Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  I was losing my mind. I wanted my life back.

  47

  Parenting an autistic child is like hitting a baseball. The best you can hope for is one in three, and that’s if you are truly stellar. One in four keeps you in the game. Sometimes you’re just going to be trying to draw a walk. You will strike out more often than you would like. And every once in a while, you’re going to get beaned.

  But you can’t ever take your eye off the ball.

  I had begun homeschooling the Kid over the summer. I wasn’t a natural. The Kid did not miss his friends—he had none. The other students had been tolerated, nothing more. But he did miss routine and those who helped him to maintain it. I was a poor substitute for the combined powers of Heather, Ms. Wegant, her assistant, and even Mrs. Alysha Carter, the lady dragon who guarded the gates at the school. For my part, teaching was much more difficult than trading had ever been.

  “The . . . house . . . is . . . red.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  The Kid had such a strong memory that he could often “fake” reading. I had to create new books for him every day, otherwise he would simply repeat, as though by rote, the information from the previous time we had covered that lesson. Regular reading books were only good once, or twice at most. He could effortlessly do the same trick with any book on cars. Getting him to actually sound out words or to remember their meaning beyond the subject of cars was the challenge. He had come a long way in the past few months, but each new word was a hard-won victory.

  I started every reading session with flash cards. Each one had a picture—a prompt—and a word. I made them myself with three-by-five cards and cutouts from magazines. If I thought he had memorized a picture—and so was able to cheat on the word—I would drop it out and replace the picture later in the day.

  Neither of us was a particularly patient human being. I had to bring enough for both of us.

  “Next page.”

  I also made books with pictures and simple sentences. He memorized the books even faster than the cards. The more complex the context, the easier it came to him. I thought this was a good thing. It meant that he was smart. But was he smart enough to fool me? Easily.

  “The . . . cat . . . runs.”

  “Try again. What’s that letter?”

  “J.”

  “Right. What does ‘J’ sound like?”

  “Jason.” He put his teeth together and blew out, showing me how to make a ‘J.’

  “Excellent. So is there a ‘J’ sound in ‘runs’?”

  His eyes drifted away. He did not like to be corrected or to have me demonstrate his mistakes. I didn’t know any better.

  “What letter is this?” I pointed.

  “T . . . U . . . V.” He emphasized the right answer. He knew the alphabet in three- or four-letter groups. He could only find a letter by finding the group.

  “Good. And what’s next?”

  He looked away.

  “Come on. Stay focused,” I said.

  He put the back of his hand to his mouth and began making fart noises.

  “Does Heather let you make those noises? Does Ms. Wegant? I don’t think they do.”

  The noises stopped. The Kid picked up his pencil and took a bite off the end. He did not just nibble on his pencil. He bit off a chunk of it and crunched it into a million soggy splinters.

  “You may not do that! Not allowed.”

  His mouth opened and a soup of drool and gnashed pencil ran down his chin and onto his shirt.

  I grabbed a paper napkin and wiped crud out of his mouth.

  “What is your problem?” I was yelling, which meant that I had already lost control of the situation. The frontal lobe was trying to maintain and regain, while the darker, more primitive parts of my brain were recommending more violent courses of action. “Stop this! Pay attention and do your work.”

  He flopped facedown on the table, almost, but not quite, banging his forehead into it.

  “Read this, damn it! What did the cat do?” I was screeching. It was wrong and I knew it.

  The Kid reared up and screeched right back. “The cat jumps,” he blurted out. He picked up the book I had lovingly made and turned the page.

  “Awesome. Well done.” I was exhausted.

  “Ooooooh. The big dog is fat.” He laughed. It sounded like a cat with a hair ball.

  He had made a joke. The caption read THE BIG DOG IS FAST. But the picture I had chosen showed a running Saint Bernard, shot from an angle that made him look like he was sporting a good-sized beer belly. Or brandy belly.

  “Very good, son.” He knew the word fast. The great thing was that he understood the difference well enough to make a joke out of it—no matter how lame.

  The front door opened and Willie came in bearing two bags of groceries. We’d been four days at the house and had already drifted into a regular schedule. Willie made a run into town every morning before the heat became unbearable. The Kid and I worked together. Hal stood watch and played with the apps on his cell phone.

  “How’s everybody?” Willie said. “I found a restaurant if you want to venture out some night. The El Fidel. The lady at the gas station says it’s as good as anything in Santa Fe.” He rattled on as he put away the supplies.

  The Kid shut down in Willie’s presence. He put the book down and his eyes went blank. It was as though a switch was thrown and he went into stasis. I wasn’t going to get him to concentrate until Willie put the food away and left us in peace.

  “You need a break?”

  The Kid didn’t answer, but his eyes flicked in my direction.

  “Take five minutes. Yes,” I answered before he even got the question out. “You can watch Goofy. One cartoon. Just one. Then we go back to work.”

  He scowled. I knew he was going to try for two and that I was going to let him. He knew it, too. He didn’t see the point in my making an annoying and useless insistence upon only one and it ticked him off. He was right, but I wasn’t going to admit it to him.

  I needed a break.

  “I’m going to get some air.”

  He looked up with a questioning look.

  “Some outside air,” I said.

  He opened the iPad and was gone.

  Dust devils were racing down the valley and there was a brown haze over the eastern horizon. It was going to be a scorcher. Mid-nineties. Every day had been a scorcher. It had not rained so much as a drop the whole week we had been there. The waitress at Daylight Donuts, where we’d had breakfast our first day, told us that August was their “rainiest” month.

  “It gets downright dry come the fall.”

  I saw the flash of reflected sunlight off Hal’s mirrored sunglasses across the yard. He had set up a blind on the hill where he could sit and watch the road below. He could see the whole valley from there. It should have been comforting to have him on watch, but instead it was a reminder of why we were there.

  I realized that he was talking on his cell phone. Reception was better up there than around the house.

  The two bodyguards had set up motion sensors along the road—there was little enough traffic—but the coyotes and a herd of javelinas kept setting them off. The pigs weren’t going to leave—they saw us as interlopers on their territory—so Hal shut the system down and we relied on more primitive surveillance.

  There’s no such thing as quiet in New York City. Even in the Ansonia, with its thick walls and renovated double-paned-glass windows, there was always a background hum, punctuated with occasional sirens, car horns, or the clash of metal upon metal when some fool ran the light at Seventy-second Street. The valley was quiet. Even the wind was quiet.

  “That town was once—” a man spoke behind me.

  “Whoa!” I yelled. I turned around. It was Willie. “Shit fire, you scared the piss out of me.” My heart was threatenin
g to beat its way out through my eyeballs. “Why the hell are you creeping up on me?”

  “Hmpf. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry.” I pulled myself together and tried on a laugh just to see if I could do it. “I must have been miles away. I did not hear you coming.” The laugh hadn’t gone over with the level of cool required, so in desperation I just kept talking. “You were saying something about the town? What about it?”

  “Las Vegas—this one, not the other one—was once one of the most lawless, wide-open places in the West. Doc Holliday lived here with his lady. Wyatt Earp, too, for a while. He was the town dentist. Holliday, that is, not Earp.”

  “Oh? I knew a man once who had a bit of a fixation on those folks.” Virgil’s father had named all four of his children after the Earp brothers.

  “This old guy bagging groceries down at the Lowe’s told me all this. Jesse James. Billy the Kid. Somebody called Dirty Dave.” He laughed. “They were all through here at one time or another.”

  “Jesse James?” I was no expert on the Old Wild West, but I thought the James Gang did their business more in the Midwest.

  “That’s what he said.”

  I looked back to the house. “How’s Jason the Kid?”

  “He went up to his room.”

  “I better get him back to work.” My heart wasn’t in it.

  “He doesn’t like me.” Willie stated it as a fact. There was no emotion in his voice. He might just as well have been going on about Doc Holliday.

  “He trusts very few people, which is a very logical reaction to his experience. Most people have no idea what his world is like. They approach him with a set of expectations that only confuses him.” In other words, cut the guy some slack. A lesson that I had to relearn every day. I had just failed another of our lives’ little tests.

  “Time to spell Hal,” he said. He sauntered across the road and climbed the hill.

  I walked back to the house.

  48

  The Kid stayed up in his room and I let him. A break from schoolwork—and from each other—seemed a good idea. I didn’t check on him until lunchtime. Much later on, we deduced that he had most likely been gone for close to an hour by the time I knocked on his door.

  “Hey, Kid. Time for lunch. We’ll go for a ride after. Come on down.”

  I waited the prescribed ten seconds and knocked again.

  “Hey, son. I’m coming in.”

  The room was empty. I checked his closet. The bathroom. The room was hot, despite the air-conditioning—hotter than the rest of the house. The window was open. The “secret passage.”

  I looked out onto the balcony. There was no sign of him. I checked my room. The bathroom. There was nowhere to hide. He was gone.

  I had thrown together sandwiches for lunch and Hal was halfway across the yard, delivering one of them to Willie, still on duty up the hill. I called to him.

  “Hey! Hal. Help me. The Kid’s not here.”

  That brought him running. Willie couldn’t hear me, but he saw that something important was happening. He jogged down the hill to the house.

  Hal took charge. “Let’s not panic, okay? We’ve been down this road before. First, we search the house. Look in every cabinet, every closet. Check for false walls. We start down here. Keep up the patter. Let him hear us talking to each other. And stay in sight of each other. That way he won’t slip by us like he did last time.”

  We worked the downstairs for five minutes. Five wasted minutes, in my opinion. I had been on the main floor all morning. If the Kid had come back downstairs, I was sure I would have seen him.

  Upstairs took no longer and produced no clues. I stopped looking and took an inventory of the Kid’s meager possessions. I could find nothing missing. His books and clothes were all there. His car box held sixty or seventy cars—a new Matchbox car being the only birthday present guaranteed to elicit a positive response—and I would have challenged anyone other than the Kid to know if there were any missing.

  I went back out onto the balcony. Nothing moved anywhere on the far side of the valley. Beyond the corral the hill rose up steeply.

  Willie came out and joined me.

  “Anything?” he said.

  “No.”

  He examined the railing. “Here’s where he went over.”

  I looked and saw nothing unusual.

  “He shinnied down the leader. You can see the scrape marks.” Dust clung to every exterior surface—and many internal ones, as well. Once the marks were pointed out to me, they were obvious.

  The rain gutters and leaders on the house were made of thin aluminum and were fifty or sixty years old. I would not have trusted them to hold up a squirrel, much less my son.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “He really did this, didn’t he? What the hell was he thinking?”

  He wasn’t thinking. He was running. His father had yelled at him over some stupid reading lesson.

  “We need to call the police,” I said.

  “Hey, let’s not jump ahead. There’s a lot at stake. I don’t think the marshals would want you to have that kind of attention right now.”

  “Screw that. My son is out there.” I swept my arm to show the desolation around us. It looked like the far side of the moon to me.

  “Wait. Let’s see if we can find him first. That’s all I’m saying,” Willie said.

  I didn’t so much agree to the delay as I just went along with a calm individual who was willing to make decisions. I was a wreck. I felt like I understood heart attacks for the first time in my life. We grabbed Hal on the way and the three of us went outside to explore.

  The bottom of the aluminum leader was pulled away from the wall. Hal pointed out where the Kid landed. It looked like nothing but scattered dust.

  “Someone needs to stay here in case he comes back,” Hal said.

  “I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “I’ll finish going nuts.”

  “Willie?”

  He nodded. “Stay in touch. Take water.”

  A few minutes later, Hal and I started up the back slope. Somehow I had expected him to be bent over looking for signs, like some Indian tracker from an old Western movie. He didn’t. He stayed upright, as tall as he could. His eyes were constantly sweeping across the terrain. I tried to emulate him. It was hard work. My feet had to find their own way over rough ground. We were both wearing hiking shoes. Mine were suede and ankle-high. Hal’s were thick leather and laced halfway up his shins.

  “Watch for snakes,” he said.

  “Great.”

  “It’s too hot for them to be out and about. Just don’t kick over any rocks without looking first.”

  There were thousands of places all around us where a small seven-year-old child could hide. It was hopeless. The trees were short and sparse, not much more than shrubs, but as we moved higher, the trees became taller and our horizon shrank.

  “Stop and drink,” Hal said.

  “We’ve got to keep going.” We had only been searching for half an hour.

  “Drink. Otherwise you’re going to keel over from heatstroke and I’ll have two emergencies to deal with instead of one.”

  I had a half liter of water with me. The first sip seemed to evaporate in my mouth. I was surprised a moment later to realize that I had polished off half the bottle in one long gulp. And I was still thirsty. Was the Kid carrying water?

  Hal took off his glasses and wiped his face. Without the mirrors hiding his eyes, he looked much more human. And he looked worried.

  “We’re kidding ourselves,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He could be hiding five feet away and we’d never see him,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what do we do? I can’t go back and just hope he gets hungry and comes home.”

  He took out his cell phone an
d looked at it. “Nothing. No bars.”

  “Who do you want to call?”

  “Willie. It’s time to bring in help. I want him to start making calls.”

  “Let’s head back. Call him on the way,” I said.

  49

  What the hell, Willie? What do you mean you didn’t call?”

  It took us another half hour to get back to the house. A half hour of nightmarish imaginings of what was happening to the Kid. A full hour wasted. Hal had finally gotten a signal and had told Willie to bring in the local police.

  “I spoke to the marshals. They said to wait ’til they got here. They’ll be able to control the situation.”

  “This isn’t about turf, you idiot! I’m calling the sheriff’s department.”

  “No, no. Reyes has a chopper bringing him in. Just wait another half hour and they’ll be able to search the whole county, if need be.”

  Hal looked as astonished as I was at Willie’s failure to act. “We’re a hundred miles from Albuquerque. By the time they get in the air and get here, it’s going to be another hour or more.”

  “But they’ll be able to fly over and find him in no time. What’s the sheriff going to do? Besides, if you bring in the locals yourself, you risk having your cover blown.”

  Blowing my cover was a different problem. It wasn’t less important, it was less immediate. One thing at a time. First thing was to get the Kid as much help as I possibly could.

  I told Siri to dial the county sheriff. Five minutes later, we could hear a siren coming up the road.

  50

  The deputy contacted the sheriff, who, upon hearing that it was an autistic child who was missing, called the state police. They turned it over to the state SAR—search and rescue—coordinator, who said he would be on-site in two hours. I fumed.