When Maddie sees Noah she thinks of boxes. There’s her brother, and there’s his life on his walls, neatly contained in the small squares of his spreadsheets. Colour-coded, contained, and the moment one becomes too small to hold data pertinent to a certain activity or regulation, a subsection is added. And then another, and, if needs be, another. That’s her brother. Boxed within a prison of rules that make sense to him but confuse everyone else. Its gates are a thick mesh of minutes and seconds, steps, and walls waiting to be tapped. His five fingers rattle out distress calls, but there’s nothing she, or her mom or dad, can do to help him. The prison he built has such thick walls and gates so securely locked that unauthorised entry is impossible. Only Noah has the power to dismantle it, block by heavy block. Their job is to let him do it, in his own time and in his own way … Or that’s what Ms Turner says.
So, no more waiting as he completes his self-imposed chores, no humouring his need to eat alone, or keeping his door closed. Once Noah comes home, his routine will have to change to meet theirs. It will be hard work.
But that’s all in the future. Right now, their task is to persuade him to leave his room and join them outside.
Ms Turner wants them to walk with Noah into the garden, sit there with him there for at least ten minutes. ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ she warns them, ‘but persevere. At least get him as far as the main door. I want Noah to meet you out there tomorrow, for visiting hours.’
Ms Turner’s right. It’s not easy at all.
‘Shouldn’t we just go there straight away?’ Maddie says as the door of Ms Turner’s office closes behind them. ‘Get it over and done with? It’ll probably be much easier than we think.’ Her face is hopeful, but Noah’s not listening. He’s hurrying ahead of them, getting to his room as fast as he can, no tapping at corners, no counting at all. He opens the door and walks to where his calendar and timetable are stuck to the wall.
‘It’s Saturday,’ he says. ‘Look. Here.’ He jabs a finger at the calendar and then another at a list on the wall:
Saturday Chores
1. Sweep/dust.
2. Change sheets.
3. Laundry.
4. Tidy cupboards and desk.
5. Clean windows.
‘And I’ve got more to fit in – catch up on homework, studying.’
Noah’s speaking fast, a rush of words he has to say. He points to the activities listed at the bottom of his Greenhills timetable. ‘They say it’s unstructured, but it’s not. It’s just more difficult to organise. How am I supposed to fit all that in?’ His hands are at his face, fives to his cheeks.
‘I don’t have time for extras. Not today. Ms Turner’s already interrupted my chores. We’ve spent one hour with her. And now …’
He stops, fingers at his lips now, mumbling through them. ‘I can’t waste time on visitors.’
Maddie’s mom flinches.
‘Sunday is visiting day.’ Her brother’s tapping the timetable now. ‘Here, or downstairs, in the lounge. Not outside on the lawn. And not today. Not Saturday.’
Their mom’s blinking, still dealing with the hurt of being lumped into the ‘visitor’ category. ‘We can help you, darling,’ she says. She peers at the list. ‘Look. It’s not that much. We’ll help you save time on your chores so you can come out into the garden for a little while. We’ll choose a bench and then, tomorrow, you can wait for us there.’
Maddie groans. Mom knows better than that. They’ll never be able to do each chore according to Noah’s specifications. He won’t trust them, he’ll do it all over and it will take even longer because they might have inadvertently moved something or disturbed the air molecules, or fractured the sound waves – whatever it is that sends her brother off on his twitchy circling, walking the floor, mumbling under his breath, pausing to draw a frantic breath and then continuing.
No, that won’t work, and as Mom is suggesting that Noah show her where to find the broom, Maddie interrupts. ‘Mom, leave it. Noah has to do his chores by himself. Right, Noe?’
Her brother looks at her with a flash of gratitude, and for a second Maddie remembers when Mom treated them both as ordinary kids, when Maddie and Noah took it in turns to incur her wrath, or her blessings. Now she’s dithering around him, scared to talk to him, scared to touch him, worried that the slightest wrong move will set him off and he’ll become even stranger, more foreign, even less of the son she has consigned to the care of NoH-where.
‘Treat him normally,’ Ms Turner said in the family meeting. ‘He’s not an invalid. He’s your son, your brother. Talk to him, don’t tiptoe around him.’
Maddie glances at her father, standing alone at the end of the long room. If her mom is helpless as far as dealing with Noah is concerned, her dad is worse. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing. He doesn’t know what to do, so he does nothing. He doesn’t want to be there. And it shows. So that when they get to Noah’s room, Dad mutters something and turns to walk back to the end of the room and look out of the window. ‘Trimmed the hedges, I see,’ he says to no one in particular, ‘and weeded those flowerbeds.’ Meaningless lifelines the garden throws out to contribute something to the conversation. He doesn’t see how Noah listens when he speaks, doesn’t notice his son taking out his small notebook, flipping to the back of it and jotting something down.
Anyway, on this day, almost four weeks after Noah moves into Greenhills, Maddie isn’t bothered about notebooks, or the state of the garden, or even how, from the back, her father looks as if he wants to flatten himself to the glass of the window and melt through it, bound across the lawns and over the tall wrought-iron gates, and down the road, as far away from NoH-where as possible.
Today is all about following Ms Turner’s suggestions and seeing how far they can persuade Noah to go. At least her mom is standing still now. She’s staring at the grey rug, at his bed with its hospital corners, the pages and pages of fine web-like diagrams of his Family Tree.
Maddie follows her eyes. So much about his room in Greenhills is familiar and yet everything looks so uncomfortably out of place.
She still can’t believe that every Sunday afternoon for the next eight weeks they’ll be pointing the car in the direction of NoH-where. She can’t think about that now. She has to put herself inside her brother’s head, figure out how to get him out of his room and onto the lawn. She remembers Ms Turner’s request. ‘At least as far as the doors.’
Think differently, she tells herself. Think Noah.
She’s able to do that at home. Deflect him, divert him. Steer him onto a different path, one he doesn’t mind walking.
That’s at home, though, where everything is familiar and she can work with his code so that it’s not an absolute train smash if they’re having spinach for supper, not carrots, even though Mom specifically said it would be carrots and Noah wrote that into his ‘Menus’ chart.
‘Take your time.’ That’s Ms Turner’s solution to everything connected to Noah. ‘Don’t expect it all to happen overnight. It could take a good few weeks, months even, before Noah changes his patterns. He’s already put a great deal of effort into working out new routines for life at Greenhills. He’s going to cling to them like a limpet. They’ll be his new lifelines.’
‘Shouldn’t we leave them in place, then?’ Maddie’s mom had said, so worried by it all. She’d been almost as agitated as Noah, but Ms Turner had an answer for everything.
‘It would be easier, but not necessarily better. Noah’s created a new set of constants. We need to introduce changes within those constants – some small, some more challenging. For instance, from Monday to Wednesday, Noah can stick rigidly to his timetable, but we might ring a few changes on Thursday and Friday and then on Sunday something slightly different will happen. Or,’ – she looks at all of them when she says this – ‘in this case, Saturday, when you persuade him to go out into the garden.’
Slightly different? Maddie wants to laugh out loud, but there’s no time for that either. She has to get Noah to take one step towards the door. Away from his chores. Ms Turner’s working on all of them, not just Noah. They also have to change their patterns, their habit of accommodating Noah, making space for the demands of his ‘quirks’.
Quirks. Maddie hates that word.
She joins Noah, looks at the careful categorisation of things to do and when to do them.
‘Nice work, Noe,’ she says.
Noah nods. ‘Thanks, Mads. It’s all more or less approximate for now.’
Maddie’s gazing at the timetable. ‘What’s this?’ she asks eventually. Her finger’s on the block of activities, resting on the words ‘Quiet Time’.
‘That’s for everyone,’ he says. ‘After supper.’
‘In your room?’
‘Yes. “Time to think”,’ Ms Turner says. We can write in our journals if we want to.’
‘You know, Noah,’ Maddie says, ‘it’s such a waste of time not to be doing something and thinking at the same time.’ She wonders if Ms Turner would approve of this strategy, multitasking so that each minute is used to the full. But she doesn’t care. Ms Turner has given the family this impossible task; she’ll have to live with the methods they use. Especially when – Maddie glances to the window again – her dad’s standing immobile and detached and her mom’s getting more jittery by the minute.
‘I suppose …’ Noah’s mulling this over and Maddie cuts in.
‘Sweeping, Noah. Sweeping and thinking. So maybe … maybe some of your chores?’
Noah checks his chart. ‘That could work.’
‘Yes,’ says Maddie. She glances at the list. ‘And windows. Dusting, cleaning windows, thinking, sweeping and thinking. Before you know it, Quiet Time will be over, Noah. And then, on a day like today you can use the time that’s left over to do other things.’
His eyes dart around the room.
‘Just for getting to the garden and back. Because here’s the thing, bro. Tomorrow Ms Turner wants us to meet you out there, on the lawn, with the other kids and their parents. And it’s going to be really hard if you don’t walk it out now. Count the steps, time them. You know. And, if we do it now, it’ll save you time in the long run. Otherwise you’re going to spend forever wondering about how many steps to take between here and’ – she looks beyond her father’s stiff shoulders to a white bench – ‘that big oak tree. The one with the bench under it. That’s where we could sit.’