The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (25 page)

When Mike had lost his job, I’d found ways to cut corners, including making big pots of chili for the family. (Jake and I looked it up: Chili was invented during the Great Depression of the 1930s as a way to stretch a little bit of meat.) When the daycare numbers dwindled and I couldn’t even afford to make chili anymore, I would put a big pot of water on the stove and throw five packs of ramen (three for a
dollar) in so that we could still have a family dinner together. To make it fun, we’d ask the kids three trivia questions, with Michael imitating the Soup Nazi from the sitcom
Seinfeld
, wiggling his eyebrows and making faces and berating the kids in a crazy accent if they got the questions wrong. “No soup for you!” he’d thunder, making them laugh until they were about to wet their pants. Both of us were determined to keep the mood light for the kids, no matter how scared we felt.

That winter was one of the coldest on record in a state notorious for unforgiving winters. A lot of the time, we couldn’t afford to heat our house. To stay warm, we’d pile onto the big couch under a load of blankets, watching movies and cuddling with one another. Many people around us burned old tables and chairs for heat. A lot of people didn’t have electricity, and the people who did weren’t using it. Every house was dark. There were no lights on anywhere. I remember walking through Walmart, the aisles cleared of everything except necessities: camping gear, coffee, fire logs, lighter fluid, water, cheap electric blankets for those without heat—and beer. The store didn’t bother to stock anything else. It looked like an army surplus store.

Then I got a call from my brother, who had been living in our old house. He’d lost his job working construction, and there was no hope of another one. There were lines around the block for those jobs. He’d been taking care of my dad, who’d had some health issues, including open-heart surgery that winter. When it became clear that nobody was going to buy the house, Ben had offered to move in with some of his friends and fix it up in the hope that we could find someone to rent it. But they didn’t have enough money to heat it, and one particularly cold night—with a windchill of minus thirty—while my brother was sleeping somewhere warmer, a pipe burst, and the equivalent of an Olympic-sized pool’s worth of water rushed through the house.

It was a catastrophe. The entire house was gone, just gone, on the inside. There were no walls left, the ceiling was on the floor, and the stairs went up into nowhere. Everywhere you looked, there was dripping water overlaid with ice. The drywall still standing bulged with
moisture. When I opened the door and saw the damage, my knees gave way.

Like everyone else, our insurance company was in serious financial trouble and didn’t know if it was going to be able to stay in business. At first the company disputed that we were insured, but even when we’d had to eat ramen to survive, we’d always managed to pay our bills. Still, the company sat on our claim, and sat on it, and sat on it, while our flooded house slowly rotted from the inside out. I was frantic. With every passing week, the house became more uninhabitable, but we didn’t have a single cent in the bank to fix it.

At that point, I was babysitting for a lower hourly rate than I’d charged when I’d first opened my daycare sixteen years earlier. I let everyone know that I was available anytime—nights, weekends—for anyone who needed help. Moms I knew from Little Light and from sports would bring their kids to me if they were still employed. That was the unspoken code: If you had a job, you looked out for those who didn’t. To avoid feeling like charity cases, we baked for one another, or sewed, or cleaned one another’s homes. I watched people’s kids. Still, there wasn’t much money to go around.

For the first time in my life, I was hungry. I bought vitamins for the boys because I could no longer regularly afford meat. If there was meat, I would pretend to have a stomachache and push my plate away so that they would have more. New winter clothes were out of the question, and every piece of clothing we had was mended within an inch of its life. Wesley, my little kamikaze, looked the worst. There were patches on top of patches on his pants. It made me sick to watch the boys heading down for the school bus with an inch of wrist showing between their parka sleeves and their gloves, but I knew too-small coats were better than none, and a lot of people had none.

By Christmas, we were barely making it, and the false cheer of holiday decorations going up in the empty stores only highlighted how desperate and frightened everyone felt. We’re not big on Christmas presents in our family. Christmas is a religious holiday for us, and we tend to focus on charity. But when our church gave us a box to fill for
the poor, we had to write a note saying that we had only prayers to send. Our pastor understood. We certainly weren’t the only ones with nothing to give that year. But without question, that was the hardest thing for me to do.

Still, we had our own little miracle. First thing Christmas morning, when Mike went out to shovel the driveway, he popped his head back in the door and called quietly for me so that the kids wouldn’t hear. A bright red sack sat on our snow-covered porch—a Santa sack. I looked at him, and my heart dropped into my stomach. What had he done? I knew for a fact we had $32 in our bank account, and there was no money coming in for a while. If that was gone, there would be nothing for groceries.

But Mike was looking at me the same way. “Oh, no, Kris,” he whispered, “what did you do?”

I shook my head, and then the answer hit us both at the exact same time:
Narnie
.

Inside the sack, there were three brightly wrapped presents, and they were the perfect presents: a Lego set for Ethan, a skateboard for Wesley, and a telescope for Jake. And when Narnie brought her cup of coffee over later as she usually did, innocently asking us how our Christmas morning had been, I wept with gratitude in her arms. It remains the single kindest gesture I have ever known, and it sealed Narnie as an unofficial member of our family.

That was a bright spot, but it was short-lived. Once so empowering, Facebook only brought news of more suffering. Everyone was broke and afraid. Every night on the news, there was another plant closing, another factory shutting down, signaling disaster for another family we knew. The President visited, and when the president comes to Indiana, you know you’re in trouble. I heard at one point that half the state was unemployed, which seemed like a conservative estimate from where I was sitting, maybe because everyone we knew was working-class like us. Nobody had anything, but we had to keep our chins up, and so no matter how bad the news got, I’d always post, “Any of you are welcome over for a pot of ramen anytime!!!!”

By January, it looked as if our worst fears might come true. My
sister, Stephanie, and I stayed up late talking on the phone, seriously considering what we would do if we lost our homes. The threat was real, and it was happening to people we knew. One of my daycare moms had lost her house and had ended up on the street with her kids. She had been taken in by friends, but nobody was sure how long the arrangement would last, as the other family was struggling, too. Stephanie and I figured we could always take our families out to the church my grandfather had built and live up in the unused choir loft for a while. I was calm during the conversation, but after we hung up, I started shaking and couldn’t stop. The prospect of being homeless, of our children being homeless, terrified me.

The weather was unrelenting. Christopher, Jake, and Wes spent every weekend building complicated tunnel systems through the snow covering our yard and developing elaborate spy games to go with them. Because it was so cold, the igloo safe house they constructed became a permanent part of our property. The moms I knew were all worried about the driving conditions, but the schools got paid for lunches, and so they stayed open, even though we couldn’t even get down to the end of our own driveway without falling. (Wesley flattened a cardboard box so he could “surf” down the icy hill.) More than once after I saw the bus fishtail down the road toward our stop, I told my boys I didn’t care about their attendance records and brought them right back home with me.

Our Super Bowl party was a brief bright spot in that horrible winter. The Super Bowl is always a big deal in our house. Michael loves football, and so do our boys. Every year, I put on a big feast—wings and potato skins and cupcakes decorated to look like footballs—and people come over to watch the game with us. That year, the feast was just a bowl of pretzels, but I was grateful anyway. At least we could all be together. We made a party out of it, cheering and screaming at the television, and the boys competed to see which one of them could make up the silliest cheerleader-style dance.

Even Christopher was there—sort of. Phyllis hadn’t been able to drive him over as planned, so Jake called and put him on speakerphone, and he stayed on the phone with us all day. He and Mike pretended
to high-five through the phone, and Christopher even opened a bag of pretzels on his end. After a while, I forgot that he wasn’t actually there. That was a great day.

Soon after, I received an official letter from the town of Kirklin containing more bad news. Our rec center building was a hazard, the letter said, and the town had no choice but to demolish it. I closed my eyes and saw a wrecking ball swinging through the basketball court we’d hoped to build. The kicker? Not only were they going to destroy our building, but they expected us to pay them for the privilege of doing it. As I stood there with the letter in my hand, my eyes still closed, I thought,
It can’t get worse than this
.

A week later, I’d have given everything to take that thought back.

L
ate in February, I picked up the phone to hear my friend Rachel’s voice telling me to turn on the TV. I rolled my eyes and said, “Don’t tell me. More bad news?” expecting to see another factory closure, heartbreak for somebody else we knew. But the bitter joke died on my lips when I heard nothing but a sob on the other end.

I switched on the television to the local news station and watched as the words “Breaking News: Spring Mill Elementary Student Struck and Killed by School Bus” went by on the crawl. Even after I saw his name, even after they’d flashed his school picture up on the screen, I still didn’t believe they could be talking about Christopher.

His school bus had dropped him off in the school parking lot, not at the curbside spot where Christopher was used to arriving. In a story that will be nauseatingly recognizable to any parent of a child with autism, Christopher was disoriented by the change and tried to make his way between parked cars over to the building entrance he knew best. While doing so, he ran into another bus lane and was hit by another school bus.

I don’t remember the rest of that day at all. I was in shock. How were we going to tell Jake?

When he got home, there was a group of women from the neighborhood and from the sports program in our living room, all standing in a horseshoe around the television. Narnie was crying and rubbing my back, but I was still too stunned to move or speak.

“Was there a bus accident?” Jake asked, scanning each of our faces
for clues. Almost as if in answer, Christopher’s school picture came up again on the screen. I watched Jake’s face as comprehension hit, and then he threw himself on the couch and made a noise I have never heard another human being make, a noise I hope to God I will never hear again.

He stayed there, squashed underneath the cushions of the couch, for hours. Eventually, Mike and I got him out of there, and Jake and I drove over to see Phyllis. We were close enough that I didn’t even knock before going into her house. I found her sitting motionless in the living room, still in the bathrobe and slippers she’d been wearing that morning, while the phone rang and rang. Jake took one of her hands, and I took the other, and the three of us sat there together without speaking for the better part of the night.

Jake’s grief over the loss of his best friend threw his autism into high relief. His sorrow was so intense, so all-consuming, that I think he simply didn’t have the emotional resources to navigate socially the way he could most of the time. He had room for only one emotion, grief, and the fact that other people could operate on a wider bandwidth was beyond his comprehension.

He was genuinely shocked, for instance, by the behavior of the other mourners at the wake. The mood in the room was one of complete devastation, of course. But there was also a buffet, as there usually is, and people were making themselves plates and sitting down and eating together. To me and almost everyone else there, this was a welcome signal of community and fellowship, of people embracing life even in the face of this horrifying tragedy, but it was incomprehensible to Jake. The idea that anyone had room for anything other than grief—that a person could feel this tremendous loss and also eat a piece of chicken, or ask a question about how someone’s grandkids were getting along at school—was inconceivable to him. He sat in the receiving line with Phyllis for most of the afternoon, accepting condolences like the family member he’d become.

On the car ride home, Jake said, “I didn’t think angels got jealous.”

I didn’t understand. “What are you talking about, honey? Angels don’t get jealous.”

“I think they do,” he said. “They came and got my best friend because they wanted to play with him.”

After we buried Christopher, it was like a hush fell over the world. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that such a happy, gentle spirit was gone. It seemed impossible, a violation of every principle in nature. When I opened my eyes in the morning, for a few precious moments I would forget that this light had been put out. Then I would remember, and the hurt would start again.