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“Okay. November 1932,” I say.
“There was no hurricane that month. Just a tropical storm. That’s boring.” Jake peers at me, eager. Too eager. “Give me another one.”
Just once, I’d love to come home, disappear into my room, listen to some Arcade Fire, and spend some quality time writing.
“Okay, here’s a reverse one. Hurricane Dana,” I say.
“Oooh. I know that one.” Jake is so excited, he starts to vibrate.
Jake is smart. Scary smart. People assume he’s stupid because he’s got a disability, but they’re dead wrong. If anything, he’s disabled by his superbrain. The carrots are back on the floor.
Mom rushes down the stairs, her uniform hanging open, her overstuffed purse dangling from her arm. “Can you make di
She kneels down and picks up the carrots.
“Mom, please don’t do that. Jake can pick them up. Right, Jake?”
Jake says nothing.
Mom continues to gather the carrots into the bowl with one hand as she buttons her uniform with the other. “Oh, Kylie, it’s just carrots. Don’t be so hard on him.”
Jake looks at me, and we have a moment of understanding. He’s gotten away with it, as usual.
“Here, honey.” Mom hands me a piece of paper with an elaborate chart sketched on it. “He’s got to do three sets of fifteen each, okay, and that includes the arm stretches and the hopping thing the doctor showed us the other day. He needs it to improve his balance. And don’t forget the pills.” If Mom paid one tenth this much attention to me, maybe I wouldn’t have lost my mind on a squash court this afternoon.
“Okay,” I say.
“I want to play guitar tonight. I don’t want to do the stupid exercises.” Jake’s mood is shifting.
“You can play guitar, honey, after you and Kylie do the exercises, and after you eat di
Mom works as a nurse at Piedmont Retirement Village four nights a week. I’m in charge of myself and Jake those nights. And Dad, whenever he’s around. God knows what will happen once I leave. Dad doesn’t spend a whole lot of time taking care of anyone but himself. He mows the lawn and takes out the garbage, such classic dad duties it would be fu
“And can you do the laundry, Kyles?”
“Is that clean or dirty?” I ask, pointing to the mound of clothes on the floor.
Mom stares at the pile, confused. “Can’t remember. Can you poke around and figure it out?”
“Sure,” I respond. What else can I say?
Mom pecks Jake on the cheek and then rushes out the door with a wave. “Bye, guys. Love you.”
I look at my watch. Mom’s going to be twenty minutes late to work. Typical.
This has been my life for as long as I can remember. Mom is so distracted by Jake, everything else is an afterthought and I’m forced to pick up the slack. Normally, I don’t complain. It’s pointless. It’s just, today I’m so not into sifting through a heap of potentially smelly clothes and then whipping up di
But that comfort is fleeting. As much as I want to escape, I worry about how Mom will handle things on her own. On the one hand, it makes me want to enroll at UCSD and just live at home. On the other, New York City doesn’t seem far enough away. The moon doesn’t seem far enough away.
I’m interrupted from my roundelay of anxieties by Jake tugging at my sleeve.
“Can I tell you the answer? Can I tell you? Can I tell you?” Jake has been waiting patiently, and now he’s bursting to answer the question I’ve long forgotten. Still, he’s made impressive progress at his new school. I am reminded what Jake is capable of when he sets his mind to it. A year ago, he never would have had the self-control to wait. “September 1987. Grenada had bad flooding. Grenada had bad flooding!!”
“You’re amazing, Jake,” I say. And I mean it.
Jake could do this for the next ten hours. He will do this for the rest of his life, actually. This, and recite every iteration of the dozens of bus schedules that service the greater San Diego area.
I wade through the laundry and realize, to my relief, that it’s clean. One less thing to do. I grab the clothes and start to head up to my room. “Jake, I’m going upstairs for a little bit. You want to watch TV? Or read your book?”
“I want to tell you about the Garbage Patch,” Jake whines. “You have to hear about the Garbage Patch. You just have to.…”
I can feel myself shutting down. I just want to proof my valedictorian speech one last time, and get back to my screenplay. But then I see Jake’s hands trembling. He’s verging on a tantrum. I look at his sweet, open face, pleading with me for more time. I plop onto the couch with the laundry.
“Tell me, Jakie,” I say.
I fold the laundry as Jake settles onto the floor.
“Well, it’s twice the size of Texas and located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s made up of plastic and other forms of debris, like fishing nets. Garbage from all over the world gets sucked in by an oceanic gyre, which is a huge system of rotating currents.” He speaks with the zeal of a true believer. It’s not so much the words I’m hearing, it’s more the cadence.
“It takes about five years for a piece of garbage from the west coast of North America to be carried into the gyre. So if I lie down on a raft tomorrow, I could get to the gyre by 2017. Nobody knows how long it’s been there, but it’s growing larger every day. At some point it might just fill up the ocean so that we are the island and it is the land. I don’t understand why someone doesn’t just clean it up.”
He makes a good point.
Two of Jake’s friends who also have Asperger’s, have the same lilting quality to their speech. When all three of them are together, it can sound like a spoken symphony. They say people with Asperger’s can’t understand basic human signals, the little things we all do that mean “I don’t understand” or “You are standing too close.” They are always bumping up against a world that confuses and thwarts them, and occasionally, this foreign planet and its people can be too much for them, and they can rage, as Jake does sometimes, when his brain erupts into flames. Pure pain and anguish shoot out of him in the form of a tantrum. Despite the fact that I’m the “normal” kid in the family, I understand Jake’s behavior only too well. I experience it myself, albeit in a muted form. Sometimes I wonder who the normal sibling is. I’m rarely ever as happy or comfortable with myself as Jake can be. I wish life were easier for both of us. It would be nice to slip through the world, smooth and slick as arrows whizzing through air, instead of always crashing into things.
As Jake buzzes on, my mind drifts back to the worry stream, and I find myself lost in the current again. How will Jake deal without me? What if he can’t find his blue sweatshirt, which happens at least twice a week? What if Jake spits on his teacher again, Mom can’t leave her shift, and Dad is traveling? That happened last year, and I skipped my math test to pick him up.
And, on the B side, what about me? Wouldn’t it be ironic if Jake was just fine when I left, and I turned out to be the basket case, all alone in New York City? Who will be excited to see me when I return to my dorm after a long day of clawing my way through the city? Who will comfort me? Who will I confide in, without Will and Jake around?
But if I stay, I’ll never leave. And then what?
This is the drain of being me. I can’t seem to find the joy, just the dilemmas. A Möbius strip of crazed thoughts loops through my brain on constant rotation. I’ve wanted to go to NYU forever. When I got in—with a full ride, no less—my parents weren’t the least bit pleased to hear the news. Especially in light of the fact that I’d gotten into Brown, Princeton, and the University of Pe