not much. He seems calm and focused—following the group, making eye contact—and oddly settled, a slight smile, eyes alight, just as he is while watching the movies on our bed.
By day’s end, we’re feeling a bit of the same—settled, in a kind of walking repose that we’ve not felt since the days in Dedham. Owen seems at home here, as though his identity—or however much of it has formed—is somehow tied to this place.
On the way out of the Magic Kingdom, when Walt spots the Sword in the Stone near the carousel, we can’t help indulging fantasy. It is a fortuitous moment: A Disney actor dressed as Merlin appears near the sword periodically during the day. As the boys approach the sword, he’s there, reciting dialogue—“Let the boy try”—and then, approaching the anvil, someone flips a hidden switch that loosens the sword. Walt pulls it out as Merlin cries, “You, my boy, are our king!”
Then both of them turn to Owen.
“You can do it, Owie,” Walt whispers. “I know you can.”
Owen looks evenly at his brother and Merlin, then steps to the anvil and lifts it true.
Did he understand what Walt was saying? Did he just imitate what he’d seen his brother do? What the hell difference did it make!
Today, in sunlight, he’s the hero of his imagination.
C ornelia and I are changing. By March of 1995, our second spring of crisis in Washington, it’s now something we can see in the mirror.
And not just in the bags under our eyes. We’ve become single-minded. She’s now going on a year and a half of round-the-clock duty with carpools, therapists, school meetings, more therapists. At all hours of the day, she’s executing a self-styled, round-the-clock version of Greenspan’s Floortime: follow Owen around, try to pick up cues and dive into his world; show intense, upbeat interest. This sort of exertion demands focus and priorities. Niggling day-to-day concerns are sandwiched between frantic work with Owen and taking care of a growing Walt. Those “ What’s new, how are the kids? ” phone calls that are the fabric of keeping up with old friends, or making new ones, have been jettisoned. Who has time for that? Some buddies from Boston wonder if we’ve entered the witness relocation program.
I’m changing, too, even if it’s directed by subconscious drives I can’t—or, at very least, won’t—recognize.
A year before, in February 1994, to be exact—right after we met with the Ice Queen and first heard the dreaded word autism —I was chatting with my roommate from Columbia J-School, Tony Horwitz, who had just returned from Bosnia, where he’d written a powerful story for the Journal about the capacity of children to summon hope in war zones. As we talked, it dawned on me that to learn in some of the toughest “combat zones” of DC was a kind of feat, like one of those kids in Bosnia finding a calculus book on the street and learning calculus. Find a kid like that and we’d roll a red carpet from Harvard to the former Yugoslavia. But if it’s an inner-city African American or Latino American kid—managing to learn while the bullets fly—we shrug. I sensed a gap, an unexamined one, and that’s often the starting point of a story.
I looked for the worst high school in America and found a worthy nominee in Frank W. Ballou Senior High School in Southeast DC. So that was where I spent most of my time in those fear-filled days after Owen had vanished.
Cornelia gave me one of her favorite cassette tapes from college—John Prine—and driving from one side of town to the other, by the Capitol dome and down Martin Luther King Boulevard, I’d often play Prine’s song “Hello In There,” about reaching out to people who’d become invisible:
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare,
As if you didn’t care,
Say, “Hello in there.”
After a few weeks of watching kids pass in the hallways of Ballou—a school of virtually all African American students in a part of DC where 70
By day’s end, we’re feeling a bit of the same—settled, in a kind of walking repose that we’ve not felt since the days in Dedham. Owen seems at home here, as though his identity—or however much of it has formed—is somehow tied to this place.
On the way out of the Magic Kingdom, when Walt spots the Sword in the Stone near the carousel, we can’t help indulging fantasy. It is a fortuitous moment: A Disney actor dressed as Merlin appears near the sword periodically during the day. As the boys approach the sword, he’s there, reciting dialogue—“Let the boy try”—and then, approaching the anvil, someone flips a hidden switch that loosens the sword. Walt pulls it out as Merlin cries, “You, my boy, are our king!”
Then both of them turn to Owen.
“You can do it, Owie,” Walt whispers. “I know you can.”
Owen looks evenly at his brother and Merlin, then steps to the anvil and lifts it true.
Did he understand what Walt was saying? Did he just imitate what he’d seen his brother do? What the hell difference did it make!
Today, in sunlight, he’s the hero of his imagination.
C ornelia and I are changing. By March of 1995, our second spring of crisis in Washington, it’s now something we can see in the mirror.
And not just in the bags under our eyes. We’ve become single-minded. She’s now going on a year and a half of round-the-clock duty with carpools, therapists, school meetings, more therapists. At all hours of the day, she’s executing a self-styled, round-the-clock version of Greenspan’s Floortime: follow Owen around, try to pick up cues and dive into his world; show intense, upbeat interest. This sort of exertion demands focus and priorities. Niggling day-to-day concerns are sandwiched between frantic work with Owen and taking care of a growing Walt. Those “ What’s new, how are the kids? ” phone calls that are the fabric of keeping up with old friends, or making new ones, have been jettisoned. Who has time for that? Some buddies from Boston wonder if we’ve entered the witness relocation program.
I’m changing, too, even if it’s directed by subconscious drives I can’t—or, at very least, won’t—recognize.
A year before, in February 1994, to be exact—right after we met with the Ice Queen and first heard the dreaded word autism —I was chatting with my roommate from Columbia J-School, Tony Horwitz, who had just returned from Bosnia, where he’d written a powerful story for the Journal about the capacity of children to summon hope in war zones. As we talked, it dawned on me that to learn in some of the toughest “combat zones” of DC was a kind of feat, like one of those kids in Bosnia finding a calculus book on the street and learning calculus. Find a kid like that and we’d roll a red carpet from Harvard to the former Yugoslavia. But if it’s an inner-city African American or Latino American kid—managing to learn while the bullets fly—we shrug. I sensed a gap, an unexamined one, and that’s often the starting point of a story.
I looked for the worst high school in America and found a worthy nominee in Frank W. Ballou Senior High School in Southeast DC. So that was where I spent most of my time in those fear-filled days after Owen had vanished.
Cornelia gave me one of her favorite cassette tapes from college—John Prine—and driving from one side of town to the other, by the Capitol dome and down Martin Luther King Boulevard, I’d often play Prine’s song “Hello In There,” about reaching out to people who’d become invisible:
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare,
As if you didn’t care,
Say, “Hello in there.”
After a few weeks of watching kids pass in the hallways of Ballou—a school of virtually all African American students in a part of DC where 70
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