Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

“Who are you?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“Not so many days ago, I had a son. He was a good kid. He was sweet and he was kind. But he’s not here anymore. Do you know what happened to him?”

“Maybe you left him in Billings, you bitch.”

My left arm shoots out, and my hand grabs Kyle by his coat. This surprises me, as I did not ask my left arm and hand to do any such thing.

“Let go of me, you fucking freak.”

Donna slaps Kyle across the face. Hard. The sound of her hand against his skin reverberates (I love the word “reverberates”) through the cold in this empty park.

Kyle looks at her. He looks shocked, like someone told him something incredible and scary. He looks at me. Donna is twitching beside me. I want to start running and not stop until I am away from here and what just happened.

And then Kyle starts crying. He cries and he cries and Donna stops twitching, and she reaches for her boy, and he tries to shove her off, but she reaches for him again, and he lets her pull him in. He sobs into her shoulder, and Donna is crying, too. There’s a very small voice inside of me that says I should hug them, but that impulse does not prevail.

I sit down on a park bench and I watch them.

I wish I weren’t here, but I also feel like this is where I am supposed to be.

Those two things, together, make no sense.

How can I help my friend when I am lost, too?

By Kyle’s own action, he is stuck in his bedroom again, the door closed. Donna says she isn’t sure if Kyle is locked away from the rest of us, or if we’re locked away from him. This is one of the things I like about Donna. She is clearly hurting for her son, and though she can cry and hug him when he needs it, she’s also not one to let him slide when he acts inappropriately and calls her a nasty name like “bitch.” (I’m setting aside, for a moment, the fact that he called me a freak. That hurt my feelings, but I’m trying to remember that none of these things with Kyle are about me. He will have to do something to repair his relationship with me. That much is clear. But that can wait for another time.)

Donna takes away his Wii and his computer. She tells him that he needs to sit quietly and think about things, and that he can come out when Victor comes home. Together, as a family—and it makes me feel good that Donna includes me in that word, “family”—we will all sit down and talk about Kyle and where we will go from here.

Even though these are awful circumstances, I’m glad to be part of this. I usually don’t get to help sort out adult situations with other adults. When I think about it rationally, which is what I always try to do, I can see that this is an understandable response, given some of the things I have struggled with, but being left out of things for my own benefit still frustrates me. What few people outside of my friends and family seem to grasp is that I am not too stupid to understand adult problems. I am not stupid at all. I’m developmentally disabled, and so I process information in ways that often don’t make sense to the people they call neurotypical. (I love the word “neurotypical.”)

There’s something else that people don’t realize. Because of my long association with Dr. Buckley, I have come to know something about rage and how to control it, or at least mitigate it. When I began to see Dr. Buckley, I was consumed with rage, although I didn’t realize it, and I did not know how to let it go or channel it into something constructive. I had been ordered to stay at least five hundred feet away from Garth Brooks and to not send him any more letters of complaint, even though I still contend that he ruined country music. I had been fired from a job—that time for my conduct and not as an involuntary separation. I had been banned from an Albertsons in Billings—not my favorite one, the one on Grand Avenue and Thirteenth Street West, but the one on Sixth Street West—because I had knocked down an old lady, even though I still contend that was not my fault.

Dr. Buckley helped me overcome all of that. She helped me see that writing my letters of complaint could be a positive action, in that it would allow me to blow off steam in the act of writing. I could then file the letter away without ever sending it. That didn’t make a lot of sense at first, but it really does work. These days, I no longer write a daily letter of complaint, although I will write one if someone genuinely wrongs me. In those cases I even send the letter, and I’ve often seen positive results (in November, for instance, I got ten free pizzas because one that was delivered to my house arrived soggy and I wrote a letter of complaint). When Dr. Buckley and I began working together, I would not have thought it possible that I could write a letter of complaint and not get in trouble for it later.

In addition to all of that, Dr. Buckley taught me coping strategies for rage and frustration. Sometimes I close my eyes and let the flash of anger pass before I take any action. Sometimes I sleep on things and wake up with a new perspective. And sometimes I even get angry and show it, although not very often. The point is that most reasonable actions, even anger, have their place. It’s just a matter of learning how to judge the situation and the propriety (I love the word “propriety”) of the moment. That, among other things, is what Dr. Buckley has helped me to do. I am not saying I’m perfect at it; no one is perfect. I am saying that I’m better than I was before I started seeing her.

I know this sounds like bragging. I do not wish to do that. I’m simply trying to say that if Kyle needs my help developing any of these coping strategies, I will be happy to provide it. I’ve had practice.

Donna and I are having coffee at the kitchen table. She is having coffee, anyway. I am having sugar-free hot chocolate, because I don’t like coffee and because Donna didn’t have any chai tea, which I do like. Discovering that was the only good thing to come of my misadventure in Bozeman, although I’m not sure that chai tea was worth a punch in the face from the intemperate young man.

Donna has a grave look, which I understand. Today has not been easy, nor has it been fun.

“Edward,” she says. “I want to talk to you about something. I want us to talk about it now so when it comes up tonight when Victor’s home and we all sit down to chat, you won’t be surprised by it.”

“OK.”

“I think you’re going to need to go back home.”

I feel an ache in my stomach.

“OK. Why?”

She looks at me, and tears have begun to build up in her eyes. I reach out and catch one on my thumb before it runs down her face. This surprises her. It surprises me, too.

“I hate to say it,” she says. “I hate it. But this thing is so much bigger and more awful than I imagined, and I think we’re going to need all the time and effort we can muster to save Kyle from whatever’s got hold of him.”

I agree with what Donna is saying, and I try to communicate this to her by nodding.

She goes on. “You’re a part of this family, Edward. I want you to know that. When Kyle came home after being expelled, he said he wanted to go back to Billings and visit you, and, honestly, we considered it. We’d still love to do it. But we can’t while he’s like this. It wouldn’t be fair to you. He’s way, way out of control. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I nod again. I get it. It still hurts me in my gut, but I think Donna is only making sense. She is a very logical woman.

“I will do whatever you think helps the most, Donna,” I say.

Donna sets her head down. She grinds her forehead into her arms, which are crossed on the table. Her shoulders heave. She is crying again.