Part 2: The Chocolate Bar
That thought grew worse in the spring.
I was driving my delivery route on a rainy Tuesday when a pickup truck blew through a red light on Route 9. I hit the brakes. My van spun halfway around and slid into a guardrail. The airbag slammed into my face. When I opened my eyes, there was glass in my lap, and my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t unbuckle my seatbelt.
I was fine. Bruised ribs. A gash on my forehead that took four stitches. The urgent care doctor said I was lucky.
But I sat in the parking lot afterward with the cut throbbing and the rain pouring down, and all I could think was: What if it hadn’t been lucky?
What if I’d been killed? Who would meet Theo at the bus at three-fifteen? Who would know about the cereal? The seven o’clock medicine? The way to cut his chicken? Who would know that he needs you to say “five-minute warning” before you turn off the TV, or he’ll melt down for an hour?
Mom was gone. Dad was gone. Aunt Rosa lived in Phoenix and had four kids of her own.
There was nobody.
If something happened to me, Theo would land in a place like Brookfield after all. A place where strangers would look after him. And he was terrified of strangers.
I went home that night and watched him sort his laundry into seven perfect piles. He hummed the theme song from his train show. He had no idea how close he’d come to losing everything.
I made a decision.
“I want to try something,” I told him the next morning.
He was eating his cereal. Honey oat circles. Yellow box. Blue bowl. Exactly one cup of milk.
“What?”
“I want to practice doing some things on your own. Little things. Not all at once. One step at a time.”
He stopped chewing.
“On my own?”
“Without me right next to you. But I’ll be close. I’ll always be close.”
“Why?”
I considered how to put it. Theo needs things stated plainly. If you’re vague, he gets confused. If you lie, he can usually tell.
“Because you’re fifteen,” I said. “And someday you’re going to be a grown-up. And grown-ups need to be able to do things by themselves sometimes. Like buy groceries. Or go to the doctor. Or talk to people they don’t know.”
“You do those things.”
“I do. But what if I’m busy? Or sick? Or what if I’m not there?”
He laid his spoon down.
“Where would you be?”
“Nowhere. I’m just saying what if.”
“I don’t like what if.”
“I know, buddy. Me neither.”
He was silent for a long while. He picked up a single honey oat circle and turned it between his fingers.
“Mom wasn’t there,” he said. “And Dad wasn’t there. And then they just weren’t there anymore.”
My throat closed.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I promise. This is just practice. In case.”
He gazed at the cereal in his fingers.
“Okay,” he said. “In case.”
We started small.
First, he ordered his own food at the drive-through. He sat in the passenger seat, leaned toward the speaker, and said, “One chicken nugget meal. Six pieces. Apple juice. No sauce. Thank you.” It took him three attempts to get it out. When the voice said “That’ll be six forty-nine at the first window,” he turned to me with eyes as wide as plates.
“I did it.”
“You did it.”
He talked about it for a week.
Then he asked a librarian where the train books were. I stood at the end of the aisle and watched. He walked up to the desk, stood there nearly a full minute without a word, and then said, very fast, “Where are the books about trains please.” The librarian smiled and led him to the shelf. He returned clutching three books to his chest like treasure.
Then he paid for his own haircut. Then he asked the bus driver if the bus went to Market Street. Then he phoned the pharmacy to ask whether his prescription was ready, with me right beside him and his hand gripping my sleeve so hard it left marks.
Each time was hard. Each time, his hands flapped or he hummed or he froze. But each time, he did it.
And each time, he came back to me a little taller.
One Saturday in October, we stood outside Fairway Market.
It was our neighborhood grocery store. Six blocks from our house. We’d gone there every Saturday morning for six years. Theo knew every aisle. He knew where the cereal was. He knew the cashiers by name, though he had never spoken a word to any of them.
But he had never gone in alone.
I handed him a ten-dollar bill and a slip of paper. On it, in big block letters, I’d written a list. Just one item.
1 CHOCOLATE BAR.
“Here’s the plan,” I said. “Go in. Find one chocolate bar. Any kind you want. Pay at the register. Take the receipt. And come straight back. I’ll be right here by the door.”
Theo studied the ten-dollar bill. He studied the list. He studied the automatic doors, sliding open and shut as people passed through.
“Repeat it back to me,” I said.
“Go in. Find chocolate bar. Pay at register. Take receipt. Come back.” He drew a breath. “Go in. Find chocolate bar. Pay at register. Take receipt. Come back.”
He always said things twice when he was nervous. As though locking them into place.
“You’ve got it.”
“What if I can’t find the chocolate?”
“Aisle seven. Candy and snacks. You know where it is.”
“What if the cashier talks to me?”
“Then you say, ‘Just this, please.’ And you give her the money.”
“What if she asks me a question?”
“Then you answer it. Or you say, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s always allowed.”
“What if it’s too loud?”
I touched the headphones hanging around his neck. “Then you put these on. You can wear them the whole time if you want.”
He thought it over. He put the headphones on. Then he took them off again.
“I want to try without,” he said.
My chest squeezed. “Okay. But you can put them on anytime.”
“Anytime,” he repeated.
He stood a long moment, eyes on the doors. His hands fluttered slightly at his sides. His lips moved. Counting, I think.
Then he swallowed hard and stepped inside.
I watched him through the glass. He passed the flower display, the fruit, the bakery case. He never glanced back. At the end of the produce section he turned left and vanished behind the first aisle.
I stayed by the door, hands in my pockets, heart pounding.
Five minutes went by.
That was fine. He was finding the chocolate. He’d want to look at all of them. He’d read every wrapper. He’d compare the prices. That’s what Theo does.
Then ten minutes.
Okay. Still fine. Maybe there was a line at the register. Maybe he was waiting for a cashier he knew. Maybe he was trying to pick between two kinds and couldn’t. That happens sometimes. He can stand before two options for a long time.
At twelve minutes, I began to pace.
At fourteen, I was pressing my face to the glass, trying to see past the produce section. I couldn’t spot him. I couldn’t see anything but shoppers with carts and a man stacking oranges.
At fifteen minutes, my chest was so tight I could barely breathe. Every terrible thought I’d ever had crashed into my head at once. I took one step toward the door. I was going in. I didn’t care about the plan. I didn’t care about practice.
And right then, the automatic doors burst open.
First came shouts. Voices from inside the store. Loud. Many of them.
Then a cashier rushed outside.
She was a woman in her fifties with gray hair tied back in a ponytail and a green Fairway apron. I knew her. Her name tag read DENISE. She’d rung up our groceries every Saturday for six years.
She was crying.
Tears streamed down her face. Her hands shook. She looked wildly around the parking lot, at the people walking by, at me.
“Marcus,” she said. “Marcus… are you Marcus?”
My stomach dropped through the sidewalk.
“Yes,” I said. “Where’s my brother?”
“Come inside.” She seized my arm. “Right now. You need to see what he did.”
I ran past her.
Every ugly possibility raced through my mind. Maybe someone had laughed at him. Maybe a kid had filmed him again. Maybe he’d panicked and knocked over a display. Maybe he’d had a meltdown and somebody had grabbed him and he’d lashed out. Maybe security had been called because he misunderstood something and they thought he was stealing. Maybe a police officer was standing over him right now, yelling at him to look him in the eye, and Theo couldn’t, and they thought he was hiding something.
I’d read the stories. I knew how these things could go wrong.
I sprinted past the flowers and the produce and the bakery. My sneakers squeaked on the tile.
Then I reached the checkout area.
And I stopped.
People stood completely still.
There must have been thirty of them. Shoppers with carts. Cashiers behind their registers. A stock boy holding a box of cereal. A security guard in a gray uniform, hands at his sides. A man in a business suit. Two teenage girls. An old man leaning on a cane.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
The overhead music was off. The beeping registers were silent. Even the big refrigerators along the wall seemed hushed.
It was the quietest I’d ever heard a grocery store.
And Theo was in the center of them.
He sat on the floor. Cross-legged. Right in the gap between register four and the gum display. His back was perfectly straight. His ten-dollar bill poked out of his shirt pocket.
He wasn’t wearing his headphones.
A little girl was.
She looked about five. Small, with dark curly hair and a pink jacket. She sat on the floor facing Theo with her knees drawn up to her chest. Theo’s big gray headphones covered nearly half her head. Her eyes were shut. Her body swayed back and forth. Back and forth. Slowly.
And Theo swayed with her.
Same rhythm. Same speed. Back and forth. Both his hands lay flat on the tile on either side of him. He wasn’t touching her. He was only rocking. And humming. Very softly.
I knew that hum. It was the theme song from his train show.
Beside the little girl lay a tipped-over shopping basket. Apples had rolled across the tile. A carton of eggs had cracked open, yellow yolk seeping out. A jar of tomato sauce had shattered into red pieces near the gum display.
Theo sat amid the mess and didn’t seem to notice any of it. His gaze rested on the floor beside the little girl. Not on her face. Just near her.
And very softly, between hums, he was counting.
“Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.”
The little girl’s lips were moving too. Silently. Counting along with him.
One look at the scene before me and my hand flew to my mouth.
“Theo…” I whispered.
He didn’t look up. He just raised one finger. Wait. The same signal I used when he was little, mid-calm-down, when I didn’t want anyone to interrupt.
“Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.”
The little girl stopped rocking.
She opened her eyes. She looked at the spot on the floor where Theo was looking. Her breathing slowed. Her small hands, which had been clamped over her ears on top of the headphones, drifted down into her lap.
Theo stopped rocking too.
“Fifty,” he said quietly. “That’s a good number. That’s halfway to a hundred.”
The little girl looked up at him. Not at his eyes. At his shirt. It had a train on it. A blue steam engine.
She pointed.
“Choo choo,” she whispered.
“It’s a Class A4 locomotive,” Theo said. “It’s called the Mallard. It’s the fastest steam train in the world. It went one hundred and twenty-six miles an hour in 1938.”
The little girl kept staring at the train.
“Choo choo,” she said again.
“Yes,” Theo said. “Choo choo is correct.”
Somewhere in the crowd, someone let out a sob.
That was when I noticed that nearly everyone around us was crying. The two teenage girls clung to each other. The old man with the cane had pulled out his handkerchief. The security guard was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
I looked down at my brother. My brother, who had once covered his ears and rocked on the floor of a school hallway while a boy filmed him and four thousand people laughed.
I didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew it was something enormous.
“Theo,” I said again, quietly. “What did you do?”
He didn’t answer. He was still watching the little girl.
It was Denise who told me. She had come back inside and now stood beside me, mascara streaking down her cheeks. She kept her voice low, as if she were in church.
“It happened so fast,” she said. “That little girl came in with her mom about twenty minutes ago. And something set her off. I don’t know what. Maybe the music. Maybe the lights. Maybe the eggs breaking. All of a sudden she was screaming. On the floor. Kicking. Hitting her own head with her hands.”
I closed my eyes. I knew exactly what that looked like.
“Her mother was trying to pick her up,” Denise said. “Trying to hold her. And the little girl was screaming no, no, no and fighting her. And people started staring. And some man in line started yelling at the mother to control her kid. He said, ‘Some of us have places to be.’ He said something about bad parenting.”
“Who?”
Denise gestured with her chin. Near the end of register three stood a man in a golf shirt beside a cart piled with beer and steaks. His face was bright red. He was staring at the floor. He looked like he wished he could vanish.
“Then the manager came over,” Denise said, “and he was saying maybe they should step outside, and the mother was crying and saying I’m trying, I’m trying, she’s autistic, she can’t help it, and the little girl was screaming so loud, and I was about to call—”
She broke off.
“And then your brother walked up.”
My heart hammered.
“He came from aisle seven,” Denise said. “He was holding a chocolate bar. He walked right into the middle of all of it. And he looked at the little girl screaming on the floor. And he looked at the mother. And he looked at the man yelling. And then—”
She pressed a hand to her chest.
“He said, ‘Everybody needs to be quiet.’ Just like that. Not loud. Just very clear. Everybody needs to be quiet.”
“Theo said that?”
“Nobody listened at first. So he said it again. Louder. Everybody needs to be quiet right now. She can’t hear you. It’s too loud inside her.” Denise shook her head. “And the man in the golf shirt said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And your brother turned around and looked at him and said, ‘I’m autistic too. When I was little, I did that. My brother sat with me. Nobody yelled. Yelling makes it worse. You’re making it worse.’”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Then he turned to Gary, our manager,” Denise said, “and he said, ‘Please turn off the music. And the light over register four is buzzing. It’s very bad. Please turn it off.’”
I looked up. The fluorescent light over register four was dark. The rest of the store was lit, but that one panel was off.
“Gary did it,” Denise said. “He didn’t even argue. He went in the back and turned off the music and flipped off that light. And then your brother took off his headphones and asked the little girl’s mother if he could put them on her. And the mother just—she just nodded. She didn’t know what else to do.”
“And then he sat down,” I said.
“And then he sat down.” Denise wiped her eyes. “He sat down on the floor right in all that broken glass and egg. Didn’t care. He said, ‘Hi. My name is Theo. I’m going to count. You can count if you want. You don’t have to.’ And he started rocking. And humming. And counting.”
She looked at me.
“And the whole store just stopped,” she said. “Everybody. All at once. Nobody told them to. They just stopped. Like they knew.”
I surveyed the crowd around us. All those strangers. Standing perfectly still. Barely breathing. For a little girl they didn’t know and a boy they had never noticed.
“Then I ran outside to find you,” Denise said. “Because he told me to. He said, ‘My brother Marcus is by the door. He should see this.’” She laughed through her tears. “He said, ‘He’s teaching me to do things alone. He’ll want to know I did something.’”
I put my hand over my face.
On the floor, Theo was gazing at the little girl’s shoes. They were purple, with light-up soles.
“Your shoes light up,” he said. “Do they light up when you walk or when you jump?”
The little girl thought it over.
“Jump,” she whispered.
“That’s good,” Theo said. “Jumping is good for regulating. I used to jump on a trampoline.”
Then the little girl’s mother stepped forward from beside the register, her hand over her mouth, tears running down her face.
She knelt on the floor next to her daughter. She reached out and touched the girl’s back, very gently.
“Lily, baby,” she whispered. “Are you okay now?”
The girl leaned into her mother’s arm. “Choo choo,” she said, pointing at Theo’s shirt.
The mother looked up at Theo.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t know who you are, but thank you. I didn’t know what to do. Nobody ever knows what to do.”
Theo looked at her. At her chin, the way he always did.
Then his whole body went still.
He gazed at her chin for a long time. His hands stopped moving. He tilted his head.
“I know who you are,” he said.
The woman frowned. “I’m sorry?”
I looked at her. Truly looked at her for the first time. The dark hair, shorter now and threaded with gray. The thin face. The tired eyes.
The tiny mole on her left cheek. The one Theo used to touch when he was a baby.
The floor dropped out from under me.
“Your birthday is March fourteenth,” Theo said.
The woman’s face drained of color.
Slowly, she turned her head. And she saw me standing there.
“Marcus?” she whispered.
It was our mother.
