Chapter Twenty-Four
Jeremey
On the one-year anniversary of my meltdown at school, I had a family meeting with my parents.
It was at my therapy session, and Dr. North was there, but I almost thought I could have done it without him. He’d given me that option, but I decided it was the same as my Target practice. Best to start the first try with something I was sure would work out.
My parents were nervous, and I couldn’t blame them. The last time we’d had a family meeting, Emmet had panicked, and I’d shouted. This time he wasn’t with us, though. He waited in the lobby, probably counting ceiling tiles or figuring pi.
This was a meeting I wanted to do by myself.
“Thank you for coming,” I told Mom and Dad as we sat down. “It’s good to see you.”
My mom frowned and brushed invisible lint from her trousers. “You never visit us. You don’t call often.”
It wasn’t a friendly start to our meeting, but I’d talked a lot about my parents, especially my mom, with Dr. North. I’d expected this kind of greeting. Worse, to be honest. I hadn’t been sure they’d come at all.
“Well, I want to talk to you about visiting you more.” I had my hands in my lap, carefully not making a fist or fidgeting. I wanted to present calm, controlled body language. It was difficult to do, but I wanted to try. “But I also wanted to tell you what I’ve learned in the last year. Since the day I had to leave school. Would you care to hear what I’ve learned? What I’ve done at The Roosevelt?”
My mom crossed her arms over her body and glanced at my dad, still frowning. “I suppose.”
I admit, I wanted her to be eager and happy. I will always watch Emmet’s parents and David’s and wish mine could be like theirs. But that wasn’t who my parents were. And though they made me nervous and were, I’m pretty sure, the reason I got as out of control as I did, I did love them, and if I could have a relationship with them, I wanted one.
This was the first step toward that. I wasn’t sure success here was any more likely than me being able to go to a rock concert and dance in the pit, but I wanted to try.
I told my mom what I’d learned.
“Well, there are a lot of things. Most of them are little to most people, but they’re big to me. I’ve learned how to live by myself, for one. I know how to balance my checkbook and make sure there’s food in the fridge. With Emmet’s help, I keep my room clean, and the apartment too. I help residents at The Roosevelt, especially David, my friend who is a quadriplegic. I want to go to school to be his aide. I signed up for an online class this summer. I want to go to the classroom in Ankeny, but I’m going to work up to it slowly.
“That’s the big thing I learned this year: it’s okay to go slow. That everybody else’s pace and definition of success isn’t mine. What is easy for other people isn’t necessarily so for me. Though some things are easy for me and hard for other people. This year I learned I’m good at feelings. Emmet calls these our superpowers—his are listening and seeing and math and remembering. Mine is feelings. I can tell what everyone is feeling all the time, and I almost feel it with them. So I have to be careful, because if there are too many feelings around me at once, I get overwhelmed. This is why shopping is challenging for me. It’s as if every aisle has strangers with too many feelings, and I can’t always stop them. But I’ve learned how, sometimes. I take headphones and wear sunglasses. I take my friends. I take my boyfriend.”
I smiled, thinking of Emmet. “That’s another something I learned this year: how to be a boyfriend. How to listen to someone else, what they need, how to give it to them. What I need. How to love them. How to handle it when they get jealous—or when I do. How to make a life with someone. How to help someone else through their struggles, and let them help me with mine.”
I stopped then, waiting. I wasn’t sure if they still didn’t like Emmet. I watched their faces, trying to read them. They weren’t happy, but I couldn’t tell if it was Emmet, or because this meeting made them uncomfortable.
That seemed a good time to move on to the next part.
“The other thing I learned, Mom and Dad, is that I need to protect myself. There’s nothing wrong with me and who I am, but I do have depression and anxiety, and they’re both pretty severe. I have major depressive disorder. I have clinical anxiety. They’re real things. They’re invisible to everyone but me, but I have to tell you, most days Emmet’s autism and David’s quadriplegia don’t hold them back as much as my depression and anxiety do me. I have to fight every day, and some days I can’t win. There are days I have to tell David I can’t help him go to school when my depression or anxiety is too bad. And you know what? Those days he usually stays with me, unless he has a test. He sits with me or helps Emmet make my lunch. Until I can climb on top again. He’s my employer, but he’s also my friend. One of my two best friends.”
My mom was frowning, and my dad seemed disgusted. I was sad, since it was clear this meeting wasn’t going to be a success at all. I felt the dark clouds coming over me, as if the lights in the room were going dim. I didn’t panic, but I felt tired, and I wanted to withdraw.
Dr. North, sitting beside me, rubbed my shoulders.
I glanced down at my hands, which I held still, but they were clenched in fists now. I stared at a bracelet Emmet had made me, an intricate weave of patterns that he said reminded him of me. I touched it, thinking of him in the lobby, wondering what he was counting now.
I considered going to sit with him, leaving my parents. Not trying anymore. I told myself I still had a family. I had Emmet. But it still made me sad.
“I only wanted you to be happy.”
The voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. I looked up, wondering if maybe I’d imagined it, but my mom was watching me. Crying silently. Whispering. To me, while my dad held her hand.
“I only wanted you to be happy,” she said again. Her face was twisted up in misery. Her mascara ran down her cheeks, until she wiped at it with a tissue and made streaks. “You’re always so withdrawn, and I knew how you felt, because I felt that way too at your age. I didn’t want you to be sad. I wanted better for you.” She blew her nose, and my dad put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close. She put her forehead on his cheek, crying harder. “I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want that for my baby.”
I stared at my mom, my head spinning, too light, like it wasn’t on my body. Was this actually happening? Was this my mom? My dad? It felt unreal. I’d imagined her hugging me a million times the way Marietta hugged Emmet, of magically becoming somebody else, but I’d never envisioned this. Her telling me she wanted me to be happy. That she understood. And crying as if someone had taken everything away.
In the same way that one day I’d had a glimpse of Emmet only wanting good things for me, helping, not waiting for me to be fixed, I had a new look at my parents, especially my mom. I watched her crying, as upset as I felt sometimes, more upset than I’d ever seen her. I felt that way too at your age. Did she still feel that way, I wondered? Had her mom talked to her the way she’d talked to me? Had she been lumbering through life in the dark, heavy fog, the same as me?
Without an Emmet to light the way?
I don’t know if I was right, or even close. But at that family meeting, I didn’t wish my mom were somebody else. I didn’t get nervous about what she might say that would upset me. That day I got up from my chair, crossed the room and hugged her tight. I let her cry on my shoulder. Felt the bad feelings with her, and did my best to make them go away.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and buried her face in my shoulder.
I patted her back and rocked her side to side like Emmet rocked me. “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay.”
And you know what? It really was.