An Uncomplicated Life (11 page)

Half an hour later, Kerry noticed Jillian wasn’t home. Kerry reacted the way most mothers of first-graders would in that situation. She panicked. She called Denice Rutkousky. “Has Jillian been there?”

“Yes.”

“Is she there now?”

“No. She left 20 minutes ago.”

The Snyders. They lived one house down the street, to the left.

“Did Jillian come by?”

“She did.”

“Still there?”

“Not in the last 15 minutes.”

Kerry’s heart played bongos in her chest. “The first time I let her out of my sight . . .”

Her fingers shook as she dialed the home of the Warzalas, two houses up the street. If Jillian wasn’t there, the next call would be to 9-1-1. The phone rang. Once, twice, three times. Oh, no.

That’s when Jillian answered the Warzalas’ phone.

“Jillian?”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for the Warzalas to get home.”

Kerry wondered how Jillian got in. Wasn’t their front door locked?

“Yeah,” Jillian said. “I go ’round back.”

Jillian had felt a sworn duty to place the invitation directly into the hands of Cathi Warzala. This was her first assignment
out of the front yard. She wasn’t going to blow it. She figured she’d just hang out in the Warzalas’ family room until they showed up. She had her feet up in a La-Z-Boy. She was looking for some microwave popcorn. She really was.

“You can come home now,” Kerry managed. All parents recognize that unusual mixture of anger and relief upon locating a wayward child. That was Kerry at that moment.

“Mrs. Warzala not home yet,” Jillian protested.

“Home,” said Kerry. “Now.”

When Jillian arrived, Kerry didn’t yell.

But I did. I yelled, and I lectured.

“Did Mom tell you to come right home?” I asked.

“I want to give Mrs. Warzala the note,” said Jillian.

I went on a while, suggesting that the mailbox would have worked, that Mom was frantic.

“Fran-stick?” Jillian interjected.

. . . that if we were ever going to trust her to leave the yard, she had to do better, and that if she pulled that stunt again, I’d personally chain her to her bedpost for the rest of her life. The usual stuff.

I might have raised my voice above acceptable conversational levels.

Jillian listened calmly. She might even have nodded once or twice, in response to the obligatory “Do you understand me?” I could tell she was not moved by the force of my argument or by the logic involved. Jillian, who was by then 50 pounds of iron will, still believed she had been right to take up residence in the Warzala family room.

When I was done haranguing, or when she believed I was done, Jillian screwed up her face and looked at me dead-on.

“You wanna piece of me?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You wanna piece of me, Daddy-O?”

I have no idea where she came up with that. Maybe it was from the movie
Home Alone,
which she and Kelly had seen, oh, 500 times. Maybe it was from one of Kelly’s old videotapes of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
. Maybe she’d heard it from some kid at school.

Regardless, I couldn’t stay mad, even as I wanted to. “You better hope I don’t want a piece of you,” I managed.

“Come on,” Jillian suggested.

I burst out laughing. Any groundwork I’d laid about coming home at the appointed time, and the penalties for failing to do so, was in a shambles.

I love Jillian’s sense of humor, and I know you can’t be funny without being smart. She may not be smart in the IQ sense. No one’s suggesting Jillian will be building reactors anytime soon. But she’s plenty smart in knowing what resonates. She understands what prompts a chuckle, what makes the synapses gather and fire.

This is essential to getting along with the world. Jillian is a citizen in good standing, not because she practices the King’s English. Sometimes, even Kerry and I have to ask her to repeat herself. She gets along because she knows how to get along. She is social because she is confident in herself. She is confident because she has been placed in typical social situations and has succeeded.

Her sense of humor has eased her road. It is one of life’s ordinary blessings.

This Deliver-the-Fliers Incident helped Jillian over whatever
qualms she had about venturing beyond the demilitarized zone of the front yard. And the more we let her, the more that independence dynamic kept kicking in. All manner of interesting things ensued.

THERE ARE FOUR HOUSES
on our little drive. At one time or another, small children were living in each one. Part of the drive’s appeal was that parents could let their little ones out without worrying about traffic. So we let Jillian out. It was like letting a monkey loose into the people portion of the zoo.

One summer day, as the mothers of the drive gathered on folding chairs and the kids played, Jillian ventured unnoticed down to the Slatterys’. They had two kids—Kate the eldest and Tommy the youngest. Not that it mattered; Jillian was friends with everyone—whether they were interested or not.

Their storm door was open, so she walked inside. Maybe she called for Kate or Tommy. Maybe she just wanted to come in. When she discovered nothing or no one on the first floor that interested her, she went upstairs, and into the master bedroom, where she saw John Slattery emerge from the shower, seeking a towel.

“Hi, Mr. Slattery,” Jillian said.

“Uh . . .” was the essence of John’s comeback.

It might have been that same summer that Jillian stole a car.

The phone rang in the middle of the day. Kerry answered.

The man on the phone lived up the street, maybe five houses away. He didn’t sound angry, really. Nor especially concerned. You could tell by his voice that he was talking while
smiling. He knew Jillian. Or at least knew of her. She was the kid who had walked in on the naked guy.

“Your daughter took my son’s Jeep out of our driveway,” he said. “She’s on Ashire, heading up to the pool.”

The Jeep in question was electric and no bigger than a little red wagon. Ashire Lane was on the way to the neighborhood pool. I guess Jillian didn’t feel like hitchhiking. By the time Kerry discovered our young car thief, Jillian was almost to the pool, steady-truckin’ at about a mile an hour. “Does this Jeep belong to you?” Kerry asked.

“Yes,” Jillian said.

“Jillian.”

“I bought it.”

She meant to say she “borrowed” the ride. At least that was my interpretation. Bought, borrowed. Whatever.

“I ride,” Jillian added. She was pleased with herself.

Lots of Jillian’s adventures provoked terror before laughter. She had a tendency to wander. Every other kid explored. In Jillian’s mind, she was just doing what her peers did. In fifth grade, she decided it would be a great idea if she walked home from school. It might have been, but we lived eight miles from school.

By this time, Kerry had started back coaching high school girls’ soccer in the fall. After Jillian’s school day ended, she could take the regular school bus home. Or she could catch the bus that went from her school to the high school. That bus served kids involved in extracurriculars at the high school. Jillian was marginally a ball girl for the soccer team, though it was up to her if she came to practice or went straight home.

The bus drivers looked after her. They had walkie-talkies
and one of their daily routines at 2:30 p.m. was to check with each other, to make sure Jillian was on someone’s bus. This particular day, she wasn’t. The drivers called the school, then Kerry. The school dispatched its police officer to locate Jillian. Officer Fred Barnes set out in his cruiser, and it didn’t take him long to find our world-trekking daughter. She was less than a mile from school. Amazingly, she was headed in the right direction.

“Jillian,” said Officer Barnes. “I need to get you back to school, honey.”

“No,” Jillian said.

“C’mon, Jillian. Your mom’s worried about you.”

“I can’t get in the car with you. My mom told me never ride with strangers.”

Officer Barnes wasn’t a stranger. Jillian knew him well. Jillian knew everybody well.

Fred finally convinced Jillian to climb aboard.

Jillian didn’t limit her explorations to the home zip code. We spent a vacation one summer in a cottage on a pond, on Cape Cod. The house was secluded, right on the water. Maybe a half mile away, up a dirt road lined with pine trees, was the main road, a busy two-lane. There was a convenience store across the two-lane.

One fine very early morning, as Kerry, Kelly and I slept, Jillian arose with the idea that we needed doughnuts, and we needed them now. She knew just where to find them because she and Kelly had walked to the store the day before. She left with a dime and a nickel in her pocket. Nobody heard her.

We flew into mass panic when we woke up. Jillian was at the store when we found her, trying to negotiate down the
price of a dozen doughnuts. Apparently, we’d gone from overly protective parents to parents whose daughter should have become a ward of the state. She’d have been in better hands.

These were times when Jillian’s disability earned her a pass. Another child found tooling up the road in someone else’s toy Jeep might have faced more severe consequences. A typical eight-year-old finding herself uninvited in a strange house, face-to-torso with a naked guy, might have lost dessert privileges or something. Probably, in our ever-quest for Jillian to be seen as typical, we should have punished her accordingly.

During the scary times, we let our hearts skip a beat, then we laughed. We laughed in the way other parents would laugh in the retelling of an incident that might have occurred several years earlier. We didn’t tolerate Jillian’s occasional excursions off the ranch. We didn’t condone thievery or breaking and entering. She just didn’t suffer the consequences Kelly would have.

Kids are kids. Innocence doesn’t discriminate.

Jillian learned in school that you dial 9-1-1 if there’s an emergency. In one particular instance, her emergency was that she needed some chocolate milk. I was out of town, thank God. Kerry was extremely surprised to see two police cars, lights flashing, in the driveway.

“Jillia-n-n-n!”

Afterward, we couldn’t figure what she’d been most sorry about: That she’d called 9-1-1 for a frivolous reason. Or that the officers didn’t have her chocolate milk.

Jillian also had a lemonade stand. On a day when no one was buying, she drew letters on cut-up pieces of notebook paper and put them in an envelope. Then she went to the
Whites’ house (down the drive, on the right) and offered them the whole alphabet, at ten cents a letter.

Other life events prompted a more serious approach. Jillian hit puberty at age 11, in fourth grade. She had her first period on Christmas Day. This was one area in which Jillian was not delayed. When she noticed the discharge, she screamed for Kerry to come upstairs. “I think I having a baby,” Jillian said.

Kerry told her what was happening and what it meant, the first of many talks regarding womanhood and the responsibility it entailed. I was delightedly out of that loop. I’d bought Kelly a jock strap, way back, when such accoutrements still existed. That was the extent of my involvement in matters that make men itch.

“You’re a woman now,” Kerry told Jillian.

A few days later, they went to a restaurant for lunch. Being small in stature, Jillian was often given a children’s menu without being asked. But this day, the server did ask.

“And would you be needing a children’s menu?”

“No,” Jillian said. “I’m a woman now.”

After Christmas break, Jillian returned to school with what she called her “woman thing”—a sanitary pad—packed in a lunch bag. One day, she asked to go to the restroom, knowing she needed to change her pad. “I have a ’mergency,” she’d announced.

Problem was, she’d left it in the classroom. After several minutes, she hadn’t returned. An anxious Nancy Croskey went to the bathroom, seeking Jillian.

“You okay, Jillian?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Jillian answered. “But I need my pad.”

She was developing her own personality. It was a unique
set of traits that reinforced the fact that Jillian was far more like us than not. Like her mom, Jillian loved to go out to eat. If restaurants were the New World, Kerry would be Columbus. We were running errands one Saturday at close to lunchtime when the subject of food came up.

“McDonald’s,” Jillian said.

“We’re not going out to eat,” I said.

“Applebee’s,” Jillian said. I told her we had food at home.

“Chili’s,” Jillian said. This was a child who was “cognitively delayed”?

“Burger King. Arby’s, Frisch’s, Wendy’s.” She proceeded to name every restaurant that had a kitchen. Free verse, with a drive-thru. “Outback, Johnny Rocket’s, Steak-n-Shake, Penn Station, Domino’s, Papa John’s!”

She was very proud of herself.

Sometimes, we didn’t know quite what to make of Jillian’s progress. In ninth grade, a classmate had been giving her a hard time. Jillian almost never encountered meanness at school. Her classmates were universally kind, if mostly distant. But this time, one boy was not.

After a while, Jillian decided she’d heard enough. She passed the boy a note that the teacher intercepted.

“You’re a deck,” she’d written.

Now, typically, a parent wouldn’t greet that with a smile, let alone the big laugh I let out when I heard what had happened. We’re pretty sure Jillian wasn’t calling the kid “a floor-like surface wholly or partially occupying one level of a hull, superstructure, or deckhouse.” She was referring to a portion of his anatomy.

We were upset about that, sort of. We know high school
kids can’t go around calling each other decks. But we were darned proud that Jillian was able to offer it in a complete and cogent (if misspelled) thought. And the thought she’d had was entirely “typical” for a ninth-grader.

Around that time, Jillian visited Kerry’s sister in Baltimore. Janis had been recently divorced, which saddened Jillian. “I love my uncle Marc,” she said, when she was told about the breakup. Jillian’s way of consoling Janis was to offer to help make dinner. “My world-famous pasta salad” was to be Jillian’s contribution.