Carry the Ocean

by Heidi Cullinan

  Emmet stared at the umbrella crank. “That is not specific. The word this is a pronoun, but you gave me no antecedent. What are you not good at?”

  He was so intense. I wasn’t sure what to do, or say. “I’m not good at much. I have a hard time talking to people.”

  Emmet nodded. “Me too. I want to talk to people, but they don’t understand me. They get mad a lot. Or they get mean, which is worse. This is because of the autism, why I can’t understand. I can’t read faces, and people say confusing things. You said, I’m not good at this, but you didn’t tell me what this is, so I can’t understand you. I try to be clear and exact when I talk, but sometimes that’s bad. Talking with people is tricky for me. Why is it difficult for you?”

  It took me a second to digest the fact that he’d spoken of his disability as casually as he might a paper cut. Plus he’d given me so much information about himself, helpful information. Intense and direct. It was, honestly, refreshing.

  I wondered if I could dare to be the same.

  “If I say the wrong thing, I’m sorry,” Emmet said. “If you tell me what was bad, I won’t say it anymore to you.”

  I made myself look at his face while I answered. “It’s okay. I’m trying to find my answer is all. That’s one of the reasons it’s hard for me to talk to people. I worry about saying the wrong thing, and sometimes it means I can’t say anything. It takes me a long time to give an answer to a question.”

  Emmet brightened. “This is why we can be good friends. If you say the wrong thing to me, I’ll tell you. Then you can stop, and it will all be fine.” He rocked in his chair, clearly a subconscious gesture. “Thank you for telling me how sometimes it takes time for you to answer. I will try to wait. You’ll have to tell me if I’m not being patient enough.”

  He made it sound so easy. “I wouldn’t want to upset you, though, even by accident.”

  “Accidents happen. Even if we all stick to a schedule, the world is unpredictable. Sometimes I’m late to an appointment because of traffic. Sometimes the power goes out because of a storm or the weather closes the roads. It upsets me, but I can’t let it ruin my life. If you said the wrong thing and upset me, I would tell you, and then you would stop, and it wouldn’t matter that you had said something wrong. We’re friends. Friends forgive each other.” He started rocking, then stopped. “Does it bother you when I rock? It bothers people sometimes, but it calms me down.”

  “I don’t mind.” I watched him begin to rock slightly in his seat. “Are you nervous, though?”

  “Yes, and I don’t know why, which makes me more nervous. But I don’t want to end our date. So I’m calming myself down.”

  The more I sat with Emmet, the more fascinated I was. Basically he kept saying out loud what I was feeling, except where I scolded myself and felt awkward, he…rocked. Or reached for some kind of pragmatism I could barely dream of.

  I didn’t want this date to end either. Though that gave me pause, that he called it a date.

  Obviously he didn’t mean date.

  Except, maybe he did. The thought made me feel jumbled and heavy, and I had to push it away.

  His mother appeared then with a tray bearing two plates and two glasses of water. Emmet took his own plate and glass from the tray, but I let his mother serve me, and I told her thank you after.

  “You’re welcome.” She smiled at me and held out a hand. “Hi. I’m Marietta Washington. It’s good to meet you.”

  I accepted her hand. “J-Jeremey. Good to meet you too.”

  Her face was as animated and bright as Emmet’s was cool. “If you need anything, let me know.”

  “Mom, go away. I want to be with Jeremey by myself.”

  I startled at his rudeness, but Marietta took it in stride. She turned to Emmet and without a word extended two closed fingers in front of him.

  He grimaced and touched three fingers to her two.

  “I’ll be inside if either of you need me,” she said, and went into the house.

  Emmet rocked in his seat, staring at the umbrella crank. “Do you want to eat, or do you want to keep talking?”

  I was confused. “We can’t do both?”

  Emmet shook his head. “No. Separate is better. I want to keep talking, but it’s rude to keep a guest from their food. I can wait if you’re hungry.”

  “Talking is okay,” I told him. I wasn’t actually hungry at all.

  Emmet remained agitated. “I wish she would have texted. The interruption was unexpected. I wanted to ask you more about being nervous, and about depression.”

  I blinked. “You did? I mean, you do?”

  “Yes. I want to know about you. So I don’t make mistakes.”

  Well. That was…pragmatic. I leaned back in my chair, thinking. “Can I ask about your autism?”

  He smiled. Not big, not long, but it was there. The gesture arrested me.

  “Yes. You may always ask me about my autism. Then you’ll know. Knowledge is important.” His rocking was gentle now. It made me think he was happy-rocking. “But I’ve told you some things about autism already. It’s your turn to tell me about depression. I refreshed my research about it this morning. It’s fascinating, but there seem to be few determinable causes, which makes treatment difficult. Which medicine do you take?”

  “I don’t take any medication. They’ve talked about it, but…I’m not taking anything now.”

  “There are many kinds, but some of the side effects are bad. It’s inefficient that they have to use trial and error to find the right one, and then there is relapse. You should consider exercise and Omega 3 fatty acids. My mom is a doctor. You can always ask her questions about depression if you want. And health food. It’s all she wants to eat. Except my aunt Althea is worse. She’s vegan. Mom and Althea have fights about paleo and vegan diets. Sometimes my dad and I let them fight and we go to Subway and get meatball subs and watch The Blues Brothers together.”

  I smiled, then ducked my head to hide it.

  He continued to rock gently, but sometimes now he flapped his hands too. “How does depression feel? The article talked about low mood and self-esteem, but they weren’t specific. Does it mean you’re sad all the time? Also, it said clinical anxiety and depression are often present together. Do you have anxiety too?”

  “I—don’t know.” Clinical anxiety? What the hell was that? I wanted to say no, I didn’t have it, whatever the hell it was. It wasn’t as if I needed anything else wrong with me, but it was hard to argue I wasn’t anxious when I hid in the school bathroom and got nervous about going to the store.

  Except clinical anxiety was probably the flip side of major depressive disorder. Why hadn’t the doctor asked about that? Was it because I didn’t tell them about the panic attacks? If I told them, would they say I had clinical anxiety too? Would that mean I was too messed up and they’d put me in an institution?

  Tiny claws of terror sank into my brain, and I thought, Yeah, you totally have clinical anxiety. You have both. That has to be bad.

  I picked at the bread, mostly for something to do with my hands. “I didn’t always have depression. But I was always quiet. It got bad in high school.”

  I tried to think of how to answer Emmet’s question, about how it felt. I put the anxiety question away in a box inside my head and sealed it shut with mental duct tape. “Depression feels like there’s a bowl over you. A glass bowl you can see out of, but it makes the world further away. It feels lonely and heavy. But sometimes the bowl gets cloudy.”

  I could see the bowl in my head, myself in the glass. “Even though I’m inside the bowl, everything from the outside still gets in, too loud. So I’m under glass, full of clouds, with a loudspeaker piping in all the sounds, and the smells and lights get in too. Sometimes they make me panic, but sometimes there’s all the sound and it makes me feel flat and dull. Or nothing at all. It makes it difficult f
or me to be with people, but if I’m not with people, I feel more lonely.”

  Emmet leaned toward me, earnest. “You need people, Jeremey. Humans are social animals. We get sick without contact.”

  Didn’t I know it. I loved this contact right now. It was weird—I kept forgetting he had autism, though it was obvious every time I looked at him or he spoke. Mostly, though, he felt like someone who wasn’t annoyed with me or awkward around me. Someone who made me feel like a real person.

  A friend.

  “I’m glad we became friends.” His gaze flicked to my chest.

  I smiled at him. “I’m glad we’re friends too.”

  Emmet rocked gently. “I want to eat my banana bread now. Would it be okay if we stopped talking long enough to eat?”

  “Sure.” I kept smiling. It was so easy—he was easy. This felt good.

  “We can keep talking after we finish. I enjoy talking with you.”

  The nerves which had troubled me all day began, by inches, to fade away. “I enjoy talking with you too.”

  Emmet and I didn’t meet every day, but we always texted. At first it was random, but by the third day he asked if we could schedule time to chat with each other at 9 p.m., and he got me to do it on Google Talk instead of phones.

  I wish you had an iMac or an iPhone, he texted me one night. The iMessage interface is much better, and if you were on Apple products too, we could switch between phone and computer more easily.

  I don’t even have a smartphone, I replied.

  We have an old iPhone you could use, if it worked with your plan.

  I lied and told him I’d look into it. I didn’t want to tell him my mom and dad would never go for it.

  Things had been tense with my parents since the picnic for a lot of reasons, but it didn’t take long for Emmet to be the focus of our recurrent arguments. They’d seen me talking to him at the block party and asked about him when we got home, but I mostly blew them off. I could tell Emmet would rather be at his place, so we hung out there, and honestly I felt better at the Washington house too. When I got home from visiting him a third day in a row, I was glad I hadn’t had him over to my place and vowed it would be a cold day in hell before I did.

  “Where were you?” my mom asked me as I came in the door. “I searched the whole backyard, but you weren’t anywhere. Were you walking on the tracks again?”

  I thought about lying, but it felt wrong to lie about Emmet. “I was visiting a friend.”

  “Bart?” My mom’s whole demeanor changed. She smiled, and her shoulders went back, like the world was coming into the right orbit. “I hadn’t realized you two were hanging out again. How’s he doing?”

  Now I wished I’d gone with my original impulse to deceive her. “It’s not Bart. A new friend.” I could see the question forming on her face, the judgment and censure about Emmet, and I decided to trap her. “He’s a sophomore at ISU. Double major in computers and advanced physics.” Or maybe it was applied physics. I didn’t care—advanced sounded better.

  She paused, thrown off her game. “A university student, here? This far from campus? Is there a rental house in the neighborhood?”

  “No. He lives with his parents. Might as well, to save money. And we’re actually close to ISU, if you cut through the park.” I decided to lay it on thick. “He’s wicked smart. Programs on his computer for fun.”

  “Oh.” Mom relaxed, comforted by the idea I might be making a decent friend who could straighten me out. “What’s his name? I can’t believe I didn’t know about a boy your age in the neighborhood.”

  Boy? What was I, twelve? “Emmet Washington,” I said, and watched her tense up.

  “Jeremey Andrew Samson.” She closed the distance between us and loomed over me. “That’s horrible of you, lying about a retarded boy. What are you doing with him? Babysitting?”

  I blinked at her, blown away by her cruelty and insensitivity—except she wasn’t being mean. She was that clueless. “Mom, he got a perfect score on his ACT. He really is a double major in physics and computers. I’m not babysitting. I’m hanging out with him. He’s not retarded, and you’re not supposed to use that word anymore anyway.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me that PC nonsense. Retarded means delayed. You can’t tell me that boy is normal.”

  No, I couldn’t—but sometimes I thought he was a lot more normal than me.

  Emmet had his tics, yes, but he had a pragmatism I didn’t just admire—I found it soothing. If nothing else, I always knew where I stood with Emmet. If he didn’t want to do an activity, he said so. If something was important to him, he let you know. He was kind though too—he noticed things about me I wouldn’t have expected anyone to notice, and he regarded what I considered my most awkward oddities as simply part of who I was.

  The greatest example of this was the day we walked to Wheatsfield, the organic grocery store at the end of my street. Emmet’s mother needed some things for dinner, and Emmet asked if we could run the errands for her.

  “How kind of you to offer, Emmet. Thank you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll get the list and the wheeled shopping bag.”

  I don’t know why, but I was ridiculously excited to run the errand with him. We’d taken walks around the block before, usually in the evening when it was cooler, but shopping together was kind of domestic and grown-up. This wasn’t hanging-out shopping, either. We were helping make dinner, which I’d already been invited to stay for. The whole episode made me feel like part of the family. A real family. A good one.

  No sooner did we start down the street, though, when Emmet stopped us. “No. You like the inside.” He pushed me to the far side of the sidewalk, the one closest to the houses. “You get nervous when you’re by the street.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. You jump when a car goes by. You still do when you walk on the inside, but you relax more.”

  I had no idea I did that. How many other people had noticed this? “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. But you need to be on the inside, so don’t take the outside.”

  We didn’t talk the rest of the way, but we didn’t usually talk a lot when we walked. I used the time to think, to enjoy being with him. Also, it was fun to find out what he was counting. I’d learned he was always counting something when he was so quiet. I had asked him so often on our walks that now he simply told me when we arrived at our destination.

  “Nine hundred thirty-one cracks in the sidewalk,” he announced when we made it to the store. He pushed a multicolored striped wheeled trolley ahead of him, which Marietta had explained would hold the grocery bag. “One hundred twenty-four irregular. Eight hundred and seven straight lines.”

  “Sidewalk cracks? Surely you’ve counted those between here and your house before.”

  “Yes. But there were four new ones today.”

  I wondered what it would be like to have a brain that counted so many things. I would think it would be exhausting, but Emmet enjoyed it.

  I was going to ask him more about the cracks, but then we went into the store—and hit a wall of noise.

  I’d been in this store before, and I enjoyed it because it was so small, but I’d never come when a live band played in the corner. The store was full of people talking and laughing as they shopped. I wasn’t laughing. All I wanted to do was run. It felt like someone was slamming cymbals against my head over and over. It was hard to breathe.

  I was so embarrassed—I was having a panic attack in front of Emmet.

  And then, abruptly, I wasn’t. Or rather, the cymbals were gone and I was breathing rough, but we were outside and Emmet was sitting me down on a bench.

  He touched my face awkwardly. “It’s too loud in the store.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tried to say, but mostly I wheezed.

  He pushed my head between my knees,
his warm hand on my back. “Take deep breaths. Go to a happy place in your head.”

  He was so calm and logical it frankly surprised me partially out of my attack. It took me a minute to regain full control, but I recovered more quickly than I had in a long time.

  I was sad when he took his hand away.

  “You’re better. You need something to drink. Will you be okay?” I nodded. “Good. I’m going to find Carol.”

  I thought he would go inside, but he loitered by the door, rocking back and forth until someone came outside—a middle-aged woman with red hair and a bright smile and an apron marking her as a store employee.

  “Hello, Emmet. Where’s your mother?”

  Emmet didn’t look her in the eye, and he kept rocking. “She’s at home. I’m here with my friend Jeremey. But your music is too loud, and there are too many people. He had a panic attack and needs something to drink. It’s too loud for me too. I have good adaptations because I’ve practiced, but I don’t like the store either right now. It makes both of us uncomfortable.”

  Carol turned to me, all empathy. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”

  She spoke to me as if I were a four-year-old. I shut my eyes and tried to wish her away.

  Emmet gave her no quarter. “Your music is too loud, Carol. You upset people. It’s bad for your business. Althea would lecture you about ableism. I want to lecture you too. But I can’t right now. We need to take care of Jeremey. He’s upset. He needs something to drink.”

  I tried to say I was fine, but I wasn’t. Carol and Emmet spoke for a minute—he asked for two mineral waters with raspberry, and he gave her the list of groceries and his mother’s debit card. Then he sat beside me. “I’m sorry for her music. I’m angry with her for upsetting you.”

  He was the calmest angry person I’d ever met. I still felt embarrassed, though I was touched Emmet took my side. “It’s okay. I’m sure the normal people enjoy the party.”

  “No one is normal. Normal is a lie. The store should be for all people, not only people who like loud music. It’s rude. I’m telling my mother. She’s a board member of the co-op. All people should be included. They make the aisles big enough for wheelchairs. They should make the stimuli low for people who need things calmer. If our sensitivity had a chair, they’d make room for it.”