CHAPTER TWENTY
Jeremey
I couldn’t believe we actually lost.
Part of me was sure it had been a mistake. How could they vote for the bill when so many people had showed up to tell them to vote against it? How?
It was as if from the moment the call went out that the bill had passed, that we had lost, the world rippled. I felt like I’d fallen into the wrong timeline. I was sure we’d win. I was sure we had won. This had to be a mistake. It wasn’t possible for us to have lost. Not with all these people. Not with all our chanting and our…
It didn’t make sense. How could we have lost? How?
As I hurried with the others through the crowd, as Kaya and Mai cleared us a path through the people crying and whispering—There they go, that’s them, The Roosevelt Blues Brothers, the ones who sang, oh my God, they must be so upset right now—all I could think was how this was a mix-up, how somewhere else there was a version of me celebrating our victory, not rushing away trying not to cry.
Except I was crying. Tears kept running down my face, and by the time we left the building, I was sobbing.
The others were too—Darren kept his head bowed, but he would make these little gasps every now and again, and his shoulders would shake. Emmet was flapping, the kind of flapping he did when he didn’t want to flap but couldn’t help himself. David wept, hard enough he was making it difficult for himself to breathe, and he had to work to keep his airway clear.
Mai kept trying to soothe me, pawing my leg to comfort me, but I didn’t know how to explain to her there was nowhere to take me right now, no way to calm me. This was a hurt she wasn’t trained to mend, that nothing could fix.
Kaya was crying too, but she kept pulling herself together—she’d sort of fall to pieces, see how lost we were, then straighten up and find some kind of new strength. “I can’t get a hold of Bob or Marietta. They were up in the balcony, and there are too many people using cell phones. Signal’s jammed.” She wiped her eyes furiously, trying to pull herself together. “I’ll get the van and bring it over. You guys wait over there by the loading zone, okay?” She left, but she kissed us all on the forehead first, even Darren. “It’s going to be okay.” Her voice broke, and new tears fell from her eyes. “We’re not going to give up, do you hear me? We’re not done fighting. Nothing stops The Roosevelt Blues Brothers. I’ve got your back. And right now I’ve got your van.”
I felt lost when she left. There were too many other people around us, all of them staring. We were still in our costumes, and for the first time I didn’t feel cool in them. I felt conspicuous. We weren’t the heroes anymore, or at least not right now. We were the losers. We were crying, vulnerable, falling apart, descending into the aspects of our disabilities we didn’t want put on display. I could feel my panic attack ready to burst out of me. Emmet looked as if he wanted a wall to bang his head against. David was jerky and upset, drooling from his crying. I didn’t know Darren’s breakdowns well enough to predict them, but I knew it wasn’t pretty either, that he’d start making noises and gestures that would make him seem strange and awkward, unfamiliar.
A woman came out of the crowd, tears on her face. She had her hands up in front of her in a kind of Don’t mind me, I’m harmless gesture. “Let us help you. Let us help you get to the loading zone.” More tears fell, and her voice broke, but she kept going. “Tell us what you need, and we’ll help you.”
Darren tugged on my arm and signed desperately. I swallowed the lump in my throat, watching him sign. Then I took deep breaths to calm myself and repeated what he’d said out loud. “We need less people looking at us. We need a safe space.”
The woman nodded, but before she could speak, a man appeared beside her. He faced the crowd and cupped his hands around his mouth.
“Hey. Everybody, turn to the parking lot, and quiet please. The Roosevelt Blues Brothers need our help.”
He had to shout it a few more times, but soon people quieted, and they started to turn away from us.
The man kept talking. “This is what they asked us for. This is what they need from us so they can get to their van and get out of here safely. Please be respectful and give this to them.”
Then the man quieted too, and he also kept his back to us.
We went, slowly, to the loading zone. Emmet flapped more now, and hummed, letting out his pain. His hums were his sobs, and they tore me up inside, mingling with Darren’s bark-sobs. We were a kind of funeral procession, David leading, occasionally slamming his fist on his tray and swearing, Mai whining at me, confused because she couldn’t decide how to help me and none of her attempts were working.
Everyone had their backs to us, but all the people we passed were crying too. They cried harder as we went by, their shoulders shaking, sobs bursting out at odd intervals, mixing with ours. They stayed turned away, though, and it was easier with them not looking. It was a kindness, to be able to melt down without having as much of an audience, though they could still hear us. Though they still knew.
At some point someone began to sing. It was slow, soft, and disorganized, the voices not quite in sync or in the same key, and at first I couldn’t understand what they were doing. They were talking, chanting I supposed, but because I had heard it so much from Emmet, I recognized it as the opening monologue to “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” the song from the Blues Brothers movie.
And then the crowd sang the song to us. Softly. Out of tune. Like a lullaby. Telling us they needed someone to love. Telling us they needed us, us, us. When they got to the instrumental section, they hummed it, and they broke out into parts, some people singing as if they were the instruments, others singing the words. All the while they remained turned away.
Everybody needs somebody to love.
I need you.
Emmet didn’t sing along, and he didn’t dance. It was the first time I’d seen him hear this song and not join in. I don’t know if the singing helped us or not, or if it hurt, or if it did nothing. I suppose it meant something to me, that once we were in the van and we were driving in the silence home to Ames, as I sat hugging Mai, letting her lick my tears, I thought of the huge crowd of strangers singing to us, singing our song. Except it wasn’t a song we’d ever sung. I wondered why they hadn’t sung “Try Everything,” or “Happy.” I wonder why they sang that one.
Everybody needs somebody to love.
I need you.
We’d had a party planned for after the vote, but we weren’t going to it now. We were going home, to The Roosevelt. Jan had texted me, telling me she’d come over, but I asked her to give me time first. I wanted to make sure my friends were okay and to give myself a little time too.
Except it was almost worse once we were home. The staff and residents from The Roosevelt were there, and they were upset too. The staff had been crying. Some of the residents had been too, but some had never understood what was going on in the first place.
Stuart approached me in the lounge. I didn’t want to talk to him at first. I didn’t have my usual patience for his loud noises and intensity, and I almost told Mai to make him go away. But the song from the parking lot still echoed in my head. All those strangers singing to us. Helping us.
Everybody needs somebody to love.
I need you.
My tears started up again, but I didn’t wipe them away, and I didn’t turn from Stuart as he shuffled toward me, as he pressed in too close. His expression was tense, upset.
He knew. From overhearing, from listening to the aides whisper, from watching the feed over their shoulders. He wasn’t looking in my eyes, but somehow I knew he knew everything about what had happened. My heart skipped several beats, and the room spun a bit as the world reoriented, my perception shifting. That couldn’t be right, though. Everyone had always told me Stuart didn’t understand what was going on.
Was Stuart…had everyone…all this time, had we…?
Stuart’s moan morphed into a sad screech, and then he threw his arms around my neck and began to rock me gently.
I stood there, dazed, shaking, barely able to breathe as Stuart pressed himself heavily against me. Comforting me. He was comforting me. I shut my eyes, let out my breath. Let him comfort me. Let him love me.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
He patted my back clumsily and made a mewling noise, kind of like Chewbacca. My heart clenched. We’ve been ignoring you. But when I pulled away, this thought burning in my heart, no doubt on my face, he’d turned away from me, retreating into his usual Stuart-space.
No, I realized. We hadn’t been ignoring him. He’d been ignoring us.
Most of us, anyway. Maybe I’d nudge Emmet to reconsider talking to Stuart more the next time he approached him.
Right now, however, Emmet wasn’t going to talk to anyone. Everyone else had gone to their rooms. Emmet was upstairs, and when I caught up with him, he was unlocking the door to our apartment. When he saw me, he signed that he loved me, then went to his room and locked his door. I heard his foam hammer, heard him shout, and then silence. I assumed he was in his closet in his sensory sack.
I lay in my bed with Mai. She brought me my anxiety medicine, and I let it dull the painful edges of my sorrow, but I could find nowhere inside me safe to retreat. Only softer dullness. I kept circling back to the feeling of impossibility, that this was all wrong. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. We weren’t supposed to be here.
The drug swamped me, flattening me out, and Mai licked my chin, trying to remind me she was there, to comfort me, but I had too much sorrow inside me. I thought of the people we’d met along our journey, the people we hadn’t been able to help. Kaya had tried to boost us up on the drive home, reminding us we had more fighting to do, that we still had the foundation, but it felt so hollow.
They could erase it all so easily. We did so much, we brought so many people, and the lobbyists simply walked around the room, shook hands, and took our effort away. For some of us, they took our lives away. How was this okay? How were we supposed to fight when they could do that?
How am I supposed to feel like a full person when you treat me like this?
Eventually Mai began to whine, worried for me, tugging at me to tell me she wanted me to get up and walk, to connect with someone. I didn’t want to, but I thought she might be right, so I texted Jan. She came to get me, and I left a note for Emmet before I let her take Mai and me to her hotel room, where I let her hold me on her bed, and I cried some more.
I cried so much. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried like that in my life.
“Oh, baby.” Jan held me close and stroked my hair. She was crying too, but she kept trying to soothe me. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say, and I hate seeing you like this. It shouldn’t have passed. Everyone is so upset. They had to adjourn the session because the people in the balcony wouldn’t stop yelling. I think they arrested some people, maybe, but I don’t know. People are still at the capitol, chanting, fighting.”
But the vote had still passed. Another sob broke out of me, burning my throat. I didn’t know how I could keep crying. I felt as if someone had wrung me out, that there couldn’t be anything left, but it kept coming. “We worked so hard. And it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say that.” She pulled me closer, kissing my forehead, stroking my hair. “It mattered. It mattered to so many people. To me. To the mom at that restaurant. Did you know she posted the video of Emmet on Facebook, and it’s gone crazy viral? It’s everywhere. People are doing response videos to it too. Do you think that’s going to stop because of this vote? Do you think the people who shut down the legislative session and camped out at the capitol are going to simply go home and forget this? Do you think I am?”
The deepest well of sorrow rose within me, the thing I hadn’t said yet, what I was too ashamed to say. To Jan, here alone, I admitted it in the quietest whisper. “I don’t know if I can keep going, though. I don’t know if I can do this again.”
“Sweetheart.” She rocked me gently, her tears falling on my hair. “You don’t have to do anything, not yet. Not right away. Rest a bit. Let other people fight for a while. Mend your broken heart. Let us handle things while you recover. It’s like Emmet said. We’re all Roosevelt Blues Brothers now.”
She held me until I fell asleep, and I slept for hours, with Mai beside me. When I woke up, Jan brought me a pizza, and we ate together before she took me to The Roosevelt.
Emmet had come out of his sensory sack—his mother had come over and helped soothe him, and she was at our apartment often for the next week, bringing us meals, helping Emmet. At first he didn’t go to work and spent most of his time in his room or in his rocking chair watching trains, but eventually he went back to Workiva, because he agreed a schedule was better for him.
He didn’t talk much to anyone, only to me and to his mother. He refused to talk about the vote or the foundation, or the project.
David and Darren were a bit better, though Darren was also subdued. He spent a great deal of time on his computer—a lot of time on his computer—and he too wouldn’t talk about the foundation or the project or anything that had happened. David, however, was another story entirely. When we went on walks together with Mai, he talked about how he felt, and sometimes he became so emotional he cried.
“I don’t understand. It shouldn’t have happened. I don’t get how they’re allowed to just do that.”
I didn’t understand either. “Kaya says they’re counting on people not caring by the time the elections come around. People are too distracted.”
“Well, we have to make sure they’re not too distracted, then.”
I twitched, a flicker of panic rising at the idea of fighting once more only to taste another kind of defeat. I didn’t want to do that ever again. But I didn’t say so to David.
It was true, though, how other people were still fighting. I could see it. The Roosevelt Foundation was getting stronger every day, and Kaya was clearly thriving, working there. She came by The Roosevelt all the time, and by the second week in July she’d hired David and Darren officially, no longer part of any grant or special project, though they wouldn’t be making much money.
She tried to hire me, but I told her I wasn’t ready. She said as soon as I was, I had a job waiting for me. I knew, though, I would only ever work as David’s aide, never as an official employee like David or Darren. It wasn’t the way I was ever going to help shelter the sea.
I did watch Darren and David work plenty, though. Darren’s job was to scour the Internet for stories relevant to the foundation and the cause in general, and he was excellent at it. David helped too, but he did more of the sorting, deciding where they went and what they might mean, and talking with people in social situations. In a way I suppose I was working for the foundation because I was right there, watching them, helping David when his software couldn’t quite do what he needed it to do and I had to give him an assist, helping him set up his appointments with people.
In doing so, I saw not only were other people helping and fighting, I saw how we, The Roosevelt Blues Brothers, had a more significant impact than I had ever imagined.
Jan had told me about Emmet’s video going viral, about people doing responses to it, but I didn’t understand what she meant until I saw the phenomenon for myself. The original video had hundreds of thousands of hits on Facebook, but many of the responses had high counts too. Some were kids in Roosevelt Blues Brothers outfits, and some were adults or young adults. Some were clearly people like us, people with some kind of disability, but some were people on the mean, and those people usually told stories about family members or friends.
They moved me so much, because they talked about people with social anxiety like me, and they talked about me, how the stories about me had helped them feel normal. Some of them talked about David. Some of them talked about Darren—there were several videos of people with cerebral palsy or severe autism with additional complications or a disability that made it difficult for them to speak or made it so they couldn’t at all, and Darren was their hero of choice.
But there were so many who loved Emmet. So many little boys who said Emmet was their Elwood Blues, their Roosevelt Blues Brother. They sang “Try Everything” or “Happy” or simply stood there flapping and grinning, their gazes locked slightly away from the camera. I wanted more than anything for Emmet to come downstairs to David’s room and see them, or to log on to his own computer and see them himself.
Emmet wouldn’t.
He got angry if anyone brought up the topic, even three weeks after the vote. He was fine at work, and he didn’t have any explosions at The Roosevelt, but this was only if we didn’t push him and only if we didn’t bring up the vote or anything related to it. Which became a problem as the viral videos kept spreading.
The movement hadn’t died. If anything, it had grown, and exponentially. The Roosevelt Foundation had donations pouring in every day from all over the world. The legislators at the statehouse were still inundated with calls, and the governor was under pressure to not sign the bill. The conventional wisdom was he still would, that the vote would pass no matter what, but it felt as if the whole state was on fire. The newspapers were full of angry letters, and the reporters were writing article after article.
And they kept coming to talk to us.
Not only local news, either—because of the videos, the national news wanted to talk to us too. The morning talk shows kept playing the video, and they wanted to interview Amanda Beatty and her son, but she hadn’t come forward because she wouldn’t do it without Emmet. And Emmet wouldn’t let us tell him what was going on.
Sometimes I wondered if he knew. He was on his computer, he went to work—he had to have seen or heard some of it. I hated that he wasn’t telling me, how he wouldn’t let me in. I understood why, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t care for it at all.
Especially since the more I watched the movement rise, the more I wanted to rejoin it, to take my place inside it again. But I didn’t want to do it without Emmet beside me.
The longer our silence went on, the more The Roosevelt Blues Brothers didn’t appear, the more the fervor for us rose. Reporters began showing up outside the building. They tried to talk to Emmet on his way to work. They haunted Amanda and her son as they went to the grocery store. They followed David and Darren and me and Mai, and eventually we couldn’t go anywhere without being harassed.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to argue with Emmet, because he’d get angry with me. We had to do something, though, and we had to do it soon.
When I had the idea, I wasn’t sure if it was a good one or not. I called Kaya, apologizing before I told her because I was already unsure, but she said it was a great idea and wanted to try it right away. So I paced the lounge, making Mai uneasy because she could read my anxiety, but there wasn’t much else to do but wait.
When Kaya texted me, I’ve got them, we’re on our way, get him ready, I was even more nervous. But I went upstairs, rubbed Mai’s head to calm myself, and went into my apartment to talk to my fiancé.
Emmet was in his rocking chair, rocking and flapping his hands. He didn’t face me as I came in, but he stopped rocking. “Hello, Jeremey.”
“Hi, Emmet.” I stood near him, trembling with nerves. “We have a visitor coming to see us. Or, to be accurate, you do. Someone is coming to see you.”
He flapped a little harder. “I don’t want to see anyone right now.”
“It’s Neil Beatty.”
Emmet stopped flapping. He turned toward me, looking near my shoulder. “He’s the boy I made a video for.”
“Yes. The reporters are bothering him and his family too. His mother is hoping you’d be willing to meet with him, hoping seeing you will help calm him. She posted the video on Facebook to share with her family, and it went viral.” It dawned on me he was letting me talk to him, and everything began to spill out. I tried to keep it from veering into something that would make him shut down, but I felt like I was driving a mine cart on a rickety track with no brakes. “Very viral. A lot of people made response videos, and they’re viral too. All the news places want to talk to him, and to you and to us, and it’s difficult to make them stop. She isn’t sending him to ask you to do anything about that, but if you would talk with Neil, she’d be so grateful.” I drew a breath. “We all would.”
I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what he would say, to be honest. All I knew was the whole world balanced on his answer, my whole world. Please, I begged him silently, knowing he couldn’t read the desperation on my face, my hopes, my silent signals. I had to rely on my words, on my logic. On my love, on his.
Please, Emmet. Please come out of your shell again for me. For you. For Neil. For us.
Emmet turned away, rocking and flapping gently, more soothingly. “All right.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. I wanted to hug him so badly, but I knew better, so I hugged Mai instead. “Thank you,” I whispered, then hurried to go meet Amanda and Neil.