May 28, 1923
Amelia felt complete when she was at Monarch Manor. She loved the butterflies that found sanctuary in the gardens, the veranda that protected the soft swish of the white wicker rocking chairs, and the summer cicadas that lulled her to sleep each night. But most of all, she loved that the estate rested on the shores of Geneva Lake. The water was a sparkling, magical beauty that pulled her near, and begged her to jump in.
Yet that night it was much colder, and darker, than ever before.
The black water swirled around her as she hit the surface. Her head went under first, followed by the rest of her body and her satin shoes. Her body had braced itself as she had gone over the edge of her father’s steam yacht, the Monarch Princesses, but she still felt the shock of hitting the surface. She quickly brought her head above the water, gasped, and screamed.
“John! John!” She frantically splashed around, doing a furious twist and spin as she treaded water, her light pink satin shoes falling off and disappearing, far below the surface. Rain fell all around her, roughing up the surface of the lake, making it harder to see with the darkness of the night sky.
“Help!” she called again for her five-year-old son, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her. Her eyes scanned the surface of the water for any sign of his blond hair.
She twisted around toward where the steam yacht still floated, and heard the distant shouts of the captain and guests still on board. The boat was strung with tiny white lights that glowed like fireflies against the water. A crack of lightning crossed the sky like a crooked branch from one of the maple trees that lined the shore, and the rain began to fall harder.
And still, no sign of her son.
In the distance, on the other side of the water, she could see Monarch Manor, lit up like one of the Chinese lanterns they had released into the air from the edge of the estate. The lanterns floated up into the cloudless blue sky as the wedding guests made silly wishes fueled by champagne, raspberry petit fours, and brandy.
“For a never-ending barrel of ale and for the Chicago Cubs to win the World Championship series once again,” Randall Whittingham had said as he puffed on a cigar, which led to a chorus of laughter from the guests, dressed in their finest furs and dresses, and the most handsome tuxedoes.
“For the bride and groom to be blessed for many years,” Amelia had said when it was her turn to release her lantern. She looked back and gave her sister Jane and her new husband, Edward, a warm smile. They lifted their champagne glasses in thanks, and the guests had collectively sighed.
Of course, Amelia said her own silent wish—the real wish that lay in her heart, the wish that she couldn’t share with anyone. A prayer, really, more than a wish.
Please. Please let John be safe. Tonight and forever.
And from the dark water, she could see that the party still continued. The refreshment tent was decorated with twinkle lights and oak branches that wound around the support poles, providing cover to the guests below as they sipped their cocktails. A trail of lights connected the tent to the ice-cream station, where a white-gloved waiter handed out miniature sundaes in dishes shaped like her father’s beloved yacht.
“John . . . John!” she weakly called into the night. All of her senses were both heightened and dulled at the same time—she could hear nothing in her ears but the rush of her own blood, but she knew if she so much as heard a whimper from him a mile away she would detect it. Her vision became a blurred sense of fairy lights peppered by the flashes of lightning, and she could smell the steam from the yacht nearby.
It grew farther and farther away from where she thrashed on the surface as the captain unsuccessfully tried to turn such a large boat around in such a short time.
She watched Monarch Manor and the yacht grow farther away as the waves pushed her toward the center of the lake, where the deepest water lay: The Narrows. Her arms burned from the effort of keeping herself above the water. The beading and crystals on the dress, hand-sewn in by her mother’s seamstress in Chicago, were like tiny anchors, pulling her down toward the bottom of the black water.
She called out John’s name one more time, as the clouds opened up and rain fell in dark sheets, obscuring the view of her childhood home.
Present Day
I never really thought about the things that people leave behind when they die. And by things I don’t mean people or treasured family heirlooms, but the small pieces that inhabit junk drawers, like souvenir coins and old refrigerator magnets. We know those things are worthless, yet we can’t seem to throw them away, so they get stashed away in a domestic purgatory, stuck somewhere in between trash and treasure. There they stay until it becomes someone else’s duty to decide what we should let go.
I was never more keenly aware of this small piece of human nature than on the warm October morning when I slid a silver key into the door of my grandmother’s house in Powers Lake, Wisconsin, and surveyed the enormous amount of stuff inside. Even from the front porch, I could see that she hadn’t thrown away anything in the years before she died.
I took a small step inside, narrowly avoiding a six-foot-tall metal knight standing at attention in the foyer. I remember once when I visited her as a child I had asked her where she had gotten it, as I didn’t imagine they were for sale at the nearby Tobin Drugs. She had smiled and whispered, “Garage sale.” Of course, at eight years old, I hadn’t thought to ask why.
“Why, oh, why,” I muttered under my breath as I slowly turned around, my eyes widening at the three china cabinets filled with porcelain figurines in the living room, and the jungle of dusty plastic plants decorating every corner of the dining room.
In the coat closet, I found boxes stacked end to end. I gingerly peeled back the flaps of the closest cardboard box, and the top nearly crumbled in my hands. Inside was a pile of wire hangers, haphazardly stacked on top of one another, knotting into a small metal sculpture that would certainly never be dismantled.
“Well, looks like I have my work cut out for me,” I muttered as I fanned my face with my hand, to no avail. Even though it was autumn and the Midwest weather had already begun to listen to the whispers of winter in the early-morning hour, the warm air in the house hung motionless and stale.
I was about to pick up the box of Joan Crawford’s favorite things and begin a pile for trash when I heard my mother’s voice boom across the front yard.
“Erin, my love! Where the hell are you?” My mom, Mary Ellen, trudged into the house, her black boots marching across the linoleum floor with a satisfying click clack with every footstep. She wore ripped blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. Under her arm she carried her motorcycle helmet. She turned to close the front door and jumped when she saw the knight.
“Every time. Every. Time,” she said with a sigh. She looked up at the ceiling. “Mom, I know you’re laughing right now.” She rolled her eyes before she walked over and gave me a tight hug.
I closed my eyes and inhaled the familiar scent of her earthy leather jacket mixed with the sweetness of her Marilyn Miglin perfume, a combination that could not have been more quintessentially my mother. I had seen her at my grandmother’s funeral two weeks prior, although it felt like longer. Right before she turned eighty, my grandmother had died peacefully in her sleep, her hair still in curlers and her housecoat hung on the bedpost.
“Ready to work?” I said as I swept my hand around. “Grandma definitely didn’t slow down her ‘collections’ at any point.” I hadn’t been in her house for a few years, as she preferred to visit us at our house, ninety minutes south in Illinois. I think she was worried my twins would break something. Which, given even the most cursory glance around the house, was a likely scenario.
“Well, let’s stop screwing around and get to it, huh?” My mother’s Wisconsin roots showed in every vowel pronunciation, and I fought back my usual urge to tease her about it.
We looked at each other and shrugged before I headed toward the coat closet and my mother went into the living room to start tackling the cabinets stuffed with Precious Moments figurines.
“I don’t think this is what the estate sale company meant by ‘valuable items,’ ” I said as I opened up a box of pens and a half-used pad of paper. I flipped through the filled pages. “Apparently, Grandma was very meticulous about saving her grocery lists.” I closed the box and slid it into the hallway, into the ever-growing pile of boxes marked Trash.
“Listen, hon: Just keep going. As I told you yesterday, we need to get through everything, as hard as it might be.” Her lined face softened for a moment as she surveyed her childhood home, but she shook her head and turned her attention back to the porcelain figures. “Man, she never really collected this stuff until after I moved out. And for that I’m glad. I can’t imagine growing up in a house with this many . . . eyes.” She frowned at a figure of a child holding binoculars.
“For sure. Although I shouldn’t talk. I have boxes and boxes in my basement filled with random junk, too,” I said. “I’m sure Katie will be so sad she’s missing all of this.” My younger sister, Katie, had moved to New York the year before, to take a job in public relations for a major media outlet. Which meant she escaped family responsibilities exactly like this one. Unmarried, no kids—and no desire for any of the above—her life could not have been more different from mine. Even the finality of a mortgage terrified her, let alone the milestones of suburbs, school, house, twins, husband, and car payments that seemed to dominate my world.
I carefully spun around like I was a caterpillar building a cozy cocoon, unsure of what to go through next, when a chest in the corner of the dining room caught my eye. It sat under a secretary desk covered in antique eyeglasses. The metal and leather box had a healthy layer of dust on top and was guarded by a metal hinge worthy of a tetanus shot. “Open sesame,” I said. Gingerly, I lifted the rusty latch up and opened the chest, praying that a family of mice hadn’t somehow found a way to make it their home.
I exhaled when I saw it was empty except for a yellowed envelope full of black-and-white photos on the very bottom. I was about to pull the pictures out of the envelope when my phone’s alarm went off.
“Shoot,” I said as I saw the time. We had been there for over four hours, and I was due to relieve my mother-in-law, who was watching my twins after school. “I need to run,” I said to my mom as I shoved the envelope under my arm. She tossed the box of old cable bills into the trash pile and we walked out on the front porch to lock the door.
“How are my favorite kiddos?” my mom said as she kicked a leg over her Harley in the driveway.
“Great. Same. Crazy,” I said as I put my sunglasses on. “You should come and visit soon. They would love to see you.”
She nodded. “I would love to. After we get this place ready for sale.” She gave one last glance toward the house, a white ranch with black shutters and peeling paint on the siding, before she revved her engine and turned north toward East Troy, thirty minutes north in Wisconsin. She and my father had moved back to Wisconsin three years before, after my mom retired from her position as a history professor at Loyola University in Chicago, citing the need for open roads for her bike and a desire to stoke her passion for ice fishing.
I waved good-bye, and it was then that I realized I still had the envelope of black-and-white photographs in my possession. “Guess you’re going on a road trip,” I said as I tossed them into my passenger seat and pulled my car onto the highway for the ninety-minute trip home.
“Did you get cheese pizza, Daddy?” Charlotte asked. She followed my husband, Luke, into the kitchen, skipping behind him with her blond braids bobbing up and down like Pippi Longstocking.
“You know it,” I heard Luke say from the kitchen. “Erin,” he called, “bring Will in here!”
I stood in the foyer and saw Will staring out the front door at the pizza delivery guy getting back into his car. I knelt down next to Will and rubbed his back. He was getting so tall but still seemed so fragile. “Do you want some pizza, Buster Brown?” I had called him that nickname since the day he was born, five years ago. We had planned on naming him Ryan, but the instant I saw him I knew his name was Will. I always said that he chose his name, not me. Good thing he chose one we loved.
Will didn’t turn to look at me. His eyes stared blankly out the window, his mind retreating to some small corner of his existence like a mouse hiding in a wall. “Do you want pizza—yes or no?” I firmly patted his back, trying to bring him back. Concrete questions were always better than open-ended ones.
He slowly turned toward me, his multicolored eyes looking through me like I was nothing but a window in between him and the wall. His sister had eyes that were a light cornflower blue, but Will’s eyes changed nearly every year—sometimes gray, sometimes brown, occasionally green. His mouth twisted to the side as he lifted his fist and made the sign for “yes,” while softly humming.
I smiled and grabbed his hand and led him into the tiny kitchen of our one-hundred-year-old house. Luke and I had bought the house four years earlier, when the twins were barely walking. He wasn’t sure about the uneven floors or the scary basement that had a concrete floor and a plethora of wolf spiders, but I instantly fell in love with it. I loved that the wooden baseboards were wider than anything you would see in a McMansion, that the closet under the stairs was only about five feet tall, and that the moldings in the family room were hand-carved. Yet most of all, I loved the large trees that surrounded the house—nothing like the wimpy juvenile trees planted around the teardowns that peppered the neighborhood. It was small, but it was perfect. “Like our family,” I remember cheerfully saying at the closing as Luke half-rolled his eyes. My assumptions at the time were that if we had a beautiful home only easy, perfect things would happen there.
In the kitchen, Charlotte was already pawing at a slice of cheese pizza. I led Will to a seat next to her, and Luke put a slice of pizza in front of him.
Will looked at the pizza and screeched in delight, clapping wildly. I meticulously cut it into tiny bites and put a fork in his hand. He threw it on the floor and started to scream, fists flying in the air in frustration. Charlotte expertly leaned away to avoid being hit as she took another bite of pizza, a sauce ring forming around her mouth.
I placed my hands over his and firmly asked, “What’s wrong? Are you thirsty? Do you want water?” He warbled, and I turned toward the fridge, silently admonishing myself for not making him look at me and request the drink via a sign or gesture. Next time, I promised myself.
I filled Will’s sippy cup with water and placed it next to Charlotte’s glass and he stopped screaming. Both kids silent, I absentmindedly twirled Charlotte’s braids around my finger, my mental to-do list growing exponentially longer. Besides all of the preparation for the afternoons I would be gone as I helped my mother in Powers Lake, I still had several hours of research into therapies ahead of me after the twins went to bed. Kindergarten in our district was only a half-day program, with the two and a half hours eaten up by a variety of basic needs and tasks, so anything extra, especially anything that required concentration or silence, had to be done at night.
“Mommy, stop. That’s irritating,” Charlotte said, and swatted my hand away.
I released her hair and smiled, wondering where she picked up that word. It seemed like every day she learned something new—a new name, a new word, a new fact about the world. It all came so easily to her, and all we had to do was try to keep up.
“So, how was the house?” Luke leaned against the kitchen counter and poured himself a beer.
“Stuffed to the gills, as expected,” I said as I blotted my pizza slice with a napkin. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Will examine each piece of food, expecting him to find a flaw and refuse to eat—again—as Charlotte began to sing a song about the black spots on ladybugs.
“At least it’s quiet.” He put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed as his eyes flickered to the twins.
I laughed and leaned against his chest, enjoying a brief moment of safe respite. “There’s that, at least.”
“Think you’ll find anything valuable hidden away in some closet?” he said as he released me and I relaxed back on the countertop.
“Like earplugs?” I smiled as Charlotte’s song grew louder before Will screeched at her in annoyance and she stopped.
“Exactly. Hopefully a pair for me, too,” he said. “Seriously, though, I’m glad you’re getting a break. When’s the last time you had some time to yourself?” he said.
I glanced at the twins, Charlotte separating her pizza into piles of dough and cheese, and Will flapping his hands, and smiled. “Five years, I’d guess.” Although it was likely longer than that. My pregnancy with the twins was difficult, dotted with bed rest and three solid months of contractions before I finally had them. Then, there was the difficult task of caring for two newborns who never slept at the same time. And finally, chasing after two toddlers who always seemed to run in opposite directions.
And all of that was before we found out about Will.
Done flapping, he picked up his plate and smashed it on the floor.
It was just another plate, another material thing we could easily replace, but as I swept up the jagged pieces and cut my finger, it seemed to hurt everywhere.
Luke was already in bed when I walked into the bedroom. He had on his dark-brown-rimmed glasses that reminded me of Clark Kent. He didn’t look up from his phone as I collapsed next to him. His thick black hair had fallen across his forehead as he peered down at the screen. “Think you’ll sleep at all tonight?” he asked.
I laughed as I surveyed the clean laundry still haphazardly thrown on the bed in crumpled piles. “Not likely.”
He took off his glasses and stared at the rumpled clothing. “Look, my mom can help with all that. And I’ll say it again: You should just stay up there in Wisconsin. Find a hotel. Have a real break.”
I gave him a small smile and shook my head. “You know I won’t do that.”
Luke crossed his arms over his ratty college T-shirt with Crowd Control on the front—a leftover from his bouncer days in college. He was over a foot taller than me and broad chested, so the shirt had been a perfect fit when I was pregnant with the twins. I don’t think he ever forgave me for accidentally washing it with a pair of pink socks, though, as the shirt now had a faint rose color. “Rosé all day,” I had laughed the week before as he rolled his eyes.
“Someone else can take care of the twins for a few days. Really,” he said.
I picked up an old hoodie, a leftover from my bachelorette party ten years ago with Mrs. Marinelli bedazzled on the back. The previous week, Charlotte had found it buried in a drawer and worn it around the house like a cape. I shoved the hoodie and the rest of the laundry off the bed. “Nope. I can’t leave Will for that long.”
“Okay, fine.” Luke closed his eyes, while I grabbed my laptop and propped myself up in bed, notebook full of therapy and treatment notes at my elbow. I sighed and began to click through the layers of Web sites I had bookmarked the night before. Every night, after the twins were finally asleep, I stayed up late to research different therapies and interventions for Will, sorting through all the information in the hope of finding some breakthrough that would propel his life into a new, easier chapter. One where he could finally tell us what he wanted, without the frustration of signs and gestures. One where the world wasn’t so terrifying and painful for him.
One where he could play, make friends. Sleep through the night. Stop wearing a diaper.
Find peace.
This routine had gone on for three years. When the twins were two, we had a gnawing suspicion that Will wasn’t developing like his sister. Charlotte wasn’t just precocious or an early talker, as we first reasoned. No, she was typical . . . and it became clearer with each passing milestone that Charlotte reached and Will missed that something was wrong.
When he was two and a half years old, we took him to a local developmental pediatrician, Dr. Dorner, a kindly old man who reminded me of my next-door neighbor growing up. He looked at us—I’ll never forget the look in his eyes: a mixture of resignation and defeat—and said the word we were so afraid to hear: autism.
It was just a word, and not even a four-letter one. Yet it went off like a bomb that scattered dust into every corner of our lives, forever separating our family into Before and After.
At first, I thought of the quirky kids who go on to work for NASA or who find some new mathematical theory. Yet it was imminently clear that wasn’t Will’s variety of autism. Severe, is what the official diagnosis report from Dr. Dorner said, impacting all skills and quality of life. He will need intensive therapy and intervention.
So each night I devoted hours that should have been spent sleeping to finding ways to help him. And it was not a fruitless task. Each night, I found another story of a child who had this therapy or that intervention, one the parents might never have thought to try if it weren’t for Internet research, and now their child was indistinguishable from their peers. There was hope; there had to be—others had climbed the autism Mount Everest and come down on the other side.
This will be us, I always thought as I read of a formerly nonverbal child giving a speech to their class or of a kid moving from a self-contained special education classroom to mainstream, without an aide. I even read about children who lost their autism diagnosis completely due to. . .
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