And as we do, I keep thinking back to the question Kyle asked me. What would I do if someone wanted to beat me up and I couldn’t walk away?
I think about it and think about it. Kyle isn’t talking and Donna is reading the newspaper, so I have time to give the question the proper attention. The problem is that I just don’t know what I would do. It’s too much hypothesis and not enough fact for my brain to process it. I’ll just have to hope it never happens.
Donna tells me that she has cleared her entire day for the three of us to do things together. First, she says, we’re going for a nice, long walk so I can get my exercise regimen going. Donna Middleton (I keep forgetting that her new last name is Hays) is a very logical woman.
“I’m not going,” Kyle says.
“Oh, yes, you are,” Donna says. “Young men who are polite and respectful get to spend time alone if they want, because they’ve earned that right. Young men who get expelled from school are made to spend endless, agonizing hours with people who love them.”
She picks up his bowl and mine and carries them into the kitchen. Once her back is turned, Kyle makes a very rude gesture toward her that is known as flipping someone off. I am horrified, and I guess the look on my face tells Kyle that, so he flips me off, too.
We go north on Donna’s street, North Twenty-Fifth, and pass cross streets with names like Lemp and Heron and Hazel, all of which are interesting names to me. This subdivision doesn’t seem like the ones in Billings. In the neighborhood I live in, the street names are on a theme: Lewis, Clark, Custer, Miles. They’re names of important people in Montana’s history. But here, I don’t know. I will concede that I don’t know my Boise or Idaho history, but I don’t see any order to these names. I don’t know what a “lemp” is. A heron is a kind of bird. Hazel is an old woman’s name, or a color. Farther up, we cross Bella Street and then Irene Street—those are definitely women’s names. Bella is a very popular name right now because of those vampire books and movies. So is Edward, unfortunately. When I worked at the Billings Herald-Gleaner, people kept telling me that I was on Team Edward, which I guess has something to do with those movies. I didn’t like that.
On the other side of Irene, we turn right and walk down to a pretty park on the corner. Donna has hooked her arm in mine, and we’re talking—well, she is, mostly—the whole way and smiling at each other. Kyle hasn’t said a word on the whole walk, and most of the way he’s been a few feet behind us, his head down.
“Do you like it here?” Donna asks me.
“It’s a very nice town. Do you like it?”
She doesn’t answer immediately. I look across the street as I wait.
“I miss Billings,” she says. “I was there a long time, and I had a lot of friends. But there are possibilities here, and Victor has such a good job. I can see a future.”
Kyle, from behind us, says: “Ha.”
“You don’t see a future?” I ask Kyle.
To be honest, I too am a little flummoxed by what Donna said. I’m not sure I trust the idea of seeing a future. I don’t like predictions, and I don’t think they are reliable. I prefer facts.
“No, all I see are a couple of douches.”
Donna turns around to face her son. She is twitching. I have seen her this angry before, and I remember hoping that I would never see it again. This is what hope gets you.
“Who are you?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Not so many days ago, I had a son. He was a good kid. He was sweet and he was kind. But he’s not here anymore. Do you know what happened to him?”
“Maybe you left him in Billings, you bitch.”
My left arm shoots out, and my hand grabs Kyle by his coat. This surprises me, as I did not ask my left arm and hand to do any such thing.
“Let go of me, you fucking freak.”
Donna slaps Kyle across the face. Hard. The sound of her hand against his skin reverberates (I love the word “reverberates”) through the cold in this empty park.
Kyle looks at her. He looks shocked, like someone told him something incredible and scary. He looks at me. Donna is twitching beside me. I want to start running and not stop until I am away from here and what just happened.
And then Kyle starts crying. He cries and he cries and Donna stops twitching, and she reaches for her boy, and he tries to shove her off, but she reaches for him again, and he lets her pull him in. He sobs into her shoulder, and Donna is crying, too. There’s a very small voice inside of me that says I should hug them, but that impulse does not prevail.
I sit down on a park bench and I watch them.
I wish I weren’t here, but I also feel like this is where I am supposed to be.
Those two things, together, make no sense.
How can I help my friend when I am lost, too?
By Kyle’s own action, he is stuck in his bedroom again, the door closed. Donna says she isn’t sure if Kyle is locked away from the rest of us, or if we’re locked away from him. This is one of the things I like about Donna. She is clearly hurting for her son, and though she can cry and hug him when he needs it, she’s also not one to let him slide when he acts inappropriately and calls her a nasty name like “bitch.” (I’m setting aside, for a moment, the fact that he called me a freak. That hurt my feelings, but I’m trying to remember that none of these things with Kyle are about me. He will have to do something to repair his relationship with me. That much is clear. But that can wait for another time.)
Donna takes away his Wii and his computer. She tells him that he needs to sit quietly and think about things, and that he can come out when Victor comes home. Together, as a family—and it makes me feel good that Donna includes me in that word, “family”—we will all sit down and talk about Kyle and where we will go from here.
Even though these are awful circumstances, I’m glad to be part of this. I usually don’t get to help sort out adult situations with other adults. When I think about it rationally, which is what I always try to do, I can see that this is an understandable response, given some of the things I have struggled with, but being left out of things for my own benefit still frustrates me. What few people outside of my friends and family seem to grasp is that I am not too stupid to understand adult problems. I am not stupid at all. I’m developmentally disabled, and so I process information in ways that often don’t make sense to the people they call neurotypical. (I love the word “neurotypical.”)
There’s something else that people don’t realize. Because of my long association with Dr. Buckley, I have come to know something about rage and how to control it, or at least mitigate it. When I began to see Dr. Buckley, I was consumed with rage, although I didn’t realize it, and I did not know how to let it go or channel it into something constructive. I had been ordered to stay at least five hundred feet away from Garth Brooks and to not send him any more letters of complaint, even though I still contend that he ruined country music. I had been fired from a job—that time for my conduct and not as an involuntary separation. I had been banned from an Albertsons in Billings—not my favorite one, the one on Grand Avenue and Thirteenth Street West, but the one on Sixth Street West—because I had knocked down an old lady, even though I still contend that was not my fault.
Dr. Buckley helped me overcome all of that. She helped me see that writing my letters of complaint could be a positive action, in that it would allow me to blow off steam in the act of writing. I could then file the letter away without ever sending it. That didn’t make a lot of sense at first, but it really does work. These days, I no longer write a daily letter of complaint, although I will write one if someone genuinely wrongs me. In those cases I even send the letter, and I’ve often seen positive results (in November, for instance, I got ten free pizzas because one that was delivered to my house arrived soggy and I wrote a letter of complaint). When Dr. Buckley and I began working together, I would not have thought it possible that I could write a letter of complaint and not get in trouble for it later.