It's. Nice. Outside. (6 page)

“Daddy?”

“Thank you, God! Listen, talk to him, will you? Please! He has to go to the bathroom. Just talk to him for a few minutes, calm him down, distract him. We're driving.”

“I don't want to talk to him right now.”

“You have to talk to him! He might go in his pants. He's done that before.” I put the phone on speaker.

“Hi, Karen!” I yelled.

“Hi, Ethan,” Karen said. Her voice was soft, dull, resigned.

“Karen!” Ethan stopped stomping his feet. “Where. Are. You?”

“In a hotel. In South Carolina.”

“Where. Mom. Be?”

“She's in the room next to me. Daddy?”

“Where. Mindy. Be?”

“I don't know where she is.”

“Poo-poo. Bad.”

“Hold it, and Dad will stop.”

“What. Eat. Today?”

“Nothing, Ethan. I had nothing to eat today,” Karen said. She was doing a poor job of hiding her irritation, and this angered me. She only had to deal with him for a few minutes—that was all I was asking, a few minutes.

“Could you make more of an effort?” I said. “This isn't the time to mail it in.”

“Can we talk now?”

We finally came to an exit, which I took at fifty miles per hour. “Actually, no. He has to take a crap. I'll call you back.”

“Daddy?”

“I'll call you back.” I ended the call and threw the phone off to the side.

*   *   *

After a long poo-poo break at a Cracker Barrel; and after I asked the elderly church-lady-looking waitress if they served alcohol; and after the elderly church-lady-looking waitress reacted like I had just asked her to breastfeed us; and after we ordered and ate fried chicken and fried ham with French fries; and after Ethan put my credit card in his mouth right before giving it to the elderly church-lady-looking waitress who reacted like I had just handed her a severed body part; and after we made a series of unscheduled pee-pee-Sprite-let's-play-catch-with-the-orange-Nerf-football, let's-take-the-pickles-off-of-the-McDonald's cheeseburgers and befriend them (“Hey there, Mr. Pickle, what you knowin'?”); and after Ethan whined and pinched me hundreds if not thousands of times, he fell mercifully asleep in the back seat.

I turned off “Jingle Bells”. “I don't know if I can do this,” I said aloud.

“Yes, you can, old man,” Stinky Bear told me. “Yes, you can. Just hold on.”

“This is a big mistake. I don't think I can do this.”

“You can do it. Just take the next step. You've been doing this for nineteen years, old man, nineteen years.”

*   *   *

Mary suspected that something was wrong with Ethan around nine months. He didn't sit up, and he didn't reach or grab for things. Absorbed in my job, teaching two AP English courses, finishing my book, and contending with two young daughters, initially I paid little attention to her concerns. It wasn't until our pediatrician recommended some tests be taken, including the MRI, that I took notice.

The tests results surpassed our worst fears: global brain damage brought on by a rare chromosome disorder. His primary diagnosis was Trisomy 9 Mosaicism syndrome which meant the ninth chromosome appears three times rather than twice in some cells of the body. (Later he would later also be classified as mildly autistic.) At that time, specifics didn't mean much to me. All I knew was that my only son, my youngest baby, would never be normal.

Instantly, our lives transformed into an exhaustive string of sleepless nights and stressful days, punctuated by an array of neurologists, therapists, and geneticist meetings. Mary was constantly doing research, constantly looking for information on his conditions, hoping for some good news, for some light. I, on the other hand, stumbled through, in denial, overwhelmed and disbelieving. Things like this happened to other people.

The first three years were probably the worst, since every missed milestone was cause for sadness and stress. He didn't walk, he didn't talk. He didn't play with any toys. He just cried and stared at us with helpless, accusing eyes.

Ethan took his first steps when he was three and a half, a glorious day in the Nichols house. It was Valentine's Day, but more important, an overachieving Illini team was beating a Bobby Knight–led Indiana
at
Indiana, when I glanced away from the TV to see Ethan smiling while he pulled himself up from the couch and then proceeded to let go.

“Daddy,” Karen whispered.

We were in the family room, and we all just stared in wonder as he took a few drunken steps. Finally, after he had managed a smooth landing, sitting softly down in the middle of the floor, Mindy broke the silence by saying, “Hey, Ethan, go get me a Coke.”

The War Years came next—years when the air raid sirens blared, when you grabbed a helmet and jumped into a trench the second you entered the house, when smiles and laughter were rationed like sugar and bits of chocolate. Really sucky years. This was when he was about five and six. This was when the mood swings began.

There was simply no predicting him. The smallest thing—an unclosed dresser drawer, an errant thread hanging from your sweater, a ringing phone—could send him into a rage. Bedtime became a terror; he never wanted to sleep. Consequently, we took to locking him in his room at night. When he broke the lock, we fixed it; when he broke it a third time, I held the door shut until he grew tired of pulling on it. This could take up to an hour every night.

When he was around six, things took a turn for the better when, after years of speech therapy, and years after we had given up hope, he defied all odds and started speaking. Not well and not often, but he eventually managed two- and occasionally three-word sentences, each utterance an achievement. “Leave. Now.” “I. Want. Milk.” Once he could articulate some of his needs, his behavior improved, and the tantrums became less frequent, less pronounced. After years as shut-ins, we could finally take him places: out to eat, shopping, to the pool. At restaurants in particular, he was, for the most part, well behaved, polite to the point of debonair. He would say thank you and please, pretend to study the menu, and hold the door open for other customers. Waitresses, waiters, hostesses, and even cooks took a liking to him, and as a result, we spent an inordinate amount of time and money eating out.

Other than a terrifying seizure when he was around eight, physically, he emerged fine. Though he was undersized and had teeth that needed but would never see braces, he was healthy and normal in appearance. His cognitive state, however, was a much different story. Doctors used the term
developmentally delayed
, but we never took to this description, for it conveyed hope, implied a temporary condition. Ethan wasn't delayed. He was going to be three years old forever. Meanwhile, the rest of us kept getting older.

His comprehension, we concluded over the years, was a crapshoot. We were never sure what he was understanding. Some abstract things—death, heaven, where the sun goes when it sets, what the moon was—were simply and permanently beyond him. Others—changing weather, time, anger, the concept of family—he seemed to grasp. Every so often, after listening to a conversation, or observing an action or scene, he would surprise us with an appropriate comment or gesture.

While he had a minimal attention span, adolescence brought some new interests, and additional relief. He began watching basketball on TV, and while he didn't understand most of what he was seeing—the rules, the score—he understood the overall objective of the game, get the ball in the basket, and as a result enjoyed watching others play.

Hoops became his thing. Over time, he began to play with me, developing a skill for shooting. His style was unorthodox, he held the ball down low in front of his chest and shot with both hands, but somehow the ball went in. He could shoot for up to an hour, an astounding length of time for him to do any one thing. Afterward he would summarize the game: “How. Many. Me. Make?” (“You made one hundred baskets, Ethan.”) “How. Many. Dad. Make?” (“I made five.”) “Go. Illini!”

“Yes, go, Illini!”

Eventually, along with his love of basketball, a basic sense of humor also emerged; he understood and even loved slapstick comedy. Pratfalls and body function references and noises—hence Stinky Bear—were his favorites, so in that one regard, at least, he was a normal male.

He also loved his family. If we were all together, he would bring us into a circle, make us hold hands, and sing, “Family! Family! Family! U!… S!… Aaaaa!” I have no idea what the origin was, really no clue, but it became a staple of his, and both a source of embarrassment and amusement, depending on the moment or occasion.

As I drove on, my retrospective inevitably turned into a review of my Overall Plan. Was I doing the right thing? Would he be happy? Exactly how and when was I going to officially fill in Mary? A host of questions, of worries, each one weighing me down.

Being able to think—this was the downside of Ethan being quiet.

Somewhere close to Louisville, my thoughts took a turn for the worse. (Note: I don't know much about depression, I've made no effort to research its clinical definition, never been to a therapist, do not take antidepressants, but I suspect that I suffer from a mild form of it from time to time, an Ethan-induced Black Despair. It didn't stay with me, it was not permanent, but it was there—a hole I occasionally and without warning fell into, impenetrably dark and hopeless. I suddenly felt myself falling into that hole, now falling fast.)

I switched lanes, opened the window a crack, took deep breaths, and tried to settle myself. Nothing was helping, though, so I slowed then stopped on the shoulder; apparently, I had started to cry.

I was at the lowest level, the deepest part of the Black Despair, when I heard my phone go off, a faint buzzing, then louder. The outside world, a thin light down the mine shaft. I groped for it on the seat next to me, answered.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Nichols?”

I opened my eyes, cleared my throat. I didn't recognize the voice. “Yeah?”

“This is Kyle Baker from across the street.”

“Who?” I stopped with the crying, sniffled some. “Oh, yeah, right. Kyle.”

“I thought you might be coming today, but I wasn't sure.”

I sniffled again, wiped my eyes, checked the rearview mirror, tried to get my bearings: Ethan was sleeping, I was in Kentucky, my name was John Nichols, I was on my way to my daughter's wedding and things were going to be okay. “Yeah, right, I am. We are. We're actually about twenty minutes away. I think. We'll be there soon. I'll call you when we get there, and maybe we can meet or get an early dinner or something.”

“I was thinking that maybe we can go to a park, shoot around. It's supposed to stop raining. I live right near a park. It has a good court.”

“Hoops. Okay, yeah, hoops, that would be good, great. Yeah, I'll call when we get closer. Thanks. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you. Thank you.” I put the phone down, cleared my throat again, and started up the van. Ethan was still sleeping, my name was still John Nichols, and I was on my way to play basketball. Things were going to be okay.

*   *   *

Kyle Baker lived directly across the street from us and used to spend time, quite a bit of time, shooting hoops with Ethan. Their friendship had originally been court mandated. A few years back Kyle had been arrested for plowing into a parked and, fortunately, empty car in downtown Wilton. While drinking was suspected, no official charges were ever filed against him. The local Chicago media had a field day, however; Kyle was Illinois's “Mr. Basketball”—the state's best basketball player. A hailstorm of negative press ensued. Consequently, the Wilton police were forced to come up with some form of punishment to quell the mounting controversy. While I was never privy to all the backroom machinations, the court decided that one of his many penances would be community service, and that one of those many services would be to spend time, four hours a week for six months, teaching a special-needs boy from Wilton, Ethan Nichols, how to play basketball.

After some discussion, Mary and I agreed to this. We were going through our divorce at that time, and both of the girls were out of the house, so any help we could get with Ethan, we took. Besides, we knew Kyle. He had come over a few times before the accident to play with Ethan in the driveway, and we felt he was basically a good kid.

To our delight, the arrangement worked. Ethan lived for his visits with Kyle (which Mary and I were required to dutifully report to the police) and loved playing basketball with him. Long after his probation had ended, Kyle continued to come around and play with Ethan, teaching him how to shoot, how to dribble. During his senior year, Ethan and I went to all of Kyle's games, sitting right behind the bench, staying as long as Ethan lasted.

I hadn't seen much of Kyle since he left for the University of Louisville and, when we met up with him that night at a park somewhere just off campus, I was surprised to see him sporting a buzz cut. His floppy hair had been a trademark.

“Hey, Mr. Nichols. Hey, Ethan!” he yelled as we approached. The park's basketball court was well lit and still glistening from the rain.

I hadn't told Ethan we were meeting Kyle—the anticipation would have been too great—so when he saw his old friend, he went predictably crazy.

“Kyle! Kyle! Kyle!” he screamed. He dropped my hand and ran, stiff-legged, over to him.

The two met in an awkward embrace under the basket, Kyle patting him on the back and smiling, a little embarrassed.

“Hey, buddy. Want to shoot some hoops?”

“How. Many. Me. Make?”

“You're going to make fifty baskets,” Kyle said.

“How. Many. You. Make?”

“I'm going to make ten.” Kyle looked over at me. “Is it okay?”

“Yes, of course.” I remembered to reach out and shake his hand. “What's with the hair?”