Gestalts

Brian’s new client lived in a mobile home at the edge of the Texas suburbs, where fields of bluebonnets and hayrolls were slowly giving way to walled-in subdivisions. Brian drove a lot for his work, and he saw them everywhere now: flattened, watered tracts that turned overnight into matchstick cities, and then, the next time he passed, cramped stucco protectorates with names like “Saddleback Ranch” or “Heritage Oaks.”

The mobile home park, with its weathered, one-story prefabs and dented plastic swimming pools, felt like a place out of time. At the tiny playground, a burnished steel merry-go-round looked hot as a poker in the April sun. Verbena grew untended through rusted fences. It was Brian’s last session of the week, and he wished he could skip it.

~ ~ ~

His new client’s name was Jace. When Brian entered the kitchenette, Jace did not look up from his iPad. From the device came the sound of a hair dryer, then a shrik, shrik of damp hair being combed as Jace swept his finger across the screen. When Brian leaned forward to place things on the table—a penny token board, a Connect 4 game, some laminated pictures of objects—Jace made a simmering hum that rose and subsided. Brian put down a package of Skittles. Jace looked at them, then up and to one side, smiling faintly, his lips suddenly moving to an inaudible phrase. He had wispy, red-blonde hair, bad teeth, and a scar from the bridge of his nose to his cheekbone. His hands were slim and pale, with deadly looking fingernails. The file said he was 15 years old, but he looked about 12.

According to Brian’s supervisor, Jace was nonverbal except for a few “rote phrases,” and was being homeschooled following a legal dispute with the local school district. He’d been through multiple therapists. “We think he might respond better to a male,” she had told Brian, with the cloudless optimism of someone delegating a difficult job. In Brian’s experience, this was code for: “You might get punched in the face.”

“Jace, trade,” Brian said, offering a Skittle in exchange for the iPad. Jace surrendered the iPad to take the Skittle but then began to shriek and chew at the same time. Brian found the Talker Deluxe app, opened it, touched the CHAT folder, then pressed labeled panels that announced:   

Hi. … I am …  He finished the sentence by speaking his own name: “Brian.”

He handed the iPad back, and Jace deftly switched it back to the pet-grooming app and his shrieking stopped as if a soundproof door had closed. Brian could hear a reality survival show on TV in the living room, where Jace’s parents Maggie and Tanner sat. 

“Insects are protein,” a man said in a British accent.“Crunchy. A bit bitter. Mmm. It’ll have to do.” 

Brian reached into Jace’s personal space and reopened Talker Deluxe. “Tell me something you like to eat, Jace. Here. Touch the ‘FOOD’ folder.” 

Jace grinned and rapidly moved his upper body in a bowing motion.

“Right on the button!” Jace blurted. These were his first audible words of the session. Brian felt the thrill of a breakthrough.

“Yes, touch it right on the button,” he said, “And then…”

Jace’s mother Maggie suddenly appeared in the kitchenette.

“That means he wants to hit you,” she warned. Brian pulled back suddenly, Jace swung, Maggie flung one thick arm between them, and the contents of the table—game, checkers, Skittles, laminated sheets—scattered onto the floor. A little black dog trotted in and began barking officiously, rushing Brian then retreating when Brian faced him. Tanner arrived next, beer in hand. He surveyed the scene with a mild, philosophical look, compressed his lips to politely suppress a belch, then nudged the dog with the toe of his work boot.

“Shhh, Napoleon,” Tanner said.

“Right on the button!” Jace repeated.

~ ~ ~

After work, Brian watched from behind the backstop as Luke squatted in the dirt, covered in hot black padding, and got pelted by baseballs. The pitcher had decent arm strength but poor control. Luke had to slide down onto his knees to block the bouncers—he took one off the forearm, another hit an exposed section of his leg—and the one time he followed his instinct and ducked a high bouncer, the ball got past him, runners stole bases, and coach Kreutz shook his head condemningly.

Once, Brian had asked his son why he chose catcher.

“It’s … good,” Luke had said, while watching YouTube videos of tag outs, pick-offs and bone-breaking home plate collisions. Now a foul tip sent a ball high into the air just outside the first base line. Luke tore back his mask and loped in his awkward gait out to catch it but lost it in the low sun. It bounced off his conch-shaped mitt and hit the grass.

“Good try, way to get there,” Brian yelled.

“Fundamentals, boys!” Coach Kreutz growled, shaking his head. “OK, one out, play’s at first. Stop the bleeding.”

Luke slumped and his arms hung limply as he walked back to the plate. For a moment Brian wanted to leap into Luke’s skin, straighten his posture, puff him up, stare the coach down; he wanted to take the bouncers and bruises and hit a home run for Luke, but he couldn’t, he was standing behind the fence, as stuck in himself as Luke was, and he watched Luke pull the mask back down, drop to his knees, and brace for another painful blow.

~ ~ ~

Brian and Luke lived in a rental apartment complex with a gated pool, a bright, foam-covered playground, and a frigid rental office with a big bowl of Costco mints. You could see elevated highway ramps in the distance, but you couldn’t hear the traffic. Brian planned on being here no more than a year. He kept their two-bedroom apartment militantly clean and organized. Next to the chore chart was a rectangular canvas print that said:

The Holub Family
Be Honest
Keep Your Promises
Forgive and Forget
Take Care of Each Other
Practice Gratitude
Be Proud of Each Other
Love One Another

He’d ordered it on an impulse at the big box home furnishings store where he got their beds. He didn’t have a lot left over after dishware and silverware, but he’d wanted to put something on the wall, something to shoot for, something to remember.   

Sometimes, when he was having trouble sleeping, Brian would get into his son’s bed. It comforted Brian. He thought he could feel his son’s love most definitely in their proximity, in Luke’s deep, steady breaths, in the slow rise and fall of his body. Brian would pull and spool a little blanket onto himself and Luke would somnolently pull the blanket the other way, so it would stretch like a scroll of parchment, and they would lie back to back, barely touching. Sometimes it helped Brian sleep. Luke slept heavily but ground his teeth. Like many other things, it worried Brian. He always woke up before Luke and crept out to make coffee. He didn’t want Luke to feel weird about it.

~ ~ ~

Brian’s favorite client was a former elementary P.E. teacher named Carl—a jolly, bald, baby-faced man with forearms as thick as Brian’s calves. He favored Hawaiian shirts and Teva sandals over white socks. Carl had suffered a left hemisphere stroke in Broca’s area. He understood everything that was said to him—the stroke hadn’t affected the receptive language centers of the brain—but he could only produce one phrase: “Crystal snowglobe.”

Brian had tried different tools—a low-tech alphabet board, a dedicated augmentative communication device, the Talker Deluxe app—but Carl would always revert back to his only phrase. What impressed Brian was how his facial expressions, gestures, and even intonation—all intact after the stroke—allowed him to be much more conversational with two words than Luke was with a whole language.

“What have you been doing this week, Carl?”

Carl shrugged, suggesting a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Suddenly he rose and swung an imaginary baseball bat.

“Snow … al … b– … ah … Crystal … Snowglobe?”

“My son’s baseball?”

“Crystal snowglobe!” Carl nodded vigorously.

“He’s doing all right. He keeps hitting grounders. I don’t know how to help him get the trajectory up.”

Carl moved suddenly and disconcertingly behind Brian, pulling him gently up until they were like two figure skaters about to start a routine. He tapped the inside of Brian’s feet into a batting stance, then hand-over-handed him through a slow batting motion, prompting Brian to step with his left foot, tucking Brian’s elbow in to touch his side and lower the bat at the point of contact, underscoring every step with a carefully modulated, “Crystal snowglobe.”

Carl’s wife Janet entered with lemonade and sugar cookies. She looked at Carl with a bemused shake of the head, then stage-whispered to Brian, “He’s always gotta be in charge, doesn’t he?”

“He’s teaching me about batting stances,” Brian explained hastily.

“Crystal snowglobe!”

“Are you finally going to give me a crystal snowglobe today, baby,” she said, fixing her eyes on Carl. They stared at each other like newlyweds, although Carl was still standing behind Brian, giant arms around him like they were taking a prom date photo. Brian looked away, out the window of their tidy Craftsman bungalow, over the well-tended lawn with its live oak tree and its trimmed blue salvia. On the sidewalk across the street, a thin man with an aqua fanny pack and white earbuds was walking and talking furiously to somebody who was not there.  

~ ~ ~

After Luke was asleep, Brian practiced Jace’s IEP objectives on Talker Deluxe, working out simple “I feel …” and “I want …” statements that were supposed to help Jace express himself and avoid aggressive outbursts. The app’s home screen was a quilt of labeled symbols for high-frequency words—I, like, want, get, you, not—that spoke when you touched them. Category folders like FOOD, PLACES, PHRASES, FEELINGS, DESCRIBING, and QUESTIONS opened silently like trap doors into still more folders and words.

Brian tapped a phrase and the synthetic voice said,

I … want …

He opened successive folders – FOOD, SNACKS – and selected Cheese Puff.

He touched the text box. The digital voice spoke.

I want cheese puff.

He went to Home, then FEELINGS, and tapped out sentences.

I love you. I hate you.  

ACTIONS, SENSING.

I hear you. I touch you.

QUESTIONS.

Where are you? Are you …

FEELINGS.

Happy?

Brian closed Talker Deluxe and opened a year-old email from Luke’s mother, Lucia, which began, “Brian, It’s too early in our lives to give them up.” He had read it dozens of times without fully understanding it. He started again, then closed it and opened the email she’d sent three weeks ago, titled “Final Agreement.” There were legal documents attached. Brian noticed then that Lucia had updated her profile picture. It had been Emory peak, where they hiked together when Luke was 8. Now it was a selfie in an unfamiliar bedroom, her dark hair let down, her shoulders exposed in a thin white tank-top. She looked younger, as people often did in profile photos. He closed the email, opened a new window, and typed in the search bar, “Right on the button.”

It offered, among other things, a YouTube clip from the animated 1967 version of The Jungle Book. Alone in the forest, abandoned by the wolves who had raised him, the man-child Mowgli met the lumbering, avuncular bear, Baloo, who tried to teach him how to fight. To the sound of careening tom-toms they engaged in comical shadowboxing: the tiny, off-balance man-cub all sharp elbows and flailing limbs; the fat, graceful bear dancing around and propping him up. Then Mowgli landed a punch on Baloo’s nose.

“Hey,” Baloo replied with gee-whiz jolliness, “Right on the button!” Brian recognized the intonation so clearly that he could see Jace’s face. He wondered, again, how Jace got his scar.

~ ~ ~

A month went by. Brian saw Jace every Friday at 4. Maggie greeted him at the door. She was heavy, with short blonde hair and a disarmingly joyful smile. There were wings tattooed on her clavicle. Tanner sat on the couch with a beer, work pants slashed with asphalt, holding Napoleon like a football. Across the kitchenette table, Jace rocked and hummed, the sound oscillating randomly as if detecting the presence of a foreign element nobody else could perceive. A landscape of hidden salience. He refused to use Talker Deluxe except to build sentences that led to immediate, tangible reward, but sometimes he spoke in urgent, out-of-context phrases that performed no recognizable speech act. These were called gestalts, because they referred to a larger story, a superstructure of meaning that only Jace understood. Jace’s gestalts often came from The Jungle Book.

“Not like those fair-weather friends,” Jace kept muttering today, shaking his head and grinning mysteriously while simultaneously tapping out, I want cheese puff, on Talker Deluxe. Brian dutifully wrote a “+” on the data sheet and handed him another cheese puff. Then Jace opened FEELINGS and touched,  I feel …  full. He stood suddenly, took Brian by the wrist, and pulled him out of the kitchenette, past the living room, to his tiny bedroom. Maggie rose and followed, a hint of alarm in her bright smile.

In Jace’s bedroom, there was a dirty orange exercise ball in front of a TV with a DVD player and animated movies lined neatly underneath. A window looked out to an identical mobile home six feet away. There was a tall baseball trophy on the bureau.

State Champions, 2007
Tanner, Second Base

Jace sat down on the ball, took the remote, and fast-forwarded The Jungle Book DVD to a scene where the boy, Mowgli, gets hypnotized by the boa constrictor Kaa. Maggie positioned herself between Jace and Brian.

“No, sir, I know what you’re trying to do to me,” Mowgli was saying. A clarinet played a sly, insinuating motif and the boa constrictor’s eyes bulged and began to pinwheel with multi-colored stripes, hypnotizing Mowgli.

“I’m not like those so-called fair-weather friends of yours. You can believe in me,” Kaa lisped. Mowgli began to sleepwalk, and every time he escaped Kaa’s clutches the constrictor’s body would morph into a different shape to snare him—stairs, a hammock, a spiraling slide down into a tightening cocoon.

Maggie took a fake leopard-fur blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her son.

“He wants you to cocoon him,” she said to Brian, squeezing the blanket tightly around her son and then touching Brian’s side, pulling him gently toward them. Brian could smell her coconut skin cream. Jace gritted his teeth and clenched his fists under the blanket, his body shaking as if racked by an irrepressible joy. Then he looked expectantly at Brian, something he had never done before. With his hand on the remote poking out under the blanket, Jace backed up the DVD, skipping through frames, and then deftly replayed the same 10-second sequence again: the song, the stairs, the hammock, the spiraling, tightening cocoon.

 “I’m not like those fair-weather friends,” Jace said, bouncing on the ball and lofting in the air while Brian held onto him. Jace landed, froze the movie and looked up at Brian, who adjusted and squeezed the blanket tighter. Maggie stepped back. Jace rewound and repeated the sequence, and this time Brian spoke in unison with him, “I’m not like those fair-weather friends,” putting his arms around Jace protectively but letting him bounce up and down, and Brian added, “You can trust in me!” Jace wriggled, his face lit with joy, and they repeated together, “I’m not like those fair-weather friends,” and Brian elaborated, “I’ve got you. Not like those fair-weather friends. Not letting go!”

Brian looked at Maggie. Her guard was down. She regarded him openly, as if, for the first time in their home, he was saying something important. Brian recalled, years ago, picking up a giggling, 2-year-old Luke by the armpits and tossing him gently a few inches into the air and then catching him. Lucia had seemed content then. They would lie down in bed in their tiny, cruddy apartment in San Antonio with Luke between them, imitating his quizzical coos and trills. They had many nicknames and each was for all three of them—as if they were one being.

Brian heard the beeping of a heavy truck in reverse, like an alarm clock, just outside the fence line of Jace’s mobile home park. He glanced at his watch; it was time to get Luke to practice. Jace was still bouncing high, and Brian asserted a firm, downward pressure. For a moment, they struggled against each other.

“Whoa,” Brian said, “time to cool down!”

Jace escaped the blanket and hit Brian in the face. Brian fell over backward.

“Right on the button!” Jace yelled. Brian sat up, then counted to five in his mind and tried to deepen his breathing. He heard Maggie say as if from a great distance, “No, Jace. No hitting, all done.” And Jace: “Tougher than you think!” Napoleon barked frantically in the doorway until he squealed and retreated from Tanner’s boot.   

“What happened?” Tanner demanded, staring down at Maggie. He was holding a beer and looked ready to punch somebody’s lights out. 

 “It was my fault,” Brian said. “I got him wound up.”

A tense quiet. Brian looked at his finger and saw blood, but suddenly he seemed to be the least upset person in the room. Tanner wheeled around and went back to the TV. Maggie had Jace on her lap with one arm around him like a seat belt, the other kneading his trapezius muscles.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but she did not look sorry, she looked frustrated. “They were supposed to tell you. There are certain phrases—like what you just said—that trigger him.”

“Tougher than you think,” Jace chirped, more contemplatively now. Brian went back to the kitchenette, put a paper towel on his bloody nose, and returned with both iPads. He handed Jace’s iPad to Maggie and opened the CHAT folder on his own.

I am … OK.   

Jace opened CHAT on his iPad.

OK. Bye.

~ ~ ~

Brian took an unpaid hour to visit the school district’s special education office and view Jace’s foot-thick cumulative SPED file. There were hundreds of forms, evaluations, reports, graphs, scales, legal supplements, assurances, and amendments. Very little of it contained insights or observations about Jace.

Flipping back through the annual IEP documents, Brian saw that Jace never had one speech therapist for more than a year, and worse, as new therapists and itinerant teachers came and went in the typical cycles of SPED burnout, the communication goals remained remarkably unchanged, even cyclical. Jace had been working for years on versions of “I want” + X. No wonder he hated therapists, Brian thought.

In a sub-folder marked “legal”, Brian read that Jace had been pulled from a “self-contained” SPED classroom and placed in a “cool down” room multiple times when he was 12. On the final occasion he had bitten an aide and drawn blood.

Brian read, “The student’s violent behavior caused him to collide with a desk and a bookshelf, resulting in a laceration on his nose and cheek, bruising on his right shoulder and a broken rib.” An unsuccessful lawsuit followed. It was settled through mediation that Jace would be educated through the district’s homebound education program, which contracted Brian’s company. The school district had wanted nothing else to do with Jace.

A handwritten note said: “Do not use the phrase ‘cool down’!”

~ ~ ~

Luke was tall for his age and his appetite was astonishing. Brian loved to watch him eat. When Luke was a toddler, Brian and Lucia had laughed and commented about it proudly. There had never been any of the refusals, negotiations, airplane-fork flights into the mouth that other parents suffered through. Luke loved to eat almost as much as he hated to talk. It was not that he couldn’t talk; he read on grade level and spoke when necessary. He just didn’t seem to like or trust words.

But tonight, after baseball, Luke wouldn’t speak or eat.

“Everything OK?” Brian asked.

“Fine. Can I go to my room?”

“You just had a two-hour practice. Is something wrong at school? Is somebody picking on you?”

Luke shrugged and stayed quiet. Brian waited.

“School’s fine.”

“Is it the internet? You see something? There’s some bad stuff out—”

Luke interrupted him. “Did you sleep in my bed last night?” He looked at his father with contempt and Brian didn’t know what to say. He paused mid-chew, then finished his taco and cleared his plate.

“Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. I feel anxious about things. Hearing your breathing … being near a family member helps. … I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about Mom? You just never … say anything about it. You never explain.” There was a catch in his voice.

Brian heard himself making a long, high-pitched hum.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said finally. “I don’t really understand it either.” 

~ ~ ~

A week later, Lucia called to ask about the papers, and to set up a FaceTime with Luke. She hadn’t spoken to her son in over two months. She missed him now, she said.

Brian stood outside the camera eye and watched Luke communicating with his mother through the iPad. Her image occasionally froze, then re-vivified; her voice sounded slightly metallic, distorted, but it was still recognizable in its contours, its cadence, her emphasis on certain words; it was a voice, as much as anything else, that Brian had fallen in love with. When Luke spoke, Lucia bit her lip and nodded, her eyes widened suddenly, a kind of acknowledgment and exclamation point to Luke’s sentence.

Brian remembered their first date on the River Walk in San Antonio, their sophomore year in college. He’d told her about growing up an Air Force brat, moving every couple of years. In high school he was neither popular nor unpopular, just kind of there, the tall guy who was the pretty girl’s best friend because she could talk to him, but then she went to prom with the quarterback anyway.

“Really,” Lucia had said, “I bet you had a couple fans.”

And what about her? She grew up with three sisters; she was the dramatic one.

“Let’s see some drama then,” he’d said, surprising himself.

There are some people who make you feel like your best self, like you have funny and original insights. You can tell your story to them. Lucia had made him feel that way back then. They’d walked under the lights along the water; she took his hand and pulled him across a bridge to show him something in a store window. The smile hadn’t left his face for weeks.

Now she was listening to Luke the way she once listened to Brian. He was glad. He was also jealous of Luke. Or maybe he was jealous of Lucia. Luke was telling her about kids who ignored him, about who he sat with at lunch, about his favorite subject, which was apparently math. Why hadn’t Luke told him these things? In these last eight months of separation, of Brian raising Luke alone, he had earned the right to know more of Luke’s heart, but it seemed Luke had saved these thoughts and observations for his mother, like a gift to win her back.

“Why don’t you call more, Mom?”

“I’m sorry, Lukey,” she said. “I had some … stuff going on. I want to talk to you every week now.”

“You promise?”

Her phone vibrated next to her.

“Hold on,” she said, reaching down, tapping a text, then turning it over. “Yeah. I promise.”

~ ~ ~

Brian arrived at Jace’s home with a box of cookie mix and cans of frosting. It had cost him eight bucks but it was a good lesson plan: they could actually do something. Brian had called Maggie ahead of time, and she had already helped Jace practice phrases on Talker Deluxe. Jace looked happy to see Brian.

“Birds of a feather,” Jace said. He touched the ACTIONS folder, then FOOD, DESSERTS.

Make cookies?

Brian: CHAT, Yes.

“Cookies together,” Brian said.

“Birds of a feather.”

“Birds of a feather make cookies together.”

“Make cookies together,” Jace said. He made quick bowing motions with his torso, then reached out to shake Brian’s hand formally. Napoleon sat quietly below them, nodding as his eyes tracked between food and faces.

Jace opened COLORS, ANIMALS, FEELINGS.

Black dog hungry.

Brian spoke: “Me too.”

“Me too.” Jace agreed.

On his way out, Brian stopped to talk to Tanner and Maggie, who were on the couch watching cage fighting. Jace had mastered his IEP goals and needed new ones, Brian told them. He was done with “I want” + X. They could work with gestalts, and maybe he could find a social group with other autistic students and typically-developing peer mentors. There was one at the university Brian had heard about. They’d have to have a meeting, though, and include the school district. 

Maggie glanced at Tanner, who was staring at two men in skin-tight shorts tangled up on a blood-stained mat.

“Another meeting? With those people?” Tanner said, taking a sip of beer, then shifting his head from side to side, watching one fighter try to smash the other’s face with his elbow. He glanced at Maggie and their eyes met. 

“We’ll do what we need to do for Jace,” she said, nodding cooly at Tanner until Tanner nodded too.

~ ~ ~

Luke was in a slump. He’d had five strike-outs in two games. He was even more clipped and surly than usual, so they hadn’t spoken about baseball, about the impending divorce, or about why his mother hadn’t called yet this week, like she said she would. It was easier to communicate with Jace, Brian had decided.

But as he sat alone at the dining table and worked on expanding gestalts from The Jungle Book, Brian kept worrying about Luke. What upset him more than anything was how his son didn’t swing at strikes. He’d wait for two strikes to come right down the middle, standing there frozen by indecision, and then, with two against him, he’d have to swing at anything. Life required action, he wanted to tell his son. You have to swing to hit. It seemed to be Luke’s  problem in life: he stood there watching. That’s why he hadn’t made friends yet at school. He couldn’t engage. The last time it happened, Coach Kreutz had just shaken his head as Luke jogged dejectedly back to the dugout. It was as if Kreutz expected him to fail.

 “What are you doing, Dad?”

His son’s voice surprised him. Brian realized he was talking to himself.

“I’m getting ready for a student I work with.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifteen.”

“Is he retarded?”

Brian paused, assessing Luke’s face, but he saw no malice or mockery.

“No. He’s on the autism spectrum.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“It means his brain works in a different way.”

“Do I have some autism? Like, a little bit?”

Brian could tell it was a serious question by the downcast look on Luke’s face, the monotone delivery, his eyes shifting sideways, the way they did when Luke suspected something bad might be true. He seemed prepared for another let down.

“No,” Brian said. “You’re just quiet.”

He tugged his son to him and held him tightly, then kneaded his trapezius and smacked his strong back gently. Luke’s body odor was getting tart. Brian needed to add deodorant to the shopping list. “Now do your reading. You’ve had enough screen time. Then get your shower, and brush for the full two minutes and tell me when you’re ready for bed.”

Luke said OK and started to walk away.

“Oh — one thing,” Brian said. “Someone wants to come to your next game. A guy I know who used to play baseball.”

Luke turned. He looked irritated again.

“Is he going to shout out a bunch of stupid advice?”

“He can’t talk.”

“Cool.” Luke nodded and went to his room.

~ ~ ~

Thinking about the session with Jace ahead of him, Brian barely noticed a new sign at the entrance of the mobile home park. “Coming Soon: Enchanted Village II, 120 New Units, Community Center and Pool, starting in the low 400s.”

Tanner’s battered F-150 was not in the driveway. On the tiny porch, a garbage can had fallen over and scattered crumpled beer cans. A legal notice was taped to the door. Brian knocked, but there was no sound, no barking. He knocked again, feeling a mix of dismay, relief, and deflation. He placed his backpack on the porch and stood for a moment. It was the end of May and very hot.

A woman came out onto the porch of the next mobile home, leaning heavily on a cane. A man with longish gray hair and square glasses glowered in the doorway behind her. Brian explained who he was.

“They’re gone,” she said.

“Where’d they go?”

She eyed him coldly.

“We were making progress,” Brian added. “I need to share that with the receiving school district.”

“I believe they have family in Corpus.” She turned to look at the man, who responded by disappearing back into the mobile home. “We won’t be here much longer either. The whole place is getting bought up.”

“Wow.” Brian picked up his bag and turned back toward his car. 

“Teacher, you said?”

 He nodded, opened the door, and put the backpack on the passenger seat. The woman took another step toward him, her face assuming a more thoughtful expression.

“It’s hard for families, sometimes,” she said.

“Yes,” said Brian.

“But they have God. And they stayed together.”

“That’s good.”

He got in, closed the car door, and started the engine.

~ ~ ~

It is hard to describe the fear and anxiety a father feels, the bet-on-your-grandmother’s-grave prayers a father makes when his son is coming up to bat, and there are two outs in the bottom of the ninth and a player on second and his team is down one and his son is faced with the possibility of defeat so stark and abject that the very phrase to describe it—strike out—is the universal metaphor for luckless, humiliating failure. The game has gone long. Moths swirl like snowflakes in the park lights and the parents have lost any pretense of civility, their outbursts explosive, taunting, fevered. Coach Kreutz’s ball cap has been tossed to the ground and kicked several times.

It is both fortunate and unfortunate that the player before Luke struck out; it spreads the blame slightly if Luke goes down, but it also puts the game on Luke’s shoulders. After a stare down between the pitcher and runner over the lead at second, the umpire signals for Luke to come to the plate. There is a hold up as Luke struggles, embarrassingly, to get the donut weight off his bat. The assistant coach pulls it off for him.

At the plate, Luke takes in the shoulder pats and visor taps that contain the hidden signal for how he is supposed to hit. He nods. The wind up: a fastball comes right down the middle and Luke barely flinches. Strike one. The other parents cheer and hoot, Kreutz shakes his head and mutters and stalks along the third base line, while parents around Brian call out encouragement. “You know where it is now.” “Nothing broken.” “You got the next one.” Brian stays silent.

Luke taps his cleats with the bat and bites his lower lip and widens his eyes and for Brian it’s as if a window has opened and he sees Lucia in his son. She is inside of him. So is Brian. Together they created something miraculous, yet they failed at something mundane. Other people did it, through poverty and eviction, through strokes and developmental disabilities. He and Lucia had made a perfect child, yet they had failed to understand each other.

The next two pitches are obvious balls; the count goes to 2 – 1; and then another perfectly straight pitch down the middle and Luke doesn’t move and the umpire jumps out of his crouch and flashes his right fist and yells, “Steeee-rike,” major-league style, which ignites the opposing dugout and bleachers, and even the parents are joining the other team in chanting, “Hey-batter-batter, Hey-batter-batter,” while Kreutz tosses and kicks his poor hat, and Brian sees how this quality in his son—standing, frozen, while the opportunity passes him by—will dog him for the rest of his life. It’s who Luke is, his essential gesture. After all, he has made few friends, even on the baseball team, and he is growing more isolated even from Brian; he is disengaged from his school work, shows no interest in girls. He will end up living alone, in an apartment not unlike the one they live in now, only dirtier, in a worse part of town, and he will work a dismal retail job and spend his nights lost on the internet, because he cannot engage, he cannot speak, he cannot swing the bat, and Brian hears himself yell, “Swing the damn bat, son,” which he instantly regrets, because the next pitch is coming low and outside—an obvious, intentional ball, a smart pitch too—and Luke lunges for it, the bat angled so low it’s practically a golf swing and Brian turns away in defeat; he cannot watch.

There is a bright plenk sound of the aluminum bat, and Brian turns to see the ball angling up into the outfield, a hard line drive, which clears the tip of the centerfielder’s glove and rolls out near the fence.

Armageddon in the stands. The runner on second makes it home and Luke is rounding second as the outfielder turns to heave it back. It’s a poor throw and bounces once before getting to the second baseman, who is now well into the grass for the relay as Luke touches third. There are so many instructions being yelled– “Go!” “Stay!” “Run!” “Hold!” that Luke seems momentarily paralyzed, halfway between third and home, as the second baseman cocks back his arm for a long throw—and then Luke’s eyes seem to fasten on to one person—not Kreutz, not even his own father, but a stout, balding man in a Hawaiian shirt who is yelling, “Crystal Snowglobe!” while making the pinwheeling motion of his arm that says, keep going, don’t stop, and now Brian sees his son’s face clear of confusion and fill with determination, tongue at the corner of his mouth, as he begins to jolt forward with his jerky stride, closing the distance—4,3,2—yards as the throw hangs in the air, the throw is taking forever, yet so is his son’s progress to beat it, to make it home.