The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (26 page)

A few weeks later, I came home to a message from a man named Chip Mann. He was interested in restoring some of the older buildings in Kirklin, he said, and he wanted to talk to us about ours.

I was numb as I drove out to meet him. The rolling landscape that had always brought me such peacefulness and joy now seemed barren and ugly. I understood what people meant when they said they felt dead inside.

I pulled up in front of the building. As soon as I stepped out of the car, a tall, commanding man with gray hair and piercing blue eyes strode up, hand extended to shake mine. I handed the keys to the building to Chip without meeting his eyes. “You can go in, but I can’t walk through it with you. I can’t bear it,” I told him.

Watching his disappearing back, I thought,
There it goes. This is the end of the dream for these kids
.

“I’ll give you a thousand dollars,” he said decisively when he came out. It was a fraction of what we’d paid and put into it, but what choice did I have? A thousand dollars was better than paying the town to tear it down, and our own finances had been so dire for so long, even that pittance seemed like a fortune.

Suddenly, I started to cry. Standing in the middle of the street in front of a man I’d met minutes before, tears streamed off the end of my nose. Without meaning to, I blurted out all our plans for the building. Through my sobs, I told Chip how Mike and I had talked for years about building a recreation center for autistic kids such as my son Jake, and how we’d put every penny we had toward it. I told him how
we had wanted to make Jacob’s Place a safe place for them, a place where they could be themselves. I told him we’d recently lost one of those kids, a really special one.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally, wiping my face as best as I could. “I guess I’m not in a very good place in my life right now.”

Chip looked at me for a long time, and then he took my arm and started walking toward another old commercial building directly across the street. There had been a fire in there, and it was almost as dilapidated as mine was.

“I own this building, too,” he said. “Are you telling me if I put a basketball court in here, you’ll find kids to play on it?”

Still sniffling, I nodded.

“Okay, then. We’re going to do this. I’m going to build Jacob’s Place.”

Chip was a successful entrepreneur, bringing the same acumen he’d used to create a series of thriving businesses to revitalizing Kirklin. For a long time, I didn’t completely believe he was real. This was a prayer answered. The construction crew got started that spring.

In March, Michael got a job with T-Mobile. We all breathed a sigh of relief. At least we could put food on the table. Then, after months of refusing every single contractor’s bid we’d gotten, the insurance company finally sent us a check for the damage to the old house. It was drastically less than it should have been—the amount the adjuster authorized would barely be enough to repair the floor—but we didn’t have any choice in the matter, and it felt as if we were at least on the right track.

That terrible winter wasn’t done with us yet, though. The contractors we hired claimed that they’d have to move into the house in order to do the work for so little money. They did, along with their terrifying dogs, so we could never get in to see how it was going. They ended up stealing the first two payments we made to them and taking off with everything in the house they could remove: light fixtures, door handles, radiator covers, the cabinets we’d bought to replace the ones lost in the flood. They set a fire in the garage, and then they were gone.

It was a devastating blow, especially when we’d thought things
were starting to look up. By that time, summer was officially starting, and as the weather heated up, the mold in the house took over. Michael and I decided that we had to try to do the work ourselves. We’d buy the cheapest materials on a Lowe’s card and get by as best as we could. Michael put the word out to all of our friends on Facebook: “Please help. We have to fix the house. If you have any skills at all, please come and lend a hand.”

The next Saturday, hundreds of people showed up, almost all of them the parents of kids I’d helped over the years through the daycare, Little Light, and the sports program. It was like an old-fashioned barn raising. People brought their own tools and anything they’d been able to find in their basements or garages that we might be able to use: cabinets, lights, paint. Some of them brought friends with them (“This is my next-door neighbor, Al, and he’s going to do all your grout.”) They stripped the walls and put up new drywall. They brought new carpeting and laid it. As this amazing community of people rebuilt my house, I cried and passed out slices of pizza and coffee and doughnuts.

A couple of months later, I drove over to Kirklin to check the progress on the rec center, and I ran into Chip on the street.

“You’ve got to come over to see your old building, Kris. You’re never going to believe what we found in there.”

He took me over to show me the work he’d done. I could hardly believe my eyes. The entire second story, which had been hanging like a bowl over the back, had been completely restored. It was amazing. I’d owned that building for a year and a half, and I’d never even gotten back there; it was too scary. Chip had to jump up and down to show me it was safe to walk on the floor.

All the wood, though damaged, was very old and very beautiful, and so he’d made the decision not to tear down the second story, but to restore it. He’d hired workers to salvage all those warped pieces of wood, then rebend and sand them to bring them back to their former glory. And do you know what they found when they started sanding all
those layers of varnish off of those old floors? Painted lines. At one time in the building’s history, that room had housed a basketball court.

I was so stunned, you could have pushed me over with a feather. Chip told me that when he’d seen them for the first time, he’d fallen to his knees. “When I saw those lines, there wasn’t any doubt left in my mind. It felt like a sign—a sign that I was supposed to be making a rec center for these kids in Kirklin.”

I smiled then, more widely than I’d smiled all winter long, as I headed back to the other building across the street. It did feel like a sign—like Christopher was up there in heaven looking down on us, telling us he wanted his friends to play.

“C
heetos or chips?”

The good thing about a ten-year-old boy is that no matter how obsessed he is with the electromagnetic physics lecture he’s attending, he will always give serious consideration to what kind of junk food he’s going to share with his mother during the break.

By the time Jake was in fifth grade, a question about snack food was the only kind I was capable of answering for him. He’d run through all the astronomy classes at IUPUI, and he’d taken some of them, including Dr. Pehl’s, a number of times. When we all realized it was time for him to move on, Professor Rhoads suggested that he might be interested in taking a class in electromagnetic physics.

He
was
interested—fascinated, in fact—but I was completely lost. The professor, Marcos Betancourt, began the weekly class with a lecture. Then the students would split up into small groups to work equations on the whiteboards lining the walls, and at the very end the class would reconvene for a closing lecture. It was an evening class, and I suspect breaking the class up in this way encouraged the students to stay awake. Unfortunately, the strategy didn’t work for me. The most basic concepts eluded me during the lectures, and the equations on the boards were even worse. With apologies to Dr. Betancourt, I started bringing a book to class. Eventually, I stopped attending altogether. Jake was in heaven, and I felt confident he wasn’t going to misbehave.

About two weeks before the end of the class, Dr. Betancourt mentioned to me that Jake’s participation had begun to drop off. He was
no longer paying rabid attention to the lectures, and he was not joining the others at the whiteboards during the recitation portion of the class, electing instead to stay in his seat, reading intently. Whenever he could, he’d pepper Dr. Betancourt with questions. Apparently, he had gotten sucked into one of the concepts they were studying, and he didn’t seem to be able to move on. All his questions had to do with light and how it moves through space.

When he’d exhausted the specific knowledge (and perhaps the patience) of the professors at IUPUI, I had to broaden his field of inquiry. Once more, I found myself on the phone, advocating for Jake by way of a crazy request. I got in touch with Dr. Alexei Filippenko at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Philippe Binder at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Both calls began the same way: “Please, please, don’t hang up, but I have this ten-year-old …”

You have to understand how far out of the realm of ordinary experience this was for me. I had no experience with world-class astrophysicists. Yet there I was, buttonholing these renowned scientists because Jake had a question his own professors couldn’t answer. Even more remarkably, they became friends and among Jake’s most encouraging supporters. Their answers seemed to temporarily solve whatever problem Jake was struggling with, but our Pac-Man was running out of dots to gobble.

Early in 2009, I received a call from Dr. J. R. Russell at IUPUI, wondering if we could meet.

The special-needs kids in the daycare made it hard for me to find someone who could take over if I needed to get away. Some of the kids were intensely compromised. For instance, one of the little boys, Ty, had a feeding tube that an assistant had to be trained to change.

In addition to the daycare, we’d opened our home to a number of seriously disadvantaged children through a program at our church called Safe Children, a free foster arrangement for families in temporary distress. We fostered a little girl for a single mother who needed surgery and a brother and sister for a family that had lost its home in the recession and didn’t want the kids to go into a shelter.

Fostering was Mike’s idea. We’d finally been able to sell the old house, and he was so grateful to be back on our feet again financially, it seemed natural to ask how we could help people who weren’t quite there yet. I was behind the idea 100 percent. We had so much love to give, and fostering made me feel as if we were putting our big, beautiful house to good use. Only after we started to take in children did I truly feel as though I had the right to live there, and I was finally able to paint the living room the girlie peach color I’d picked out when I was a child.

Fostering was an amazing experience for all of us. It meant a lot to Mike and me that our children would know what it felt like to give to people in need, and it was wonderful to see my sons in this new context. Jake’s patience, Wesley’s openheartedness and generosity of spirit, and Ethan’s sweet, serious peacefulness weren’t news to us. But seeing how easily our children gave of themselves and how much pleasure they seemed to take from it made me a thousand times happier than anything we could have bought.

Some of the children who stayed with us came from the kind of poverty we couldn’t have imagined before we’d met them. I remember the whole family turning away in horrified silence, our hearts breaking, as one little boy who had never seen indoor plumbing before opened the sliding door in the kitchen and used the backyard. (He was a love, though, and caught on quickly.)

So between daycare and the foster kids, simply getting out of the house during that period took some major planning. But the morning of my appointment with Dr. Russell, I scrambled to rearrange things, remembered to put a clean blouse and some lip gloss on, and drove down to the university.

Honestly, my first reaction was anxiety. We’d been attending a lot of classes at IUPUI, and we hadn’t paid for any of them, relying instead on the benevolence of the individual professors. They hadn’t seemed to mind having Jake (and me) in their classrooms. Quite the opposite, in fact. But who knew? One thing was clear: We couldn’t afford to take these classes if we had to pay for them. We were in better
shape financially than we’d been in a while, but we were still a long way from being out of debt, and there was no way we could afford to pay for a university class going forward, let alone the classes Jake had already attended.

But I’m a naturally positive person, so by the time I was halfway there, I was thinking happier thoughts.
Maybe they want to give him credit for that last astronomy class
, I thought. After all, he’d taken the tests along with the other kids.
Wouldn’t that be a kick if this ten-year-old had three college credits under his belt?

As I parked the car, I thought,
Well, this is either going to go really well or really badly
. Whichever way it went, I knew we would find a way to get Jake what he needed.

As it turned out, Dr. Russell ran a program called SPAN—Special Programs for Academic Nurturing. He’d heard from the professors at the university what Jake had been doing, and he thought that his program, which allows exceptionally talented high school students to enroll in university classes, would be a good fit for Jake. “We’d like Jacob to apply to IUPUI through the SPAN program,” he said.