Later that day I told Bri about the Facebook posts and watched all the color drain from her face. She had warned me, intermittently, that the cat probably belonged to somebody else and they’d be pissed off once it stopped coming home because we were feeding it. I had pooh-poohed these concerns—if it was somebody else’s cat then what the hell was it doing in our yard all day for weeks on end?
But her fears had proven justified and now we had a mess to clean up. I was prepared to let the people come over so we could tell them to go take a shit in their hats, and if their cat was so important to them they shouldn’t have left it alone in the neighborhood all summer. Briana, more diplomatically minded, insisted instead on a proactive peace offering. It was late summer and she was in a baking mood, so she said she would bake them an apple pie and I would bring it over to their house and make amends. We ran the plan by Jason Brumwell to make sure it didn’t violate any unspoken small-town Minnesota norms regarding neighborliness.
“Why don’t you bake them a plum pie instead?” he suggested.
“This isn’t funny!” Briana yelled at him.
The next day, fresh pie in hand, I embarked on the long walk from our house to Missy and Danny’s. I took Jack with me based on the purely cynical calculation that a small child would help humanize the evil out-of-town reporter and that they’d be less likely to start any serious shit in his presence.
We went to the front door and I knocked. It was answered by a petite woman with long red hair.
“So uh, I’m your new neighbor and I heard that—” I began, but I didn’t get a chance to finish my opening spiel.
“Yeah, look,” she said. “We left the cat with Larry over the summer, okay? And he wasn’t supposed to let her outside, but we found out he kept leaving her outside, and now we’re back home and she won’t even come see us, I guess because you’ve been feeding her.”
“Yeah, sorry I had no idea who she belonged to!” I said. “When she started showing up we asked around but nobody seemed to know. I guess we should have asked Larry. But anyway we’re sorry, we weren’t trying to like, steal your cat, I promise! Briana feels really bad and she baked you a pie.” I offered the pie.
“Look, kids!” Jack said. Missy’s two daughters, about Jack and Charlie’s age, peered out from behind her.
“Thank you,” Missy said. “Could you just . . . stop feeding her?”
“Yes, of course. What’s her name, by the way? She’s a great cat.”
“Her name’s Honey.”
“Honey!” one of the girls squealed.
“That’s a good name for an orange cat,” I said. “Maybe some time if you want, the girls could come over and play in the yard with Jack and Charlie? They love making friends in the neighborhood.”
“Yeah, sure,” Missy said.
And that was it. Briana’s face was pressed up against our kitchen window as Jack and I walked back. “How did it go?” she asked.
“Well. Not great? But not bad, either,” I said. “I told her if her kids ever wanted to come play with Jack and Charlie they were welcome to.”
“Great, now they’re gonna think we’re trying to steal their kids, too.”
That was the end, for the time being, of the Great Orange Cat Debacle of 2016. We learned our charm offensive had worked several months later when for Christmas, Missy, out of the blue, gave us four tickets to a performance of the Nutcracker in Grand Forks. This was surprising to me; based on our experiences in other places where we’d lived I’d assumed that Danny and Missy were now our sworn enemies and would continue to be so until we either moved away or died. When things go south with neighbors it’s often impossible to put them on the right footing again. But Danny and Missy have since become good friends. Their girls come over to play with our boys in the summers, and vice versa. And in the end, oddly enough, we ended up adopting the orange cat after all. In 2017 Danny was off to West Virginia for work on the pipeline, and Missy and the girls went with him. They were gone for much of the year and Larry was put in charge of the cat again. Eventually he told them he couldn’t take it anymore—it was too much of a hassle to run over to their place every day and deal with the damn cat. So they agreed to let him see if anyone else was interested, and of course when we found out, we volunteered immediately. Now the orange cat—Honey—lives with us but still spends plenty of time with Missy, Danny, and the girls when they’re in town.
Other challenges began to present themselves as our Minnesota honeymoon wound down. Finding after-hours medical care out here is not so easy. The closest urgent care facility is the hospital in Grand Forks, an hour away, although we found that “urgent care” typically means just getting checked into the emergency room. One day in the fall Jack began complaining of pain when he peed. Back in Baltimore this would have been a standard urgent care call—drive out to the place around the corner, get a quick exam, and most likely be prescribed some antibiotics. Instead Briana had to take him to the emergency room in Thief River Falls, where they did the exact same procedure but we had to pay a lot more for it out of pocket due to how our health insurance is set up.
But we really didn’t appreciate the medical challenges of living in a rural area until the next summer, when Jack and Charles were getting screened to enroll in preschool at the elementary school in town. We were excited to learn that the county offers universal one-day-a-week preschool. Part of the enrollment process was a standard hearing and vision screen. Charles, who had always been oddly sensitive about his ears, took great offense at having headphones placed over them and couldn’t complete the screening. No worries, the staff told us, just see if you can get it done at your pediatrician’s office before school starts.
The boys loved the pediatrician we had lined up for them, a Dr. Sreedharan in Thief River Falls. Charles had no problem completing the screening there but afterward Dr. S., as he told people to call him, took Briana aside.
“Has Charles ever been screened for autism?” he asked.
Dr. S. laid out the potential markers. Charles rarely made eye contact with unfamiliar people. He occasionally engaged in nontypical behaviors, like walking around the perimeter of large objects, like tables, while intently staring at them out of the corner of his eye. His cognitive abilities were quite literally off the charts—he had all his numbers memorized before the age of two. On the flip side, his expressive communication abilities were a different story. He was harder to understand, and had a much more difficult time articulating his needs, often causing him to erupt in frustration.
In the backs of our minds, we admitted to ourselves later, we had always wondered about this. Charles had lagged behind Jack on most of the big developmental milestones, like crawling and walking. Potty-training Jack had been a cinch, but Charles had been fiercely resistant to it. We knew that because they had been born six weeks prematurely they were at greater risk for autism and any number of other health problems.
Dr. Sreedharan explained that he wasn’t a specialist and couldn’t offer a definitive diagnosis, but it would be good to take Charles someplace where they could. There was no such facility in Thief River Falls. Ditto for Grand Forks, an hour away. The closest place was in Fargo, two hours to the south. When we called to set up an appointment, we found that they were booked out for months.
Those months, through the fall and winter of 2017, were a period of profound unease and uncertainty. If Charles was autistic, what sorts of services—speech therapy, physical therapy, and the like—would he need to live to his fullest potential, and would northwest Minnesota be able to provide them? It’s one thing to move to the middle of nowhere with a healthy, self-sufficient family whose chief needs could be fulfilled by the occasional Amazon order. But how would a child with special needs fare out here? Would we be depriving him of the care he required by not living in a place like D.C. or Baltimore, where there were world-class medical facilities?
The evaluation in Fargo was less than ideal: he’s not on the spectrum, they said, he’s jus
t a genius. Their “autism evaluation,” as it turned out, was based largely on a written questionnaire we filled out. That wouldn’t cut it as far as the school was concerned: they—and we!—wanted a rigorous clinical evaluation, which is what we thought we were going in for. The results, or lack thereof, from Fargo left us grappling with what to do next. Was there even a clinic within a thousand miles of the place that was used to dealing with kids like Charlie? Was he doomed to get written off as a “bad kid” in school just because teachers and doctors out here didn’t have much experience with kids like him?
We needed another opinion. We turned to what we knew: Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
At the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), Charles underwent an additional two days of evaluations. He was, in fact, on the spectrum. But, as far as the doctors were concerned he’d be best off in a regular classroom with an individualized instructional plan. And he’d benefit greatly from regular speech, physical, and occupational therapy sessions to help him catch up on the skills that other kids just took for granted. The important thing at this point in his life, they stressed, was small classrooms with regular routines and familiar faces. We wanted to know if we should move back to Baltimore. Sure, they said, we could find a Maryland public school for him, but class sizes would be larger. We might be able to find a private school in Maryland that would take him on, but it would not come cheap. If we had found a great small school where he could get the assistance he needed in Minnesota, then perhaps, they suggested, we should stick with that rather than spend so much time trying to find the equivalent for Charles in Maryland.
In the years since the diagnosis, ferrying him back and forth to all those appointments—and dealing with the bills associated with them—has proven to be one of the great challenges of living here. The Pew Research Center recently reported that for the typical suburban and urban residents, the closest hospital is about a ten-minute drive away. The average rural hospital, on the other hand, is about seventeen minutes away from the average rural resident. Our nearest hospital was twenty minutes, in Thief River, but it doesn’t provide any of the specialist services Charlie needs. So we’ve patched together a plan of care based on what’s available, and what we can reach in a reasonable drive. One specialist is in Grand Forks. Another is in Crookston. One comes to the clinic in Red Lake Falls, but only periodically. Since I’m the one working, Briana bears the brunt of the ferrying duties. It’s exhausting, no doubt. But then we ask ourselves: would it be any easier in Baltimore? There would probably be more options for service. But with both of us needing to work there, whoever was driving the Charlie bus would end up burning through sick time at a prodigious rate. Yes, the clinics would probably be closer. But once you factor in the traffic congestion for late afternoon appointments. the travel time would probably be similar. A ten-mile trip in suburban Maryland can easily take longer than a forty-five-mile trip in northwest Minnesota.
Once we had a diagnosis, the other big anxiety was how the community would respond. The Brumwells were the first people we told. Somehow, it was like they knew exactly what to say. Kristin Weiss, Ryan’s fiancée, said simply “Oh. Well, that’s his super power!” Jason quipped that he took after his father. All of them said, emphatically, that Charlie was Charlie and that this didn’t change anything. It was exactly what we needed to hear.
The other wild card was the school. Would the teachers treat him differently? Was a tiny school like J. A. Hughes Elementary (typical grade size: twenty kids) be equipped to work with a kid like Charlie? Would they try to redirect him to a special ed program? We let the school know about the diagnosis, in kind of a casual “FYI” kind of manner since we didn’t know what the typical protocol was. To our surprise the teachers and administrators immediately sprang into action. They bumped him up to two days a week of full-time preschool, in order to help him develop the social skills he was lacking. They worked with a special educator to put in place some in-classroom interventions, like a cool-down corner where he could take a break when he got overstimulated. They quickly performed their own evaluation, to ensure he met Minnesota state guidelines for requiring educational assistance.
Within a couple of weeks of learning about the diagnosis, the school put together a meeting between us, the principal, the pre-K teacher, a school psychologist, a special ed teacher, and a speech pathologist. They agreed that he should be in a regular classroom, on an individualized educational plan and with para-educator assistance when needed. They were extremely supportive, and to my relief and embarrassment they didn’t seem to think of Charlie as a burden, or a drain on school resources. He was just a kid with a certain set of needs.
By all appearances he is currently thriving at J. A. Hughes Elementary in the town of Red Lake Falls. His kindergarten classroom is small—fifteen kids—and filled with friendly, familiar faces. As luck would have it, his kindergarten teacher, Hannah Seeger, had formerly taught special education. It is difficult to think of a more ideal environment, anywhere in the country, for a child with his specific needs than the place he is at right now. The small scale of the school drastically reduces the risk of things going south during the unstructured moments, like recess or the bus ride, that kids on the autism spectrum often have trouble with in a typical public school setting. Jason Brumwell drives the bus that picks him up for school in the morning, and Ryan drives the bus that takes him home. In larger public schools, in particular—like the ones we left behind in Maryland—kids like Charlie can easily get lost in the crowd. A special need can become a special burden, and overworked, underpaid educators can be forgiven if they don’t have time to comfort a five-year-old having a meltdown because somebody else is using the crayon he wanted. Westchester Elementary, the school the boys would have attended had we stayed in Maryland, has about six hundred students. J. A. Hughes has less than a third as many. It’s the kind of place where at the end of the school day, every single day, Principal Chris Bjerklie stands by the door to greet and high-five every single kid who walks out. If he can’t make it, school secretary Julie Buse does it instead. In the wintertime they make sure every kid is properly attired—boots, snow pants, hat, mittens—before heading outside to face the cold.
Even with the smaller school, Charles still has his challenges, of course. He and Jack joined 4-H in kindergarten, for instance. Briana volunteers with the program, in part to keep an eye on Charlie and in part because she just enjoys helping out. One day a month they board a different bus than usual in the afternoon, which takes them to the community center in town where 4-H is held. I had some reservations about letting five-year-olds navigate an unfamiliar bus situation by themselves, but for the first few months everything went without a hitch. But then, one day in February, everything went wrong.
Jack was out sick from school that day, so the brothers wouldn’t be able to look after each other the way they usually did. We found out later that Mrs. Seeger, Charlie’s kindergarten teacher, was also out. So was Ryan, the usual bus driver. And on top of it all, the 4-H bus did something different that day: rather than take the 4-H kids directly to the community center it made a number of stops beforehand.
Charlie’s usual support structure—brother, teacher, bus driver—wasn’t in place to help him deal with the double whammy of both riding a different bus and dealing with a different route than usual on that different bus. When the bus pulled up to the community center to let the 4-H kids out, Briana realized with horror that Charlie wasn’t there.
She called me. Had he gotten on his usual bus instead? No, that bus had already come and gone and he wasn’t on it.
She talked to the other 4-H kids. Had Charlie been on the bus? Yes, they said. He had gotten off at an earlier stop, the one down the road. She flew out the door and ran down the road.
The temperature that day was right around zero—not too cold by northern Minnesota standards, but cold enough that a kid wandering around outside could be in some serious danger before long
.
Fortunately, Charlie’s snow pants are bright, Day-Glo orange—his favorite color. That was the first thing she saw, his bright orange snow pants walking down the road between two older kids. She ran up to them, breathless.
They had gotten off at the same bus stop Charlie had and he had just started walking with them, the kids said. They took him to their place and their dad, with some alarm, told them to walk him over to the county social services office, which was at the courthouse right down the road. That’s what they had been doing when Bri found them.
Charles didn’t seem particularly fazed by the incident, but with his expressive communication being what it was, we had a hard time figuring out his side of the story. He believed that he had gotten off the bus after the 4-H stop, rather than before. He saw the red brick Catholic church outside the bus and mistook it for the red brick community center. He tried to go into the church but the door was locked. He went along with the other kids because he didn’t know what else to do.
It didn’t end anywhere near as badly as it could have—just google “autistic child missing” for a sense of the worst-case scenarios. But it badly rattled us, and it rattled the folks at the school, too. His teacher called us. The principal called us. Jason and Ryan called us when they heard what happened. An administrator called us. Another administrator who lived in our neighborhood showed up at our door to apologize and broke down in tears.
It’s hard to work out the counterfactual of how this would have played out in Baltimore schools. Would they have had five-year-olds navigating unfamiliar bus routes to begin with? Would Charlie even have been able to enroll in a regular kindergarten class with extracurricular activities? Had he gotten lost in a much larger, much stranger neighborhood, would the consequences have been much worse? Would administrators have even had time to care?
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Page 12
