In a millisecond, the rock arcs through the air again. Lifting off like a small bird. Soundlessly. Hopefully. The rock bounces on the top of the lake one more time.
And skips through the air.
Into the pink sunlight.
Author’s Note
I was only three when my oldest sister, Catherine, boarded a plane to Germany as an exchange student, the year before she went off to college. So even in my earliest memories, she was always a grownup, a writer who liked to travel, a big sister who brought me jewelry, weavings and seashells from such faraway lands as Lebanon, Israel, and Honduras. But because we were so far apart in age, I knew almost nothing about my amazing big sister’s childhood. Not until we were both grownups, and I had also become a writer, did I learn about what she had endured as a little girl.
At a literary event, I was in the audience as she read a short memoir. I had heard her read in public before, usually about her exotic travels, but this piece was different. This piece was about how, when she was ten years old, sudden fears took over her life. And then, for reasons she never understood, she withdrew into her own world and created rituals to protect everyone she loved from unknown harm. For more than two years, she did everything in threes, including reading. Just like Cooper, she read every word three times, every line three times and every page three times to keep her family from bursting into flames.
When Catherine read about our father’s concern that, because of her strange behavior, she might hurt her new baby sister, I started to cry. I realized I was that new baby sister. And, as a mother, I was saddened that no one understood this lonely, frightened little girl. Not even our parents. Catherine’s behavior scared them, but her account of her fears and her struggle broke my heart. It was then I decided to write a story that would honor both her inner turmoil and her bravery.
My sister suffered from what the medical world calls Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Some children are able to work through the condition. Some are helped by medications and therapy. For others, we hold out hope and ask that the world be patient, kind and accepting.
Catherine overcame the odds on her own. She graduated from high school and college with honors, learned several foreign languages, traveled the world alone and became a nationally recognized, award-winning travel journalist and photographer, as well as a beloved teacher, sister, wife, aunt, my mentor and friend.
After Catherine read The Notations of Cooper Cameron she sent me this note: “The book made me feel it again—the exhausting constancy of the isolation, that imperative of having to do more counting, more touching, more anything. You created a pitch-perfect portrait of how that old fear felt. I felt like Cooper—looking up from the edge of the water at the cabin, but finally being understood. Comforted. Rescued. How amazing to have healing drop out of the sky—and from my baby sister.”
More than anything, The Notations of Cooper Cameron, like Catherine’s, is a story of hope.
About the Author
Jane O’Reilly is the author of the acclaimed middle grade novel, The Secret of Goldenrod, and the recipient of a McKnight Fellowship in Screenwriting. She also holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University. The youngest of five children, she spent her early summers traveling the country on family vacations and her teenage summers with her family in the North Woods of Minnesota at the cabin her grandfather built on Round Lake. Her children and grandchildren live out of state, but she and her husband live in their hometown of Minneapolis.
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