Life, Animated (21 page)

Dan would later cite this moving moment in his memo, and talk about how surprised and touched he was that Owen could access the emotions of Phil, Hercules, and the three other characters in that scene.

As that day’s session ends, Dan pulls me aside. “Autistic kids like Owen are not supposed to do that—this is getting weird in a very good way.”

Cornelia ducks into my studio office behind the house and puts Owen’s black-and-white composition book on my desk. It’s late February 2006.

I can tell it’s a good urgency—to report something hopeful.

“Read this. Last entry.”

I open to the book’s last page. She asked Owen to create a story, with himself as the character.

“A boy is fearful of his future and what his life will be like…” the story begins. It has a few twists along the way, as the boy wanders into a forest and finds a stone, a magic stone. Tilt it toward the sun and it becomes a mirror in which the boy can see the future. The boy loves the stone. He sees many possible futures for himself, all of them exciting. But then crossing a river the boy slips and loses the stone.

“But it’s okay,” the story finishes. “He doesn’t need the stone anymore, now that he knows his future will be bright and full of joy.”

“I think he’s ready to go,” she says.

“I think you’re right. Are you ready for someone else to take over?” I respond.

She smiles. She talks about how she was dreading this, before it began, how it’d devour her life. “I realize I’m going to really miss it. Just the two of us, making our way. But he’s ready. This is what we’ve been working for—for him to join the rest of the kids.”

The next week—the first week in March 2006, a few days before his fifteenth birthday—we tell Owen that he’ll be interviewing at the school we’ve been angling toward in Rockville, Maryland, called the Katherine Thomas School (KTS). It has a new high school program, which was just started last year by the former assistant director of the Lab School’s high school, Rhona Schwartz. The school, which Schwartz is the director of, is much like the Lab, but more inclusive of more types of kids, with about one-third of them on the spectrum.

It’s very small—only about forty kids—but due to grow, or so Rhona Schwartz, tells us on our visit with Owen. She takes us on a tour. It’s a spacious building, only half-f, and we can see Owen, nodding, checking the boxes of what represents school to him: classrooms, library, science lab, music room, art studio, gymnasium, and principal’s office, where we settle for a chat.

Rhona, having worked under Sally Smith, knows just who she’s looking at with Owen. The school, set up to handle ninth through twelfth graders, currently has only the first two grades filled. In the fall, Owen would be in the third class of ninth graders, she explains. “Would you like that, Owen?”

“Yes!” he says, with a plastered-on smile. “I think this is the place for me!” We all chuckle. I’ve never seen him in this mode, like a salesman looking to close a deal: settled, clear-eyed, sort of charming. Cornelia’s looking bemused, behind which she’s thinking what I’m thinking:
he must
really, really
want this
. Rhona tells Owen and us that he’ll come back for a day so he can be observed, “just to make sure this is the right place for you.”

We next talk to Schwartz after Owen’s observation day. It’s a disaster. She tells us he was walking the halls, pacing, flapping his arms, doing “lots of stim.” He passed by a classroom where he spotted his friend, Brian (from the social skills group) and just strode right in, in the middle of a lesson, loudly telling Brian he’s coming to this school.

It’s all, suddenly, hanging by a thread. We rush right over. Cornelia explains he must have been very anxious. “This is not the way he usually behaves…I’m with him every day,” she says. “He must have been very nervous and trying too hard.” He certainly seemed settled on his visit with me, Rhona says. She’ll give him another tryout.

During his second observation day, Owen’s a little better, but not there yet. But then, after a third observation day, Rhona reports he’s “significantly better.” These three days stretch over four weeks. For us, it’s a month of sheer hell.

But he’s in. We pass the good news to Owen, and he’s ecstatic. “I really love this school,” he says. With the homeschooling, we always worry about the so-called social piece, with his loss of daily peer interactions, spending so much of his time in one-on-one sessions with adults. Over the past two years, Cornelia and I have tried to schedule as many organized activities with other kids and “playdates” as possible, even if the pool of potential friends is small. And they mostly are just that—potential friends. The hope—ours and his—is that in the mix of high school, with kids like him, he’ll finally make friends.

We credit the anxiety of his visitations to performance pressure, just Owen wanting it so badly.

And, soon enough, the items from Patch of Heaven—the desks, the file cabinet, the white board—go up on craigslist. Cornelia ends up donating everything to a mom who is homeschooling her kid in Cedric’s old neighborhood, rather than having him brave the schools in their part of town. She doesn’t want the lockers, which Cornelia leaves at the local church.

They have served their purpose.

Owen gets up on a bright June morning, slips out of bed, and puts a video into a small television with a built-in VCR. In this period—already dominated by DVDs, Netflix, and video streaming—the set’s a throwback: it’s of the same generation as the one we used when he and Walt were toddlers in Dedham, Massachusetts.

And that’s the way Owen likes it. The familiarity, in the shape and function, is a comfort to him. The video presentation is slightly different than the DVD, all but imperceptible variations in the framing and pixilation of the picture. He sees it though. And then there’s the rewinding. You can rewind a VHS tape to the frame, and work the controls,
pause, reverse,
and
play
, to isolate the tiniest shifts in an expression, or the way a mouth shapes around a word.

He still does that sometimes, though he doesn’t need to, using the screen as a mirror, to mouth words or get the movements of his body just so, matching the screen. Or just running a few seconds again and again—a moment of surprise or fear or tenderness—to feel whatever sensation the character is feeling, over and over.

It’s nice that this portable TV is in his bedroom—a concession he just won this year—so he can put in a video, grab the remote, and slide back into bed. Lately, he’s started something new: watching certain scenes, with the sound low, in the early morning to prepare him for the day ahead.

This morning, it’s
Aladdin
, and, sitting up in his bed, he points the remote and presses
FAST FORWARD
. It takes a minute—he picks the fast option, where the movies races by—until he nears the end.

It’s the scene after Jafar and Iago are vanquished, and all the plot-lines are swiftly resolved. Aladdin has to decide what to do with his third wish—turn himself into a prince, so he can marry Jasmine, or free the Genie from servitude, as he’d promised. The Genie suggests the former, saying “this is love—and you won’t find another girl like that in a million years.” Aladdin chooses the latter: “I wish for your freedom.” This sends the Genie into whoops and flying loops of celebration:

G
ENIE:
O
H, DOES THAT FEEL GOOD
! I
’M FREE
! I
’M FREE AT LAST
! I
’M HITTIN’ THE ROAD
. I
’M OFF TO SEE THE WORLD
! I
’M
…

H
E IS PACKING A SUITCASE, BUT LOOKS DOWN AND SEES
A
LADDIN LOOKING VERY SAD
.

A
LADDIN:
G
ENIE
, I
’M
—I
’M GONNA MISS YOU
.

G
ENIE:
M
E TOO
, A
L
. N
O MATTER WHAT ANYBODY SAYS, YOU’LL ALWAYS BE A PRINCE TO ME
.

Owen hits
REWIND
. Watches it, again. And then one more time. Beside him on the night table is a pile of cards he’s been drawing over the past few days. Nearly a dozen of them. They’re thank-you notes to his therapists and the assorted others—his music teacher, art teacher, swimming coach—that’s he seen each and every week for the past two years at Patch of Heaven. His team.

Each note carries the picture of a sidekick.

Dan Griffin, the psychologist, made him a flip-book of laminated index cards, each carrying the picture of a favorite Disney character with a lesson—listen to others, smile whenever possible, don’t worry about what you can’t control—that he carries with him everywhere. As a gift, Owen gives Dan a precise rendering of Rafiki from
The
Lion King
, with a note that says, “Dear Dan, I want to thank you for helping me make friends and for being popular. You’re my great wise man.”

A carefully selected picture, with an inscription, has been fashioned for each of them. Tony Riel, the media arts teacher from the Lab School, who visits our house one evening every week to teach Owen how to turn drawings into flash videos, gets a vivid rendering of the royal blue Genie…who is, after all, a sidekick.

C. T. Gordon, the psychiatrist who takes Owen and the other boys on nature hikes, as he helps them create stories that’ll reveal their inner feelings, is granted the role of Cornelius, the wise old mentor from
Once Upon a Forest
, a 1993 Hanna-Barbera animated movie. Cornelius leads the “the young furlings” on their adventures through the woods, teaching them as he goes.

Sharon Lockwood, a gentle speech therapist/psychologist of late middle age, watches movies with Owen and analyzes scenes that can be applied to life and help him work through anxiety. In some ways, she’s the most maternal of his therapists—a woman of soft-spoken deftness and compassion—so she gets the character often applied to Cornelia: Big Mama, from
The Fox and the Hound
.

And on it goes. Each one is placed in the pantheon.

By early afternoon, they start arriving—the whole cast—with their husbands or wives. In some cases, they’ve brought friends. It’s a warm day, and the flowers are in bloom in our backyard. Dan, an earthy Italian/Irish musician who also cooks, brings a pepper and sausage dish. Sharon, with her husband, a psychiatrist, bears a fruit salad that fills a large carved watermelon.

Cornelia passes out Patch of Heaven yearbooks, a small hardback book of about twenty pages, that she designed and had printed online. In it, they’re all pictured with Owen, above captions of the things they did for him and with him.

And at the center of it is Owen, watching them all, at the very slightest remove, as they drink and balance paper plates, talking with animated zest—in a swirl of pairs and clusters, moving to and fro on the backyard’s flagstone patio. He sees the sunlight is reflecting off them in several interesting ways, especially off the women’s earrings and the men’s wristwatches. One usually laughs before the other, like they’re going in some sort of order, but then they switch. No one is wearing red. The women sometimes touch the men’s arms, but not the other way. There are birds chirping from a tall branch. A car is passing far off on the street. Christine moves like Grace, the pretty, goofy cow in
Home on the Range
. He’s glad he picked that character for her card.

“Owen. Owen? It’s time.” It’s Cornelia. Coming out the back door, with plates for cake in one hand, she hands him a folder with the thank-you cards.

He passes them out. He doesn’t say much—just a cheery, “Here’s your card!” But he doesn’t have to say anymore. The cards speak for him.

Years later, once he became able to reminisce about these days, he told me, “I was excited about going to high school. It’s something I really wanted. But I was scared about what I’d do without all of my therapists and teachers. They all knew who I was.”

As he watches them read their cards, and he looks from one face to the next, there’s something Owen knows he can now feel, powerfully: that this is a party for him. That’s who they’re all here for. He’s on his way to a high school, just like Walt. A real high school, with all the things a high school has. And everyone here helped.

He hears Aladdin’s voice; it’s in him. He’s not a hero, no. But he sure will miss them. Twelve sidekicks, all smiling in the sun.

C
ornelia looks over at her passenger sleeping in his down jacket, the packed feathers inside the collar providing a soft ledge for his cheek. Vibrating between the knees of his tattered jeans is a loaded-to-bursting backpack—the signature item of any American high schooler, anywhere.

He sure does look the part. And not just when he sleeps. He does his homework after dinner in his room with the door closed. Most nights he calls one of his two friends, just to talk, and then usually calls the other. He moans, “just five more minutes,” when his mom wakes him up for school.

It’s 8:07 on a brisk morning in early November 2007, about ten minutes still before the exit off the interstate for Rockville, Maryland, where Owen, now sixteen, is a few months into his sophomore year at the Katherine Thomas School.

He usually doesn’t sleep during the half-hour drive each morning. But he was up late last night—there’s a big math test today—and hearing his light breathing, safe in this warm womb of the car, warms Cornelia, too. He does seem happy and engaged—and that’s what she’s hoped for. Owen’s mom has concerns, all sorts of them, old ones and new, and questions about how the traditional challenges of adolescence will present themselves, or not, in a teenager whose body is growing fast while his mind—his feelings, his intellect, his identity—remain, as ever, largely beyond view or reach. But Cornelia’s worries are steadily unwinding, with each morning drive or afternoon pickup, as is a knot in her stomach that she’s carried so long it now seems like a traveling companion.

The Volvo could drive itself; she’s made this trip so many times, and she nudges him awake—“we’re here, honey”—as they make the last few turns toward school.

“Ready for your math test?” she asks, never much of a math student herself. He’s in algebra, a course they stretch across two years. His father helps him with that.

“No, umm, I’m good, Mom,” he says in a grumbly exhale, his voice low and oddly unaffected, as it is sometimes right when he wakes up, almost as though, coming out of sleep, his body forgets he’s autistic. Just one of those mirages, she knows, moments when a spectrum kid does something so typical—could be a look, a word, a gesture—that it seems like they’ve suddenly emerged from a spell. Of course, it just tees you up for a hit. This autism is no spell—it’s a way of being. And, by now, Cornelia has built retaining walls against such surges of uplift.

The car eases into the drop-off line, and he opens the door. “See you after school, Mom!” he all but sings, all chirpy. And a voice in her head says…
wish he could use that other voice in the halls
.

But who’s she to say? She doesn’t know much of what goes on in those halls, and that’s the way it should be: at some point, a boy must grow away from his mother. What book doesn’t say that?

A few minutes later, she settles into a booth at Panera Bread at a mall not far from the school. She has about forty-five minutes before Rhona Schwartz, KTS’s director, is due to meet her here. So, over tea and a muffin, she answers yesterday’s e-mails and sends off a few texts to her sisters. Cornelia’s been given a big slice of her life back since the homeschooling experiment ended almost eighteen months ago, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Or worse. Earlier this year, Cornelia’s middle-age brother died of cancer—just like her sister had in 2004. And then her father passed away two months ago. It was cancer as well. Cornelia’s battered and a little numb. She couldn’t have been there 24-7 for Owen, not this year. He found a home, a lifeboat, at KTS just in time. It was lucky. Luck from unluck.

She reaches into her purse for a half-dozen folded pages: Owen’s year-end evaluations for last year, ninth grade, in all his subjects.

Cornelia looks at the date: May 2007. Sure, it was a bad time after her brother, Martin, died. But did she even read this? It wasn’t just Martin. She’s been the recipient of so many bleak progress reports on Owen over the years that she can barely bring herself to look at them anymore.

But she needs to cram. Rhona will be here soon enough. Her eyes scan for the key parts—direct assessments of Owen—and finds herself surprised. They’re generally positive: he’s sometimes distracted, needs prompts, works hard, and has trouble with abstract ideas, especially in math. But it’s very much him. In English, he did not test well, but “seemed to especially enjoy voice acting the characters in our reading.”

Cornelia reads on. In computers, his work in class was inconsistent, but “he was able to give a very nice presentation on Disney sidekicks”; in drama, “he displayed remarkable skills at character development.” And, “as an actor he was beyond creative in his demonstration of technique.”

One teacher wrote he started the year with “limited independent work skills and frequent pacing” and ended it with “minimal prompts and pacing” and working independently.

Cornelia folds the sheets and carefully returns them to her purse. After thirteen years and four schools, this may be the first positive report she’s ever received. She doesn’t want to embrace hope that’ll soon enough be dashed. But what’s here is indisputably forward motion. His conscientiousness and effort come through in almost every assessment—always doing his homework, giving it his all, even in the subjects where progress is slow. Whatever worked at Patch of Heaven in terms of building his skills, integrating schoolwork with his blast furnace imagination, and teaching him to manage anxiety, he’s self-propelling now. One theme found in each teacher’s comments is his desire to improve. He really wants it.

She hears someone with a New York accent approaching and looks up. Rhona Schwartz gives Cornelia a hug and slips into the booth, a travel cup of coffee already in her hand. She’s a small bundle of readiness: short dark hair, large dark eyes, quick smile.

They’ve met a few times and get right into it. She has twenty minutes before she has to return to KTS. Rhona offers updates on how the nascent high school is faring in just its third year. With twenty-nine juniors, eighteen sophomores, and a strong incoming class of fifteen freshmen, the school now has sixty-two students. It’s an eclectic mix of the learning disabled, with maybe a quarter of them on the spectrum, mixed with lots of Attention Deficit Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders, and a few students with severe medical problems. Some, understandably, have issues of emotional self-regulation, though the emotionally disturbed students go elsewhere. KTS has, in essence, become the school for kids who don’t quite fit at any of the other special-needs schools in the area.

Most of the students are funded by Washington, DC, or Maryland as not appropriate for the public system, at a cost of nearly $35,000 each a year.

We’re in the private paying group, along with about a third of the parents. But in a school this small, you can see the dollars at work. With a four-to-one student-to-teacher ratio, there are fifteen teachers; many of them are quite energetic, from artists to retired professionals. They use a typical high school curriculum, but one that’s lightened and slowed down. Some kids, Owen among them, are on the trajectory toward earning a high school diploma; others are on track to receiving an achievement certification.

And Owen, Rhona assures Cornelia, is doing fine.
Really.

She talks about his growth in the first year, but they both know the biggest breakthrough is that he now has friends. Owen knew one student coming in—a boy on the spectrum named Brian from his social skills group. Rhona describes to Cornelia in a cursory way how she matched Owen up with another boy, Connor, who has since become his other great friend. She knew that Connor, who’d been at KTS from elementary school, was a movie enthusiast, like Owen, and also gentle and cheery. Schwartz recounts that she approached Owen, even though he said that he already had a friend (Brian) and was fearful of losing that friendship if he tried to bring in this other person.

Rhona tells Cornelia that she has seen this before with kids on the spectrum; that they opt for control and sameness, rather than risk uncertainty and its pitfalls. She describes how she called Owen into her office and worked with him, using the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram, showing how the circles of Brian and Connor can overlap but remain distinct, and that both can overlap with Owen’s circle. She had him color in the place where the three circles overlap in a color he likes. He picks green, and Schwartz tells him that’s where friendship lives.

What Cornelia knows is that Owen, Connor, and Brian, who’s also a movie fanatic, are now calling themselves “The Movie Gods.” They have used movies to forge a trio. It’s just about the best thing in Owen’s life. After so many years of pining for friends, he now has two.

“I didn’t know how it happened, how you found Connor,” Cornelia says, softly, reaching across the table to squeeze Rhona’s hand. “Thank you.”

It’s working, finally: a school for Owen. The key is that it’s happening—classwork, friends for lunch, activities, the flow of a school day—in a controlled environment that suits him. It’s not too controlled, but just enough. And modulated to what most of these students need. A chance to move at their own pace. And the pace is important, more so than for the typical kid at this age. Folks, plenty of them, know about this with learning-disabled kids. That’s why they get extra time on the tests.

With a typical kid, the extra time wouldn’t really matter. They process quickly, naturally. Either they figure out the answer or they can’t, and then they move to the next question. With the learning-disbled student, the unevenness of how they process information, fit it together, means the extra time matters—it helps them work through their learning difference to get at their underlying intelligence…and show it on the test. For many autistic kids, you need to multiply—with the deeper complexities in the way they process information, either written or spoken, their underlying intelligence is often more deeply submerged or unevenly expressed.

That means there’s some cat herding that’ll go on, with kids moving at many speeds and in many directions in every classroom at KTS. But with enough time, they get there, often summoning some very improbable pathway to the right answer.

So, there’s that, in terms of the academics. But similar dynamics apply to everything else going on in the building, to the small society that forms in every high school. What’s different here, or needs to be? Everything here needs to be softened and slowed down a notch, including social matters.

Many of the kids carry a look-before-they-leap cautiousness, socially, a delay switch for time to demystify. And that translates into a gentleness; aggressiveness, after all, is often born of an overflow of confidence or frustration, based on comparative issues. On that last score, these kids don’t form hierarchies in the usual way; there aren’t ongoing battles for supremacy or rank, so typical of high school. Not that the underlying desires are any different. Their hearts beat strong and true, and maybe a bit more exposed than the rest of us.

And what we begin to see, day to day, is what Rhona tells Cornelia: that in this delicately controlled ecosystem, he’s thriving.

Owen wakes up one morning in early December 2007 at 7:10. He’s out of bed by 7:15, done with breakfast by 7:25 (a quick eater), out of the shower and dressed by 7:45, in the car by 7:50 (today, Dad drives), and at school by 8:20
A.M.

It was a day like any other, or so Owen would tell me a year later in quotidian detail. That memory, again. So much he can remember. Some things, he’d rather not.

And on this wintry day he weaves through the bustle on the way to his locker. Puts gloves inside hat, pushes the knitted ball into the jacket’s arm and hangs it in the locker. Then he makes his way to homeroom, where he first sees Brian and Connor (they’re both in his homeroom). All three talk about DreamWorks’s new animated film,
Bee Movie,
which is just out for the 2007 holiday season. In their opinion, it isn’t any good. Owen says he watched
Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs
last night, that it’s been awhile since he’s seen it. Still great. Brian loves it, too. Owen does Grumpy’s voice. Connor and Brian laugh; they know it’s Grumpy at the first word. They both chime in with other dwarf dialogue.

First period is music. Owen arrives and slides into his desk in the music room. His mind is moving this way and that.
Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs
. Grumpy. Why Connor likes the first Superman movie. Owen takes in the room. There are drums, a piano, and a few other instruments. Other kids soon arrive. There are five boys and two girls.

Owen doesn’t mix with the kids. He’s polite—always polite. But he keeps to himself. He has his two friends.

The boy sitting next to him—William—is a big, athletic guy, almost Walt’s size. He’s very popular. And he’s bending over his desk toward Owen’s.

“Hey Owen, something I’ve got to tell you,” he whispers. “I know where you live.”

Owen turns. He can’t read the expression on William’s face. He has a nice face, and he may be making a joke, but Owen’s not sure. His dad always says, “If you think someone’s making a joke, assume they are. Act like it is a joke, and you’ll find out if it’s not.”