“No, no, I get it,” Stan says, and I immediately feel calmer. “It’s really hard to deal with Ted sometimes. You know? I need to watch out for him pretty much all the time. I need to watch out for authority figures who might not realize that it’s not that Ted’s a problem, it’s that someone abandoned him in the Arctic when he was a baby, and so he doesn’t understand language and is maybe in a constant state of shock or something, but we have no way of knowing because, once again, he cannot speak. And when he gets confused he gets upset, and when he gets upset he gets tackle-y. And then I need to watch out for everyone else.”
He looks away a bit, and I follow his gaze to Ted, who fidgets and then looks around. Stan looks back at Ted again, sort of nods downward, and then points to the bathrooms, and Ted gives him a kind of “hello” sign, then heads back to the men’s room. I wink at Callie, because it’s not until now that I realize how lucky I am to have the sibling with the big bladder—we had to pull over at least a dozen times on the way here so Ted could go relieve himself.
“Callie’s got a big bladder,” I tell Stan. “Not like Ted over there. Right, kid sister?” She’s shredding up her paper place mat and arranging the scraps into something beautiful and unnamable.
Stan, though, isn’t listening to me. He’s still watching Ted and looking an awful lot like he has something to say but isn’t sure if he should say it. And then he goes for it.
“He’s never, like, hurt anyone,” says Stan, still looking toward the bathrooms, even after we both watch Ted get in safely. “Or done anything really out of the ordinary. Out of the ordinary for Ted, I mean. You know?”
I do, and I think about that rule from earlier, about determining the baseline of behavior for each individual Iceling.
Stan goes on. “The most alarming thing he’s ever done—that has ever made me think he wants or needs something really urgently—has been, like, running into walls. So building this thing and figuring out a way to tell us to take them somewhere . . . I know it’s awful of me, but I keep thinking maybe this means there’s something out there he can do. You know, some purpose he can serve, some way for him to be independent. And maybe then that means . . . for a time . . . or for once, or just . . .” And he kinds of trails off a bit and looks out the window.
“What?”
“Sometimes,” he says, still looking out the window, “I think about how, if Ted weren’t Ted, I could maybe have my own life that didn’t revolve around just keeping my crazy brother from getting tackle-y all over the place all the time. And I could maybe have friends, who I could actually spend time with, or invite someone over—not just to my house but anywhere, ever, and not worry about Ted, or my dad, or my dad’s reactions to Ted. I mean, this is good, talking to you. But you only know me through Ted and Callie.”
“Stan—”
“It’s fine. Or it’s not fine, but it’s whatever. It’s awful and it’s selfish, and maybe I’m awful and selfish. But I can tell Callie isn’t a burden to you, Lorna.” And I look over at Callie, at my sister, and I don’t know what to tell him. Because I know what he means, but I also don’t. “She’s not like Ted,” Stan goes on. “I mean, I don’t mean that he’s a burden. But, like, for instance, you have a boyfriend. You have friends, you have people over, you have parties where you don’t worry about your sibling tackling someone because the music is weird and not what he thought it would be. Or, I mean. I don’t even know if that’s what he’d do. Or if that is what he would do, I wouldn’t know why he’d do it. I don’t really know why Ted does the things he does when he does them.” And I can tell how much this kills him when he says it.
Stan leans in, kind of looks down at the table or his hands in front of him, and his voice gets quieter. “His whole life. His whole life, and Callie’s whole life, they’ve just . . . they’ve been trapped, basically. Right? Those researchers found them, and then the government just stuck them in homes, just decided on the families they’d grow up with. And the whole time they’re just stuck in their own heads, totally unable to talk to us about what it’s like for them. And then we just stick them in hospitals when things get too weird for us! And in the hospital Jane just sticks them in closed-off spaces and guarded areas where they can only leave when someone else decides, and they have to be there alone without the people who they know and maybe trust.” Stan leans back in the booth, looking exhausted. “Wow. I guess the short version of all that is that I agree with everything you said. And I guess my feelings about this are more complicated than I thought. Which is I guess what happens when you don’t spend a lot of time thinking or talking about them much.”
I want to hug him. Because yes to that whole last bit, and that whole other bit too. But still, when he was talking, I’m sure I made some kind of sour face at him, because I could feel myself judging him for thinking those things. For feeling like his brother was a burden. He’s right that I would never think of Callie like that. Except that I do, a little. And she isn’t even anything at all like Ted.
So “Yeah” is all I say to Stan. “Yes.”
“We’re supposed to be doing this, right? We can do this much for them. Who else is going to? Our parents?”
“Probably not.”
“Their caseworkers?”
“Definitely not.”
“The government?”
“One hundred percent no.”
And then, of course, my phone rings.
POP [snow-capped mountain emoji]