An Uncomplicated Life Read online

  “I beautiful, Mom,” she said.

  “Yes,” Kerry answered. “You are.”

  Fifteen minutes away, Ryan Mavriplis was slipping into a suit and tie. He’d spent part of the day getting a haircut and a shave. He was 16 years old, a freshman in high school. I’ve often marveled since that night at the coincidences of great fortune that have filled Jillian’s life. There have been so many of them that I don’t find them coincidental anymore:

  The amniocentesis that wasn’t. The anger Jillian used in the hospital to help her breathe. Nancy Croskey, teaching fourth grade in our school district. And Ryan Mavriplis, being raised nearby, also to believe opportunity was a birthright.

  He arrives at our house at 6:00 p.m. sharp. He is a young man in a black suit, white shirt, and a red tie. He strides purposefully up the sidewalk and to the door, offering me his hand. “Good evening, sir,” he announces. “I am here to take your daughter to the Homecoming.”

  His parents, Dimitri and Ellen, stood just behind him, beaming, and followed Ryan inside.

  We had no idea, then, what this evening would portend. It was just a first date. Lives are filled with first dates. Living with Jillian meant living in the moment. Anything else could be overwhelming. This was a fine moment.

  Jillian stands at the top of the stairs, just out of Ryan’s gaze. Her formal construction is complete: Dress and shawl, shoes and pedicure, manicure, braids, and makeup. I look up at her from the landing below. Ryan has moved on to more introductions, in the family room.

  “Dad, I so nervous,” Jillian says.

  It’s impossible to describe what she looked like in that instant. That’s why we have poets and sunrises. Jillian was slim in her form-fitting aqua dress. Audaciously red lipstick propelled her into womanhood. She paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. She gathered her poise as she prepared to pass through this blooming window of time.

  “Don’t be nervous, sweetie” is what I manage to say. “It’s going to be a great night. The best.”

  “Is Ryan handsome?” she asks.

  “Yes, Jills. He is.”

  She begins a slow stride down the stairs and across some new and indefinable threshold. She holds the railing until she reaches my outstretched hand. “I so nervous,” Jillian says again.

  The day Jillian was born, I thought of this moment. I thought it would never occur, and I grieved. I pondered the cruelty of her best steps stolen, before she ever got to dance. Nearly 15 years earlier, to the day, I had hurt for my baby girl and what I believed would be a half full existence. A life without Homecomings and proms—and the promise of both—is no life at all. I wondered why God would do this to my daughter. Now, I am at the bottom of the stairs, holding her hand. Knowing that, in a few hours, she will dance.

  “You look beautiful,” I say.

  In the years after this, as Homecomings, proms and anniversaries with Ryan assumed a familiarity, Jillian would wait downstairs and stare out the window until she saw Ryan’s car turn onto the common drive. Then she’d run upstairs so Kerry could give her a proper entrance.

  “In-tro-ducing . . . Miss Jillian . . . Phillips . . . Daugherty!”

  She’d enter then, with all the poise and confidence of a runway model.

  Not this time though. This was the first time, so she held my hand, maybe for the first time in the few years since she had asked that I not escort her to the bus stop.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says.

  Jillian takes the first walk of a lifetime then, down the hall and into the family room. Ryan waits, standing tall, a corsage box in his hand.

  “Hey, Ryan,” Jillian says.

  “Hey, Jillian,” Ryan says. “You look beautiful.”

  He removes the wrist corsage—an orchid!—from the box. “You want to put it on me?” Jillian asks. Ryan asks how. I help him get the corsage safely from the box. Kerry helps place the corsage on Jillian’s wrist.

  “That okay?” he asks.

  The flower is on the underside of Jillian’s wrist. She turns it upright. “Thanks, Ryan. You’re so sweet. I got something for you, too.”

  Kerry takes Ryan’s corsage from its box and pins it to the lapel of his suit.

  Jillian says, “We’re a good team.”

  They leave then, with Ellen and Dimitri, arm-in-arm across the lawn. We follow them to Ryan’s house, where several of Ryan and Jillian’s friends have gathered. Kids from soccer and Special Olympics, mostly. They’re all going to dinner first, and then the dance. Sparkling grape juice fills champagne flutes.

  Ryan offers a toast: “I want to thank everyone for being here. To my good friends Ben and Robbie and Jacob and Margo and Jillian. I’m happy I have a date. Amen.”

  Jillian adds her own words: “I love this time to spend with my boyfriend. I love my coach. I love this very lovely evening. I really love you guys.”

  A year later, in the same spot, Ryan offered another tribute to the assembled revelers: “To my girlfriend I love with all my body and love I have in my heart. She’s an angel and good at soccer and everything. Amen.”

  And amen.

  Ellen swears now that in the backseat of the car, on the way to dinner that first night, Jillian said, “Ryan and me gonna get a ’partment and get married.” We take Ellen’s word on that one. None of us were that far along yet—at least not that night. The hope was there though that Jillian and Ryan would have such a chance.

  They danced that night. “All the slow ones,” Ryan said.

  Jillian praised her boyfriend’s dancing prowess: “Lots of good moves. I felt like I was in love.”

  I had worried Jillian’s disability would come to define her. Then Ryan arrived. The door opened. Everything was possible again.

  There have been nights, more than I could ever have imagined, when Jillian and Ryan have lived my dreams for her. They’ve lingered in the porch glow. The scent of cologne has become familiar. Ryan has felt the delicate touch of a young lady’s fingertips on the back of his neck as they danced around the room. They have shared the mysteries. They’ve earned what lovers own.

  That has all happened. But that first night, when Jillian returned to our porch from the Homecoming dance, Ryan offered a swift, gentlemanly goodnight hug. Kerry and I watched from our bedroom window. Much later, we would learn that Ryan began referring to Jillian as “the girl of my dreams” on that first date.

  It was a nice thought, on an enchanted evening. At about midnight, Kerry and I kissed our suddenly bigger little girl goodnight.

  “I love my life,” Jillian said.

  Kerry hung the teal dress in Jillian’s closet. Not long ago, we fished it out from the pack of at least a dozen formal dresses our daughter has worn over the years. Long dresses for proms, short dresses for Homecomings. It still sparkled.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kelly

  How old are those guys, Dad?

  —KELLY

  Meantime, Kelly was a senior in high school, and we worried about him. Typical teenaged-kid worries. How are your grades? Where’s your homework? Who do you think you’re talking to? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not telling you again. Where are you going, what are you doing and who are you doing it with? When will you be back? When’d you get home last night? Where’d you put my car keys? No, I don’t have twenty dollars. I’m your father, not your maid. Get out of the shower. Water costs money. You broke what? Don’t tell me you forgot. Do you have to wear your hat that way? Those aren’t shoes, my friend, unless you’re Jesus. Get a haircut. As long as you live under my roof . . . I can’t do it for you. How many times do I have to tell you? Pull your pants up. Turn the music down. Have you been drinking? Don’t drink and drive. Be home by midnight.

  Navigating adolescence is hazardous in any family. Trying it when your focus is on another child is even harder. Because this is a certifiable fact:

  Sometime between about eighth grade and high school graduation, t
he connection is lost, and your child stops talking to you. He seeks refuge in everything he doesn’t want you to know and hangs out with everyone who thinks just like he does. He doesn’t understand that all you really want is a decent conversation.

  I wrote about Kelly occasionally in the newspaper. I called him “The Kid Down the Hall.” It seemed a properly vague reference to a typical teenager who sought nothing more than estrangement from his parents. Starting at age 14, he began digging a tunnel to his own personal China, deeper and deeper, marking each new excavation with a No Trespassing sign.

  I can’t tell you why the getting-along was easier with Jillian than with Kelly, but it was. Guys are guys. Guys don’t share much of anything, really—especially when one is the father and the other is the teenaged son. The father-son dynamic is perpetual grist for fiction writers. Bookstores offer shelves of self-help, promising peaceful answers to the father-son wars. Those volumes are often larded with goopy sentiment: Fathers playing catch with sons. Or they are written by people with more postgraduate degrees than actual sons to raise.

  When Kelly was 14 and 15 years old, I didn’t have much of a connection with him beyond yelling at him. Dealing with Jillian was uncomplicated, partly because she was uncomplicated. Dealing with Kelly was like working a Rubik’s Cube. In an irony only a parent can understand, Kelly became a bigger project than Jillian.

  I’d tried various ways to reconnect with my Kid Down the Hall. I got him into wrestling, a sport I’d practiced with mild success for several years. He wrestled. He didn’t like it.

  I’d try to engage him in sports talk. After all, that was my job, and I knew a little about it. He had no interest in sports talk. Or sports generally.

  Kelly liked rap music. I thought “rap music” was an oxymoron. No father-son conversation there. I decided I’d introduce him to some real music. Rock and roll. I commanded my 14-year-old to sit as I slipped some Rolling Stones into the CD player. I played “Gimme Shelter,” and proclaimed it the “Greatest rock and roll song ever made.” Keith Richards’s opening guitar licks, menacing and taut, slid seamlessly into Mick Jagger’s urgent vocal, considerably aided and abetted by Merry Clayton’s feral wailing.

  “A masterpiece,” I announced at the finish. I was feeling pretty smooth.

  I hoped my son would hear “Gimme Shelter” and begin a love affair with good music. That is, my music. Or at least I hoped he’d take a break from his current heroes, Tupac and Snoop Dogg. I thought an intro to the music I enjoyed at his age would forge a re-bond between us, just as he began his wade into the teenaged swamp. I really believed that.

  “What did you think of that?” I asked. “Pretty awesome, wasn’t it?”

  I actually used the word “awesome” at age 42. No wonder kids think parents are ridiculous. I was planning on breaking out some Allman Brothers, a little Eagles, maybe some Hendrix. You think you’re cool, kid? Check this out. It’s awesome.

  That’s when Kelly said, “How old are those guys, Dad?”

  He was a smart kid who didn’t like school. “I like high school when I’m not there” was how he explained it. He was a respectful kid who nevertheless did what he pleased as much as possible, not all of it respectful and much of it undetected.

  He was a friendly kid who kept a small circle of friends. Kelly didn’t do school things. No dances, no football games, no clubs. He wasn’t antisocial; he was selectively social. As Kelly put it, “Dances sucked. Homecoming sucked. Going to high school football games was cool. In middle school.”

  He always wanted to get away. Denver was a fascination for a time. Then the West Coast. Kelly didn’t want to stay in Loveland, or Ohio. He believed the kids who thought high school was great were the kids who never left Loveland. By the time he was a senior, it didn’t much matter where he went, as long as he could get away from here.

  The deeper he got into high school, the more his grades retreated. He lacked motivation. He experimented with what high school kids experiment with. We sent him briefly to a psychologist. He wouldn’t talk to us, not even disrespectfully. We thought he needed to talk to someone. He thought that was ridiculous.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to talk about?” the doctor would begin.

  “No.”

  “Why do you think you’re here?”

  “My parents made me come.”

  “No issues or concerns?”

  “No.”

  Sixty minutes of silence ensued. Fairly quickly, the doctor announced she couldn’t “help” Kelly.

  “That’s because there was nothing to help,” he said.

  In truth, there wasn’t. We didn’t know that then. We just saw a bright kid who didn’t care about school. We didn’t want Kelly to flush his future. We didn’t know how to fix him. We yelled a lot. Kelly never yelled back. He never said anything. We wished he would say something. Anything.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t do the work for you. You have to want to change your life.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’ll do better. I guess.”

  All he wanted was for the lecture to end.

  My dad was a yeller. He yelled so frequently that I became expert at tuning him out. I could tell what words he was yelling by the inflections in his voice. The up-and-down cadence let me know what the sermon was about. I didn’t need to hear the words to know exactly what they were.

  As I yelled at Kelly, I knew he was doing the same thing.

  He sat politely and offered the good answers. Then he’d go to the basement, shut the door, engage the thump-thump of Tupac and enter a different place.

  Turn the music down.

  During those times, the lingering fear was that Kerry and I had neglected our son in service to our daughter. We didn’t think we had. But building the better Jillian could be a soul-sapping enterprise. Emotional energy wasn’t boundless.

  “Do we need to spend more time with him?” Kerry would ask.

  “He doesn’t want to spend more time with us,” I’d say.

  “Then, what?” she’d ask.

  I didn’t know.

  We believed that, in all the fundamental ways, we’d raised Jillian the same way we’d raised Kelly. We hadn’t given her preferential treatment. She had responsibilities. She had to be respectful to us and to others. Jillian had to make her bed and clean her room. She had to help with the dinner dishes. When she messed up, we punished her. We may have allowed for her disability, but we didn’t cater to it.

  Occasionally, usually at the dinner table, Jillian would boast about something nice she’d done for someone at school that day. “You’re the good child,” we’d say, a teasing shot across Kelly’s apathetic bow. Jillian would borrow the phrase whenever she and Kelly quibbled. “I’m the good child, Kelly,” she’d say.

  We had made a point of spending as much time with Kelly as we did with Jillian. When he was younger, he appreciated it, but by high school, he probably wished we would let that go. Kerry in particular had made sure Kelly felt fully included. Mothers and sons have the same bond as fathers and daughters. Kerry was always closer to our son than I was.

  Yet there was no denying that we needed different approaches to raising each child. As Nancy Croskey had said, one size didn’t fit all.

  Kelly provoked different worries than Jillian. We’d never worry about the 3:00 a.m. phone calls with Jillian. We wouldn’t listen for her opening the garage door on a Saturday night. Jillian could be typically teenaged in her attitude. But she didn’t party. We always knew where she was. We walked the midnight floor worrying about her future. Not her present.

  We worried about Kelly’s present.

  They’re two very different people. Jillian is social, engaging and engaged. Kelly is contemplative. He taught himself to play the guitar. Hours in the basement, experimenting with sounds. It was Kelly’s kind of thing, a solo accomplishment set to music.
He’s the guy in the corner at the party, observing and nursing a beer. That’s if he goes to the party, which he’ll do only under protest. A good day for him is a walk in the woods with a very good friend or his girlfriend, smoking a cheap cigar and now that he’s legal, taking a nip of Jack Daniel’s, before finishing the day listening to music.

  Kelly has always loved reading. When he was a freshman in high school, I gave him a book of Hemingway short stories. “Read ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ That’ll tell you all you need to know about Hemingway,” I said. Surprisingly, he did. Kelly didn’t become a Hemingway devotee right away; that took years. But it was the story that piqued his interest.

  He wrote his master’s thesis on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Discussion of “Big Two-Hearted River” consumed several pages.

  Jillian is an open book. Kelly is a Faulkner novel. He’s careful who he lets in. You can know him. It takes time. I’ve been working on it for 28 years.

  To some extent, you raise your kids the way your parents raised you. My dad was an engaged parent, if not exceptionally attentive. We used sports as our adhesive. We had season tickets to Washington Redskins games. We spent that lost and lonely winter on the Greyhound to and from Baltimore, going to Bullets basketball games. We played catch, though not routinely, and only when I asked.

  I tried the catch stuff with Kelly. I was always the instigator. It was comical, this nearly 40-something guy with a ball glove on his hand, beseeching his 10-year-old to come out and play.

  Kelly and Jillian at our cabin in rural Ohio.

  Jillian had no such issues with her brother. To her, everything Kelly did was cool. There were times when Kelly felt the only person who loved him unconditionally was his little sister. She didn’t care about the D he got on his report card. She knew he had parties when we were out of town. She knows things about her brother that Kerry and I will never know. They had a bond that Jillian’s disability affected only in good ways. Kelly assumed the role of protector. He has said since that he would never have been as close to her if she were typical.