Chapter 9

“The medicine Frightful takes doesn’t make her better,” Andrew told me one gloomy October afternoon.

Frightful was shoved in the front of his sweatshirt with both scaly feet poking out beneath the hem.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not working.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about Frightful. He was talking about his weekly infusions of methyl prednisone and the fact that he was only getting a few days of marginal relief at a time. The first time he had transferred his feelings to something else was with Ben, his little velveteen bear. Then came T-Rex, who took the brunt of his pent-up childhood frustrations. I suppose it allowed him to avoid feeling the full impact of emotions he couldn’t really explain.

“What does Frightful think we should do?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and patted the bird that let out a squawk. “I dunno.”

“Well, I don’t know either!”

A million conflicting emotions clashed in my mind. I was out of ideas and it seemed that no matter how hard I pushed for answers, the doctors just threw their hands up in the air and repeated the same thing: “We don’t know what to do.”

It made me crazy, this feeling of helplessness. I had no power to change things, so I channeled my frustration into a maniacal cleaning of the house, starting with Hannah’s closet. I stripped hangers and shelves, and tossed toys and shoes on to the carpet. Drawers were dumped, walls were cleaned, and I disinfected every surface I could reach. I was headfirst in the back corner of Hannah’s closet scraping something sticky off the wall when it occurred to me: “Maybe…being a superhero is the only option,” I said.

I emerged from Hannah’s closet holding a Batman cape I found wrapped around one of her American Girl dolls. “All you really need is one cool trick or talent…or just a plain old cape,” I said, more to myself than my audience of two.

Both kids gawked at me from the hallway, a little fearful of my frenetic activity and my recent announcement.

The glossy black cape I held in my hand was Andrew’s first in a collection of capes he’d acquired over the years. He became animated the moment he tied it around his neck, taking on the persona of the hero he envisioned himself to be. When he added the Batman mask to hide his eyes from a prying world, he became invincible. Nothing could hold him back, not even the shadowy veil of autism. Those were the times I felt he was the most real, my little boy whom I loved with every fiber of my being.

I dove back in the closet, pushing a set of rollerblades into the room.

“What are you talking about, Mom? And why are you shredding my room?” Hannah huffed.

I said it again, slowly this time, as I let the truth settle over me. Was this what Andrew craved all along? Power? There was power behind a mask; there was power cloaked in a cape. And I was determined to seize it, too.

I sat back on my heels, considering my answer, something the kids would understand.

“I think we have to harness our own power. It’s like recognizing something inside us that makes us special, or unique. I think it’s something that’s bigger than us.”

I was still grasping at the concept, not quite able to put it to words. But on some level, I suspected Andrew had figured it out a long time ago. From the time he was very young, he was convinced he could defy gravity, fly like a bird, or climb walls with his fingertips.

He also wanted to be an excavator.

“You mean you would like to drive an excavator?” I had asked.

“Nope. Be one.”

“But humans can’t be construction equipment,” I said.

“They can if they want. And besides, excavators are super strong. Huge teeth. Like T-Rex.”

I remember shaking my head, exasperated by his logic. For years, I spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to make my little boy conform to all the norms I thought were important. Yet by doing so, I had been deaf to the murmurings of his heart. What he was really trying to tell me was: I want to be strong. I want to be powerful. I want people to hear me roar. And most of all, I want to be special.

He was special. The day Andrew pulled a peeping fluffball from a bin of a hundred chicks, we knew something extraordinary had occurred. He found his voice. From that moment on, we were able to join him in his complex and fascinating world.

We began telling others our son was bilingual—he spoke English and Chicken. “The Chicken Whisperer” we called him. He would call, “Chi-KENS Back-ACK!!” out his second-floor bedroom window and the hen house would go wild. Six feathered dinosaur beasts with impossibly skinny legs went nutso until he ran across the yard to let them out of the coop. Then they would follow him around like he was a god, so I guess that was another one of his super-talents.

Finishing my purging of Hannah’s room, I crossed the hall and began rummaging through Andrew’s closet.

“Are you assembling your superpowers, Mom?” Andrew asked, following me into the room.

“Yes, I guess I am,” I replied.

Buried beneath a landfill of Legos, I found a light saber and a pair of vinyl Spiderman boots. Andrew grappled for the boots. “That’s where they went! I’ve been looking for them.” He scrunched his too-large feet into the kid-sized Halloween costume. “Do I look like Spiderman?” he asked.

“A little,” I shrugged and started pulling more things from his closet.

On top of a cardboard box lay Ben, forever smiling at me with his worn velveteen face. I rubbed a thumb across the knotted-thread nose, remembering Andrew doing the same thing. “Take good care of him,” I spoke to the flat little shell of a body before placing him back in his hiding spot.

In the wreckage of Andrew’s room I came across a pair of pants with fat, crinkly pockets. I emptied them of a few coins, a rumpled dollar bill, a note from his special education teacher, and a black and red action figure of a goofy looking creature with an oversized star-shaped head and wide, probing eyes. I turned it over in my hand, wondering what it was, then suddenly remembered it was the Shadow, the little hedgehog. I set it on his nightstand.

Hannah stood in the hall, dress-up clothes spilling from her arms to the floor, making a colorful heap at her feet. “Do you want us to make you into a superhero?” she asked.

“Oh! I’ve got just the weapon!” Andrew added, pulling the light-saber from the back of his closet.

For the next hour, my children transformed me into their version of a ‘Supermom.’ Listening to them plan the best way to create the perfect costume, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was who they thought I was, or if this was what they needed me to be. When they finished, I was wearing a discarded ballet tutu, motorcycle chest pads, Batman’s cape, a tiara and wig. In one hand, I carried Cinderella’s princess wand; in the other, a light saber. With the final addition of Batman’s mask, my costume was complete.

“Do you feel different?” Andrew asked eagerly.

Hannah stood in the hallway, snickering at the seriousness of her brother’s question. Did I feel different? I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel like.

“You have powers now!” Andrew added, pleased at my newly created look.

Staring at the stranger in the mirror, I tried to grasp what he meant. I peered at myself through the mask, searching out the only thing that was truly me—my eyes. What did they say about me? Were they scared? Lonely? Overwhelmed? I smiled, and they changed, giving me permission to feel…different. Both kids gazed at me expectantly…and something inside me changed. A giggle escaped my lips and I threw my head back and roared, lunging at them with both sword and wand. Andrew and Hannah screeched with laughter and took off down the stairs, with me in hot pursuit. In that instant, I remembered how it felt to fling my arms and voice into the air. Wild. Powerful. Free. Without a care in the world.

It was short-lived. Two days later, Andrew was struck with another fever. This time it held him in its grip for nearly two weeks.

“The space between episodes seems to be getting shorter,” I told my mom on the phone one afternoon.

“Are they more frequent, or are they just running together?” she asked.

In my head, I calculated the date of his last fever. “Maybe they’re running together. There’s less time during the month that he’s well. And he’s not bouncing back like he used to.”

From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Andrew dragging the chicken tractor across our front slope of lawn. I moved to the window to get a closer look.

“Actually, today is the first time in days he’s been out of bed,” I said, wondering what in the world he was up to.

The ulcers in his mouth still swelled his lips, his eyes were ringed with the bluish tint of illness, but apparently the pain had diminished enough for him to schlep the heavy moveable coop across Jon’s perfectly groomed turf.

When Jon had banned the chickens from roaming the yard after they had dismantled the garden during a particularly nasty rainstorm, Andrew’s solution was to build the portable coop. It was fashioned from leftover chicken wire, two by fours, and wheels from his old wagon. On the front of their contraption was a half-moon of rope used to drag the square box across the lawn to a fresh patch of grass. This allowed the chickens to access only certain parts of the yard and surrounding woods.

“Oh, Mom, you won’t believe what Andrew is doing now!” I told her with a snort.

Andrew trudged through a giant puddle at the edge of the lawn, pulling at the coop with both arms. Frightful rode on top, queen-like, in a Tupperware throne. Bits of cracked corn popped out of the bowl as she pecked, sprinkling the perimeter of the pen. The other hens, trapped in the tractor, squawked in protest as grain showered the wet grass out of their reach.

“Really? Does Frightful just stay in the bowl?” she asked.

“She’ll do anything Andrew tells her to do. I suspect she would stand there all day if he wanted her to,” I replied, still laughing.

“I just love that boy. He’s going to do remarkable things, you know.”

I knew she loved him deeply, but I had a hard time imagining what those remarkable things would be. Watching him play with Frightful that day gave me hope, but I couldn’t have predicted how much I would need it.

Andrew disappeared, and a moment later I heard his voice find its way through the garage door. “Frightful is hungry!”

“Oh, she is?”

I smiled to myself, knowing this meant he was getting better rapidly. Tomorrow he would go back to school.

“Yep. Hungry.”

The door slammed and I heard his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous Terminator line, I’ll be back! Ten minutes later, Andrew sat on a barstool in our kitchen, picking at the food I put in front of him. The BRAT diet, I called it: Banana, Rice, Applesauce, Toast—the only thing halfway agreeable to his body when he was sick.

He absently studied a spoonful of applesauce as it plopped onto the counter. “I don’t feel right,” he said.

“What makes you say that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t.”

I sat down next to him and brushed my fingers through his hair, taking a moment to study his face for clues.

“But you’re better than yesterday, aren’t you?”

He nodded and tugged my hand away from his face. Why would he say that when I could clearly see he was getting better? I didn’t understand what was happening. I never did. The answer always seemed to linger just beyond my fingertips, making it impossible for me to discover the truth. For years, I had been living on a mood rollercoaster, riding the waves of his illness. Today I was hopeful, but just days ago, in the throes of fever and pain, I had been terrified.

Along with Andrew’s predictable illness, I had developed a predictable pattern of insomnia. At the first sign of fever, I slept with an ear cocked and one eye open. When I heard Andrew’s first groan in the black hours of night, I flung the covers onto Jon and streaked into his room with a pounding heart and a fist in my throat. On those nights, fear and anger warred for supremacy, leaving me no room for sleep.

Frightful became my lifeline to Andrew. We talked about her as if she were in the room.

“How’s Frightful?” I would ask after school.

Andrew would pause, considering how the chicken was feeling. “Good. She likes history class.”

I wasn’t surprised. Andrew had become a history buff, and had since expanded his interests beyond World War II to include World War I, the Revolutionary War, and Vietnam. Our house was inundated with books, maps, and videos of each era. For his sixteenth birthday, Jon glued a giant map of war-era Europe to his wall—his very own war room. Andrew added hand-drawn pictures of Churchill and Roosevelt as superheroes complete with capes. Stalin and Hitler were portrayed in black—leaders of evil empires, forces that would need to be overcome and conquered. I wished I could overcome the evil empire lurking in his body and conquer it once and for all.

The next morning, Andrew left for school with a backpack full of books and a new series of war maps he had sketched for his history class. As I walked him to the bus, a few chunky clouds clotted the horizon, leaving Seattle with an ominous reminder that more rain was on its way. This recent fever had kept him in bed for twelve days, leaving his face drawn and absent of its usual goofy smile. I felt an odd need to hug him tightly that morning, hold him a little longer, shelter him from something I couldn’t see.

After the bus groaned its way down the street, I stood in the yard as filtered sunlight poured through the evergreen canopy, leaving slices of emerald and lime across the lawn. Under any other circumstance, it would have been a beautiful scene—the black clouds pushed against a bright blue sky—but somehow, that day, all I saw were the muddy tractor marks across the lawn, and mucky pools of water left by the chickens’ search for worms.

I saw T-Rex standing alone on the chicken tractor at the far side of our property. I rescued the rain-soaked dinosaur from his exile and tried to shake off the sense of déjà vu that overcame me each month. This month seemed more unsettling, although I couldn’t put it into words as to why. Rounding the corner of the garage, I saw Frightful sitting on the front porch in her green wicker chair, waiting for the bus to bring back her friend. I dropped T-Rex and scooped her into my arms.

“What secrets are you keeping?” I asked the bird who was my son’s best friend.

She avoided my gaze, pecking instead at something on my sleeve.

“Do you know something I don’t know?”

She didn’t answer. She stood motionless, gazing across the yard until her wings pressed gently against my hands, pushing them outward. Then she fluttered and jumped down without looking back.