In the summer of 2008 I spent my mornings watching Osmosis Jones on VHS with my mom’s friend’s young son who had severe autism. We were in my great aunt’s Florida beach house and Wyatt and I had made it a routine to sit on the stained cream colored couch eating dry cereal every 6:30 AM when we were the only two awake. I was eight and I liked him but sometimes he’d start screaming and couldn’t stop. In the mornings, though, he was calm and peaceful. He had two brothers staggered around the same age who would play hide and seek with me and my sister, Annie. We hid in nightstand cabinets, behind open doors, beneath ottomans, or in between shower curtains. Sometimes we played with wooden toy train tracks, making routes along the living room floor that would wander into the kitchen and get kicked around by drunken grown-ups in the evenings. I don’t remember what Wyatt would do when we played, but I think he was somewhere watching us, perplexed, or maybe ignoring us and wandering through the house in the safety of his own mind.
We spent one of those 2008 days at the pool. As soon as everyone woke up, we packed bags and bags of toys and towels and snacks and walked down the road to the beach-pool, rather than the spa-pool or the frog-pool or the crab-pool. I didn’t think about what it meant to be a kid that had to specify which pool. The beach-pool earned its name because it was connected to the beach, of course. My mom and her friend, Tiffany, went on a long walk looking for shells. Annie, at six, didn’t like to play the game where my dad threw a ring and we raced to it, but I still made her play. I never understood why she didn’t like it but it may have been because if she was catching up to me I’d kick her hard in the shoulder or briefly pull her under. When I kicked her too hard she’d cry, and I’d pull her to the side so my dad couldn’t see.
“Don’t tell Daddy, don’t tell Daddy. You can do it back. Here, please, here, come on, kick me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she’d say, sitting gingerly on her high horse. Then, she would roll her eyes and swim away from me for a minute or two, until she got over it and we were laughing again. The day passed quickly. After the sun had set, my mom, Tiffany, and the other kids left. I wanted to stay longer and because I did, so did Annie.
My dad did too. He was talking to his friend, Dave. Dave was the security guard at the beach-pool. I didn’t know how he and my dad got to be friends. Dave’s hair was a worn out ginger or maybe dirty blonde, and his voice carried across the deep blue water.
Around nine or ten, the pool closed. The walk home was less than fifteen minutes, but it was dark and Dave’s shift was over anyway so he drove us home in his golf cart. Annie and I sat in the back, and it was a tiny golf cart so the back seat faced the wrong way. You had to watch yourself leave, the trees getting smaller, and the houses fading into blackness. Or you could stare down at the white dashes on the road and try not to think about the feeling of something ending.
It was quiet enough that I could hear the whoosh of the soft, warm wind mixed with the chirping and croaking of night animals. Dave started talking to my dad, loud enough that I could easily hear but not loud enough that I was supposed to. They had talked their way through all the small things, fishing, sports, and worked their way down to the But how are you really? part of the conversation. Dave said that life was hard. He said that his wife had cancer and they’d just gotten custody of his granddaughter because his daughter and her boyfriend got into a fight. A fight fight. Physical. He said that the cops had been called, and when they showed up they found a purple thumbprint on the baby. Dave and his wife were given the baby, and now they take care of her. He slowed the cart down as he whipped out his phone to show my dad a picture. I heard Dave call the boyfriend a bastard-son-of-a-bitch.
I looked over at Annie, into her glowing blue eyes. Mine were blue like the pool, but her’s blue like the ocean, deep and dark, almost purple in some places. She looked scared, and I was sure I did too. Scared of how babies could get bruises and mothers could get cancer. We felt this feeling, like being picked up by a giant claw machine, and dropped into the horrors of someone else’s life, just two pink teddy bears.
I wanted to go back to that morning, sitting next to Wyatt on the couch, when his mind, his whole life, seemed so impenetrable and protected. His thoughts, his curiosities, his anxieties and problems, all so very private. In this foreignness, this shield of distance, I think we both found comfort and safety. He was a mystery to me, and one I wasn’t trying to understand or unfold or unravel. And maybe, he appreciated that I wasn’t trying to decipher him in the ways others were. I certainly felt that way about him. Me, eight, and him, maybe five or six, there wasn’t the wave of daunting curiosity that flooded the space between us that I felt with most other kids. Instead, there was a tranquil acceptance of our cluelessness about one another, and through that I felt a warm and quaint connection to him.
In the sanctity of that connection I could hide from the lives of others. There were no Daves, or people like him, who had ever-fragile wives and daughters. With Osmosis Jones on the screen, we watched the animated germs without the echoing reminder of each other’s consciousness, and without that, we could each revel in our own deafening innocence.
I recently played this movie for my 8th grade students. In the shadowy dim classroom, with just the light from my small window pouring in, I was reminded of these events in Boca Grande. As half a dozen fourteen-year-olds sat before me in plastic chairs, leaning against graffitied desks, I thought of all the brutal truths they’re getting to know. The horrors of life peeking out at them, clawing at them, or, for some, remaining at bay. I thought about the delicate naivety slipping away from them, like sand through an hourglass, and I willed the sand to fall slowly.
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Tabitha Chilton is a middle school English teacher based in Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys playing poker, board games, and badminton (but only when she’s winning).
© 2024, Tabitha Chilton
Halfway Down the Stairs 