CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Emmet
Neil Beatty was like me.
His hair was different and his face had a different shape, and it was rounder than mine had been when I was younger. But he was like me, the way I had been when I was his age and still was. I could see myself in the way he moved. The way he averted his eyes, the way his hands wanted to flap. The way his legs didn’t want to do what he wanted.
There were other ways too.
He stood near his mother, not touching her, but staying near her space too as he rocked and flapped. Then he hummed and jerked his head. “‘Try everything, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.’” He pointed to his suit, his hat, the sunglasses he was waving in his hands.
Echolalia. His mother had told me he’d been using the song to speak. I didn’t need to use the song to speak back to him, though. He’d understand me just fine. But it made me feel warm inside that he was using my song to parrot.
“I like your suit. It’s the same as mine.” It hurt to say that, though I did like his suit, that he’d had one made to match my Roosevelt Blues Brothers one. The problem was I still didn’t want to talk about the project or the vote. Although it didn’t hurt as much when I watched Neil. He looked good in his suit.
“He wears it every day.” Amanda’s voice was a whisper above her son. “I tried to get a second one, but he’ll only wear this one, his one Roosevelt Blues Brothers outfit. I don’t know what I’m going to do when it wears out.”
That made me smile. “I had a cup I had to drink out of. When it got lost, my mom replaced it with one that seemed the same, but I knew it wasn’t the right one, and I was sad. But eventually I learned to like the new one too.”
Neil kept looking at me—not right at me, but I wasn’t looking directly at him either. I noticed everything about him, though. He was fascinated with me, as much as I was with him. I wondered if this was how I had been when I dressed up with my dad to be a Blues Brother. If this is how I would have been if I could have met Dan Aykroyd.
Neil flapped his hands as if he was trying to speak. “‘I won’t give up, no I won’t give in.’”
I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say to me through his echolalia, so I waited, but he didn’t clarify. It occurred to me he might mean precisely what he said, and then I flapped, gently.
He wound up again. “‘I’ll keep on making those new mistakes.’” Then he stepped forward and did my dance routine from our performance.
He did it perfectly. He did the whole routine, singing the whole song from that point, doing his best to mimic dancing with Jeremey when it came to the part where Jeremey should have been there.
When the song was done, he flapped and rocked, staring as near my face as he could bear to.
I knew what he was telling me now, and I didn’t want to hear it. But I couldn’t be angry with him the way I was angry with everyone else. I couldn’t walk away from him. It wasn’t because he looked like me when I was little either, or because he was a kid.
It was because I knew he was right.
I ignored his mother, forgot the rest of the world. Everyone else had tried to talk to me about this, from Dr. North to my mother to Kaya to Jeremey, but I decided it had to be Neil I confessed this to, that he was the only one who could understand.
“Neil, I couldn’t save them. I let everyone down. I wasn’t the hero after all. I wasn’t Elwood Blues. I let the bad guy win, and it made me sad. I don’t want to fight him again.”
Neil shook his head vigorously. “‘Try Everything.’” He pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jacket that was folded up tight, and unfolded it with clumsy hands before pressing it into mine. “‘I won’t give up, I won’t give in!’”
I looked at the paper, reading it as Amanda asked Neil what he’d given me. Neil shooed her away, and I ignored them both. It was an email to Neil, from the Ellen show. Inviting him to come. With his mom, and with me, and with the rest of The Roosevelt Blues Brothers.
I shifted my gaze toward Neil, but I already knew what he was going to say.
“‘Try Everything.’”
I thought about the reporters bothering me every time I went anywhere. I thought about Jeremey and Kaya and David and Darren, working hard, rejoining the fight. I thought about RJ King, smiling and shaking hands with men in suits, taking the funding for the mental health projects and trying to ruin The Roosevelt and all the projects like it before they had a chance to get started.
I thought about Neil in his Blues Brothers suit, his face as cool and blank as mine and yet full of expression and hope, if you knew how to read it.
I did.
“I want to try everything,” I told him.
And the clouds inside me parted as the smile spread across Neil’s face.
We flew to California instead of taking a train.
I investigated Amtrak, because we could have gotten a sleeping car, but the show wanted us to come right away, and they pointed out it would take several days with a lot of switching to get to them by train. Plus the lines were known for their delays. Also Neil hadn’t been on a train, and we didn’t know how well he’d do on that long of a trip, plus it was tough for David because he had to be on the lower floor, and it was impossible to navigate anywhere else, which made a long trip boring.
So we went by plane. The show paid for our flights, and they booked us first class. This meant we went through different security too, which helped because security is stressful. But Kaya went ahead and talked to them, and it turned out we had fans in the security line. They really liked how Neil had on his Roosevelt Blues Brothers outfit, but when they engaged with him too much, I told them to give him space. I appreciated how they listened right away. Jeremey didn’t have any trouble with Mai either, which was good.
I wondered if this meant our message was getting across, that maybe people were paying attention after all. Maybe we hadn’t lost.
The flight wasn’t direct, so we had a layover in Denver, and we had fans there too. People recognized us everywhere we went. David kept having to lend me his sunglasses so I could pose for pictures with Neil. Eventually Kaya had to ask the airport staff to find us somewhere to sit where we could get away from the crowd, and they put us in a VIP lounge for our airline, and we had free drinks and snacks.
I noticed Neil ate and drank whatever I did, waiting to see what I chose and then taking the same thing. He always sat beside me, and if I ever flapped my hands to relieve tension, he flapped with me, smiling like we shared a secret.
There had been a weird moment at The Roosevelt before we left, with Neil and Stuart and me. We’d been waiting in the lounge to leave, and Stuart came up, I thought to bother me. But he went to Neil instead, and the thing was he didn’t bother Neil. Neil seemed happy to see him. It was almost as if they understood each other. On the way to the van that would take us to the airport, Jeremey told me I needed to reconsider Stuart, that lately he’d started to wonder if maybe Stuart wasn’t more like Darren than we’d known. Maybe not a Blues Brother, but he was still who we were fighting for, yes?
I told Jeremey I didn’t want to think about that right now. But the thing was, every time I looked at Neil, I thought about Stuart.
By the time we landed in Los Angeles I was doing a lot of flapping and humming, and so was Neil, and Darren, and the non-autistic people were doing their own versions of the same, because they were tired and overstimulated too. I worried maybe people here would recognize us the way they had in Denver, and I didn’t want to take any photos, but this time there was someone ready to pick us up as soon as we came out of the gate. The escort took us away in a big, black car with tinted windows. He and the driver talked to us through the window of the front seat of the car, telling us we could help ourselves to the refreshments, and there were all kinds of them—little sandwiches, drinks, even hamburgers and cheeseburgers in a heated bin.
The sandwiches were too complicated, too fancy, but they didn’t have sauce on them, which was good, because I was able to take them apart and make them simpler with only ham and cheese and lettuce. Neil tried to copy me, but I could tell he didn’t care for his sandwich and was nervous. He kept repeating try everything in a worried tone.
I turned to Amanda. “What does he normally eat on his sandwiches?”
“Only peanut butter. I should have put some in my carry-on, but I worried they wouldn’t let me take it through security.”
“Does he like cheese?”
“Some kinds, yes.”
I pulled the cheese from my sandwich and broke it in half and passed some to Neil. “Try everything?”
He took it hesitantly, then put it in his mouth. He chewed and nodded. “Try everything.”
We ended up eating our sandwich in pieces, the cheese and the bread only, and everyone except for Darren ate cheeseburgers and hamburgers so we could pick apart the sandwiches. I wanted to eat the ham, but Neil had tried it and didn’t like it, and if I ate it, he would try too, and this would cause a problem.
I wanted the ham, but I wanted Neil to be calm more.
Once we were at the hotel, Neil went with his mom to his room and Jeremey and I went to ours. It was quite nice and spacious. We had a beautiful view of the city, and I stood at the window with Jeremey, holding his hand, looking at the buildings, the people. But we couldn’t see the ocean. I wished we could.
“We’ll have some time after the taping.” Jeremey squeezed my hand. “We should go to the beach. I’ve never seen the ocean up close.”
I hadn’t either. I was glad I would see it for the first time with Jeremey. But then a great feeling hit me, and I checked the clock on the bedstand. The taping wasn’t until tomorrow. We didn’t have anything scheduled for tonight. “Let’s go right now.”
“Right now? But I don’t think we’re close to the shore. And it’s late, and everyone is tired. We can’t get a ride from anyone.”
“It’s only seven.”
“It’s nine for our bodies, which are still on Iowa time. Besides, I think Kaya is about to come ask us what takeout we want to order.”
I couldn’t get the thought of going to the ocean out of my mind, though, and the idea that no one else would be with us only made the concept better. “We’re adults. We can go on our own. We’ll take a cab and go ourselves.” I tugged on his hand. “Come on.”
We immediately ran into trouble with my plan. It turned out Jeremey was right. We were nowhere near the ocean. Also, cabs were expensive, and I didn’t have a comprehensive understanding of L.A. traffic. “You need to wait until after the taping,” Kaya insisted. “I promise we’ll go, as long as you want to stay, but it has to be after the taping.”
I knew I was being unreasonable, but it was as if my octopus had finally realized its natural habitat was close by. Part of me hoped it would hop off and swim away. “Kaya, I need to go.”
In the end, we compromised. Kaya called friends of hers who came to get us and take us to the Santa Monica State Beach. This meant we had to wait forty minutes for them to arrive, but it did mean we got to see the ocean that night, and while we waited we freshened up and had something to eat from the hotel restaurant that wasn’t picked-apart sandwiches.
Kaya’s friends were nice. Stephen and Kari said hello to Kaya, gave her a hug, shook our hands, then took us to the beach. They were friendly but not intrusive, and they let Jeremey do most of the conversation. Mai sat between us, and Kari asked a lot about Mai. They had two dogs, and they loved dogs in general. She didn’t try to pet Mai, though, and she didn’t talk to Mai, only to Jeremey.
I talked to them a little. They asked me about my work, and I was okay to talk about that. Stephen worked in finance and was interested in the technical details of my job, and I enjoyed sharing them with him. He was also an author and wrote horror books. I downloaded several so I could read them on the way home. He also liked to play video games. I told him he needed to meet Darren.
We didn’t talk about The Roosevelt Project, but I could tell they wanted to.
When we got to the beach, I couldn’t quite see the ocean. I could glimpse part of it—the big body of water in the distance, and it was beautiful, but I couldn’t view it properly. I was able to see some kind of light display with a Ferris wheel and everything, which Kari said was the Santa Monica Pier. She told us we should go see it, but it didn’t have an ocean on it, so I wasn’t interested.
There was nowhere to park, so Kari and Stephen found us as quiet of a place as possible, dropped us off, and told us that we should text them when we wanted to go back.
“We don’t live far from here. So let us know when you’re ready, and we’ll be your taxi to Burbank.” Kari smiled at us. “Stay as long as you want. It’s a great night to enjoy the ocean.”
There was noise everywhere, so many people, so many lights and cars, things banging and snapping and popping, but behind all of it there was that sound, something I had never experienced before in real life, only in movies and on CDs. The soft roar and rush of water, crashing and pulling onto sand. Over and over and over.
The ocean.
I heard it before I saw it, as Jeremey took my hand and drew me forward, down the walkway toward the great expanse of sand, until the people and the buildings parted and I could see it.
There it was. The ocean was there, in front of me.
It was so big. I’d known it would be big, but it was so big. I tried to calculate how large it was compared to the land mass, but my brain couldn’t do it because it was too busy noticing how huge the water was. I hummed at it, flapping my free hand as the ocean sent another wave onto the sand, reaching farther than it had the time before. It was alive. It was a real thing, the ocean. I felt it the way I always felt objects, felt their feelings, attached to it the way Neil attached to that particular suit he wore and I had attached to that one cup when I was young. Autistic people felt differently. We saw the world differently.
I saw this ocean differently.
The ocean was a real thing, and I had love for it. I loved it so much, so quickly it hurt my chest and made me sway, made my octopus quiver with all the emotions inside me. I could watch it reach for the land for hours. For days. It would make me so happy to do nothing but watch this ocean forever.
It was almost better than a train.
It was, actually, better than a train.
Jeremey seemed to think so too. “It’s so beautiful.” His voice was soft, and he kept squeezing my hand. Mai wagged her tail as she watched the water come in.
I couldn’t use my words yet. I could only watch the water. I could still see the pier in the distance, and there was a great deal of stimulation all around, but the ocean was so big and powerful it overwhelmed everything else. It shut down the other noises for me and made me calm.
We stood there for a long time, until eventually Jeremey spoke again. “Let’s take off our shoes and walk in it.”
We used one of the bags Jeremey kept in Mai’s jacket for catching her dog poop to hold our shoes. I carried them while we held hands and walked in the shallow waves of the ocean. Mai played in the water when Jeremey told her she could. I got wet to my knees, and it was great. My feet were sandy, and I knew I wouldn’t be happy when this was done and I had gritty, dirty feet, but the water felt too wonderful. I was walking in the ocean. It was tickling my feet, and Jeremey’s feet, saying hello to us. I kept laughing, flapping the hand holding the bag of shoes, almost dropping it, I was so happy. I didn’t care anymore that I had flown so far and was overtired. I wasn’t tired, not anymore.
I loved the ocean so much.
We stayed until it was dark, until the moon rose above us in the sky and shone down on us, glowing faintly because there were so many lights it had to fight against, but I could see it there, could feel it smiling at us. I flapped at it and whispered to Jeremey so he could see it too.
“I see Tycho.” Jeremey pointed at the moon. His face glowed in the lights from the pier, from the moonlight too. “I wonder if there’s moondust rising from it right now, falling slowly in space.”
I told him no question, absolutely there was.
It was almost eleven when Kaya buzzed Jeremey’s phone telling him we really needed to get back. Jeremey texted Kari and Stephen, and while we waited for them to come, we cleaned our feet at an area near the parking lot with sprays just for this purpose. I thought that was clever.
When I finished putting my shoes on and stood, Jeremey was waiting there, looking at me with a serious expression.
“Emmet, I want to get married to you at the ocean. At this ocean.”
I smiled at him, my heart swelling with warm feelings. “Yes. I would like that too.”
Jeremey leaned on my shoulder all the way to Burbank, and I thought about getting married to him as we drove through the darkness. I could still feel the ocean on my feet, on my legs, and as we went to bed, after I made love to Jeremey and lay beside him staring at the ceiling while I waited for him to fall asleep, I felt as if the ocean were moving across my heart too. It felt good. It felt as if it were washing me, and I let it keep coming, because every wave made me feel lighter, stronger.
Then it was morning, and it was time to go to the taping.
Darren had done some research on what would happen at the show, but it turns out he had been wrong. They didn’t behave as they usually did for shows. The producer came to our greenroom first thing and asked us what would be the best way to approach the taping to make sure everyone was comfortable, to make sure Neil didn’t get overwhelmed, to make sure none of us did either.
I was impressed by that.
Amanda talked with the producer, but I could tell she was intimidated because this was Hollywood, so I talked to Kaya and we basically stepped in and took over. I pointed out Neil would be okay with whatever I did, he’d be okay if I was there, but a big audience might be a problem. I asked if there would be a way to hide the audience from us while Ellen interviewed us, or to let Neil do a test first to see if that many people would be scary.
“You might want to have a plan A and a plan B,” Kaya pointed out. “And a plan C might not be a bad idea either.”
The producers were okay with this, and later we learned they had plans D and E as well. But Neil was okay with being on stage with Ellen and me, so long as no one clapped and the lights weren’t too bright.
Ellen was nice. I liked her face and her smile. She was patient with Neil, and when she found out he only answered questions with lyrics to “Try Everything” but that Amanda and I could translate them, she acted as though this was an awesome skill he had.
She treated it like a superpower.
She asked me questions too, and of course she asked me about The Roosevelt Project. It was the first time I’d spoken about it since talking with Neil, though I had let Kaya coach me on answers I should give since I was representing the foundation. Except here on the stage with Ellen, with Neil beside me, with the ocean still washing over my heart, I ended up saying different things.
“It was difficult to lose the vote.” I rocked in place as I told her this, and I couldn’t help flapping my hands. Neil flapped with me, an echo. “We had worked so hard. It made me sad to know we could put so much work into trying to change things and find out we couldn’t change anything.”
This time when Ellen smiled at me I couldn’t figure out what her smile meant. It was tricky. “Well, Emmet, it’s funny you should bring that up. I have something I want to show you. In fact, it’s something several people want to show you, including your friends and family. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a great deal of video on the Internet about you. Many, many people have made videos for you. And that’s part of why you’re here today, because we wanted to show you those videos, and we here at the show have done a little something extra with them. Will you let me show you something right now? Here on the show?”
‘“Try everything,”’ Neil whispered, flapping enthusiastically.
I nodded. “Yes. I’ll watch it.”
And on the screen between us, on the wall behind us, a video began to play.
It was the one of me, the one I made for Neil in the restaurant. Or, it was at first. The audio stayed, but there was also a pop song underneath it, something about the future looking good. The video also changed, to one of Neil, and then to another boy, and another.
And another. And another. And another. And another.
There were girls too, and older boys and girls, and adults, and groups of people. Then there were large groups of people. There were famous people, and sometimes people who spoke in foreign languages. The clips went by fast, and sometimes they were only pictures.
Everyone was always dressed up in a Roosevelt Blues Brothers suit. Everyone had a sign that read, “I am a Roosevelt Blues Brother.”
Sometimes, if it was a video, not a still, the people said it too. “I am a Roosevelt Blues Brother.” Some of the girls said, “I am a Roosevelt Blues Sister,” but most of them said Brother even if they were female. It kept going and going, and the song had to be on some kind of loop, because it was an exceptionally long video.
The video changed. It still had people dressed up as Roosevelt Blues Brothers, but now there were words at the bottom. I realized they were tallies. Tallies of money people had raised for The Roosevelt Foundation, or for foundations like ours. It was a lot of money. Whenever famous people came on screen and said they were Roosevelt Blues Brothers, there was a tally too. It always went to our foundation.
Dan Aykroyd was one of the famous people, and he winked at me. “Good job, Emmet. I’m proud to be a Roosevelt Blues Brother too.”
I hummed and flapped hard.
The video kept going, and going, and going. It had gone on for at least ten minutes, I realized. More, maybe. They wouldn’t ever be able to have that much go into the show.
This meant they had shown this long version just for me.
When it was done, I turned to Ellen, who was looking at me with another tricky smile, and tears in her eyes. “I think you changed quite a bit, Emmet Washington.”
I let the ocean wash away the last bit of sadness on my heart. “I think you might be right.”
The audience started to clap, forgetting they weren’t supposed to, but Neil was okay. He’d done well, and I think he wanted to watch our performance, which was the next part of the show.
But Ellen wasn’t done with surprises for us.
She gave us a big cardboard check donation of her own, but then she said she’d heard Jeremey and I were getting married, and she gave us matching fancy tuxedoes and a gift package to get married on the beach in Santa Monica. She told us there was no rush, we could get married anytime we were ready, but she hoped we’d send her an invitation if we had a spare one.
I don’t know how she found out about it, since we only decided we wanted to get married there the night before, and we hadn’t told anyone. I was starting to think Ellen was magic.
She had one more surprise, though. When Darren and David came onstage to join us, we had already known Ellen would get in a Blues Brothers suit and dance with us too, and we had a space for her in our routine, but she stopped us and said we had to make room for one more person too. We were confused, and then who do you think came onto the stage?
Shakira, the one who actually sings “Try Everything.”
So that’s how we ended up on the Ellen show, dancing with Ellen while Shakira sang for us. While Neil danced in the audience until I motioned for him to come forward and dance beside me on the stage. And as he smiled up at me, big and awkward and beautiful, I realized this was what it would have been like for me if Dan Aykroyd would have invited me up to dance with him when I was little.
Our routine was a bit off while we performed, but they were all new mistakes, so it was okay.
I sang with Shakira a couple of times on the chorus. She smiled at me as we danced together, as I did my Elwood Blues moves with her. Ellen was good too, doing her silly Ellen dance with me, with Darren, with David, with Jeremey, even for a while with Neil until he got overwhelmed and had to go sit with Amanda again.
The best, though, was when I danced with Jeremey. When I spun him in my arms, when the world went away and it was only the two of us inside the space. There were lights and cameras on us, and once this show aired, more people would recognize us in airports. We were going to be celebrities like Ellen.
We were going to keep fighting. We’d keep falling down, and sometimes it would hurt a lot. But I reminded myself Jeremey would always be here with me, inside this dance and outside of it. So would Darren and David and everyone else, even Ellen. Everyone in the video she’d played for me.
I’d had it wrong all along. I didn’t have to shelter the sea. I had to find the way to let the sea shelter me. And as the audience’s roar washed over me in a wave, as I let the video and everything we’d accomplished sink into my heart, I acknowledged my sea was quite wonderful indeed.