The day before her son eloped, the rains came and the river increased. She recalls the immense, confused sound in the woods behind their home. All day, dense endless thunder. In the evening hailstones gathered in strings along the iron lip of the gutter.
By then she’d forgotten the romantic overtones—eloped—word for lovers. She hears it still. The palm-warmed pebble tossed against the upstairs window, the trestle descent—but not for her child, her boy. Autistic children do not run away with lovers, they just run off with themselves. What must it be like to have such a slack sense of home, or attachment? “Elopement,” as the clinicians say, a behavior half of all autistic children engage in. Another form of wandering, of withdrawing, from her, from her love, her need of him, which grew stronger only as he grew older and more independent of her, more willing to shrug her off—to shrug the world off too, water off a duck’s back.
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If her son had shoes on when he left that morning, the river took them. The river took everything but his bicycle helmet. The bright orange one, perhaps the only reason the body was found at all, the parents were told, as though they should be grateful he had been wearing it.
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At night, the mother sees the orange helmet winking out from behind the stilt grass, flashes of it in the corner of her eyes, and when she turns she sees him, under the bright cap, the pale stamen of her son drifting, naked boy with his long hair—surely they thought he was a girl when they first came up on him—her darling in the bulrushes.
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Her son of so many shades. A gelding changing color. Their nonverbal son; their distant, open-mouthed son; their angry, self-absorbed son; their beauty queen son; their supple, warm-skinned son with the long fragrant hair; their stubborn son, barnacled to the steel pole in the supermarket; their ecstatic son, limbs outstretched on a bright fall day outside his grandparent’s house, dancing; all of their sons, all gone, all flown out like swallows into an aperture of severe self-light.
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He was diagnosed officially by four, suddenly stopped speaking at three-and-a-half, all in a few weeks, a month perhaps, from compound sentences, to phrases, then a few last words, like a good-bye. After that it was only gestures, if anything.
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Anything, that is how the mother remembers feeling, how acute her anger could become. She would take anything from him. She had never wanted to shake her child, but in those first months of regressive onset, she could not stop herself from asking him, “Thomas? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?” and how she hated her reliance on that question, how she never said anything else to him those days, only asking, pleading, was he okay in there, was he hurting in there, was he scared in there? Was he okay? Because he seemed in pain, or hurt, the way he scrunched his face, closed so tightly his eyes. And his silence was so awful, and sudden. Are you okay? Are you okay?
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How she wanted to hurt him, she admits this now, how she wanted to make his agonized gestures correspond to something real, to make his clinched eyes correspond to the world as it was. She wanted to place something hot in his hand and see him do something about it, to see him hurting because of something outside. Something she could then remove, and say, all better, all better. She is not ashamed.
They tickled him, but instead of the normal squeal, the look in the eyes that before had pleaded with delight, “no more,” he would instead go stiff, eyes wide as though listening to something far off.
In the mornings, she would go in to find him manipulating his tongue in his mouth, his eyes clamped shut as though focusing very hard on something. It reminded her of someone trying to tie a cherry stem into a knot, though more involved. Each time she found him this way she would pry the mouth open, convinced and scared he actually had something in there. And it was always empty. Empty and empty and empty. This lovely mouth with its full lips, mouth that had before held songs, and laughter, and such precise little demands.
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This is autism, she is told, over and over again. This and this and this. The word alone, whenever she hears it or is forced to use it, like a door getting slammed upstairs in a big drafty house, a house growing ever bigger now, big enough to contain all the new things she is fearful of.
The word itself was first used to describe a particular kind of self-absorption noted in schizophrenic patients in 1908. Auto. Self. Selfism. It sounds judgmental to her. Why would you do this to yourself? And then, in the forties, child psychologists decided it was not a form of schizophrenia at all, but something else, some other wilderness of the mind. That’s about as far as they have gotten. And yet, they kept Eugen Bleuler’s troubled word. Autism.
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His arms swung over his drawn-up knees again, his hands together, his whole body rocking, not wildly rocking, but gracefully, rhythmically, his long fingers interlaced and bumping up and down just so on his shins. His eyes remain fixed to the side, into an empty corner. The eyes are moving as though someone is there, dancing.
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They bought a TV. They had never owned one. They had vowed to raise him on books and toys, but now they thought, hoped, it might help. He did like it. Thomas preferred the national weather radar channel. It played a loop of storms in fifteen-minute increments, a stop-action animation of crawling shapes, vivid greens and blues, red and yellow cores, all ticking and shifting across the nation.
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He had reversed the course of his life at the age of four. He had turned his back on the world to become a hoarder of self, jettisoning language first, that unnecessary burden. Of course, language would be the first to go. He was transformed innately, like a window at dusk, the reversal of light, repealing the exterior, becoming a transfer of the interior.
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They had a brochure, “Preventing Wandering: Resources for Parents.” Winter is past. Flowers appear on the earth. Rise love, beautiful one, and come away. Where would he go, the mother thought? And with whom? Who would come to his window in the night? But it was real, and very soon the word elopement took on hard, pragmatic edges, daily wear. Thomas was only six when they installed the dead bolts, key-operated on both sides.
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Swim Lessons for Autistic Children. Once a week during the summer, starting when he turned six. They were strange lessons, lessons that were hard to watch: her son with all his clothing on, in jeans and sweatshirts, in sneakers, sometimes with his book bag, learning how to shed these items once in the water. How to kick off his shoes. She remembers watching his book bag drop first, down to the deep end under his feet. It was not actually his book bag—and what a pain trying to get him to put on a bag that was not his, not the same brand and color. In place of what would be books were carefully measured Ziploc bags of sand, the weight of three books, a lunch box, and one half-liter of water, she was told. And this is how he learned to swim, encumbered, his lank arms thrashing over the deep end. She could see the shed book bag down there beneath him, by the drain like a body, a menacing red spot. She would not be able to watch these lessons at all if it were not for his joy, his joy to be in the water on any occasion, nothing else was like that.
The happiest they had ever seen him was not swimming in the traditional sense but floating. And he could swim, but given the chance, he just didn’t want to. What he wanted to do was float in the substance, face down, eyes wide, like a snorkeler without the snorkel, as though he were a colloidal part of the element itself.
And what did water mean to their little boy? The mother had always wanted to feel it herself, the strange urge, just once, the way Thomas felt about water, had always felt, since he was able to stand, to motion: the strongest urging. An ear full of murmurous beckoning, a narcissus blooming sweetly in the upper chamber, standing in its own reflection.
This is what the mother wants to know. Why her son loved the very sight of it, why he plunged toward it always, at the pool, at the lake, at the ocean, his feverish and powerful body driven toward it—the child once vengeful for days after being caught in a dash toward a golf course pond across from the pediatrician’s office in the middle of winter, how he screamed to be denied, as though being told he could not live.
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They slept with their keys hidden at the back of their nightstands. They hung signs on the inside of the exterior doors, red stop signs, a big stop in white type in the center, just to reinforce, the visual cues help they were told, and nonverbal now doesn’t mean nonverbal always, and so they were met as a family with the big bright white words every time they went out. The signs became just as much a reminder to the mother. Stop and think for a moment about your possible mistakes, what chink you’ve left in the day’s armor, what precaution you have left undone.
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The numbers were so high. She runs them over in her mind often to keep herself vigilant. Forty-nine percent of all autistic will elope. Fifty-three percent of those go missing for over four hours. Ninety-one percent of all autistic deaths are due to drowning subsequent to elopements.
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Their neighborhood streets were hung with crape myrtles. She remembers the hard star-shaped seedpods and how they fractured under her sandals as they distributed postcards each fall with the start of school. They spent extra on the high gloss. An updated picture of Thomas on the front; on the reverse, their number and street address with brief instructions: “Dear Neighbor, My name’s Thomas. I live with my parents at 3200 River Dr. I have a severe form of autism. I don’t speak. If you see me by myself please call this number.”
The mother dreaded this time of year, the sending away, the updated postcard. And she wondered if sharing this information only put her son at greater risk—had she merely chummed the water for predators? These decisions, this constant weighing of risks. No wonder she doesn’t sleep, no wonder how often she stands over the sink in the middle of the night staring out at the silvery eucalyptus in the backyard, washing her face again and again, pacing the kitchen floor. Sitting on the edge of the sofa watching the occasional car pass down the road, listening to the sounds of birds slowly rise with the morning, the first cicadas rising like an alarm. The night watch, a life turned preventative.
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The day before he bolted, while Thomas was trapped inside by the heavy rains, the river down the hill from their home climbed its banks, slipping in a six-foot wall of opaque water over the weir, flooding the bottomland forests to the south.
And then came evening, and morning. It plays now like a tableau at the back of her fragmented mind: how the father had gone out the evening before to roll out the trash, and in his rush to get out of the rain, had forgotten one of the two locks—the garage door dead bolt—and now the image would surely stay with him always, the door opening off the kitchen, the door wide, a hole ruptured in the center of their son’s world through which he might flow.
The sweet oily smell of the warm garage was inside the kitchen that morning, the wrongness of that. She woke to the sound of her husband calling their son’s name, and knew by the sound of his voice and by the way it came not from inside the house but from outside, through the bedroom window, from out on the street. And that is when the image came to her, the sight of the open door—and she knew which door, the image of the lock turned out, turned out, the brass knob showing the oblong face of her beautiful little man, before he covers it over with his moist, awkward palm. Out you go. Out you go. The squeal of brakes on the dark wet road above the bridge as he crosses. A blue heron rising, stretches a prehistoric span to drift slowly downstream. The rushing intake of dark water.
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The grandmother drove down from upstate and stayed at the house in the event Thomas should suddenly show up, wander in like a cat after the hunt. There is always hope, which is the problem. Autistic children have been found alive in the most extreme conditions. Five days, ten degrees, beyond hope, and then not only alive and well but screaming to be pulled back into the light, screaming to be made to enter the world again. These stories, god they are endless, and she had heard so many of them. A ten-year-old boy survives five days in a Florida swamp the size of two counties, in winter, a swamp that killed four army rangers the year before. A seven-year-old girl disappears on a trail in the mountains of Virginia, is missing for seven days. There were three storms. The temperatures at night were near freezing. One morning, a miner finds her at the bottom of the quarry he was working, asleep like a lamb, alongside the muddy creek bank. A boy is in the open sea for fourteen hours, pulled out with his father in a rip current from the Ponce Inlet in Florida, covered in jellyfish stings, treading water, very happy to have a free helicopter ride. How can this be accounted for?
You see, these children, children who run from strangers, from sirens, who are not motivated by a fear for their own safety, who bend toward their own particular wilderness, a wilderness of the mind and heart which they carry inside them always. They can cover impossible distances, these children, like wolves in the northwest ranges. There is always hope, said the chief of police, who visited with them first and stayed with them during the searches all day before heading back to his own home that first night. Yes, hope was what made them feel like they were dying, like their nerve endings were crawling through one another.
After the long day of calling, the mother and father spent the first night on the tailgate of a DNR truck on a landing road by the river—calling until their voices were gone, trying not to think of him as a pet that might wander suddenly back, but hard when you’re walking and yelling the same name, over and over again, until the name sounds so odd, so very strange—the search went on all through the night and involved an occasional helicopter and a fleet of long aluminum boats, two working upstream, six down. Dogs worked the bank on both sides.
“He is scared of dogs,” said the mother, “he won’t come to a dog.”
“They will go to him,” the police chief said, knowing better than to tell her that they were not those kinds of dogs. These were “early dogs.” They were chosen because of the cooler weather, “early” for “early decomp.” The specific scent of the human body at 65 degrees.
The father asked to go out in one of the flat-bottom boats they were using for the search, as she had already begged, but they were not allowed. Each time a boat came upstream, it was the movement of the searchlights that told them how to think, if the lights were on the water out front, they had hope, if they were carving into the darkness, sweeping along the glossy box-elder banks, falling along the eddies beneath the low-hanging boughs, they did not hope. If they are still shining the light on the bank then he is not in the boat, not in that boat. The next boat, that is the boat that will have him, and so their minds listened for the little two-stroke motor to come upstream again, to see their boy dripping wet, his madness, angry to have been pulled home, villainous with anger to be pulled out of the water somewhere.
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And how they would love him in his madness, how they would love to be angry at him and hold that unhushable unloving fiend of their child, and how they would torture him with their embraces, for days, for years. How they would ruin him with the closeness of their own bodies, how they would never care again for development or autonomy or well-being over their own need to hold him and feel his long dark hair against their faces, to kiss his beautiful face. How they would lock him up and bury him in love. How they would ruin him with their selfish affection, how they would never let him see the world again. If only they could have another chance at this mutual ruination that is parenthood, one more chance—she felt a plunge in her brain as she thought it all through—she was asking for a second chance. Asking who? Some haunted feeling of order in the world, something that would betray her but was nevertheless laid low in her from childhood, something she had picked up like a germ in Sunday school. The desire to plead with a being, to plead with whoever or whatever ordered the lives of the small and living things, it rose alongside another desire, which was to be beheld in her pain and disgrace.
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The first time he eloped was a year before. During the school day. A fire department volunteer found him at the last moment, walking knee deep in a small pond at the back of a subdivision down the hill from the middle school. Thomas had walked two full miles, more or less, straight to the pond. He had seen it every day for three years from the bus window.
He left the campus suddenly. Bolted, as they say. The bathroom in Hall B, that opened out from the other side onto the band room, where the door was always locked on that side, where he left blue finger paint on the knob before crossing the faculty parking lot to descend steeply into a power line easement overgrown with kudzu.
It always amazed the mother, who felt so alienated from the boy’s mind, that her son knew exactly what he wanted the entire time, had held for three years a constant desire, and had waited like a prisoner for his chance, for three years, waited. Trying the knob. Trying, trying the knob. Each day. Going to the bathroom. Trying the knob. Should this fact make her sad?
This is what made them feel a little closer to being with him in the days after his death. That he knew exactly what he was doing, or at least, a part of him knew, the mother believed this truly, and so he wanted to flee the world, and got it. This desire, not demented, not a broken desire; it was ecstasy. And isn’t that what he wanted, in the end? To be out, out beyond himself, beyond the need for self-expression, driven with joy beyond his mind into that substance that had always captivated his imagination.
Is this not rare, to be alive with such purpose, for one suddenly ecstatic leaving? Is there not something in him of worship, of sainthood? And is it wrong to be relieved just so slightly by these thoughts, thoughts of his ecstatic death? Thoughts of his will, his agency in full motion, expanding, opening into one final prospering?
The volunteer firefighter who found him that first time told the parents that he was assigned to that pond, that specific pond he said, on all such codes, missing child with autism. He told his story, diminishing himself and his role in saving the boy with a certain service-styled noblesse.
He parked by the pond and sat there listening to his radio, watching the water, waiting by it, catcher in the cattails. And of course, Thomas came as though called, straight out of the tall reclamation grass, the tops of the cattails waving. He was waist deep in the water before the firefighter got the truck door open. And when he pulled Thomas out of the water, the boy’s strength amazed him, the fists pressing into his chest, taking his breath, and he knew then he would have to take the blows, knew he might not get another chance at him if he were to let go.
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It doesn’t matter to her anymore what it was that saved their son that afternoon, luck or fate or god. All that matters now is that they had used it up, cashed it in. It was gone. And now they were standing down by the river near the DNR trucks asking for more, another chance, making petty deals in their minds, and then big deals, selling their souls back to the more orthodox gods of their childhood.
The morning had turned cold. A fuzzy membrane lay on the river and the mother saw the character of the sky changing in the east, day two rising up toward her—and there was evening, and morning—and on seeing the light coming up she did exactly what she did not want to do, which was to hang her body onto the very body of the man who had not locked the door, and to weep in a way she had not known was possible, and to need his body to keep her from falling, not to the ground but off the turning world, to need him to pick her up and lay her in the back seat of their van like dead weight.
She had medication the doctor called in that afternoon, but she hadn’t been taking it; she wanted to stay clear. As day three emerged, she took a full dose, and then another half. She went down into her dark dismay like a great whale diving, letting the pressure close in around her, the heavy crushing dark, the chest growing smaller and smaller and tighter as the fall continued downward into the new, the unbelievable emptiness.
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After it is all over, she finds herself thinking often of her father. She cannot explain this. It happens in the weeks after her son’s death; she is having withdrawals from the medication, she is tapering down. She is ready to start grieving on her own steam, without the chemicals, and instead of grief, she is hit with a descent into her childhood memories. The counselors have told her to grieve however she wants, for as long as she wants. But this, she did not expect.
Her father was a man who was long-limbed and elegant, like Thomas, their hands so thin, otherworldly really. Perhaps this is why she thinks of him. She recalls how her father would often disappear after dinner into the woods behind their subdivision, on summer nights especially, when the sun would stay out until nine. He always had to know what was around him in the world, had to see it on foot and be alone. The habit drove her mother crazy. What if he dies out there? We’ll never find him, never.
He would find horse trails that went on for days, old burned-out cars, antique fields and collapsed farmhouses with thick oaks growing out of them, the chimney leaning on the tree. On a Saturday, he would take her straight to these things, another discovery he wanted to show her. He would let her climb into half-collapsed farmhouses—surely it was a horrible idea, now that she thinks about it—and pull out pieces of broken china, the pages of an old almanac calendar. “Watch out for nails,” he would call out.
Was it not somehow the same desire, the same love of beyondness, that her son also clung to, and turned back toward? They say autistic children are turned inward, curved in on themselves, an echo chamber of self, incurvatus in se, but this is not the whole truth. She imagines the two of them are together now, her father walking Thomas quietly up to a field taken over by blond spear grass, a rafter of turkeys bedded down out before them.
“Okay. Now,” says her father, and her son runs, and the great birds start lofting away toward the pines, their wings, god so loud. Squeaking that horrible sound. The boy is floating through the field behind them, the bruised color of their heads all around him now, the stripes, the white rings of their tremendous tails, everywhere, the beautiful, the mighty sound that resists all of the mother’s language, a sound that can’t be driven into signs. That is where he is. With the father, somehow together, somehow alone, and together, and out beyond themselves where they always preferred to be in the end.
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But her husband, who has gone to the coroner’s office every day since he heard of the strange discovery of his son’s body, and who has sat outside the office, across from the assistant, in the same pair of unwashed corduroy slacks and the same blue button-down he threw on the morning his boy eloped, and who has only been granted one meeting and who cannot stop thinking about these questions: How is it that his little boy’s body was found by someone along the river and examined by the coroner and no one will tell him who it was that found him, or where exactly? His son’s nude body, deposited where, exhumed from the mud, where? Brought to Cedar Creek Road how? Someone would have to answer all of his questions. Not a single question, or detail, would go unanswered. And something in him, in his conversations with the coroner’s office, had detected a hollowness to the story, a lack of detail that caused his mind to wind up high and loud, striking the same note like the two-stroke motors of those first nights.
He wanted to hear every little detail and it tore at him, the missing holes in the story. She hears him coming and going now, in the early morning, and then he returns when the office is closed. She sleeps in hard four-hour cycles, eating strange things in-between, whatever is left in the pantry, canned soups she eats cold, an entire box of cereal and then a bowl of ice cream, amazed she doesn’t feel the least bit sick, or does she always feel sick?
She wants to tell him to let go of it, the dark current he is moving in, but she knows she cannot tell him anything. She is sorry for him, but she cannot be sad for him in a way that matters. She has pity, and even of that just a little, at the horrible way he tortures himself. But sadness—no. There is just not any sadness to spare for him.
His mother comes and brings food, but there isn’t room left in the freezer, and they throw away several casseroles whole, still in the glass bakeware. She hasn’t touched a single one, had forgotten they were even there. She watches her mother-in-law put one in the oven and doesn’t say a word, accepts her hugs, accepts her as a shadowy figure passing around as she cleans, washes clothing, folds and puts things away things, cleans the bathroom, dear woman, dear shadow.
She sees one morning that her husband has carried one of their expensive, mid-century chairs from the kitchen into the shower. Slowly she returns to work, slowly decreases her dosage. She has a therapist whom she begins to tell about her dreams, about her son running through fields of turkeys with his grandfather, and the therapist is happy to hear these dreams, happy to talk through these images. She tells her it is a good thing, not apart from grief, and that grief is not the same thing as sadness, that it is more complicated than that, and that she is doing it well. Suddenly, the mother finds herself laughing on occasion, as she tells stories about her son to the therapist.
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The husband, the ex-father, has hired a lawyer and turned into a student of law himself now. He has a suit filed against the coroner, and another against the owner of the property, a man who lives up in Chicago somewhere and will not give up the names of the men who lease the land as a hunt club. He is getting nowhere and spending all their money. He sleeps in the guest room at odd hours, often during the day. He sits for long hours in the shower with the water pouring over his head.
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One morning, she wakes to find him lying beside her. For just a moment she is sure the weight of the body is Thomas, and that it is all over, that somehow, she has drawn him back out of her dream and into life, or that she has left the world too, and in either case, she is pleased. It is finally over. But it is only her husband. He is sleeping, he is covered in sweat, and the smell of his body, dear god, the unchanged clothes, it is the shadow of his madness falling across her, and she knows that she can’t stay there beside him anymore.
She packs two large suitcases while he sleeps and leaves a note. “I can’t stay for this. Call me.” She rents a small apartment in a building that overlooks the river above the weir. She is writing and has started smoking again, two things she swore off in her late twenties. She cannot bring herself to pray, which is the third thing she abandoned, though her mother wishes she would come with her to church sometime, and the counselor says that it could help. She cannot, will not go that far.
Instead she smokes, which is less dangerous than prayer. She is vigilant against all forms of madness and too much love of any kind. In the evenings she watches the herons glide slowly down to the large rocks that appear in the river when the water is low and calm and the light does not shine so brightly off of it. The spider lilies are in bloom. They look like stars in the green rushes between the large stones. Families come when the heat backs off, trespassing on the apartment property below her balcony in the early morning with their cast nets. They catch loads of bright shad—who knew such fish were even in the river—the silver bodies visible in the draining nets the men raise and carry out to where their families sit on emptied five-gallon paint buckets to hold the bounty. She watches the nets fly out over the calm water, again and again, and she watches the young children playing in their wet underwear, and the men, much farther out in the current. The nets flying so far out over the water, taking what they will, hauling in those bright bodies, again and again.
The title of this story is taken from the poem “The Great Blue Heron” by Carolyn Kizer.