The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (19 page)

“Relax. I’m not criticizing. People aren’t always willing to admit it when something is falling apart, and I need to make sure you and I are on the same page. I’m
glad
you noticed. Keep in mind, families weren’t lining up to adopt those two, Adam and I included. You’re all they’ve got. But you need to learn how to parent them, and you’ve got to do it fast, or you’re going to join the list of people who have failed them.”

“Do you know anybody giving out speed parenting lessons?” A dish in the overloaded sink shifted, a belated response to the thunder of two men and five children crashing down to the basement.

“I am, actually. I teach a six-week series of parenting classes, and you and Lance are going to sign up. But you don’t have six weeks to get this under control.” She waved at the room. “Natalie and Adam Forrester’s School of Mom and Dad is now in session. Here’s how it will work. After school every day from now until the next session of my class starts, either you or Lance or both of you together will come to my house with your kids. We’ll do everything together and ease their separation from us a little bit more. They don’t deal well with change, and that’s part of your problem here.

“At least once in the next week, you and Lance will still shadow me with my younger ones during the day, while your kids are at school. And take advantage of the help you’ve got! I’m glad to see your mom around so much.”

“But she’s as much underfoot as the children. She’s trying to do all our cooking and housework, and half the time, we have to come along behind her and redo it.”

“Quit.”

“But she’s doing it like she’s at her house.”

“Show her how it works here if you must, but frankly, I’d say get out of her way and let the woman help you.” Natalie stared at me until I looked away. “You also had the sense to hire the student volunteer from your center to help you out here while you get started.”

We didn’t even know Natalie in June, and she had never met Trudy in the debacle following William’s kidnapping. Drew’s people had been the ones warning parents of a child predator, not Trudy and Darnell. Natalie only knew the agent in the context of her semi-undercover job, which included posing as a university student who interned at the sanctuary.

“But . . . what’s her name, Trudy? She needs an education, too. I can see how frustrated she gets dealing with them, and there’s simply no point. She’s got to come along too, whenever her school schedule will allow. She doesn’t seem experienced with kids.”

“I know.”

“I mean, she
knows
she can’t give a chimpanzee a time-out, right?”

“
I
know.”

“So why does she think she can clicker-train a child into obedience?”

“I had a conversation with her about that.” Trudy had muttered swear words when I told her to stop reinforcing the children’s behaviors with the noisy little tool we used with our apes. She couldn’t understand why I found it offensive. In any case, Sara loved the clicker game, but William glowered and sat with crossed arms and legs when she pulled the device out.

For my part, I was beginning to see why even Drew had been so willing to let pass Merry’s obviously inappropriate comparison between the twins and monkeys. It seemed to be a prevailing attitude among even some who worked closely with them that kids with autism were, at some level, lesser, not full, humans. These children were
hard
to understand. Even though we, too, struggled to communicate with them, especially William, Lance and I instinctively knew better, reinforcing my belief that we were their parents. But in the weeks since they had come to live with us forever, we had learned we didn’t know much else.

The worst part wasn’t merely the unpleasant surprises, though there were many. Like William’s sudden incontinence when faced with long-term stress. And Sara’s stubborn unwillingness to eat anything but processed macaroni and cheese and greasy tater tots. And their twin insistence upon sleeping curled up together in William’s bed, rather than in their own rooms.

It wasn’t only the horrific number of
things
we suddenly owned, though there were many. I honestly don’t remember what I had expected. I’d heard foster kids rarely had much of their own. Perhaps I had imagined the twins would arrive with a lone suitcase stretched between their tiny hands. If so, the sight of the children spilling out of Merry’s car with Ann and a trail of objects behind them set me quickly straight. Not only did these children come with those high-backed boosters, they also each had an armada of toys and clothes. Natalie had spent a year ensuring they
did
have personal possessions. They had overstuffed suitcases and a shared gaming system that had travelled with them from home to home since their mother gave it to them, along with hundreds of CD-based games. Lance spent two hours attempting to hook the system up to our older television before he gave up and called Adam for instructions.

It wasn’t our complete ignorance about the education system. The twins brought school bags lovingly packed by Natalie, who correctly assumed Lance and I had no idea what to send with first graders. She included highlighted copies of the Individual Education Programs detailing what services each child could receive because of their autism diagnoses. She called these forms by their initials, instructing us, “Start with the IEP whenever you’re unsure if the kids are being treated inappropriately.” She also included a calendar from each child’s school. And no, they didn’t attend the same one as I had expected. Sara was, to use Natalie’s word, “stuck” in East Ironweed Public, while William had won the magnet program’s lottery and been placed in the charter school for gifted children across town.

The worst thing wasn’t even the lack of sleep, though we stayed awake almost nonstop for the first fourteen days and slept in shifts after. Between Sara’s combination of insomnia and night terrors, William’s overnight incontinence, and our own brooding insecurities, we became heavily dependent on coffee early in our tenure as parents. The worst part wasn’t even all of these things together.

Lance put it best when he told Natalie, “They want to go back with you, and at the exact same time, they don’t ever want to leave Natasha.
We
don’t figure anywhere into their plan.”

“Not yet,” Natalie told him. “You will. I’ve had kids with attachment disorders who couldn’t bond with caregivers. That’s not these two. Change comes hard for them, and they’ve faced too much of it.”

Now, she was extending an extraordinary gift that might help us support the twins through that change and convince them we were their parents. I had no idea why the state had ever allowed the twins to be moved into our care from hers. Surely if she had spoken one word against us, the twins would still live in her home.

She seemed to read my mind. “They belong here,” she reassured me. “It’s hard to explain, Noel. But there’s a click, a moment of certainty, of ‘this one is mine.’ You felt it with the twins. I can see it. We’ve clicked with a couple of our kids, but mostly, the kids who come to us belong to other people. And that’s better for them. To go home.

“Adam says it’s complete nonsense, that I make my mind up for things to go a certain way and then exert my will on the world to shape events to my liking. But I think I’m pretty good at picking out families for my kids. What did you feel when you found William under the Marine’s Dumpster?”

“Relieved, obviously. But until I saw him, I was worried in a more distant way. Then when he was under there, where he shouldn’t have been able to fit, I suddenly felt like a weight was lifted, one I hadn’t known was all on me. Then . . .” How to explain that emptiness, that sense of loss when he got in the ambulance. I didn’t have the words. “It was all action, reaction, and reaction again.”

“Do you remember how hysterical I was?”

“Who wouldn’t have been?”

“You. You weren’t. You, Lance, and Natasha. You were calm in that maelstrom. Me? I was making it worse for poor Will, but I couldn’t get my own emotions under control. I thought they were going to have to sedate me; I did. I remember how much worry I saw in you. You were every bit as distressed as I was. But you were calm. I remember thinking, ‘She might be his mother.’ I may have said it out loud. I don’t know. If I did, I’m probably the one who accidentally set Merry on you. What about Sara? What was your first knee-jerk impression of her?”

“I knew who she was right away, even though she and William don’t look all that much alike. And I knew she was alone.”

“Yeah, but what did you feel?”

“I felt like crying. I . . . Lance was the one who always said he didn’t want kids. I went along with him, and I only minded every once in a while. But when I saw her on our porch, I felt like the Gulf of Mexico was stretched between Lance and me, because . . . because I knew she was mine, and I was so sure he wouldn’t feel the same.”

“Exactly,” said Natalie. “That’s what I’ve seen in both of you all along. That protective energy they need so much. Don’t worry. These kids belong to you. Did you make the decision to adopt them too quickly? Without question, yes. You didn’t take the time to learn about autism or young children at all. But your speed isn’t the same as I’ve seen in some others. I’ve seen couples so desperate to have a child,
any
child, they scoop up the first one available without pausing to find that connection. They hope love can cause bonding. And it can. Sometimes. But sometimes even love isn’t enough.

“You and Lance were excited, and Merry pushed to go too fast, but you weren’t child hungry. You don’t want
a
child or
any
children. You want
these
children. And really, you had a narrow window of opportunity before Merry spirited them off in her hurry to find them placement.”

“Why
was
she in such a hurry? Wouldn’t it be worse to have an interrupted adoption than to take her time and be sure?”

“I don’t know,” said Natalie. “But she was pushing hard. And they
are
yours, Noel. Now, you have to learn to all live together.”

“And you think you can teach us that?”

“Of course I can. Now let’s tackle this mess while the guys have a captive audience downstairs.”

She
could
teach us. And I fervently hoped we could learn. We restored some order to our kitchen before lunch, and the Forresters taught us a couple of tricks to curb the rather immediate problem of our children refusing to do anything we said.

After lunch, I asked Sara, “Do you want to take your plate to the sink for me?”

“No.” The child didn’t sound defiant, but it was clear she didn’t intend to follow my instruction.

Immediately, Natalie said, “Sara, please take your plate to the sink.”

“Okay,” Sara chirped, and she took not only the plate, but her cup and silverware as well.

I turned to Natalie. “Why did that work for you when it had just totally failed for me? Is it because she knows you better?”

“Maybe a little. But mostly it’s because you asked her and I told her. You asked if she wanted to take her plate to the sink. Of course she doesn’t! I mean, do
you
want to take
your
plate to the sink? No! But you know why it needs to be done. She doesn’t. You can bore her with the reason—only some of which will stick, and that’s true of any kid—or you can assert your authority. Gently.

“As far as she’s concerned, you asked for her opinion. Any time you
need
the twins to do something, you can’t ask it. It’s fine to ask about the optionals, but when you do, be prepared to accept ‘no,’ especially from Sara.”

She also steered us away from some behavior methods frequently used with autistic kids, many of which we’d never heard of. “Do
not
under any circumstances tell William to have ‘quiet hands.’ ”

“Quiet hands?”

“It’s a way to remind him not to flap and touch everything in sight. I guess that works for some people. But his uncle took it as license to strap down his arms. He will
bite
you if you tell him to keep them quiet. Personally, Adam and I let him flap and touch as long as he isn’t hurting anything, and if he is, we redirect him to do it elsewhere.”

“Tie them
down
?”

“That’s what Will told me, and I don’t have any reason to disbelieve him.”

“How could you understand what he said? He hardly talks, and everything he says sounds like a question. I can engage in back and forth with Sara, but Will . . . he hardly seems to hear me.” Circular, unusual, often unintentionally hilarious back and forth, but at least my new daughter was having conversations.

“He clams up in new places. Be patient. Plus, nobody had worked with him much before he came to us. With the receptive language delay, you have to help him to understand new words and ideas using words and concepts he’s already got. He’s obsessed with categories. If you can categorize something, you can help him understand it.”

“Meaning?”

“Okay. To teach him about garden squash, I had to start with generic categories, ‘yellow foods’ and ‘curved foods,’ and narrow from there. Lemons are yellow. Butter is yellow.
Squash
is yellow. I can eat lemons. I can eat butter. I can eat squash. Bananas are curved. I can eat bananas. Squash is curved. I can eat squash. He eventually caught on, but he called it ‘lemon-banana.’ ”

“He’s been telling me ‘William has a lemon-nanner’ all week!”

“There you go. Get him some squash. And when you do, keep substituting the correct name. Eventually, it will stick.”

Actually, I liked “lemon-nanner,” now that I knew what it was. I thought squash in our house might have a permanent new identity. “But how does it help me understand what he’s already saying? How can I get him to work it backward for me?”

“You can’t. But I know most of them. Give me a for-instance.”

“Cheese-light. Is it a kind of cheese? A refrigerator?” He spent a good portion yesterday night begging us, “William, do you want a cheese-light?” Of course, none of our offers of food had been sufficient.

Natalie laughed. “It’s a camera. He’s a little ham.”