SINKHOLE by Dawn Davies

Fox Urine as a Secret Weapon

I’m somewhere in the Deep South, sitting inside a pop‑up camper that is illegally parked on the side of my mother’s house, holding a Lutheran church directory in one hand and my cell phone in the other. It is mid-afternoon on a Sunday in late June, and the moon-faced, well-intentioned, vanilla-flavored Lutherans wearing Supercuts and jumpers stare back at me from the directory photos. They are fine folk who occasionally invite me to religious and social events with the underlying hope that the events (and Jesus) will make me a better person. The pop‑up camper is where I live, despite having a husband and a home in Florida. It is 92 degrees. Every few hours, the camper’s anemic air conditioner, which is plugged into an exterior outlet on the outside of the house, goes one step too far and trips a circuit breaker and I must hike into the garage to reset it.
The camper smells like mold, to which I am allergic, but I am living in it because I’m less allergic to the mold than I am to the several cats that wander in and out of my mother’s house. Unbeknownst to my mother, whose magical cat call can bring unneutered, spraying strays from several counties, I have purchased fox urine (Yes! I have paid money for this!) and have sprayed it over the base of the pop‑up so the cats will stay away. It seems to work.
I am here to help my seventeen-year-old son get through high school, though the odds are stacked against him due to problems in the structure and function of his brain. I am looking for an apartment near his new high school, where we can stay until he graduates. This will involve living apart from my husband, whom I love, for at least three years. All this because I don’t want to look back someday and say we didn’t try every possible option for this young man whom I also love.
My son has been diagnosed with autism, which is not uncommon. He is also a year away from being diagnosed as a primary psychopath, which according to scientist and psychopath whisperer James Fallon is far less common than autism. Fallon believes that around one percent of all people in all cultures are full-blown clinical psychopaths, but there are an additional five percent of “borderline” psychopaths who have the traits but who can still live within the normal societal rules. He calls those people pro-social psychopaths. It’s this label I am hoping will follow my son around on his medical charts. Incidentally, in case this sounds heartfelt and hopeful, Fallon also calls psychopaths “intraspecies predators,” which, in hindsight, fit some of my son’s behaviors during this time of his life.
In front of me on the camper table is my son’s cell phone, a flip phone with basic texting capabilities that we have given him so he can call us to pick him up from things like his friend’s quinceañera practice or detention. Since his behaviors include a compulsive drive to look up child pornography, he is no longer allowed to have a smart phone. The flip phone, it turns out, has worked very well for downloading porn and sexually grooming the preteen boy he met in the Lutheran church youth group. I put the directory down next to his phone and dial a number. While I dial, adrenaline surges in my body, starting an arrhythmia in my heart that has recently begun to plague me. The phone begins to ring. I hear a woman’s voice.
“Hello?”
I take a deep breath, introduce myself, and begin to tell her what I know about our sons.

Ronco’s Hope-O-Matic

There’s this thing that happens when you have a troubled kid that makes you think that any change in behavior, or habit, or even an outside scheduled event or new activity can be The Thing that finally makes your child turn the corner to become “normal,” and at this point, when my husband and I say “normal,” we mean “a kid who can create a life outside of prison.” Any new thing holds the promise of being The Thing, though you have duped yourself into thinking this way one hundred times before. You buy into the new thing, even though, like every other thing you’ve tried, you suspect it won’t do jack squat. The new school. The new therapist. The new medication. The new doctor. The new vitamin protocol. The new hobby. The new church youth group.

I Told You So

My son wore out his welcome at my mother’s after nine months. Like everyone, she loves his sweet disposition, his easy laugh, the memories of their shared history – but she can’t handle him any longer, which is why I am living in the pop‑up camper next to the house. My son spent the previous school year compulsively lying to her about nearly everything.
He also snuck into her bedroom at night and stole her electronics. He looked up child pornography on every computer he could get his hands on. He sat around and watched television from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep at night. When she restricted the television, he sat waiting until she went to sleep, then watched television until daybreak. He quietly, sweetly, without overt defiance, broke all the rules she made. It is also at this time that he began to sexually target an eleven-year-old boy in the middle school youth group. My son initiated a series of text messages with the boy that demonstrated predatory grooming, including obsessive talk about sex, encouraging the boy to masturbate, asking him to measure his penis size when erect, and worse. Unbeknownst to me, the youth group summer retreat included middle schoolers, and my son slept overnight in a tent with the boy. He initiated a game of Truth or Dare, the “dares” being a variety of attempts to get the boy to take off his clothes and show my son his penis.
In hindsight, I should have known not to trust anyone else to be vigilant enough to handle my son’s care. But my mother’s love and attention and the wholesome church youth group activities were the latest Hope-O-Matic. The Thing we hadn’t yet tried that might work.
I am desperate enough to ask the parents of this boy to press charges. In fact, after they say they only want a letter of apology, I hang up and call the police myself, because I can’t police him anymore. I know the stakes are high; they include jail time with a pedophile label, and a potential lifetime on a sexual predator list. I don’t want my son to be in the system yet, especially if I am not convinced we have ruled out OCD and other compulsive behaviors, but I can’t be his system any longer.
This is also the time when my health begins to take a wrong turn. I contracted Lyme disease from a tick bite and had recently finished a long course of antibiotics that didn’t seem to work. I had been sick for a few years, but at this point, my body hurts so much that it is difficult to fall asleep, or work, or walk, or think clearly. My hands and feet and face tingle and often I feel a buzzing in my muscles I can’t explain. I begin to forget simple things, like my daughters’ phone numbers. I have also developed a nearly suicidal migraine headache that hits at least once a week. And most troubling: I began to get a cardiac arrhythmia when I eat certain foods, or after being startled, or after taking a deep breath, or after walking across a room. All medical tests indicated “benign PVCs,” though I can’t stand upright until afternoon without fainting and my blood pressure is far below normal. I limit my diet to control the arrhythmia, which is called bigeminy – a benign pattern of PVCs that don’t feel benign to me. I have had electrocardiographs, Holter monitors, tilt table tests. I’ve been offered beta-blockers that make my blood pressure undetectable, Florinef to support my adrenal hormone output, and occasionally, anti-depressants, which I refuse, because I am sick, not depressed. Between doctors’ appointments that don’t help, and feeling like I am about to die, I look after my son.

The Romantic Sound of a Freight Train

The chipmunk shows his face on the day we move into the 70‑year-old duplex, which is next door to an abandoned dental office that looks haunted. The duplex is also behind the police station, which I think will be helpful for crime prevention. Train tracks and a few feet of gravel and woods separate us. There is a wide, shallow sinkhole in the backyard that is supposedly stable. The duplex has four rooms – two small, lead paint-laden bedrooms, an 8x8 living room, and a kitchen with a clothes dryer in the middle. The move takes half a hot day in the beginning of September. Standing in my new backyard, I can hear the after-school traffic from the main street three hundred yards away. While I unpack, my son rides the new bus route that will drop him off at our new home.
In the shed attached to the back of the duplex, I kick a box of air conditioner filters against the wall and the chipmunk leaps out. He stands up on his back legs, squares his shoulders, shrieks once, and begins to chatter. Once he realizes that the shed door is open and he is free to leave, he sprints out and I don’t see him for days.
Soon I realize I can throw a rock from our porch and hit the passing trains. Before we move in, I romantically think about the sound of trains in the distance, but later, when I must pause a phone conversation while a train passes because I cannot hear the person speaking, and when trains wake me in the middle of the night, I will think differently. Some days there are ten trains, some days none. My son and I talk about crossing the tracks and cutting through the police station parking lot to get to the Dairy Queen on foot, but we will never do this because I don’t feel well enough to walk anywhere.

The History of the Neighborhood

I hear the moped buzz the street the day we move in, and I don’t think much of it. I assume it is a high school kid, but when I finally get a look at the rider, he is a 50-plus-year-old man with a long, grey Jerry Garcia beard and a tie-dyed T‑shirt.
A few days later I meet my next-door neighbor, Jim, who has lived on the street his entire life. He is a spry old man with an odd triangular topiary of sideburns that point toward his mouth like arrows. He tells me the moped rider is a drug runner who delivers for the 32‑year-old drug lord who lives with his elderly mother a few doors down and across the street. The mother goes to Neighbor Jim’s church (which he invites us to by handing me a pamphlet). They are all praying for her there. She said her son had threatened to knock her over the head and bury her in the yard if she turned him in, so she continues to allow him to sell cocaine and meth from her little yellow house.
“Haven’t you called the cops?”
“Do you think we’re retarded? Honey, look up yonder at the houses on this side. Every one of them neighbors has offered to let the police use their living rooms as a stakeout.”
“And?”
“The police want nothing to do with it. I think the criminal done paid them off. I’ll tell you what, though, if he steps onto my property, I’ll pepper his ass. I’m a nice guy but I don’t play games.”
“I’ll pepper his ass, too,” I say, but I won’t actually be able to do this because I don’t have anything to pepper it with.
“Atta girl,” Jim says. The next day, after his wife watches me pull a rusty fire pit out of someone else’s trash, Jim spends four hours in his backyard splitting wood, soaking the pieces in kerosene, then storing them in milk crates. When I throw away my garbage that evening, there are fifteen milk crates of this wood stacked behind my shed.

The Sinkhole as a Metaphor for Loss of Control

A few weeks later, my son and I explore the abandoned dental office. The back door is rotted out so we walk right in. The room is covered in a black and green fur of mildew and I get chills.
“This place feels really bad,” my son says. The wind blows over an empty two-liter bottle in the hallway and it clatters. We freeze and look at each other.
“I’m out,” my son says. He turns and I turn and we trip over each other to get out the door. We won’t ever go back in.
Another day, Neighbor Jim and I stand cross-armed like farmers and survey the fire pit, which I’ve set up in the middle of the sinkhole. Jim points to the abandoned dental office. Before it had been an abandoned dental office, he says, it had been a marginally successful dental office, and before that, a nasty man had lived there – a man they called Old Tom, a rich feller with a kowtowed wife, who, according to Jim, spread hate everywhere he went.
“Old Tom used to own this property, you know,” Jim says. “There was trailers all over your yard here that Old Tom rented out. Guy named Charlie rented one. Old Charlie, he drank too much but he was as nice a fellow as you could get. He walked up to Old Tom’s house one day, said he was feeling sick and asked for a ride to the hospital and Old Tom said no, you can crawl back to your trailer and die for all I care. A few days later Old Tom’s wife Gloria was outside talking to me and we realized we hadn’t seen Old Charlie in a while.
“Let’s go knock on his door, I said, but I’m afraid, she said, well, you got the keys, I said, so we’d better do it. We could smell him before we opened the door. Old Charlie had up and died right in the trailer. Old Tom, he told Gloria to pull Old Charlie’s body out in the yard, along with all his possessions, and burn them.” He pointed to where we were standing.
“Right here?”
“Yep. Right in the sinkhole.”
“Oh, my God. Did she do it?”
“No, but he did. Course it wasn’t a sinkhole then. It was just regular ground. Man was crazy beyond fixing. I was home the day Old Tom threatened to murder Gloria in the house. Tom said I’ll give you three seconds to get out of here before I blow your head off and Gloria ran. When her foot hit the driveway, she heard the shot. She went back inside and his brains was all over the bedroom curtains.”

Conjugal Visits

In October, my husband flies up in the middle of a rain jag. It is getting cold so on a Saturday morning, we venture out to a few neighborhood thrift stores, where we buy a women’s parka with fake fur around the hood. It looks new but smells like someone else’s house.
We sit in the car and talk. It is 49 degrees and the rain is coming down sideways. We both confess that living apart and the strain of my son’s behaviors and the uncertainty of his future has exhausted us. My husband resents my absence and he takes it out on my son subconsciously, in small ways, because a part of him still thinks my son should be able to shape up. It’s easy to think that way and sometimes even I do it. While I question the existence of God out loud, I see a striped flash race from the backyard, under the chain link fence, and into Neighbor Jim’s shed.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“What was it?”
“That’s the chipmunk I was telling you about.”
“I missed him,” he says. We go inside. The following day, three hours after my husband flies home, the roof of our duplex begins to leak through the ceiling. I call my landlord and he says to give it a couple of days, see what happens when things dry out. The ceiling gets soft and begins to sag.

#Russianmafia

My landlord also owns the duplex across the street. The left half is occupied by a tiny old couple with matching aluminum walkers. A group of tattooed Russians occupy the right half. Neighbor Jim tells me, with his lip curled in disdain, that the Russians are on the dole, but I notice that they have a pristine Mercedes van. Every night when it gets dark, they go outside and sit in it. They drink and smoke with the doors open, lights on, as if it were a lounge. I wonder what they are doing, but am afraid to ask, so instead I split open my plastic mini blinds and send cleverly hashtagged Snapchats to my husband of them doing nothing all night long.

The Average Heart Rate of a Chipmunk Is 400 Beats Per Minute

During the third week of October, the weather gets frosty and the trees start blushing colors I had long forgotten about as a Floridian. I smell smoke from people’s chimneys during the evenings and begin to leave snacks out for the chipmunk, whom I am beginning to admire. Winter is coming so I give him fattening things: peanut butter-stuffed pinecones, sunflower seeds, chunks of suet rolled in birdseed. He scampers around the crates of kerosene-soaked wood scraps and snacks. On weekends, my son and I light a fire in the sinkhole and sit around it. We talk about TV shows and movies and other things he likes.
One Friday, my son asks to go to a football game. If he cleans the stadium after the game with his ROTC class, he will get service hours.
“Great,” I say. “Should I come, too?”
“Mom. I’m fine. You don’t have to watch me all the time. I’m going to get in free for the game, then I will stay and clean up with ROTC.” We are broke and he knows that the getting in free part will help my decision. He sounds so normal that I am lulled by it, like a ship passing the Sirenum scopuli. I forget to plug my ears with wax and there is no one to lash me to the mast. I hear the sirens’ song of a typical teen moment and I long for my son to have this experience.
“Who’s in charge?”
“Commander and Master Chief,” he says. Commander is six foot two and Master Chief is six foot three. Both are controlled, military men.
“You will be with them the whole time?”
“Of course,” he says. “You can just drop me off.” I say yes, because I am getting a headache and I wouldn’t mind a Friday night home alone by the fire while my son does something wholesome. After the game, I pick him up.
“How’d it go?” I ask.
“Great.”
“Who won?”
“I have no idea,” he says.

Monday afternoon, the chipmunk pops up the back steps to gather some spilled birdseed. I am standing in the doorway. I freeze. He has soft, brown eyes and lush stripes down his back. He is chubby. His whiskers glow in the sun. As I look at him, he begins to swirl in a pinwheel of color, disappearing into an aura in my right eye, and another migraine is beginning to assert itself. Lately they have been lasting for three or more days. Fifteen minutes later, once the aura recedes, the pain comes in waves until I want to hit my head with a bat, or snap my own neck. My heart begins to beat funny again, first fast, then bumpy. The phone rings.
“Hello, this is Dr. Uppenworth, Vice Principal of Paradise High School. We have your son in the office with the police.”
“I’m sorry, did you say the police?” I open the back door and step out into the grass. The bright light slices in my eyes. I pace. Before I know it, I am pacing the rim of the sinkhole, wishing it were quicksand that would open like a maw and suck me into the center of the Earth.
“Friday night at the football game your son confided to a friend that his father sexually molested him. The friend was so upset that he told his parents. The parents sat on it for the weekend then decided it would be best to call the police. The police came in today to get some more information from your son. We’re here in my office now.”
“Okay,” I say. Then I immediately feel the familiar gnaw that bites when I think people are judging our family. I look like a single parent. My son qualifies for free lunch. He is often either in detention or involved with the police. The events in question are usually sexual. I immediately feel guilty and embarrassed.
“This is a serious situation. We’re going to have Officer Broski talk to you.” They put me on hold and I think about my ex‑husband, who is at a hospital in Atlanta sitting at his father’s deathbed. I question whether he molested his son for about two seconds, then discard the idea, then second-guess myself, because why would someone accuse someone else of something that dangerous unless it were true? Nobody does that. I highly doubt that it is true, but I am supposed to think it through. Sometimes children who are molested don’t talk about it until years later and then people don’t believe them.
The officer gets on the phone.
“Hello, ma’am. This is Officer Broski. Your son has accused his father of sexually molesting him. Any reason you know or think this to be true?”
“No. No way. What did he say exactly?”
“That’s just it. He couldn’t come up with any facts, or times, or incidents, or specific acts, and when I pressed him, he told me he made everything up because he was angry.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I’m an interrogation specialist. I talked with your son for about two hours and I believe he fabricated the whole thing.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said he was angry that his relationship with his father wasn’t going well, and he was mad that his grandfather was sick. He says he made it up because it was the worst thing he could think of to do to his dad. He wanted to hurt him.”
“That is the worst thing he could do.”
“I tried to explain it to him, but ma’am. I think something’s wrong with your son. I’ve been a police officer for twenty-two years. Have you considered that your son is a psychopath?”
“Technically, they can’t diagnose him that until after eighteen, but yes, we’ve had some leanings in that area. Though he also has autism and things get scrambled between the two.”
“I could technically charge him with false reporting, but since he didn’t initiate a call to us, and he was basically caught in a lie, I’d recommend that you see a therapist.”
“We already are.”
“Get a better one.”

Cocktails

By Friday night, the headache is so severe and so long-lasting that I frighten myself by dreaming of slamming my head against the wall over and over until I lose consciousness. I ask my mother to come over and stay with my son, but I don’t wait for her. I leave him watching television and drive myself to the ER, closing one eye and whacking my forehead with my palm against the pain. While waiting to be called into triage, I vomit into a trashcan and people move away from me.
In the exam room, the doctor looks at me the way doctors look at people whom they suspect are trying to get narcotics. He comes right out and says it.
“Every third person around who tells me they have a migraine is a druggie looking to score. I’m not giving you narcotics.”
“Fine,” I say. He offers to give me a narcotic-free migraine cocktail.
“Fine,” I say again. “Just do it fast.” I mention that I have a hearing loss and I can’t take any medicines that are ototoxic, which means medicines that can damage the hearing. Sometimes non-narcotic migraine cocktails contain ototoxic drugs.
“Look at you with your fancy words,” the nurse says. “Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll be fine.” She injects it into the IV.
Ten seconds later I shoot up into a sitting position with a gasp like I’m coming up from the bottom of the ocean. My heart seems to stop beating and blood floods my head and neck. It gallumps once and then starts to beat again.
“Something’s wrong with my heart. Help me!” I begin to panic and a nurse ambles over, takes my pulse and tells me I am fine.
“Please put a heart monitor on me. Please. This isn’t normal.”
“Would you just lie down and let the medicine work?”
“I need a heart monitor. Something is wrong.”
“You’re fine. You’re just anxious.”
Six hours later I come home with the beginnings of an ulcer from one of the medications in the cocktail, roaring tinnitus in both ears which will develop into further hearing loss, a nine-hundred-dollar ER bill brewing somewhere in the billing bowels of the hospital, and the headache, which has sunk its claws into the back of my head and is riding me like a demon. My heart has returned to a normal rhythm on its own, but I don’t trust it.
Two days later, while I am hanging clothes over the back fence to dry, the phone rings. It’s Dr. Uppenworth calling to tell me that my son was caught looking at child pornography on a Russian website. Instead of going to a student activities meeting or reading a book during lunch, he had installed a Tor browser on the computer in the library so he could access the dark web.
“I told you guys,” I say. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“This is very advanced behavior, installing a browser like that. Your son is very bright.”
“Another kid taught him how to do it in five minutes. He told me this last time he did it at his old school. I warned you about it.”
“We’re giving him a full day of detention tomorrow.”
“That’s not going to help. He’s very sweet. He’s kind. He’s nonviolent. He’s great unless you turn your back on him. He needs daily supervision because he can’t help himself. He’s not being willful. He just can’t stop. His access to computers needs to be locked down. It’s how we do it at home.”
“How does he do schoolwork?”
“By hand.”
“What does he do for entertainment? No social media? Nothing that the kids are doing?”
“We watch movies.”
“He won’t be able to get his schoolwork done if we take away his computer privileges. We’ve told him that his behavior is unacceptable and he is showing remorse.”
“He’s showing remorse that he got caught,” I say. “Don’t you understand? Something is different in his brain.”
“We like to give students second chances and see if they can rise up to the standards we set here at Paradise High. He’s new. He’ll catch on.”
My son comes home from school like nothing happened. He smiles and gets a snack, then turns on the TV. I wait for him to say something, then I test him.
“How was school?”
“Fine,” he says.
“Anything unusual happen?”
“Nope.”
“I talked to Dr. Uppenworth. He says you got another detention.”
“Oh, that,” he says. “Yeah.”
“You’re going to get arrested,” I tell him.
“I know, you keep saying that.”

Borrelia Bergdorferi as a Fucker of Mankind

Off the Lyme antibiotics, I am getting worse. I have all-over body pain that makes me squirm. Every day at three o’clock I feel like I am about to spontaneously combust with fever. My cheeks get hot and my joints hurt, but because my average temperature is about 97.3 degrees, a 99‑degree fever feels like 101. I need to lie down. My son can tell even when I don’t bring it up, and one of the loving things he does is ask how I am feeling.
“Are you Lymie today, Mom?”
“Yes, sorry to say. How do you know?” I ask.
“I can see it in your eyes,” he says. I love him for this. Besides it always gives me hope for his future when he demonstrates that he cares about someone else, even for a moment.
When I was 29 and living in Massachusetts, I pulled a tick off the back of my knee, thinking nothing of it. By the time I was 33, I had lost about 40 percent of my hearing. No one knew why. At night my heart would beat so hard that my body, and sometimes the bed, would shake. My heart rate would go into the two-hundreds when working out. When I was 38, my knees became so painful that I walked with a cane and I had to quit my job as a spinning instructor. One rheumatologist’s answer to that, after clean X‑rays and normal blood work, was antidepressants. My thyroid attacked itself and my moisture-producing glands stopped working, so my eyes dried up, my mouth dried up, and I had trouble swallowing food. Despite normal antibody blood work, they diagnosed me with Sjogren’s syndrome.
At around age 40, my blood pressure dropped into the 80/60 range and I started to faint when I stood up, was exposed to heat, or stood for long without walking or moving my legs. I failed a tilt-table test and was diagnosed with POTS. In 2012, I developed a severe intolerance to alcohol and I ended up in the ER with cardiac arrhythmia after a few sips from a glass of wine.
Add to this debilitating headaches, double vision, floaters and flashes of light in the eyes, intermittent vocal paralysis, facial paralysis, exercise intolerance, intolerance to sound and light, tinnitus, joint pain, alternating diarrhea and constipation, numbness, tingling fingers and feet, abnormal electromyography results, fatigue, and memory loss. At my worst, I could read a page in a book, turn the page, and not recall what I had read.
During pre-diagnosis, I saw several general practitioners who told me I had anxiety and/or depression and offered antidepressants and allergy medication, an immunologist who told me there was no Lyme in Florida, discounting, as she said it, confirmed tick bites I had had in Massachusetts and Virginia, three endocrinologists (I’m sorry, but endocrinologists are the worst and I will never see one again), an ENT doc who took me seriously but who could offer nothing, three rheumatologists (two of whom offered me antidepressants for my imagined disease, and one who took me seriously and who is my current rheumatologist), four neurologists (three of whom denied that Lyme has neurological effects when I asked to be tested for it), three cardiologists (who never caught the arrhythmia and told me that my anxiety was causing the PVCs and the low blood pressure, and that the POTS was idiopathic), as well as several ER doctors. I was admitted to the hospital three times with potential heart issues, but was sent home without a diagnosis because no one could find anything other than borderline low potassium levels that didn’t point to anything specific.
I had anxiety, they said. I needed to relax, they said. Take the antidepressants and the anticonvulsants they offered, even though I didn’t have depression or seizures. I was labeled as non-compliant by a number of doctors, simply because I refused the drugs. I believe, by the way, that this is part of the danger of being a woman seeking medical treatment in a male-dominated medical system. We don’t toe the line and we get a label that hints at Victorian-level “hysteria.”
Eventually I ordered a Lyme test kit and took it to walk‑in clinics and asked to be tested for Lyme, because no doctor on my insurance plan would test me. All they needed to do was draw the blood, I said. I would pay cash. I included in my plea a list of my symptoms, and a three-inch-thick medical folder of my medical records, as well as a stack of medical studies on chronic Lyme, and one proving the existence of Lyme disease in Florida. I finally found a PA who took me seriously. She was from Pennsylvania where they had a lot of Lyme. She drew the blood. Called me five days later. I was CDC positive for Lyme disease.
I found a doctor six hours away who specialized in Lyme and started antibiotic treatment. I got worse before I got better, and then got worse again. After nine months, I was no longer able to tolerate antibiotics. That was the time I moved to get my son through school.

The Stoma Don’t Like Sugar

The leak in the ceiling starts to turn black so I call my landlord again. He says he will send someone out to look at it, and then invites me to his church. I tell him I haven’t been feeling well enough to go to church, so he names a website where I could watch their services from home. I say thank you. That afternoon when I pull in the driveway, there is a pickup parked in the middle of the grass and a ladder against the side of my house. Ten minutes later a knock on the door. I open it up to find a large man in his fifties with florid red cheeks and a bulge in his upper abdomen.
“I’m Perry. Landlord sent me to fix the roof. Mind if I come in and look at the leak? Dunno if it’s black mold or not. I either gotta paint the ceiling or cut it out.” He is clutching his stomach and hunching over slightly, as if in discomfort.
“Sure,” I say. I open the door and step aside. He inspects my bathroom ceiling, but is clearly in pain. I offer him a glass of water and a seat.
“Thank you. I got colon cancer. It’s stage four. Spread to my bladder and liver and lymph nodes. I got four new tumors on my liver. Last week they gave me three months to live. I just had chemotherapy yesterday. I get it every Wednesday. It makes me a little shaky.”
“Are you sure you should be climbing ladders and working on roofs?”
“Man was made to work,” Perry says. “It makes me happy. The thing that bothers me is this stoma from the colostomy. My intestines keep coming out of my stoma hole. Right now, I got about four inches poking out and it gets dry and starts to hurt. I gotta wrap it in a cloth, see?” He presses his T‑shirt over the prolapsed piece of colon so I can see the outline. It looks like a sausage.
“Jesus in the morning,” I say. “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”
“Naw, I’ll put some sugar on it when I get home. The stoma don’t like sugar. Makes it go back in. Ma’am, if you don’t mind, I have to wonder what kind of a relationship you have with the Lord taking His name in vain like that.”
“Not much of one, right now,” I say. “There’s a lot going on.”
“You should get right with Him. You never know what could happen.”
Perry hands me over a church business card and starts giving me his testimony. This is a man who needs to share what’s on his mind, so I let him talk. He stays for an hour and a half and talks about God and life in a way that I envy, demonstrating feelings I once had but can no longer access. Outside the window, the man on the moped drives by fourteen times, seven in each direction.

Imprisoned Bees as a Metaphor for Desperation

I hear a story on NPR about a woman with Lyme who was near death and was accidentally stung by a swarm of bees and recovered from her Lyme. I begin reading everything I can about bee venom therapy for Lyme disease. I study it for two months, and by November, I decide to try it. I locate a woman who is willing to sell me some bees, and on a Friday evening, when my son goes to my mother’s for dinner, I drive an hour and a half to the lady’s farm to let her do a test sting. She grabs a bee with some long, thin tweezers, stings me, quickly euthanizes the bee in a container of rubbing alcohol, then hovers over me with an EpiPen. When nothing happens, she sells me twenty bees in a glass jar, teaches me how to take care of them. That night, between the sounds of the heater roaring on and off, and the moped runs, and the shrieking of the train whistles, my tinnitus seems terrible. I realize it is not my ears, but the bees, which I have stored in my bedroom closet. Even with my hearing loss, I can hear them buzzing like electricity in the dark.
Two days later, my mother comes over to sting me. It takes an hour to manage two stings, and I cry when the bees die. It can take months to see results, so I go about my business. That afternoon, when the phone rings my heart starts to beat fast. I’m growing afraid of answering the phone in the afternoon, because it’s usually Dr. Uppenworth.
It’s Dr. Uppenworth. He reports that my son waited until his teacher left her classroom during a free period, and then snuck in and used her computer to look up child pornography, and when she caught him, she saw some of the images.
“The teacher is beyond devastated,” he says. “As you can imagine.”
“I can,” I say, because I understand. I’ve also seen images I’ll never forget. “Call the police.”
“We’re not ready to do that.”
“Then stop acting so shocked. I told you he couldn’t be trusted. I told you he needed more supervision. In fact, I’ve begged for a self-contained classroom and an aide.”
“You can come pick him up now. He is suspended for the rest of the week.”
When I drive to get him, my blood pressure is so low I can’t sit upright in the car without blacking out. I drive with the seat leaned way back, like a gangster. The drug runner gives me a smile and a peace sign when he passes me on the street. When I pick up my son, he is angry. He says he looked at the child pornography because his friend is being bullied, and he couldn’t do it at home because I lock everything down so he has to do it at school.
“But it’s still illegal. At home. At school. No matter where you are.”
“But no one is being harmed. It’s just a video.”
“Someone was harmed when they made the video. The child in the video was harmed. That child will never be normal. He didn’t want it. It ruined him for life. Little kids are harmed any time they make a video. That’s why it’s illegal.”
“But I’m not doing the harming,” he says. It’s the same talk we have about once a month, because he doesn’t understand.
“They are going to eventually call the police, you know, and you know what will happen if they do.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” I look at him. He is silent. I can’t understand how he doesn’t understand.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

One night after therapy, my son comes home peevish, scowling, slamming things. His therapist, a sexual deviance expert who works solely with juvenile sex offenders, has pressed him to finish the letter of apology to the boy in the church youth group. My son has no interest in writing this letter. He cannot understand why he must do this, and when pressed, admits that he is angry. My son maintains that, because he never touched him, the boy was not harmed. Each version of the letter he has attempted to write says something to the effect of “I don’t see why everyone is so upset. They should just get over it already.” His life is getting harder and he resists. He resents not living with his grandmother in her nice house, with her nice cooking, and her loving attitude, and her big television. He resents not getting away with things. He resents that I watch him like a hawk and make him talk about his actions. He resents our dumpy duplex, resents my lack of energy, resents what his therapist is asking him to do, what he is pushing him to think about. He resents the friend who told his parents about the fake sexual abuse confession that led to the police questioning. He tries to check out using the television. I physically take the remote out of his hand.
“It’s time for bed,” I say.
“Okay, jeez! Goodnight,” he says.
“Goodnight. You’re going to bed now, right?”
“Yes.” Pause.
“No TV after I go to bed. I’m taking the remote.”
“Mom.”
“Let’s go. School tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I hug him. He stiffens.
“I love you,” I say.
“Love you.” We turn out the lights and go to our rooms. A few minutes after getting into bed, I get up again and lock my bedroom door.

Dead Bees for Days

On my son’s second day back from suspension, I am sitting at the kitchen trying to catch an angry bee with my own long, thin pair of tweezers, so I can sting myself along the spine. I am up to four stings per day, three days per week, and it is no fun, especially for the bees. So far, all the bee venom therapy has done is cause fevers and body pain the likes of which feel like a severe flu. At times, I can’t drive. I can’t sit still. I can’t sleep. The bee venom community with whom I am in contact say this is good, that my immune system is responding to the venom, which will hopefully kill the borrelia bacteria that have corkscrewed themselves into hard-to‑reach places in my body. I have no idea if it is working, so I keep sacrificing bees like a despot.
I can now eat only a few foods that don’t cause arrhythmia. These foods are: watermelon, blueberries, fresh chicken and lamb, one brand of rice cakes, natural peanut butter with no sugar, bananas, coconut water, and fresh vegetables. The amount of histamine produced within twelve hours in a piece of leftover meat causes arrhythmia, so I can’t eat leftovers. Dairy products cause arrhythmia. Canned foods cause arrhythmia. Beans cause arrhythmia. The probiotics in yogurt cause arrhythmia. Having poop move through my bowels, which stirs the vagus nerve, causes arrhythmia. Anything with table sugar or butter in it causes arrhythmia. Sneezing causes arrhythmia. Scary movies cause arrhythmia. The only thing that helps stop it is double servings of coconut water, presumably because it is high in potassium. I drink two quarts of coconut water per day and carry it with me wherever I go. I am six feet tall and I weigh one hundred thirty-six pounds.
It is a cold, grey Monday afternoon and I am glad to be alone. It had been a long weekend. We stayed home and watched movies and listened to the drug runner zimming back and forth on his moped in the rain, and the train whistle, lonely in the wet cold. I cussed the drug dealer under my breath, wondering why his mother put up with him, while also wondering if I am doing the same thing with my son. I decided the difference is that my son is still a child and he has a disability, and hers is a grown-ass man who is a drug dealer.
I catch a bee with my tweezers, reach behind me to where I think one inch off the spine might be, and touch the bee lightly to my skin. The bee obliges me by stinging the shit out of my back. I drop her into the alcohol quickly so she doesn’t suffer, but she has already suffered enough, because the stinger yanked her tiny guts out of her abdomen when it disengaged from her body.
A few minutes earlier, the chipmunk strolled through the pile of snacks I placed near the woodpile for him, ate a few peanuts, then popped back under the shed, so I take my mind off the pain of the sting by looking for him out the kitchen window. The phone rings. It is Dr. Uppenworth.
“Hi, Mrs. Davies. I have your son in my office. We are trying to decide whether to give him another suspension or to expel him.”
“For what?” A rush of adrenaline warms my face and begins to cause my heart to beat wrong.
“Inciting a riot.”
“He incited a riot? He’s one of the most passive guys I know.”
“No one actually rioted. But he offered to pay a girl $25 to beat up another girl.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said the girl he was trying to have beaten up was bullying his friend.”
“You know he has autism, right? This sounds like an autism misunderstanding to me. I’m not trying to make excuses for him, but I am sure there is something to the story you haven’t gotten to yet.”
I am in the middle of begging him to not expel my son, when I see a cat, that mottled, mean sonofabitch that lives with the Russians, sprint and leap upon something in my yard. It dives into the sinkhole and shoves its head under the fire pit. When it comes out, it has the chipmunk in its mouth.
“Drop it, you fucker!” I shout, and race outside in my socks, knocking over the bee condo on my way, releasing thirty-two angry bees into my kitchen. I keep the phone to my ear.
The assistant principal says, “Excuse me?” and I say, “I’m sorry, that wasn’t for you,” and while he talks about suggested punishments for my son, I chase the cat through the wet yard, my heart pounding in that way it does before it switches into arrhythmia. The cat scales a tree with the chipmunk in its mouth and I realize there is nothing I can do. I watch the chipmunk struggle in the cat’s jaws.
“I’ll tell you what,” the assistant principal says. “We’re going to give him a five-day out-of‑school suspension starting tomorrow.”
“You know it won’t help, right?” I said. “He needs more intervention. He needs a special school. We really need help. We need so much help.” When I say this, I start to cry.
“We can’t accommodate that at this time,” the assistant principal says. “You can pick him up at 1:30.”
Twenty minutes later, I find the chipmunk’s body at the base of the tree under a wet leaf. I bury him in the sinkhole, where microscopic bits of Old Charlie’s ashes wait to claim him. I return to the house and try to catch the bees. I catch two. The rest die of dehydration within the next few days. We find their little bodies everywhere, light glistening through their stiff, lovely wings.

I Wish Jesus Were Still My Homeboy

My landlord pulls up and bangs a ladder against the side of the house. He waves. I grab a coat and step outside.
“Where’s Perry?” I ask.
“Hospice.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “How long does he have?”
“It could be anytime,” my landlord says. “It’s okay, though. He knows he’s going home. Everything will be alright.”
“Okay,” I say.
Here’s the thing about our situation: I don’t think anything will be all right, and neither does anyone else. People assume we are doing something wrong. That we are ignorant. We are too hard on my son, or we are not hard enough on him, or we are not showing him enough compassion, or we are showing too much compassion. That if these problems designed by our family structure were erased, if his life were simplified, he would become a neurotypical boy and develop friends and social connections and he will stop lying all the time and start doing homework and schoolwork and everyone will be shitting fresh, rainbow-covered daisies and Jesus will come down from the right hand of the Father and bless our home and the Holy Spirit will dwell within us all.

”No One Would Listen” as a Metaphor for “No One Is Listening”

During my son’s five-day suspension, we have several talks over the sounds of trains and moped engines. The one about inciting a riot is easiest.
“Why did you offer to pay that girl twenty-five bucks to beat up another girl?”
“Because the girl needed to be beaten up and you said I can’t ever hit a girl.”
“That’s true. Where did you get twenty-five bucks?”
“I don’t have twenty-five bucks. I was bluffing.”
“Why did the girl need to be beaten up?”
“Because she was bullying my friend and we couldn’t make it stop.”
“Did you try all the things?” As a kid who was picked on in elementary school, my son had learned a few tricks.
“We tried all the things. We tried ignoring it. We tried talking to her. We tried avoiding her. Nothing worked so I went to guidance to get help.”
“Why didn’t your friend go to guidance herself?”
“Because she told me she was suicidal and she said she couldn’t do it so I did.”
“What did guidance say?”
“They told me to mind my own business.”
“Wait, really?”
“No one would listen. I needed to stop the girl from bullying my friend. I couldn’t do it. Paying someone to beat her up was the only thing I could think to do.”
“Okay, you can’t ever pay someone to hurt someone. It’s illegal. Very wrong. Also, you can’t hurt someone to make them do something or make them stop doing something. Also illegal and very wrong. But, you did the right thing going to an adult. Next time, if an adult doesn’t listen, try another adult. Keep trying until you find help. Tell me. I’ll know what to do. How is your friend now?”
“I told her to tell her parents that she wanted to kill herself and she says she did.”
“That was absolutely the right thing to do,” I say. “Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she is,” he says. He smiles. I pat his leg.

Colonization

My son has been decompensating before our eyes, each year worse than the one before. One neurologist diagnosed him with cognitive decline and encephalopathy along with the autism and conduct disorder. There was no program my son could attend and no person the doctor knew who could help him. We were in uncharted territory, he said. We were told the best place for him was at home, which placed the burden of protecting society against his impulses on us, and we had no idea how to do it. They did offer him fistfuls of medications, some of which made him hallucinate, some of which caused the vessels in his arms to expand and cause excruciating pain, some of which caused mania, and some of which landed him in the ER with anaphylaxis.
Doctors told me my illness was in my head, even when I’ve held the abnormal EKG strips in my hand, or appeared with eyes so dry my corneas were scratched. They failed to show concern when a previously fit woman in her thirties began walking with a cane and lost half her hearing. No one lost sleep over my abnormally low blood pressure. Even though it was in my head, they offered me fistfuls of medications, too.
My son and I surrendered our bodies to a complex organization and instead of offering us a haven, they colonized us. They told us what to think, and what they thought of us. We became patients instead of people. We became their territory. We became their livelihood. They judged us without listening to our stories, and the stories they told each other about us became our stories. Our stories were stripped of their narratives and written in charts in a private language we had to work to access. Our identities were replaced with labels. We became A Bad Family who created A Monster. I was A Hysterical Woman. I was a Depressed Housewife. I had Munchausen Syndrome. My son was Autistic. He was a Psychopath With No Future. Their inability to help us became like a sinkhole on their land that they circumvented as a matter of course.
As my health worsened, I became afraid that I would die and leave my son without anyone to truly advocate for him. This made me angry. It was a time when I swore that I would punch in the face the next person who told me God gave us our son because he only gives tough things to people he knows can handle it. In my mind, I punched people in the face all the time. I stabbed knives into their car tires. In my mind, I threw their metaphorical precious things into the metaphorical sinkhole to see how they’d like it.

The Stopping of the Heart as a Metaphor for Loving Too Much

On a Friday evening in the first week of December, I am at the mailbox when I see the drug dealer slink out of his house and get in his car. His mother cowers behind the living room window. I want to smack him. When he rolls past, I wave at him to stop. His window slides down and he leans his elbow out of the car. He’s small and blond and fine-boned.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
“Everybody knows what you are doing, you piece of shit. Take it somewhere else.”
“Fuck you and have a nice day,” he says. He looks straight ahead, rolls up his window, and shoots me the bird as he drives off.
“I’ll pepper your ass!” I scream behind him. Across the street one of the tattooed Russians slow-claps from his driveway. His cat sits beside him, tail twitching, yellow eyes narrowed.
Later, my son and I build a fire in the fire pit, even though I have a fever. We put on coats, go in the backyard, and light up the sinkhole. The kerosene-soaked wood goes up like it has been lit by a wick and a blasting cap. The dust of Old Charlie and the chipmunk swirl in the smoke. I shiver through the fever. I feel like I am on the edge of everything, though really I am just on the edge of the sinkhole.
My son sits in a chair and throws small sticks into the fire. He looks handsome and strong in the firelight. My heart gallumps, then pauses, then starts again. I am sick, but more than that, I am frightened. When I see his baby face peek through the clenched jaw of the young man he has become, I remember that they say he is dangerous. Yet my love for him lives inside the crooked beatings of my heart. The flames change color and shape with the breeze, each there an instant before it is never to exist again. The heat kisses my face and my own bones want to disintegrate into dust.
“I love you, Broheme,” I say.
“I love you too, Mom. I’m sorry you don’t feel well.”
“Me too,” I say. Then we talk about his brain. I tell him about color blindness. How some boys are born unable to see colors, but we can’t get mad at them for it. Something is missing in their brains that won’t allow them to see the colors. They can’t help it.
“That’s how your brain is with most feelings,” I say. “You are just plain missing them.”
“I know,” he says. “I don’t feel anything they say I should. I try to care but I can’t. I just don’t know what it feels like to feel things.”
“I understand. And we can’t get mad at you for that because it is as out of your control as color blindness would be,” I say. “It’s like your brain is colorblind to feeling empathy for other people. You can’t help it.”
“That makes sense,” he says.
“We have to figure out a way to make you act like you feel the feelings, though. Then if you respond as if you feel them, people will respond to you as if you feel them, and you’ll have a better time relating. You have to follow the moral code even if the code doesn’t make sense. You have to figure out how to fake it in a good way.”
“How do I do that?” he asks.
“I have no idea. I’m still working on it.” We sit in silence.
And a rush of memories now: Opening the Payless bathroom door to find my son, at age five, with his arm stuck up to the elbow inside the toilet, laughing and also terrified. Teaching him the alphabet by holding his finger like a pencil and tracing it over the letters. Tucking him in at night, smoothing my hand down his cheek, and telling him tomorrow will be a better day.
Someday, these memories will be gone like bones into dust. Gone like Perry. Gone like the sacrificial bees. Gone like Old Charlie. Gone like a chipmunk with a snapped neck. When these memories go away, it means I go away, and if I go away, who will take care of my son? There is no one I know who can manage the potential of this sinkhole: protecting him from society while also protecting society from him, while also protecting him from himself. No one I know who will love him the way he deserves, because who can know a psychopath as well as his own mother?
“I’m ready to go inside,” he says. “I’m cold.”
“Let’s go,” I say.
We kick dirt onto the fire and walk toward the house, me bent at the waist, him holding my arm, because if I stand upright I will faint. It is twenty-four hours before I will nearly die from a dangerous heart arrhythmia, and it will be some years before the doctors’ predictions of my son’s fate will prove them either right or wrong. In this moment though, we stand on the precipice together, and it will be our fall or our flight, depending on how we choose to go.

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Dawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, and Fourth Genre.