It didn’t take being around Ted for too long to learn that he’s startled by sudden movements, so when I get the urge to check on Callie, I glance up to the rearview mirror instead of turning around. I look at Callie’s reflection instead of her real self, and then I look at Ted’s reflection too, and I think about how different the two of them are, but also how identical. And then I think about the first time I realized things were different for us, for me and Callie. I was older than a person might think, because it turns out that most people are fine—almost happy—with a kid who doesn’t ever speak. Especially a cute and affectionate kid like Callie, who sometimes smiles for no reason but in ways that can accidentally make your whole day better. So I was as old as nine or ten the day that some office lady came into my classroom to take me to the vice principal, who then took me to the nurse’s office, where Callie was sitting alone on the cold linoleum floor. She’d been having a fit for nearly thirty minutes. It was already starting to become common for kids to have seizures and brief telekinetic explosions back then, but for something like that to go on for thirty minutes was not something the nurse felt was normal—or that she was equipped to handle. I remember the nurse’s face: pure terror. I have no way of knowing what went on in there before I got there, but I have an idea. And it must have been bad, be cause I remember the nurse talking to my parents in her office later that year, telling them that she was worried the event was going to have some sort of brain-damaging effect on Callie. But it didn’t. According to Jane, the CAT scans came back completely normal, the same as before. Callie has gotten regular CAT scans ever since she first got rescued, and no matter how bad the fit, there’s never been a blip. But after that day, the school sort of made it clear that they felt they couldn’t handle Callie and that alternate arrangements had to be made.
I’ve never told this to anyone before. Obviously my parents knew the facts of the matter, but still, I’ve never told anyone about it from my angle, or confessed that that was the first time I looked from myself to Callie and saw something fundamentally different. But I guess if something is important and awful enough for you to carry around inside yourself for long enough, it’ll eventually find a way to get out. I guess my “something” has chosen now to come out, because that memory has come back to me with such force that before I know what I’m doing, I’m saying it aloud to Stan.
“Lorna,” he says, once I’m finished. “I’m sorry.” I bite my lip and don’t look at him. “And I’m also sorry that I have nothing more helpful or creative to say than ‘sorry.’”
“Ha,” I say, letting him know that it’s fine. I’m fine. “I doubt anyone does. There’s not exactly a step-by-step guide for how to talk about non-lingual adopted siblings that someone found abandoned in a boat in the Arctic. You know?”
Stan nods and gives me a long, thoughtful pause.
“So you’re saying,” he says, slowly and seriously, “I would not find this as a volume in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series?”
“Oh, my bad, you’re right. There is a guide. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul of a Teenager Whose Sibling Is Totally Non-lingual and Was Found Abandoned in a Boat in the Arctic.”
“Ah-ha—so you’re the one who always has it checked out of the library!” he says, and we both laugh, which feels great.
“So,” says Stan, once we’ve laugh-sighed our way into silence again. “They were still calling it the ‘special class’ when Ted was there, which is a horrible, awful name, and I can’t believe a professional educator would allow it. Anyway, this one day, when Ted was maybe eight or nine—and huge for his age—there were some workers out on the playground pulling out a tree to make room for a new jungle gym. Some genius—the same one who thought of ‘special class,’ probably—thought it was a good idea to go ahead and hold recess outside anyway, with just the jungle gym part of the playground off-limits. But of course that rule didn’t deter Ted—he didn’t even know there was a rule. So Ted sees the guys working out there, and he starts to have a fit. It was a short one—like, weirdly short—and it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. His eyes were rolling up, his hands were opening and closing, and his entire body just got really stiff. One of his teachers came to get me—I was just over on the playing fields for gym class—and as I walked over toward him, I saw it all happen. His body unfroze, he shook his head, and he stood up, like nothing happened. But then he turned. He was looking at the workers, who were pulling up a tree to clear out the ground for the jungle gym. And then something came over him, a different kind of fit. And this is where it gets fuzzy for me, because all I could do was start panicking and running toward him. The roots were starting to surface, and the tree was out of the ground, and Ted lowers his head and just . . . went at them. He pummeled them with his little-kid fists, and it didn’t do much to the huge dudes removing the tree, but it made an impression on everyone, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Jesus” is all I can say, and a bright, clear image of Ted as a child, violently lashing out on an elementary school playground, crops up in my mind with a fierceness that lets me know it’ll be there for a while.
“Yeah,” Stan says quietly, his eyes straight ahead on the road, where they’ve been the whole time he was telling the story. “Ted’s on the . . . aggressive side. Sometimes I wonder if all the wrestling my dad has us do isn’t so much so Ted can have an outlet but more, like, my dad seeing if I have what it takes to help contain him. I truly don’t know—my dad is a weird enough guy for an idea like this to either be right on the money or so far from his mind that he’d find it insulting that I’d even suspect it. But I wonder.” Stan pauses, and I let the moment be a silent one. “Anyway,” he says after a short while, “Ted was asked to not come back. Just like Callie. I guess a nine-year-old kid built like a twelve-year-old, prone to seizures and who doesn’t speak or react when spoken to and who sometimes freaks out and tackles or hits things and people, is not exactly . . . easy. The saddest part about it was that even though I was just a kid too, I still got the distinct feeling that the main sentiment around school after Ted was gone was sweet relief. Everyone was glad to not have to worry about him anymore. And just . . . it’s not always easy having to live with people looking at your brother like that.