The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (27 page)

Clearly, Brenda and Dad had read the riot act to Sweetie about a great many things, but mainly about not heaving himself into Adam as soon as he opened the door. Mr. and Mrs. Ross were measured and achingly thoughtful. Sweetie’s version of thoughtful was that he didn’t pepper his brother with nonstop demands for attention. But he still shadowed Adam from the moment he came into the house until they both went to bed, terrified that his big brother would disappear again into the bad place.

“Hello, Adam.” Brenda brushed his forehead with a kiss. “How did it go? Was it bearable?”

Adam nodded, not sure whether it was or not. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a lot of things. It seemed to take him days to sort out whatever thing had just happened, let alone the whole … well, everything. “It’s a protective shock,” Chuck had explained.

Whatever it was, you’d think it would protect him from the rest of his compulsions, but no. Although he’d broken through the threshold thing, Adam was still counting in an endless series of patterns. That didn’t seem to rattle Chuck. “It’s just the leftover, Adam. No biggie. The ERP will nail it. You have tremendous resources. You, Adam, are going to be
fine
!”

“Were Father Rick and that woman from the hospital there too?” asked Brenda.

“Yeah, they both dropped me off. She’s a piece of work. I hope she doesn’t get anywhere near my mom.” Adam grabbed a biscotti from the cooling rack and saluted Brenda with it before heading to his room, Sweetie hot on his heels.

Their room was lit up like a Christmas tree. Sweetie had decided that his brother would be much comforted by an extremely bright room. All the lights were on—the table lamps, all four night-lights, the overhead. Sweetie had snagged their father’s desk lamp, which now illuminated the floor beside the garbage can. And to add to the festive holiday air, Brenda’s Christmas candlestick lights twinkled merrily from the windowsill. You could have shot a movie in there. Sweetie trotted over to the far side of his bed and pretended to be absorbed in his latest Tonka truck acquisitions.

With a shaking hand, Adam reached into his pocket for the handmade card that he had found peeking from under
a flat white stone in front of Marnie Wetherall, 1935–1939. He hadn’t trusted himself to open it while the priest and social worker were waiting. He knew it was from her, of course. They loved Marnie best and Marnie loved them. Adam had taken the folded creamy paper and replaced it with the $6.99 Batman ring that Snooki and Wonder Woman had given him.

Now, on his bed, Adam stared at her perfect rendering of the Batman insignia. His heart beat in his throat as he opened the note.

He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, blinking in the brightness. Finally, with his hand still shaking, he put the card back in his pocket.

“You can talk to me, you know. I won’t fall apart or anything.”

Sweetie shot over like a bullet almost before Adam could finish the sentence, and clambered into his lap.

“Batman?”

“Yeah?”

“Do I still have to take care of you?”

And Adam wondered for the hundred millionth time,
Just how does this kid’s mind work?

“No, Sweetie.”

“Good! I like it better when you have to take care of me all the time.”

He turfed his brother off his lap. “You’re too big for lap-sitting, goof!”

“No!” Sweetie’s lip quivered. “They said I was too little, a shrimp. On the monkey bars, the big boys said … they said …”

“If they say it again, point ’em out and I’ll nail ’em for you. Besides, you’re not too,
too
little.” He messed up Sweetie’s hair. “We, you and me, are what they call late bloomers.”

“Late bloomers,” Sweetie said, repeating and storing. He hopped back onto his brother’s lap. “And you’re going to stay here with us forever, right, Batman?”

“Geez, little guy, things like that are mucho-hyper-complicated.”

“No, they’re not,” said Sweetie. “Our dad and Mrs. Brenda Ross love you more than Mrs. Carmella Ross does. And I love you more than all of them, so we win and get to keep you!” He looked delighted with himself.

“Sweetie, that’s not fair. My mom … well, she
does
love me. She loves me a lot.”

“Okay,” Sweetie conceded. “But she’s very,
very
crazy, so she can’t do a good job.”

Adam turfed him off again. “Hey, any of us Ross men
calling anybody else crazy is just the pot calling the kettle black.”

Sweetie frowned, trying to wrestle some meaning out of talking pots and black kettles. “Is
Daddy
crazy?” That seemed to be his takeaway.

“No! Dad’s a bit of a workaholic is all. Chuck—that’s the doctor guy I go see—says that’s how Dad deals with his anxiety.”

“Anxiety,” Sweetie repeated, waiting semi-patiently for more.

“Anxiety is like being afraid.”

“Ohh …” Sweetie was instantly sympathetic.
This
he understood. “Is Mrs. Brenda Ross anxiety too?”

“No. Well …” Adam whipped another pillow at him. “Your mom is … like, your mom is just a little sensitive. She kind of sees things and feels things about people.”

“Like you, ’cept you’re really, really sensitive, right?”

“No, I’m—”
Wait! Was it true?
“Uh, okay, maybe you’re right, Sweetie. Maybe I
can
recognize when people are hurting or sort of lost, more than other people.”

“And that’s why you can fix me when I’m bad-scared?”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re not very,
very
crazy, right?”

Everybody lies
.

Well, hell, maybe
everybody
has damn good reasons to lie. Maybe we all just lie to hide the hurt or to fake being strong until we
can
be strong. That’s not so bad, is it?

Is it?

“No, not
very
, very, I guess.” Adam could almost see the wheels turning as Sweetie tried to sort all this out.

“But Mrs. Carmella Ross is,” he said brightly. “So you have to do the rest of your growing up here!”

“Aaargh! I give up! Yeah, maybe, probably, mostly.” Adam sat back down on the edge of his bed.

Sweetie sat on his own bed, mirroring Adam movement for movement, except that the cast kept getting in the way. “I’m never going to break my arm again,” he announced, folding his hands in his lap when Adam did.

“Good call.”

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking and—”

“Okay,
what
already?”

“You’re still the Batman, right?”

“Yeah. I’m still part of Group, and so yeah, I’m still Batman.”

“But you lost your Robin?”

My Robyn
. Adam’s throat closed. He got up, sat down, got up again and started to pace.

Sweetie got up too. “She’s gone, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I lost her.”
One, three, five, seven, nine, eleven …

“Okay, good.” Sweetie started pacing with Adam.

It was crowded. The room wasn’t big enough for two simultaneous pacers, but they continued nonetheless.

“So can I be your new Robin, and you won’t have to call me Sweetie anymore, ever? Mrs. Brenda Ross said exactly, ‘Robin is, I
suppose
, rather marginally better than Sweetie.’ And our dad said exactly, ‘Well, there might be
more hope of him not getting the crap beat out of him every other day if he’s a Robin.’ So can I be your Robin, huh? I asked everybody. Robin should be a boy anyway. I asked everybody, and
everybody
said so. I’ll be the best Robin in the world and I won’t ever pester you again in my whole life, promise.”

Adam wondered who would have been included in Sweetie’s extensive polling group.

“Please, Batman! Please!”

The kid was nuts.

They were both nuts.

He reached into his pocket and clasped the note.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
.

A sweet, hard hurt threatened to crush him.

“Sure.” Adam threw his arm around his crime-fighting partner. “Okay, Robin, go tell Mrs. Brenda Ross about your new identity.”

“Yay!” His brother shot out of the room screaming. “Holy name change, Batman. Mom! Mom! Guess what, Mom!”

As soon as Sweetie left, Adam took out the note again. He exhaled, inhaled. The weight was unbearable.
One, three, five … No!
He opened the note and traced the words with his finger.
You, Adam Spencer Ross, are a man
. A man?

And then, for the first time since that man was a boy, Adam Spencer Ross sat on the very edge of his bed, in that very bright room, and wept.

It takes a lot of work by a lot of people to turn what I write into a novel. I am grateful to the following purveyors of courage and encouragement—in other words, my first readers: my family, Nikki, Ken and Sasha Toten; the indefatigable Marie Campbell; and my writing group, Susan Adach, Ann Goldring, Nancy Hartry and Loris Lesynski.

I received generous advice and inspiration from every practitioner and young adult I met at the 19th International OCD Foundation Conference in 2012. My story was shaped and shaded by their stories. I also thank Friar Rick Riccioli, OSM Conv.; Albert Ottoni; Geoffrey Pearson; and Jenn Coward for their counsel and honesty, as well as Dr. Peggy Richter, who pointed me in the right direction. If I veered off course or drove into a ditch, it is entirely my own doing.

I am grateful beyond words to the patient and talented team at Doubleday Canada: Amy Black, Allyson Latta and especially Janice Weaver, who managed somehow to both embolden me
and
save me from myself.

Finally, I am indebted to all those who cannot be named but whose courage and determined hope drove me to write this book. You are not alone.

This book has been in my head for years. I watched so many of the young adults who were in or near my life struggle with OCD and debilitating anxiety. Their courage was both breathtaking and fascinating. I became haunted by the question of what it would be like to be them, to cope and carry on in the world with this invisible burden.

Ah, bear with me here. My Adam is a composite of a few young men I’ve had the good luck to know. I stole their gentleness, intelligence and fierce protectiveness, and I gave those pieces to Adam. He became real and whole very fast. That first scene—when he falls in love with Robyn before she even shuts the door—was in my head for years. Yet after I’d finished the first full draft of the novel, I worried that Adam was too good, too sweet, too decent in the face of the enormous weight he had to carry.

Then I went to an international conference on OCD in Chicago, and it was there that I met him: a young man about Adam’s age, strikingly attractive, sensitive, smart and funny. I watched him as he posed questions to the experts. This young man vibrated with confusion and pain, not only for himself but also for the people who loved him. In his soft southern accent, he asked expert after expert when he would “hit bottom with all this,” and if he’d recognize it when he got there. He’d deal with it, but he wanted to know how much further down he and his family had to go. I’d found him. This was
my
Adam.

The next day, I noticed him standing alone and I went up to tell him that he had inspired me. I told him that I was writing a book and had been fretting about the “hero” being too amazing. And now, because I had met him, I knew there was no such thing as too amazing. I thanked him, and he—understandably bewildered—thanked me. And then, to my everlasting regret, I ran off before he could say anything else, because like a fool, I was crying.

Robyn is probably me. I inserted myself into her reality and took her story where I would likely have taken mine if I were her. I would absolutely have fallen in love with an Adam.

When I was a kid, I loved, loved, loved comic books! I confess that I still line up for all the superhero movies. While my girlfriends read about Archie, I read their older brothers’ stashes of superhero comics and got into heated, never-ending debates about Marvel versus DC. Marvel had the character edge for me overall, but I always loved Batman best.

It was a long road. I certainly know quite a few young people and adults who have OCD. That was my starting point. Then I read dozens of books, memoirs, self-help guides and research papers. I had the benefit of good advice from generous professionals like Dr. Peggy Richter at the Frederick W. Thompson Anxiety Disorders Centre in Toronto, and as I mentioned, I went to that wonderful international conference in Chicago, where I spent a few days questioning and observing everyone I met, and snuck into as many teen panels and workshops as I could.

No. I honestly wouldn’t know how to do that with any skill. My characters move through their drama while handicapped by a disorder, but the novel’s not
about
the disorder. All of us have experienced, to varying degrees, moments of debilitating anxiety and depression, and even obsessive thoughts. That is part of being human, and it is certainly a hallmark of being a young adult. To me,
The Unlikely Hero
is about first love, making friends and struggling with yourself. If my readers have done any of that, hopefully they’ll feel just a little less alone when they pick up the book.