Raising Blaze (13 page)

Dr. Roberts smiled. “Blaze is very lucky to have you in his life,” she told my father. I had no doubt she was completely genuine. “It’s clear how much time and effort you and your family dedicate to Blaze. The school setting is much more stressful for him than his home environment, though. Sometimes it’s difficult to gauge how best to deal with his anxieties here.”

“He does seem stressed,” Mrs. Noel piped in. “He doesn’t really participate with the class. He makes sounds and he rocks—”

“What do you mean?” my father said sharply and turned to glare at her full on. I saw the gray snap of anger in his eyes that had always signaled for me and my siblings to get the hell out of his way when we were kids, and my heart started beating a little faster.

“He rocks, you know, in the back—”

“He’s not a rocker!” my father snapped. “Listen, in addition to spending a lot of time with Blaze and raising five kids of my own, I’ve also got experience with disabled kids. I’ve got a degree in psychology. I’ve known kids who rock back and forth. I’ve never seen Blaze do that. He does not do that. That is not who he is. Blaze is not a rocker.”

There was a small, tight silence in the room. I gave wordless thanks for my father who could state what I could not. I knew where Mrs. Noel wanted to go: he rocks, he hears noises, he makes sounds, he perseverates. Sure, I thought, if I believed her, I’d have to lock him up for good. I couldn’t scream
fuck you!
at the top of my lungs as I dearly wanted to. But my father could—in his own, perfectly reasonable way. To my mind, it was nothing less than the verbal equivalent of a SWAT-style rescue.

Without missing a beat, Dr. Roberts guided the meeting back
around to the annual goals and objectives for Blaze, both academic and behavioral. Mrs. Noel signed the meeting notes and quietly excused herself to go back to her classroom. The occupational therapist, who had been added to Blaze’s team back in kindergarten, weighed in with her report and, like the others, it was hardly a rosy picture.

“We seem to have reached a plateau,” she said, “as far as how much Blaze is willing to do for me.” She described what she’d been working on with Blaze. Instead of working on gross motor functions like the monkey bars and walking on a balance beam, she had been focusing primarily on writing. There had never been a time when writing or drawing had been easy for Blaze and not for lack of trying. Improvement was terribly slow and Blaze grew increasingly frustrated. The occupational therapist told us that Blaze’s frustration impeded his progress so severely that she felt it was probably a good idea to give him “a break” from occupational therapy.

“You mean you’re firing him?” my father asked, only half joking.

“No, no, of course not that,” the OT said. “It’s more like he’s reached a point where it’s not benefiting him.”

“Reevaluate in January?” Dr. Roberts asked, all business.

“Yes,” the OT said, signed the papers, and left.

Sally took her leave shortly afterward, leaving me, my father, and Dr. Roberts alone in the conference room. I’d never known Dr. Roberts to rush a meeting. She always remained in the room, calm and impeccably mannered, crossing every
t
and dotting every
i.
She would never cut a conversation short.

Now, preparing to write up the team meeting notes in her immaculate script, Dr. Roberts asked if we had given any thought at all to medications for Blaze. Both my father and I told her that we wouldn’t even consider it. As she had before, Dr. Roberts urged me to “read the literature” on Ritalin and similar medications that were proving very successful with children like Blaze. I thought, Blaze has been in this school for over four years and all I’ve heard is how he’s not like any
other children. Dr. Roberts reiterated that she had plenty of material and I would always be welcome to peruse it at any time. She had the names of several doctors as well, she said, if we wanted to consider another evaluation.

I left the meeting feeling hostile and dispirited. At home, I begged Blaze to listen to his teachers at school.

“You have to try harder,” I told him.

“You can’t talk nonsense at school anymore,” my father added, sharply. “They’re going to think you’re a nut. Do you understand? That teacher of yours—what’s her name—Mrs. Something? She said you rock. I don’t ever want to hear that kind of thing again, do you understand?”

“Yes, Papa,” Blaze said.

“Blaze,” my father said, “you’ve really got to make sense when you talk to people at school. You can’t tell people not to say certain words and you can’t make noises in class. This is important, Blaze.”

“Okay, Papa,” Blaze said.

I went back to work and I finished writing my novel. The days grew shorter. Blaze brought notes home from Sally. “Blaze has been holding his ears a lot in class and on the playground, but he says they don’t hurt,” one said. “You might want to take a look at them.” Another note said, “Blaze ran off the playground today to look at the construction equipment on the other side of campus. We have discussed safety with him, but perhaps you can reinforce at home?”

I didn’t ignore the notes, exactly. I addressed them all with Blaze. I told him I was disappointed, tired, annoyed. He promised to behave. A small part of me observed, from a distance, that I was out of touch with my son. My righteous indignation at the school had little to do with what was really going on inside his head. My talks with him were tiny Band-Aids on a gaping wound. But the part of me that saw these facts was not quite strong enough to acknowledge them fully. I carried on—working, reading, and doing laundry on weekends. I don’t know
how long we might have gone on like that or what the end result might have been. But early in November, Blaze forced me to pay attention to him. I’d been in a slumber of sorts for eighteen months and Blaze was about to give me a rude awakening.

It was a gray Wednesday afternoon, heavy with the threat of rain. The ocean looked angry and bleak through my office window. I was tired. My desk was covered with bits of paper, each one with a separate task attached to it, and I was losing an ongoing battle to keep my in-box clear. I was wearing nylons and they itched. Sighing, I picked up the phone and called home. I liked to check in with Maya on Wednesdays because this was the one day of the week that Blaze stayed in the on-site child care program after school. Maya would pick him up at four and give him an early dinner. I was usually home by five-thirty. Wednesdays were long days for Blaze and I knew he often came home tired and grumpy. I wanted to talk to him and ask him how his day was.

“Bad news,” Maya said when I got her on the phone.

“What? What is it?” I was immediately shaken out of my work lethargy. “What’s wrong with Blaze?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” Maya said. “But when I went to pick him up today, they told me at the child care that he decided to just leave school today. Just took off across the field with some girl. Didn’t go to child care at all.”

“Where is he?” I had managed to work myself into a quiet little hysteria.

“He’s here. At home.” She sounded irritated. “The guys at child care saw him leaving and one of them ran to get him. It’s a good thing they pay such careful attention over there. This is definitely no good. You’ve got to talk to him. You’ve got to tell him how dangerous it is to take off like that.”

She continued on about how he could have gotten lost or kidnapped and where did he think he was going, and did I realize how
serious it was, but I heard only the sound and pitch of her words. The flooding sense of relief I felt when she told me that he was safe at home had given way to something much darker. I knew that Blaze didn’t have the maturity or enough fear of the unknown to protect himself. My mind went to the edges of what could have happened to him had the school staff not been as vigilant in tracking him down and then shut off. All I could see was a fleeting vision of my son vanishing into the horizon, slipping away from me forever. My whole body was stiff with fear and I felt as if I were suffocating. It was
my
responsibility to watch out for my son, not the school’s, not Maya’s. Who knew better than I that he was different from any other kid, that his leaving the school in the middle of the day was a much bigger deal than it would have been with any other nine-year-old in the school? It was I who needed to educate him about danger, make sure he understood it was not all right just to disappear—into the world or into himself. Clearly, I hadn’t done any of this. I’d lost the thread that connected me to my son.

I was such an idiot. I’d spent the last year and a half thinking I was doing such a great job as a single parent, a supermom with a burgeoning literary career, a good provider who received no outside financial assistance from anyone. My son lacked nothing on the material level and was doted on by everyone in my large family. But I was failing, I thought bitterly, in my most important responsibility as his mother. I was not keeping him safe, something even the wildest of animals did for her young. If I couldn’t do that, the rest was all a big joke.

We’d been limping along like this for a long time. I’d known that school wasn’t going well, but I’d convinced myself that it was nothing serious. So, he’d gone back to special ed in second grade, big deal, I’d told myself. So he didn’t seem as excited as school as he had in first grade, he’d work it out. So he was afraid of butterflies, so what? Blaze hadn’t been able to tell me about the space that was starting to gape
between us, but his actions that afternoon were much clearer than words. You are not here, he was telling me, and I am going my own way.

I hung up the phone, telling Maya that I was too upset to talk to Blaze and that I’d deal with him when I got home. I put my head in my hands, twin feelings of fear and shame running unchecked through my heart.

“What is it?” My coworker, Laura, had turned around in her chair and was looking over at me, concern on her face. My conversation with Maya had been quiet and I hadn’t made a sound since I hung up, but Laura could hear what was going on in my head. She had spent many years as a single mother herself.

“Blaze left school today,” I told her. “He just walked off the campus. The guys from child care got hold of him before he got too far.” Tears started welling in my eyes. “We’re pretty lucky if you think about it,” I said and the tears spilled.

“I’m so sorry,” Laura said.

“I have to do something about this,” I said.

“I know,” Laura said, with understanding for everything I couldn’t explain in her voice.

I turned back around to my desk and stared blankly at its cluttered surface. I felt my life spinning out of control, taking Blaze along with it. In that moment, I realized that I would not be able to carry on a career in any traditional sense of the word. I certainly wouldn’t be able to continue working eight to five, snatching a couple of hours with Blaze in the evenings before I fell into the couch with a stack of manuscripts to read. Yes, I could and would talk to him about what had happened today. I could make him promise that he’d never do it again, but that just wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to give up the idea—for good this time—that I was going to have anything that resembled what I’d thought of as a conventional life. I had to get inside
Blaze’s head. I needed to understand him. Blaze needed me to be more than his mother, I had to be his translator. In order to do that, I had to learn his language.

Sometimes the events that change the course of one’s life don’t announce themselves loudly. Sometimes the seismic shift is so far below the surface you can’t feel the effects until everything comes tumbling down. This is how it was on that Wednesday in November. I went home and I asked Blaze why he had left school without telling anybody. He told me he wanted to visit Natalie’s house, the girl he had started to follow home. “She said it was okay,” he told me. I tried to explain to him that it was very dangerous to simply wander off when he was supposed to be somewhere else.

“Natalie walks home by herself,” he said.

“Natalie’s house is right near the school,” I said. “Her mother can see her when she walks home. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what Natalie does. It matters what
you
do.”

He looked at me, amazed that I was so upset by his behavior. He simply couldn’t understand what I was going on about. I felt like someone who had been away on a long trip and had just come home to find the place completely redecorated and filled with new inhabitants. How could it have been that I had drifted so far away from this boy? What had I been thinking? There was no hesitation about the decisions I knew I had to make next, just a renewed sense of determination. Looking down into Blaze’s eyes, I hoped that I hadn’t been gone too long.

When I gave notice two days later, my boss asked me if there was anything she could offer that would make me reconsider. I told her that I didn’t really think that there was. She sensed that it wasn’t about money (although if she had offered me a big spike in salary, it certainly would have made leaving more difficult) so she offered me flextime. I told her that even with flextime I wouldn’t be able to dedicate the amount of time to Blaze that he needed. She warned me about tossing
away my career out of a sense of guilt. She said I’d be sorry. She told me I would waste my talents working as a waitress, which is what I told her I’d probably be going back to. She was angry. She was disappointed. I agreed with her about almost everything. But she didn’t have children. More important, she didn’t have
Blaze
. I wasn’t martyring myself out of a misguided sense of guilt. Blaze was my real job. What the hell did it matter that I did a great job for her if I couldn’t get my own son together? What did that say about me as a person? It was difficult for my boss to understand this, but she came to an acceptance of it. Two weeks after Blaze walked away from school, I left my job. When I told Blaze that I wouldn’t be going to the office anymore and that I was going to spend more time with him and try to help him with school, he gave me an uncharacteristically short response.

“Good,” he said, and that was all.