Counting to D (19 page)

“He’s dyslexic too. He can’t read, or write, or cope, and he feels trapped inside his head all the time. That’s why he drinks so much. That’s why he hates himself. That’s why he hates me.”

Dr. Larson shook his head and smiled this funny half smile that looked exactly like Nate’s. “I don’t think he does. Your father definitely could have handled the situation better, but I don’t think he hates you, Samantha. I think he probably loves you very much.”

“What?” Nate asked for me.

“After your dad left, what happened? What did your mom do?”

I blinked. “She handled it. She got me a tutor and did everything possible to ensure my inability to read never let me fall behind in school. And since she works a lot and my dad wasn’t home anymore, she arranged for me to go to a friend’s house after school on days I didn’t have tutoring.”

“So did it work? Did your dad’s parting wish come true?”

“What?” This time I asked before Nate beat me to it.

“According to your impeccable memory, your father’s last words before leaving were, ‘Don’t let her grow up to be like me.’ And you just described your father as a dyslexic who can’t read or write or cope, who feels trapped inside his mind all the time and turns to alcohol as his only hope of escape. So how far did the apple fall from the tree? Do you feel that way too?”

“No.” I stare at the swirling, uneven grains of the Larsons’ coffee table. “I mean, I can’t read or write very well. And I definitely spend a lot of time trapped in my own head. But I cope okay. I don’t want to run away and hide in a bottle. And I definitely don’t want to run away and hide in a desert.”

Dr. Larson nodded. “I think you cope remarkably well. It sounds to me like you were born with a good mother, a difficult father, and a serious learning disability. Handling all three of those things would be challenging for anyone. Lucky for you, your dad decided to remove himself from the equation relatively early. His exit strategy may not have been perfect, but I think he was telling the truth that night. I think he knew you’d be better off without him, and he loved you very much. He loved you enough to leave — he just didn’t know how to say a proper goodbye.”

Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I leaned forward to grab a tissue off the table and blew my nose. “So what you’re saying is that my being dyslexic is okay. That it doesn’t make me totally unlovable?”

“There is absolutely nothing unlovable about you. And there is nothing wrong with being dyslexic.”

I nodded, even if a part of me didn’t fully believe Dr. Larson. If I wasn’t dyslexic, my dad never would have left. And leaving because he loved me was such a whacked-out explanation, only a shrink could believe it. Nate’s arms squeezed around me, silently telling me that at least someone didn’t think I was totally unlovable.

“Is that why you lied when you moved here?” Nate’s breath tickled my neck. “You didn’t tell people you were dyslexic because you thought it made you unlovable?”

I nodded again and hugged my knees into my chest. Dr. Larson had been right about one thing. My mom had never stopped loving me. We used to be really close. She’d take Gabby, Arden, and me to the zoo or the beach or Legoland. She wasn’t just the responsible adult there to drive us around — she was one of the girls. I felt like I could tell her anything and that she wanted to listen to whatever I said. That she wanted to be in my life.

Since we’d moved here, everything had changed. I spent all my time at Nate’s house, talking to Nate’s parents. My mom was working a lot more hours, so she wasn’t around much to talk to. But when she was home, I was usually off doing something else. The few times she’d tried to talk to me, I’d just pushed her away. I suddenly felt very tired of pushing.

I picked up the cup of tea Mrs. Larson had set on the coffee table for me. The hot lemon flavor warmed my insides. “Thanks for listening to me, Dr. Larson.” I put the teacup back down on its coaster. “But Nate, I’m pretty tired. Can you take me home now?”

“Yeah, of course.”

As Nate and I walked toward the door, Mrs. Larson stopped me in the foyer. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight. “Samantha, you know you are always welcome here. Always. Anytime you need a safe place to hide out, you don’t need to lock yourself up inside that head of yours. You can just come over here.”

“Okay.” I hugged Mrs. Larson back. She was a really good mom, Nate was lucky. But I was too. And right then, Mrs. Larson wasn’t the mom I wanted to hug. “I will.”

W
hen I got home, my mom was already asleep. On TV and in the movies, parents always stayed up half the night, ready to bust their teenage children for coming home after curfew. Apparently, I didn’t live in TV land. I thought about waking my mom up, but I was tired too. Instead, I found a Post-It note in the kitchen and wrote my mom a note.

I stuck the note on the coffee pot and headed off to bed.

The next morning, I woke up to the feel of my mom’s hand rubbing my back. I blinked my eyes open and smiled.

“I got your note. You want to go to the zoo?”

“I know it isn’t the same as San Diego, but I heard the Oregon Zoo has polar bears.” I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “And we haven’t spent a whole day together since we moved here, so I was just hoping, if you could maybe take the day off, we could, you know, go see some polar bears together or something.”

My mom smiled. It was a sad smile, but definitely not a fake smile. “I’d love to go see some polar bears with you. I need to send out a few emails first. But in half an hour, I could probably start whipping up a few chocolate chip pancakes, and we can head to the zoo after that.”

“Thanks, Mom.” I reached out a hand toward her. She squeezed it once before disappearing down the hall.

Two hours later, we were standing in front of the polar bear cage. Huge glass walls lined their enclosure, the same type of glass that holds back the whales at SeaWorld. One of the bears dove off the rocks that filled the back of his enclosure and plunged into the icy water. We watched him swim laps around his tank. His giant paw pressed against the glass, larger than my head.

“Lately you’ve been out with friends whenever I get home.” My mom rested a warm hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for taking the time out of your busy social schedule to drag me here.”

“No problem.” I leaned in toward her, bumping my hip against hers. “Thanks for taking the day off work.”

“Are you still spending all your time with that Nate character?”

“Most of my time.” I watched as a second polar bear belly flopped into the pool. “I’ve made a few other friends. But Nate’s the most important.”

“I want to be the cool and understanding mom here, but should I be making you a gynecologist appointment? Do you need birth control?”

I felt my cheeks burn, especially as a young mom pushing a stroller entered the polar bear exhibit. I turned to leave. Nate and I had only been dating a few weeks. Our relationship felt real, like it would last a long time. But that just made me feel more comfortable about taking things slow. And Nate never tried to pressure me to go farther. He’d never even reached up my shirt. I pushed open the door to the primate house. “You know, the only form of birth control that’s one hundred percent effective is abstinence.”

“You memorizing your entire freshman health textbook is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” We paused in front of the baboons. “But you two are spending a lot of time together. If you want to talk to someone who isn’t me, there are plenty of knowledgeable doctors in this town.”

“Relax, Mom. Nate and I are taking things slow. But if I ever get to the point where I need a gynecologist, I promise I’ll see one.” One of the older baboons sat picking lice out of a younger baboon’s fur. She then ate the lice, which was sort of disgusting. “And you don’t have to worry about us being unsupervised all the time or whatever. Nate’s parents are always around. I think his mom wanted a daughter or something. I sometimes get the feeling she loves me even more than Nate.”

“Nate’s mom?” My mom stared at the baboon cleaning its young. The eating-lice thing was still gross, but it was also intimate. “You’re never home because you’re spending all your time bonding with your boyfriend’s parents? God, I’m the worst mother alive.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.” She slumped against the guardrail, unable to fully support herself. “This isn’t even the first time I’ve done this — focused on work, when my own daughter needs me most.”

When my dad left, my mom never cut back her hours. She just arranged for Arden’s mom to watch me. I didn’t mind — I liked Arden’s mom. And I liked Nate’s mom. I patted her back, wishing there was something I could do. “It’s not a crime to like your job. You’re just — parenting by example — showing me the importance of hard work.”

She chewed on her bottom lip and kept her eyes on the ground, like she was ashamed to face me. “I’ve never even met Nate’s parents, and I’m letting them raise my teenage daughter for me.”

“Just because you aren’t Martha Stewart, it doesn’t mean you don’t love me. Besides, Martha’s a felon. I’d much rather have you.”

My mom laughed. “God, I love you, kid. But you deserve better. I’ll be better, I promise.”

I nodded. “I just really miss you.”

“It will be a while before I can cut back to a forty-hour workweek, but I’ll try to bring work home with me in the evenings so I can be around a little more.”

“That would probably be good.”

“Let’s start with two nights a week, Mondays and Thursdays.” She was getting into project manager mode, but I didn’t try to stop her. Being a task on her to-do list was better than nothing. “If I promise to be home by six every Monday and Thursday, do you think you could make an effort to be home those nights too? You can have Nate over, or any of your other friends. Or we can just spend the evenings alone together. It’s totally up to you.”

I liked eating dinner with the Larsons, but two nights a week with my own family sounded a lot better. “I promise I’ll come home early every Monday and Thursday.”

My mom and I left the primates and headed toward the elephants. One of them was significantly smaller than the rest. Thanks to all the help I’d been getting from Ms. Chatman, I was able to read the plaque to find out that Lily was born at the Oregon Zoo in 2012. She was an elephant toddler, running between the older elephants and causing mischief.

I knew elephants were matriarchal and enjoyed watching the older female elephants work together caring for little Lily. “I heard once about these two elephants in a circus together. One was an adult female and the other a toddler, like that one.” I pointed to Lily.

“When the younger elephant was maybe three or four years old, the circus ran out of money, so they sold the older elephant to a zoo. Eventually they sold the younger elephant to a different zoo. Then fifty years later, that zoo closed and the younger elephant was transferred to the same zoo as the older elephant. These two elephants hadn’t seen each other for half a century.

“But, on the very first night that these two elephants were at the same zoo, the older elephant bent three of the bars in her cage and ripped one all the way out of its foundation. The people might have forgotten the elephants knew each other. But the elephants remembered.”

My mom reached out and took my hand. “She wasn’t going to let anything keep her away from her baby.”

I squeezed my mom’s hand and hoped we’d just broken through a few bars of our own.

Ms. Chatman was working with Logan when I entered the resource room on Monday afternoon. I hated working with Logan, so I sat down in the seat next to Yesenia and hurried to pull a book out of my bag before Ms. Chatman could give me other instructions. Yesenia banged on the table, which I knew meant she was happy to see me. I read to her for about ten minutes before Ms. Chatman came toward us.

I set down the book and looked at her. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.” She pulled a chair over and sat facing me and Yesenia.

“You know a lot about different kinds of learning disabilities and stuff, right?”

“Quite a bit. Did you have a question about something specific?”

I wiggled my toes inside my shoes, feeling the itch to run away or at the very least bury my question back inside myself. “Do you think it’s weird…” I pushed myself to finish the question. “That I’m so good at math?”

“I think your ability to compute complex mathematical ideas in your mind is quite remarkable. You are definitely unusual, Samantha, but
weird
isn’t a word I would choose to describe you.”

“I don’t want to be extraordinary. Sometimes, I don’t even like math. I just understand it. When everything else feels overwhelming and confusing, math is the only thing that keeps me from falling apart. It isn’t a remarkable gift. It’s just a freaky weird tic or something.”

“If you don’t like math, what pushes you to think about it? What drives this ‘freaky weird tic’?”

“My total inability to fit into normal society.” I looked past Ms. Chatman and focused instead on the buds starting to form on the dogwood tree out the window. “There are so many things I don’t understand, and that I can’t control. With math, it’s different. Numbers are orderly and neat. They make sense. They feel safe. I was a toddler when I started, only two or three years old. I just start counting. Anytime life got to be more than I could handle, I’d crawl inside myself and block everything else out.”

Ms. Chatman set her hands over mine and squeezed gently. “What are you afraid of, Samantha? What are you hiding from?”

I tore my eyes off the new spring day and focused on Ms. Chatman. Her gray hair frizzed out of a loose bun and framed her face. “Everything. All the normal everyday stresses that other people just deal with. I don’t
deal.
I hide and compute. My friends all think it’s weird. They keep asking me if I’m autistic. And I guess I’m just kind of curious. Do you think I am…autistic?”