SO DO WE

Billy and Bobby were born under the strangest of circumstances. Mom and Sarah went to the grocery store one hot summer afternoon. Sarah stayed in the car to listen to her favorite song, while mom went in to grab some milk. There were shouts inside, as the car and Sarah started rolling down the hill, Sarah, old enough to be alone, but too young to know how to stop the car, screamed for help, pounded on the glass of the windows and cried out for her mom.

Mom – seven months pregnant – came barreling out of the store like an injured cow, running towards the moving car. She struggled with the keys in the door as her ’56 Cadillac started to gain speed. Finally, she was able to open the door to an hysterical Sarah, she dove to the floor and hit the break. The car stopped abruptly and Mom had barely enough time to wipe the sweat from her forehead and put the car in park before her water broke.

Billy was born June 30th, 1962 and Bobby followed on July 1st. They made the papers as the twins separated by a month, with no mention of their small chance to survive longer than a year. Two and half months premature, Billy was born 3 pounds 1 ounce, and Bobby a penny more. Back in those days, incubators fed oxygen to the premees, making the two eternally deaf and mute. But on top of all the elements working against them, the twins made it out of the incubators and completed our family of five.

Billy had what they would now call autism. He struggled in even the smallest tasks. When he was old enough, he went under the care of the state hospital where they could keep a close eye and moderate his unusual behavior. He had the darkest eyes, like his pupils actually matched the dark outer ring of his retina. Arkansas in the 1950s was no place for an unusual child – Christians thought he was possessed as he would go into episodes of fits and screams. But the screams were silent, like a muzzled dog, which made them all the more terrifying. The Christians would come to the hospital and put their prayer candles and rosaries on the roots of the tree below his window.

He was crippled on the right side of his body, making his right hand form a claw and his right knee bend inwards. Regardless, Billy taught himself how to walk. I wondered what went through his mind behind the dark spaces of his eyes. He couldn’t sign, nor write, nor speak. Billy was a silent ghost of my memory.

Billy left this world as strangely as he entered. He used to take walks in the woods around the hospital against the better judgment of the staff. He would walk down the yard to the creek bed and play with the sand and mud and build tunnels for the leaves. One day in January, the temperatures hit a record 15-below around 3pm. He walked out to the frozen creek, all alone, in a thin wind jacket with no mittens. He slipped and fell face down into the 6-inch creek bed, broke through the ice and got stuck. By the time they found him, he had frozen to death.

Bobby was 11 when Billy died. Bobby wasn’t nearly as crippled as Billy and had managed to stay out of hospital care and at home with us. We had all just learned to sign the alphabet and I would practice with him after school.  “M-Y N-A-M-E I-S S-A-L-L-Y” He smiled. Until then, he really didn’t know what my name was. I felt bad that I lied… he called me Sally for the rest of his life. I never could figure out how to sign that I had played a trick on him, nor did I have the heart to tell him that the first thing I ever communicated to him was a lie. I could have at least come up with a more clever name. Everyone else just thought it was sweet that he had a nickname for me and went along with it.

In the winter that Billy died, Bobby almost became a real person. His eyes lit up and his face contorted with emotions. He went from a reclusive child to an energetic pre-teen, as if a heavy spirit had been lifted from his heart. And he was funny. He played pranks on us. He would sneak into our rooms and steal our toys and then leave a map of where he had buried them in the backyard. He made an X on the map – X marks the spot. I don’t even know where he learned that expression. It makes me wonder if some things are really just the natural answer, a given, like there’s no chance there could be any other way to do something.

But as we got older, our lives got smaller and more focused on our own activities. And Bobby’s pranks became a nuisance. He could feel us separating from our innocence. He could feel us getting friends at school, and playing sports and talking – talking around him – creating a verbal fog that he could never comprehend. He grew angry and as his hormones became muscles, he grew aggressive. The maps became hateful pictures and the toys became mangled and dismembered.

It made Mom cry. The hospital that allowed Billy to die, took Bobby in a few years later “as a favor” – or probably to avoid a lawsuit. He lived at that hospital, in the same room as Billy, until he was 21. By then, he was an angry, aggressive, confused man-boy. He was skinny and tall, couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds. His skin hung on his arms like Grandpa’s and was as transparent as the sheets.

I visited Bobby on my way home from school in the afternoons. I would look up at him through his window where he would sit and wait for me. We would stare at each other from the distance. Sometimes, I would play on the roots of the tree that stood between our view. I would pretend the ground between was lava and I would trace the earth on my tip toes. Some days he would play along and sign to me “Watch out for the dark spaces, S-A-L-L-Y”.

When Bobby turned 21, the hospital said they could no longer care for him. He had to move to another hospital across town, in another county. I was in high school then and could drive, but I never went to the new hospital. Life had taken over, I had a boyfriend and a job. I was busy. I thought he would understand.

One day, a week before I was about to head to Colorado for college, we got a call. Bobby had been beaten up at the hospital and was in a coma. When he woke up, I was staring at him in the chair across his room. “Who did this to you?” I signed.

He never responded. His eyes were old, as if he were aging twice as fast as the rest of us. We found out later that it was his roommate. A 300 pound sociopath who grew up in a white supremest gang. He was convicted of killing 18 neighborhood cats by putting them all into a trash can and burning them. The psychiatrist felt that if he lived in a controlled environment, he would be completely harmless and could even get better. So he lived with Bobby. I’ve always wondered what Bobby could have done to make him so mad.

When Bobby finally woke up, we took him home to our ranch. It was August, but the fall had come early. Bobby turned to me in the car as we approached the ranch, “I’m going to die.”

I said, “We are all going to die someday.”

“No. I won’t be here when you get back from school.”

I left for college, and Bobby died the ten days later. The day of Bobby’s funeral, Sarah and I went for a walk to the old hospital, to Billy’s tree where the Christians would come and pray. I looked up from the tree to the twins’ old room – now a vacant window. We talked about their lives and how Bobby would hide our toys. We carved an X in the tree.