life, the ongoing problems of tics and tantrums. You explain that if Tilly wants your attention, it is nearly impossible not to give it to her. That normal forms of discipline have little effect. That you don't intend to turn everything into a power struggle; it just seems to happen. You tell him that when someone doesn't quite get Tilly, or approaches her with the wrong set of intentions, things can go terribly, terribly wrong. You've had more than one babysitter call you in tears.

“And what about Iris?” Scott asks. “How is she affected by all this?”

You have stories about this, too. When Iris was three years old, she had a favorite element. She chose carbon (for reasons that remain impenetrable to you), so that when her big sister told people that her favorite element was mercury, Iris would be able to chime in, too.

Iris adores Tilly, but she's also beginning to be embarrassed by her. “That's where my sister sits,” you overheard her telling a friend a few weeks ago, explaining a cluster of crumbs on the dining room rug, “and sometimes she eats with her fingers.”

You've tried hard not to define Iris by the ways she's different from Tilly, but you haven't always succeeded. Once, when Iris was about four, she said something clever and you called her “my smart girl.” “No,” she corrected you, her little voice stretching out the vowels. “I'm not your smart girl. Tilly is.”

Iris is complicated and fascinating. But she has the luxury of being an ordinary mystery, in the curious, endearing way that all children are.
Potential waiting to be unlocked, consciousness unspooling from nothing to something. A bud gathered up taut, working hard at growing itself. You may know that this particular bud is going to open to reveal a rose or a daisy, and that it will develop in a way that's consistent with every other rose or daisy since the beginning of time. But there are endless variables: warmth or coolness of color, number of petals, placement of thorns. You don't know which rose, out of all the possible roses in the past and future of the world, this one will turn out to be.

Tilly is a flower, too, of course—but you already feel like you're using the wrong metaphor. What terms could you possibly use to describe her to someone, if you had to use images instead of terminology? Imagine, maybe, what it would be like to take care of a child who'd been born with wings. Is it a blessing or a curse, or somehow a little of each?

“And how about you?” Scott Bean asks. “How are you doing?” Kind. He is very kind. And you don't think he's pretending.

You find that you're a little less willing to talk about yourself. You've been listening to Scott's CD series in your car again; you're midway through your second go-around. The disc that's currently running is about “self-talk” and mantras, and while you've found it helpful, you're not quite ready to spill out your actual feelings for this man to examine.

“I want to die” is not an unusual bit of self-talk for you, but you wish you could get rid of it, because you suspect you're just being dramatic. You and despair are on . . . friendly terms, but there are a number of reasons why you think you'll probably never kill yourself, and one is that you're too dedicated to keeping track of minutiae. Every life has as many lasts as firsts, and if you knew the date of your death, you'd feel compelled to make note of them: The last time you yell at one of your children. The last time you sing a song out loud. The last time you hold a baby. The last time you go on vacation. The last time you cry as if your heart might break.

In any case, this isn't (quite) a therapy session, and you're not going to spell out your every neurosis. Instead, you tell him that there are times when you feel like you can hold everything together, but just barely. You tell him that you need help, but you're not sure how to ask for it, and that you don't even know what sort of help you need.

Revealing even this much is a risk. Your words in the air, their pitch of desperation.
Label me
, you might as well say.
Give me a checklist. Show me how to fix it.

But Scott won't let you be embarrassed. “The first thing you need to know,” he says, “is that you're not alone.” He leans forward, takes hold of your hand for a moment. “Do you believe me?” he asks.

You know what the right answer is, but you pause for a minute, waiting to see if it's true. “Yes,” you say, surprising yourself. “I do.”

“Good,” he says. “That's the beginning. That's the most important part.”

He sets up a time and date to come back and meet the rest of the family. He gives you homework, and you promise to do it, like the eager schoolgirl you are: yes, you'll look at these handouts on environmental toxins and behavior; yes, you'll try eliminating dairy from Tilly's diet; yes, you'll arrange for a night out with Josh.

“Before we meet next time,” he says, just before he goes, “I want you to think about these two things: happiness and purpose. What do those things mean to you? And do you believe I can help you fulfill them?”

“I . . .” you say, and you're not even sure where the sentence is heading, but he stops you anyway.

“Not now,” he says. “Next time.” He opens your front door, and he's gone.

You feel exultant, almost light-headed. What is it, exactly, this vital warmth, this bird in your chest taking flight? How can you give it a name? You might call it joy and relief; you might call it fellowship
and communion. Faith, with its edge of magic, its unspeakable certainty, has always eluded you. The beauty of prayer: sending messages out into the universe and believing they'll be heard. How must it be to have that kind of singular, compelling purpose? A life labeled with both a direction and a goal? You've never realized that maybe it's not something that just happens. You've never realized that it may be something you can actually choose.

On Sunday morning, before the new GCs arrive, Tilly, Ryan, Candy, and I have a talk about Project Werewolf. You might think we'd give it up after last week, after we got in trouble and everything. But if there's something special about being in the CF, like Scott keeps saying, then there must be something special about being in the CK. (That means Core Kids. Tilly made it up.) When new kids show up, thinking that we're like the housekeeping staff or something, we need to show them we're powerful, and that's what the Werewolf story does.

Like Scott said at Saturday Campfire, sometimes you need to tell a story, even if it's not one hundred percent true.

We're changing our strategy, though, this time around. We're not going to
tell
the new kids anything. We're just going to set out the evidence and let them figure it out for themselves.

The nicest part about Sundays is that there's usually a little time after lunch, while the new campers are getting unpacked and whatever, when we all get to go back to our cabins and just hang out together as a family. Today, my mom goes to take a shower, and my
dad sits down on the couch with a book. I remember suddenly how much he used to like to read the newspaper; that's something none of us have seen in a while.

I sit down next to him and lean my head back on the couch cushion, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. “Hey,” I say. “I think we completely missed Father's Day.”

He looks over at me and squinches his eyes, like he's trying to remember. “You know, I think you're right,” he says. “No big deal. We have enough Mother's Days to balance it all out.”

“You know what I'd get you, if I could get you a Father's Day gift?”

He puts down his book and smiles at me in one of those weird parental ways, like he's proud of me just for asking the question, when I haven't even told him the answer yet.

“What?” he says.

“A newspaper.”

He laughs, surprised, and puts his hand on the top of my head, stroking my hair. “I would love that,” he says. “I really would.”

Then Tilly walks in from the bedroom and starts talking to us, the way she always does, like we've been with her in her head for the past ten minutes.

“So how come we know so much about like George Washington, but nothing about the guy who was his blacksmith or whatever? Or the blacksmith's wife and kids? Even if someone never gets to be president or a famous general or something, that person still lived a whole life. They were still important to their family and the people they loved.”

“Well, that's a good . . .” my dad starts to say, but Tilly isn't done, so she just talks right over him.

“I mean, why can't there be a big giant statue of George Washington's blacksmith or like Napoleon's cook? And if there could be a giant statue of Napoleon's cook, then there could be a giant statue of you or me. Our whole family.”

“Well, there can't be big giant statues for everybody, obviously,” I say. “We'd run out of space.” It's a cool idea, though. I'm picturing a humongous Iris statue standing on top of a mountain somewhere. High up, where people could see it for miles around.

“I see what you're getting at, though, Tilly,” my dad says. “All of these billions of people have lived on the earth, and most of them have been just ordinary people. But if you don't do something that makes you famous, your story gets kind of lost.”

“I wish we were famous,” I say. “Maybe we could start a band or something.”

“Yeah,” says Tilly. “But why can't we just be famous because we're awesome people? Or just because we're people, period.” She starts pacing, the way she does when she's thinking about something. “The Hammond Family,” she says, like she's seeing the name all lit up on a billboard or something. “There could be books about us and movies. There could be a whole museum—the Museum of Hammond Family Artifacts.”

My dad smiles. “What do you think it would have in it?”

“There could be baby pictures of us, and those envelopes with a little bit of hair from our first haircuts,” Tilly says. “Things we did in school, and souvenirs from our vacations, like that snow globe I got in North Carolina with the lighthouse in it . . .”

“What about the Galaxie?” asks Dad. “Would there be room for it?”

“Of course!” says Tilly. “It would be in its own special display area, and people could get inside it, like we always did.”

The 1971 Ford Galaxie was this old car that we used to have in our house in DC. When I say “in our house,” I mean it literally, because we had this garage that was actually part of our basement. I don't really know why we had the car—I think my dad bought it before I was born, because he likes old cars, but as far as I know, it never worked enough for anyone to turn it on. I didn't even know
about the Galaxie until I was three or four. And then one day, Tilly showed it to me, and it was like one of those dreams where you're in your house, and you discover a room you've never seen before:
Really? This was here all the time?

Tilly and I used to go inside the car and play in it. It was really big, wider and roomier than most cars I've been in. And it had this really big steering wheel, and jump seats in the back that folded up when you weren't sitting on them, and funny cranks to put the windows up and down. We used to pretend we were old enough to drive, or else we'd pretend that it was our own house, where we lived without any grown-ups. There were all these random toys in the backseat, ones that we'd brought in to use as props and never took out. We didn't go in the Galaxie as much as we got older, but suddenly I wish that we could go inside it now. I wish it more than anything.

I'm starting to feel sad, and no one's noticing. I feel like I might even start to cry. “So what you're saying”—I pause, waiting until I have their attention—“is that the museum would have all the stuff we left in Washington. All the stuff Mom and Dad got rid of or put in storage.”

Dad makes a sympathetic little sound. He sits up straighter on the couch and puts his arms around me. “Poor sweetie,” he says, his voice muffled against my head. “I know you miss a lot of the things we left behind.”

Tilly comes over and wraps herself around us, making a three-person hug.

“Don't be sad, Iris,” she says. “Just pretend it's all in the museum. And we can go there and see it anytime we want.”

We stay like that for a minute, and then Tilly gets another idea, and she's off, walking in circles around the room.

“Hey, what do you think they would sell in the Hammond Museum gift shop?” she asks. Her voice is all happy and excited with ideas.
“They could have postcards with pictures of us, and jewelry with our birthstones . . .”

“Snow globes with us inside,” I say, because I like the idea, and I know it will make Tilly happy.

 • • • 

We all have secret assignments to lay out werewolf clues, in addition to all our chores, and the plan is to get them all ready by Wednesday. My thing is, I've got an old T-shirt of Tilly's that we ripped up and spattered with fake blood. We had some trouble figuring out how to make the blood, because of course there's no artificial food coloring here. So we tried mixing together some honey and cocoa powder, because Candy said she had heard that in the movie
Psycho
, the blood they used was actually chocolate syrup. And then we smushed in some cherries, and blended it all together. It actually looks pretty good; it's a little bit thick and chunky, but that's okay because that makes it more gory, like there might be . . . I don't know, bodily
tissue
or something in there.

So I've got a big piece of T-shirt crumpled up and hidden in my pocket. A little while after breakfast, when I'm supposed to be feeding the chickens, I walk into the woods and leave the shirt on the ground at this one place we picked out yesterday. I can see that Tilly's already been here, because her job was to stick little bits of hair and fur around in different tree branches. (The fur is from this stuffed gorilla that belongs to Ryan's little sister, and the hair we just pulled out of everybody's brushes and combs, so it's all tangled and gross.)

I spend a minute or two deciding where to drop the shirt. It's really quiet here, and I like being on my own for a few minutes. When we first got to Camp Harmony, I thought there was going to be a lot more time like this, just hanging out in all the pretty nature and chilling. I mean, half of what my parents said about moving was
that we'd all benefit from being able to roam around freely, and hear our own thoughts without a million computerized distractions or whatever. But really, most of the time we're with all these other people, doing exactly what Scott tells us to.

There's rustling behind me and I turn quickly, worried that I'm about to get caught. But it's just Ryan, coming with some chicken bones and the rest of our fake blood to dribble on leaves and rocks and stuff. As we pass, we both smile and give the secret signal Tilly came up with: cross your fingers on both hands and then tap your index fingers together twice. I walk out of the woods and go back to my chores, feeling that happy-sneaky feeling of knowing that I have a secret.

 • • • 

My favorite chore is taking care of the chickens. We have six little chicks—there were supposed to be eight, but one died and one egg didn't hatch—plus a full-grown hen named Henny Penny. Kind of a stupid name, but Scott had everyone vote on it, and all the littlest kids got two votes instead of one. Most of the time, we just call her Penny.

Penny's my favorite. I never thought I would like a chicken. Like before we came here, I don't think I'd ever even seen a real live chicken, and I figured they wouldn't have much personality. They're not particularly cute, and you can't play fetch with them or anything. But Penny knows who I am, and maybe I'm just making this up, but I swear she clucks in a special way when she sees me coming.

So on Thursday, I'm hanging out with the chickens, and some kids' voices start drifting in from the woods, close to the area where we left all the werewolf stuff. I look around to make sure there are no adults nearby, and then I put down my bag of chicken feed and duck into the trees.

When I get to the place with all the fur and fake blood, I see there are two boys there: Ryan and a guy named Lincoln, who's one
of this week's visiting kids. He's older than me; about thirteen, I think. Tilly's age.

They see me before I get to them, and Lincoln leans over and whispers something into Ryan's ear, and then the two of them start laughing crazily. I hate when kids do stuff like that. It suddenly changes everything, you know? Like a minute ago, things were all normal. I was on my way to talk to these other two kids, and everyone was . . . equal, pretty much. I mean, there were various ways you could group us together, like those activities teachers used to give us in kindergarten: you have three beads, and none of them is exactly the same. If you group them by color, then the two red ones go together, and the blue one is the odd guy out. Or you can group them by shape, and then the two square ones go together, and now one of the red ones is the odd guy out, because it's the only one that's round.

So right then, it seemed like it didn't matter that they're both boys and I'm a girl, because Ryan and I are both permanent camp kids, plus we're the same age. Lincoln should definitely be the odd guy out. But now I feel all worried, because I don't know what they're saying about me. And if anyone's the odd guy out, it's definitely me.

“Hey, guys,” I say when I'm close enough to talk in a normal voice. “What's up?”

“Not much,” says Ryan. “Lincoln wanted to show me this weird stuff he found.” He's pointing at the fake blood, and trying not to give me a knowing look, so that evens things out a little again.

“Huh,” I say.

“Oh, fuck that,” says Lincoln. “It's obviously fake as hell. We were just shooting the shit.”

Tilly and I used to have a secret swearword bingo game when we were watching grown-up TV shows and movies. Lincoln would only need a “bitch” and a “damn” to win the whole board.

“Anyway,” he's saying, “things are a lot more interesting, now that you're here.”

I can feel my mouth drop open a little, and I concentrate on closing it again. I don't know where to look. It's a compliment, but it's not. Because the way he says it kind of creeps me out.

“I'm going to go back and finish feeding the chickens,” I say.

“No, wait,” says Lincoln. “You should see this.” He puts his hand into the pocket of his shorts. “I found a little baby mouse.”

“You have a mouse in your pocket?” I'm confused and, honestly, worried for the mouse. I don't think it would have a lot of room in there.

He turns away from me a little, still moving his hand around in his pocket. I'm feeling a little bit anxious, but only because I'm wondering if he's going to show me a dead mouse. I'm not expecting at all that when he turns back he's going to have his pants unzipped and be holding his penis in his hand.

“See, look,” he says, making a move toward me. I step back. “Isn't it cute? Do you want to pet it?” And he laughs uproariously.

I feel nervous inside and a little like I might throw up. But I also don't want to run away like a scared little girl. I try to think of what Tilly would do in this situation.

“Asshole,” I say. It sounds stupid and wishy-washy. When Tilly says it, you can tell there's real feeling behind it.

“Ooh, hot,” says Lincoln. “I like a girl with a potty mouth.”

He's rubbing his penis a little, and I can see it getting hard, which is kind of fascinating, even if it's also the most repulsive thing I've ever seen.