by Paul Cody
The light was muted, and I just felt really safe and comfortable there, the way I felt in Meg’s office.
And stuff with Levon and school, with Mom and Dad, was cool. I was afraid they were gonna hover over me after the hospital, check my emotional blood pressure and pulse twice a day, but they really treated me—not as if nothing had happened—but as if something had happened but that we had dealt with it, and we were all gonna be more mindful and alert and vigilant, I guess you’d call it.
It made me think quite a bit of two years ago, and being in that shower, and what if I had talked to someone instead of drinking vodka and grabbing an X-Acto knife. I had felt at the time that I had nobody to talk to, and in a weird way, that I had no voice. No way of articulating what was inside me to anyone in the outside world. To anyone outside my own trapped thoughts and my own trapped head.
By then it was spring in Ithaca, and as everyone had always been saying, spring in Ithaca was a glory. Just our yard alone. It went crazy with flowers and trees and bushes and buds, and on warm days, my parents, me and Levon, me and Anna, we’d sit outside, and sip tea, or just sit, and the colors, the layers of lawn and rock terraces—lavender and yellow, and red and orange and blue, and I swear, there was almost nothing that was simply green. I mean, the grass was green, and the big trees had these pale green buds, but everything was color and light, and all the colors changed in the sunlight, depending on the time of day.
It was like that horticulture professor had really been an artist, not a scientist, and his eye was perfect and everything was grace and harmony.
We were almost finished with senior year, and our project was nearly done, and it was all hard to believe. That I had friends. That I loved Levon so much, and I was pretty sure he loved me back just as much. And I had Anna and Avery. I had Noah, and even Sierra. And my mom and dad were becoming almost normal regular people. They went out together, and they laughed and talked with each other, and for parents, that was almost a miracle.
I mean, they were still parents. They still drove me a little crazy, but they were really okay. They were doing the best they could.
And I thought a lot about Meg Goldman, and what an amazing teacher, what an amazing woman she was. She was tough and tender, and she saw everything. She pushed us when we needed to be pushed, and hugged us when we needed to be hugged. And I kept thinking, How on earth did she know to pair me off with Levon for the project?
I mean, she didn’t even know me. And knowing Levon now, it could have gone way wrong. Looking back, I was pretty shaky at the beginning of the year, and he was Levon the withdrawn. How did she know that writing about our history and our daily lives would have such an effect on us?
Did she know we’d fall in love? She couldn’t have. We might just as easily have ended up fighting like cats in a bag. Or just curling up and withdrawing to our separate corners.
But she knew. And my Lord, look what’s happened.
Now I guess it’s all coming to a close. Senior year at the Clock School. And that kind of scares me and excites me, and does all kinds of things to me.
Plus, I really don’t want to get too happy and confident and up. That’s a little dangerous for me, because I’ll always crash afterward. I’ve got to be really careful and mindful and aware and vigilant. I’ve got to watch out all the time for signs of the black dog. Because he’s always there, somewhere, waiting.
He’s very, very patient. I’ve got to stay in my skin. I’ve got to be still, but still move forward, and that’s way harder than you’d think.
But I can talk now. I have friends and parents. More than anything, I have a voice.
And I didn’t have that before.
Thirty-nine
Susan
He showed me the email he wrote to Trevor back in January, I guess it was. He wrote the email in January.
That evolution in students, their changing so much during the semesters, happens every school year. The winter is longer and tougher than you ever think it will be, despite the snowdrops and crocuses, and you somehow think that winter has killed all the plants and flowers and trees. But spring does come. You see the thickening buds, you see green sprouts, and by mid- to late April, there we are again, and by May you wonder how you ever doubted it in the first place.
I was hurt and a little shocked by Levon’s first email to Trevor, though there was nothing he said that was untrue. Just that I was unaware, and surprised and even shocked by how unaware I was. And I was even more shocked by Trevor’s response, because I had been, in fact, completely in the dark about his background, his poverty, his extreme shyness and sense of social displacement. I was not aware that the life of tenant farmers was still going on in remote parts of rural England as late as the 1980s, and that Trevor had spent his first six or seven years as the child of sharecroppers, with no indoor plumbing, and extreme working conditions, and what a profound effect that would have on his personality.
I was wrong to have judged him based on such scanty evidence. Terribly wrong and unfair. I was not wrong to be attracted to him, for that I surely was, and to recognize how unique and brilliant he was, but I have been thinking long and deeply and guiltily about this, and I do not like what I see. Was part of the attraction the presumption that he had Asperger’s, and I wanted to see if my sexual powers could overcome that, even for one night? Partly true. But I also wanted to give him something of myself, and I wanted to express my deep fondness for him and empathy for his loneliness.
And why the separateness? That, I don’t know. The sex was unprotected. I knew that from the start, and I knew going to dinner that night I was going to have sex with Trevor, and that there could be consequences. But part of it was pride. I could raise a child alone.
But there was definitely the Asperger’s question with both of them. I assumed there must be an Asperger’s link genetically, and when I, when research began to show that it was weaker than I had assumed, there was the behavior or modeling factor. If Levon met or knew his father, if he visited with him, and saw the odd behavior, the one-sided verbosity, the lack of social skills, the lack of give-and-take, he would in a sense have that behavior reified. It would somehow make that behavior more acceptable.
What I failed to see, and feel now, was that like his dad, Levon was shy and bookish, needed some time and encouragement to engage socially, and he would have been fine. But I only ever saw, or feared I saw, Asperger’s, and I was determined they would not label my child as such.
And without realizing it, I kind of turned Levon into a young man who resembles in many ways someone with Asperger’s. The shyness, the obsessiveness, the lack of social skills—and that might have been why I was terribly moved by Samantha, that lovely young woman who was recently here.
Not just that she was so lovely, but her poise, her style, her courage and frankness, and the absolutely matter-of-fact way with which she talked about her family and her recent history. No self-pity.
I don’t think it will be that uncomplicated for Levon and me. Not that it’s uncomplicated for Samantha and her parents, but for us, I think maybe the damage will never be undone.
I remember years ago, I was at a weeklong conference at the FBI Academy at Quantico, in Virginia, on the subject of serial killers and violent offenders. I sat on a panel with one of the most famous forensic psychiatrists in the world, a man who had been the principal prosecution witness at the trials of John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Reagan; Arthur Shawcross, who killed children and hookers; and Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed, dismembered, and partially ate seventeen young men in Milwaukee.
There were two or three hundred hardened police detectives in the room, and this man was riveting, especially on the subject of Dahmer. He had spent two or three straight days, six or seven hours a day, interviewing Dahmer in great detail about his crimes.
During Q&A, a detective asked the psychiatrist what he did after spending a long day interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer.
In a flat voice, with no affect, the
psychiatrist said, I’d take a long, hot shower, eat dinner, then go to my hotel room, double-lock the door, and lie in bed and read gun magazines.
Gun magazines? I piped up.
The psychiatrist looked at me and nodded.
I wonder what a psychiatrist would make of that? I joked, but the psychiatrist didn’t even smile.
I’ll never forget that. Because why would he smile? He had spent twenty-five years dealing with the darkest, ugliest things human beings are capable of, and he was an expert marksman. Why wouldn’t he read gun magazines?
My point, I guess, is that we go so far into our own little worlds that we lose our way. All of us.
At one time, in graduate school, and for several years afterward, we thought we had found the Psychopath Gene. In simple terms, we thought that we had found monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme that degrades amine neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, and we thought that this had much to do with aggression, with the Warrior Gene, and we were finding it in high levels in certain races. Aha. What social implications. Follow this research and we’ll have less violence in the world.
But as it played out, and as our research became more sophisticated, we found, using PET scans, that people suffering major clinical depression had MAO-A levels 34 percent higher than average. More like the results you’d expect for people ready to go out to war.
What we did find out wasn’t what we had expected, but it did have a profound impact on patients with depression.
All of which brings us around to the fact that we get it wrong.
I got it wrong.
I caused real damage to my son. If I could do it over I would.
But I love him deeply, and he knows that. He has always known that. And I believe he loves me.
He has a different set of data to work with now. Already—the young lady is a case in point—we are seeing different results.
We will move on. There is hope.
Forty
Meg
I find it hard to believe how each year, despite the tears, the panics, the crises, the various impossible and insurmountable obstacles, we arrive at late May again and again and again. The ice and snow are gone. The maple and oak, the beech and ash, the forsythia, the lilac, the tulip and rose, the daisy and jonquil—the thousands of flowers and trees and weeds and grasses—have survived the ice and cold, even twenty-two below, for week after week, even when we were taking the cold personally, when the polar vortex broke records in twenty-seven states, when snowfall levels reached an unheard-of record of ninety-six inches, or one hundred six inches in a half dozen cities.
Spring somehow arrives. And when the drowsy-sounding, busy buzz of bees carrying pollen from flower to flower makes me want to nap on weekend afternoons, it’s here. We had four straight days in mid-May when the temperatures hit the mid- to upper eighties, as the colleges began to empty out, and our kids were getting restless, especially our seniors, who were putting the final touches on their various projects.
Then the temps took several steps down the ladders, and by midweek, we had a day when the high was fifty-six, and freeze warnings for overnight, so the big rule, as it always is, is that everything changes all the time, everywhere, all the time.
The whole thing about Sam’s brief plunge, the visit to the ER, seems almost like a blip, but a scary reminder too. Sam was back in school by the following Monday, and she said she didn’t know what it was, maybe it was some kind of placebo effect, but she had started to feel pretty decent already. Maybe it was about getting more sleep, maybe it was that she’d talked, and she’d asked for help, and every single person listened and every single person helped her. And spending only one night. God, that was so wonderful for her to walk out of the hospital after one brief night.
And then there were tears in her eyes, and she hugged me, right there in my office, and she said, Thanks, Meg. I love you.
To which I could only say, Oh, honey. What did I do?
You taught me to speak.
I couldn’t, didn’t, say how moved I was.
They hadn’t quite finished, but I’d read about 90 percent of Sam and Levon’s project, and I have to say, they’d far exceeded my expectations. In pretty much every way. They had written well over a hundred pages, and at least another hundred or two hundred pages had been written about them, and I don’t need to speak to the content. It speaks very clearly and eloquently for itself.
The thing that surprised me, though, was Sam. I’d had some rough idea of what I might possibly get from Levon, if everything went as well as it could go. If each part and piece clicked exactly into just the right place. I’d known Levon a long time, and even knowing him I had as much doubt as hope. But he delivered, and he delivered big.
Sam was the unknown. I had never met her, knew her only on paper, and though there was a great deal about her on paper, I’d never seen her or talked to her. And I must admit I had this small nagging thing about very rich kids, and it’s not entirely fair. That some of them lack grit, that there’s a tiny measure of entitlement. So I had some sliver of doubt about Sam.
But when I met her, and then as the days and weeks went by, and I watched as she dealt with Levon, and all the swings and gyrations, I not only began to admire her, she kind of became my hero. She never lost her poise, her courage, her grace. She was so consistently strong and on-target that I’d often fail to see just how extraordinary she was.
It’s wishful thinking, of course, and it’s none of my business, but I hope they become an item. But that’s asking life to become a little too much like a bad movie.
So one more week, and we pretty much wrap things up with the seniors. Then two weeks, and we free the younger ones for the summer too.
Then Ithaca becomes Ithaca for the summer. Shorts and sandals and sailing. Water moving in the gorges, long hikes, dinner and wine on the back decks at the houses of friends. Fireflies, and insects making their insect noises in the dark as we sit and talk and laugh around candlelight. All will seem well with the world. This small part of it, at least.
Forty-one
Levon
A few weeks after spring got really under way, Sam said that her parents were going to Boston for the weekend to see her grandparents. They hadn’t been there in almost a year, and her dad in particular was not crazy about the idea, and her mom was not much more enthusiastic. But they had to do their duty, and they were letting Sam stay home alone, which was some kind of record in human history, or at least in her family history. A milestone anyway. And she thought that maybe I wanted to come over and hang out, that we could do whatever. Ask some friends over, Avery, Sierra, Noah, Anna, whoever.
Or not.
Whatever, she said.
Did that sound like a teenager? she asked.
I said it did, but that that was fine because she was, in fact, a teenager.
I said I’d check to see if I could get the car from Susan, and Sam said she could just pick me up, but I said it would be fine with Susan. That she thought Sam hung the moon. Susan had a kind of Homeric epithet for Sam; instead of “gray-eyed Athena,” it was “that lovely girl.”
Stop, Sam said.
So I did, and said I’d see her around seven.
When I asked Susan she didn’t so much as blink when she asked if I’d be staying the night. I said I didn’t know, and she said if I had even one beer she wanted me to spend the night.
I suddenly felt the urge, and I hugged her, and kissed her on the forehead.
When Sam had told me her house had been owned by a horticulture professor, it was winter, but by then, in late May, it was just a thing to behold. Not that there was this riot of flowers like a funeral parlor, but bushes and trees, flowers, rock walls, and paths, and curves and light, all done in these ways you didn’t even notice for a while. And terraces, and stuff that would take days and weeks to even notice, and maybe years. The colors, and the way one shape or color was set near another, and was shaded and shaped near another.
>
I swear, I’m no garden type, but I could have spent hours out there.
Instead we just sat outside until it was getting dark. Sam’s hair was in two loose braids, and she had a dark top with thin straps, and I could see the black straps of her bra. She wore tan shorts and sandals. I wore my usual Docs and short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the top and khakis. We sat at the dining room table and had this salad of avocado and tortellini and tomato and pesto, and I’d never tasted half the things that were in it. Plus the wine. It was delicious.
Did you make this? I asked, and she nodded.
Wow! I said.
It’s easy.
Right, I said. They always say that.
And the wine’s good, I told her. I bet you know the vintage and country and region and everything. Italy, France.
Try New York, homeboy, Sam said.
Really?
Snob, she said.
Okay. You got me. I wouldn’t know it from MD 20/20, but it’s good.
Tell me, she said.
Yes?
Do you get out much in the summer?
Why do you ask?
I was wondering if that’s your summer wardrobe.
I hadn’t given it much thought.
We could take you shopping, she said.
That’s possible.
Shorts. Sandals. Take you swimming, if you swim.
I’m quite the swimmer, I said.
Oh.
Lessons at the Y.
Ah.
And like learning to ride a bicycle, I began.
You never forget.
Clever.
Shrewd, she said. I was wondering.
Yes?
Since I’ve seen your boudoir, if you might like to see mine.
Why, how prescient.
I thought so.
I’d be honored, and most curious, I said.
And while it would lack the drama, the unusual timing of my Christmas visit, it would not lack for interest.
