Chapter Fourteen
Jeremey
I’d been tempted to move back with my parents after being discharged from the hospital, and when my mom and dad started accepting my condition after the disaster of a family meeting, at first I considered giving a return home a try. Dr. North made me wait to finalize my decision, and he asked me a lot of questions about why I wanted to go home. “Do you think you’ll be kicked out of the hospital?”
Well, not kicked, exactly, but yeah, I didn’t think I could hang out until The Roosevelt was finished. I wasn’t sure what would have happened if my parents had disowned me, but I figured now that they hadn’t, I had to go home. “I can’t move in with Emmet yet, so where else would I go?”
That was when he told me about the group home.
In my head I called it the halfway house, which I know the term is for people with drug additions, but it fit me too. I wasn’t ready for living on my own, and honestly, I worried if I went home, Mom especially would try to make everything the way it used to be. I didn’t know if I could be strong enough for that yet, and just thinking about it, Dr. North pointed out, increased my anxiety. The Icarus House was meant to be a bridge, he told me, between an institution and total independence.
I was confused. “Isn’t that what The Roosevelt is?”
“It is, in a way. The Roosevelt won’t have such a formal daily structure. Essentially there will be a common area for laundry and socialization, plus social workers will live on site and be available in case of trouble. Beyond that, though, the residents will be responsible for rent, utilities, everything but building maintenance. If you don’t clean your apartment, it won’t get clean. But if the social workers are concerned about how unsafe the room is, they might say something. And Bob will probably make occasional inspections to make sure someone hasn’t set up something that would harm the residents. At Icarus the residents are much more monitored. Many live there permanently or in similar facilities, and The Roosevelt is wildly beyond their reach. Some are like you, simply needing one more leg of recovery or a stop-gap between situations.”
I’d had no idea group homes existed—which was how most of my life felt right now. I felt like Alice, lost in an alternate world that didn’t always make sense or at least followed a logic pattern I’d never considered.
I went home for an afternoon the day I moved into Icarus. Mom wanted me to stay a night at the house, but she didn’t push when I said I didn’t want to. That was good, but things were still tense as I packed.
It felt weird to be home, even for a few hours. Everything was familiar, which was nice, but the house felt heavy too. It would be easy to slide into my room, to let my mom nag me to send clothes down the chute, to empty the dishwasher, and then go back to shutting out the world.
That wouldn’t be the case at Icarus. Dr. North had told me I’d have chores, house meetings in the morning and group therapy meetings in the afternoon. I’d made my peace with this and told myself it would be temporary, a bridge between the hospital and getting my own place with Emmet. However, when I arrived with Mom and Dad to check in, I became immediately aware of a challenge I hadn’t considered: the other residents.
To be blunt, the other men and women at Icarus were a mess, and it shocked me to think these were my peers. Sometimes their disabilities were starkly, physically obvious, from vacant stares and odd postures to loud noises and inappropriate gestures and comments. Some of them appeared normal until you tried to talk to them. One woman had severe schizophrenia and carried on whole conversations with people only she could see. One boy made noises that could have been the soundtrack to a horror movie—screams, moans and other elements of cacophony that made my skin tingle. A middle-aged woman had Down’s syndrome—she was my favorite because she didn’t make loud noises, and she always smiled.
Three residents were autistic, a condition I thought I was familiar with, but I quickly learned wherever Emmet was on the spectrum, it wasn’t anything close to these guys. They were a mixed bag of strange behaviors: one guy never moved, always sitting at a small table by the window watching the street, maybe rocking back and forth a little, sometimes humming. He only got up to go to the restroom, to eat and to sleep. Another guy was his polar opposite, talking nonstop and always moving. He had his own room, and it was a cluttered mess of clothes, books and broken things. He had a strict idea of how the house should be run, and something as simple as his cup not being in the right spot in the cupboard could send him into a frenzy.
The third autistic boy played solitaire and watched YouTube videos on an iPad, and he talked to the people in the videos. He wouldn’t speak to anyone directly, but if his videos were playing, sometimes he’d tell the people in the videos if he wanted oatmeal or pancakes for breakfast, stuff like that.
My parents flipped out.
“Are you sure you want to stay here, honey?” Mom kept asking me this as we set up my room. I could tell she was working not to shout or be angry and barely making it. “I understand you’re…sick, but you’re not like this. This isn’t the place for you. Come home. It’ll be so much better now.”
I wanted to believe her, but here’s the thing—Jan was with me too. While Mom made promises about how everything was different, Jan stood behind her, shaking her head and mouthing the word no over and over. The reason Jan had come all the way from Chicago to help move me in was to make sure I did move in. When my parents left, she lingered and drove the point home.
“I know this place looks freaky, Germ, but let me tell you how much better it is than Home Farm. You’ll get one good night, and then she’ll start undermining every decision you’ve made. You want to know what’s spread all over the kitchen table? Apartment brochures. Regular apartments close to campus. She still wants you to go to school, to be a real boy.” She ruffled my hair and kissed my forehead. “Except you are a real boy. You can do this. If your therapist said this is the place for you to be, then it is.”
I stayed, but the first night was horrible. My roommate was the YouTube-watching autistic boy, Darren, and I lay awake late into the morning listening to him snore as he tossed and turned in his sleep.
It was difficult to believe I belonged here. If I didn’t have my parents or The Roosevelt as a backup, I’d have to live here, or somewhere like Icarus, and the idea terrified me.
I told this to Dr. North when we had our session back at the hospital the next morning. “I don’t belong there. Or if I do, I don’t want to.”
“Tell me what upsets you specifically.”
Specifically? Where did I start? “Everyone is so broken. I’m not that bad, am I?” I sighed. “I guess I thought Icarus House would be a warm, safe place. It’s not. It’s not a home at all. It’s stark, cold and weird. We’re all the rejects nobody knows what to do with.”
I thought this might make him mad, but he only smiled a little sadly. “You will find, I’m sorry to say, this population is rarely given priority or much attention by our culture. Caring for adults with special needs is challenging on the best of days and always costs a great deal of money. Staff are paid poorly and often move to different jobs. Housing is rarely kept up. Food is government issued and not often prepared with the care one might expect at home. No, group homes are rarely homes at all, despite the best efforts by those who care for the residents. But they are better than institutions. In decades past, many of these people would have been institutionalized at birth.”
The idea of Emmet in an institution—of me in an institution—was beyond thinking about. “I guess I’m nervous about what happens if I can’t make it work at The Roosevelt and I have to live there.”
“Perhaps it would be better to focus on working to be sure you are successful.”
That would be smart, yes, but I’m rarely able to focus on the positive. I’m so conscious of the negative ready to pounce.
I tried, though. I didn’t have it in me to actively make friends, but as I sat in the living room watching daytime TV talk shows while Darren watched YouTube with headphones, I made an effort to notice the good things, not the bad. The room was threadbare and the furnishings tired, yes, but the room was actually quite clean. This, it turned out, was because of Carrie, the woman with Down’s syndrome. It was her job to clean up, and she loved her work. In fact she came through once in the morning with a dust mop and a cloth and again in the afternoon. No food or drink was allowed in the living room, so there were no wrappers. If someone got out a puzzle or a game, they had to pick it up when they were done.
The staff was also great. Sure, they spoke to most residents as if they were children, but honestly? Mentally a lot of them were. I noticed Darren got different vocal tones than Carrie. In fact the female staff member working that first day seemed to quietly favor Darren. As I watched the two of them interact, I thought maybe he felt the same way. His face didn’t change much, but his mouth almost smiled when she was nearby. I’d learned with Emmet that autistic facial changes are subtle and difficult to catch—but they’re always there.
I wanted to connect with Darren. Partly I was curious—I was about to live with someone with autism, so some recon couldn’t be bad, right? Also, there was something so comforting about him. While he wasn’t really like Emmet, he kind of was. Sitting on the couch next to Darren made me feel calm and okay. I still didn’t know how to interact with him, or if I should, but wanting to felt like a good start.
I admit, though, that while I could focus on the positive, I still couldn’t wait to move into The Roosevelt.
Emmet came to Icarus House the afternoon of my second day there. At first I worried it would upset him, because it was sometimes so loud, but he surprised me by being almost cheerful about the visit. In fact he knew several residents, including my roommate.
He also taught me the trick of how to talk to Darren.
When Emmet came into the living room and saw Darren sitting on the couch with his tablet watching YouTube, he smiled what for him was a pretty impressive smile. He didn’t say anything, however. He sat on the far end of the couch and remained still. Then, when Darren’s video finished, Emmet lifted his hands and began to sign. Not spelling the way we sometimes did, no ASL that Emmet had taught me, but complicated gestures I couldn’t understand.
For the first time since I’d met him, Darren put down his tablet. He signed back.
This went on for several minutes, and it was the damnedest thing because neither Emmet nor Darren looked at each other, but they seemed to see anyway. I, however, couldn’t stop staring. Every so often one of them would laugh, and sometimes Darren made one of his semi-articulate sounds. Eventually Emmet made one last sign and stood up. He took my hand, which made my heart flutter, and led me out back to sit in the garden on one of the benches.
“I didn’t know your roommate was Darren. He’s nice. We were friends in Iowa City. I didn’t know he was here in Ames now. That was a nice surprise.”
I blinked. “How did you know he was my roommate? I hadn’t had a chance to tell you yet.”
“Darren told me.”
“So you were using sign language?”
“Darren language. Some of it is ASL, but mostly he made up his own language. It’s simpler. He says he works at the library sorting books. He’s good at that kind of thing.”
He’d learned more about my roommate in ten minutes than I’d learned in a day. “How could you read what he said with his hands without looking at him? And the same for him with you?”
“We both have camera eyes. It’s easy.”
“You have what?”
“Camera eyes. A lot of autistic people can see things like camera pictures. We use our peripheral vision to see things, and we can remember what we see. It’s why sometimes we get overwhelmed in busy places. We take too many pictures.”
This potentially explained so much about Emmet. “Are you telling me right now, though you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at me? I mean, even though your eyes aren’t focused on me, for you they are?” Every time I said it, the words didn’t make sense.
Emmet smiled, understanding anyway. “Yes. I can show you. We’ll play a game. Hold up a number with your fingers and I’ll tell you. You can try to hide it a little to make it challenging.”
I did try, and he never, not once, failed to know exactly how many fingers I held up. I went into the house and got a book to hold up, and as soon as I held it close enough, he could read it from the side as well as he could in the front. In fact, it wasn’t as close as I’d have had to have the book reading it the usual way.
“That’s amazing.” I put the book down and shook my head. “You’re Superman or something.”
He smiled, but it was a subtle smile. “I am. Super Emmet.”
“Are you this way with everything? Can you hear like that too?”
“Yes.”
I never thought I’d be jealous of an autistic person, but I was. A veil had been lifted between us, and while I’d admired him before, I was besotted with Emmet now. “Everything about you is more powerful, isn’t it? When you smile, it’s big to you. And to you your voice isn’t flat at all. I’m the stupid one.”
“Not stupid. You can’t use the S word.” He rocked on the seat. “Sometimes autism is bad. Sometimes I don’t have control. I’m lucky. It’s not as severe for me, and most of the therapy worked to help me modify myself. Some autistic people have a difficult time. We have trouble sleeping, and our digestive systems can be sensitive. Darren can’t make his mouth work the way he wants. He thinks a lot, but he can’t make his mouth work right. He says people are too loud too, so he watches YouTube.”
“Is that why you sat so far from him? So you wouldn’t be loud for him?”
“Yes.”
Huh. I watched Emmet rock for a second. “How can I be a friend to Darren? I don’t know his sign language.”
“I can be an interpreter. Also, he can use his tablet to make it talk, when he wants to. But he doesn’t usually want to.”
The idea of being able to bond more with my roommate excited me. “Can we go talk to him now?”
“In a minute. I want to kiss you first.”
Emmet always announced our make-out sessions, and it thrilled me every time. There was something delicious about him giving the order. Emmet always arranged us, initiated the kiss and introduced any new elements.
Today it was tongue.
We’d kissed at the hospital, and some of those kisses had felt pretty steamy to me, but they’d only been teases of lips, maybe a little nibbling and gentle suckling. Emmet liked to play with the sensory aspects of a kiss, sometimes stopping to comment on the feelings they elicited. I loved that.
I didn’t often say much, but sometimes I did. I could tell him anything: how hard he made me, how my chest felt tight, how I loved the way I could feel his mouth on my lips for an hour after. He always smiled when I said that and paid more attention to my lips.
That first day in the garden, though, he parted my lips with his tongue. Surprised, I opened my mouth. His tongue slipped inside and touched mine.
I gasped. Emmet smiled and pulled back, touching my face. “That felt like a fish.”
I laughed and leaned into his hands. It had, kind of. “Bumpy. Like wet sandpaper.”
Emmet’s fingers stroked my cheeks. “I want to do it again. Open your mouth and let me kiss you with my tongue.”
The shiver that went through me was so intense I had to shut my eyes. “Emmet, you make me so hard when you talk like that.”
“Let me touch my tongue on yours again, and I’ll make you harder.”
He did. I’d stopped asking him where he learned to kiss—it was the Internet, always. Sometimes he watched videos, sometimes he read things, and sometimes he found message boards. There wasn’t a corner of the Internet he didn’t know how to find, I swear.
I loved being the recipient of his kissing research, and kissing with tongues was no exception. His tongue stroked along mine, exploring my mouth. He was hesitant and uncertain, but not for long. I made my own explorations too, but mostly I went quiet and let Emmet lead me, because it was the way I liked it. When he kissed me and touched me, everything went away except for Emmet.
The only problem today was that Frenching Emmet made me so hard it drove me crazy not to touch myself. I wanted to touch him. I broke the kiss to nuzzle his nose with a careful amount of pressure. “Emmet, I want to do more than kiss you.”
His fingers in my hair tightened. “Yes. When we get our apartment, we can have sex.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go that far, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I also didn’t want to wait that long to do more than kiss. “We could go to my room here, now.”
“No. Darren might come in.”
I rested my head on his shoulder. “I don’t want to wait. Moving into our room together is another month and a half away.”
I swear I could feel him smile. “I forgot to tell you. Bob said we’re a special case, and we can move in two more weeks.”
I lifted my head and caught him grinning. He hadn’t forgotten. He was playing one of his Emmet jokes on me. I didn’t care, I was so glad. Everything in me got loud and hot, but in a good way.
“I want you to kiss me again,” I said. But when he leaned forward, I put fingers over his lips. My stomach flipped in nerves and anticipation as I made my next request. “Can you kiss me hard, Emmet? With your tongue too?”
His face didn’t change much, and his voice was flat, but I could hear his smile anyway. “Yes,” he said.
And he did.